Post 10: The Power of Linguistics

October 29^th, 2012

Blog Post 10

Kumar chapters  9 & 10

Brown chapter 17

            Kumar’s chapter 9, Contextualizing Linguistic Input, is probably my favorite chapter so far.  I really enjoy learning about linguistics and find sociolinguistics absolutely fascinating.  Kumar discusses how to join together realities that make up a context.  The four realities that he presents are linguistic, extralinguistic, situational, and extrasituational.

            The linguistic context is the immediate linguistic environment that contains formal aspects of language required for the process of meaning-making (205).  This can pertain to the sentence or sentence to sentence levels.  Kumar then gives the example of the word ‘table’ and the different meanings that can be inferred by using the contextual clues. While the word ‘table’ will usually evoke the referent of an object to place things on in a dining room, the linguistic environment must be assessed to determine if that is indeed what is being referred to.   

While reading this I kept wondering if this was the same thing as pragmatics.  That word is not used while explaining linguistic environment but that is what I think of to describe the concept.  While spending time with my conversation partner, I asked her what the hardest part of the English language is to learn.  She said that the hardest part is knowing all of the different meanings of the same word.  I found that very coincidental because I had just finished reading this chapter!

Another phenomenon that ELLs learn is the linguistic context, mainly the notion of cohesion.  Productive communication depends on the understanding of cohesion.  I cannot answer a question properly if I do not understand the question. My answer is dependent on the question.  The other aspect of cohesion, the fusing of sentences, reminded me of Spanish class in high school.  When you fuse sentences you do not need to repeat the question within your answer, your answer can be an incomplete sentence and still be mutually intelligible.  In Spanish class we were always forced to not fuse our sentences while engaging in dialogue.  I guess this just gives us more practice speaking, but it always felt overly formal and unnatural.

The extralinguistic context referrers to the immediate linguistics environment that contains prosodic signals, such as stress and tone (207).  While reading this, I was overwhelmed thinking about the task of teaching all of these things.  This seems like such an important concept to be taught be 1) not all languages have these aspects, and 2) not knowing these aspects of the English language and societal norms can cause some problems.  Like in the example given, the Asian woman who offered gravy had a spoken the word with a falling intonation which in turn, rubbed the Americans the wrong way because usually when offered something, the word has a rising intonation to signal an offering.

The reflective task 9.2 asks if we have ever experienced a situation where incorrect intonation led to a misunderstanding.  Something that I immediately thought of is how in English, when you put the stress on the front syllable of certain words, it makes the word a noun.  When you put the stress on the back syllable is makes the word a verb.  For example, the word ‘subject’ or ‘construct.’  I remember when I learned that rule, it blew my mind.

Brown’s chapter 17 discusses the integration of the four main language learning skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.  While many institutions separate these skills, ESL teachers need to make sure to integrate all of these within our lessons.  In a lot of our C&I methods courses we learn about the Multiple Intelligences and how we can tap in to each of them in our lessons.  We have all different types of learners in the classroom; it is impossible not to.  Even if we learn a certain way and we feel comfortable teaching a certain way, it is imperative that we realize our students differ from us and our teaching methods always need to vary.  By varying our lessons amongst listening lessons, speaking lessons, hands on lessons, etc. we can try to best teach each of our students equally.

Post 9: Grammar, Vocabulary and Heuristics

Blog Post 9

October 22, 2012

Kumar chapters 7 & 8

Brown chapter 22

            In Brown’s chapter 22, the concept of teaching grammar and vocabulary comes up.  This seems to be the hardest concept to weave into teaching.  Like we have discussed and like the book mentions, there are many opinions as to how these topics should be taught.  Through the last century there are mixed feelings about the place of teaching language forms.  I am not sure exactly what I believe just yet but I do believe that there should be some explicit teaching of grammar and forms.

            “Organizational competence is necessary for communication to take place….in other words, grammar tells us how to construct a sentence, and discourse rules tell us how to string those sentences together.  Semantics tells us something about the meaning(s) of words and strings of words.  Then pragmatics tells us about which of several meanings to assign given the context of an utterance or written text” (Brown 420).  So obviously, this is some important stuff that our students need to grasp.  Can they grasp it just through communication and observation alone?  I don’t think so.  Just like when we learn our L1, we learn a great deal of grammar and sentence structure, discourse, semantics and pragmatics through observation and trial and error as children.  When we enter school, however, we still are explicitly taught the rules.  I believe that not explicitly teaching our students these things puts them at a disadvantage.  We may not even be teaching them the specific rules, but just teaching them about language in general and how it all works together is important.

            This then leads into Kumar’s chapters 7 and 8, Fostering Language Awareness and Activating intuitive Heuristics.  He begins by discussing the two major reforms that the US and UK have undergone.  The UK is using the Language Awareness movement in which students become more sensitive to and conscious to the nature of language and its role in human life.  The US uses the Whole Language movement which I have first hand been learning about it my other classes.  Because I am an English major and I am becoming a certified reading specialist, I have taken many courses on the importance and prevalence of language instruction.  Like discussed in the Kumar’s chapter, students learn best by experiencing the whole language experience which consists of listening, speaking, reading writing, and two that are missing from Kumar’s chapter but that I have learned about in my other classes, viewing and visually representing.  This helps the student see that language is all around us and we use it almost constantly in our everyday lives. 

            I really like how Kumar brings up the concept of language effecting one’s understanding of how language is often used to control people economically, culturally, and socially.  Being an English major, I have created a unit plan that involves aspects of rhetoric in literature and in our daily lives.  To be well educated and informed consumers, students should learn how language is used in rhetorical strategies.  This is a type of discourse that teaches students to be critically aware of the input they are receiving, which in turn allows them to make informed decisions. 

            Kumar then discusses heuristics, which is the process of self-discovery on the part of the learner.  This type of strategy is something that I have learn about before as well.  When students learn and discover things for themselves, it becomes a memorable experience and that will stick with them longer than a lecture will.  This can be done in many different hands on types of lessons.  I learned before that the best way to obtain this is to have students create their own questions that they want to have answered.  They then work to discover the answers to these questions with the guidance of their teacher.  Because they have created their own lesson, more or less, the student has taken autonomy of their learning which becomes authentic.   For example, Kumar discusses the pre-grammatical stage and how it can be utilized to convey a large amount of information of grammar and is acquisition without explicit rules.  Students come across a grammar rule and realize that they already know it or half-way know it from just native observation.  Because they discover a rule that they already know or kind of know, they will more likely remember it.

Blog Post 7: Teaching Listening and Speaking

Blog Post 7
October 8, 2012

The article that was assigned brought up some very important points that ELL teachers need to keep in mind.  Even though we may not speak any or all of the languages within our classroom, we still need to support our students’ native languages.  This was shown in the article when the teacher made sure to take interest in the students’ native languages as well as native cultures.  She made sure to communicate with the parents and encourage them to keep their native languages intact.  The teacher did something that was very important which was allowing the students to take turns being the language teacher.  By doing this, the students show pride in their language and their culture.  It empowers them as well as bring them together.  The only thing that I found maybe a little problematic were the stars that those who spoke more than one language got to wear that read something along the lines of “I speak more than one language!”  Those who don’t speak more than one language still got a star to wear but I can see the students who do not speak more than one language feeling less as special or as talented.

            Brown’s chapters talked about teaching listening and teaching speaking.  TPR actually was one of the first methods that placed a high value on listening comprehension.  The two types of dialogues are interpersonal, which are exchanges that promote social relationships and transactional, which are exchanges for the purpose of conveying propositional or factual information.  Both of these involve shared knowledge between the two participants.  Because of this, the familiarity of the interlocutors will produce conversations with more assumptions, implications, and other meanings hidden between the lines. This would be a great place to teach students certain social customs or social rituals that may be unique to the target language.  For example, in American English dialogue situations, formal dialogues may start off with a hand shake and an introduction.  This may be obvious to some students but for others it may be awkward or uncomfortable.  Depending on the classroom demands (specifically the cultural needs of the students) a teacher may need to decide if a mini lesson on these social customs is necessary or not.  Something that I believe would be very hard to teach would be, in addition to idioms, colloquialisms.  A lot of the time, native speakers such as myself do not even realize we use colloquialisms.  It seems almost impossible to teach something like that let alone teach the discourse in which they may be used.