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
Department Of English, MKBU
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>.
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