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.

Blog Post 6: Maximizing Learning Opportunities

Blog Post 6

September 24, 2012

Brown Chapters 4 & 16  

Kumar Chapter 3

            Brown’s chapter four in Teaching By Principles, will be a great resource in the future.  I found each section was answering either questions that I had and answering questions I didn’t even know I had.  These sections or elements, are referred to as foundational principles that form building blocks for theoretical rationales.

            “I have see many a novice language teacher gobble up teaching techniques without carefully considering the criteria that underlie their successful application in the classroom…..I just want to know what to do when I get into the classroom” (Brown 63).  I believe that this statement is relevant to all preservice teachers, including myself.  This semester in particular I have been focusing on building a database of methods, approaches, and activities because, frankly, I am terrified by the idea that next semester I will be teaching ELL’s in a high school.

            As important as methods, approaches, and activities are to teaching language, Brown states that we need to carefully consider the criteria that underline their successful application in the classroom (Brown 63). The principles that form the core approach to language teaching are as follows: Cognitive Principles: automaticity, meaningful learning, the anticipation of reward, intrinsic motivation, strategic motivation, and autonomy.  Socioaffective principles: Language ego, willingness to communicate, and the language-culture connection. Linguistic Principles: the native language effect, interlanguage, and communicative competence

            Automaticity is an interesting concept.  Teachers need to realize how children, adolescents and adults learn languages differently.  Children do not focus on the grammatical aspects thus allowing them to absorb the language and promote fluency.  Adults can benefit from certain focal processing of rules, definitions, and other formal aspects of language.  However, adults, stated by Brown, “can take a lesson from children by speedily overcoming our propensity to pay too much focal attention to the bits and pieces of language and to move language forms quickly to the periphery by using language in authentic contexts for meaningful purposes” (Brown 65).  I think the hardest part for me when I was learning an L2 was moving the rules, definitions, and other formal aspects of the L2 to the periphery of my focus.  I guess I, as being as linguistically inclined as I am, focused strongly on grammar-translation and assumed I was past the ability of using automaticity to gain fluency and comprehension.

            As Brown discussed in his chapter four, students need to learn autonomy without too many outside rewards.  In Kumar’s chapter three in Beyond Methods, he also states that, “learning is primarily a personal construct controlled by the individual learner” (Kumar 44).  With this in mind, we can help our students by maximizing learning opportunities for our learners.  Kumar discusses that we need to realize that our lessons cannot be bound by teachers’ agenda, teaching materials, or by syllabus specifications.  We can sort all of these out before we even get our class list of students, but as we begin to learn about our students, our agendas, materials and syllabi need to reflect the information we obtain. 

Blog Post 5: The Essence of CLT

Blog Post 5

9-17-12

The End of CLT by Stephen Bax

Task-Based Instruction by Peter Skehan

Potential Cultural Resistance to Pedagogical Imports by Guangwei Hu

            The first article I read, The End of CLT: A Context Approach to Language Teaching, by Stephen Bax, discusses and problematizes Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). The author starts off by discussing how CLT does not meet all of the needs in language instruction, and just because a teacher, or institution does not use CLT does not mean that they are “backward.”

            I find the stories at the beginning of the article interesting because I was not aware of the idea that not using CLT is “backward” and that CLT is the modern way of teaching language.  “This in turn rests on the unspoken assumption that CLT is not only ‘modern,’ but is in fact the only way to learn a language properly” (Bax, 279). 

            Bax’s way of countering this common belief is stating that we need not think of CLT as the one and only, we must realize that there are many different approaches to consider and use when teaching, sticking with CLT alone is wrong.  The reason why it is wrong is because CLT lack the use of the context, which is what Bax calls “Context Approach.”  Bax uses this term because he believes that CLT needs to take a step down from the number one, and only spot, and take second place to the Context Approach, because CLT lacks a key aspect of language teaching, which is context. 

            The Context Approach disagrees fundamentally with CLT by arguing that methodology is not the only solution.  I like the idea of the Context Approach because it seems to not only observe that the whole context is of importance but that other approaches may be equally valid and implemented.  Any method or approach that claims that you should only use that specific method of approach and discard all others immediately raises a red flag in my head.  Nothing can be taught or solved using just one approach, especially because students are all different.  Teaching can’t be a one size fits all, and the Context Approach discusses that other methods and approaches may be equally valid.

            The second article, Task-Based Instruction, by Peter Skehan, discusses the concept of task-based instruction.  Over the course of the last fifteen years, researchers have made vast improvements in the methodological progress within the task-based area.  From my understanding after reading this article, during the 1970’s there were moves in instruction to move from language structure focus alone to a focus more on conveying meaning and information to one another and to develop the capacity to express meanings.  This in turn influenced a lot of things, which I believe one was CLT which in turn called for task-based approaches.  The term “communicative activity” was replaced with “task.”

            Something that I found very interesting was the discussion of cognitive perspectives on TBI.  Take the aspects of performance (complexity of language, accuracy, fluency).  There are two approaches here.  When we focus on one aspect of language, some researchers believe that there will be a trade off. Attending to one aspect will result in the suffering of another.  Other researchers believe that learners can access multiple and non-competing attentional pools.  It is unclear which is correct, more research is needed.

            The last article, Potential Cultural Resistance to Pedagogical Imports: The Case of Communicative Language Teaching in China, by Guangwei Hu, has really brought everything together for me as well as raise some important issues that may arise in classrooms.  The article discusses that communicative language teaching in China is important, however, it goes against the Chinese social culture of learning.  This is something I have never considered, but it is so obvious.  Not to stereotype, but it is common to see a Chinese classroom run by teacher centered approaches and traditional methods.  The Chinese students have primarily learned English through grammar-translation and audiolingualism but this approach has failed to develop an adequate level of communicative competence.  The question I have is this: Just because the Chinese are learning English does not mean that they have to adapt an American-like culture classroom, but how do they obtain the communicative competence they need?  How did they originally obtain their L1 communicative competence? Is the Chinese school structure not beneficial to the learning of an L2? Of course this can be, just as American classrooms cannot be.  But the main issue comes down to how do the Chinese students, even if they are in America, best learn communicative competence.

            In China there has been tremendous efforts to promote CLT; they have changed curricula and spent a lot of money on resources and materials to aid in the revamping of instruction. However, despite these efforts, CLT has not received the support that it was thought to gain and the traditional approach is still the dominant approach in the classrooms.  This is, as stated in the article, because of the “host of constraints on the adoption of CLT in the Chinese context which includes, among other things, lack of necessary resources, big class size, limited instructional time, teachers’ lack of language proficiency and sociolinguistic competence, examination pressure and cultural factors” (Hu 94).

            What I believe seems to be the biggest obstacle that the Chinese schools face is the cultural factors because Hu discusses that the conception of CLT is that of communicative competence, rather than linguistic competence alone.  Communicative competence consists of grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence.  With the lack of in-class communicative work, students will not practice and obtain these aspects.  I believe that unless Chinese classrooms completely change their culture of teacher lead and student submissiveness, which is unlikely due to the countrywide ideology, CLT cannot work in its totality.  Parts of it can be practiced and aspects can be altered but CLT in the true essence cannot be practiced.  Now as we learned from the previous article, CLT is not the end-all-be-all.  There are other methods and approaches that can be implemented.