Law of nature vs. law of society in 'Scarlet letter'

Assignment Paper 10

American Literature

Ajit A. Kaliya

M.A. Sem. 3

Roll No.1

Enrollment No. 2069108420170013

Batch: 2016-18

Email- kaliyaajitbhai@gmail.com
Department Of English, MKBU

To evaluate this assignment, click here

'Scarlet letter' is a famous novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is a novel about a woman who has committed adultery and how she punished by society. How she struggles in society. There is depiction of nature also. What is nature's law? Does for nature also Hester's crime was punishable? How do characters feel while they are society and when far away from society in nature? We can find in novel that both are different. Mother Nature is different from human nature. The things which are natural become crime in society. All laws, rules and customs are made by humans. And it changes with time. So, nature vs. Society becomes important theme in the 'Scarlet letter'

After custom house episode, when main character Hester' story begins we see that one woman is brought to the scaffold among the crowd. She was there for punishment. There is child in her hands. The crime was she had relationship with other man and now a child. No one knows who the father of the child was. This was unforgivable crime for the society. And people hate who have relationship without marriage. It is crime for society and not for nature. Desire of body is natural thing and Hester may have this vision and that's why even after people's hatred she lives with dignity. Society contrasts with nature. Society has laws, nature has no laws. Society binds, nature frees. Society punishes, nature forgives. Society gives stress, nature relives it.

This contrast is made clear from the very first page, when the narrator contrasts the black flower of the prison that punishes sin with the red rose bush that he imagines forgives those sentenced to die. The theme of nature continues with the forest outside Boston. Which is described as an unchristianized, lawless region. In the dark forest would, passionate and persecuted people like Hester, Pearl, Mistress Hibbins and the Indians can escape from the strict, repressive morality of puritan society.  In society, is also the only place where Hester can reunite with Dimmesdale when Hester moves to the outskirts of Boston, the narrator says she would have fit in the forest. Hester's choice to live on the border of society and nature represents her internal conflict. She can't thrive entire within the constraints of Puritanism, but because of her attachment to society and to Dimmesdale, she also can't flee. (litcharts.com)

Thus here writer praises nature by saying it unchristianized and lawless region. It accepts all without any discrimination.

With the use of Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl Hawthorn successfully proves that a relationship with nature, which embodies purity and freedom, can draw one’s mind away from the corruption and enslavement of a cruel society. Hester Prynne the main character of The Scarlet Letter is plagued with the adulteress “A” throughout the novel. Her Puritan society shuns, scorns, and talks negatively about her behind her back and to her face. Aware of society’s lack of acceptance of her sin Hester looks to nature for her own sense of security and freedom. “She had wandered without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast and as intricate as the untamed Forrest…Her intellect and heart had their home as it were in desert places where it roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods.” The forest for Hester was freedom from the “A” that society damned upon her. In the forest she had the ability to take off the “A” and be her natural self. Chapter 18 states, “She undid her clasp that fastened the scarlet letter and taking it from her bosom through it among the withered leaves.” After taking off the letter in her place of freedom she was clean of society’s evil eye against her. “O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom. (123HelpMe.com)

In the forest natural laws are supreme and so Hester and Dimmesdale commit their adultery there, black man makes his home and Mistress Hibbins practice her witchcraft. These things are abandoned by society. (studymoose.com) Hester and Dimmesdale meets in jungle and there they decide to leave Boston. Hester who even never removed 'A' in house removed her A for the first time. It symbolizes that in nature there is no crime and no punishment. She was criminal on society, not in jungle.

Pearl also can be considered as representing nature. She has not yet aware about society's laws. For her meaning of A is different. Meanings, rules, morality all are different from person to person. So natural laws are universal laws. When left alone on the beach, pearl pelts small birds with pebbles for amusement. However when she injures one she grieves to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as sea breeze. Pearl learns an important lesson about right and wrong by using nature and her own conscience. The remorse she feels leaves a lasting impression far more powerful than punishment from authority. Nature provides clear examples for children to learn from and on which to base their morals. From society child gains vices more than morals while from nature they learn good things. By learning from nature children can use their conscience instead of the rules of authority to learn the difference between right and wrong. Left alone in the forest, pearl interacts with various animals which accept her because they all recognized a kindred wilderness in the human child. This wildness refers to pearl's natural childhood environment free from the pollution of society. (gradesaver.com)

Another symbol coming from the forest are the Indians. They live in the forest and only periodically come under the jurisdiction of moral laws by entering a city or town. Because of this their actions and ideas can be interpreted to represent the position of natural law. In the instance when they interpret the meaning of the scarlet letter during the election day sermon their interpretation that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity among her people, is the exact opposite of what the symbol was originally intended to mean. The symbol for nature in this case considers the scarlet letter a boon. In contrast, the scarlet letter was originally intended to be a punishment having the effect of a spell, taking her out of ordinary relations with humanity and including her in a sphere by herself. This was the original function which the moral law dictated the letter should serve. It is human’s nature that they ignore all the virtues and see only vices. (studymoose.com) Indians from jungle see Hester's virtues and she becomes holy figure for them. Hester is a good woman who helps everyone. But only because of one event of her life, everybody started to hate her.

In the novel both mother nature and human nature are presented. But human nature dominates Mother Nature because we have to live in society. Who cannot bear the rule of society they want to go far away from society and live in jungle and mountains. Hawthorne regards natural laws by asserting the dominant position and influence of the human laws. By noticing when and how Hawthorne offers the truth to the reader such as when Hester lied to Pearl in the forest setting or when Chillingworth's character is revealed under the scrutiny of heavenly light, the human laws are dominant. Even the chief symbol of the book, the Scarlet letter has a meaning imposed solely by the human laws. In all of these instances the human laws prove that they are stronger and more pervasive than the natural laws. (studymoose.com) Some questions arise that does for nature also adultery is crime? In the novel when Dimmesdale, Hester and Pearl were standing on scaffold on one night, they see a meteor falling down and it created ‘A’ shape in the sky. Does it mean nature also wants to say that they have committed adultery. Other thing is about ‘A’ on Dimmesdale’s chest. Nobody know from where the letter came? Had it carved by him or was it naturally came out as punishment of his sin. But in the end of the novel when Hester comes back she had still wear the ‘A’ but now no one hate her. By charitable work she gets respect and after death she is buried next to Dimmesdale. It is showed that whatever Hester had done was not wrong and virtues should be praised in the society.

Works Cited

123HelpMe.com. Nature vs. Society in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter . 27 October 2017 <http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=84866>.

gradesaver.com. Law of nature versus man in scarlet letter. 27 October 2017 <http://www.gradesaver.com/the-scarlet-letter/essays/law-of-nature-versus-man-in-the-scarlet-letter>.

litcharts.com. Nature theme analysis. 27 October 2017 <https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-scarlet-letter/themes/nature>.

studymoose.com. moral law vs natural law in scarlet letter. 13 July 2016. 27 October 2017 <https://studymoose.com/moral-law-vs-natural-law-in-the-scarlet-letter-essay>.

 To evaluate this assignment, click here

Dependency complex, inferiority complex and superiority complex

Assignment Paper 11

Post-colonial literature

Ajit A. Kaliya

M.A. Sem. 3

Roll No.1

Enrollment No. 2069108420170013

Batch: 2016-18

Email- kaliyaajitbhai@gmail.com
Department Of English, MKBU

To evaluate this assignment, click here

Introduction

Frantz Fanon is one of the major figures in post colonial literature. His book black skin white mask is famous among post colonial literary critics and provides many important theories and position of black people in white world, their mentality, their behavior etc. In 4th chapter he talks about dependency complex, inferiority complex and superiority complex.

Mannoni, a French psychoanalyst, wanted to understand the mind of the native and the white colonial based on his experience and study of Madagascar under French rule in the 1930s and 1940s. Himself a white colonial, he wrote a book about it, “The Psychology of Colonization” (1950). Frantz Fanon, himself a native spends this chapter tearing it to pieces.  (abagond)

Dependency complex

Most natives are content to put whites above them and be dependent on them because it fulfills a deep need in their hearts, one that was there long before whites showed up. Mannoni calls this dependency complex.  (abagond)

So it is about black people's dependence upon white people. White people rule the world because black people are dependent on white people. Even today also white countries rule the world. Eastern countries are very much dependent
on them. Weapons, nuclear bombs, most of the products are controlled by Western world. Any country cannot make nuclear weapons without Western countries permission. So in many ways black people are dependent on white people. Even after freedom all countries are dependent upon Western world. It is mentality of black people that they cannot do anything without white people. In Robinson Crusoe Friday himself accepts Crusoe as his master.

What becomes of the exceptional cases of which M. Mannoni tells us? Quite simply, they are the instances in which the educated Negro suddenly discovers that he is rejected by a civilization which he has none the less assimilated. So that the conclusion would come to this: To the extent to which M. Mannoni’s real typical Malagasy takes on “dependent behavior,” all is for the best; if, however, he forgets his place, if he takes it into his head to be the equal of the European, then the said European is indignant and casts out the upstart—who, in such circumstance, in this “exceptional case,” pays for his own rejection of dependence with an inferiority complex. Earlier, we uncovered in certain of M. Mannoni’s statements a mistake that is at the very least dangerous. In effect, he leaves  the Malagasy no choice saves between inferiority and dependence. These two solutions excepted, there is no salvation. “When he  [the Malagasy] has succeeded in forming such relations [of dependence] with his superiors, his inferiority no longer troubles him: everything is all right. When he fails to establish them, when his feeling of insecurity is not assuaged in this way, he suffers a crisis.” The primary concern of M. Mannon was to criticize the methods hitherto employed by the various ethnographers who had turned their attention to primitive peoples. But we see the criticism that must be made of his own work. After having sealed the Malagasy into his own customs, after  having evolved a unilateral analysis of his view of the world, after having described the Malagasy within a closed circle, after having noted that the Malagasy has a dependency relation toward his ancestors—a strong tribal characteristic—M. Mannoni, in defiance of all objectivity, applies his conclusions to a bilateral totality—deliberately ignoring the fact that, since Galliéni,18 the Malagasy has ceased to exist.  (Fanon)

Inferiority complex

Inferiority complex is the feeling of consider yourself less important than others. Mannoni says that native black people suffer from inferiority complex. They are unhappy because of they have not as much importance as white people and so they want to be equal to white.

There are reasons behind this complex of black people. In chapter black man and language Fanon says that who speak perfect French they are considered good while who sidewall Creole they do not. White people feel ashamed of their children speak it. Fanon found out first-hand: in France white people talk down to you if you are black. Either they speak in fake pidgin French – “Why you left big savanna?” – Or they would act too familiar, calling you old fellow and so on. French doctors, for example, would talk to their white patients with impersonal respect but to blacks and Arabs like they were their old friend or something.  (abagond)

This is an example of how even language is the factor for inferiority complex of black people. In India we see in history that his untouchability was there. There is inferiority complex in lower caste people. They do not get education, they do not get good job, they do not get reputation in society, they insulted in many ways. Same ways in ruling white countries black people are insulted and white people see them differently. These all factors are reason behind feeling of inferiority. Only because of their skin color they become inferior. And it become their mentality that they are inferior to white and the way of white live, eat, wear behave that becomes right way and other start to imitate them.

Do inferiority complex is major issue even today also. Eastern people imitate Western people and consider those countries better.

Prospero complex (superiority complex)

As black people suffer from inferiority complex, white people suffer from Prospero complex. Just like the Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, they want to lord it over the natives. The colonies draw those whites who cannot accept others as they are, who do not want to have to take other men seriously but instead want to lord it over them.  (abagond)

White people believe themselves superior and believe their way is better. Rudyard Kipling's sentence it is white man's burden to civilize the world is the best example of superiority complex.

Shakespeare's theme is the drama of the renunciation of power and domination, which are symbolized by magic, a borrowed power which must be rendered up. Man must learn to accept himself as he is and to accept others as they are, even if they happen to be called Caliban. This is the only wise course, but the path towards wisdom is long and infinitely painful for Prospero. There is no doubting the nature of Prospero's magical power, for at his side we find his obedient daughter -- and magic is the child's image of paternal omnipotence. Whenever his absolute authority is threatened, and however slights the threat, Prospero -- our aspirant to wisdom -- always becomes impatient and almost neurotically touchy. The essence of the problem is revealed at the outset; Prospero lays down his magic garment and prepares to tell Miranda the story of his life. In other words, he tries to treat Miranda as an equal; but he fails. He begins with 'Obey and be attentive,' and the recital is punctuated with other orders of the same kind, all absurd and quite unwarranted; later in the play he even goes so far as to threaten Miranda with his hatred. It is the same with Ariel; Prospero has promised him his liberty, but fails to give it to him . . . This again means that Prospero has the absolute authority of the father. Caliban is the unruly and incorrigible son who is disowned. Prospero says he was 'got by the devil himself.' At the same time he is the useful slave who is ruthlessly exploited. But Caliban does not complain of begin exploited; he complains rather of being betrayed . . . . Caliban has fallen prey to the resentment which succeeds the breakdown of dependence. Prospero seeks to justify himself: did Caliban not attempt to violate the honor of his child? After such an offense, what hope is there? There is no logic in this argument. Prospero could have removed Caliban to a safe distance or he could have continued to civilize and correct him. But the argument: you tried to violate Miranda, therefore you shall chop wood, belongs to a non-rational mode of thinking. In spite of the various forms this attitude may take (it includes, for instance, working for the father-in-law, a common practice in patriarchal communities), it is primarily a justification of hatred on grounds of sexual guilt, and it is at the root of colonial racialism.

What the colonial in common with Prospero lacks, is an awareness of the world of others, a world in which others have to be respected. . . . Rejection of that world is combined with an urge to dominate, an urge which is infantile in origin and which social adaptation has failed to discipline. The reason the colonial himself gives for his flight -- whether he says it was the desire to travel, or the desire to escape from the cradle or from the 'ancient parapets', or whether he says that he simply wanted a freer life -- is of no consequence, for whatever the variant offered, the real reason is still what I have called very loosely the colonial vocation. It is always a question of compromising with the desire for a world without men. As for the man who chooses a colonial career by chance and without specific vocation, there is nevertheless every possibility that he too has a 'Prospero complex', more fully repressed, but still ready to emerge to view in favorable condition. (The Prosper Complex)

So by example of Prospero Mannaoni talks about superiority complex of white people. Like Prospero they want to make others their slave and want to rule the land.

Conclusion

So these theories of Mannon are important to study racism and mindset of black people and white people. Fanon psychologically analyses that and gives further information. This type of complexes does not only feel between white people and black people but poor-each, and between castes also those complexes are there.

Works Cited

abagond. Fanon: The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized. 26 February 2010. 26 October 2017 <https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/fanon-the-so-called-dependency-complex-of-the-colonized/>.

Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 1986.

The Prosper Complex. 26 October 2017 <https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/engl2080/208.scholia12.html>.

To evaluate this assignment, click here

Listening skill, speaking skill, reading skill, writing skill

Assignment Paper 12

English language teaching 1

Ajit A. Kaliya

M.A. Sem. 3

Roll No.1

Enrollment No. 2069108420170013

Batch: 2016-18

Email- kaliyaajitbhai@gmail.com
Department Of English, MKBU

To evaluate this assignment, click here

In any language there are four basic skills. Listening skill, speaking skill, reading skill and writing skill. Purpose of language is to communicate. For communication listening and speaking skill is necessary while reading and writing skills are additional functions of language. The natural sequence of learning language is listening, speaking, reading, and writing. When learning another language the sequence changes to reading, writing, listening and speaking. When learner knows all these four skills then language is known.

1) Listening Skill

The skill comes at first place when learning language is listening skill. When a child comes into the world, they cannot read, write or speak they can only listen. Any native language is acquired by listening. So listening skill is most important in learning language.

The term listening is used in language teaching to refer to a complex process that allows us to understand spoken language. Listening, the most widely used language skill, is often used in conjunction with the other skills of speaking, reading and writing. Listening is not only a skill area in language performance, but is also a critical means of acquiring a second language (L2). Listening is the channel in which we process language in real time - employing pacing, units of encoding and pausing that are unique to spoken language.  (Nunan and Carter)

Background

Listening in language teaching has undergone several important influences, as the result of developments in anthropology, education, linguistics, sociology, and even global politics. From the time foreign languages were formally taught until the late nineteenth century, language learning was presented primarily in a written mode, with the role of descriptive grammars, bilingual dictionaries and 'problem sentences' for correct translation occupying the central role. Listening began to assume an important role in language teaching during the late-nineteenth-century Reform Movement, when linguists sought to elaborate a psychological theory of child language acquisition and apply it to the teaching of foreign languages. Resulting from this movement, the spoken language became the definitive source for and means of foreign language learning. Accuracy of perception and clarity of auditory memory became focal language learning skills. This focus on speech was given a boost in the 1930s and 1940s when anthropologists began to study and describe the world's spoken languages. Influenced by this anthropological movement, Bloomfield declared that 'one learns to understand and speak a language primarily by hearing and imitating native speakers' (Bloomfield 1942). In the 1940s American applied linguists formalized this 'oral approach' into the audio-lingual method with an emphasis on intensive oral-aural drills and extensive use of the language laboratory. The underlying assumption of the method was that learners could be 'trained' through intensive, structured and graded input to change their hearing 'habits'. (Nunan and Carter)

Listening in SLA

In second language acquisition (SLA) research, it is the 'linguistic environment' that serves as the stage for SLA. This environment - the speakers of the target language and their speech to the L2 learners - provides linguistic input in the form of listening opportunities embedded in social and academic situations. In order to acquire the language, learners must come to understand the language in these situations. This accessibility is made possible in part through accommodations made by native speakers to make language comprehension possible and in part through strategies the learner enacts to make the speech comprehensible. (Nunan and Carter)

Practice

For learning language continuous listening is required. There are many ways to practice listening. Now there are audio tapes, Television available which can be good source for listening practice.

Here are key recommendations that have been made by language educators concerning the teaching of listening.

Morley (1984) offers an array of examples of selective listening materials, using authentic information and information-focused activities (e.g. notional-informational listening practice, situation-functional listening practice, discrimination-oriented practice, sound-spelling listening practice).

• Ur (1984) emphasizes the importance of having listening instruction resemble 'real-life listening' in which the listener has built a sense of purpose and expectation for listening and in which there is a necessity for a listener response.

• Anderson and Lynch (1988) provide helpful means for grading input types and organizing tasks to maximize learner interaction.

• Underwood (1989) describes listening activities in terms of three phases: pre-, while- and post- listening activities. She demonstrates the utility of using 'authentic' conversations

• Nunan (1995c) provides a compendium of recipes for exercises for listening classes, organized in four parts: developing cognitive strategies (listening for the main idea, listening for details, predicting), developing listening with other skills, listening to authentic material and using technology.  (Nunan and Carter)

2) Speaking skill

Speaking is the main function of the language. Languages are for speaking. In natural process of language learning, speaking comes to second place. Through listening children imitates the utterance. Slowly they know the meaning of the words. Gestures also plays very important role in understanding meaning of the language.

Speaking in a second language (L2) involves the development of a particular type of communication skill. Oral language, because of its circumstances of production, tends to differ from written language in its typical grammatical, lexical and discourse patterns. In addition, some of the processing skills needed in speaking differ from those involved in reading and writing. (Nunan and Carter)

Background

Disabling as a branch of teaching emerged for last two decades. Earlier there was not much importance of spoken discourse. There are three reasons for this.

First is traditional grammar translation method of language teaching. Teachers just teach grammatical rules and translate the words in native language. There is no scope for learner to speak language.

The second is technology: only since the mid-1970s has tape-recording been sufficiently cheap and practical to enable the widespread study of talk - whether native speaker talk (Carter and McCarthy 1997: 7) or learner talk - and use of tape recorders in the language classroom. Due to the difficulty of studying talk, it was easier for teachers, methodologists, applied linguists and linguists to focus on written language than spoken language (for nearly 20 years the TESOL convention has run annual colloquia on the teaching of reading and writing, but not on speaking or listening).

The third reason for its peculiar development might be termed 'exploitation': most approaches to language teaching other than grammar-translation (the direct method, the audio-lingual approach) as well as more marginal approaches (such as the Silent Way, Community Language Learning and Suggestopedia) exploited oral communication centrally as part of their methodology: not as a discourse skill in its own right, but rather as a special medium for providing language input, memorization practice and habit-formation. (Nunan and Carter)

Characteristics of speech

Levelt (1989) proposed that speech production involves four major processes: conceptualization, formulation, articulation and self-monitoring

Conceptualization is concerned with planning the message content. It draws on background knowledge, knowledge about the topic, about the speech situation and on knowledge of patterns of discourse. The conceptualize includes a 'monitor', which checks everything that occurs in the interaction to ensure that the communication goes to plan. This enables speakers to self-correct for expression, grammar and pronunciation.

After conceptualization, the formulator finds the words and phrases to express the meanings, sequencing them and putting in appropriate grammatical markers (such as inflections, auxiliaries, articles). It also prepares the sound patterns of the words to be used: LI errors of pronunciation very commonly involve switching sounds between words that are separated from each other; such switches suggest that the pronunciation of words must be prepared in batches prior to pronunciation.

The third process is articulation. This involves the motor control of the articulatory organs; in English: the lips, tongue, teeth, alveolar palate, velum, glottis, mouth cavity and breath.

Self-monitoring is concerned with language users being able to identify and self-correct mistakes.  (Nunan and Carter)

Practice

• A range of different types of interaction need practicing.

• The conditions of oral tasks need to differ from those for written skills.

• Improvised speech needs practice, but around some content familiarity.

• Overt oral editing skills need to be encouraged, including the use of communication strategies.

• Oral language processing requires integration of accuracy, complexity and fluency.

• For learners' oral abilities to develop, courses need to vary the emphasis on fluency, accuracy and complexity. (Nunan and Carter)

3) Reading skill

In second language learning teaching can improve vocabulary. Like listening it can also helps learner to get natural structure of sentences.

Focus on the uses of reading

A number of scholars have wished to locate discussion of reading within the wider framework of literacy practices, as specific to particular sociocultural environments. This emphasis is of relevance to teachers whose learners come to English language literacy with diverse experience of literacy in a first or other language. Some will be highly literate in a first literacy; others may be acquiring literacy through the medium of English. In either case it is important to see reading and writing as part of language behavior beyond the learning of specific skills or strategies. Street (1984) introduces a dichotomy between an autonomous model of literacy which sees reading and writing as the learning of skills which are supposedly universally implicated in literacy instruction, and a view of literacy which is called 'ideological' and by which reading and writing practices have currency and prestige, not because of any inherent value but because of social and historical factors particular to the cultural setting. (Nunan and Carter)

Product: focus on text

In some accounts of reading, priority is given to the text and parts of texts with varying attention paid to form alone or the relationship between form and meaning. At the same time, particular reader skills may be identified as linked to the focus on specific textual features. One such skill is phonemic awareness, as evidenced by sensitivity to the sound constituents of words, allowing the learner reader to map the letters in words onto an equivalence of sound. The teaching approach promoting this skill is called phonics. Traditionally seen as alternative to phonics approaches in the teaching of initial reading are look-and-say or whole-word methods where learners are encouraged to acquire a sight vocabulary, largely through memorizing.  (Nunan and Carter)

Process: focus on reader

Process accounts of reading take the reader rather than the text as a point of departure. They are sometimes termed top-down, on the grounds that they give greater emphasis to the kinds of background knowledge and values which the reader brings to reading. The nature of this knowledge can be characterized as a 'schema', or mental model, allowing a reader to relate new, text-based knowledge to existing world knowledge. In the 1980s and 1990s the role of the reader shifted. In early accounts of reading the reader was seen as passive: reading, along with listening, was referred to as a 'passive skill'. There was then a shift in emphasis from a passive, acquiescent reader to an active one. Thus, the reader was typically described as 'extracting' meaning from a text. More recently the ground has shifted again to talk of reading as 'interactive' rather than simply 'active'. Readers are seen as negotiating meaning; meaning is partial within the text and writers' intentions may not be privileged over readers' interpretations.  (Nunan and Carter)

READING AS A SOCIAL PROCESS: CRITICAL READING

More recently there has been interest in reading as a social, critical process (Wallace 1992a; Baynham 1995). This strand of enquiry pays greater attention to social and ideological factors which mediate in readers' access to text. Critical reading is concerned less with the individual author's communicative intent than with ideological effect: the claim is that readers need not accept the words on the page as given, but that a range of interpretations are legitimate, providing that textual warrants are offered. L2 readers, in particular, may bring different kinds of cultural and ideological assumptions to bear on L2 texts, thereby offering, it is argued, fruitful challenges to mainstream or conventional readings.  (Nunan and Carter)

4) Writing skill

Writing is last skill of language learning. Teaching English second language (L2) writing differs from teaching other language skills in two ways. First, even as late as the 1970s, L2 writing was not viewed as a language skill to be taught to learners. Instead, it was used as a support skill in language learning to, for example, practice handwriting, write answers to grammar and reading exercises, and write dictation. In fact, while graduate programmes in TESOL regularly offered courses in other skill areas, virtually no coursework was available in teaching L2 writing. Second, as the theory and practice of L2 composition teaching gradually developed, it followed the path of US native English speaker (NES) composition theory. Only recently has English L2 composition theory and pedagogy begun to offer English first language (LI) researchers and teachers insights and pedagogical practices. (Nunan and Carter)

Background

In the 1970s many English L2 language programme writing classes were, in reality, grammar courses. Students copied sentences or short pieces of discourse, making discrete changes in person or tense. The teaching philosophy grew directly out of the audio-lingual method: students were taught incrementally, error was prevented and accuracy was expected to arise out of practice with structures. In the early 1980s, as teachers became more aware of current practices in NES composition, there was a shift from strictly controlled writing to guided writing: writing was limited to structuring sentences, often in direct answers to questions, or by combining sentences - the result of which looked like a short piece of discourse. (Nunan and Carter)

Writing strategies in TESOL

• re-writing from different viewpoints

• shifting registers to explore changing communicative effects

• writing predictions and completions to texts as part of a process of detailed text study

• Cross-genre writing (e.g. from poetry to prose and vice versa). (Nunan and Carter)

Practice

As ESL research and practices have developed, many techniques and methods have proved successful in English L2 writing classrooms:

• Careful needs analysis to plan curriculums (Reid 2000);

• Co-operative and group work (including collaborative writing) that strengthen the community of the class and offer writers authentic audiences;

• Integration of language skills in class activities;

• learning style and strategy training to help students learn how to learn (Reid 1998); and

• The use of relevant, authentic materials and tasks. (Nunan and Carter)

Conclusion

All four skills together make the language. In language learning they are interdependent. One skill helps to learn other skill. So, it is necessary to having good control of all four skills for acquiring good language.

Works Cited

Nunan, David and Ronald Carter. Full text of "The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages". 26 October 2017 <https://archive.org/stream/ilhem_20150321_1654/[David_Nunan,_Ronald_Carter]_The_Cambridge_guide_t_djvu.txt>.

 To evaluate this assignment, click here