TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS

Table of contents :
TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS
TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Learner and Teacher Characteristics
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Learners
Age
Young Children
Adolescents
Adults
Language Learning Aptitude
Learner Styles
Learner Strategies
The Affective Domain
Motivation
Teachers
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Chapter 2: Lesson Planning in Language Teaching
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Why Should Teachers Plan Lessons?
Basic Principles of Lesson Planning
What Should Be Included in a Lesson Plan?
A Sample Lesson Plan
Alternatives to Formal Planning
1. Half-plan
2. Focus on the “critical learning moments”
3. Plan the “critical teaching moments”
4. The jungle path
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Microteaching in ELT
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Microteaching
The Participants of Microteaching Process
The Student Teacher
Other Students
The Supervisor Teacher
Steps of Microteaching
Step 1: Orientation about microteaching
Step 2: Providing theoretical information about the Skill or Topic
Step 3: Providing a model microteaching
Step 4: Preparing a microteaching lesson plan
Step 5: The microteaching session
Step 6: The Feedback Session by the Peers and Supervisor
Step 7: Reflection by the Student Teacher
Feedback in Microteaching
Video Recording in Microteaching
Practical Tips
Advantages of Microteaching
Conclusion
Further Reading
Appendix A
Assessment Tool for Microteaching
Appendix B
Reflection Paper
References
Chapter 4: Teaching Speaking in EFL Classes
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Characteristics of Spoken Language
1. Mechanics
2. Functions
3. Social and Cultural Rules and Norms
Spontaneous Communication
Conversational Rules and Structure
What Does Teaching Speaking Involve for Language Teachers?
Characteristics of a Successful Speaking Activity
Problems with Speaking Activities
What the teacher can do to help to solve some of the problems?
Practical Tips
What Makes a Good Speaking Activity?
Awareness Raising Activities
Sample Activity / Picture Dictation
Procedure
Tips for Making the Activity Work Well
Variations
Using Recordings and Transcripts
Focusing on Selected Language Features
Using Live Listening
Using Noticing-The-Gap Activities
Appropriation: Practised Control
Drilling and Chants
Writing Tasks
Reading aloud
Assisted Performance and Scaffolding
Dialogues
Communicative Tasks
Task Repetition
Sample Activities
Discussion Activities
Activity 1) Good manners
Preparation
Procedure
Activity 2) Discussing languages
Preparation
Procedure
Discussion Statements
Problem solving/Task-Based Activities
Activity
Change place, change face
Preparation
Procedure
Activity 4
Task-based speaking
Preparation and Materials
Story Telling Activities
Activity 5
Talking about the past
Preparation
Procedure
Activity 6) Story in a bag
Preparation
Procedure
Variation
Communication Activities
Activity 7
Conversational English
Preparation
Procedure
Role-Play / Acting from a Script Activities
Activity 8
Consequences role play
Procedure
Activity 9
A shopping role play
Preparation
Procedure
Sample Lesson Plans
Lesson Plan 1
Lesson Plan 2
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Internet Sites
Chapter 5: Teaching Listening
İzmir University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, English
Language Teaching Department, Izmir, Turkey
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Important Issues and Frequently
Asked Questions on Listening
1. Extensive vs. Intensive Listening
2. Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches to Listening
3. How Many Times Should Students Hear the Text?
4. What Strategies Do Students Use to Cope with Listening?
5. Anxiety Makes Concentration Difficult. How Can Teachers Overcome Anxiety?
6. Learners Are Unfamiliar with the Topic or Culture. What Can Be Done?
7. Learners Lack Motivation and a Reason for Listening. What Can Be Done?
8. Learners Get Overloaded by the Quantity of Information. How Can Teachers Help Students about This?
9. There Are Lots of Distractions and Students Lose Concentration. What Can Be Done?
10. Learners May Not Have Enough Grammar or Vocabulary. How Can Teachers Help Them?
Sub-Skills and Aims in Listening
Stages of a Listening Lesson
1. Pre-Listening Stage
1. a. Activities for Pre-Listening Stage
2. While-Listening/In-Listening Stage
2. a. Activities for While / In-Listening Stage
3. Post-Listening Stage
3. a. Activities for Post-Listening Stage
A General Procedure of a Listening Comprehension Activity
Sample Activities
Using Films in the Classroom
Using Songs in the Classroom
Activities with Songs
Conclusion
A Sample Lesson Plan
Pre-Listening
While / In-listening
The Text to Be Read
Post-Listening
Further Reading
References
A Study of Accented Speech of Turkish Speakers of Chapter 6: Intelligibility in Pronunciation Teaching: English
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Description and Analysis
The Pronunciation Issues to Be Addressed
The Analysis of the Data and the Prioritization of the Pronunciation Issues
An Instructional Plan for Enhancing
the Speech Intelligibility of the Target Population
Lesson I
Activity 1
Activity 2
Activity 3
Lesson II
Activity 1
Activity II
Activity III
Lesson III
Activity I
Activity II
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Chapter 7: Vocabulary Instruction in EFL Classes
Gaziantep University, Faculty of Education, English
Language Teaching Department, Gaziantep, Turkey
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
What Is Vocabulary?
The English Lexicon
Target Vocabulary Size in a Foreign Language
Receptive vs. Productive Vocabulary
Breadth and Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge
What Does It Mean to Know a Word?
Practical Tips
Contextualized Vocabulary Learning/Teaching
Decontextualized Vocabulary Learning/Teaching
Using Corpora to Learn/Teach Vocabulary
Sample Activities
Thematic Teaching Scenarios
The Contextualized Scenario
Activity 1. Guessing the Meaning Out of Context
Activity 2. Negotiation Activities
Activity 3. A Box of Words
The Decontextualized Scenario
Activity 4. Semantic Mapping
Activity 5. Mnemonics
The Corpus-Informed Scenario
Activity 6. Concordancing Activity
Conclusion
A Sample Lesson Plan
Further Reading
References
Chapter 8: Teaching Writing
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Why Should We Teach Writing?
Sample Activity: Dialogue Dictation
Sample Activity: Punctuating and Completing a Joke
What Writing Activities Should Learners Do?
Sample Activity: Response to a Newspaper Article
Sample Activity: Writing Notes to Each Other
Process and Product Writing
Creative Writing
Writing and Genre
Sample Activity: Writing a Formal Email to the Teacher
Sample Activity: Newspaper
How Should Teachers Give Feedback?
Sample Activity: Peer Editing on an Academic Paragraph on Topics of Interest
Homework or In-class Writing?
What Are the Assessment Criteria?
More Sample Activities
Sample Activity: Preparing, Conducting and Reporting a Survey
Sample Activity: Extensive Reading Project
Sample Activity: Sentence Completion
Sample Activity: Complementing Each Other
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Chapter 9: Teaching Reading in EFL Classes
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
How Reading in Native Language Differs from Reading in FL
Reading Comprehension
Difficulties Encountered by EFL Readers When They Are Reading
Schema Related Difficulties
Vocabulary Related Difficulties
First Language Related Difficulties
Principles for Teaching Reading
Meaning-Focused Input
Meaning-Focused Output
Language-Focused Learning
Fluency Development
Reading Sub-Skills
Skimming
Scanning
Lexical Inference
Intensive and Extensive Reading
A Sample Activity for Intensive Reading
Critical Reading for EFL Teachers and Learners
Distinguishing between Fact and Opinion
Sample Activities for Fact and Opinion
Recognizing and Evaluating Arguments
Conclusion
Further Reading
Sample Lesson Plan
References
Chapter 10: Teaching Grammar
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
The Place of Grammar in the History of Language Teaching
Presentation
Deductive vs. Inductive Grammar Presentation
Teaching Verbs That Take Both Gerund and Infinitive Forms Using Concordance Data
Advantages
Disadvantages
Discovering Grammar
Reading Text
Practice
Grammar Games
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Chapter 11: Integrated Skills in Language Teaching
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Advantages of the Integrated Skills Approach
Limitations of the Integrated Skills Approach
Overcoming the Limitations
Types of Integrated Skills Instruction
Content Based Instruction (CBI)
Theme Based Instruction
Task Based Instruction
Experiential Learning
Practical Tips for Integrating the Language Skills
Sample Integrated-Skills Lesson Plan Based on the Novel The Alchemist
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Chapter 12: Using Literature to Teach Language Skills
The Goals of the Chapter
Introduction
Using Literature to Teach Language Skills
Genres of Literature Used in Teaching Language Skills
Novels
Why Use Novels
Target Skills
Role of the Teacher
Drama
Why Use Drama
Target Skills
Role of the Teacher
Short Stories
Why Use Short Stories
Target Skills
Role of the Teacher
Poems and Songs
Why Use Poetry
Role of the Teacher
Methodological Approaches
to Teaching Literature
The Critical Literary Approach
The Stylistic Approach
Language-based Model
Literature as Content or Culture Model
Literature as Personal Growth or Enrichment
The Story Grammar Approach (SGA)
Reader Response Approach (RRA)
New Criticism
Structuralism
Stylistics
Reader-Response
Language-based
Critical Literacy
Integrated Approach
Activities
Reading
Listening
Speaking
Writing
Sample Lesson Plan
While-Reading Stage
Post-Reading Stage
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Chapter 13: Using Tasks in Language Teaching
The Goals of the Chapter
I. Introduction
II. The Main Issues of TBLL
a) What Is a Task?
b.) Task Sequences
c) Task Types
d) Other Task Types
Information Gap activities
Sample Questions:
Dictogloss Activities
Jigsaw Activities
Example
Open and Closed Tasks
III. Sample Activities
1. Introduction
2. Student Questionnaires
3. Discussion
4. Post-Discussion
5. Language Focus
6. Controlled Practice
7. Follow-Up
IV. A Sample Lesson Plan
10. Language Work
10.1. Identification
10.2. Analysis. Ask them to look at these patterns
10.3. Help your learners to organise their knowledge of verbs followed by to
10.4. Practice
11. Round-up
12. Vanishing words
Conclusion
References
Useful Websites
Editors’ Contact Information
Index

Citation preview

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS

No part of this digital document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means. The publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this digital document, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained herein. This digital document is sold with the clear understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical or any other professional services.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS Additional books in this series can be found on Nova‘s website under the Series tab.

Additional e-books in this series can be found on Nova‘s website under the e-book tab.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS

BANU INAN-KARAGUL AND

DOGAN YUKSEL EDITORS

New York

Copyright © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. For permission to use material from this book please contact us: Telephone 631-231-7269; Fax 631-231-8175 Web Site: http://www.novapublishers.com NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers‘ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Any parts of this book based on government reports are so indicated and copyright is claimed for those parts to the extent applicable to compilations of such works. Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. Additional color graphics may be available in the e-book version of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN:  (eBook)

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Introduction

ix

Chapter 1

Learner and Teacher Characteristics Firdevs Karahan

1

Chapter 2

Lesson Planning in Language Teaching Banu Inan Karagul

17

Chapter 3

Microteaching in ELT Dogan Yuksel

29

Chapter 4

Teaching Speaking in EFL Classes Çağlayan Erdönmez

39

Chapter 5

Teaching Listening Aylin Köyalan

65

Chapter 6

Intelligibility in Pronunciation Teaching: A Study of Accented Speech of Turkish Speakers of English İrfan Kuran

79

Chapter 7

Vocabulary Instruction in EFL Classes Ihsan Unaldi

91

Chapter 8

Teaching Writing Tülin Yildirim

113

Chapter 9

Teaching Reading in EFL Classes Mehmet Bardakçi and Kadriye Dilek Akpinar

135

Chapter 10

Teaching Grammar Banu Inan Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

159

Chapter 11

Integrated Skills in Language Teaching Andreea Nicolaescu

169

Chapter 12

Using Literature to Teach Language Skills Aşkin Haluk Yildirim

181

vi Chapter 13

Contents Using Tasks in Language Teaching Gokce Bayraktar

203

Editors' Contact Information

223

Index

225

PREFACE Teaching Language Skills is a comprehensive guide that included the combination of both theory and practice related to how to teach different language skills and components that might be used while teaching a second and/or foreign language. It aims to do the following things: -

to present a detailed discussion of the theories related to teaching different language skills and the components of the learning/teaching process to provide the readers with a great deal of information on specific techniques for classroom teaching to supply sample lesson plans, classroom tasks and activities that might be used as a starting point to produce some further examples

The addressed readers of this edited book will be able to get an insight about different ways of presenting a new language to their students so that it will become more interesting and useful. The first three chapters of this book will clarify the significant concepts such as learner and teacher characteristics, planning and syllabi and microteaching. The following chapters, on the other hand, will dwell upon the practical aspect of language teaching by means of some sample tasks, activities and lesson plans that might be useful for understanding the nature of language classroom. This book is not only a product of the experiences of chapter writers that work in prestigious universities both in Turkey and abroad, but also a useful guide which is expected to contribute to the field of language teaching.

INTRODUCTION Teaching Language Skills is a book written for language teachers, prospective teachers, students in the language teaching departments and researchers working in this field. This book includes the issues related to language teaching, how to do it effectively and how to focus on different language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing in the language classroom. It is believed that this book will facilitate the process of teaching English as a foreign and/or language in different language teaching contexts all around the world. Teaching Language Skills consists of twelve chapters which are concerned with important issues to be taken into account while teaching a second and/or foreign language. In the first chapter, Firdevs KARAHAN explains the significance of teacher and learner characteristics that play an important role in the process of teaching and learning. Banu INAN KARAGUL writes about the process of planning and the role of different types of syllabi appealing to different learning/teaching needs in the second chapter. In the third chapter, Dogan YUKSEL defines microteaching, which is an important concept to be learned and practised for trainee teachers and explains its significance in the contexts of teacher training. Caglayan ERDONMEZ, in the fourth chapter, writes about the role of speaking in language teaching and lists some sample activities that might be used by teachers trying to teach how to speak in another language. In the fifth chapter, Aylin KOYALAN exemplifies different types of listening activities that might foster students‘ listening skills in a target language. In the sixth chapter, Irfan KURAN focuses on the significance of intelligibility while teaching the pronunciation of a second and/or foreign language. In the seventh chapter, Ihsan UNALDI dwells upon the necessity of teaching vocabulary and the possible activities teachers might use in their language classrooms. Tulin YILDIRIM, in the eighth chapter, highlights another important skill in language teaching, which is writing. She describes the process of teaching this challenging skill with the help of some sample activities. In the ninth chapter, Mehmet BARDAKCI writes about how to teach reading, different reading strategies and some possible activities to be used in the language classroom. Banu INAN KARAGUL and Dogan YUKSEL address the issues related to teaching grammar discussing the role of grammar in different language teaching methods and approaches throughout the history and they also suggest some sample activities related to grammar in the tenth chapter. Andrea NICOLAESCU focuses on the necessity of integrating different language skills instead of teaching each skill separately and recommends some possible ways of doing it in the eleventh chapter. In the twelfth chapter, Askin Haluk

x

Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

YILDIRIM writes about the use of literature for language teaching purposes and different ways of doing this in the language classroom. Gokce BAYRAKTAR, in the last chapter of the book, highlights the role of tasks in the language classroom and how to benefit from them so as to teach a second and/or foreign language.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 1

LEARNER AND TEACHER CHARACTERISTICS Firdevs Karahan Sakarya University, Faculty of Education Department of Foreign Languages Teaching English Language Teaching Program, Sakarya, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading the present chapter, students will be able to: 1. Define the most important characteristics of learners; 2. Discuss the relationship between these characteristics; 3. Debate the possible differences specific to Turkish culture and foreign language teaching context; 4. Describe the most important characteristics of teachers. STUDY QUESTIONS 1. As a leading factor, how does age either facilitate or obstruct the process of language learning and teaching? Provide your arguments with specific examples. 2. What are the three learner styles? How do they play a role in assembling the strategies one employs while learning or teaching a language? 3. How do various learning theories define motivation? What are the implications of these definitions for language learners and teachers? 4. What are the main duties of a contemporary language teacher to follow the curriculum and reach the course objectives?



E-mail: [email protected].

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Firdevs Karahan

INTRODUCTION In language teaching and learning, major roles belong to teachers and learners. Active involvement of these two parties necessitates profound background knowledge of factors which affects the process of learning and teaching language. Deriving from this knowledge, the teacher develops his skill in teaching; the learner learns how to become more successful in achieving his goal, i.e. to learn another language. This chapter will present the basic factors about learners and the basic characteristics of teachers.

LEARNERS Learners are at the forefront in the language learning process. Without them, it would be impossible to talk about other factors in learning such as teachers, materials, methodology, and so on. There are several important characteristics of learners such as age, language aptitude, motivation affecting the learning process both in a positive and negative way.

AGE It is generally believed that the younger the learner is, the easier it is to learn another language. Although starting to learn at a very young age gives the learner more opportunity to allocate more time to be in a learning process, there is not enough evidence that children in similar classroom situations are performing better than adults in language learning. It is true that adults have many advantages in terms of memory, organization skills, attention spans, study skills, and handling complex mental tasks. Since they have sturdy motivation, they can easily understand the necessity of learning a foreign language for educational or professional purposes. Moreover, they are more careful about accuracy and appropriateness of language use with right vocabulary. Besides its advantages, age also has disadvantages. It is generally a requirement for adults to learn a foreign language in a limited amount of time, especially for professional purposes. They may also demand specifically to perform speech acts such as persuading, arguing, expressing concern, objection, explaining, and presenting information about complex issues related to their life, work or education. Since adults avoid making mistakes, they often shrink away from practicing for fear that they would appear foolish, incompetent, or not be able to get their message across. Moreover, it might be more difficult for adults to make friends speaking a foreign language. Regarding age, the ease with which children can pick up an authentic accent sets a good example to support the superiority of young language learners over adults. But adults in need and with a strong motivation such as diplomats or those with an access to a wide range of opportunities to practice may acquire native-like accent. However, it may cause retention of their cultural and linguistic identity (Harmer, 2013). Subsequent to general comments of students as children and adults on advantages and disadvantages, it might be good to mention their characteristics in general. But it should be

Learner and Teacher Characteristics

3

kept in mind that they are only generalizations, much depends on individual learner differences and motivation as Harmer (2013) notes.

Young Children Children, up to the ages of nine or ten, reveal certain characteristics as:        

Although they do not understand the meaning of individual words, they respond to meaning. Since they learn from everything around them without focusing on a certain topic, they learn indirectly. They learn better through the five senses along with from explicit explanation. Abstract concepts are difficult for them to learn. Generally they have enthusiasm and curiosity to learn the world. They are in need to have individual attention and approval from the teacher and adults around them. They learn better by examples from themselves and their own lives. As they have a limited attention span, activities should be encouraging enough for them to engage in.

Within the childhood period, it is also important to consider changes. For example; games, puzzles and songs are better ways to learn for children at the age of 10 and 11 while dialogues, question-answer activities and matching exercises are more suitable activities for the ones at the age of 12 and 13 (Keskil and Cephe, 2001).

Adolescents Teenage students are generally perceived as a group of learners difficult to manage despite their relative success as language learners with their greater ability for abstract thought and their passionate commitment to what they are doing once they are engaged (Harmer, 2013). As teenagers are in search for identity and in need for self-esteem in this period, they all need to be valued and approved by not only adults around them but also their peers mostly. Disruptive behaviors in teenage classes and lack of enthusiasm to learn are the basic issues that teachers have to cope with by persuading the students to engage in learning process through relevant and involving materials. Learning issues directly, discussing abstract notions, contrasting ideas and concepts with teacher‘s guidance, linking what they have learnt to their everyday interests are the ways adolescents apply in a humanistic learning environment where their self-esteem is reinforced and their search for identity is aided.

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Firdevs Karahan

Adults As language learners, adults have special characteristics. When compared with children and adolescents, adults‘ ability to engage with abstract notions, their previous experiences on which activities can depend, their expectations and own way of learning, their ability to overcome the feeling of boredom, their clear understanding of the reasons of learning that results in a high level of motivation, their ability to sustain their motivation level help teacher a lot in carrying out activities longer and involving them in a more conscious learning process. The most crucial issue for teachers is to deal with diminishing dreadful effects of their past learning experiences by offering achievable activities and adjusting the learning process according to their needs. Activity 1 Observe 3-5 students at different ages in your neighbourhood and write at least 5 characteristics for each.

LANGUAGE LEARNING APTITUDE Dictionary meaning of the word ‗aptitude‘ is the ability and capability of doing something. It is a natural or acquired ability to properly perform some task and is believed to be a part of general intelligence but to be in part distinct. John Carroll (1965) identified components of language aptitude as: 1. Phonemic coding ability: It is to identify the accepted sounds of a language and to handle sound-symbol relationships, for instance, to identify the sound which ―w‖ stands for. 2. Grammatical sensitivity: It is to recognize the grammatical functions of words in sentences, for instance, the subject and object of a sentence. 3. Inductive language learning ability: It is to identify patterns of correspondence and relations between form and meaning, for instance, to recognize that in English ‗to‘ can denote direction and ‗at‘ location. 4. Rote learning ability: It is to form and remember associations between stimuli. This is believed to be important in vocabulary learning. The results of researches on language aptitude in the 1950s and 1960s show that the higher score the learners have on language aptitude tests, the more rapidly they learn. However, different components of language aptitude may be implicated in different stages of processing. Phonemic coding ability seems to be relevant to the processing of input, grammatical sensitivity and inductive language learning ability to the central processing stages including interlanguage construction, memory to the storage and access of language but this assumption remains to be searched. Regarding language aptitude tests, there have been a number of criticisms. Firstly, the content of these tests measured general intellectual ability rather than linguistic talents because they had mostly grammar-focused tasks. So, analytic-type learners had higher scores

Learner and Teacher Characteristics

5

than holistic learners as they use language in a more message-oriented way. Secondly, low scores adversely affected students and demotivated them in their future learning experiences. Moreover, teacher‘s treatment to students scoring low would inevitably be biased. As a result of discussions on the language aptitude, the characteristics of ‗good language learners‘ have been tried to be identified (e.g. Naiman, et al., 1978, Rubin and Thompson. 1982, Lightbown and Spada, 2006). The common points of the good learner characteristics can be listed as the tolerance of ambiguity i.e. learning to live with uncertainty, being positive towards learning, finding own way by using aspirations and creating opportunities to practice, being able to guess by using contextual clues, reasoning out of mistakes. This list can be longer but they have been put forward as a result of teaching practice in western-influenced methodologies (Harmer, 2013). Since these characteristics are to a significant extent culturespecific, training students in order to gain the qualities of an ideal learner requires great amount of time and effort in the process of ‗learning to learn‘ as a combination of motivation and effective strategies. Moreover, learners who did very well in their formal education in language learning may not be highly competent outside classroom, especially with native speakers. Activity 2 Survey the language aptitude tests e.g. ―Modern Language Aptitude Test‖ on the web, discuss its components of your choice and comment on whether there are any contradictory issues in terms of its use within a Turkish EFL context.

LEARNER STYLES ‗Style‘ is defined as individual tendencies or preferences and general characteristics of intellectual functioning and personality type that are pertinent to individual (Brown, 2000). While solving or approaching a problem, we make use of established link between our personality and cognition, i.e. our cognitive style. Referring to learning process, they are called ‗learning styles.‘ According to Keefe (1979), learning styles include cognitive, affective and physiological traits as the steady indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment. As learning styles are bridges between emotion and cognition, the selection of sensory, communicative, cultural, affective and intellectual factors (Ausubel, 1968, Hill, 1972, Reid, 1995, Ehrman 1996, Cohen, 1998 cited in Brown 2000) contribute a lot to successful learning. Among learning styles, the field independent style enables the learner to distinguish parts from a whole, to concentrate on something, to analyze separate variables without negatively affected by the other ones. However, ‗too much‘ field independency may lead the learner to deal only with parts but not to establish their relationship to the whole. A field dependent style may help the individual perceive the whole picture or general view of a problem, idea or event. So, both field independency and field dependency have their own place in learning process. In different cultures, children are raised with a general tendency towards being either field independent or field dependent. For example, in authoritarian or agrarian societies, individuals are more field dependent due to high socialization and strict rearing practices. In

6

Firdevs Karahan

democratic, industrialized, competitive societies, the individuals tend to be more field independent due to freer rearing norms (Brown 2000). As affective factors, it can be said that field independents are generally more self-reliant, competitive and self-confident, whereas field dependents are generally more socialized, empathetic and perceptive of the feelings and thoughts of others. In language learning environments, researches disclose that field independents are more successful in analyzing, paying attention to details and doing exercises, drills, and other focused activities (Naiman et al., 1978, Hansen, 1984, Hansen and Stansfield, 1981, Stansfield and Hansen, 1983). On the other hand, field dependents display better results in inductive lessons and learning the communicative aspect of language. These seemingly paradoxical results demonstrate that both styles are important. In faceto-face communication, the learner needs to be more field independent; in doing exercises, tests, he needs to be more field independent. Concerning age, compared to adults, children are predominantly more field dependent which can be considered as an advantage. Depending on the context of learning, learners may vary in their utilization of being field independent or field dependent. So, choosing the appropriate style for the context is the point that the learner should be careful about and teachers should understand his learners‘ preferred styles. The second learning style is related to right- and left-brain dominance. In the lateralization process throughout childhood, the left and right hemisphere become responsible for a diverse array of functions. The left hemisphere is for logical, analytical thought, with mathematical and linear processing of information. The right hemisphere is for the perception and remembering of visual, tactile and auditory images, the processing of holistic, integrative and emotional information. As Krashen, Seliger and Hartnett (1974) suggest, left-braindominant second language learner preferred a deductive style of teaching, while right-braindominant learners appeared to be more successful in an inductive classroom environment. The study by Stevick (1982) mentions that left-brain-dominants in language learning are better at producing separate words, gathering the specifics of language, carrying out sequences of operations, and dealing with abstraction, classification, labeling, and reorganization. Right-brain-dominant learners seem to deal better with whole images, with generalizations, with metaphors, and with emotional reactions and artistic expressions (cited in Brown 2000). Activity 3 Studies reveal a strong relationship between field independecy/dependency and leftand right-brain functioning. Find out the left- and right-brain characteristics in other sources or on the Internet and discuss the relationship by mentioning similarities and differences. As the third style, ambiguity tolerance means the degree of cognitively willingness to tolerate ideas countering the individual‘s belief system or structure of knowledge. Relatively open-minded people can accept the contradictory ideas, ideologies, beliefs, etc. whereas more conservative people tend to reject different ideas as far as they do not fit their own perception. Regarding language learning process, both styles contribute a lot, especially ambiguity tolerance. Chapell and Roberts (1986) and Naiman et al. (1978) found that ambiguity tolerance is one of the important factors in successful language learning. As Brown (2000)

Learner and Teacher Characteristics

7

suggests, ―it is hard for a person who sees everything in black and white with no shades of gray ever being successful in the overwhelmingly ambiguous process of learning a second language.‖ Being reflective or impulsive is another important tendency in cognitive domain. Reflective people are slower and more calculated in making decisions, whereas impulsive people make a quick or gambling guess at an answer to a problem. According to studies (Kagan, 1965; Goodman, 1970; Kagan, Pearson and Welch, 1966; Doron, 1973; Jamieson 1992):   

Reflective people are slower, e.g. in reading and make fewer mistakes but impulsive people read fast and make guesses a lot. Reflective people are better in inductive reasoning. Learners who are impulsive are good guessers in tests.

So, for language teachers, it is important not to react harshly to the answers of impulsive learners and to be more patient to allocate more time for reflective learners. Last but not least, learning style is the preference of learners towards visual or auditory input. Visual learners choose mostly visual aids like drawings, pictures, charts, figures, etc. while auditory learners prefer listening to lectures and other listening materials. In the same path with other learning styles, both are implemented by most successful learners. Activity 4 Within the context of ambiguity tolerance, visual and auditory learning styles, discuss the effect of culture.

LEARNER STRATEGIES ‗Strategy‘ is the specific method of approaching a problem or task, modes of operation for achieving a particular end, planned designs for controlling and manipulating certain information (Brown, 2000). In second language learning, it is possible to distinguish two strategies: learning strategies and communication strategies. Learning strategies are related to how the individual takes input, i.e. how to process, store and retrieve the given information, while communication strategies are about output, i.e. how to express meaning. During 1970s, studies proved the important role of learners including variation in learning process. So, personal characteristics, styles and strategies of ‗good‘ or ‗successful‘ language learners were enumerated and these characteristics are used as pieces of advice to be better language learners (e.g. Rubin, 1975; Stern, 1975; Rubin and Thompson, 1982; Naiman et al., 1978; Brown, 1991; Marshall, 1989). In compliance with the scope of the study, the list of learning and communication strategies will be given as an encapsulated summary. If a teacher training program has enough time and space, a course on strategies-based instruction would be very helpful for prospective teachers.

8

Firdevs Karahan Learning strategies A. Metacognitive strategies: They involve organizing, planning for learning, thinking about the learning process as it is taking place, monitoring of one‘s production or comprehension, and evaluating learning after an activity is completed (Purpura, 1997). It can be exemplified as being an advanced(?) organizer, directing attention, selective attention, self-management, functional planning, self-monitoring, delaying production and self-evaluation (O‘Malley et al., 1985). B. Cognitive strategies are limited to specific learning tasks and involve more direct manipulation of the material itself as the processes of repetition, resourcing, translation, grouping, note taking, deduction, recombination, using imagination, auditory representation, using keywords, contextualization, elaboration, transfer and inferencing (O‘Malley et al., 1985). C. Socioaffective strategies are to do with social mediating activity and interacting with others. They could possibly be formulized as cooperation and asking questions for clarification (O‘Malley et al., 1985). Communication strategies A. Avoidance strategies are applied when the learner is not sure about the right lexical item or appropriate pronunciation. He may also avoid the topic of the conversation by changing the subject, pretending not to understand or not responding at all (Dörnyei 1995). B. Compensatory strategies cover circumlocution (e.g. the thing you open bottles with for corkscrew), approximation (e.g. ship for sailboat), use of all-purpose words (e.g. thing, stuff), word coinage (e.g. vegetarianist for vegetarian), prefabricated patterns (e.g. Where is the ………?), nonlinguistic signals such as mimes, gestures, facial expressions, literal translation, foreignizing (e.g. adding to L1 lexical item a L2 suffix), code-switching, appeal for help and time-gaining strategies (e.g. well, now let’s see). Activity 5 Regarding characteristics of ‗good language learner‘, add more in terms of Turkish educational context.

THE AFFECTIVE DOMAIN In relation to learning another language, different degrees of specific personality factors such as self-esteem, inhibition, risk-taking, anxiety, empathy, and extroversion contribute a lot to the performance of the learners either in a positive or negative way. Self-esteem is defined as the personal evaluation and judgment including the attitude of approval or disapproval, the feeling of worthiness, and the subjective experience. The ‗global‘ self-esteem is stable and resistant to change. The self-appraisal of the individual depends on the assessment of one‘s own worth over time and different situations. The ‗situational‘ self-

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esteem is one‘s self-appraisals in particular life situations. The ‗task‘ self-esteem refers to particular tasks within specific situations, for example one‘s self-evaluation of particular aspect of the process: speaking, writing, a particular class in a second language. Inhibition is pertinent to defenses to protect the ego. In language learning, making mistakes is inevitable, which causes a growth in tension students have. Taking on a new identity may lead to some degree of identity conflict. For similar reasons, the learner may hinder himself from practicing in learning environment. Risk-taking which is a continuum from high to low means to gamble, to be willing to try out hunches about the language and take the risk of being wrong (Brown, 2000). In order not to feel embarrassed or appear foolish, learners may prefer to keep silent and be reluctant to take risks. Anxiety is defined as the feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension, or worry (Scovel, 1978 cited in Brown, 2000). It has different levels: The ‗trait‘ anxiety is global, i.e. a person is anxious about numerous matters, whereas the ‗state‘ anxiety refers to a specific event or an act. In language learning, language anxiety is concerned with state anxiety which primarily manifests itself in self-expression, social and academic evaluation. The degree of anxiety functions as an arbiter since it can either be ‗harmful‘ (debilitative) or ‗helpful‘ (facilitative). As it is known, facilitative tension keeps one alert and enough amount of feeling of nervousness is a stimulating factor in the learning process, whereas debilitative anxiety may preclude the learner from taking notice of his real performance. Empathy generally refers to understanding how another person is feeling. It necessitates an awareness and knowledge of one‘s own feelings and identification with another person (Hogan, 1969 cited in Brown, 2000). So, empathy means not only knowing someone else but also being aware of yourself. The language learning process requires the learner to have a certain degree of empathy towards the target culture and other learners within the learning environment. Together with its counterpart i.e. introversion, extroversion is a term used to define people who are talkative, outgoing but having a need to receive affirmation of other people for a sense of wholeness. On the other hand, introversion characterizes people who are silent and reserved but also can have a sense of wholeness and fulfillment derived from an inner strength of character. Moreover, being extrovert or introvert, carrying out different assets and liabilities may vary across different learner groups, and it‘s sensitive to cultural norms. Activity 6 As teachers, how can we measure the affective domain of our students? Search about the different tools and discuss the problems that such tools present.

MOTIVATION For language teachers, it is crucial to describe the components of motivation, motivated people‘s behaviors, and the ways of creating motivation for language learners. Different learning theories have provided definitions of motivation from different aspects. Behaviorism describes motivation as a factual matter, i.e. acting towards reward using generally external factors. On the other hand, cognitivists define motivation as the

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individual‘s decisions based on personal needs and forces which are grouped as the need for exploration i.e. probing the unknown, manipulation i.e. changing the environment, activity i.e. physical and mental movement, stimulation i.e. being actuated by others and the environment, knowledge i.e. to process, internalize, the results of the previous needs and moving on to the next step in the systems of knowledge and ego enhancement i.e. selfrealization. For constructivists, motivation is shaped not only by the individual himself but also by the social context. A hierarchy of needs is defined by Maslow (1970) who considered motivation as dependent on the satisfaction of fundamental physical necessities, community, security, identity, and self-esteem; all of which lead the individual to self-actualization. Regarding language learning process, Ellis (2003) states that language aptitude deals with the cognitive abilities, on the other hand, motivation includes the attitudes and affective states influencing the degree of effort made by learners. Four types of motivation have been identified as instrumental, integrative, resultative, and intrinsic. Instrumental motivation defines functional reasons to learn an L2 such as educational and economic opportunities. Integrative motivation refers to the interest of learners in the people and culture of the target language. Since integrative motivation may be seen as the cause of L2 achievement, resultative motivation is the result of learning, i.e. learners achieving success in learning may become more motivated. Lastly, intrinsic motivation includes the personal curiosity and interest in learning itself. The nature of motivation is complex and dynamic. These four types of motivation are complementary rather than distinct issues, and subject to change depending on the learning context. Activity 7 Considering the Turkish learners of English or any other foreign languages, discuss the factors that may motivate and demotivate them to learn.

TEACHERS Since foreign/second language teachers having a crucial role in learning process are supposed to pave the way for changes in learners‘ behavior, attitude, knowledge, habits or skills in an unfamiliar language; they are to be a combination of linguist, sociologist, anthropologist, pedagogue, (Finocchiaro and Bonomo 1973) and even an artist at times. As a teacher, while following the curriculum and striving to reach the course objectives, he should be able to 1. Select the right course material by taking into consideration the learners‘ age, proficiency level, interests, learning styles, etc. at the beginning of the language teaching program. 2. Adapt or modify the content provided by the course materials depending on the learners‘ needs, motivation, learning strategies, etc. 3. Utilize the available instructional materials at utmost level possible, as well as supplement additional materials in relation to students‘ characteristics and needs.

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Learner and Teacher Characteristics

4. Act as a carrier of culture, that is, introduce the features of the target language culture in a comparison to the native context along with the language itself. 5. Keep the motivation of his students at a high level not only by implementing various methods and techniques but also by creating a positive atmosphere where the learners feel secure, successful and triumphant. 6. Conduct a variety of activities addressing the learners with different learning capacities, skills, styles and strategies by organizing the learning experiences carefully in order to facilitate the learners‘ acquisition. 7. Systematize not only habit formation but also meaningful use of the language as used by the native speakers. 8. Keep the previously learned language items alive by fostering necessary learning strategies. 9. Implement right ways of classroom management such as whole, group, peer, or individual work where it is necessary in accordance with the activity requirements. 10. Incorporate activities requiring simultaneous implementation, e.g. setting the CD while practicing listening and writing task concurrently. 11. Approximate in-class activities to the authentic practices of students to let them engage in a true-to-life atmosphere by integrating diverse language skills into communication situations and simulating the real ones where learners will need to use the foreign language. 12. Follow students‘ performance regularly through tests, portfolios, projects, etc. in order to check learners‘ achievement, to diagnose individual learning problems, and to reflect on hisown performance in teaching. 13. Encourage students to take advantage of facilities provided by self-access centers to create and enhance opportunities inside and outside the classroom/school for the learners where they can actively involve. 14. Follow new techniques, technology, materials by establishing good relations with other colleagues and participants in language teaching professional world. The key roles of a good language teacher can be summarized as ―planner,‖ ―organizer,‖ ―guide,‖ ―coach,‖ and ―researcher.‖ Many other roles can be added to this list since the teacher‘s role is subject to change according to the teaching environment including not only the classroom but also the school and the society. Qualifications of teachers include three important issues: 1. Personal qualities, 2. Wellbalanced education including knowledge of his own language and culture, and 3. Training in professional education and psychology. Regarding the language proficiency level of the teacher, Finocchiaro and Bonomo (1973) adapted the standards prepared by the Steering Committee of the Modern Language Association as;

Aural understanding

Minimal The ability to get the sense of what an educated native says when he is enunciating carefully and speaking simply on a general subject.

Good The ability to understand conversation at average tempo, lectures, and news broadcasts.

Superior The ability to follow closely and with ease all types of standard speech, such as rapid or group conversation, plays and movies.

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Speaking

Reading

Writing

Language analysis

Culture

Professional preparation

Minimal The ability to speak on prepared topics (e.g. for classroom situations) without obvious faltering, to use the common expressions needed for getting around in the foreign country, and to speak with pronunciation readily understandable to a native. The ability to grasp directly (i.e. without translation) the meaning of simple, non-technical prose, except for an occasional word. The ability to write correct sentences or paragraphs such as would be developed orally for classroom situations, and the ability to write, a short, simple letter. A working command of the sound patterns and grammar patterns of the foreign language, and a knowledge of its main differences from the native language of the learners. An awareness of language as an essential element among the learned and shared experiences that combine to form a particular culture, and a rudimentary knowledge of the geography, history, literature, art, social customs, and contemporary civilization of the foreign people. Some knowledge of effective methods and techniques of language teaching.

Good The ability to talk with a native without making glaring mistakes and with a command of vocabulary and syntax sufficient to express one‘s thoughts in sustained conversation. This implies speech at normal speed with a good pronunciation and intonation The ability to read with immediate comprehension prose and verse of average difficulty and mature content. The ability to write a simple ―free composition‖ with clarity and correctness in vocabulary, idiom, and syntax.

Superior The ability to approximate native speech in vocabulary, intonation, and pronunciation (e.g. the ability to exchange ideas and be at ease in social situations).

The ability to read, almost as easily as in the native tongue, material of considerable difficulty, such as essays and literary criticism. The ability to write on a variety of subjects with idiomatic naturalness, ease of expression, and some feeling for the style of the language.

A basic knowledge of the historical development and present characteristics of the language, and an awareness of the difference between the language as spoken and as written.

The ability to apply knowledge of descriptive, comparative, and historical linguistics to the language teaching situation.

First-hand knowledge of some literary masterpieces, an understanding of the principal ways in which the foreign culture resembles and differs from our own, and possession of an organized body of information on the foreign people and their civilization.

An enlightened understanding of the foreign people and their culture achieved through personal contact, preferably by travel and residence abroad, through study of systematic descriptions of the foreign culture, and through study of literature and the arts. A mastery of recognized teaching methods, and the ability to experiment with and evaluate new methods and techniques.

The ability to apply knowledge of methods and techniques to the teaching situation (e.g. audio-visual techniques) and to relate one‘s teaching of the language to other areas of the curriculum.

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Activity 8 Think about teachers you had throughout your education and state why they were ‗good‘ or ‗bad‘ teachers.

CONCLUSION Teaching profession necessitates the participants to have a high level of awareness of the personal factors affecting the learning process. Teachers should not only be equipped with theoretical knowledge about them but also with the ability to identify and handle all possible teaching situations where individual differences appear as the leading factors. Since promoting the learner‘s performance requires knowing the personal factors including strengths and weaknesses, and working on them by applying suitable techniques, teachers have the key role in raising the learners‘ awareness of them, and creating the necessary conditions and opportunities to facilitate the learners‘ improvement in language learning. For learners, having enough amount of information about themselves, their needs, and how to develop and meet them would contribute a lot in becoming an independent and successful language learner due to the fact that a language consists of a huge amount of forms, functions and meanings which cannot be taught solely by the teachers. Learning to learn will make the learners autonomous and efficient in their journey.

FURTHER READING Cohen, A.D. (1998). Strategies in Learning and Using a Second Language. Essex, U.K.: Longman. O'Malley, J.M. & Chamot, A.U. (1990). Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Oxford, R.L. (1990). Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. Oxford, R.L. (1996). [Marianne–do we remove the ―a‖ here?]: Language Learning Strategies Around the World: Cross-cultural Perspectives. Manoa: University of Hawaii Press. Skehan, P. (1989). Individual Differences in Second-Language Learning. Edward Arnold.

REFERENCES Ausubel, D. P. (1968). Educational psychology: A cognitive view. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Brown, H. D. (1991). Breaking the Language Barrier. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. Brown, H. Douglas. (2000). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. 4th Ed. New York: Longman. Carroll, J.B. (1965). The prediction of success in intensive foreign language training. In R.Glaser (Ed.), Training, Research, and Education (pp. 87-136). New York: Wiley.

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Chapell, C.A. and C. Roberts. (1986). Ambiguity tolerance and field independence as predictors of proficiency in English as a second language. Language Learning. 36. 27-45. Cohen, A. (1998). Strategies in Learning and Using a Second Language. New York: Longman. Doron, S. (1973). Reflectivity-impulsivity and their influence on reading for inference for adult students of ESL. Unpublished manuscript, University of Michigan. Dörnyei, Z. (1995). On the teachability of communication strategies. TESOL Quarterly. 29. 55-84. Ehrman, M. (1996). Understanding Second Lanuage Learning Difficulties. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Ellis, Rod. (2003). Second Language Acquisition. Hong Kong: Oxford UP. Finocchiaro, Mary and M. Bonomo. (1973). The Foreign Language Learner: A Guide for Teachers. New York: Regents Publishing Company. Goodman, K. (1970). Reading as a psychologistic guessing game. In H. Singer and R. B. Ruddell. (Eds). Theoretical models and Processes of Reading. Newark, N.J.: International Reading Association. Hansen, L. (1984). Field dependence-independence and language testing: Evidence from six Pacific island cultures. TESOL Quarterly. 18. 311-324. Hansen, J. and C. Stansfield. (1981). The relationship of field dependent-independent cognitive styles to foreign language achievement. Language Learning. 31. 349-367. Harmer, Jeremy. (2013). The Practice of English Language Teaching. 4th Ed. China: Pearson. Hill, J. (1972). The Educational Sciences. Detroit: Oakland Community College. Hogan, R. (1969). Development of an empathy scale. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 33. 307-316. Jamieson, Joan. (1992). The cognitive styles of reflection/impulsivity and feld independence and ESL success. Modern Language Journal. 76. 491-501. Kagan, J. (1965). Reflection-impulsivity and reading ability in primary grade children. Child Development. 36. 609-628. Kagan, J. Pearson, L. and L. Welch. (1966). Conceptual Impulsivity and Inductive Reasoning. Child Development. 37. 583-94. Keefe, J.W. (1979). Learning style: An overview. In J.W. Keefe (Ed.). Student Learning Styles: Diagnosing and Prescribing Programs. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals. 1-17. Keskil, G. and P.T. Cephe (2001). Learner Variables in Learning English. Modern English Teacher, 10 (1). Krashen, S.D., Seliger, H. and D. Harnett. (1974). Two studies in adult second language learning. Kritikon Litterarum. 2. 220-228. Lightbown, P. M. and Spada, N. (2006). How Languages are Learned. (3rd edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, T. (1989). The Whole World Guide to Language Learning. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. Maslow, A. H. (1970). Motivation and Personality. Second Ed. New York: Harper and Row. Naiman, N., Fröhlich, M. and A. Todesco. (1978). The Good Language Learner. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Reprinted 1996 by Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK.

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O‘Mally, J. M., Chamot, A.U., Stewner-Manzares, G., Russo, R.P., and L. Kupper. (1985). Learning strategy applications with students of English as a second language. TESOL Quarterly. 19. 557-584. Purpura, J.E. (1987). An analysis of the relationships between test takers‘ cognitive and metacognitive strategy use and second language test performance. Language Learning. 47. 289-325. Reid, J. (1995). Learning Styles in ESL/EFL Classroom. Boston: Heinle&Heinle. Rubin, J. (1975). What the ―good language learner‖ can teach us. TESOL Quarterly. 9. 41-51. Rubin, J. and I. Thompson. 1982. How to Be a More Successful Language Learner. Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle Publishers, Inc. (2nd edition, 1994). Scovel, T. (1978). The effect of affect: A review of the anxiety research. Language Learning. 28. 129-142. Stansfield, C. and J. Hansen. (1983). Field dependence-independence as a variable in second language cloze test performance. TESOL Quarterly. 76. 29-38. Stevick, E. (1982). Teaching and Learning Languages. NY: Cambridge UP.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 2

LESSON PLANNING IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Banu Inan Karagul* Kocaeli University, Faculty of Education English Language Teaching Department, Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading the present chapter, students will be able to: 1. List the most important elements that should exist in a lesson plan. 2. Identify the significance of lesson planning in the process of language teaching. 3. Define what syllabus is and different types of syllabi.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Is it necessary to plan a lesson? If yes, how should it be prepared? 2. What are the most important elements that should exist in a lesson plan? How should they be organized? 3. What is syllabus? How many different types of syllabus do you know? 4. How does syllabus affect lesson planning?

INTRODUCTION Planning is a necessary step no matter what business you are involved in if you want to achieve your goals. If we consider teachers as “the managers” of the student learning, s/he also needs to know exactly what s/he intends to do in the class. There are four main things that a teacher needs to know before going to the class to teach:

*

E-mail: [email protected].

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Banu Inan Karagul    

the aim of the lesson what new language the lesson contains the main stages of the lesson (when and how to organize different activities) what to do at each stage

A lesson plan is a very useful tool which can be seen as a combination of guide, resource, and historical document reflecting our teaching philosophy, student population, textbooks and most importantly, our goals for our students (Jensen, 2001). Jensen also suggests that ―a lesson plan is essential for novice teachers and convenient for experienced teachers‖ (p.403).

WHY SHOULD TEACHERS PLAN LESSONS? Teachers should plan lessons so as to:      

achieve the objectives prepare and use a variety of teaching-learning activities select and prepare appropriate teaching-learning resources be able to time, sequence and link the stages of a lesson effectively in the class use the learning/teaching materials in an organizes way organize groupwork/pairwork activities effectively

Before a teacher starts teaching, s/he should have developed his/her own understanding of second language learning/teaching. Knowledge of theories of SLA, learner characteristics, historical and current trends in second language pedagogy are some examples for teachers to take into consideration while they are developing their ideas. This stage is called ―preplanning stage‖. In this stage, the teacher may benefit from a variety of sources (Harmer, 2007); namely, teachers‘ seminars, internet, TV. At this stage, it is important to pay attention to the learners‘ level, their personalities, and the requirements of the syllabus. Syllabus is one of the most important components of lesson planning. According to Ur (1996, p.176), a syllabus is ―a document which consists, essentially, of a list‖. She lists the characteristics of a syllabus in the following way: 1. It consists of a comprehensive list of content items (words, structure, topics) and process items (tasks and methods). 2. It is ordered (easier, more essential items first). 3. It has explicit objectives (usually expressed in the introduction). 4. It is a public document. 5. It may indicate a time schedule. 6. It may indicate a preferred methodology or approach. 7. It may recommend materials. There are many different types of syllabi suggested for language teaching. They are not totally different from each other. Although different types of syllabi are presented, in practice,

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they rarely appear independently. Ur (1996, p.178) lists some of the most common syllabus types in the following way: a. Grammatical Syllabus: A list of grammatical structures, such as relative clauses, the simple present tense, usually divided into sections graded according to difficulty and/or importance. b. Lexical Syllabus: A list of lexical items (man, woman, go out…) with associated collocations and idioms, usually divided into graded sections. c. Grammatical-Lexical Syllabus: A very common kind of syllabus: both structures and lexis are specified: either together, in sections that correspond to the units of a course, or in two separate lists. d. Task-Based Syllabus: This type of syllabus is based on Task-Based Learning, an approach where learners can carry out tasks such as solving a problem or planning an activity. The language learnt comes out of the linguistic demands of the activity. A task-based syllabus is structured around a series of these tasks. e. Topic-Based Syllabus: It takes real life contexts of language use as its basis and headings are broadly topic-based, including things like ―Food‖ or ―The family‖; these usually indicate a fairly clear set of vocabulary items, which may be specified. f. Functional-Notional Syllabus: Notions are concepts that language can express such as time, place, whereas functions are things you can do with language such as identifying, denying. In these syllabuses, functions and notions are combined. According to Ur (1996, p.92), a notion is a concept, or idea: it may be quite specific, in which case it is vistually the same as vocabulary (dog, house, for example); or it may be very general –time, size, emotion –in which case it often overlaps with the concept of ‗topic‘. A function, on the other hand, is some kind of communicative act: it is the use of language to achieve a purpose, usually involving interaction between at least two people. TASK 1: Look at the following list and decide which of them are functions (F) and which of them are notions (N) Location Food Complaint

advice money suggestion

threat crime apology

(adapted from Ur, 1996, p.93).

g. Mixed or Multi-Strand Syllabus: Increasingly, modern syllabuses are combining different aspects in order to be maximally comprehensive and helpful to teachers and learners; in these you may find specification of topics, tasks, functions and notions, as well as grammar and vocabulary.

Basic Principles of Lesson Planning Jensen (2001, p.406-407) states that there are some basic principles to be taken into account while planning a lesson, which are:

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1. A good lesson plan has a sense of coherence and flow. No matter what the subject is, a lesson does not consist of a sequence of discrete activities. For teachers, it is important to connect the various lessons over the days and weeks of a course. In addition, students need to understand the rationale for each activity and they can learn better if they see the connections between activities. 2. A good lesson exhibits variety. A certain degree of predictability in terms of the teacher, the texts, classmates, and certain administrative procedures is comforting; however, to avoid boredom and fatigue, lesson plans should not follow the same pattern day after day. In addition, there should be variety in terms of topics (content), language, and skills over the length of the course. 3. A good lesson is flexible. When a lesson is planned, it does not mean that the teacher has to follow it strictly. Good teachers know when it is time to change an activity, regardless of what the lesson plan says. A question posed by a student out of the blue may change the direction of the lesson and may lead to teaching a related topic.

What Should Be Included in a Lesson Plan? Since there are different teaching institutions with different systems, it is impossible to say exactly what a plan should be like. There are a variety of formats to be used but the teacher should consider the background of the students, the objectives of the lesson, the skills to be taught, the activities, the materials and texts, the time constraints, and the connections to previous and future lessons (Jensen, 2001, p.404). However, there are a number of elements that are always present in most of the lesson plans. TASK 2: Work in groups and discuss which of the elements of lesson plans you would use in a lesson plan for teaching English and circle the related numbers Elements of lesson plans 1. number of learners

11. aids used

2. overall aims 3. aims of each stage 4. coursebook used

12. timing of each stage 13. skills practiced 14. page numbers

5. numbers of exercises/activities 6. what the learners do at each stage 7. what the teacher does at each stage 8. materials used 9. homework 10. groupings of learners (individuals/pairs/ groups/ whole class) (Tanner & Green, 1998).

15. anticipated problems

21. different colors for important points 22. review of last lesson 23. sex of learners 24. short description of each activity 25. level of class

16. new vocabulary

26. time of class

17. extra activities

27. name/number of class

18. age of learners 19. the date 20. interaction (e.g. S-S, S-T)

28. length of class 29. which learners work together 30. abbreviations (e.g. L= learner)

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The following components take place in most of the lesson plans no matter what the subject matter and the formats are: Aims: Aims are considered to be one of the most important elements in a lesson plan. According to Harmer (2007, p.371), the aims in a teacher‘s lesson plan are ―the outcomes which all our teaching will try to achieve –the destinations on our map‖. Aims should be associated with what we expect our students to do, not related to what we are going to do. Harmer (2007) suggests the following criteria to describe lesson aims: a. b. c. d. e.

Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timed

Tanner & Green (1998, p.102) mentions the following types of aims that can be included in a lesson plan: Type of Aims Topic aims Grammar aims Communication aims Vocabulary aims Function aims Skill aims Pronunciation aims Group dynamics aims Reviewing aims Cultural aims Organizational aims

Examples Learners discuss capital punishment Learners practise Present Perfect Tense by writing a grammar exercise from the book. Learners talk to each other about what they do every Saturday. Learners listen for all the words related to school. Learners learn how to complain in a shop. Learners write a holiday postcard. Learners identify the difference between /ı/ and /ı:/ sounds. Learners discuss their learning experience this term. Learners revise the vocabulary from the last unit. Learners read about recent political events in an Englishspeaking country. Learners correct last week‘s homework in the workbook.

Class Profile: This part includes a short description of who the students are, the number of the students, their level, their genders, etc. If the number of the students in a class is small, more detailed information about the individual students might be included in the lesson plan as well, e.g. A is very silent but usually good at writing activities. B likes to participate in classroom discussions but does not submit his/her assignments on time. Procedure: In this part of the lesson plan, the steps or stages of the lesson, which are necessary to ensure that the lesson aims are achieved, are included. Activities, transition notes, as well as time management and class management notes such as the students‘ seating arrangements for different activities are the other important components included in this part. In addition to these, it is a good idea to include the indications of what you will do, what the students will do, how long you expect it tol ast, what kind of interaction there will be, what the aims of each stage are, etc.

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While preparing this plart of the lesson plan, it is a good idea to ask the following questions:     

How much time do I have? How will I divide up the lesson into stages? How much time will each stage take? What will be the aim of each stage? How will the stages be linked? (Gower, et al., 1995).

In this part of the lesson, the teacher also details classroom interactions. Who will interact with whom (T→S, T→SS, S→S), how long will each activity take, what techniques should be used, etc. are some of the details that could be included in the lesson plan. There are different types of lesson procedures that might be adopted by the teachers while teaching English in an EFL/ESL context. Here are some of the most commonly used ones: 1. The PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production) Model: This procedure has been the most traditional classroom procedure since Audiolingualism was suggested as a language teaching method. In the Presentation part of the procedure, the new language form is presented to students either deductively or inductively. Visual materials, songs, video clips, stories are other forms of presentation. In the Practice part of the procedure, students have the chance to practise the new language form presented in the first part. This practice may be done through some drills or exercises. In the Production part of the procedure, students are asked to produce utterances including the newly-studied language form. They may be asked to write sentences, paragraph or do a role-play.

2. The ESA (Engage-Study-Activate): This procedure was suggested by Jeremy Harmer as an alternative to the traditional PPP Model because of the criticisms stating that in such a procedure, lessons are teacher-centered and students are passive. In this alternative procedure, the lesson starts with an Engagement part in which teachers aim to engage students emotionally. This can be achieved through some warm-up activities, games or any activities that students might find interesting. In the second part of the procedure, Study, the lesson focuses on how a language form is constructed. Teachers can directly emphasize a grammatical form or draw students‘ attention to a language form in a communicative task. Activate is the last part of the procedure. In this part, students are encouraged to use the language meaningfully with the help of some communicative tasks.

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3. The OHE (Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment): This procedure is the one that was suggested as a way of teaching vocabulary in The Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis. In the first part of the procedure, students observe language in use through listening to or reading a text. Then, they hypothesize about how language works. In the last step of the procedure, they try to experiment it by using them in new contexts. 4. Pre-task, Task Cycle, Language Focus: This is the course sequence which is used in Task-Based Language Teaching contexts. In the Pre-Task stage, the teacher and the students try to explore the topic together and the instructions of the task are clarified. In the Task-cycle stage, including three subtitles, which are Task, Planning and Report, the students work together so as to perform the task; afterwards, they plan how they will tell their friends what they did, and then, they report on the task either orally or in the written way. In the last stage of the procedure, Language Focus, students and the teacher work on specific linguistic features of the task and/or they can do some exercises based on the problems that appeared in the previous stages. Anticipated problems: No matter how careful or experienced you are, there is always a possibility of having problems in your lessons. A good lesson plan ―tries to predict potential pitfalls and suggests ways of dealing with them‖ (Harmer, 2007, p.373). It is a good idea to include a part related to ―anticipated problems‖ and ―possible solutions‖ in your lesson plan as the one in the following: Anticipated Problems Students may have difficulty in understanding the difference between ―should+have+V3‖ and ―must+have+V3‖ structures.

Possible solutions I will prepare extra worksheets including different examples with these structures and exercises.

This part is also important in case of problems related to time management, class management and classroom organization. Gower, et al. (1995, p.178) state that it is a good idea to think about what you would do if:      

the students take a longer or shorter time to do the activities than you had planned; they find an activity easier or more difficult than you thought they would; some students finish before the others; there are some students who need extra support; there are uneven numbers for a pairwork activity; some or all of the students have already met the material you have based your lesson round: for example, they have already seen the video you were planning to show.

Materials, aids and equipment: Teachers should ask themselves ―what materials, aids or equipment will I need at each stage of my lesson?‖. They should make a note in their lesson plan of when they will use these materials and aids.

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A SAMPLE LESSON PLAN Oral Fluency Activity Making a comparison between now and 100 years ago ↓ Students read about Jane Williams who was a young girl in 1960s Reading about the 1960s and what people did at that time ↓ Language Study Based on the examples in the text, studying the use of ―used to+V1‖ in English ↓ Immediate Creativity/Personalization Students talk about what they used to do when they were younger ↓ Interview Role-Play Students plan and role-play interviews as Jane and a journalist

(Adapted from Harmer, 2007).

Reading Text Jane Williams was a young girl in the 1960s. Read what she says about it. I was a young girl in the 1960s. I used to do many things that I don‘t do anymore. I used to dance to the music of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. I used to watch films with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. I used to smoke a lot, wear very short skirts, and go fishing with my father. I didn‘t use to attend most of my courses instead; I used to drive to Brighton with my boyfriend. I used to argue with my mum a lot because I used to spend a lot of time away from home. I miss those days so much. AIMS: 1. To give students practice in reading for detail. 2. To enable students to talk about what they used to do when they were younger. CLASS PROFILE: The students in this pre-intermediate class are between the ages of 20-25. There are 10 girls and 15 boys. Since the class starts at 8.00 a.m, students are a bit sleepy in the first lesson; however, they become more active and enthusiastic after the break time. They like visual materials and listening to songs in English. ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS and POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Students might have difficulties in using ―Used to‖ in positive and negative sentences and questions. In order to cope with this problem, extra exercises might be supplied by the teacher.

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Lesson Planning in Language Teaching A SAMPLE PROCEDURE (Adapted from Harmer, 2007) Activity/Aids Making comparison and contrast

Interaction S S

2 3

Pen and paper Reading Language study

SS S,S,S T C

4

Textbook page……

T

5

Discussion

S,S,S

6

Role-Play

SS

1

S, S,S

SS

Procedure Students work in pairs and make a comparison between now and 100 years ago Students write down the ideas that they have come up with. Students read the text individually T elicits sentences from the text including unfamiliar grammar structures and then explains the use of ―used to‖ in English. I used to do many things that I don’t do anymore. I used to dance to the music of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. I didn’t use to attend most of my courses T has SS do the exercises in the book Students talk about what they used to do when they were younger Students do the role-pay between Jane and the journalist

Time 4‖

3‖ 3‖ 10‖

15‖

3‖ 2‖

Alternatives to Formal Planning Even though there are important reasons why teachers need to plan their lessons, it is not carried out in practice very frequently. According to Gower and Walters (1995, p.129), there are various reasons behind this:       

teachers haven‘t got time the lesson methodology they wish to use cannot easily be characterised using the suggested formats it doesn‘t seem an economical or helpful way of describing a lesson‘s way of working it might restrict teachers‘ freedom to respond to learners in class the lesson content and/or aim will emerge during the class rather than pre-decided teachers‘ priority is to create a specific atmosphere, a certain type of rapport, etc. teachers may want to experiment or work on specific aspects of their teaching

Instead of preparing a formal lesson plan, Gower and Walters (1995) suggest the following alternatives:

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1. Half-plan This alternative might be preferred by experienced teachers or by the ones that are selfconfident about their own language awareness and of their own ability to quickly think of mini-activities. Put your energy into planning how your class will do skill work (e.g. reading, speaking, etc.). Don‘t plan any work related to the language system. In class, spontaneously work on language issues as they come up if they are useful, interesting and appropriate for students. 2. Focus on the “critical learning moments” Instead of planning the entire lesson procedure, before the class, decide on a number of specific key things you hope learners will gain from the class. For each of these, decide what the ―critical learning moment‖ will probably be, i.e. which thing you or they do (lasting no more than 30 seconds) that is likely to make the most significant impact on their success and –why. Think through each of these moments very carefully. 3. Plan the “critical teaching moments” Which instructions, explanations, feedback stages, etc. will be ‗critical moments‘ for you, the teacher, which may need to be prepared in detail in advance? 4. The jungle path An alternative approach would be to not predict and prepare so much, but to create the lesson moment by moment in class, with you and learners working with whatever is happening in the room, responding questions, problems and options as they come up, and finding new activities, materials and tasks in response to particular situations. The starting point might be an activity or a piece of material, but what comes out of it will remain unknown until it happens.

CONCLUSION No matter what the topic is, planning before taking further steps is an important issue. When teaching is taken into consideration, planning step will include important components such as determining the aims, lesson procedure, anticipated problems and possible solutions, etc. Even though most teachers prefer to follow the coursebook, which they find safer and easier, planning at least the main structure of the lesson will be beneficial especially for teachers who are in their initial years of their teaching experience. With the help of such a plan, it will be easier for teachers to manage the time in the classroom, foresee some potential problems and come up with solutions to them.

REFERENCES Gower, R., Philips, D., & Walters, S. (1995). Teaching Practice: A Handbook for Teachers in Training. UK: Macmillan. Harmer, J. (2007). The Practice of English Language Teaching. The UK: Pearson Longman.

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Jensen, L. (2001). Planning Lessons. In Celce-Murcia, M. (Ed.) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. (pp.403-413). The USA: Heinle & Heinle. Tanner, R., & Green, C. (1998). Tasks for Teacher Education: A Reflective Approach. The USA: Addison-Wesley. Ur, P. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 3

MICROTEACHING IN ELT Dogan Yuksel Kocaeli University, Faculty of Education English Language Teaching Department, Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1. 2. 3. 4.

define microteaching list different roles different participants play during microteaching list the major stages of microteaching discuss the basic benefits of using microteaching in language teaching

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Have you had any teaching experience before? If yes, where did you teach? Who were your students? 2. What were (might be) some problems that you may encounter while teaching? 3. Which part of teaching is the most difficult? Classroom discipline or presenting the information? 4. How would you feel when/if your teaching performance was videotaped?

INTRODUCTION Most of the undergraduate and graduate level English Language Teaching programs offer courses in Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Approaches and Methods, Methodology and Teaching Language Skills as well as Practicum and School Practice. All of these courses provide the necessary skills and knowledge to help student teachers become skillful and adept practitioners. Usually, Practicum and School Practice courses are offered late in the program.

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Until the Practicum and School Experience courses, many of the foundational courses in ELT programs do not focus on the practical aspect of teacher preparation. Microteaching, as a technique for teacher education, can address some of these problems and help the student learn the process of becoming practitioners while they are taking some basic foundational courses. It is also commonly used as a component of in-service teacher development programs for various types and stages of professional development (Kpanja, 2001). This training procedure focuses on the simplification of the complexities of the regular teachinglearning process by minimizing any of these aspects: class-size, time, task and content (He & Yan, 2011). It also adds the immediate and delayed feedback opportunity from various resources.

Microteaching Microteaching as a structured classroom technique dates back to the 1960s. It was first introduced at Stanford University‘s Educational and Research Development unit. It is defined as a a scaled-down, simulated teaching experience designed for the training of both preservice and in-service teachers. It mainly aims to equip (student) teachers with the tools to attain the practice of some basic teaching skills in any given subject or skill in a controlled and relatively safe environment. It also facilitates the promotion of real-time teaching experiences (Remesh, 2013). Originally, when it was first introduced, microteaching aimed to serve three purposes: (1) as a preliminary experience and practice in teaching (2) as a research vehicle to explore training effects under controlled conditions, and (3) as an in-service training instrument for experienced teachers (Allen, 1966). However, with its development in the last 40 years, it has evolved both in shape and content. Microteaching can help students practice some basic teaching techniques such as introducing and closing lessons, using a whiteboard effectively, questioning, giving corrective feedback, presenting specific topics, using ICT materials, applying lesson plans effectively, and so on. It can also be used to practice teaching skills such as speaking, listening, writing etc. One of the main advantages of microteaching is the opportunity for the presenter to receive immediate focused feedback just after the teaching practice. The reflection process at the end of the session has additional advantages. Activity 1 If you were to microteach, which of the skills below would your first preference be to practice and why? introducing and closing lessons, using whiteboard effectively question ing giving corrective feedback presenting specific topics using ICT materials applying lesson plans effectively

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There are two different metaphors about the microteaching technique. As it is scaled down, it is usually referred as ‗teaching under a microscope‘. With this metaphor, the scrutinization of every single detail of the teaching process is highlighted. It is also analogous to putting the teacher under a microscope with the idea that all aspects of the teaching process are brought into perspective for the observers to provide constructive feedback (Rao &Lakshmi, 2009). Another metaphor is the ―slice of a cake‖. This metaphor implies that with microteaching, we only present one segment of the whole teaching process; however we try to illustrate the overall qualities and characteristics as they are reflected in that piece. Activity 2 Can you think of any other metaphors about microteaching? Discuss it in groups or pairs. Please also state the rationale behind it.

The Participants of Microteaching Process The Student Teacher The main goal of the microteaching process is for the student teacher to present in a protected environment where he/she can get feedback from various resources in a nonthreatening way (including him/herself as a part of the reflective process after watching his/her own performance). Previous research on microteaching reveals that the students find it useful (Amobi, 2005; Benton-Kupper, 2001; Metcalf, 1993; Mills, 1991). The student teacher prepares him/herself for the microteaching by collecting information about the topic and rehearsing some skills. The key aspect of the preparation period is preparing a lesson plan. Without it, reaching the goals of the microteaching session would be far-fetched. The student teacher also prepares the reflection paper at the end of the session following the instructor‘s and peers‘ feedback. Other Students The other students in the class will act as the students of the lesson. They might need to pretend that they are in a different proficiency level or from a different cultural or linguistic background. The student teacher should specify the background characteristics of the class in his/her lesson plan and other students should act accordingly. As the students know that they will eventally be in the shoes of the student teacher as well, most of the microteaching sessions reported in research yielded positive environments. One key role of the other students will be the providence of the feedback at the end of the microteaching. The students should be encouraged to give feedback (both positive and negative) and can be given a rubric to assess the performance of the student teacher accurately. The rubric can be prepared prior to teaching with a discussion involving the students or a rubric can be adopted into the setting. A sample rubric taken from The Evergreen State College‘s Student Teaching Rubric can be seen in Appendix A.

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The Supervisor Teacher The supervisor teacher is usually the instructor or coordinator of the course where the student teacher is practicing. S/he sits at the back of the classroom and observes the session. Generally, the instructor does not interrupt the microteaching lesson but takes notes on both problematic and positive parts and then provides feedback at the end of the lesson. Here, the attitude of the instructor is vital in the effectiveness of the microteaching. He/she should first highlight the positive aspects of the performance and then list the problematic components by giving evidence and proposing solutions. Activity 3 List the specific roles of the each participant below. Participant

Before microteaching

During microteaching

After microteaching

The student teacher

123-

123-

123-

Peers

123-

123-

123-

The supervisor

123-

123-

123-

Steps of Microteaching Step 1: Orientation about microteaching In this step, the students are given background information about microteaching. Related theoretical background together with advantages and disadvantages of using microteaching sessions are discussed. At the end of the session, the students should understand the major differences between microteaching and making a presentation. Step 2: Providing theoretical information about the Skill or Topic In the second step, information about the skill, technique or topic that will be practiced should be introduced. In this theoretical session, the students can read about what they need to know prior to teaching their topic or skill. For example, if the microteaching session will be a practice of ―Teaching Speaking‖, the students should study on different aspects of teaching speaking such as theories, techniques and activities of teaching speaking.

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Step 3: Providing a model microteaching If the students have not conducted a microteaching session before, it would be practical to observe a microteaching session. If there is no time limitation, good and bad examples of microteaching sessions can be introduced and discussed in class. Step 4: Preparing a microteaching lesson plan One of the key elements of microteaching is the lesson plan. The student teacher should know how to prepare a lesson plan and also should scale down the steps of the lesson plan in order to meet the time requirements. A lesson plan template can be provided to assist the students. Step 5: The microteaching session In this video-taped session, the student teacher teaches the skill, technique or topic to her peers. The supervisor should monitor the process but should not interfere until the end of the session. The time restrictions should be followed carefully. If necessary, one of the students can be given the role of the time-keeper and inform the student teacher about the time. The Microteaching Evaluation Rubric should be distributed to the class prior to the session. Step 6: The Feedback Session by the Peers and Supervisor Immediately after the performance, 5-10 minutes should be allocated to the feedback session. First, the peers should be invited to give feedback. The students should be reminded about the caveats regarding giving feedback. Aftr the student feedback session, the supervisor should wrap up the session by highlighting both positive and negative aspects. This step is video-taped as well. Step 7: Reflection by the Student Teacher The final step of the microteaching session is the reflection paper prepared by the student teacher. If necessary, a sample reflection paper can be introduced. In the reflection paper, the student teacher should briefly describe what she did, why she did it and if she did it well or not. She should also address the important suggestions and/or feedback from the peers and instructor. She should also address the important suggestions and/or feedback from the previous feedback session. A sample reflection paper is provided in the Appendix B.

Orient

Plan

Teach

Get Feedback

Reflect

Figure 1. The Microteaching Cycle.

Feedback in Microteaching One of the strengths of the microteaching technique is the multi-channelled feedback. The student teacher gets feedback from her peers and her supervisor immediately after the session and can also reflect upon her practice after watching her performance and feedback

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from others. While providing feedback, as Maheshwari and Vishnoi (2011) assert, the following caveats should be kept in mind: Be respectful, do not judge the student teacher, be polite and consider the social ties with in the class. Start on a positive note, highlight the positive aspects first. If you start off with negative criticism, the person receiving the feedback might not even hear the positive part, which will come later. Be descriptive and specific, rather than evaluative, clearly point out the problematic aspects. Do not say: ―I did not like your overall performance‖ or ―Your pronunciation in general was really bad.‖ You can say: ―You did not use the blackboard efficiently‖ or ―You mispronounced architecture‖. Don’t be repetitive, do not repeat what other people said in a negative or positive tone. Avoid conclusions about motives or feelings. For example: rather than saying: ―You don‘t seem very enthusiastic about the lesson‖, you can say ―Varying your rate and volume of speaking would give you a more animated style‖. Activity 4 What other suggestions can be given while giving feedback? Discuss it with your partner(s).

Video Recording in Microteaching Videorecording the microteaching is an important component of the process. In some places where the technological tools are available, Microteaching Labs are used to facilitate the process. However, it is not a must. A good camcorder can be used to have a similar effect. If it is possible, a technician from the school, if not one or two students can be responsible for the recording process. The presence of the camera in the classroom might make students feel uneasy or look artificial. This is one of the major drawbacks of the microteaching session.

PRACTICAL TIPS The following tips can be considered during the microteaching process.        

Provide a rubric for assessment if possible Present a video-taped microteaching session during the orientation Provide a sample reflection paper Be careful about time restrictions Be positive while giving feedback Address both effective and ineffective aspects of the performance while giving feedback Video-tape the whole process Guide the students about the feedback process

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ADVANTAGES OF MICROTEACHING Sharma (as cited in Rao & Lakshmi, 2009) summarized the advantages of microteaching as follows:            

Modification of teaching behavior Knowledge of teaching skills Developing teaching skills Improving teaching practice Individual training Regulating teaching practice Real teaching Reducing complexities Focus on teaching Analysing one‘s own teaching behavior Continuous reinforcement Research tool

CONCLUSION The use of microteaching is a commonly used training technique worldwide. It is used in many areas such as science education, medicine as well language teaching. If properly planned and administered, it can be a very effective tool to help student teachers‘ transition from theory into practice. The simplification of the complexities of regular teaching process might be conducted in different components of the teaching process such as class size, time, task and content (He & Yan, 2011). With the multi-chanelled feedback module, it is an effective tool of teacher development. Different adaptations of the microteaching process make it feasible in different contexts throughout the world.

FURTHER READING More information about microteaching can be accessed from the following resources. Borg, W. R., et al. (1969). Videotape feedback and microteaching in a teacher training model. The Journal of Experimental Education, 37(4)9-16. Bull, P. (2002). Communication under the microscope: The theory and practice of microteaching. New York: Routledge. McGarvey, B., & Swallow, D. (1986). Microteaching in teacher education and training. London: Croom Helm. Rao, D. B., & Lakshmi, M.J., (2009). Microteaching and prospective teachers. New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House Pvt.

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APPENDIX A ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR MICROTEACHING Presenter‘s name:

Observed by:

Source of Evidence: Microteaching Observation 1. The teacher candidate aligns instruction with the plan and communicates accurate content knowledge Teaching Elements

Criteria

A. Alignment

Classroom instruction is aligned with the instructional plan.

B. Meaningful Opportunities to Learn C. Accuracy

Students are learning the key skills - concepts needed to reach the learning targets. The teacher candidate demonstrates accurate knowledge of the content. Students are engaged in tasks that provide interdisciplinary connections with other subject areas.

D. Interdisciplinary Instruction

Rating Not present

Developing

Proficient

Accomplished

2. Students participate in a learning community that supports student learning and well-being A. Respect

Classroom interactions between teacher - students reflect respect for students.

3. Students engage in learning activities that are based on research and principles of effective practice A. Questioning and Discussion Techniques B. Delivery and Pacing C. Active Learning

Teacher answers and poses questions in a way that engages students in cooperative discussions that enhance learning, critical thinking, transformative multicultural thinking, and problem solving. Students engage in learning activities that are: paced appropriately for all students, culturally responsive, and allow for reflection & closure. Students are cognitively engaged in the learning activities.

4. Students experience effective classroom management and discipline A. Transitions

Teacher helps students move between learning tasks or lesson segments in an efficient manner.

5. The teacher candidate and students engage in activities that assess student learning A. Alignment B. Multiple Modes and Approaches

Students engage in assessment activities aligned with learning targets. Students engage in various assessments that measure their performance relative to the learning targets.

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APPENDIX B Nagihan Kara Tok 11090XXXX

REFLECTION PAPER The type of the activity is role-play called ―Ordering Food At The Restaurant‖. In this speaking aktivity, students make a dialogue with his/her friends based on his/her roles, which are the waitress/waiter or the customer. This communicative speaking activity is planned to make the students to use some specific structures, such as ‗ I would like to have…‘ or ‗Can I…‘. The other aim of the activity is to provide the students with specific lexical items, such as ‗ steak, waffle, doughnuts‘. The activity is also designed to improve students‘ speaking fluency and self-confidence while speaking. In order to achieve this ojectives, firstly, I planned to motivate my students. Since their age is fourteen to fifteen, I thought preparing some attractive materials changes the classroom atmosphere in a positive way. These materials, such as knife, spoon, bread, chicken drumsticks, give the student the chance to carry, touch the objects and pretend eating the food, which makes the task a practical and hands-on activity. These materials are the basic motivation factors in the task, which work well in my opinion. The preparation and the presentation part are devoted to the revision part so that the student will have a clear idea about what to say and how to say. Moreover, by following the steps written on the role cards that I distrubuted before the task, students know what is expected to do from them, instead of what is expected to say. This gives a choice to students on their own speech. Of 15 minutes, first 5 minutes are devoted to the revision part and organizing the students for the activity. After that students perform their roles in front of the calss. Therefore, when we take the ratio of teacher talk and the students talk into account, we can see that students talk more. In this lesson, teacher is an organizer, a model, a facilitator but not a participant. As a teacher, I also did my best to give corrrective feedback to my students during the performance and while they are peraparing their dialogues. Most of the feedack is an immediate one. Some of the pronunciation errors and communication breakdowns are handled in a smooth way. Furthermore, I tried to draw my students‘ attention not to use their mother tongue during the task. Finally, apart from being too fast while revising the previous topics and giving instructions because of the limited time, I think that I did my best to make student motivate to talk. As a result, most of the students would love to come to the board and show their performance by using the object that I prepared as educational materials. Also, I think that I should be more careful while giving instructions. I should explain the task and the materials before distrubuting the cards. Consequently, I think I was amply rewarded by my students because what I want to do is to make my students to talk in a positive and enjoyable atmosphere.

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REFERENCES Allen, D. W. (1966). Microteaching: A new framework for in-service education. The High School Journal, 49(8), 355-362 Amobi, F. A. (2005). Pre-service teachers‟ reflectivity on the sequence and consequences of teaching actions in a microteaching experience. Teacher Education Quarterly, 32(1), 115–128. Benton-Kupper, J. (2001). The microteaching experience: Student perspectives. Education, 121(4), 830-835. Borg, W. R., et al. (1969). Videotape feedback and microteaching in a teacher training model. The Journal of Experimental Education, 37(4), 9-16. He, C. & Yan, C. (2011). Exploring authenticity of microteaching in pre-service teacher education programmes. Teaching Education, 22(3), 291-302. Kpanja, E. (2001). A study of effects of video tape recording in microteaching training. British Journal of Educational Technology, 32(4), 483-486. Rao, D. B., & Lakshmi, M.J., (2009). Microteaching and prospective teachers. New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House Pvt. Maheshwarii M.K., & Vishnoi, N.R. (2011). Micro-Teaching: A scaled-down, simulated practice teaching technique. Available at http://www.vkmaheshwari.com/WP/?p=173. Metcalf, K.K. (1993). Critical factors in on-campus clinical experience. Teaching Education,5, 164 – 174. Mills, R.F. (1991). Micro-teaching: Organisation and benefits. Education, 111, 559 – 562. Remesh, A. (2013). Microteaching, An efficient technique for learning effective teaching. Journal of Research in Medical Sciences, 18(2):158-63.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 4

TEACHING SPEAKING IN EFL CLASSES Çağlayan Erdönmez Kocaeli University School of Foreign Languages, Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1. 2. 3. 4.

list different types of conversational rules and structures list important conversational strategies list important aspects of a good speaking activity list different types of practical activities that can be used in a speaking class.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. What are the differences between spontaneous and prepared talk? 2. What are some of the factors to consider in determining the effectiveness of speaking activities? 3. What are some teacher roles in speaking classes?

INTRODUCTION What language skill comes into your mind first when you are asked to define the term fluency in a foreign language? ―…people who know a language are referred to as ‗speakers‘ of that language, as if speaking included all other kinds of knowing‖ (Ur, 1996, p. 120). Speaking seems to be intuitively regarded as the most important skill of all the four language skills. In fact, many language learners consider speaking as equal to the overall language competence, and they measure their language proficiency, their accomplishments and their progress through learning based on their speaking skills. Fluency is then strongly associated

Çağlayan Erdönmez

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with and measured by the ability to converse with others, much more than the ability to read, comprehend oral language or express oneself on a written document. In many contexts, people judge a language user ‗at face value‘ upon speaking skill. In other words, people form judgments about our language competence from our speaking skills rather than any other skill (McDonough, 1996). Speaking can be defined as ―the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts‖ (Chaney, 1998, p. 13). Speaking plays a crucial role in foreign language learning and teaching. With the internalization of English as the medium of communication, the need for meaningful and successful interactions has become more imperative than ever. Students should not only form grammatically correct sentences, but also use these sentences in appropriate social contexts taking into account the cultural background and social status of the interlocutor (the person(s) they are talking to).

Characteristics of Spoken Language It is useful for language teachers in the classroom to consider and analyze how native speakers participate in oral interactions and what they actually do when they are engaged in conversations. Towards this end, language learners and teachers need to recognize that speaking consists of three main areas of knowledge:

1. Mechanics Mechanics of a language involves pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. This basically means expressing oneself with the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation. 



Lexis and Grammar: The nature of speech involves the use of common lexical phrases. It is highly like to use certain lexical phrases for a variety of language functions. Therefore, teachers should plan and prepare language activities in such a way that students can have plenty of opportunities to engage in communicative activities which involve certain language functions such as agreeing or disagreeing, expressing surprise, apologizing, inviting, and offering etc. It is really essential that teachers provide students with certain lexical phrases, fixed expressions and conventional routines that learners can use within certain conversational contexts (job interview, buying clothes, etc.) for a variety of purposes and functions (convincing, agreeing, etc.). Expressive devices: During conversational interactions native speakers of English resort to physical and non-verbal (paralinguistic) means in order express different emotions through the use of varying stress and pitch patterns for certain parts of their utterances. These suprasegmental features and devices are especially important in face-to-face interactions where speakers need express different emotions, change the intensity of their emotions and express extra emotions. Therefore, classroom activities should be designed to provide students with at least some of the major expressive devices to help them become effective communicators.

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Connected Speech: Speaking does not necessarily involve bringing together speech sounds and form words and then sentences. Speech involves a continuous stream of sounds and it is not always easy to find clear-cut borderlines between sounds and words. Effective speakers of English do not just produce individual phonemes of English but they are also able to use connected speech. In connected speech, speech sounds go through some modifications and changes such as omission, assimilation, adding or weakening of some sounds. Therefore, activities in the classroom should be designed in such a way that they help students to get acquainted with the features of connected speech, and improve their fluent, connected speech.

2. Functions This includes transactional and interactional language use. It is basically the knowledge of using language for a variety of purposes. Language users need to know when the message needs to be clear and precise (transaction/information exchange) or when precise and exact understanding is not really essential (interaction/relationship building). Nunan (1998) points out that listening texts and tasks can be categorized according to functional terms. For instance, news report carries out a different function from transactional encounters, and the type of language used changes accordingly. Our analyses of texts can benefit from similar considerations from the perspective of the producer rather than the receiver. Bygate (1987) describes oral interactions in terms of routines. These routines are conventional ways of presenting information and they can focus either on information or interaction. Information routines can either be expository (e.g. narration, description, instruction, comparison) or evaluative (e.g. explanation, justification, prediction, decision). Information routines frequently involve recurring types of information structures. Interaction routines on the other hand can be either service (e.g. job interview) or social (e.g. dinner party). This distinction between information and interaction routines reflects the distinction between transactional or interactional functions of language. The speaking grid by Nunan (1998) in TABLE 1 can be used as a planning device to design a syllabus for speaking and oral interaction. Table 1. A planning grid for speaking and oral interaction by Nunan (1998) Information/Transaction Expository Evaluative narrate describe instruct compare Interaction SERVICE

SOCIAL

Job interview Booking a restaurant Buying stamps Enrolling in school etc. Dinner party Coffee break Theatre queue etc.

explain justify predict decide

Negotiation of meaning Management of interaction

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Negotiation of Language: Negotiation of language is mainly used for two purposes; to ask for clarification of meaning and to give information about the structure of language we use. Teachers should design some activities that can help students master some clarification strategies and some fixed phrases that can help clarify what the other person is saying. The best way to teach clarification is to offer students some expression that can be used to ask the other person clarify any part of his/her speech that sounds obscure. A helpful way to offer such activities is to write some phrases, explanations and topics to be explained on cards. Some phrases and explanations on the cards can be left a bit obscure and incomprehensible so those students feel the need to make clarifications. Some example phrases that can be given to student:    

I‘m sorry. I didn‘t catch that. I‘m sorry. I don‘t understand. What exactly does X mean? Could you explain that again, please?

Second reason why we use the negotiation of language is to give information about the structure of our language. Structuring the discourse of our language is especially helpful when we want to make more written-like speeches. If you are giving a presentation to a group of people, you have to structure your thoughts and use some initiation phrases to highlight important parts of your speech and help your audience follow the sequence of your speech. This is also helpful in signaling the cause and effect relations between your arguments. Some useful expressions or phrases that can help students to structure their discourse:      

The important thing to grasp is that… To begin with/And finally… What I am trying to say is that… What I mean is… The point I am trying to make is that… … or, to to put it another way…

3. Social and Cultural Rules and Norms This basically involves conversational rules and structure (turn-taking, rate of speech, relative roles of participants, etc.), and conversational strategies (paraphrasing, asking for clarification, use of filler, etc.). It is essential for learners to understand how to take into account who they are speaking to, under what circumstances, about what, and for what purpose and reason.

Spontaneous Communication One of the biggest challenges language teachers face in speaking classes is to prepare appropriate communicative activities in systematic ways. More often than not, teachers draw on their intuition-based random selection of communicative activities. This often results in

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failure to find effective ways to prepare students for spontaneous communication. Although there are detailed guidelines to bring real-life like communicative situations into the classroom thanks to communicative teaching methodology, the type of communicative skills and language input is not really specified. Dörnyei and Thurrell (1994) points out that although many people think informal everyday conversation is unstructured and random, all conversations are governed by certain rules. These rules determine who speaks when, and for how long. They also state that natural conversation involves fixed expressions or conversational routines. They classify these rules and routines into six categories in order to design the content of a conversation course.

Conversational Rules and Structure Conversational rules and structure are related to the organization of a conversation, causes for possible interruptions and simultaneous talk: 1. Openings: There are various ways to initiate a conversation. They might come in the form of greetings and introductions (e.g. How are you? / Fine thanks. And you?), questions (Excuse me, do you know…) comments (That‘s a nice necklace…), general complaints (Public transportation in this city is really efficient…), and social lines (A great dinner, isn‘t it?). It is important to note that students can easily turn a very formal or a factual communication exchange (buying clothes in a shop) into an informal conversation using the above mentioned openings. 2. Turn-taking: There are underlying rules in the language determining who, talks, when and for how long. The language classroom does not give students enough chance to raise their awareness of turn-taking rules. This is especially disadvantageous for students coming from different cultural backgrounds. By using authentic video recordings and sample native talks, turn-taking ability can be developed through a systematic and conscious planning. 3. Interrupting: Interrupting is an important issue in turn-taking. Language user should know when, how, and how much to interrupt. Otherwise they might look rude. Therefore, students should be familiar with phrases like (e.g. Sorry to interrupt, but… or Sorry, but did I hear you say…?) 4. Topic Shift: Sometimes when we need to end a topic and start to talk about a new one, using certain conversational routines can be very helpful to make a smooth transition (e.g. Oh, by the way… or That reminds me of…). Or we might want to return to an earlier topic (e.g. Going back to…, As I was saying…, or Yes, well, anyway…). 5. Adjacency Pairs: Some utterances (e.g. questions, invitations, requests, apologies, compliments, etc.) ask for a certain immediate response or reaction from the interlocutor (the person on is talking to). The utterance and the immediate reaction or the response is called adjacency pairs. 6. Closings: People usually use a specific sequence of pre-closing and closing steps to set the basis to end a conversation (e.g. It’s been nice talking to you…, Well, I don’t want to keep you from your work…, We must get together sometimes…). Closing signals can easily be misleading in a foreign language; therefore it is really beneficial to explicitly teach students a set of closing routines so that they can be prepared for the kinds of phrases they might encounter in a spontaneous conversation.

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As we can see the above mentioned categorization of conversational rules and structure come in handy when we want to prepare language learners for real-life like situations. Taking these into consideration can set the ground for a planned, systematic lesson planning to teaching conversational skills. Activities geared towards awareness raising for fixed structures/responses and formulaic expressions can help learners increase their communicative competence. Dörnyei and Thurrell (1994) also state that other than conversational rules and structure, conversational strategies also play an important role in spontaneous conversation where learners have to deal with communication troubles such as inability to understand a word, or misunderstanding the other person. Getting familiar with and learning conversational strategies can assist learners gain a sense of security and room for maneuver. The most important conversational strategies proposed by Dörnyei and Thurrell (1994) are as follows: 1. Message Adjustment or avoidance: Depending on your language competence, saying what you are capable of saying rather than what you want to say or not saying it at all. 2. Paraphrase: Using a set of words to describe or exemplify an object or an action whose name you don‘t really know or remember. Some useful expressions are structures like something you can… with, a kind of …, etc. 3. Approximation: Expressing what you want to convey in such a way, using different terms, that you mean as close as possible to your original message. Using ‗allpurpose words‘ such as stuff, thing, what-do-you-call-it can be very helpful. 4. Asking for help: What’s the word for…? Or What do you call…? 5. Asking for repetition: Pardon? or Sorry, what was the last word? 6. Asking for clarification: What do you mean? What are you saying/trying to say? 7. Interpretive summary: You mean ….?, If I’ve understood correctly… or So are you saying that…? 8. Checking: OK?, Is that clear? Or Are with me? Are you listening? Did you hear what I said? Or over the phone, Are you (still) there? 9. Use of fillers/hesitation devices: Well, Now let me see, or The thing is, etc.

What Does Teaching Speaking Involve for Language Teachers? Language teachers should help their students develop areas of knowledge (Mechanics/Functions/Social and cultural rules and norms) given above. They should provide their students with ample opportunities for authentic practice. It should be kept in mind that ultimate aim of these activities should be to prepare students for real-life situations. Language teachers should also encourage their students to develop the ability to produce:   

grammatically correct (mechanics) logically connected sentences that are appropriate (Functions/Social and cultural rules and norms) and to use comprehensible pronunciation.

to

specific

contexts

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Now many linguistics and ESL teachers agree on that students learn to speak in the second language by "interacting". For interaction, communicative language teaching and collaborative palys a crucial role in that they foster information and interaction exchanges between and among learners. Communicative language teaching is designed based on the characteristics of real-life situations and they require communication. By using this method in speaking classes, students will be provided with enough opportunity to communicate with each other in the target language. Therefore, teachers should create a classroom environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language. This can happen when students collaborate in groups to achieve a goal or to complete a task. (Kayi, 2006)

Characteristics of a Successful Speaking Activity Whatever the nature or the goal of the speaking activity is, a good, learner-centered speaking activity should involve the following qualifications: A speaking activity where:    

learners talk a lot participation is equal and even motivation is high language is of an appropriate level

Problems with Speaking Activities By its nature, speaking can be problematic and therefore difficult for language teachers. No matter how organized or involving the speaking activity is, some problems just arise on account of students. Some of the common problem that might arise during a speaking activity and some possible strategies to help solve these problems are listed below: Inhibition: Sometimes students‘ personalities come into play and they might feel reserved to participate in any activity. Nothing to say: Sometimes it is hard for students to comment on a topic or find ideas to put forward. Low or uneven participation: This mostly happens in crowded classes where some certain students dominate the discussions. Mother-tongue use: Particularly low-level students tend to use their mother tongue especially during group work activities where they need to talk with their peers.

What the teacher can do to help to solve some of the problems? Speaking activities should involve each and every student in the classroom through the use of group work. This also helps remove some of the responsibilities of a student gets reserved or inhibited students to talk as well. Teachers should base activities on easy language so that students feel no need to use their mother tongue. Appropriate and interesting task choice is essential for student participation. Unfamiliar topics might leave student with no

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idea to talk about. As a summary, the following points should be kept in mind during designing a speaking activity:     

use group work base the activity on easy language make a careful choice of topic and task to stimulate interest give some instruction or training in discussion skills keep students speaking the target langauge

PRACTICAL TIPS What Makes a Good Speaking Activity? Thanyalak Oradee suggests that speaking is the most important and essential skill (Oradee, 2012). Thus, before preparing any speaking activity, there are important points to consider in detail. The following table provides a good overview of these points. Table 2. What make a good speaking activity

Repeatable

Structured

Open-Ended

Has A Task Goal

Competitive Reportable

Challenging Has A Teaching/Learning Goal

Can it happen only once, or will it be interesting to do the task multiple times with slight changes (e.g., new groupings, new ―topic‖, etc.). Repetition allows for rehearsal, refinement, confidence building, and teacher input/repair. Is there some procedure that should be followed, some process to go through? Adults can accept speaking as an aim in and of itself, teens and kids feel better ―doing something‖. A structure helps support the learners by giving them aims, let‘s them know what they should try to do/achieve, etc. This isn‘t just the opposite of the above! Is there enough room in the task for the learners‘ personality, creativity, and sense of humor – or are there only limited and ―correct/incorrect‖ choices given them? On the other hand, does it depend on the students having creativity? (not a ―teacher‘s goal‖) Related to the above item. Some ―end point‖ also lets students know when they are done, gives them a reason to work through the task to completion. Is there some way to evaluate or rank the products of the task? With teens and kids competition can add motivation (and some adult groups like it too). Is there something to tell/show once the task is done? Can we rank individuals/groups? Will the audience have a reason to listen to the ―reports‖ of other groups, or will they all have essentially the same thing to show/tell? Are the learners doing something that ―pushes‖ them, and allows them to work at their level of ability? Is the task structured to allow for different levels of challenge/ability? Not every free speaking task needs a tight link to ―newly learned language‖, but can learners see a connection between the speaking task and other recent work in the course – do they feel that they are ―practising‖ something? The goal might also be diagnostic/evaluative.

Source: Thomas Topham (prepared for tefl.net).

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Awareness Raising Activities As they lack certain skills, there are things that learners can‘t easily do, such as retrieving words at speed or achieving long, pause-free runs. Yet, there are also things that learners don‘t know such as what to say in order to signal a change of topic or how to respond appropriately to a difficult request. This results in inhibited fluency. Activities that help students uncover gaps are called awareness activities. It is assumed that the instructor will always be available to guide the event and provide support & feedback where and when necessary. Awareness concept is rooted in the cognitivist learning theory arguing that, to some extent, conscious awareness is needed in the sense of a prerequisite to restructure learner‘s mental representation of the language. Thornbury states that three processes are involved in this concept: attention, noticing and understanding (Thornburry, 2005). A teacher or several learners can support or contribute to these processes. To give an instance, a teacher may secure attention by sharing a humorous or strange story or a tale. Learners together form a story depending on a picture and share and convey their creation to others in the groups. This leads to attention, then to noticing and finally to understanding.

Sample Activity / Picture Dictation This is a low preparation fun activity that works well with large classes, especially with young learners and teens. All your students‘ need is a blank piece of paper and what teacher needs is a little bit of imagination.

Procedure 



 

First of all explain to the students that they are going to do a picture dictation, that you are going to describe a picture to them and that all they have to do is simply listen and draw what they hear you describe. You then describe a simple and easy-to-draw picture to them and they draw it. To help you with your first picture dictation you can use the picture on the accompanying worksheet and the description below it as a guide. It is a very simple picture for a low-level beginner's class but this kind of activity can be adapted to any level of student. Simply change the content of the picture accordingly. When you are describing the picture it is best to describe one object at a time slowly and to repeat each description two or three times. Make sure you give students enough time to finish drawing one object before you move onto the next object and it is a good idea to walk around and look at the students' drawings as they are drawing them so that you can see how well they are understanding your descriptions and then you can adjust them accordingly and give them any support they need.

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Tips for Making the Activity Work Well 



Before starting the activity you may want to draw a square or rectangle to represent a piece of paper on the board and elicit vocabulary from the students that they will need to know for the activity, such as in the middle of the piece of paper, in the top/bottom/right-/left-hand corner of the piece of paper, in front of, behind, on top of etc. For lower levels, you may even want to draw pictures of the things, the house, the hill, clouds, birds and children skipping etc. that will appear in the picture on the board before starting the activity to review vocabulary. How much pre-teaching of vocabulary and language you do will depend on the level of your students.

Variations 

    

Get students to colour the pictures in afterwards like a colour dictation, for example, colour the roof of the house green, colour the door of the house red, or get students to label different objects by writing the name of the object underneath it, such as house, bird etc. You can also get students to write a description of the picture afterwards. Another good variation is to give students a list of objects and get them to draw their own pictures with all those objects in them. The students then work in pairs. One student describes their picture to their partner and their partner draws what they hear. They then swap roles and afterwards they compare the pictures they drew with their original drawings pointing out the differences and usually having a giggle. Source: Fiona Lawtie, Teacher, Freelance materials writer

Using Recordings and Transcripts Inside the classroom, speaking and listening are the most often used skills (Brown, 1994). Exposure to instances of spoken language is one of several ways to raise awareness of aspects of spoken language in learners and to get them to study such instances works as well. Up to now, it has been in the form of recordings including monologues and multi-person interactions. These tools are pre-scripted. The problem with recordings is that they are superficially reflecting the real spoken language due to the lack in pause fillers, repair, backtracking, and lack in features such as interaction and turn-taking. Regarding this, R.A. Hall (1968) tells us that language is ―the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols". One drawback of recordings is that they are often prepared to contain a pre-selected grammar structure and they are made simple to make sure that they are intelligible. On the other hand, one advantage of them is that instructors can insert examples of particular features that learners need to be aware of. Again, one other problem with recordings is that they are mostly native speakers who speak in them. That may sound unnatural and far from reality. Many non-native learners

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may need an easier way of getting hold to English-speaking context. Besides, some contexts such as soup operas and films can be far away from intelligibility. Putting recorded data into effective practical use may require a number of factors such as; activation of background knowledge, checking gist, register, details, listening & reading, resolution of doubts and focusing on language features.

Focusing on Selected Language Features Focusing on organization is about making learners sensitive to the aspects of spoken genres. These genres such as business presentations or press conferences may be little bit unfamiliar to learners. Language functions (or patterns) that tend to occur in certain discourse situations (e.g., declining an invitation or requesting time off from work), can be identified and charted (Burns & Joyce, 1997). Apart from this, focusing on sociocultural rules, topic shift, performance effects, communication strategies, speech acts, discourse markers, features of spoken grammar, vocabulary, lexical chunks, stress and intonation are what learners may need to touch upon to hold a better grip of a rather more effective speaking skill.

Using Live Listening Compared to recordings, live listening bears a notable advantage of interactivity with a guest speaker or a teacher. Learners can direct questions to the speakers, can ask them for repetitions and clarifications.

Using Noticing-The-Gap Activities These kind of activities aim to display the difference between the current level and the target competence of the language learner. A task-based instruction would best work with this activity making learners perform a speaking task, observe what a skilled person can do, and re-perform the initial task to display the difference between the initial stage and the final one.

Appropriation: Practised Control While controlled practice involves repetition of language items with minimal mistakes, practiced control displays a progressive control of skill and, at the same time, involves mistakes that may be present all over the process, yet with a constant teacher support available all the time. Because, speech has its own skills, structures, and conventions different from written language (Burns & Joyce, 1997; Carter & McCarthy, 1995; Cohen, 1996). That means that especially a low-level learner/speaker of a language would benefit from being monitored by a skilled user of the same target language.

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Drilling and Chants Learners need to practice to get the control of speaking skill in the target language. According to Bashir, Azeem & Dogar (2011), learning to speak demands a lot of practice and attention. We learn to speak our mother tongue just by listening and repeating. Thus, imitating and repeating the structures such as words, phrases and sentences, that‘s, drilling is what is required to gain the management of speaking, even by trial-error process. Apart from enabling articulatory control for a speaker, drilling also moves fresh items from working memory to long-term memory. All these benefits result in fluency in the long run. Chants involve the practice of repeating and chunking more commonly than drilling does.

Writing Tasks R.H. Robins (1979) does not give a formal definition of language but points out certain facts related to language, saying that ―languages are symbol systems, almost wholly based on pure or arbitrary conventions". However strange it seems, writing has a role in the initial stages of several works aiming at speaking. These writing tasks include dictation, paper conversations, computer-mediated chat and rewriting.

Reading aloud Just as strange as writing feels, reading aloud is a useful tool to support any objective directed at spoken language. It is a transition between writing and speaking.

Assisted Performance and Scaffolding Competent practitioners, according to Socio-cultural theory, make L2 learning easier and more accessible for less skilled ones through scaffolding and several other interventions.

Dialogues Essentially, any language use is dialogic in its nature. Dialogues provide transition from a teacher-based classroom to an interaction-based/focused setting. To incorporate new language items and to provide an easy access to/for memory, a several number of tips are on hand such as items on board, chunks on cards, memorization script, picture and word cues, flowdiagram conversations, conversational tennis, disappearing dialogue and dialogue building. According to N. Chomsky (1957) a language is ―a set of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements‖.

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Communicative Tasks As speaking is a cognitive skill, it is basically automated through practicing successively. Therefore, when tasks are communicative, they help to accomplish two crucial learning needs: preparing learners for authentic context use and automization of their knowledge. Enhancing communicative competence and performance is realized inside and outside of the classroom setting. Conversational fluency in a new language develops inside and outside the classroom, and students can attain it in one to three years (Collier & Thomas, 1989). Jigsaw activities, info-gap race, surveys, blocking games and guessing games are among the frequently used activity types to prepare a communicative learning-teaching interaction.

Task Repetition By adjusting elements of planning, interactivity, results, outputs and task repetition, teacher can influence the outcome of tasks. To teachers, task repetition may bear several advantages, yet, to learners, it may feel demotivating without a strong motive and incentive. To handle this shortcoming, here are some suggestive mini-activities: the onion, poster carousel, headlines.

SAMPLE ACTIVITIES Discussion Activities Activity 1) Good manners This activity is all about manners and etiquette. This can be an interesting topic to discuss with your students, especially if there are cultural differences regarding norms of behavior between the country you're working in and the UK. Preparation Write up two columns with headings on the board: Good Manners

Bad Manners

Procedure  

This is a simple introductory activity to get across the idea of manners, both good and bad. Draw the table on the board and give students a few ideas to get them going.

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Then they should fill their table with as many examples of good and bad manners as they can think of. Ask students to read the statements about manners. There are three that are FALSE. See if they can find them. (The three false ones are: 3, 4 and 6.)

In the UK...1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

... do stand in a queue when you wait for a bus or to pay for something in a shop. ... don't spit on the street. ... do burp loudly after a meal. ... don't apologise if you bump into somebody on the street. ... do say ‗please' and ‗thank you' at every opportunity. ... don't cover your mouth when you yawn or sneeze. ... don't greet people with two kisses. ... don't pick your nose in public.

Once the students have finished, ask them to decide on a list of do's and don'ts for good manners in their country.

Activity 2) Discussing languages This is a discussion activity that you can use to find out about your students‘ opinions of language learning and how important they think it is. It gets your students talking and sharing opinions but also gives you a chance to listen in and to understand their motivation and attitudes towards languages. Preparation Make a copy of the discussion statements and cut them into strips so those students can take one statement at a time and discuss it. Add some statements of your own if your students have specific language issues they may want to discuss.

Procedure    

1

Put your students into groups of four or five and give each group a statement.Let them discuss the statement for a few minutes while you monitor and feed in any language they need. Then rotate the statements around the groups. Once all the students have discussed all the statements you might want to have a class vote to see what the consensus of opinion is on these statements and share some of your own opinions and insights.

Source: Jo Budden, British Council, Spain.

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DISCUSSION STATEMENTS2 Everybody should speak at least two languages. In the future there won‘t be so many different languages in the world. Tourists in my country should make an effort to speak my language. Life would be easier if all countries spoke the same language. I think learning languages is really important these days. Girls are normally better at learning foreign languages than boys! If languages disappear, different ways of thinking also disappear. I would like to know more foreign languages. Some languages are more important than others. English is an ‗international language‘. Knowing foreign languages helps you to get a good job.

Problem solving/Task-Based Activities Activity Change place, change face This activity gives students maximum speaking time and helps develop fluency. The slightly ‗unusual‘ classroom set-up seems to encourage students to speak, producing a healthy buzz and fostering a positive learning environment. I‘ve found it can be a good option for classes with shy students, or groups who have become bored with traditional pair-work activities. Requiring only minimum preparation and just a little moving around of furniture, this activity can be used with learners at all levels. Preparation You will need a list of 8-10 questions which encourage your students to speak about themselves/give their own opinions, and which could be discussed for a few minutes each. You should also think about how to arrange your classroom so that students are sitting in rows lined up to face another row, with enough room for them to get up and change places. Procedure3  I arrange the classroom so that chairs are lined up in a row with another row directly facing them. Space permitting, I put all the desks to one side, though this isn‘t essential. Large classes can be set up with several sets of rows.  I ask students to find a seat. For an odd number of students, I add an extra chair at the end of one row, making a ‗threesome‘.  I explain to students that they will have a chance to speak with different students and to develop their fluency. They will discuss the question on the board for several minutes until I say ‗change‘. They will then get a new question and also change 2 3

Source: Jo Budden, British Council, Spain. Source: Marta Joyce Sabbadini-Essinki, Teacher & Trainer.

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



 







partners. To change, students in one row stay in the same place, whilst those in the opposite row move along one space every time. I write the first question on the board, reading it aloud if not all students can see it, and ask them to start speaking. Soon everybody is engrossed in conversation, finding ways to communicate with their partner, despite all the surrounding noise. After two/three minutes, I tap on the board and ask students to ‗change‘. Students on one row each move down a seat, with the person in the last position moving back up to the top of that row. Students ‗greet‘ their new partner as I board the next question, and then start speaking again. In my experience students are happy to keep talking, and it is up to the teacher how much speaking practice s/he feels the students need and how many questions to give. Twenty minutes is usually appropriate. Whilst they are speaking I listen to/observe individual learners from the back of the room. I don‘t get involved in the conversations; however, if I see that students don‘t have much to say for any particular question, I move onto the next one, though this rarely seems necessary. At the end, I do a short feedback session, for example asking students which question they most enjoyed discussing. Feedback could also focus on error correction, an opportunity to pick up on problems common to several learners. For teachers with access to an OHP, an alternative to boarding each question is to prepare the questions on a transparency to be projected, using a piece of card to ‗unveil‘ one question at a time.

Activity 4 Task-based speaking This is a speaking lesson on the theme of planning a night out that uses a listening exercise to provide language input. Preparation and Materials You will need to record two people planning a night out on the town. Pre-task (15-20min) Aim: To introduce the topic of nights out and to give the class exposure to language related to it. To highlight words and phrases.   

Show sts pictures of a night out in a restaurant / bar and ask them where they go to have a good night out. Brainstorm words/phrases onto the board related to the topic: people / verbs / feelings etc. Introduce the listening of two people planning a night out. Write up different alternatives on the board to give them a reason for listening e.g. (a) restaurant / bar (b) meet at the train station / in the square. Play it a few times, first time to select from the alternatives, second time to note down some language.

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Tell them that they are going to plan a class night out and give them a few minutes to think it over.

Task (10min) Students do the task in twos and plan the night. Match them with another pair to discuss their ideas and any similarities and differences. Planning (10min) Each pair rehearses presenting their night out. Teacher walks around, helps them if they need it and notes down any language points to be highlighted later. Report (15 min)  Class listen to the plans, their task is to choose one of them. They can ask questions after the presentation.  Teacher gives feedback on the content and quickly reviews what was suggested. Students vote and choose one of the nights out. Language Focus (20min)4  Write on the board five good phrases used by the students during the task and five incorrect phrases/sentences from the task without the word that caused the problem. Students discuss the meaning and how to complete the sentences.  Hand out the tapescript from the listening and ask the students to underline the useful words and phrases.  Highlight any language you wish to draw attention to e.g. language for making suggestions, collocations etc.  Students write down any other language they wish to remember. Note: You can go on the planned night out with your students. This can make it even more motivating for them.

Story Telling Activities Activity 5 Talking about the past This speaking activity is for a 1-1 class with a learner at an intermediate level and who works, as many of the questions ask for reflection about working life. It could be adapted for use with a group but would need some very close monitoring and support from the teacher. The learning aims of the activity are to review and provide further practice in various ways to talk about the past, including past continuous, two perfect forms, used to and expressing past regret (I wish I hadn‘t…). This could also be used as a diagnostic for a higher level learner.

4

Source: Richard Frost, British Council, Turkey.

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Preparation Before the class, prepare a copy of the questions for yourself and your learner. Remember you can also explain the activity‘s aims and procedure to the learner at a more detailed level than you would with a group. Procedure5 1. Ask your learner to answer the questions first – this could be done in note form (which will focus on speaking more) or as full written answers. 2. Ask the learner to share their answer for each question. Encourage discussion of their response but don‘t correct at this stage. 3. Ask the learner to ask you the same question, then record your answers. Encourage discussion of your response also if the learner is interested. 4. If one of your aims is accuracy, give the learner time to correct their answers using yours as a model, then give feedback. If the learner is interested discuss and develop the language points more explicitly. Or (for a lower level) 1. Ask your learner to ask you the questions first and record your answers. This is slightly less demanding and provides the learner with a model before writing. Encourage discussion of your response if the learner is interested. 2. Ask your learner to answer the questions referring to yours as a model – this could be done in note form (which will focus on speaking more) or as full written answers. 3. Ask the learner to share their answer for each question. Encourage discussion of their response but don‘t correct at this stage. 4. If one of your aims is accuracy, give the learner time to correct their answers using yours as a model, then give feedback. If the learner is interested discuss and develop the language points more explicitly.

Activity 6) Story in a bag This oral story-creating and relating activity works best with intermediate level and above learners. (I don't recall the origins of this activity. I picked it up from some book or workshop at least ten years ago!) Preparation Before class, the teacher fills paper bags with 5-6 random objects. You'll need one bag per group of four students. To make this activity interesting, the objects should be diverse and unrelated to each other. Go for a combination of the unusual and the mundane. An example of a diverse content bag from my class is:   

5

a postcard from Singapore a can-opener a candle

Source: Paul Kaye, Teacher, Writer, Trainer.

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a surgical mask a theatre playbill (programme) a teddy bear

Procedure At a signal, each group of students opens its bag, removes its objects and invents an oral story incorporating all the objects found in the bag. The stories become very complex and creative in order to make each object a step in the plot. Here's an example based on the bag items described above. "One morning Shelley received a postcard from her old college friend, Louise. The card was from Singapore, and in it, Louise had invited Shelley to come for a visit. Shelley flew to Singapore and met Louise. The first night she was there, they went to a play at a local theatre. It was a murder mystery and the ladies were feeling a bit nervous walking back to Louise's home after the show. When they got home Louise tried to turn on the light, but there was no electricity. She lit a candle and ……etc."







It's important that the story be oral and not written and then read. This allows spontaneous changes, and for group members to jump in and correct each other or add details in the final telling. When the groups have finished, each group shares its story with the whole class. Each student in the group should tell one part and hold up the related object when it is mentioned in the story. Some group members may tell two parts, or tell one part that uses two objects - it doesn't matter. Most of the talking is done in the creation of the story within the group.

Watch out for those clever souls who would say "Shelley packed her suitcase for Singapore. In it she put a candle, a can opener, a teddy bear…etc."

Variation6  The teacher makes up a crime that has been committed, for example; 'Professor Whatsit found dead under a picnic table, Lady Wigglebiggle's diamonds stolen from her bedroom drawer'.  The groups are then told that the items in their bags are clues to the crime collected by a detective. The story that the groups come up with then are the details of the crime. Here is an example. "The teddy bear had been ripped open, to reveal a hiding place. It was now empty. The detective realised it was the place where Professor Whatsit kept the key to his secret laboratory. But how had the killer made it past the guard dogs? The can opener left on the kitchen counter was analysed and found to contain traces of dog food. Clearly, the killer fed the dogs, maybe even drugged them to keep them calm etc." 6

Source: Maria Spelleri, Manatee Community College, Florida, USA.

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Communication Activities Activity 7 Conversational English Preparation Take the script of a dialogue and blank out one half of the conversation. Procedure7 1. Hand out a gapped version of dialogue with only Steve's utterances showing and Sharon's blanked out. 2. Get your students to try to write in Sharon's lines using the clues given in Steve's subsequent respective answers. 3. Play the dialogue and get the students to compare what they hear with what they have written. 4. Give them some feedback. They may not have predicted what the speaker said exactly, but they may have given some good possible answers, so be sure to acknowledge that. 5. Write some keywords from each part of the dialogue on the board Example: Sharon: "…you?" Steve: "I….. You?" Sharon: "I….. What…..? Steve: "Not…..Busy….We….I…..go….." Sharon:"…That…..When….?" Steve: "….week…..know." 6. Ask the students to listen again then work in pairs to rehearse and act out the dialogue.

Role-Play / Acting from a Script Activities Activity 8 Consequences role play Why not play a game of consequences with a difference, where students must take on the role of another person?

7

Source: Elisabeth Boeck.

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Procedure8 Give each student a piece of paper. On this they must first write: 1. The first name of their favourite movie star - male or female but of the opposite gender to themselves 2. Their favourite fruit 3. A number between 1 - 9 4. The names of vegetables - the same number of vegetables as the number given above 5. A job they don't like 6. Their favourite job they would like to do 7. A description of their dream house e.g. by the sea, in the mountains - using adjectives to describe this place 8. Finally, they describe what country they would really like to live in. Now they are required to change character to the person they have described on the piece of paper. Here are what the points above mean:        

This is their husband's or wife's first name This is their family name This indicates the number of children they have This indicates the children's names This is their job This is the their husband's or wife's job This describes the family house and tells the listener where it is located This last point tells us what country they come from.

Students read through the points and now are told they are at a party where they are meeting famous people. Now they must introduce themselves to several people in the room as this person. They need to share the conversation, so they need to be interactive and find out about other people in the room. It may help to put them in small groups or allow them to walk around the classroom. You could follow this up by getting students to say who they felt was the most interesting person they met and why.

Activity 9 A shopping role play This activity gives learners at an intermediate level and above the opportunity to use interactional language in a role-play situation The task of going shopping along a typical British high street. Half the class have shopping lists and the other half own a shop. There are five shops: 8

Source: Margot McCamley, Oman.

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60     

a computer shop a newsagent's a fruit shop a small supermarket a language bookshop.

The cards are structured so that some discussion and negotiation is necessary to find most of the things on the learners' shopping lists. In addition, each list also has a short task typical of normal interaction in the street, for example asking the time or directions to a bank. At higher levels learners can be encouraged to elaborate on the conversations and make them more complex.

Preparation Before the class, copy and cut up the cards on worksheets A and B, so that there are an equal number of shoppers (worksheet A) and shop owners (B). The ideal number is five of each, you can duplicate the cards if your class is larger than 10. If you have less than 10, your learners won't be able to find everything on their lists, so warn them. Procedure   

 

    

If you are practising language, review useful structures with the class first, e.g. 'I'm looking for a…', 'I wonder if you can help me, I…', 'How much is that?', etc. Hand out the cards to the students making sure there is an equal number of shopping lists and shops. Give the learners time to read their cards and ask you about any problem language. They also need to think about what they are going to say, and what language they will need. You can group the shoppers together and shop owners together to do this. Point out to the shop owners that they may need to decide how much their products cost before starting. Set up your classroom to represent a street, with each table being a shop if possible. Ask the learners who own a shop to prepare a card (folded piece of paper) saying what shop they own. Start the role-play. The shoppers need to find everything on their lists and complete their short task also. Monitor the activity for interesting language or for problems, which you can feedback afterwards. Try not to intervene too much at this stage. Keep the role-play going until enough shoppers have completed their tasks. Put the class into groups and ask them to explain how the shopping (and selling) went, and what problems they had. Feedback open class on any interesting language points. By Paul Kaye, British Council

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SAMPLE LESSON PLANS Lesson Plan 1 WEIRD MUSEUMS Introduction

Pre

Goals Materials Teaching Modes Time

Post

While

Procedure

Practicing word building & word families To extend vocabulary by practicing forming new words from stem words Written text samples. PowerPoint slides. Group work, lecture, classroom discussion 45 + 45 (90 minutes approximately) 1. Put students into teams of four to six to play a brainstorming game. Play ‗for real‘ with a few other words. Here are some suggestions: photo happy friend organize luck 2. Divide students into two groups, A and B. Give each student in group A a copy of worksheet. Students take it in turns to read out the other student‘s complete text from the bottom of their worksheet. Students stay in their pairs and discuss which words were the trickiest in their texts. 3. They work together in small groups with the same worksheet to do the exercises. 7. Now put students into pairs again, A and B. They exchange worksheets, and using the answer, they correct them. 8. Students work in small groups. They choose one of the four museum texts and look at the ‗answers‘. Then they brainstorm all of the possible words in each of the word families. When they finish, they should swap their lists with another group. Then each group checks the words in a dictionary and awards one point for each correct answer. The group with the most points wins!

Lesson Plan 2 ONLINE SAFETY Introduction Goals

Post

Procedure

While

Pre

Materials Teaching Modes Time

Talking about the use of internet & online safety To develop students‘ speaking, listening, reading skills To develop students‘ awareness of online safety issues Written text samples. PowerPoint slides, videos Group work, lecture, classroom discussion 45 + 45 (90 minutes approximately) 1. Display some images of online logos, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Amazon, YouTube. Can your students identify them? 2. Tell students about how you (or a family member or friend) use the internet, social media and your mobile phone. For example; sending emails, texts, using facebook, twitter, buying things online 3. Choose one of the videos to show to your class 4. Students do the pre-viewing vocabulary task before they watch. 5. Ask the students to watch the video and to decide with a partner what the main message of the video is. 6. Students check the UK online safety instructions booklet 7. Students discuss the booklet in small groups, and ask each group to report back to the class, summarising their discussions. In groups, students make posters with their top tips for staying safe online. You could display the posters and have a class vote on the poster with the best advice.

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CONCLUSION One of the best ways for learners to differentiate themselves is by having consistent performance regarding communication skills. Developing these skills requires a crucial amount of attention and effort by learners on speech part which is one of the core elements in any language system. That is why speaking skill composes the biggest burden along the process to reach a native-like aptitude or a competent user level. The same is true of any of four skills. Yet, the intent here has been to present positive suggestions to help teachers and learners to develop or enhance their speaking skills by means of situation-appropriate activities. This chapter will assist both teachers and learners to improvise the good ones of the activities and to avoid duplicating the mistakes of the bad ones. In students' minds, the ability to speak a language is equal to knowing the language. Regarding this statement, Nunan (1991) wrote, "success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the (target) language." Taking this into consideration, when students cannot speak the language in the classroom setting, they may easily lose their motivation and interest. However, right speaking activities in the right time and in the right way will definitely lead to an enjoyable and beneficial learning environment.

FURTHER READING Harmer, J. (2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching. London: Longman. Chapter 19 gives a good explanation of the elements of speaking. Kayi, H. (2006). Teaching Speaking: Activities to Promote Speaking in a Second Language. Retrieved from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kayi-TeachingSpeaking.html McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (1993). Materials and Methods in ELT. Blackwell. Especially Chapter 8 deals with issues related to the teaching of speaking. Thornbury, S. (2005). How to teach speaking. Harlow, England: Longman. Ur, P. (1992) Five-Minute Activities: A Resource Book of Short Activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

REFERENCES Bashir, M., Azeem, M. & Dogar, A.H. (2011). Factor Effecting Students’ English Speaking Skills. British Journal of Arts and Social Sciences, ISSN: 2046-9578, Vol.2 No.1 Brown, H.D. (1994). Teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents. Burns, A. & Joyce, H. (1997). Focus on speaking. Sydney: National Center for English Language Teaching and Research. Bygate, M. (1987). Speaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carter, R. & McCarthy, M. (1995). Grammar and spoken language. Applied Linguistics, 16 (2), 141-158. Chaney, Ann L & Burk, Tamara L (1998). Teaching oral communication in grades K-8. Allyn and Bacon, Boston.

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Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Cohen, A. (1996). Developing the ability to perform speech acts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18 (2), 253-267. Collier, V., & Thomas, W. (1989). How quickly can immigrants become proficient in school English? Journal of Educational Issues of Language Minority Students, 5, 26-38. Dörnyei, Z., & Thurrell, S. (1994). Teaching conversational skills intensively: course content and rationale. ELT Journal 48(1) 40-49. Hall, R.A. (1968). An essay on language. Chilton Books/Educational Division, Michigan University. McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (1993). Materials and Methods in ELT. Blackwell. Nunan. D. (1991). Language Teaching Methodology. UK: Prentice Hall International (Chapter two & three). Oradee, Thanyalak (2012). Developing Speaking Skills Using Three CommunicativeActivities. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, Vol. 2, No. 6, November 2012 Robins, R.H. (1979). A short History of Linguistics. 2nd corrected ed. London & New York: Longman. (4th ed., 1995.) Thornbury, S. (2005). How to teach speaking. Harlow, England: Longman. Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching: Practice and theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Internet Sites http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/speaking-activities http://edition.tefl.net/articles/teacher-technique/good-free-speaking-activity/

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 5

TEACHING LISTENING Aylin Köyalan İzmir University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, English Language Teaching Department, Izmir, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1 2 3 4 5 6. 7.

list the sub-skills of listening, list the stages of a listening lesson, mention the aims of each stage, give sample activities for pre/while/post-listening stages, explain the differences between extensive and intensive listening, list some activities that can be used with songs, list some activities that can be used with films.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Why do we teach listening? 2. What are the stages of a listening lesson? 3. What are the aims of the stages of a listening lesson? 4. What activities can be done in each stage? 5. What activities can be done using songs? 6. What activities can be done with films?



Corresponding author: Aylin Köyalan. E-mail: [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION Listening is one of the basic skills because it is essential for communication. For Doff (1990, 198), if we want to improve speaking skills, or conversational skills, we need to develop listening skills; students need to understand what they hear. This can be achieved through listening to enough English at normal speed. Unless we are teaching English at a country where it is spoken, we need to give students plenty of opportunities to listen to English in the classroom. Some people believe that listening is neglected in language teaching since it is seen as a normal reflex. ―In reality, listening is used far more than any other single language skill in normal daily life. On average, we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write (Rivers, 1981 in Celce-Murcia, 2001, 70). There are other studies which show the importance of listening. One of them was conducted by Wilt and it goes back to 1950s. In this study it was found that 45% of communication was listening, 30% speaking, 16% reading and 9% writing. In another older one, Rankin (1928) found that 70% of waking time was spent communicating. In short, all these studies highlight the importance of listening and communication in English language learning. It is believed that when learners listen to authentic English video and audio materials for a long time, they can produce better sentences more quickly than learners who do not do so. This is very important for learners who are learning English in non-English-speaking countries. To illustrate, when students listen to dialogues, discussions, debates, interviews, etc., they can practice the content of various topics and vocabulary by hearing the way people speak in real life. Another useful practice can be discussing issues after listening to texts or programs in English (Shelby, no date). To sum up, through listening, learners can modify the things they hear, and by imitating, they can learn certain structures, vocabulary items, pronunciation, and speaking skills can develop. Psychologically they will feel better and more comfortable when listening than when speaking, because they do not produce anything but just receive input.

IMPORTANT ISSUES AND FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ON LISTENING 1. Extensive vs. Intensive Listening In extensive listening students are asked to choose some listening materials for themselves to listen outside the class hour. The aim is just for pleasure (Harmer, 2007). When the students are engaged in extensive listening outside the classroom, they should be encouraged not to worry if they do not understand everything. In intensive listening, which is done inside the classroom, the students do not have to understand everything, either. The aim is to complete the given task, graded according to the students‘ level. Sometimes teachers complain about the difficulty level of the authentic listening texts given in coursebooks. In this case, the teacher should be aware that they can change the task given in the coursebook, to suit the students‘ level. For example, let‘s imagine that the students are going to listen to the weather forecast. If the students are A1, their task

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could be to note down the numbers or the city names they hear. To sum up, whether you have a difficult listening text or not, it is not important. The level of the task is important.

2. Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches to Listening According to bottom-up approach, ―listening is a linear, data-driven process‖ (Nunan, 2002 in Richards and Renandya, 235). The listeners will be able to understand the spoken message as long as they know how to decode the text. This is a linear process because phonemic units make words, which make phrases and then sentences are formed. Meaning comes in the last position. In the other, topdown approach, meaning comes first. The listener uses different clues to get the meaning out of what he/she hears. The clues can be listener‘s background knowledge of the text, the situation that the listening takes place, the speakers and their relationship with each other and with the situation at hand. For Nunan (2002), when teaching English, both of them should be used because the learner needs to be able to identify both the individual sounds and also get the general message.

3. How Many Times Should Students Hear the Text? Another issue is the number of times we are going to let the students hear the text in intensive listening. For Ur (1996, 108), in real life we rarely have repetitions; however, in an everyday conversation we can ask for clarification; moreover, we aim to have the students to hear English over and over again. We can say that there is no danger in having students to listen to the text two or more times. If we can give them a different task for each listening, it will be better.

4. What Strategies Do Students Use to Cope with Listening? Kaplan (2002, 42) mentions the use of three groups of language learning strategies: ―metacognitive – planning, regulating, managing, etc., cognitive – those that facilitate comprehension, such as conscious use of context or background knowledge, and social and affective – for example, requests for clarification, and positive self-talk.‖ Studies have shown that listening strategy training has positive effects on the development of listening skills.

5. Anxiety Makes Concentration Difficult. How Can Teachers Overcome Anxiety? Students usually find listening difficult. They are generally afraid of missing important details in listening tasks. In this case, the teacher should give importance to the activities done before listening. For example, they can give some information about the text and prepare the

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students as much as possible. Some teachers spend plenty of time doing pre-listening activities so that students feel relaxed.

6. Learners Are Unfamiliar with the Topic or Culture. What Can Be Done? Cultural differences might cause students to get confused. However, if teachers give information about the topic and the culture, they will be familiarised with it and want to listen to the text.

7. Learners Lack Motivation and a Reason for Listening. What Can Be Done? The aim of the pre-listening activities is to give students reasons to listen. If enough time is allotted on them, it will be a valuable investigation.

8. Learners Get Overloaded by the Quantity of Information. How Can Teachers Help Students about This? Sometimes listening texts in coursebooks are very long. After some time students lose concentration and have difficulty following the listening. Teachers can divide the text into parts and make them more manageable. In this way teachers will have fewer bored students and less discipline problems.

9. There Are Lots of Distractions and Students Lose Concentration. What Can Be Done? In real life it is not possible to get rid of noise altogether. Students should be taught to listen without being distracted by the noise. If they can learn to listen in spite of the noise, then they will start developing listening as a skill. We can give airports as an example, neither the crowd, nor the noise can stop us from listening to the details about our flight since as soon as we hear our flight number, we will concentrate on it and try not to miss it.

10. Learners May Not Have Enough Grammar or Vocabulary. How Can Teachers Help Them? Sometimes listening texts include unknown vocabulary and grammatical structures. In such cases teachers should look at the tasks students need to do. If the students need to know the grammatical items or new vocabulary items to do the task properly, those should be taught before the listening. If they are not necessary, they can just be neglected.

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SUB-SKILLS AND AIMS IN LISTENING Below are the sub-skills and/or aims that are frequently used by language teachers. The most frequently used sub-skill is to listen to the text and get the gist or the main idea(s). This is generally the aim of the first listening. The rest are the aims of the second listening, for example, listening for specific information. In this one, teachers sometimes give sentences to be filled in or questions to be answered. They can be true-false, multiple choice or openended questions, etc. The sub-skills to be developed might differ according to the learners‘ levels. For instance, while making inferences or drawing conclusions are suitable for higher level of students, listening and giving physical response is suitable for lower levels. Another one is guessing the meaning of unknown vocabulary from the context. For this one, the students can be given a list of words and they can write or match the opposites or synonyms of them or they can be given definitions and write the words while or after listening. Listening and taking notes is suitable and useful for students at higher education, especially if the medium of education is English. Sub-skills, such as; listening to check if your answers are right or wrong and listening to check for mistakes are used to encourage students to make guesses first and then listen to the text to see if they were right or wrong. These can be used with lower level students. Similarly, listening for dictation, listening to re-order a jumbled dialogue, listening to complete a picture, listening to other learners and listening to match pictures with descriptions can all be used with students from lower levels to higher levels.

STAGES OF A LISTENING LESSON There are three stages of a listening lesson: Pre-listening, while / in-listening, and postlistening.

1. Pre-Listening Stage This is the stage done before the listening takes place. If we just ask the students to listen to the text, they might not listen or they might not be motivated or interested enough to listen or even if they are interested and eager to listen, there might be other distracters; such as, unknown vocabulary or structure, lack of background knowledge on the topic. In short, in order to motivate the learners to listen, to give them a reason, to arouse curiosity in students, to increase their creativity, to get their attention and increase concentration, and to clarify any unknown points, teachers should apply some pre-listening activities.

1. a. Activities for Pre-Listening Stage 1 The teacher chooses some key words, five or six, from the listening text and writes them on the board and asks the students to guess what the topic of the listening is, or the students can create a story by looking at these words, later they can listen to check the similarities and differences between their stories and the original one.

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3

4

5 6

The teacher writes the title of the listening passage on the board and asks the students to guess what the passage is about and what the details can be. As in the previous activity the students will listen for similarities and differences. The teacher tells the topic of the listening passage and tries to elicit some information on it. The aim is to see where the students are so that teacher can decide whether students need help or not. When the students do not know anything about the topic, they cannot follow the listening text. Another option is to give photos/pictures related to the topic and asking the students to make up a story by using them. Later they can compare their stories with the original one. The teacher can give a few topic sentences and ask the students to make predictions, etc. Students can be given some questions to answer, and while listening, they can check the answers.

2. While-Listening/In-Listening Stage In this stage the students do the tasks or activities while they are listening to the passage. Some of the aims might be to help students to get the meaning, to check comprehension and to help them to have fun and enjoy listening, etc. Some theorists believe that the students might be distracted and lose concentration when they have to do some activities during listening and they cannot understand anything. They suggest that pre and post activities should be given more time than while-listening activities.

2. a. Activities for While / In-Listening Stage 1 Asking comprehension, true-false or multiple-choice questions. 2 Asking the students to listen for more detailed information. 3 Asking the students to complete the missing information in the tables. 4 Listen and match type of activities; for example, matching the definitions with words, the pictures with parts of the story, etc. 5 Listen and draw (the first scene, the last scene, etc.) 6 Listen and write the missing words in the paragraphs. 7 Listen and correct (the sentences, the words, etc.), the teacher gives the transcript of the passage but change some parts of it and asks the students to listen and correct them. 8 Listen and put into order; the teacher can give some sentences from the passage and ask the students to put them into order, instead of sentences, pictures or paragraphs can also be given. 9 Listen and act out the story, this can be a kind of ‗Total Physical Response‘ activity, in which students perform some actions; such as, raising hands, waving, shaking hands with the person next to them, etc.

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3. Post-Listening Stage In this stage, the aims are to get feedback, to see if teacher has achieved his/her aims, to relate what they listen to real life, to teach and test vocabulary, etc.

3. a. Activities for Post-Listening Stage 1 Draw the last scene; this works very well especially with young learners since they like drawing pictures. 2 Summarize the listening text; this can be done as a writing or speaking activity. 3 Correct the sentences; this can be done as a while/post activity. 4 Find a suitable title; after listening, the students can discuss what they have understood from the text and in pairs/groups, suggest a suitable title. 5 Change the end of the listening text; the students can alter the passage in any way they like; in pairs/groups, they can either change the end, or chose a part of it to change. 6 Finish the story; when the passage reaches the end, stop the recording and ask the students to guess the end in pairs/groups, and then listen and check the similarities/ differences. 7 Act out the story; when the listening is over, and if the teacher makes sure the students have understood the text, the students can be asked to perform role-plays. 8 Write a dialogue about what you have heard; in this activity, the students turn the passage into a dialogue form first and then act it out in pairs/groups. 9 Retell the story to your friend in pairs; this is a useful speaking practice activity. If the teachers can have half of the class outside, the other half can listen to the first part of the listening passage, later, the second part can be listened to by the first half. This will create information gap between the first and the second halves. Students from each half can come together and tell their parts to each other.

A GENERAL PROCEDURE OF A LISTENING COMPREHENSION ACTIVITY 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

Set the scene; for example, tell the students what they are going to hear, give brief information. Relate the topic to the learners‘ own knowledge/experience; to illustrate, elicit from students whatever they know about the topic. Pre-teach essential vocabulary, select some key words and teach them. Give instructions; these are determined according to the type of activities the students are supposed to perform; such as, listening and drawing, correcting mistakes (refer to the activities listed in ‗activities for each stage‘ part). Tell the learners how many times they are going to hear the text; usually they listen for two times but it depends on the teacher‘s aim. Set the listening task; give students the activity. Learners listen and do the task.

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Check that the learners are completing the task; while students are busy completing the activity, walk among the students, help and monitor them. 9 Check that the learners have performed the task satisfactorily; in other words, make sure they have all completed the task. 10 Get the learners to compare their answers (in pairs/groups). This is very important because when we skip this part, we elicit the answer from one or two students only. However, when they check the answers with their peers first, they have a chance to check the answer with a friend before speaking in front of the whole class and the teacher. In this way, not only more students will speak at the same time, but also shy students will gain more confidence. 11 Get the learners to agree / disagree with answer(s) – (open class); get feedback from students, make necessary explanations, etc.

SAMPLE ACTIVITIES 1. Giving students semi-scripted simulated authentic prompts, asking them to do roleplay and record their dialogues. In the semi-scripts the students are given ideas to speak about. In this way, they will hesitate less and speak more (Lam, 2002). Example activity: Student A Tell your partner what you do to be successful at school. Use the following clues: a) Ask what he/she does about being successful. b) Ask if he/she wants to do other things. c) Ask if there are things he/she cannot do. Student B Talk to your friend about being successful. Answer his/her question and keep talking a) Ask what he/she does about being successful. b) Ask about his/her opinion of the importance of being successful. c) Ask if there are things he/she would like to do. Later, the students can listen to the recordings from other pairs and discuss what they have listened. 2. The teacher asks students to list the topics they would like to talk about. They write the list on the board. Later, students sit in groups. Each student chooses one topic and speaks about it for 3-5 minutes without mentioning the topic. The other students in the group have to listen carefully and guess which topic he/ she is talking about.

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USING FILMS IN THE CLASSROOM It is a known fact that watching films builds the stamina, learners‘ ability to understand bigger chunks of language. For Stempleski and Tomalin (2001, 1), ―the value of film as a language teaching and learning resource is self-evident. It is motivating, and it provides a source of authentic and varied language. Many films are well-known, and some are recognized worldwide as a common frame of reference. The medium of film is excellent at communicating cultural values, attitudes, and behaviours. It is very effective at bringing the outside world into the classroom and providing a stimulating framework for classroom communication and discussion.‖ The following techniques are suggested by these writers: 1 2 3

4

5

6

Vision on/sound off: In this technique, the students are encouraged to make predictions on the language spoken and focus on explaining what they see. Sound on/vision off: After the students listen to the soundtrack, they can make predictions on setting, scene, characters, what they are doing, etc. Pause-frame control: Teachers can pause at various times and for various reasons; for example, at the beginning of a dialogue, teacher can pause and ask students to predict what the characters are going to say or teachers can ask students to tell each other what has happened. Sound and video on: Teachers can give various tasks to students; such as, asking students to act the film out before watching and then compare their version and the film, or students can be given the sequence in mixed order and put them into order, this can be done before or after watching. Split viewing: In this technique the students are divided into two groups; one group watches the film sound off, the other only hears it but does not watch it. After that, various information gap activities can be done; for example, members from each group can come together describe each other what they have watched or heard, or students can ask questions to each other to predict the missing part, etc. Jumbled sequence: Teachers can divide the film into parts and show it to students in mixed order. In groups students can discuss to find the right sequence.

USING SONGS IN THE CLASSROOM Teachers should use songs in the classroom for a couple of reasons because songs:        

are easy to remember, encourage listening, provide variety and fun, motivate students, can be used to teach culture, can relax a tense atmosphere, encourage creativity, include real language,

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stimulate discussion, present vocabulary in context, practice grammar items and are up-to-date, etc.

Activities with Songs 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Giving pictures related to the events in the song and asking students to put them into order, Giving the lyrics with blanks and asking students to listen and find the missing words, Giving the lyrics with some incorrect words, and asking students to listen and correct the mistakes, Giving the lyrics with some additional words, and asking the students to listen and cross out the extra words, Asking students to discuss the events in the song, Asking the students to act out the story in the song, Using the song to practice grammar items, asking students to explain their meanings, etc., Giving some definitions / synonyms / antonyms of the words, and asking students to listen and find the related words, Asking the students to compare their feelings with the singer‘s and discuss in groups, etc.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have stressed the importance of listening comprehension, the sub-skills of listening that teachers need to develop, theoretical and practical sides of listening comprehension, various activities to be used at different stages of a listening lesson and also a ready-made lesson plan which can be used in the classroom without any preparation. We have also stressed the importance of using songs and films to practice listening and provided the readers with tried and tested fun activities. One last word from the author could be to stress the importance of integrating skills. As the reader can easily realise that in the activities mentioned in this chapter, we have used other skills; namely, reading, writing and speaking, just as we do in real life. We always use them in an integrated way.

A SAMPLE LESSON PLAN Pre-Listening Activity 1. Pre-teach some vocabulary items. Ask one student to draw a picture of a rose and a spirit on the board.

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Explain the meaning of thorn (show it on the picture of the rose) Explain the difference between spirit and ghost. (Spirit is more abstract, ghosts can be good or bad, seen or heard, like father‘s ghost) Write the two words on the board: ‗trod – tread – trodden: stand on (you can act it out as well) and dismal: an unhappy, dark, miserable place‘. Activity 2. Ask the students: ―Have you ever read / heard a story of a spirit / a ghost? Seen a film?, etc. Can you tell your fiend near you?‖ (Students talk to each other in pairs, for 10 minutes). Later, get feedback.

While / In-listening Activity 3. Tell the students: ―You are going to listen to an African folk tale. While you are listening, fill in the table‖: Where?

From whom?

Took what?

Tell the students how many times they are going to hear the story. Read the story, students do the task.

The Text to Be Read African Folk Tale A spirit went to his father and said: ‗Father, I want to be alive.‘ ‗That is complicated,‘ his father told him. ‗To be alive you must first think, next you must remember, then you must feel, then smell, after that you must see, next hear and finally when you can do all these things you‘ll be alive.‘ ‗How can I do this?‘ the spirit asked. ‗Go and walk in the world,‘ said the father, ‗and get what you can where you can.‘ The spirit followed a path through the forest of the world and met a young man. The man sat under a tree and frowned. ‗Man,‘ said the spirit, ‗please help me, I want to think.‘ ‗To think you need a mind,‘ said the man. ‗Can I have your mind?‘, asked the spirit. ‗Certainly,‘ said the man and after he gave away his mind he looked happy and young. ‗Oh Father, help me,‘ the spirit suddenly cried in fear. ‗Walk on through the world,‘ his father said, ‗he who thinks also fears.‘ The spirit came to a village and found an old man. ‗Man,‘ said the spirit, ‗please help me, I want to remember.‘ ‗To remember you need a memory,‘ said the man. ‗Can I have yours?‘ asked the spirit. ‗Certainly,‘ said the man and after he gave away his memory he looked happy.

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The spirit looked at the path ahead but could not remember which way to go. ‗Oh father, help me,‘ he cried. ‗Walk on through the world,‘ his father said, ‗he who remembers also forgets.‘ The spirit came to a thorn tree and found a boy crying there. ‗Man,‘ said the spirit,‘ please help me, I want to feel.‘ ‗To feel you need feelings,‘ said the boy. ‗Can I have yours?‘ asked the spirit. ‗Certainly,‘ said the young man and after he gave away his feelings he looked happy. Then the spirit trod on a thorn. ‗Ah,‘ he cried, ‗Father help me.‘ ‗Walk on through the world,‘ his father said, ‗he who feels also feels pain.‘ The spirit came to a dead animal and found a child sitting there holding his nose. ‗Boy,‘ said the spirit,‘ please help me, I want to smell things.‘ ‗To smell you need a nose,‘ said the boy. ‗Can I have yours?‘ asked the spirit. ‗Certainly,‘ said the boy and took his hand away from his face. The spirit smelt the dead animal and felt ill. ‗Oh father, help me,‘ he cried. ‗Walk on through the world,‘ his father said, ‗he who smells also smells bad things.‘ Te spirit came to a dismal place without trees or flowers. He found a man there covering his eyes. Man,‘ said the spirit, ‗please help me, I want to see.‘ ‗To see you need eyes,‘ said the man. ‗Can I have yours?‘ asked the spirit. ‗Certainly,‘ said the man and smiled. ‗Oh father, help me,‘ cried the spirit. ‗this is a terrible world.‘ ‗Walk on through it,‘ his father said, ‗he who sees also sees bad things.‘ The spirit came to a house where someone cried. He saw a man there blocking his ears. Man,‘ said the spirit, ‗please help me, I want to hear.‘ ‗To hear you need ears,‘ said the man. ‗Can I have yours?‘ asked the spirit. ‗Certainly,‘ said the man and smiled. ‗Oh father, help me,‘ cried the spirit when he heard a cry ‗what is this sad sound?‘ ‗Walk on through it,‘ his father said, ‗he who hears also hears bad things.‘ (Students compare answers. Later, check the answers with the whole class)

Post-Listening Activity 4: Ask the students to complete the story. Write a paragraph to end it. After the students finish writing their paragraphs, read the last part of the story. ‗Then the spirit saw the most beautiful woman and loved her instantly. ‗Beautiful woman, help me,‘ he said, ‗I can think, I can remember, I can feel and I can smell, I can hear, and even see you but still I‘m not alive.‘ ‗To live you need life,‘ said the beautiful woman.

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‗Can I have yours?‘ asked the spirit. ‗Certainly, because I love you,‘ said the woman and instantly died. ‗Oh father, help me,‘ cried the man in terrible sorrow when he saw his love was dead. ‗Walk on through the world,‘ his father said, ‗they that live also die.‘ Homework: Give students a list of activities to choose from:  draw pictures about the story, or  write lyrics / a poem telling the story, or  make a list of things the spirit takes from whom, or  be ready to tell the summary of the story in the next lesson.

FURTHER READING For more information on live listening, video and film, see Harmer, J. (2007). The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th Ed.) Essex: Pearson Longman. For more activities, see Thaine, C. (2012). Teacher Training Essentials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Tanner, R. and Green, C. (1998). Tasks for Teacher Education. Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.

REFERENCES Celce-Murcia, M. (Ed.) (2001). Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (3rd Ed.). Heinle and Heinle. Doff, A. (1990). Teach English (4th Ed.) Glasgow: Cambridge University Press. Harmer, J. (2007). The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th Ed.) Essex: Pearson Longman. Harmer, J. (2012). Essential Teacher Knowledge. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Kaplan, R. B. (Ed.). (2002). The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. Lam, Y. K. W. (2002). Raising students‘ awareness of the features of real-world listening input, In: Richards and Renandya (Eds.). Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nunan, D. (2002). Listening in language learning, In: Richards and Renandya (Eds.). Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rankin, P. T. (1928). The importance of listening ability. The English Journal, 17, 8, 623630. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/803100 on 10.06.2014. Rivers, W. (1981). Teaching Foreign Language Skills (2nd Ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shelby, M. (no date). The Importance of listening comprehension in English. Retrieved from http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2013/08/the-importance-of-listening.html on June, 10, 2014. Stempleski, S. and Tomalin, B. (2001). Film. Oxford University Press.

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Ur, P. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press. Wilt, M. E. (1950). A Study of teacher awareness of listening as a factor in elementary education. Journal of Educational Research, 43, 8, 626-636.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 6

INTELLIGIBILITY IN PRONUNCIATION TEACHING: A STUDY OF ACCENTED SPEECH OF TURKISH SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH İrfan Kuran Kocaeli University, Faculty of Education, ELT Department, Izmit/Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1 2 3 4

list prevalent segmental problems in Turkish learners‘ L2 English speech. have a repertoire of activities to help their future learners cope with certain segmental problems in their oral production of English. become aware of the significance of intelligibility in L2 speech instead of insistence on the pursuit of a native-like attainment. provide their learners with examples of L2 English speech similar to that of their own jto increase their motivation in speech.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. What is your attitude to accented speech? Have you ever considered the common pronunciation mistakes your learners make? 2. Do you think that native-like speech is indispensable from foreign language learning/teaching? 3. Have you ever considered intelligibility as an important aspect of oral communication? 3. What were (might be) some problems that you may encounter while teaching pronunciation? 4. What sort of phonological problems do you think are most difficult to handle? 5. What do you do about the recursive mistakes in your learners‘ pronunciation? 6. How do you feel when/if your own pronunciation mistakes are noticed by your interlocutors?

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INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the segmental and supra-segmental problems in a short excerpt from video recordings of accented speech and argues that it does not necessarily cause intelligibility problems and can be used as a model for ESL learners with the same L1. The informants used in this study are, Galip Abacı and Aylin Dolu, pseudonyms for two senior students at the English Language Teaching Program at Kocaeli University, Faculty of Education. The two informants were videotaped during thirty minute interviews at the faculty of Education while answering questions about their opinions about Turkey‘s foreign policy. My reason for studying accented but intelligible speech samples is that I find it interesting not only because it is a reality but also a very viable option for the majority of EFL/ESL speakers worldwide who are not likely to attain native-like L2 speech no matter how hard they try. As Murphy (2013:5) suggests ―accented speakers may serve as more realistic models of L2 pronunciation achievement and, in many cases, of societal accomplishment as well.‖ Furthermore, ―the speaking proficiency of an AIC (accented, intelligible, and comprehensible) speaker of English represents a sufficient and attainable level to which pronunciation teachers can feel confident in encouraging learners to aspire‖ (ibid.). The idea of intelligibility has become central to the teaching of pronunciation… the idea was slow to feed through to practice, but in the 1970s many English teachers worldwide came to realize that it was unrealistic, time-consuming and potentially inhibitory to aim for a native like accent (Field, 2005:400). This led to the abandonment of traditional checklist approaches to pronunciation instruction and intelligibility was adopted as a criterion. (ibid.). As a Turkish L1 speaker myself, I think that there is great potential in focusing on speakers like the two senior ELT majors at a Turkish university in that they are very likely to be perceived as intelligible hence successful EFL speakers by a possible target audience of this work, my first year undergraduate students at the EFL Education program of Kocaeli University in Turkey.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The instructional component of my project is designed for the first year students at the undergraduate program of the Foreign Language Education Department of The School of Education at Kocaeli University in Turkey. The students attend a two semester advanced Listening and pronunciation course including instruction and practice on both learning and teaching listening comprehension and the sound system of English. The majority of the students have Turkish as their native language with up to 5 foreign exchange students from mainly the Turkic republics in central Asia and other regions such as Japan, Poland, Nigeria, Kosovo and Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. They aim to become English teachers at K12 level. EFL instruction in Turkey begins at grade 4 in primary level of an 8 year compulsory education system. Most of them want to be employed at government schools where the focus is on the communicative aspects of language learning according to the official syllabus designed by the ministry of education. But due to lack of quality supervision and quite a safe job security environment most teachers ignore the communicative aspects of

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language teaching and adopt a grammar based approach in their instruction. Other graduates of the program get jobs with private language schools and university foundation courses, which are one year preparatory programs organized by the foreign Language schools of each university with a small minority moving onto higher academic programs for research purposes. The four year program itself is essentially a teacher training one with strong emphasis on educational science courses instructed in L1 while every other course has English as the medium of instruction. The final year has a strong focus on the teaching practicum during which senior students do an observation based course in the fall semester and a practicum course in the spring term which is supervised by one of the faculty member and a coordinating teacher at the school where the practicum takes place. Students enrolled in the program have to take a proficiency exam testing listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar, which is devised and administered by the Foreign Language Education department and those who fail the test have to do the one year preparatory foundation course instructed by the same department staff. Due to the lack of communicative focus on language teaching at primary, middle and secondary schools most students lack speaking skills and do not have a satisfactory conduct of the sound system of English. They are generally good at other aspects of language. Students do not have much of a chance of practicing their English with native speakers, for which reason the faculty usually recruits native speaking English teachers to teach courses at preparatory and undergraduate levels. The program has one full time and one visiting American instructor at the moment. There are official restrictions limiting the number of foreign employees to a certain percentage.

THE PRONUNCIATION ISSUES TO BE ADDRESSED For this chapter I have analyzed the interviews with Galip Abacı and Aylin Dolu. My reason for focusing on the two speakers is that their English is heavily accented and the phonological problems they display are highly representative of that of the English speech of a typical Turkish L1 speaker. In spite of the phonological problems their speech contains, both speakers are fairly fluent and intelligible. Neither interviewer seem to be having difficulty understanding them and it would not be wrong to say that they do not create comprehensibility-related problems for their interlocutors. I believe that the accented but intelligible quality of these speakers‘ English is likely to appeal to my undergraduate students, the target audience of the instructional extension of this study, in that they will find a lot of commonality between them and their own L2 speech. This aspect is worthy of consideration as it can be quite hard at times to encourage L2 learners with accentual problems to keep trying to perform speech in the target language when they when they find it hard to this without risking loss of a certain degree of self confidence. Exposure to the accented intelligible speech samples of these prominent speakers will hopefully provide them with the encouragement they need for L2 production.

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Both speakers display good communicative skills. They are quite fluent and maintain smooth conversation. They are both good at thought grouping, perhaps their biggest strength that compensates for the weaknesses in articulating certain sounds. Their speech contains occasional inaccuracy in word stress patterns but it does not prevent the general quality of their performance.

THE ANALYSIS OF THE DATA AND THE PRIORITIZATION OF THE PRONUNCIATION ISSUES It is possible to analyze the data at hand from a segmental and supra-segmental perspective but for the sake of clarity and practicality I am going to address the segmental elements in the speakers‘ spoken conduct. Figure 1.1. features the problem areas in both speakers‘ performance based on my analysis of the complete interviews. The words appearing on the chart are not the only problematic ones in the speech samples of my two informants and I have chosen them as they represent frequent articulation difficulties in relation to certain vowels and consonants. There are other occasional examples of outstanding pronunciation problems such as the pronunciation of the word ―change‖ as /……………./ and ―urban‖ as /……………../ by and but due to their low frequency I thought I would exclude them from this chapter. What follows is the list of prevalent segmental problems in both speech samples and the justification of my selection. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Devoicing of the alveolar sibilant. Devoicing of stops in word final position. Tendency toward changing the quality of tense and lax vowels. Articulation of the voiced, bilabial, semi-vowel. Articulation of the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives. Absence of the mid-central, lax vowel in certain words. Articulation of the voiced, labio-dental, fricative.

1. Devoicing of the alveolar sibilant: Turkish normally has this sound in word final position still it is one of the most common articulation problem for most students. The problem is there is a great tendency toward devoicing the same sound in the same position in Turkish, hence the transfer into L2 use. 2. Devoicing of stops in word final position: This is another common problem for Turkish speakers of English as Turkish does not allow voiced stops in word final positions apart from the borrowed words, which are also devoiced when they become a part of the Turkish lexicon. e.g. ―kart‖ for ―card‖, ―bar kot‖ for ―bar code‖ and ―Arap‖ for ―Arab‖. 3. Tendency toward changing the quality of tense and lax vowels: This prevalent deficiency in Turkish L1 English speech results from the fact that Turkish does not have tense vowels and the same sound is produced with the presence of post vocalic (g) which is silent and lengthens the vowel it follows. The reverse case, where a lax vowel gains a tense quality can only be explained with the overgeneralization of the rule that multisyllabic words in English have a prominent syllable

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and its prominence is usually highlighted by Turkish speakers through increasing its length rather than making it stronger or louder. Galip Abacı

Aylin Dolu atrocities-shelling(s)- cities civilians-massacres-towns institutions-processes involvescolleagues-affairs Syriansrebels-generals cities-newsareas-meetings declares Changed-world-arrived bloodshed-reforms-Arab league-road(map)-supported need-concerned-road-huge collective-stage

Devoicing of the alveolar sibilant

means- standards-others countries-ties-something friends-neighbors-wills

Devoicing of stops in word final position.

and-of- negotiating-doing making-solve-good-negative

Tendency toward changing the quality of tense and lax vowels

meaningful-criteria- unique position-pillar(s)-region interesting-agenda-position policies

regime- Armenian-three decision-Syrian-transition regional

ownership –will-well powerful

Own-law

This-that-there-then-this

truth-other

Absence of mid-central, lax vowel in certain words

capacity-agenda-adopting standards-problem-America domestic-them-referendum majority-amendments-super determined-focus-Balkans terror-energy-cooperation atomic-diplomacy-embassy professors-attacked-modern

Successful-international approaching-aggression agreedmoment-accept terroristcollective commitment-actorsobserve potential-cooperation

Articulation of the voiced, labio-dental, fricative

Very-level-have – positive values-value

collective-of-five-have-level violating-heavy-prevent observer-intervene-every

Articulation of the voiced, bilabial, semi-vowel Articulation of the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives

Figure 1.1.

4. Articulation of the voiced, bilabial, semi-vowel: Most Turkish speakers exaggerate the articulation of this sound thinking that they must do this as the orthographic representation of this sound as a letter does not exist in the Turkish alphabet while the sound does exist in the language represented by the letter (v). 5. Articulation of the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives: These sounds simply do not exist in Turkish, hence the difficulty. 6. Absence of mid, central, lax vowel in certain words: This sound exists in Turkish but it is represented by the Turkish character (ı) and it is not necessarily used in weak syllables only. Therefore Turkish speakers have difficulty articulating this sound in weak syllables with various orthographic representations. 7. Articulation of the voiced, labio-dental, fricative: The main reason for the difficulty caused by this sound is that it does not exist in Turkish and the orthographic symbol (v) has

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the sound of the voiced, bilabial, semi-vowel, which confuses students and hence the problem.

AN INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN FOR ENHANCING THE SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE TARGET POPULATION The teaching context is a two semester advanced listening and pronunciation class at the undergraduate TEFL program of a Turkish university where the majority of the students speak Turkish as their native language with a small minority of multi-language background. The learners are prospective English teachers who need to improve their written and spoken conduct of English along with pedagogic make-up. The class of 50 students meets once a week for three 50 minute slots. The course also has a listening comprehension focus and provides learners with opportunities to improve their oral communication skills. The medium of instruction is English and the instructor communicates with the students in English outside of classes, too.

Lesson I Activity 1 Proverbs are short sayings that teach lessons. As general truths, proverbs are often expressed in the present tense. Underline the nouns and verbs ending in - s. Say the proverbs with the teacher or speaker on audio. Or take turns saying the proverbs with a partner. Proverbs 1. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. 2. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. 3. The early bird catches the worm 4. No news is good news. 5. Haste makes waste. 6. It takes a village. 7. Time flies when you are having fun. 8. Actions speak louder than words Grant, L., 2010.

Meaning a) It is better to show than to tell. b) Time passes quickly when you are enjoying yourself. c) Many projects require a community d) A lack of something increases your desire for it. e) make the best of what you are given in life. f) Success comes to those who put in effort. g) Bad news travels faster than good news h) If we do things quickly, we make mistakes.

This activity is ideal in that it allows for comparing and contrasting proverbs with likely equivalents in many languages. The recording helps learners hear the correct pronunciation of the – s ending, which is consolidated with the strength of the content of the proverbs. Every time the learners think of the proverb they will remember and reproduce it with accuracy in wording and pronunciation.

Activity 2 With a partner, take turns saying the sentences. Link the – ed endings to the next word.

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That was already pointed out. Carlos majored in economics. I need something called a USB drive for my computer. You‘d better get that checked out. The teacher doesn‘t expect that to be handed in. They used to be apartments. Now they‘re condos. He already filled out the form and turned it in. I went back and looked at my notes. Harry Potter turned out to be a great movie. Which countries refused to sign the treaty?

Grant, L., 2010. Note: two sentences have – ed endings that get lost.

This activity has great potential for Turkish students, who find it hard to voice the stops in word final positions. Here their awareness is raised by the help of the linking job they have to perform. While they are connecting the two sounds they have to recognize the difference between the voiced and voiceless alternatives, which is likely to increase their accuracy. A bonus of this activity is its potential to help them develop the skill of putting the utterances into thought groups subconsciously.

Activity 3 Scrambled mini dialogues for practice with /θ/ and /ð/ With your partner produce mini dialogues choosing one suitable response from column B to the utterances of your partner A from column B. pay close attention to the sound of the combination of letters (th). This activity, although basically designed for developing accuracy in the articulation of the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds, has a strong communicative value. Students not only have to be aware of the existence of the sounds in question but also listen to each other carefully to respond to the prompts in a meaningful way. Partner A 1. Let‘s ask Thelma to join us on me! Thursday for your birthday. 2. Thad and I are through! I‘ve thoroughly lost my faith in our 3. Is your new boyfriend wealthy? 4. I think Beth is too thin, don‘t you? 5. This hotel room is filthy! Everything is covered with dust. 6. They say the weather forecast is for continued temperatures in the high 30s! 7. This bath gel is very soothing. Celce-Murcia, 2011.

Partner B a. This heat spell will be the death of me! I can barely breathe! b. I agree. It‘s a health hazard. Let‘s both go throw a fit and demand another room! c. Yes, I always use it when I bathe. It has such a nice lather. d. Have you thought about couples therapy? Maybe you can both work through your differences with a good therapist. e. Let‘s ask Ruth instead. I loathe Thelma! f. Yes, he has a house worth about three hundred thousand dollars! g. She is a lot thinner than she was before. But she looks healthy to me!

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Lesson II Activity 1 This next activity is an enjoyable one devised by Bowen (1972) to practice final consonant distinctions. It is based on pairs of index cards with drawings representing minimal –pair contrasts. On the front of the card is a minimal-pair sentence; on the back is a visual that cues the minimal pair. Front Back 1.a. He looked at her eyes (image of eyes) 1.b. He looked at her ice. (image of a glass full of ice) Front Back 2.a. They ‗re beginning to leave. (image of people walking to the exit) 2.b. They ‗re beginning to leaf. (image of two trees losing their leaves) Front Back 3.a. He‘s gone to get a cab. (image of a man hailing a cab) 3.b. He‘s gone to get a cap. (image of a man hailing a cab) Adapted from Bowen, J. D., 1972, in Celce-Murcia, 2010.

This activity is best implemented with on student making the utterance and his/her partner producing the gesture of holding an imaginary glass of ice or one student producing the gesture and the other one making the utterance for the gesture performed. Consequently this activity will likely encourage body movement, which is good for kinesthetic learners and may help overcome the challenge of focusing on the vowel length by involving them in the heat of a game-like activity.

Activity II A listening activity for sound discrimination: Listen to the paragraph. Fill in the blanks with words that have the /v/ sound. Check the answer key. VALENTINE‘S DAY All __________________the world, it is popular to _________________cards, flowers, gifts, and other tokens of ___________________on February 14, St. Valentine‘s day. There are ________________explanations for the origin of this holiday, the most believable is that St. Valentine‘s Day is a _________________ of February 15th Roman__________________. During this festival, bachelors picked names of women to _________________who their ―valentines‖ would be for the coming year. The couples then exchanged gifts and sometimes even became engaged. Adapted from Grant, L., 2010:181.

This guided activity focuses students‘ attention to a particular problem sound that does not exist in Turkish. It also provides them with some cultural input about the target language, which students can compare and contrast to those of their own. It is contextualized and not mechanical and this is another strength of the activity.

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Activity III A listening activity for sound discrimination: Which word in each pair has the /v/ sound, the first or the second? Close your book and write one or on a piece of chapter. a. very wary b. very where he c. west vets d. veil whale e. wheel veal f. verse verse g. evoke awoke Adapted from Grant, L., 2010:180.

h. vow i. vie j. boats k. ban l. vary m. have it

wow why votes van berry habit

Lesson III Activity I A listening activity for sound discrimination: Listen to the teacher or the speaker on audio say each word twice. Each time you hear /ə/, put a line through the vowel. Examples: MET- Ød DI – Ø - logue 1. spe - CI – fic 2. de – VE – lop 3. an – NOUNCE – ment 4. con – CLU – sion 5. pro – FES – sion – al 6. OR – gan Adapted from Grant, 2010:71.

7. OR – e – gon 8. EX – cel - lent 9. DE – mon - strate 10. PRE – si – dent 11. CA – len – dar 12. SPE – ci – fy

This activity is supposed to help students gain the ability to spot the use of the /ə/ sound in weak syllables of multisyllabic words. As it is a very common problem for them to articulate this sound this controlled activity would be beneficial for the Turkish learners to spot the sound as they will hardly miss it and hopefully develop awareness toward articulating it accurately in weak syllables. The clarity of this task is the strength of this activity and it will likely increase their sound recognition and production skills.As Levis and Grant (2003) argue, incorporating work on word clarity includes two major elements; students‘ choices and the teacher‘s feedback, both being quite functional in this activity.

Activity II A Communicative activity: Pair Work Use the following sentences to create a dialogue with your partner. You should listen carefully to the word the salesman chooses of the minimal pairs provided.

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When you hear a devoiced /f/, respond by choosing the word that starts with a devoiced /f/. When you hear the voiced /v/, respond by choosing the voiced /v/. You can check your work by listening for context. Example: Salesman: Welcome. I have a FEW / view things I would like to show you! Buyer: That‘s vine / FINE. I would like to get started. Salesman: What kind of ___________would you like to buy? There are a vast/ fast number of options to choose from. Buyer: I am not very / ferry good at making decisions. Salesman: If you choose today, I‘ll take one thousand dollars of / off the price. Buyer: How fast / vast does it go on the highway? Can we take it for a test drive? Salesman: If you don‘t belief / believe me, we can take it on the highway. Buyer: I will be relieved / relief. Salesman: You have / half my word. Buyer: Great! Then I choose the red fan / van. (Or match to this pair, according to voicing.) Great! Then / thin it‘s a deal! What is the customer trying to buy? Circle the correct answer. FAN / VAN Adapted from Gilbert, 2012.

This activity is quite strong in terms of its communicative, meaningful and challenging nature. The challenge does not lie in the difficulty of the task but the requirement that the students focus on the voicing of the consonants, which is usually a big problem for Turkish students.Therefore, this activity promises focus on the voicing issue while the students enjoy the conversation between the salesman and the buyer.

CONCLUSION The activities listed above are all designed for Turkish speakers‘ general segmental problems of spoken production in English. They are based on the analysis of the data gathered from two videotaped interviews with senior ELT majors in a Turkish University hoping that they will provide good models for students having similar accented speech production. As the data mostly presented segmental elements as problematic, this chapter had its focus on the design of activities to deal with those specific problems, which does not mean that supra-segmental aspects of the English sound system do not cause Turkish speakers any problems. It has just not been made a focus of this chapter but I strongly believe that the analysis of similar data highlighting those problems must be studied in the confinement of other studies preferably integrating both segmental and supra-segmental aspects of speech, which are inseparable from one another for the sake of intelligible and comprehensible speech.

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FURTHER READING More information about teaching pronunciation can be reached from the following resources. Jenkins, J. (2005). Implementing an international approach to English pronunciation: The role of teacher attitudes and identity. TESOL Quarterly, 39, 535-543. Levis, J. (2005). Changing contexts and shifting paradigms in pronunciation teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 39, 369-377. Munro, J. and Derwing, T. M. (1999). Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners. Language Learning (49) 285-310. Sewell, A. (2009). World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, and the case of Hong Kong English. English Today, 25 (1) 27-43.

REFERENCES Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., Goodwin, J. W., and Griner, B. (2010, 2nd edition). Teaching pronunciation: A course book and reference guide (2nd edition.) Cambridge University Press: NY. Field, J. (2005). Intelligibility and the Listener: The Role of lexical Stress. TESOL Quarterly, 39, 3-400. Gilbert, J. B. (2012). Clear speech: Pronunciation and listening comprehension in North American English (4th edition). Cambridge University Press: NY. Grant, L. (2010). Well Said: Pronunciation for Clear Communication (3rd edition.) Thomson/ Heinle and Heinle: Boston. Levis, J. and Grant, L. (2003). Integrating pronunciation into ESL/EFL classrooms. TESOL Journal, 12 (2), 13-19. Murphy, J. (under review, 2013). Pronunciation Models in ESL/EFL Teaching: Accented, Intelligible, Comprehensible Non-native Speakers of English. [in manuscript form, not for circulation].

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 7

VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION IN EFL CLASSES Ihsan Unaldi Gaziantep University, Faculty of Education, English Language Teaching Department, Gaziantep, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1 2 3

define related terms like the followings: word, vocabulary, corpus, contextualized and decontextualized learning discuss about vocabulary sizes that EFL learners need at various levels of proficiency elaborate on three different approaches to vocabulary instruction

STUDY QUESTIONS How do you think people learn the vocabulary of their native languages? How do you think people learn the vocabulary of a foreign language? Could there be only one most effective way of learning foreign language vocabulary? Is every word in a foreign language worth learning?

INTRODUCTION The shift from form-focused foreign language instruction paradigm to a lexically oriented one has been voiced for more than a couple of decades. Although lexical competence was already defined as one of the most crucial indicators of general language ability decades ago (Carter and McCarthy, 1988), some other researchers, after a couple of decades, stated that L2 lexicon is in a rediscovery period (Meara, 2002). This means that the importance of lexicon in a foreign language has always been accepted but has only been gaining attention recently. As is always the case, when a topic is considered to be worth learning, the well-known questions what to teach about the topic and how to teach it arise.

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What Is Vocabulary? When talking about words, most of the time, we take the topic so much for granted that when confronted with the question ‗What really is a word?’ there seems to be no straight comeback. From a phonetic aspect, in the natural stream of speech, there is a linguistic process called segmentation which refers to physically or auditorily identifying discrete units (Crystal, 2008: 426). In one‘s mother tongue, it is actually quite easy to draw the lines between sounds and meaningful units in an utterance, but when we stop and think about it, the concept of word should start to look like a delusion. Especially while listening to people with foreign languages, the fact that we cannot put spaces between their words might make us think that those people are speaking too fast. The spaces that we assume in-between words mostly come from the orthographic approach (the written forms of words) to language; that is, after frequent encounters with the written forms of words, we start imagining spaces that separate one word from another. When a word is considered from a semantic point of view, it is not that easy to establish a straightforward connection between a single word and a particular meaning. The semantic conventions in any language could be deemed to be arbitrary. The word elephant for example doesn‘t look like a big animal, nor does it sound or smell like one. What you call an elephant in English, is actually called tembo in Swahili, xiànɡ in Chinese and something else in another language. A word can also be analyzed from a grammatical standpoint. Its affixes (prefixes and/or suffixes) or its place in a sentence or an utterance might affect its meaning and function. In this respect, words are considered as mobile. In order to convert a statement into a question, we can simply change the position of an auxiliary verb. Not uncommonly, some words are mobile without that much changing the meaning or function. The positions of adverbs in English are more flexible when compared to other units in a sentence. For example, the following three sentences have the same meaning although the adverb sometimes has different positions in each of them.   

Sometimes, when they were bored, they would go out to a park. When they were bored, they would sometimes go out to a park. When they were bored, sometimes they would go out to a park.

To go even further, pragmatics could be used as a benchmark to examine lexical items. Pragmatics is often contrasted with semantics in that while semantics deals with words and meanings, pragmatics tries to deal with meanings in context. For example, the word ‗great‘ could mean wonderful in one context while in another it could be used in a quite sarcastic manner. As can be deduced from the above discussions, defining what a word or the concept of vocabulary is takes a multiple approach. Therefore, vocabulary can be defined as the body of words and phrases in any language which have phonologic, orthographic, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimensions.

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The English Lexicon The concept lexicon, synonymous to vocabulary, refers to all the words and idioms in any language (Richards and Schmidt, 2002). The number of lexical items in the English language has always been a topic of discussion (see Crystal, 2004 for an overview). There are claims that even the most conservative estimate of English vocabulary could not go below a million lexemes (Crystal 2004: 119). In this respect, the term lexeme actually refers to the basic form of a single word without any inflections. For example, the lexeme eat can be modified to fit into different syntactic environments and might appear as eating, ate and eats. This lexical capacity of the English language shouldn‘t come as a surprise as it is like an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French and several other languages. The point that should be considered carefully at this point is that it is virtually impossible to teach or learn even what could sound like a small proportion of the English lexicon in a limited time. This is an important issue to be resolved if, as language teaching practitioners, we want our learners to construct an expedient and functional foreign language lexicon in an appropriate amount of time.

Target Vocabulary Size in a Foreign Language With the framework that has been discussed thus far, it should be clear that the target vocabulary size of a foreign language learner should be one of the most important issues to be discussed and agreed on before beginning a language teaching program. When we consider that about more than 80 % of the words in any given text in English actually comes from the top 2000 most frequent words in English (O‘Keeffe, McCarthy, and Carter, 2007), we could suppose that 2000 words would be enough to comprehend a text written in English. However, the situation is not that straightforward. Nation (1992) suggests that in order to be able to read an unsimplified text in English for pleasure, the reader needs a vocabulary size of around 5000. As digital databases regarding the English language become greater in size, it also becomes relatively easy to deal with issues related to its vocabulary. In this respect, if an instructor wants to determine how much of a reading material at hand corresponds with the most frequent words in English, all s/he has to do is to input the material into a database like Vocabprofile and determine its lexical nature. In a very short time, the instructor will reach a statistical analysis of the material, which will equip him/her with a certain level of prediction about what might happen during the actual vocabulary teaching activities.

Receptive vs. Productive Vocabulary Receptive vocabulary refers to the amount of words that an individual can recognize and understand while listening or reading. Productive vocabulary, on the other hand, refers to the amount of words that an individual can use actively in language production, that is, while speaking or writing. One could suppose that receptive vocabulary of an individual is more than his/her productive vocabulary. When we consider how it is crucial to have explicit knowledge about the vocabulary size of an individual or a specific language learner group, its determination becomes a very serious problem to be tackled. Compared to productive vocabulary size, receptive vocabulary size is relatively easier to determine.

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With an orientation to determine English vocabulary sizes of individuals, Nation and Beglar (2007) developed a variety of vocabulary size tests. The main aim of their study was to create multiple choice tests by which language learners‘ vocabulary capacities could be determined in a relatively less complicated procedure but with more representative lexical items. Representativeness of such vocabulary size tests is potentially problematic in that the number of the words that can be tested is limited while the actual vocabulary size of the target language is extremely large. In the abovementioned study, through some statistical procedures, items with high levels of representativeness were chosen. Figure 1 displays a sample screenshot from one of these tests which was digitalized and freely available online at http://my.vocabularysize.com. In this test, individuals who are taking the test have to make choices depending on the clues given about the target word. In Figure 1, the target word is standard, and it is presented in a meaningful sentence. Test-takers are required to select from five options including I don’t know. At the end of the test, they get a score, and this score is used to make inferences about their vocabulary size by measuring their knowledge of the most basic form of a word and assuming that other forms can also be recognized. Related estimates about vocabulary size for reading and listening are also mentioned at the end of the same test as following. It is quite clear from Table 1 that an EFL learner needs between 8,000 and 9,000 word families to read or 6,000-7,000 to listen effectively. At this point it should be borne in mind that these figures do not refer to individual lexemes in English lexicon, but rather word families, which means that this total amount actually represents individual variations of the word ‗help‘ like helpful, helpless, unhelpful, helpfully and etc.

Figure 1. A screenshot from one of the vocabulary level tests developed by Nation and Beglar (2007).

Table 1. Vocabulary size needed for reading and listening

Reading Listening

Size estimate (word families) 8,000 - 9,000 6,000 – 7,000

Native speaker

20,000

Skill

Retrieved from http://my.vocabularysize.com.

Notes Nation (2006) Nation (2006) Goulden, Nation, and Read (1990) Zechmeister et al., (1995)

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Breadth and Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Vocabulary learning might erroneously be regarded as a kind of piling up process. According to this point of view, which is not that rare, a foreign language learner will learn a new word at some point, and then at another occasion s/he will learn another one, and put the newly learned one into his/her mental vocabulary list like putting coins into a piggy bank. This seemingly piling-up process is often referred to as the breadth of vocabulary. Nation (2001) divides learners‘ lexicon into two aspects as breadth and depth. Breadth is actually the number of words a learner knows. On the other hand, depth of vocabulary knowledge refers not only to word meanings, but also other parameters such as semantic relationships, collocations and syntactic patterning which is related to parts of speech of lexical items. For example, an EFL learner might be familiar with the word ‗wise‘ /wʌɪz/ at a very superficial level. S/he could be aware that this word refers to experience and knowledge. However, when the word becomes wisdom /ˈwɪzdəm/, its word class and pronunciation change significantly and a stress pattern also emerges because of the syllable added. Furthermore, the word ‗wise‘ might be used in a sarcastic manner as in ‗wise guy‘ which refers to a person who is trying to be overly and disturbingly smart. The same expression might also be used to refer to people involved in the mafia. At this point, it should be noted that the process of building even a barely passable vocabulary will take deeper understanding of connections among the words that are being learned by the individual. One last important theoretical point worth mentioning is the authenticity issue. Using authentic materials in language teaching has been a common sense among theoreticians and practitioners as well (see details in Gilmore, 2007). Authentic materials are produced in order to fulfil some social purpose in the language community. The producer of the material doesn't have a specific learner group in mind during the process of creation. Through the use of authentic materials, learner motivation can be improved by exposing them to real language and cultural aspects of the target language; moreover, such materials relate more closely to learners' needs in addition to providing the instructor with a more creative approach to teaching (Peacock, 1997). Sometimes it is discussed that it is actually not the material itself that should be authentic but what is done with it. However, one thing is sure that made-up language with no communicative purpose doesn't help the language learner in anyway.

What Does It Mean to Know a Word? When we take into consideration the definition of word mentioned before, the concept of ‗knowing a word‘ should have a clearer meaning. If one is claiming that s/he knows a certain lexical item, s/he has to be familiar with its phonological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimensions. At this point, a knowledge of orthography (how the word is represented with letters) is not a must when we consider illiterate people who can communicate with others by using the sound system of their native language. For such people, in order to understand a word, there is no need to see it in written form. In relation to this point, receptive knowledge of a word‘s sound patterns, and productive knowledge as to its intelligible pronunciation is the first and maybe the foremost aspect of vocabulary knowledge. Then, of course, a dictionary-like semantic knowledge is needed for successful communication. However, as is the case with dictionaries, there will be many alternatives for a corresponding reference about the target word.

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This will enforce a pragmatic approach to the word at hand because the context where the word is being used will help the individual to appoint an appropriate meaning to it. This kind of approach will also help the individual produce socially acceptable utterances because although knowing when to use a word is important, sometimes knowing when not to use it becomes more important. Meanwhile, the syntactic structure of the word is also a part of the process because syntactic knowledge will promote interpretations concerning the part-ofspeech of the word.

PRACTICAL TIPS Contextualized Vocabulary Learning/Teaching The assumption underpinning contextualized vocabulary instruction is the common sense that when learners put enough effort in order to make some sense out of a new word in its own context, this effort will somehow pay off and after several other encounters with the new word, it will be learned and retained. This point of view about vocabulary acquisition/learning is maybe one of the most well-established issues after decades of discussions (see Craik and Tulving, 1975; Jacoby, Craik and Begg, 1979 for the early discussions; and Nation, 2011 for a more recent one). Theoretically speaking, there seems to be nothing wrong with this insight; however, it is a common idea among EFL learners that sometimes the instructors spend too much time trying to contextualize just one word for minutes. Many studies suggest that EFL learners learn and retain vocabulary better when the target words are presented in a meaningful context and the learners actively try to deduce the meanings of these target words from this context (Nation, 1982; Nation and Coady, 1988). According to McCarthy (1990), a lexical item which is learned in a meaningful context is best assimilated and remembered. The effectiveness of learning vocabulary items in a foreign language can be discussed when these items are stored in the learner‘s long-term memory. Oxford and Scarcella (1994) mentions that while decontextualized vocabulary learning may help language learners memorize vocabulary for tests, students are likely to rapidly forget words memorized from lists. Moreover, learning in a context provides the learner with both the linguistic features of a word, such as phonetic, syntactic and semantic rules and the knowledge of how to use the word properly in a context (Lu-Fang Lin, 2010, p. 63). Even if most vocabulary is learned from context, which would involve the presentation of the word within a sentence, it cannot be concluded that it ―is the fastest or most efficient way of learning specific vocabulary" (Sternberg 1987: 94). These ideas seem to be widely accepted by language teaching practitioners. Indeed, very few language teachers would find the idea of writing down the target words on the board and teaching them without contexts attractive. The results of some related studies about the issue have suggested that in order to be able to guess a word from its context at least 95 % coverage is needed (Laufer, 1989; Liu and Nation, 1985). This means that if we want to make guesses about an unknown word by making use of its context, we need to be familiar with the majority of the words surrounding it. Say we have a paragraph made up of 100 words. We can make effective guesses up to five or six unknown words; our efficiency in comprehension of the paragraph will go down as the amount of unknown words goes up.

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Supposing that the learners are trying to deal with a reading passage where they are familiar with more than 90% of its vocabulary the following five steps suggested by Coady and Nation (1988: 104) could be taken to guess the meanings of the unfamiliar words in the text. 1 2 3

4 5

Finding the part of speech of the unknown word. Looking at the immediate context of the unknown word and simplifying this context if necessary. Looking at the wider context of the unknown word. This means looking at the relationship between the clause containing the unknown word and surrounding clauses and sentences. Guessing the meaning of the unknown word. Checking that the guess is correct.

These steps are, of course, flexible to some extent, but one point is worth mentioning. As one might guess, these steps will take some time to accomplish. Time, for language teachers in particular, is more than important. This is why, in the determination process of the target vocabulary to teach, only the ones which will worth spending time on should be foregrounded.

Decontextualized Vocabulary Learning/Teaching According to Oxford and Crookall (1990) we can talk about decontextualized learning when the word is removed from any communicative context that might be a clue for the learner to remember and that might make any sense about the actual use of the word as a part of the language. Similarly, Nation (2001: 100) explains decontextualization as the removal of a word from its message context to be focused on as a language item. Among language teachers, there has been an ongoing myth about the fallacy of trying to teach new words isolated from their contexts. This must-learn-in-context motto might be one of the most common views among practitioners. However, like many conventions this one is also widely accepted and is rarely questioned. There are studies whose results claim that decontextualization of target vocabulary could be more beneficial especially at beginning levels. (see a recent study Unaldi et al., 2013). Mnemonics, wordlists, flashcards and dictionaries etc. are some examples of decontextualized vocabulary learning/teaching techniques. In addition, words grouping, word or concept association, visual imagery, aural imagery, keyword, physical response, physical sensation, and semantic mapping could be regarded as semi-decontextualized vocabulary instruction techniques (Hague, 1987 and Carrell, 1984). When the topic of discussion is decontextualized vocabulary learning, using context-free mnemonics to teach vocabulary in a foreign language is one of the first techniques to come to minds. The reason why it is called context-free is not because mnemonics are totally free of context but because the stories or images created using mnemonics actually lack the traditional sense of context. The term mnemonic comes from Greek and means related to memory. This memory technique is useful when some rote learning is needed. The term rote learning refers to the learning process in which no connection can be created between the new input and the already available mental inventory.

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For example, when we are supposed to memorize a phone number, since connecting arbitrary numbers to what we already know will be very difficult, most of the time we will fail to remember it after sometime. This type of learning is often referred to as rote learning. In terms of foreign language vocabulary instruction, the first attempt was the mnemonic key word method developed by Atkinson (1975). In this method, sound associations lie at the core of learning foreign vocabulary. The sounds of the target word is associated with any possible word in the native language. For example, the word for young girl in Spanish is chica which sounds like the word cheek in English. Once this word association is made, mental images about the words are created. By using the English word cheek, a mental image is created for the Spanish target word chica. The image could be someone kissing a Spanish girl on the cheek. The effectiveness of this technique has been a research topic for some time now (see Cohen and Aphek, 1980 and Campos and Gonzalez, 2003). Semantic word mapping is a vocabulary teaching technique which is also common among language instructors. In order to make sense out of a target word, the teacher encourages language learners to create a network-like image for it without referring to a context (see Figure 2). In semantic mapping, contrary to word grouping, words are both put into categories and the conceptual links or paths among the words are presented (Hague, 1987 and Carrell, 1984). Semantic mapping might be suggested to improve comprehension and retention of vocabulary for language learners. Oxford and Crookall (1990) summarize Hague‘s (1987) six steps for using semantic mapping as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Write the target word on the chalkboard or transparency. Have the class members brainstorm words related to the topic. Write/list the words by categories in the form of a map. Have the students provide labels for each category (optional). Discuss the words on the semantic map. Students should be encouraged to discover how the concepts are related to each other. Revise the map after discussion, if necessary. Add new concepts to the map as the lesson progresses.

Figure 2. A sample semantic mapping for the word storm.

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Using semantic mapping vocabulary activities is claimed to have greater effects on vocabulary acquisition compared to the context clue approach or the traditional dictionarydefinition-plus-example approach (Margosein et al., 1982). In this study, it was stated that semantic mapping technique motivates the language learners to connect their prior knowledge to target words and this technique also allowed them to see the lexical relationships among words. Another way of learning/teaching vocabulary through decontextualized means is the paired-associate technique. In this technique, the learners are exposed to the target words in pairs and challenged to recall the target word depending on its pair. This technique is reported to be more useful than trying to remember target words in sample sentences (Prince, 1996). Context-based vocabulary learning is thought to be suitable at later stages of language development (Coady, 1997; Nation and Newton, 1997). It has also been stated that ―especially at the beginning levels the teaching of words lists through words association techniques has proven to be successful way to learn a large number of words in a short period and retain them over time‖ (DeCarrico, 2001: 288). Since there seems to be no exact answer to the question whether trying to deal with foreign language vocabulary in context is the most appropriate way one or not, the language instructor has to be flexible about the techniques being used in the language classes. Decontextualized vocabulary instruction will probably cause a one-dimensional learning. In other words, through these activities, the learners might fall into the trap of thinking that each word in the target language has only one equivalent in their own mother tongue. Therefore, their vocabulary learning experience will fall short of depth.

Using Corpora to Learn/Teach Vocabulary This is a separate heading because teaching vocabulary by using corpus-informed activities could be placed both under the heading of contextualized and decontextualized vocabulary learning/teaching because in corpus-informed vocabulary activities there are contexts but sometimes too many of them. At this point, it should be remembered that a corpus is a systematically collected and digitally stored database of naturally occurring spoken or written language samples. By using such databases, researchers try to turn intuitions about the nature of languages into well-supported arguments. If the related dataset is available, by going through very simple steps, one can see a list of the most/least frequent words in a language within seconds. Apart from such basic usage, deeper insights might also be gained by means of corpus queries. The internet and other digital media sources have helped researchers to store tremendous amounts of texts on computers. British National Corpus (BNC), for example, includes about 100 million words, and Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) operates on nearly 500 million words. Through the use of such enormous databases, new perspectives on lexical items, especially for the English language, have been gained. Accordingly, there has been a well-established and growing emphasis on the concept of collocation throughout years. Collocation basically refers to the fact that words in a given context do not act in isolation but rather in pairs or groups. For example, the verb agree seems to have close relationships with the words strongly and experts. In other words, it is

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very possible to see one or even two of these words together in a context where the verb agree is present. Therefore, we can say that the adverb strongly and the noun experts are collocations of this verb. To go even further, some researchers have come up with a way of defining the negative or positive atmospheres or the aura of meaning created by certain words. For example, in the English language, the word cause mostly collocates with negative events such as accidents, problems, deaths or damages. In the natural course of speaking or writing, a native speaker of English would not use the word cause with positive connotations. The vast amount of repetitions of such occurrences yielded the common idea that these are patterns rather than idiosyncrasies. One of the most common concepts that surface when the topic is corpus linguistics is concordancing. Briefly, concordancing is a collection of the occurrences of a word-form, each in its own textual environment, and in its simplest form it is an index (Sinclair, 1991: p. 32). Through concordancing lines, it becomes possible to see a target word in its natural environment. In terms of language pedagogy, Thurstun and Candlin (1998) suggest some simple steps when using concordancing lines in vocabulary instruction.    

Look – Screening for the key words to learn and the other words surrounding it Familiarize – Referring to the concordances to familiarization with the target word Practice – Trying to remember the target word without referring to the concordances Create – Trying to create a piece of writing

Through these steps, a new word might become more and more familiar to the learner. First of all, the part of speech of a word and its variations are very likely to become clear. That is, in one line the word may appear as a noun while in another the same word might function as a verb. This also provides the learner with a flexibility with lexical items, an insight which will help them to better understand the fact that a word might have several meanings and several functions in different context. The transfer of such insights about the English language into EFL classes seems to have the potential of transforming the whole concept of foreign language pedagogy. Recently, there are hardly any dictionaries or language teaching materials which don‘t somehow refer to a professional or academic corpora. However, the practical potentials of such corpora in vocabulary learning/teaching process remain yet to be seen.

SAMPLE ACTIVITIES Thematic Teaching Scenarios With an aim to make more sense out of the theories about vocabulary that have been mentioned up to this point, the following reading passage, an adaptation of a story from Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi, will be used in all of the sample vocabulary teaching activities. As was mentioned previously, the vocabulary profile of this story will provide us with insights as to the vocabulary level to which it can be taught.

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In order to do this, this passage should be rendered in the Vocabprofile database. After this simple process, the following screen shows up ready for further analysis. Xenduu and the old man Once there was a man. His name was Xenduu. He was not wise, but wanted other people to think that he was wise. He used to walk around in his town and try to show off his wisdom. One day he got on a ship to travel to another country. He wanted to show his wisdom to other people too. On the ship, he saw an old man and asked him: - Tell me old man, do you know any mathematics? The old man said: - No, I know no mathematics. Xenduu went on to ask: - How about philosophy old man? Do you know anything about philosophy? - No, I know nothing about philosophy, said the old man. Xenduu answered back: - Then old man, half of your life is in vain. As time went by, when everything was fine on the ship, suddenly a storm broke out. The ship started to shake very badly. Things weren‘t that good. The ship was in the middle of the sea, and it was very dark and raining heavily. There was no hope for help either. Everybody was praying. Xenduu came across the old man. The old man asked this time: - Son, do you know how to swim? - No, not a bit, answered Xenduu in fear. This time, the old man answered back: - Oh, I‘m so sorry, but your whole life is in vain.

Figure 3. Vocabulary profile of the story Xenduu and the old man.

In the outcome screen in Figure 3, it is obvious that about 96% of the reading passage actually involves lexical items from the first 2000 most frequent words in English. The interesting point here is the distribution of the first (K1) and the second (K2) 1000 words. Among these, eight of them (3.91%) fall into 1000-2000 range, which means that this reading passage is appropriate for learners who are slightly above or below the first 1000 most frequent words in terms of recognition.

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The database also provides us with valuable information as to which words fall into which vocabulary range through colors. According to the results, the following eight words vain, storm, raining, suddenly, swim, bit, sorry and pray fall into the second 1000 range. Therefore, it is supposed that these must be new for the learners. Of course, because of individual differences, some learners might already be familiar with these words, which implies that the initial vocabulary size tests are really important. Now that the material is analyzed and the vocabulary items to focus on is made clear, the instruction process will be demonstrated through three main scenarios: contextualized, decontextualized and corpus-informed.

The Contextualized Scenario Activity 1. Guessing the Meaning Out of Context It makes sense to consider lexical items in a text or a natural conversation as components of a bigger dynamic system. In other words, rather than at sentential level, words actually bind at higher levels. This is why, it is important to make use of reading activities such as skimming, scanning and mapping before dealing with the target vocabulary. As was mentioned previously, the reader has to be familiar with at least 95 % of the vocabulary items in a text to be able to make deductions about a word. The first step to take while trying to guess an unknown word in a context is to determine its part of speech. Is the target word a verb, noun, an adjective or an adverb? For example, in the sample story the new word break out appears to be a phrasal verb as it comes after a subject, a storm, and used with a preposition out. Since it is a verb, the subject has to be taken into account at this point. When the learners are encouraged to think about what a storm can do, the options will be quite limited, but at this point, the instructor should not spoon feed the learners quickly with the meaning and should make them struggle a bit in the process. Photos or pictures involving a storm and people panicking could be shown to the learners and they could be asked to make sense out of the following sentence: A storm broke out, and the people are in panic. At the end of such contextualized meaning guessing activities, it is crucial that the meaning, senses and the potential contexts of the target word are provided by the instructor. Activity 2. Negotiation Activities In negotiation activities, the learners discuss about the meanings and associations of the target words in small groups. No dictionaries are allowed, only the context of the word is used to make a common sense out of it. The discussion can be carried out in the learners‘ native languages at low levels, and in the target language in the higher proficiency levels. For example, in the story there is a man who thinks he is wise and he is trying to show off his wisdom to others. He is talking about mathematics and philosophy. The learners are encouraged to talk about his behaviors focusing on the word ‗wise‘. In the teacher-monitored discussions, the learners are supposed to come up with an agreement about the meaning of the word ‗wise‘. It could be claimed that telling the students its meaning would be a quicker way of teaching. This claim might make some sense in the

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short term, but if the vocabulary item which is chosen to be taught is really important, the focus should be on the long term effects of teaching. Any word with very low frequency can be made clear by the instructor without any extra activity in order to make time for words with high frequency.

Activity 3. A Box of Words This could be counted as a continuum wrap-up activity in which the learners try to remember and internalize the target words that they have covered recently and get ready for the new words. This activity could be very useful after the target words have been introduced in a meaningful and interesting context. Most of the time, a small box with some paper will be enough. The paper is cut into small pieces, and one target word will be presented with three of them: one piece for the target word, one for the context in which it was learned and another for the translation, the synonym or the antonym of the target word. Let‘s say, ten new words were introduced to the class the day before, 30 small pieces of paper will be needed. The target word will be written on one piece, its context will be written on another and its translation into the learners‘ native language will be noted on the last one. The same procedure will be carried out for all of the ten target words. At the end, the teacher will have a box full of words with their meanings and contexts as in Figure 4. The next thing to do will be to hand around the box in the classroom and let every student get one or two pieces according to the number of the students in the group. When the box is empty, the first random learner holds up her hand and reads what is written on her paper. The aim here is to encourage the learners to remember either the learning context from which the word is taken or its meaning or any related information about it. The teacher instructs the students to check their papers. The learners who have the context or the meaning written on their papers also hold up their hands and try to bring back the word, its context and meaning together. When this matching is done, the teacher can comment on the word or highlight important things to remember about it, then collects the three pieces from the students and puts them back into the box. Since vocabulary learning is a cumulative process, new words are added with each lesson. However, the teacher should take out the target words that have been covered and learned well to avoid a pile-up.

Target word vain

Translation and/or synonym or antonym without success, useless

Its context Xenduu and the old man

Figure 4. The target word ‗vain‘ along with its meaning and context.

The Decontextualized Scenario Activity 4. Semantic Mapping In this decontextualized vocabulary teaching activity, as was explained earlier, the target word is written on the board and the learners are encouraged to relate other words to it and thus create a network-like map for the target word. This map could be extended as much as possible as new concepts are added. The learners might be allowed to use bilingual dictionaries. However, some caution is needed not to lose

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focus of the target word by involving words which are relatively distant to it. For example, although the word problem is related to the target word pray, other words related to problem might lead the process off the track.

Figure 5. A sample semantic mapping for the target word PRAY.

The front side pray

The back side to talk to God

Figure 6. Two sides of a sample flashcard for the target word ‗PRAY‘.

Suppose that one of the learners tries to relate the word school with the word problem, which is not that far-fetched actually, the instructor might end up discussing school problems with the whole class. This network-like connection (Figure 5) scheme created as a sample for the target word ‗pray‘ will raise awareness among learners as to the operating principles of words. It should be made clear to the learners that it is quite unlikely for an isolated word to convey meaning or create a meaningful context. In the long run, this will encourage language learners to focus on the potential connections of a new word rather than trying to deal with it through isolation. An example of such isolation is flashcard studies. Actually, it is a quite traditional way of learning new words. On one side of the card, the target word is written, and on the other side related information such as meaning in the target or the native language, synonyms, antonyms or any kind of descriptions are put down. Sets of decks are created, and as the learners become more familiar with them after frequent and systematic expositions, the words that have been learned (or memorized) are removed from the deck. A sample flashcard is given in Figure 6. In the figure above, both the front and the backside of a single flashcard is given. This activity actually isolates the word from its context, which might look like a sort of rote learning. However, this does not mean that language instructors should avoid this activity. This kind of learning or reinforcement could prove helpful especially when used as a complementary to the main learning/teaching process. After some meaningful learning which is full of contexts and connections, flashcards might be a practical way of not letting go what have already been covered. If they so choose, the instructors should encourage learners to use decks, carry them around and try to study the

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new words and carry on this activity with new decks as new words are introduced during the lessons. Mobile flashcard applications could be a substitute for the classical paper ones as the language learners of this age are closer with digital technologies than then they are with paper.

Activity 5. Mnemonics The next sample decontextualized teaching activity is related to mnemonics. Although its effectiveness is still being discussed, some language teachers try to make use of the mnemonics while trying to teach vocabulary. In our context, one of the target words, vain, seems to be appropriate for such a use because this word sounds like Wayne, the last name of a renowned actor John Wayne (1907-1979). After instructing about the most frequent use of the word as pointless or meaningless, the learners could be provided with some background knowledge about the famous actor. With a couple of sentences or pictures, an image about the famous dead actor is created in their minds. It could be mentioned that he was a great actor and he influenced people all around the world. After this step, the following sentence is written on the board. It‘s a vain to wait for a new movie from John Wayne because he is dead. The sentence itself is may not be natural, but it sure creates a phonetic association which can be manipulated to make sense out of the word vain. Since the sentence also has emotive associations because of the word dead, it is expected to affect the retention of the target word in the long run. However, considering that lexical items have several aspect to be taken into account, this learning/teaching technique might not be as effective as it seems to be. To begin with, the seemingly phonetic association between the two words is only an assumption, as is usually the case, because the phonetic transcription of Wayne /weɪn/ begins with a rounded semi-vowel w whereas the word vain /veɪn/ begins with the consonant v. Furthermore, the collocations, connotations and the semantic prosody of the word vain might be very different from those of the surname Wayne. To top it all, it is virtually impossible to create stories or images about every word in a language. The trick with his kind of vocabulary instruction is that only the words which have potentials to create stories with are chosen to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique. Even if a story could be created for every important lexical item, after sometime the associations between the target words and the created stories or images might be forgotten which will make the learners end up with bunch of stories and images with no corresponding words. All in all, the mnemonics technique might be effective in developing the breadth of vocabulary knowledge in a foreign language, but it sure will not help learners to improve its depth.

The Corpus-Informed Scenario Activity 6. Concordancing Activity In this scenario, the learners are instructed through corpus data. After the reading activities which will help the learners to familiarize with the context and the new words in it, the learners are provided with a variety of contexts for each item through concordancers. The

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following is a screenshot from one of these concordancers showing the results for the target word ‗wise‘. The concordancing lines provided above make it possible to see the natural contexts of the target word ‗wise‘. Its neighboring words or phrases like wise decision, wise economic advice, wise response, or wise public policy all have the potential to create some sense about the target word.

Figure 7. Concordancing lines for the target word ‗wise‘.

Figure 8. A sample concordancing activity to teach vocabulary.

A quick collocation query about the same word will yield its first 10 collocations in COCA as follows: man, men, decision, guy, choice, decisions, movement, wise, choices and investment. In order to visualize what kinds of concordancing activities could be used in vocabulary teaching, the following activity can be checked as an example (Schmitt and Schmitt, 2005: 196). In the activity which is illustrated in Figure 8, the target vocabulary items to be taught are presented at the top, then the learners are asked to guess which of the collocations given below the target words are most likely to occur with them. This activity is a good demonstration of the collocational tendencies of the words, which might help language learners to improve a more sophisticated understanding of English lexicon rather than a simplistic one. In addition to this, if carried out in pairs or groups, this activity social learning might as well be promoted by way of negotiations over collocations.

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CONCLUSION In a science fiction movie, Phenomenon (1996), George Malley (John Travolta) suddenly becomes superhumanly clever after some complications in his brain. Before long, he becomes a nationwide concern. As usual, the government is involved, and his intelligence is to be tested. During this testing period, the following dialogue takes place between one of the government officials, Bob, and George Malley. Bob: All right, I'll start the questions, and I'll be timing your responses. And we'll be recording. Any questions? George: What's your first name? Bob: Uh, my first name is Bob. George: Shoot, Bob. Bob: Answer as quickly as you can. How old is a person born in 1928? George: Man or woman? Bob: Why? George: Specifics, Bob. Bob: Okay, one more time. How old is a man born in 1928? George: Still alive? Bob: lf a man is born in 1928, and he's still alive, how old is he? George: What month? Bob: lf a man was born October 3, 1928, and he's still alive, how old is he? George: What time? Bob: 10:00. P.M. George: Where? Bob: Anywhere! George: Well, let's get specific, Bob. I mean, if the guy's still alive, born in California, October 3, 1928, 10:00 p.m., he's 67 years, 9 months, 22 days, if he's born in New York, he's three hours older now, isn't he?

The relevant point to the dialogue above is that foreign language instructors generally have to deal with the following question: How should we teach or learn vocabulary? The reply should not be a statement but questions including specifics like the followings:    

Who are we teaching to? What is the purpose of learning? (to pass an exam, find more job opportunities or have fun) What is the learners‘ proficiency level? Is it a foreign or second language that we are trying to teach?

No one approach or technique will suffice in the process of teaching and learning vocabulary of a foreign language. The language practitioner will have to make use of a variety of techniques whose rationales might lie in contrasting approaches. For example, translation of a lexical item from one language to another might be deemed a teaching fallacy, or making the learners use word lists or flashcards could be dubbed old-

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fashioned and uncommunicative. However, as language teachers, our main purpose should be to do whatever is necessary to help learners survive even if sometimes the practice seems to be incompatible with the well accepted theories. As they say, sometimes old tricks are the best tricks. That‘s why, some conventions about learning and teaching in general should be taken into account. First of all, trying to make use of the learners‘ vocabulary which is already available could be a start. Determining their vocabulary size, and then extending it with new inputs through meaningful connections between the two will be an effective way. Trying to push the learners to extremes will not work most of the time. Being aware of their proficiency levels and individual capacities, the instructor should aim at teaching new vocabulary a bit beyond their reach. In addition to this, no matter how intelligent a learner is, it will still take some time for the new vocabulary items to settle in. Therefore, the instructor should always remind the learners that learning doesn‘t happen overnight. Another simple but effective way is to encourage the learners to take one step at a time; rather than trying to rush learners into uncharted waters, the instructor should create an atmosphere where the learners can see both where they have been and where they are heading to at the same time. Another convention worth mentioning is that learning vocabulary is a cyclical, ongoing and cumulative process. Exposing learners to the target vocabulary items to teach for the first time is the first step in this procedure. After a short time from the first exposition, let‘s say next day if possible, the learners should recycle these target vocabulary items. Meanwhile, they should meet some other new words. By the next session, the new words that they have been trying to learn will have formed some sort of accumulation onto which other new items are to be added through meaningful connection. Of course, in the process, authentic materials should be used as much as possible while trying to deal with new words. Last but, of course, not least, vocabulary learning should also start from ‗now and here‘, and then move on to more abstract items especially with younger learners.

A SAMPLE LESSON PLAN In order to visualize vocabulary teaching process better, the following lesson plan for preintermediate EFL learners can be used. As usual, the teaching plan is static and based on common assumptions about the supposed learners. The teaching process is based on one of the teaching scenarios which was mentioned before. Level: Pre-Intermediate Skills objectives: Contextualized vocabulary instruction through reading Target words: wise, show off, vain, suddenly, break out, pray, come across, swim, and whole Materials: Reading passage - Xenduu and the old man Stage 1 (about 10 minutes): -

Build background knowledge about the story. Discuss about the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge.

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Show some photos or pictures about sea voyages and share related ideas.

Stage 2 (about 5 minutes): -

Introduce the target words by writing them on the board. Ask the learners to pay more attention to these words during the activities. No pre-teaching of the target words is needed.

Stage 3 (about 20-25 minutes): -

The learners skim the reading passage. A class discussion about the story is carried out. The target words are highlighted. The learners are encouraged to think about the parts of speech of the target words. Syntactic relations of the target words are discussed. If the target word is a verb ‗who does it?‘, if it is an adjective ‗what does it modify?‘ etc. The learners, in pairs or small groups, try to guess the meanings of the target words one by one. No dictionaries allowed at this point. Confirm or correct the guesses of the learners, encourage them to refer to a monolingual dictionary for more information about the target words. Students read the passage for deeper comprehension. The main idea of the reading passage and comprehension questions are discussed.

Stage 4 (about 5 minutes): -

Review the target words with references to the story.

FURTHER READING Nation, I. S. P. (2005). Teaching and learning vocabulary. In: E. Hinkel (Ed.) Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum: 581-595. O‘Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. J. and Carter, R. A. (2007). From corpus to classroom: Language use and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, N. and McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (1997). Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, and Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press. Thornbury, S. (2002). How to Teach Vocabulary. London: Longman.

REFERENCES Atkinson, R. C. (1975). Mnemotechnics in second-language learning. American Psychologist, 30, 821-828.

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Carrell, R. (1984). Schema theory and ESL reading: Classroom implications and applications. Modern Language Journal, 68 (4), 332-343. Campos, A. and Gonzalez, M. A. (2003). Limitations of the mnemonic-keyword method. Journal of Educational Psychology, 130(4), 399-413. Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (1988). Vocabulary and Language Teaching. Longman: New York. Coady, J. and Nation, I. S. P. (1988). Vocabulary and reading. In: R. Carter and M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary and Language Teaching (97-110). London: Longman. Coady, J. (1997). L2 vocabulary acquisition through extensive reading. In: J. Coady and T. Huckin, (Eds.), Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition (225-37). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Cohen, A. D. and Aphek, E. (1980). Retention of second-language vocabulary over time: Investigating the role of mnemonic associations. System, 8, 221-235. Craik, F. I. M. and Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 104, 268-294. Crystal, D. (2004). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (2008). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell. DeCarrico, J. S. (2001). Vocabulary learning and teaching. In: M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as second or foreign language (285-300). Boston: Heinle and Heinle. Gilmore, A. (2007). Authentic materials and authenticity in foreign language learning. Language Teaching, 40 (2), 97-118. Goulden, R., P. Nation and J. Read. (1990). How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics, 11, 341-363. Hague, S. A. (1987). Vocabulary learning: The use of grids. English Language Teaching Journal, 37 (3), 243-246. Jacoby, L. L., Craik, F. I. M. and Begg, I. (1979). Effects of decision difficulty on recognition and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 586-600. Laufer, B. (1989). What percentage of text-lexis is essential for comprehension? In: C. Lauren and M. Nordman (Eds.) Special language: From humans thinking to thinking machines (316-323). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Liu, N. and Nation, I. S. P. (1985). Factors affecting guessing vocabulary in context. RELC Journal 16, 33-42. Lu-Fang Lin (2010). English learners‘ incidental vocabulary acquisition in the video - based CALL program. The Asian EFL Journal, 12(4), 51-66. Margosein, C. M., Pascarella, E. T. and Pflaum, S. W. (1982). The effects of instruction using semantic mapping on vocabulary and comprehension. Journal of Early Adolescence, 2 (2), 185-94. Meara, P. (2002). The discovery of vocabulary. Second Language Research, 18(4), 393-407. McCarthy, M. J. (1990). Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nation, I. S. P. (1982). Beginning to learn foreign vocabulary: a review of the research, RELC, 13, 14-36. Nation, I. S. P. and Coady, J. (1988). Vocabulary and reading. In: R. Carter and M. J. McCarthy (Eds.). Vocabulary and Language Teaching (97-110). London: Longman. Nation, P. (1992). What vocabulary size is needed to read unsimplified texts for pleasure? Reading in a foreign language. 8(2), 689-696.

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Nation, P. and Newton, J. (1997). Teaching vocabulary. In: Coady, J. and Huckin, T. (Eds.) Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition (238-254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: CUP. Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59-82. Nation, I. S. P. and Beglar, D. (2007). A vocabulary size test. The Language Teacher, 31(7), 9-13. Nation, I. S. P. (2011). Learning and Teaching Vocabulary: Collected Writings. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. O‘Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. J. and Carter, R. A. (2007). From corpus to classroom: Language use and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford, R. and Crookall, D. (1990). Vocabulary learning: A Critical Analysis of Techniques. TESL Canada Journal. 7(2), 9-30. Oxford, R. L. and Scarcella, R. C. (1994). Second language vocabulary learning among adults: State of the art in vocabulary instruction. System, 22(2), 231-43. Peacock, M. (1997). The effect of authentic materials on the motivation of EFL learners. English Language Teaching Journal, 51 (2), 144-156. Prince, P. (1996). Second language vocabulary learning: the role of context versus translation as a function of proficiency. The Modern Language Journal, 80, 478-493. Richards, J. C., Schmidt, R. (eds.) (2002). Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics. New York: Longman. Schmitt, D. and Schmitt, N. (2005). Focus on vocabulary: Mastering the academic word list. NY: Pearson. Sinclair, J. M. (1991). Corpus, concordance and collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Most vocabulary is learned in context. In: M. G. McKeown and M. E. Curtis (Eds.). The nature of vocabulary acquisition (89-105). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Thurstun, J. and Candlin, C. (1998). Concordancing and the teaching of the vocabulary of academic English. English for Specific Purposes, 17, 267-280. Unaldi, I., Bardakci, M., Akpınar, K. D., and Dolas, F. (2013). Comparison of contextualized, decontextualized and corpus-informed vocabulary instruction: A quasi-experimental study. International Journal of Literature and Language Education, 2(8), 78-95. Zechmeister, E. B., Chronis, A. M., Cull, W. L., D'Anna, C. A., and Healy, N. A. (1995). Growth of a functionally important lexicon. Journal of Reading Behavior, 27(2), 201212.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 8

TEACHING WRITING Tülin Yildirim* English Language Instructor, Kocaeli University, School of Foreign Languages, Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to 1. evaluate and select appropriate writing activities according to learners‘ characteristics. 2. provide feedback on students‘ written work in different ways. 3. select valid transparent assessment criteria for different writing activities. 4. design effective lesson plans on writing.

1. 2. 3. 4.

Study Questions Why should we teach writing? What writing activities should students do in and outside class? Should teachers correct every mistake? How should teachers assess students‘ writing?

INTRODUCTION One day an English teacher goes into the English class, and hears some students talking about writing in English. ―Do you like writing?‖ asks one of them to the others silently. Most reply anxiously and simultaneously ―Nooo!!‖ The answer is unfortunately but not surprisingly a big ―No‖ and the teacher feels a bit desperate. ―It is difficult,‖ one says. The other adds ―I simply can‘t write.‖ ―It takes time,‖ another says. One murmurs ―It‘s boring. I *

E-mail: [email protected].

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hope this new teacher knows what to do.‖ Hopefully, the new teacher knows how to overcome these problems in an EFL/ESL class. What makes writing in English somewhat difficult for learners is a matter question for teachers of English for ages. Writing is productive skill and requires thinking many aspects of language such as sentence structure, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, punctuation, layout besides the content, organization, feedback and the grade they will get. Furthermore, if time is limited while writing, then the murmurs start in the EFL/ESL class. How did you feel as learners when you were assigned to hand in a written work in your English class as a young learner? On the other hand, do teachers like teaching writing? Most teachers will probably answer this question hesitantly as they think about the workload after students have written any kind of text, then start asking ―Why should we teach writing? What writing activities should we do in class? Will we correct every mistake? How will we correct and assess them? How will we give feedback to each student?‖ The answers of all these questions have to be clear for both English teachers and EFL/ESL students. Therefore, when the right decisions are given, the right steps are followed in teaching writing to students in an EFL/ESL class, students become more motivated and encouraged to write in English and teachers are more willing to do writing tasks.

WHY SHOULD WE TEACH WRITING? Writing is one of the four main skills in language learning and one of the productive or active skills besides speaking. None of the skills can be excluded in language teaching and they can only be thought in an integrated way. In daily life or in careers every person has the need to write something. Therefore, the learners of English need to be able to communicate in writing. As teachers of English, we teach writing to students in an EFL/ESL class mainly for three reasons which include language development, literacy and writing skills. (Harmer, 2007) First of all, all writing activities directly contribute the development of language use in English for students. While writing, students practice the language itself to be able to convey the meaning they want. To decide what structure and what words to use is a hard process for learners, which creates the actual need for language use. When students really have felt the need to use the language, then learning occurs. Literacy or being literate is another requirement for EFL/ESL students and defined as the ability to read and write in a language. One aspect of literacy is handwriting which can be problematic if not eligible enough especially for learners from China, Russia, Japan where the orthography is different. The other aspect of literacy is spelling as the sounds and the letters of the words are not the same in English. Teachers should let students discover spelling rules through different activities in class. Poor handwriting and spelling can distract the reader which can lead to undesirable effects particularly if the text is formal or going to be assessed in an exam. Punctuation and capitalization are other issues in English teaching. Some languages have differences such as in giving quotations, use of commas or the capitalization of ‗I.‘ Moreover, EFL/ESL students need to know functional literacy, which is more than simply doing reading and writing in class. (Thornbury, 2010) Knowing what layout the

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writing requires is important for functional literacy. For example, emails, newspaper articles, essays have different layouts. Students should be aware of all these aspects of literacy to be able to function effectively in English context. In addition to the development of language and literacy, students need to learn writing skills such as writing formal and informal e-mails or letters, constructing well organized paragraphs. Moreover, if they are learning it for academic or business English, they want to know how to write essays or reports, integrating information from different sources and citing them. In order to improve literacy, dictation activities can help students a lot. Teachers can dictate new words, sentences or paragraphs to students and they write what is dictated. It does not take much time as long as the dictated part is short. You will see how difficult it is for lower level learners and make them realize the importance of spelling. However, you should keep in mind that full accuracy in spelling cannot be expected at all levels. Sample dictation activities are below:

Sample Activity: Dialogue Dictation The teacher dictates a dialogue from course books or relevant to their context twice. Students work with their pairs and each pair write one person‘s line. So that it is easier to catch up with the dialogue. At the end, to check the correct version, the teacher can project it on the board or give the print version if needed. Next, students can read aloud the dialogue and then they may be required to write a similar dialogue. Alternatively, the teacher can dictate it with missing words calling them ―elephant‖ like ―Can you come elephant Monday elephant 3 o‘clock?‖ and ask them to find the missing prepositions. Running dictation is another version (Harmer, 2006). The texts are on the walls in or outside the class. One pair runs to the text, read and come back to his\her pair to dictate. They should dictate in meaningful chunks. The teacher can also dictate emails requiring a different layout to improve functional literacy more. The secretary: The patient : The secretary: The patient : The secretary: The patient : The secretary: The patient : The secretary:

Hello. It‘s Mr. Clerk‘s clinic. Hello. It‘s Mike. Can I make an appointment with the doctor, please? Of course. Can you come on Monday at 3 o‘clock? I‘m sorry. I have a class at 3. Can you come on Tuesday at 4 o‘clock? Sure. That‘s OK. That‘s on Tuesday on 24 April, at 4. OK. Thanks a lot. Bye Bye.

Sample Activity: Punctuating and Completing a Joke Teacher gives a partly punctuated text and the students complete the punctuation and correct capitalization. Then, they can compare theirs with the other pairs. Next, the teacher puts the correctly punctuated version on the board, OHT or projected computer screen.

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Alternatively, the teacher can stick the text on the walls so that kinesthetic learners have the opportunity to move in the class. They come, read and go back to check them. Moreover, the last sentence of the joke is not given. Students are required to come up with an ending in groups. At the end, each group reads aloud the ending and then compared with the original one. Students can come up with more creative endings. This activity can be adapted to any kind of text, any joke or a paragraph in students‘ course books. The teacher is giving one of her pupils, Patty, a maths lesson. ―patty, if I give you two rabbits and two rabbits and another two rabbits, how many rabbits have you got?‖ the teacher asks. patty replies seven the teacher says no listen carefully if I give you two rabbits and two rabbits and another two rabbits how many rabbits have you got seven replies patty. lets try this another way says the teacher. If I give you two apples and two apples and another two apples how many apples have you got six says patty good says teacher now I give you two rabbits and two rabbits and another two rabbits, how many rabbits have you got patty replies seven the teacher is getting cross and asks how. Patty replies ... (Arnott & Haskins, 2004) (Patty replies ―Because that‘s six rabbits plus the one I‘ve already got at home!‖)

Activity: In your groups, find more activities to improve spelling and punctuation.

WHAT WRITING ACTIVITIES SHOULD LEARNERS DO? While deciding what writing activities students do, teachers should consider the aims, level and age of students. At first, the aims of learning writing should be set clearly in the ESL\EFL classroom so that the writing tasks can be chosen appropriately and authentically. In this process, teachers should discuss the aims with the students, check the national curriculum requirements, and if relevant future career requirements. Then, they should list the aims and determine what they need to write in the English context. For example, if they are learning English for their career or academic purposes, they might be required to write reports, well organized essays or explain graphs and tables. If they are learning English for general purposes, they will need to write emails, letters, text messages, notes, etc. If they are studying for an international exam which requires essay writing such as opinion, comparison, process or argumentative ones, they should be thought how to organize their ideas effectively in different essay types. If they are preparing for graduate studies which require summarizing many articles, they should be reading and summarizing articles in class. Another criterion to choose activity is the appropriateness of the activity to the levels of the students. The activities should fit to the students‘ level of proficiency. For instance, teachers should not ask students to write essays or expect them write on abstract topics at lower levels. Common European Framework (CEF) provides a good reference for determining tasks and the expectations of teachers according to the levels of the students. To illustrate, B2 learners ―Can write a review of a film, book or play.‖ (CEF, 2001) Therefore, teachers should not expect lower level students write detailed reviews. The students‘ age is another factor that determines the type of task or the content of task. For example, if they are young children, teachers cannot ask them write longer or on abstract

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topics. For younger learners, the task should be short and simple as their concentration duration is limited. Moreover, before students start writing, teachers should provide them with enough exposure to real life samples and analyze them together in class. When the activities are ―authentic, real-life like providing readership (having a specific reader in mind)‖ (Thornbury & Watkins, 2007), they directly contribute to the aims and students can link the activity to the aims better. Therefore, the aims should be clear and transparent to the students so they become more motivated. Activity: What type of writing activities have you done in your English classes so far? Complete the table below in pairs. Then discuss how you can make the activities more effective. Activity Type

Aim: Why do you write it?

Authenticity: Is it a real-life activity?

Readership: Does the writer have a specific reader/s in mind?

What level could it be used for?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Some sample activities can be seen below:

Sample Activity: Response to a Newspaper Article If one of the aims is ―to be able to respond to an essay/an opinion,‖ the teacher first brings enough samples of newspaper articles and responses. Then, the teacher gives a current newspaper article which is controversial, and asks students to write a reply to the article. Then, in a reading circle students can read each other‘s or send it to the newspaper.

Sample Activity: Writing Notes to Each Other If one of the aims is ―to be able to write notes,‖ the teacher expresses one rule: ‗NO TALKING.‘ The students are free and they can communicate by writing notes to each other in English. The teacher can provide the note cards or they can write on any piece of a paper. The teacher assures students that s/he will not read them but check if they are written in English or not from a distance. In this activity if the students know each other well, they write faster with more enthusiasm than they show in other activities. Some samples are below. Furthermore, more formal notes should be provided later.

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PROCESS AND PRODUCT WRITING While teaching writing to students, teachers can focus on the product and process of writing. The aim and the task type determine the proper approach of writing. In the product approach to writing, teachers are interested in the product only, not the process. Students write a text and teachers assess it. Teachers are not involved in the actual writing process and the feedback is given after the task, not during the process. For example, in an exam, students write essays and teachers assess only the product. Another example is students write one-sentence answers for a reading text or one-word answer for a gap-filling exercise. If there is limited time for the activity, teachers can prefer it. Moreover, students need to be trained to perform in time limits, making use of the time better as we do not always have a lot of time for writing in real life. However, in the process approach to writing, the teacher and peers are more involved during the writing process and constant feedback is given. Constructive feedback given during the actual process of writing contributes more to the language leaning than product based writing although it takes time. In the process approach to writing, the teacher is involved in the writing process and guide students during the stages of writing: pre-writing (choosing a topic, narrowing down the topic, brainstorming, writing freely, discussion), planning (outlining), writing the first draft, getting feedback (from the teacher or peers), editing and revising, rewriting which is writing the final product. This is a circular process. The process may also include research, discussion, and data gathering. It takes time and requires effort by both the teachers and the students, but the final product is something to be proud of. One example to the process writing activity is that students write essays in class and should be provided with enough guidance. It is usually not possible to write a text properly at one-time-sitting in class. Students first choose a topic or given the topic and they are allowed to think, discuss and research. Then they write the outline and first draft of the essay. Next, students can give feedback on each other‘s essays that is peer feedback about content, ambiguous parts. After the students have revised it again, they write the second draft and hand it to the teacher. The teachers comments on the essays and identifies mistakes and points to be improved. So after the students get them, the teacher can provide oral feedback, too. Finally, the students write the final draft of the essay which becomes a very effective one. Moreover, students can be asked to type them, so they become ‗computer literate‘, too, which means ―comfort and fluency in using hardware and software.‖ (Warschuer, 2002) Most can

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type well but do not know how to use word processing effectively. So asking to type helps them become computer literate.

Pre-writing

Planning

Rewriting

First draft

Getting feedback

Editing & Revising

Some teachers argue that product approach is better as it is easy and time saving for the teacher, but the issue is how much it helps learners improve writing. Teachers should focus on student learning. When teachers prefer product approach for a task that actually requires process approach, students write, teachers correct and if necessary grade them. After students get the corrected versions, what happens? They usually have a quick look at them and put them in a book or even make balls or planes with them to throw and therefore forget about them, which is quite upsetting for the teachers to see the result after they have spent a lot of time correcting them. As Brown (2006) stated that to come up with a perfect final product without the above process may cause ―writer‘s cramp‖ and feel anxious as they feel the pressure ―to write an in class essay that would be judged by the teacher, graded and returned with no chance for future revision.‖ However, when they are given another chance to improve their writing, they will come with better ones. Moreover, they will get higher marks for the improved versions of their writing tasks- final drafts- leading to more motivation to write more.

CREATIVE WRITING Creative writing includes imaginative writing activities such as writing stories, poems, plays and cartoons. Such activities give a sense of achievement to the students and ―most people feel pride in their work and want it to be read.‖ (Ur, 1996) Students are more engaged and try to produce more appropriate language than any other activities. They put their abilities and experiences into the work; therefore have more motivation to find the best language to express themselves (Harmer, 2007). Moreover, in order to provide readership, the written works can be read by other peers, included in class magazine or posted on walls. If the class or the school has a website, they can be published there to reach more audience. One problem during creative tasks can be student negative reaction stating ―difficult‖ or ―having nothing to say.‖ One solution may be starting bit by bit rather than expecting a long task. The more important one is providing enough courage to do the activity. Students should not feel their abilities are tested or the fear of assessment and failure.

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Activity: Analyze the activities below according to the Table 1. Think of different versions of the activities. Then, find more creative activities in your groups for different ages and levels of learners. 1. Story writing: The teacher gives the first sentence of the story and each student in the class write the same sentence as the beginning of the story. Then, the students respectively add one more sentence to each other‘s story. So students need to read the previous sentences and add one more. After the circle is completed, students read aloud the stories. This activity can also be done as a group work activity depending on the number of students in the class. The first sentence can be as followed: One day, the old man heard a loud noise in the garden…. OR Suddenly the little boy fell down the tree and the man saw him…. OR Yesterday at school an 13-year-old boy fell down the stairs. Fortunately…

2. Writing a dialogue between an animal and a human being: Students in pairs are asked to write a short dialogue between an animal and a human being. The dialogue can be between an ant, a chicken, a cow, a bull and a man. Places can be given to help them if needed such as the dialogue between a bull and a man during the carnival in Brazil or between an ant and a man in the park. Students can decide which animal to write about. A sample is below: The ant: Hey!! You are stepping on my food. The man: Oh, sorry! But you are everywhere. The ant: YOU are everywhere. The man: This is my way to home. The ant: Next to my home! Can you give me some food? The man: Sure. Take some bread. Your friend is climbing my shoe. The ant: Hey body. Jump down. Quick! The man: Thank you. I could have killed him.

4. Completing a cartoon: There are many websites available for making cartoons. The teacher has created a cartoon and asks students to write the dialogue in pairs. Students can also create their own cartoons, deciding on their scene and characters. Creativity makes them enthusiastic learners.

http://www.toondoo.com/Home.do?param=log&msg=1

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Activity: As a group write an acrostic poem about writing skill. Sample poems can be seen below written by a university student aged 18. Writing once Requires thinking twice. It is also hard To make a good organization In that context, Neglect things making no sense Good job, finally, it becomes.

Writing, spelling and punctuation, Reading and of course researching... In that university, Things like these made us mad! Incredible lessons, unbelievable profs No comment and no complaint, God see and help us graduate!

WRITING AND GENRE In a genre approach, students analyze the text genre before they start writing in that genre. After exposure to enough samples and analysng them, they write similar ones for the similar given tasks. To illustrate, if students are going to write formal e-mails, first the teacher provides them enough models of the e-mails so that the students really knows the format and the specific languages such as how to start or end. Then, their task relevant to their context is given and they are asked to write a formal e-mail. For example, they can e-mail to a teacher, to a chairman of a language school.

Sample Activity: Writing a Formal Email to the Teacher If one of the aims is ―to be able to write/reply to a formal e-mail,‖ the teacher can show some sample formal and informal e-mails, and make them analyze both types of e-mails. After the students have revised to write a formal e-mail, they can be asked to send a real email to the teacher requesting information about the course or the assessment. Therefore, the teacher can really see whether they can write and send a proper e-mail. Some students may not have even an e-mail address. So they become computer and Internet literate, too via this activity.

Sample Activity: Newspaper Preparing a school or local newspaper has usually been a challenging activity for students. First of all, the students can analyze different newspapers and discuss what sections there should be in their newspapers such as articles, advertisements. The news can be local or global. Each section can be prepared in pairs or groups depending on the number of students and sections. Moreover, they can decide on a name and an editor\s can edit the sections. Later, they can be displayed in class or at school so other students can read, too.

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HOW SHOULD TEACHERS GIVE FEEDBACK? Activity: In English class, the teacher assigned learners to write journals for a week. Read the following journal written by a university student aged 18 living in a dormitory and answer the questions below with your friends. 1. What is the aim of the activity? 2. How would you give feedback on it? 3. What comment would you write on it? 4. Would you correct the mistakes? If yes, which ones and how?

Teachers leave the English class with a lot of writing assignments, thinking ―How will I give feedback about them?‖ How you give feedback depends on the aim of the activity. For example, the aim for the activity above is to write about daily experiences on a journal so to be able to communicate or convey the message is important. Therefore, the teacher should not correct the language mistakes in this journal. The feelings are clear. The teacher can only respond it by adding a comment regarding her feelings. Moreover, if the aim is only to write about past experiences in A2 level, only past tense usage can be corrected. One problem with journal writing can be the writer‘s block, which means ―nothing to say.‖ In order to prevent it, learners may be given a specific topic such as writing about a memory when they felt embarrassed for B1 learners or describing an important person in their life for A2 learners. Constructive feedback should absolutely be given rather than just correcting and saying ―Rewrite please.‖ Teachers should write not only negative but also positive comments on students‘ written work. Otherwise, one can easily imagine what students feel when they see a paper full of red markings and negative comment. They would never want to write again. Students wonder the comments the teacher have made on the paper rather than the corrections and compare the comments on each other‘s papers. Another way to give feedback is mini student conferences. Teachers can get together in class if they have time or out of class and talk about the feedback. So students have a chance to ask questions to teachers. Furthermore, teachers can also talk about common mistakes and comments in class together. Common

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mistakes can be shown on the board or one student writing can be corrected and commented together without revealing the student‘s name. While correcting students‘ writing, the teachers can ask themselves ―Should I correct every mistake?‖ The answer depends on the aim of the task and the level of the students. For example, if the aim of the activity is to be able to write about one‘s daily activities in the past, the teachers should correct mistakes about the use of past tense, verb forms. A correction about the use of articles which is not the focus of the activity or use of relative clauses which has not been taught in class but students only have dared to use can be demotivating. So as Harmer (2007) states teachers should be selective when correcting, which he defines as ‗selective marking.‘ Teachers should avoid ‗overcorrection‘ which leads to the discouragement of the students, especially students at lower levels. Ur (1996) states if teachers correct mainly the language, they convey ―the implicit message that these are what matters.‖ However, some students can ask for detailed correction, then their writing can be corrected a bit more. Teachers can decide it only by observing the students well. To sum up, as Ur (1996) states teachers have the ―potential conflict between language instruction versus encouragement of learning,‖ but correction should not hinder learning. Another question is ―How should I correct mistakes?‖ Teachers can identify and write the corrected version of mistakes, can just underline mistakes or use correction symbols to show mistakes. When teachers usually hand back the written works with the corrections, low level learners can make use of it much. But what do the students usually do? Do they read it again carefully and learn the correct forms? Unfortunately, the answer is usually no. They have a quick look at it, see the number of corrections and put it away, sometimes between pages of a book to be lost or use later as drawing paper. Alternatively, when teachers just identify the mistakes by just underlining or marking with correction symbols and ask students to correct the mistakes themselves or with their peers, students care about them more. This is also a process of awareness raising of the mistakes for the students. They may not be aware that they have made a mistake. Students put great effort while trying to correct them. They look up dictionaries, search grammar books or ask for help from their peers. Moreover, if the teachers grade them after student corrections, that is final drafts, then their effort worth seeing. Teachers can correct the mistakes in different ways as seen below. In the first one, teachers correct the mistakes themselves and can be used with students at very low levels of English. In the second one, teachers show the mistakes by using correction symbols and ask students to correct them. In the third one, teachers just underline the mistakes without identifying the kind of mistake and students correct. It can be used with upper levels learners of English. saw a beautiful girl Later, a Yesterday he seed beautiful a girl in the café. After he went to talk to her. She was student. Yesterday he seed beautiful a girl in the café. After he went to talk to her. She was student. Wf

wo

ww

(art)

Yesterday he seed beautiful a girl in the café. After he went to talk to her. She was student.

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Use of correction symbols provides an opportunity to reconstruct the language. A short list can be seen below. Teachers can come up with more symbols as long as it is studied in class with the students. The teacher can bring a poor text and students can correct it using the symbols. Correction Symbol

Meaning

Student sentence

Corrected version

sp

Spelling

I love wrting.

I love writing.

cap

Capitalization

On monday we went home

On Monday we went

late.

home late. He answered it

Wf

Wrong form

He answered it careful.

wo

Word order

He bought cheap a book.

ww ˄

Wrong word

The bell stole.

The bell rang.

Missing word

I going home now.

I am going home now.

frag

Fragment

When I came here.

When I came here, I

?

Not understood

When sports I?

saw him. Student correction

p

Punctuation

He said Hello.

He said, “Hello.”

carefully. He bought a cheap book.

Peer feedback is also invaluable for the teachers for feedback giving. Learners learn from each other a lot and opportunities should be provided. Teacher shouldn‘t be the only reader and guide. Even one single sentence can be checked by their peers. After they have written a piece of work, they read each other‘s and give feedback on them such as effective points, parts that is not understood or need clarification. Students should be well informed of peer feedback. Guidelines which are prepared by the teacher according to the activity can be provided in class as photocopies or written on board. The expectations of the teacher should be clear for the students. An example of peer feedback can be done by the teacher as a demonstration by projecting a sample on the board. After they have analyzed a work together, they will be clearer about the expectations. While giving feedback, students can focus on content or both content and form, depending on the activity. However, it is usually more effective for students to focus on content because if it is not appropriate with their levels, students can correct a language mistake in a wrong way or try to correct the already correct one resulting in an another mistake. Therefore, the other students complain to the teacher about wrong corrections of grammatical forms. The social atmosphere of the class may also affect the appropriateness of peer checking. Some students can be content to find others mistakes which lead to humiliation.

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In an academic writing class, after the teacher have presented how to write an academic paragraph, how to give feedback, the use of correction symbols, students are given a sample student paragraph and asked to edit it. Peer editing checklist is also provided. It can be done as an individual or a pair activity. Afterwards, students can be asked to rewrite it. They may also write their own paragraphs, peer edit them in class, rewrite and submit them to the teacher. The teacher can provide different checklists for different activities or write some guiding questions on the board. There are three reasons why I love learning English. The first one is that you are free to choose the place you want to study. You don‟t have to sit at a table and carry heavy books with you. You can revise your vocabulary cards in a bus or listen to music repeating the lyrics lying on bed. The second reason is that it requires real communication if we want to improve our English. Finally, I love reading

a lot and my

leisure time activity improves my English. I read a lot of short stories. My brother really loves reading, too. To sum up, I love learning English.

Peer Feedback Checklist

1. Is the format appropriate? Write a comment about it. It looks good, yet you should remember to write a title and indent the first line.

2. Underline the words or sentences you would like to comment on.

“real

communication” Can you explain it more, please. I couldn‟t understand what you mean exactly.

3. Does it have a proper topic sentence? Yes. Your topic sentence. It is clear

4. How many supporting details are there? Have they been explained enough? There are 3. All start with a transition. You can explain the second reason better. Can you give examples of situations where real communication takes place?

5. Is the paragraph coherent? Your paragraph is about you, but you have written a sentence about your brother. It seems irrelevant. In addition, you used two subjects „I and You.‟ You can prefer one.

6. Is there a good conclusion sentence? You have remembered to write a conclusion sentence but I think you can make it stronger. It is very similar to your topic sentence.

7. Check the paragraph for punctuation, capitalization and spelling. I could not see any mistake about them. You are very good.

8. What do you like about this paragraph? This is a good paragraph. I could understand the content well and it is not confusing for the reader.

HOMEWORK OR IN-CLASS WRITING? Teachers of English have a lot of time limit in class and following a curriculum, and have difficulty in deciding whether writing should take place in class or outside.

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When there is time limit and a curriculum to catch up with, it is difficult so writing can be given as homework or as Thornbury (2012) defines ―out-of-class work or ‘between-class’ work.‖ He (2012) also adds ―What happens between lessons is as important – or more important – than what happens in them. Think of the classroom as a kind of ‗pit stop‘ where learners come in to be re-fuelled and change their tyres. The real action is happening outside.‖

However, when teachers let them write at home, other problems occur. They get help from different sources. How much help from whom is acceptable? Students can get help from other peers, internet and people with higher levels of English and may not call it plagiarism. Students should be informed of plagiarism beforehand. Citation rules should be taught briefly at least. Internet can facilitate plagiarism as it provides millions of texts for copying and pasting but also offers teachers chances to check for plagiarism via search engines or special plagiarism checking sortware (Warschauer, 2007). On the other hand, all writing shouldn‘t be left home. During the process of writing, teachers themselves should also be ready for students who seek help. Writing in groups, peer feedback on writing texts are examples of valuable activities. (Wharton & Race, 1999)

WHAT ARE THE ASSESSMENT CRITERIA? Assessment criteria should be decided before students write their texts and should be discussed and studied together in class so that students are aware of teachers‘ expectations from their writing. According to the criteria they can assess their own writing before submission, so the final work and the grade will not be a surprise. The teacher can focus on the content or the form, however there should be a ‗fair balance between content and the form‘ in the criteria. (Ur, 1996) The criteria depend on the aim of the task and the level of students. The aim of the task can be to practice a grammatical structure use or write an opinion essay, etc. If the writing task is one sentence answer to a comprehension question in a reading exam, the focus should be on meaning that doesn‘t require any loss of points for grammatical or spelling mistakes as long as it conveys the intended message. If the aim of the task is to test the use of a grammatical structure, the type of mistake determines the loss of points. For example, if the student wrote ―I went to the libary yesterday,‖ the student should not lose any point for misspelling ‗library.‘ Unfortunately when students get no points for a similar spelling mistake, it leads to the demotivation of the students for getting low marks very often. Similarly, if students are required to write dairies to improve writing for a long period of time, as long as the message is conveyed, no correction should be made and should not cause loss points. The level of students is the most important factor to determine teachers‘ expectations. When the teachers‘ expectations exceed the level of the students, it is inevitable for the students to get lower marks. According to the level of the students, the top bands should be decided reasonably and Common European Framework (CEF) provides descriptors for writing competences at each of its six levels and provides criteria for assessing the learners‘ abilities. The CEF distinguishes between written production and written interaction. The

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descriptors for overall written production at all levels are given below in the form of ―can do‖ statements. Written production also includes descriptors about creative writing; reports and essays. Written interaction includes correspondence, and notes, messages and forms.

C2

C1

B2

B1 A2 A1

OVERALL WRITTEN PRODUCTION Can write clear, smoothly flowing, complex texts in an appropriate and effective style and a logical structure which helps the reader to find significant points. Can write clear, well-structured texts of complex subjects, underlining the relevant salient issues, expanding and supporting points of view at some length with subsidiary points, reasons and relevant examples, and rounding off with an appropriate conclusion. Can write clear, detailed texts on a variety of subjects related to his/her field of interest, synthesizing and evaluating information and arguments from a number of sources. Can write straightforward connected texts on a range of familiar subjects within his field of interest, by linking a series of shorter discrete elements into a linear sequence. Can write a series of simple phrases and sentences linked with simple connectors like ‗and‘, ‗but‘ and ‗because‘. Can write simple isolated phrases and sentences.

(CEF, 2001 p.61) To give more examples, according to CEF (2001, p.62) independent user threshold that is B1 students ―Can write short, simple essays on topics of interest,‖ and B2 students ―Can write an essay or report which develops an argument systematically with appropriate highlighting of significant points and relevant supporting detail.‖ Therefore, one cannot expect B1 level students to write a detailed argumentative essay. Moreover, when CEF is checked for grammatical accuracy reference tables, top band for B1 level students is ―Communicates with reasonable accuracy in familiar contexts; generally good control though with noticeable mother tongue influence. Errors occur, but it is clear what he/she is trying to express.‖ (CEF, 2001 p.114) So students at B1 level should not lose points for every grammar mistake. Another example is that A2 level learner ―Uses some simple structures correctly, but still systematically makes basic mistakes – for example tends to mix up tenses and forget to mark agreement; nevertheless, it is usually clear what he/she is trying to say,‖ (CEF, 2001 p.114) which means teacher cannot expect total accuracy in writing texts. Teachers can use holistic or analytic rubrics while assessing and grading a piece of writing. Holistic rubrics give a broad band of grading and overall impression of the written work. It is usually easier for experienced teachers to use as there is a single score. However, if there are a lot of texts from different classes to be assessed by multiple assessors, to sustain a reasonable objectivity, analytic rubrics are preferred. Separate scores are given for different aspects of the written work such as content or task achievement, language (range and accuracy of language structures and vocabulary), coherence and mechanics which include format, spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Points for each band can be decided by teachers unanimously. Rubrics should be shared and discussed with students beforehand. Another option for teachers to assess writing texts is ‗automated writing evaluation software‘ and their use has increased since the digital age begun. They provide holistic or

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analytical scoring. They are used in standardized tests and classroom instruction (Warschauer, 2007) Students can keep their writings in a file called ―portfolio‖ where they keep all kinds of tasks they have done in the English class including first and final drafts. Therefore, at the end of the term they see how much they have studied and progressed. It is a proof of the work they have done. Teachers should set the aims of portfolio, plan and supervise it, and assess it in relation to valid and transparent criteria. Moreover, students can use it as ―European Language Portfolio‖ when they need to prove their language level internationally.

MORE SAMPLE ACTIVITIES Sample Activity: Preparing, Conducting and Reporting a Survey The students can prepare their own questions in a survey on a given topic or a topic they can decide. Topics can be how much students are content with their school, what activities they have every day or opinions asking about their school life. The topic can be chosen according to the level and age of the students. Alternatively three question be given as guidance to students and they add three more questions. After they have decided the questions in the survey, they conduct it either in the class or at school. They should ask at least 15 to 20 people. Later, with the teachers‘ guidance they should analyze the answers and write a short report about them. Moreover, they can make graphs related to the results so that they become computer literate. How often do you go to the school library? do you eat in the cafeteria? do you go the cinema?

always

Do you agree that students at university should pay tuition? should attend all classes? work?

I strongly agree

often

I agree

sometimes

rarely

I disagree

never

I strongly disagree

Sample Activity: Extensive Reading Project After the teacher have explained the importance of extensive reading to improve English, the teacher asks student to choose any book that they would like to enjoy reading. It is important that students choose their own books for pleasure in the given time, probably two weeks. Then the teacher may provide a time table for reading them. The students are asked to bring it to the class and read in the class time to time, complete the given writing tasks and

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display them on poster in the class. The content can be changed according to the level and age of the students. Week 1&2: Week 3&4: Week 5&6: Week 7&8: Week 9&10: Week 11&12:

Find the books. Give a short presentation about the book (the name of the book, the writer, why s\he has chosen that book, etc.) Read and write a short description about the characters. Read. Write a dialogue which is not directly in the book between two characters. Read. Write a letter to one of the characters in the book. Read. Write your own end of the book. Finish reading. Write a summary. / Write a letter to the author.

Sample Activity: Sentence Completion The teacher gives half sentences and the students complete them. After they have completed, they may compare their answers and the best answers can be read aloud in class. If I had ten brothers, … If I had four arms, … If I had 30 hours in a day, … I wish I could … I wish I was …

Sample Activity: Complementing Each Other After the students have learnt or revised personality adjectives, they are asked to write two or three complements to someone they choose in the class without stating the name of that person. They can be asked to write reasons, too. This activity also contributes to building positive atmosphere in the class. After they have written, the cards are read aloud and students try to find out for who they have been written. Samples can be seen below.

Sample Lesson Plan Students‘ age: 17

Students‘ level of English: A2

Aims of the lesson: At the end of the lesson, students will be able to write an informal e-mail, to describe cities briefly, to plan activities. Target language: E-mail opening and closing, the modal ‗can,‘ ‗There is/are‘ ESA Approx Stage Time Engage 1-2 min

Aim

Teacher Activity

To arouse interest

T shows students(ss) some photos of a country and asks which country Guess it is. Then asks ss match the photos to the cities written on the board. match (Hollywood, Washington, Florida)

Lockstep

Engage 4

To awaken background knowledge

T asks what they remember about them and can do there. T writes on B: ―In Hollywood you can see film studios.‖ Target language: Revision of ‗can, there is/are‘

Write sentences

Pairs

Study

3

To elicit the content

Read the e-mail and answer the questions. Then, check answers with their pairs.

Individual Pairs

Copy of the e-mail

Study

3

Read the e-mail and answer the questions.

pairs

Copy of the e-mail

Study

3-5

Answer voluntarily.

Pair

T explains that a student from the USA has sent an email to a friend and they are making plans for the summer holiday. T writes questions on the B. Then, T elicits answers. 1. Which cities does John want to go? 2. Why does John want to visit those cities? 3. How long is he planning to stay in each city? 4. ―l8r, C u‖ ? To elicit the T tells the other friend has sent a reply. T asks content 1. Does Tom want to go to these cities? 2. When does Tom want to go? 3. How long does he want to stay in each city? To analyze T asks some concept check questions about informal e-mail format. informal e-mail 1. How does he start the e-mail? 2. What is each paragraph about? 3. What transitions are used in the plan? 4. What grammar structure is used to talk about plans? 5. How does he end the e-mail?

Student Activity Interaction

Materials Photos Board (B)

ESA Approx Aim Teacher Activity Stage Time Activate 10-15 To write an T tells students informal e-mail. ―You are planning to go on holiday in August with one of your friends in Turkey. You want to visit different cities. Write an e-mail about which cities you would like to visit and explain the reasons.‖ While ss are writing, T is available for help around the class. Study 7-10 To give peer T asks ss to read each other‘s mail and give peer-feedback on them. feedback on T writes guiding questions on the board. A demonstration can be done informal eby the T. next, T monitors ss. mails -Did s/he start with an opening and a closing remark? To raise -Can you find the reasons to visit each city easily? awareness of -Underline the words/sentences that you do not understand. the informal mail. Activate 3-5 To revise and T instructs ss to revise and edit their own e-mails. edit the e-mail. Activate 10 Study

5

Study

3-5

Study

3

Student Activity Write individually.

Interaction Individual

Read each other‘s Pairs e-mails and writes feedback on them.

Revise & edit emails. Rewrite if required. To reply to an T instructs ss to write a reply to the other friend‘s e-mail. Write a reply to informal e-mail. the e-mail. To give peer T asks ss to read each other‘s reply and give peer-feedback on them. Read each other‘s feedback on (Peer feedback and reply should be written by different ss.) replies and writes informal efeedback on mails. them. To revise and T instructs ss to revise and edit their own e-mails. Revise &edit eedit a reply to mails. Rewrite if an e-mail. required. To reflect on T collects all e-mails for further feedback. Then, T asks ss to report Ss answer and achievements back about what they have learnt today, what they can do.(I can write a talk about their good informal e-mail. ) T can ask some ss about their holiday plan plans. mentioned in the e-mails.

Ind.

Ind. Ind Pair

Ind.

Lockstep

Materials Some paper

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From: John To: Tom Subject: Holiday Hello Tom, How are you? I hope you are fine. I am writing to you about our holiday in July. I have done some research and chosen three cities to visit in the USA. I think we should visit Hollywood, Washington and Florida. First, we can go to Hollywood. There are a lot of film studios there. I hope we can visit Universal Studios there. We can stay for two days. Then, we can go to Washington for two days. We should see the White House. Finally, we can go to Florida. There are a lot of nice beaches there. We can swim there. We can stay for three days in a cheap hotel. I hope you want to visit these cities, too. I am looking forward to your opinion about the holiday plan See you. John From: Tom To: John Subject: Re; Holiday Hi John, I am happy to hear about your holiday plan. I want to visit these cities, too. But I think we should spend three days in Hollywood and two days in Florida. In Hollywood there are a lot of activities to do. Two days will not be enough. We can go on holiday on 3rd of June after the school has closed. Is it OK for you? If so, we can buy the plane tickets. I am looking forward to your answer. Call you l8r. C u. Tom

CONCLUSION Writing is an indispensable part of language teaching. Enough time and effort should be allocated to improve learners writing skills, therefore, overall language skills. The writing activities should be meaningful, authentic, having readership and appropriate for students‘ levels. Process and product writing approaches should be applied according to the aim of the lesson. During the process of writing teacher and peer feedback is invaluable for learners and peer feedback should be encouraged. For teachers, giving feedback may seem difficult but we should always remember the benefit for the learners. We should avoid overcorrection and

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focus on selective marking. Moreover, creative writing activities bring humor to class and lead the sense of achievement and pride for the learner. About assessment, we do not have to assess every single piece of writing, however when there is need to assess, we should have valid transparent criteria that is discussed with the students. For students undergoing teacher education The European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages (EPOSTL) is a helpful document. It aims to encourage student teachers to reflect on the didactic knowledge and skills necessary to teach languages, help them to assess their competences, monitor their progress and to record their experiences of teaching during the course. (Newby, Allan, Fenner, Jones, Komorowska & Soghikyan, 2007) Below you can see the self-assessment, which contains lists of ‗can-do‘ descriptors about writing and written interaction. Read them and write your reflections in the space provided.

Writing/Written Interaction 1. I can evaluate and select meaningful activities to encourage learners to develop their creative potential. 2. I can evaluate and select a range of meaningful writing activities to help learners become aware of and use appropriate language for different text types (letters, stories, reports etc). 3. I can evaluate and select texts in a variety of text types to function as good examples for the learners‘ writing. 4. I can evaluate and select a variety of materials to stimulate writing (authentic materials, visual aids etc.). 5. I can evaluate and select activities which help learners to participate in written exchanges (emails, job applications etc.) and to initiate or respond to texts appropriately. 6. I can help learners to gather and share information for their writing tasks. 7. I can help learners to plan and structure written texts (e.g. by using mind maps, outlines etc.). 8. I can help learners to monitor, reflect on, edit and improve their own writing. 9. I can use peer-assessment and feedback to assist the writing process. 10. I can use a variety of techniques to help learners to develop awareness of the structure, coherence and cohesion of a text and produce texts accordingly. 11. I can evaluate and select a variety of techniques to make learners aware of and use spelling patterns and irregular spelling. 12. I can evaluate and select writing activities to consolidate learning (grammar, vocabulary, spelling etc.).

Your reflection

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FURTHER READING Brown, D. (2006) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (5th Edition) USA: Pearson Longman. Common European Framework Of Reference For Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (2001). Strasbourg from Http://Www.Coe.Int/T/Dg4/Linguistic/Source/ Framework_En.Pdf. Harmer, J. (2007) The Practice Of English Language Teaching (4th Ed.) Harlow: Pearson Longman. Tanner, R. & Green, C. (1998) Tasks for Teacher Education: A Reflective Approach. USA: Addison-Wesley.

REFERENCES Arnott, S. & Haskins, M. (2004) Man Walks into A Bar-The Ultimate Collection of Jokes and One Liners. UK: Ebury Press. Brown, D. (2006) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (5th Edition) USA: Pearson Longman. Common European Framework of Reference For Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (2001). Strasbourg. Retrieved from Http://Www.Coe.Int/T/Dg4/Linguistic/ Source/ Framework_ En.Pdf. Harmer, J. (2007) The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th Ed.) Harlow: Pearson Longman. Newby D., Allan R., Fenner A., Jones B, Komorowska, H & Soghikyan K. (2007) The European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages. Graz: Council of Europe. Retrieved from http://archive.ecml.at/mtp2/fte/pdf/C3_Epostl_E.pdf. Thornbury, S. & Watkins, P. (2008) The CELTA Course. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thornbury, S. (2010) An A-Z of ELT. Oxford: Macmillan. Thornbury, S. (2012) How İmportant Is Homework? Retrieved on from http://itdi.pro/blog/ 2012/03/05/how-important-is-homework-scott-thornbury. Warschauer, M. (2007). Technology And Writing. In C. Davison & J. Cummins (Eds.), The International Handbook of English Language Teaching (Pp. 907-912). Norwell: Springer. Wharton, S. & Race, P. (1999) 500 Tips for Tesol Teachers. UK: Psychology Press/RR.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 9

TEACHING READING IN EFL CLASSES Mehmet Bardakçi1 and Kadriye Dilek Akpinar2 1

Gaziantep University, Faculty of Education, English Language Teaching Department, Gaziantep, Turkey 2 Gazi University, Faculty of Education, English Language Teaching Department, Ankara, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

list the basic skills in reading. list the difficulties in reading in EFL context. list reading sub-skills. define intensive and extensive reading. differentiate between facts and opinions. recognise an argument in a written text and name its parts. evaluate an argument and analyse a text critically.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. What are the four strands of reading? 2. What part of the passage do you pay most attention to while reading? 3. What do you think are the differences between reading in native language and reading in foreign language? 4. What do you think an argument means in reading?

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INTRODUCTION Language is an important means of communication. People learn how to convey and share the meanings of things through language (Halliday, 1993). The relationship between second/foreign language acquisition and communication can be best explained by Halliday‘s language-based theory of learning principal. According to Halliday all learning is a linguistic process and consists of three interwoven language functions: learning language, learning content through language, and learning about language. As a complicated system language includes ―small elements that can be combined in an infinite number of ways in order to make larger structures‖ (Lems, Miller & Soro, 2010, p.3). The four dynamics of language are phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The phonology is the sound system of a language and a set of rules that control how they can be combined. In other words, it is the audible quality of language. Morphology is the forms of words, and the ways these forms of words are related to other words. Syntax is the rules for the formation of sentences and phrases in which words can be combined. Finally, the semantics is the study of meaning in language. It includes the meanings that emerge from all of the previous three elements: the sounds, word meanings, and word-order patterns. Phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics exist in all languages. However, a writing system, or orthography may not exist in every language. The other four universals of language (phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics) are naturally acquired by native speakers of a language. On the other hand, orthography is not naturally acquired and needs to be taught since it is related to literacy (Peregoy & Boyle, 2005, p. 164). Pinker (2007) supports this claim by stating that, ―Language is an instinct, but reading is not‖ (p. 14). In language learning there are four skills that learners need for complete communication: listening, speaking, reading, and writing (Canale & Swain, 1980). In the first or native language, people have all these skills and background knowledge that is needed to communicate. So, they are probably not aware of the complexity of the process. However, in second/foreign language acquisition the four skills represent a particular pattern. Though they are stated in the same order with first language, generally listening and reading are characterized as ―receptive,‖ and speaking and writing as ―productive‖. However, we should be cautious in drawing precise lines between them ―because they fail to capture the active meaning making that takes place during both listening and reading‖ (Lems et.al, 2010, p.5). The four skills need to be included in the Foreign Language (FL)/ Second Language (SL) curricula both for instructional planning and assessment. Thus, this chapter particularly focuses on reading skill in foreign language learning.

HOW READING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE DIFFERS FROM READING IN FL Reading is an interactive and complex process (Birch, 2007; Rumelhart, 1980). The major goal of reading is to make sense of the text rather than just to decode the words in the text (Adams, 1990; Blachowicz & Ogle, 2001; Goodman, 1970 and Wagoner, 1983). Koda (2007) supports this by stating that the aim of reading is ―to construct text meaning based on

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visually encoded information‖ (p.1) which takes place between the text and the reader‘s processing strategies and background knowledge. First or native and FL reading have different processes for the readers for Carrell and Grabe (2002), since:     

FL readers is limited in their linguistic knowledge; they do not have adequate cultural and social knowledge that takes place in the target language context; they do not have background knowledge, which makes sense of the reading material. they learn a FL for various purposes such as visiting, staying or working in the countries where the target language is spoken. they have to use both their native language and FL. (Carrell & Grabe, 2002).

Therefore, it is more challenging to read in FL than reading in first or native language (Koda, 2007), which requires a special instruction of strategies.

READING COMPREHENSION Reading comprehension refers to forming the meaning of the oral or written messages. Readers construct these messages by using ―bottom-up‖ and ―top-down‖ approaches (Stanovich, 1980). Bottom-up approach is a mastery of a set of word-level skills such as letters, sounds, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Meaning construction process begins with smaller parts of the texts, which results not getting the whole meaning yet it allows the reader to be able to decode connected text. Different than bottom-up approach, top-down approach refers to the analytical and cognitive skills that are needed for comprehension. Readers focus on the whole text passage (global meaning) by making connection with prior knowledge, rather than just relying on words to comprehend the text. Lems, Miller & Soro (2010, p.230) summarizes the two approaches by stating that ―bottom-up skills refer to the word-level skills that are required for decoding and top-down skills refer to the analytical and cognitive skills that are needed for comprehension‖. They add that both skills interact and overlap for ―making many rapid judgments about words and keeping the words in working memory as we form reasonable interpretations about possible meanings‖ (Lems et.al, 2010, p.33).

DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY EFL READERS WHEN THEY ARE READING Schema Related Difficulties Koda (2007) defines schemata, background knowledge, as ―generalized information abstracted from a variety of instances‖ (p. 1). Depending on the studies of several researchers (Hudson, 2007), there is a direct relationship between schemata and reading comprehension.

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For example, readers who have background knowledge about the topic of a text can understand the reading material better than the readers who do not have prior information of the topic. Generally, topics related to the target culture require a familiarity for the EFL readers to comprehend and decode the reading text as well as English-speaking readers (Jiménez, García, & Pearson, 1996). In her study, comparing the cultural differences between L1 and L2 reading, Singhal (1998) focused on the variables such as content/background schema, formal/textual schema, and linguistic/language schema. Her findings revealed that L2 readers, without cultural background knowledge about an English text, have difficulty in comprehending the text message. She also claims that text structures differ depending on the language. As for the formal/textual schema, she emphasizes the importance of the familiarity of the language structure on understanding the reading material in terms of finding the clues of ―cause and effect‖, ―question and answer‖, and ―compare and contrast‖. Finally, she asserts that linguistic/language schema is also effective on the readers‘ interpretation of the text. According to Singhal (1998), linguistic features of L1 may have an affect on the comprehension of an English text.

Vocabulary Related Difficulties English language learners‘ limited vocabulary is one of the most important problems they encounter particularly while they are reading (García, 2003). Readers need to develop their English vocabulary capacity in depth and width since vocabulary capacity is intertwined with reading comprehension (Hudson, 2007). Most of the difficulties are due to the certain words in the English language that can have more than one meaning. They can be confusing for the learners if they do not take into account the contextual meaning of the word. One example is the word of ―fall‖. ―Fall‖ in the following sentence, ―I can fall with all this water!‖ means to descend to the ground. The same word in another sentence, ―I had a fall at school‖ indicates failure in an exam. On the other hand, in the sentence, ―Fall (Am. Eng.) is nice in the US,‖ ―fall‖ means season of autumn. Moreover, many English words were derived from other languages, such as Greek and Latin and have irregular rules in affixes. Affixes include prefixes (e.g., pre-, fore-) and suffixes (e.g., -ship, -ing, or –ese). They generally help English language learners to infer the meaning of unknown words. However, there are some exceptions that may confuse them. For example, ―in- (or il-, im-, or ir-)‖ refers to ―not‖ or ―the opposite of something.‖ ―Impolite‖ is the opposite of polite whereas ―indifferent‖ is not the opposite of different. Therefore, English language learners, need to pay attention on each word since they may not always fit the rules of affixes.

First Language Related Difficulties Reading in the first and second/foreign language has different processes (Carrell & Grabe, 2002). Especially low proficiency English learners translate the English text into their first language. Upton (1997), for instance, studied on two groups of (advanced and less advanced) adult Japanese students studying in an American University. They were asked to

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think-aloud while reading an English expository text and allowed to use both Japanese and English during the comprehension process. Tape recorded think-alouds indicate that less advanced students used more Japanese language than the advanced students while reading. Though the less advanced group depended on the translation to confirm the meaning of the English passage and to decode the unfamiliar vocabulary, most of the advanced students focused on the content of the passage instead of translation. In other words, the advanced learners used the top-down skills, such as focusing on the whole text depending on the background information, whereas less advanced learners tended to focus on the bottom-up approaches, including smaller units such as vocabulary and grammatical structure. The findings of Upton‘s (1997) study were in line with the findings found out by Anderson (1991) and Carrell (1989). They claim that, overuse of the bottom-up approach which readers try to translate all unfamiliar words into their first language, may cause the danger of misunderstanding the text.

PRINCIPLES FOR TEACHING READING Nation (2009) offers some principles to design a reading instruction and practice programme.

Meaning-Focused Input Reading instruction should cover various sorts of components since there are several purposes of reading. The objectives of reading can be listed as: to search for information (including skimming and scanning), to learn, for fun, to integrate information, to critique texts, and to write. In order to fulfill these aims teachers should be aware of the leaner variables such as language proficiency level, personal, social and motivational differences. Reading materials should be selected and appropriately used regarding these learner variables. Finally, the critical role of word recognition in reading should also be taken into consideration. For a full comprehension of a text ―learners should read with 98 percent coverage of the vocabulary in the text so that they can learn the remaining 2 percent by inferencing from context‖. Nation (2009, p.6)

Meaning-Focused Output Output hypothesis was emerged as a reaction to Krashen‘s input hypothesis and conveyed the ―inadequacy of the input hypothesis‖ in terms of ―explaining the effects of immersion education‖ (Nation, 2007, p.5). ―The opportunities that output provides for learning however are not exactly the same as those provided by input‖ (Nation, 2007). According to Nation, output compensates the inadequacy of input by deliberately focusing on language features. According to meaning-focused output, language development means the development of the four skills. Reading should include other language skills. Therefore, a reading course should

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involve listening, speaking and writing activities related to the reading (Simcock, 1993; Nation, 2009).

Language-Focused Learning Effective reading covers developing language skills and sub-skills and the language features including phonemic awareness, activities, phonics, spelling practice, vocabulary learning, using word cards, and grammar study (Nation, 2009). Some of this can be done through intensive reading and for improving these skills and sub-skills diverse reading strategies should be emphasized in FL classroom. These strategies were described by several researchers (Janzen & Stoller, 1998 and García, 2003) such as previewing, setting a purpose, self-questioning, making inferences, associating prior information, concerning text structure, criticizing and reflecting on the text. Selection of the reading material is also important to achieve English language learners‘ reading outcomes. A range of text types, such as narrative text, expository text, descriptive text and literary text should be used for different purposes based upon students‘ needs and lesson objectives. Learners should also be assisted to analyze, synthesize, and critically evaluate the text.

Fluency Development Developing fluency in reading depends on the familiarity of the reading material that does not include any unknown language features. Thus, speed reading practice is necessary both for word recognition and for reading for comprehension. Skimming and scanning, speed reading, repeated reading and paired reading activities are suggested by Nation (2007) for the fluency development. All these procedures are necessary for developing fluency in reading. Table 1. Techniques and activities for teaching reading by Nation (2009) The four strands Meaning focused input Language focused learning Meaning focused output Fluency development

Activities and techniques Reading graded readers, Listening to stories, Communication activities Direct teaching of vocabulary, Direct learning, Intensive reading, Training in vocabulary strategies Communication activities with written input, Prepared writing, Linked skills Reading easy graded readers, Repeated reading, Speed reading, Listening to easy input, 4/3/2, Rehearsed tasks, 10 minute writing, Linked skills

Another factor influencing fluency is the motivation of the readers. Learners‘ interests regarding their age, sex and other characteristic features should be taken into consideration to motivate them. Instead of boring and demotivating texts, interesting texts should be selected. They can be supported with various activities like storytelling, independent reading, and

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shared reading. Finally, habit of reading should be developed by monitoring and encouraging EFL readers through the use of extensive reading and issue logs.

READING SUB-SKILLS As a systematic process, reading has various skills necessary for different reading purposes such as the kind of information and amount of information needed. Skimming, scanning and lexical inference skills will be discussed below since they have been identified as the most important ones by several researchers (Eisenberg, 2002 and Scrivener, 1994).

Skimming Skimming refers to ―reading fast or glancing rapidly through the text to get a main idea of what the text is about‖ (Simensen, 2007, p. 149). Identifying key topics or the overall theme of the text are the main concerns of skimming (Eisenberg, 2002; Scrivener, 1994; Davies, 1995 and Grellet, 1981). Additionally, scholars such as Harmer (1991), Grellet (1981) and Williams (1984) support that for having the general picture of the text; readers simply glance through the text quickly by discarding irrelevant or inessential parts. Through skimming, readers have the advantage of being able to focus on the main topic or idea of the passage besides some of the developing or supporting ideas. In other words, skimming involves reading of the titles, sub-titles, the subjects, verbs, topic sentences, conclusion parts of the paragraphs to get the gist of the text. In skimming, readers should be asked to detect facts which are expressed in sentences rather than single words (Grellet, 1981). Some skimming questions could be suggested to the teachers to ask the learners by glancing quickly through the text such as:    

What is the text generally about? ( the teacher may ask them to read the title, subheadings and the introduction or lead-in paragraph) What is the probable topic of the text? ( the teacher may give a list of topics) Which of these pictures (diagram), etc illustrate the text? (the teacher may provide several visuals) What is the main idea of the text? (the teacher may remind them that the main idea of the text generally appears in the first paragraph of a text or in the first sentence of a paragraph)

Scanning Scanning refers to rapid glancing of a text for finding out a particular piece of information (e.g. name, date) (Nattall, 1982). In scanning, the main aim is to speed up your reading just focusing on the specific fact or piece of information without reading everything. When scanning, readers only try to identify specific information by just letting their eyes wander over the text until they find what they are looking for (Grellet, 1981; Harmer, 1991

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and Williams, 1984). For example, if a reader aims at doing the research for an oral presentation, he/she could scan the index of books, web sites, and reference materials whether they contain any information he/she seeks for. There are several ways of teaching scanning as Nattall (1982) notes for teachers. For example teachers may ask the students: 1. to find the time a plane leaves from London for Turkey (using a page from an airport timetable). Do not forget to tell them to keep in mind the key words: ―from London‖ and ―to Turkey‖. 2. to look at page X and find out when the World War I started (using a page from a text book). 3. to find out how many times the phrase ―burst into tears‖ occurs on this page. 4. to identify in which paragraph the topic of ―advantages of technology‖ is discussed. Skimming and scanning are two techniques of rapid reading which are similar in process but different in purpose. Scanning is not a complete activity since it rapidly covers a great deal of material in order to locate specific isolated and scattered information. On the other hand, skimming is relatively a complete activity that requires readers to get the gist of the reading text with the purpose of getting a general overview of the content.

Lexical Inference As it was mentioned in the previous section unfamiliar or difficult vocabulary is the main problem of foreign/second language readers which usually resulted with the inadequate comprehension of the text material. Several researchers of the field (Harley & Hart, 2000; Paribakht, 2004 and Qian, 2004) maintain that readers use a variety of strategies when they encounter new words in a FL text. Ignoring them, consulting a dictionary for the meanings, writing them down for further consultation with a teacher, or trying to infer their meanings from context are some of these strategies (Harley & Hart, 2000). According to Paribakht (2004) and Qian (2004), inferring the meaning of unknown word is the most common strategy among the others. Oxford (1990, p. 47) defines lexical inference as ―using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic clues to guess the meanings of all the words when the learner does not know them‖. Lexical inference can be regarded as an important strategy for coping with unfamiliar vocabulary since it requires a deeper processing of information available in the text itself which helps the reader to comprehend the text as a whole (Read, 2000). Using this strategy requires an awareness of some knowledge sources ranging from knowledge of grammar, morphology, phonology, and knowledge of the world, to knowledge of punctuation, word association, and cognates (De Bot, Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). Successful inference depends upon using various knowledge sources (Nassaji, 2003). Knowledge sources are the clues the students make use of during the inference process. For a successful inference, FL teachers should make the students aware of these clues namely taxonomy of knowledge sources and strategies. They should train them how to use various sources effectively for developing their lexical inference skills (Shen, 2009). The positive effect of lexical inference strategies on reading comprehension have been supported by several researchers (Mondria & Wit-de Boer, 1991; Paribakht, 2004; Qian,

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2004). Depending on these researchers‘ studies it could be claimed that lexical inference is an advantageous reading strategy since it not only speeds up the reading such as skimming and scanning but it also improves the reading comprehension. Moreover, it could be claimed that lexical inference enhances the vocabulary acquisition depending on the assumptions of some scholars (Mondria & Wit-de Boer, 1991; Gao, 2012) about the positive effect of the mental effort in processing a word.

Intensive and Extensive Reading Exposure to print is efficacious regardless of the level of child‘s cognitive and comprehension abilities. Even children with limited comprehension skills will build vocabulary and cognitive structures through immersion in literacy activities (Stanovich et al. in Grabe, 2009, p. 313).

Intensive and extensive reading are two common approaches used both in native and foreign language teaching and learning. Brown (2001, p3. 12) defines intensive reading as ―a classroom- oriented activity in which students focus on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage. Intensive reading calls attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implications, rhetorical relationships, and the like.‖ In parallel with the Brown‘s definition Nation (2009) also points out that intensive study of a text helps students increase their knowledge of language features and control over reading strategies. According to Long and Richards (1987) since it is a kind of detailed analysis of a text, it is generally a classroom based and teacherled activity. Nation (2009) mentions another goal of intensive reading as the core point in determination of the syllabus of the course because the language features focused in the reading material will be the subject of the course. He goes on to claim that it has several positive aspects as the subject will be given in the communicative context of the text. On the other hand, he warns that the text may have a mixture of various vocabulary and structure, so teachers should be aware of this fact while choosing the text and he advises teachers to ask ―How does today‘s teaching make tomorrow‘s text easier?‖ (p. 26) and recommends four strategies to put this principle into effect: 1. Focus on items that occur with high frequency in the language as a whole. Such items will occur often in many different texts. 2. Focus on strategies that can be used with most texts. 3. Quickly deal with or ignore infrequent items. 4. Make sure that the same items and strategies get attention in several different texts (pp. 26-27). Hedgcock, et al. (in González and Paola, 2011 p.38) lists the significant features of intensive reading as in the following: 

The teacher selects the texts to be studied, introduces, and reinforces certain reading strategies by means of whole-class instruction and student activities.

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



Students read the same text at the same pace and complete several exercises that facilitate understanding. Teacher and students have clarity about what to do before, during, and after reading. Pre-reading activities are decisive to facilitate comprehension. These activities include surveying the text, making predictions, asking questions, and introducing key vocabulary. While-reading activities include first reading, a ―quick read-through the entire text to develop a sense of its main point(s) and to confirm initial predictions made during pre-reading‖ re-reading the text: ―read the text intensively through a careful and focused second reading‖, looking closely at language, and considering the structure of the text. Post-reading activities entail summarizing and responding, thinking critically, and reading-writing connections. ―Post-reading activities offer the best opportunities for teacher assessment of student progress, as they make the internal reading process and its outcomes more transparent‖.

Nation (2009, p. 28) lists the features of a good intensive reading exercise and gives the first feature by quoting Davies and Widdowson as ―A good reading exercise directs the learners‘ attention to features of the text that can be found in almost any text, or to strategies for dealing with any text, with the aim to develop in the language learner the ability to comprehend texts, not to guide him to comprehension of a text‖. Second feature of a good reading exercise is to direct the learners‘ attention to the reading text, which means students read the given text or part of the text to do the exercises. Third feature is to provide the teacher and the learners with useful information about the learners‘ performance on the exercise. Finally ―A good reading exercise is easy to make. Teachers have to choose texts suited to the particular needs of their learners, and if these texts do not have satisfactory exercises, the teachers must make their own‖ (p. 29). According to the Nation‘s list we can conclude that a good intensive reading exercise can be applied to any text, makes the learners read the text and gives teachers and learners an opportunity to check their performances and it is easy to prepare and apply in the classroom. Day (2003) explains that ―extensive reading is based on the well-established premise that we learn to read by reading…. In teaching foreign language reading, an extensive reading approach allows students to read, read, and read some more‖ (p. 1). Nation (2009) accentuates that reading is a source of learning and it can help students learn and be familiar with new words and structures. Similarly, Willis (2008) mentions that extensive reading provides students with opportunities to see the new words in rich contexts. Nation (2009, p. 50) summarizes extensive reading practice as ―It is a form of learning from meaning-focused input. During extensive reading learners should be interested in what they are reading and should be reading with their attention on the meaning of the text rather than on learning the language features of the text‖. By quoting Elley and Mangubhai, Nation (2009) states that the extensive reading practice can take place inside the class or outside class. In their article Day and Bamford (2002, pp. 137-139) offer ten principles for teaching extensive reading:

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1. The reading material is easy. That is, in order to have the desired effect reading texts should be within learners‘ competence level. 2. A variety of reading material on a wide range of topics must be available. 3. Learners choose what they want to read. 4. Learners read as much as possible. 5. The purpose of reading is usually related to pleasure, information and general understanding. 6. Reading is its own reward. 7. Reading speed is usually faster rather than slower. 8. Reading is individual and silent. 9. Teachers orient and guide their students. 10. The teacher is a role model of a reader. As can be seen from above principles, extensive reading provides teachers and learners with a great variety of materials; moreover, these materials can be selected by the learners, which make reading fun, and also the amount of input can be increased. After stating that extensive reading not only increases the vocabulary, but also helps proficiency development, Nation (2009, p. 55) gives some suggestions for vocabulary development as follows: a) Before reading a text, the learner quickly skims it and selects five or six words to focus on while reading. This has the effect of raising consciousness about some words and thus making them more noticeable when they are met again in the text. b) While reading the learner can collect new words that are repeated in the text to put on word cards for later deliberate study. c) A more formal follow up to this is for learners to report to the class on a word that they met while reading—explaining what it means, how it was used in the text, its word parts, its etymology, and any unusual features about it. d) The use of a dictionary while reading should also have positive effects (Knight, as cited in Nation, 2009), although this tends to increase the time it takes to read a text (Hulstijn as cited in Nation, 2009). In their studies Nation and Wang (as cited in Nation, 2009, p. 56) conclude that in an extensive reading programme: 1. Learners should read at least one graded reader every week, no matter what level they are reading at. This rate of reading allows unknown vocabulary to be repeated before the immediately previous occurrence is forgotten. 2. Learners should read at least five books at a level (say Level 2) before moving to books at the next level (Level 3). This number of books provides a chance for most of the vocabulary introduced at that level to occur. 3. Learners should read more books at the later levels than the earlier. This is because the vocabulary of the earlier levels occurs very frequently in the books at the later levels. Books at the later levels thus provide good conditions for learning all the vocabulary of the graded reader series.

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Mehmet Bardakçi and Kadriye Dilek Akpinar 4. Learners should read at least 15–20 and preferably 30 readers in a year. This number of graded readers provides plenty of repetition for the vocabulary and provides the opportunity to meet most of the vocabulary several times. A programme where learners read only three or four graded readers per year is not an extensive reading programme. 5. Learners should work their way through the levels of graded readers as the later levels provide excellent conditions for establishing the vocabulary of the earlier levels. 6. Learners may need to study directly the new vocabulary at the earlier levels or at least make use of a dictionary when starting to read books at a particular level. This is because the density of unknown vocabulary tends to be a little higher at the earlier levels.

In conclusion, reading should be enjoyable for both students and teachers so that they can share and discuss about what they read. Day and Bamford (2002) also state that if this happens, the classroom ―can be a place where students and teachers experience together the value and pleasure to be found in the written word‖ (p. 140).

A SAMPLE ACTIVITY FOR INTENSIVE READING This activity cycle is taken from Macalister (2011). The title of the reading text is ‗Seeing the ocean‘, adapted from Vukcˇevic´1997. The intended learners for this cycle are intermediate adult learners, and the language-focused learning goal is to recognize the ways in which reference words (pronouns) operate within the text. Pre-reading: These suggestions are intended for the teacher. The teacher asks questions about the learners‘ experiences of visiting a foreign country/city for the first time. 1. Begin by drawing on the learners‘ own experiences. Did they go to the foreign country/city by plane? Did they stop anywhere on the way? Where? What was the first thing they saw or thought or felt when they arrived? 2. Tell the students they are going to be reading one man‘s account of his first impressions when he arrived in New Zealand. Everyone has different experiences. Ask them what sort of questions they might have before reading. Write the learners‘ questions on one side of the board. 3. Tell them the title of the text. Write it on the top of the other side of the board. Ask them what words and ideas they associate with the word ‗ocean‘. Record their answers. 4. Ask the students to work in small groups to put the words associated with ‗ocean‘ into categories. 5. Hand out the reading text. Tell the students to read it with their questions from (2) in mind. Tell them they will be talking about these questions after they have read the text

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Reading: The learners receive the text Seeing the ocean by Vuk Vukcˇevic´ 1 I want to write about my first impressions of New Zealand—maybe you 2 can‘t even dream about my feelings at my very first step in your country. 3 I awoke in the aeroplane just a few seconds before I could see the top of 4 the North Island. I saw a lovely blue-green surface of ocean, shining in the 5 afternoon sun. It was stunning. 6 Auckland was the first city that I saw in New Zealand—just for a few 7 seconds. We had to go to Wellington. The airport seemed small to me 8 compared with airports in Belgrade, Singapore, Bangkok 9 But air! Air was the first thing I saw and felt in your beautiful country. It is 10 so clear and fresh and I remember my first breath here—I felt like a new 11 born child 12 My arrival here is a new birth for me. Learning the language is a step 13 forward. I am like a nine-month-old baby. When I reach eighteen months, 14 I will be a good English speaker. 15 Seeing the ocean close up was a second step. I like the ocean a lot, and 16 one day I chose to meet it; saying hello, touching the little waves on the 17 beach, and trying to see if it is very salty. Happiness for me is being able to 18 see the ocean, hear seagulls calling in the early mornings, spend summer 19 nights with my family looking at the calm, dark ocean surface from the 20 lawn and feeling the stillness of the world. 21 Sometimes, the starry sky seems so close to the earth that I can touch the 22 shining of a star‘s light. We are just sitting, without words, listening to the 23 silence of the night. After Reading 6. Ask the learners about their reaction to the text. Did they enjoy it? Did they find answers to any of their questions? 7. Tell the learners you are now going to give them five true/false questions to answer. Ask them to read the text again to answer the questions. He is writing this story for his family. T() F() He thought the afternoon sun was stunning. T() F() He thinks the air in New Zealand is fresh and clear. T() F() He wanted to find out if the ocean is salty. T() F() He likes to sit and look at the ocean by himself. T() F() 8. Before checking the answers with the learners, write the following line numbers and pronouns on the board. Ask them to identify what each pronoun refers to. Line 1 Line 5 Line 9 Line 17 Line 22

you it it it we

___________ ___________ ___________ ___________ ___________

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Mehmet Bardakçi and Kadriye Dilek Akpinar 9. Once the students have done this, ask them to check their answers to the true/false questions. Then discuss the answers and how the learners have arrived at them.

CRITICAL READING FOR EFL TEACHERS AND LEARNERS In our world today, by the advance in the technology and internet, specifically via smart phones, we can reach any kind of information easier than ever before. Not only can we reach the information but others can also reach us. They can share their thoughts, claims, and arguments via e-mails and social media. In other words, we are all surrounded by a very great amount of information claiming they are true. They may try to persuade and make us accept their thoughts or claims by playing on our feelings, likes, dislikes, fears and so on. Thus, as teachers we should make our students be aware of this fact and teach them how to read critically. The word critical is often misperceived as having negative sense. As Nosich (2011) mentions critical person is not the person who always finds faults or to criticize does not always mean saying negative things. But actually, it is related to the word criteria and it is clearly explained by Goatly (2000) as ―resisting the assumptions on which rational arguments are based, by explaining and questioning how common-sense logic establishes its categories‖ (p.1). In order to handle and analyse a text critically Fairclough (as cited in Goatly, 2000) offers three levels of text analysis: (1) decoding the surface structure and the meaning of a text, (2) interpreting and inferencing what is written (or said), (3) explaining the ideology behind the text or discourse. In order to read a text critically and explain the ideology, it is important to learn how to ask probing questions. To be able to ask hard-hitting questions we need to acquire and develop some necessary knowledge.

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN FACT AND OPINION To be able to recognize the facts and opinions in a discourse is a crucial skill for reading and analysing a text critically. As a receiver we cannot criticize the facts but we should be alert that some personal thoughts might be served us as facts. At this point distinguishing between fact and opinion carries out an important role. To start with the definitions of facts and opinions will help us discriminate them. Rasool, Banks, and McCarthy (1993) mention three definitions of ‗fact‘ as: 1. A fact is something most of us agree is true. 2. A fact is something that is true. 3. A fact is something that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (pp. 68-69). Similarly, Fahnestock and Secor (1990), Swinburne and Warner (1992), Pirozzi (2003) and Starkey (2004) define fact as something that can be verified, or confirmed in an unbiased manner and when it is verified, we must accept it. On the other hand, an opinion is subjective and they depend on the people‘s individual beliefs and thoughts. An opinion represents personal point of views. Pirozzi (2003, p. 371)

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explains this notion as ―Someone‘s personal judgment about something that has not been proved, verified, or confirmed in an unbiased manner.‖ Opinions may be based on facts, but they are still what we think, not what we know. Opinions are debatable; facts usually are not. A good test for whether something is a fact or opinion is to ask yourself, ―Can this statement be debated? Is this known for certain to be true?‖ If you can answer yes to the first question, you have an opinion; if you answer yes to the second, you have a fact. If you‘re not sure, then it‘s best to assume that it‘s an opinion until you can verify that it is indeed a fact (Chesla, 2005, p. 28). To see the difference clearly, consider the following examples: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

World War I broke out in 1914. Sydney is the capital city of Australia. Many experienced mechanics tell us that Audi is the best car today. This is the scariest movie of this year. The summers in Gaziantep are horrible because they are always very hot. İnönü, who was the second president of Turkish Republic, was a great leader.

When we consider the above examples in the light of the definitions, we can easily say that the first two sentences are facts (although the second sentence is false) because they can be verified by a little research. On the contrary, sentences three and four are simply opinions because both sentences have superlative forms which can change from person to person. In the last two sentences the hotness of Gaziantep and the second president of Turkish Republic can be verified; however, the adjectives ‗horrible‘ and ‗great‘ are simply subjective, so we can say that these sentences are combinations of facts and opinions. A person might like very hot climate and it would be wonderful for him/her. Similarly, some people would agree that İnönü was a great leader while the others disagree. There are some words that signal the opinions and make it easy to identify the opinions in a text or speech. These are: Believe/Think Feel May/may not My perspective is… Possibly

Best/worst In my opinion Might/might not My point of view is... Probably

Expect Least/most (with adjectives) My impression is… My sense is… Should/should not Yorke (n.d., p. 1)

In summary, we should bear in mind that the first step to critical reading is to differentiate facts from opinions. When we notice there is an opinion, we can talk about an argument and then we can ask thought-provoking questions or we can object to them if there is any faulty.

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SAMPLE ACTIVITIES FOR FACT AND OPINION Activity 1. Decide whether the following sentences are Facts or Opinions 1. ____ Penguins live in the South Pole. 2. ____ Some universities have over a hundred thousand students in Turkey. 3. ____ The students who have flue should stay at home instead of going to school. 4. ____ Vegetables can be kept fresh for some time in a fridge. 5. ____ Ronaldo scored the most goals this season. 6. ____ Spring is the prettiest season because many flowers are blooming. 7. ____ Smoking is an irritating habit. 8. ____ Mr. Steward is sixty years old. 9. ____ I think Schumacher has been the best goalkeeper ever in Turkey. 10. ____ Rollercoaster is scary, but it's also a lot of fun. Activity 2. Highlight facts and underline opinions in the following paragraph. Samuel Fernando Gonzales lived in New Jersey and was a senior student at Michigan Institute of Technology. He was the leader of gang called ―crimebusters‖. He was very brave and fought with crimes with his intelligent tactics. He was also handsome, many girls admired him. He was killed by an accident at the age of 24.

RECOGNIZING AND EVALUATING ARGUMENTS Like the word critical, argument is generally misunderstood similar to having debate or quarrel as in ―I had an argument with my mom last night‖. Conversely, in critical reading, argument means stating the claims and supporting them with some reasons and evidence. A broad definition of argument is given by Copi and Cohen (2004) as: A collection of propositions in which some propositions, the premises, are given as reasons for accepting the truth of another proposition, the conclusion. In other words, the conclusion of an argument is the proposition that is affirmed on the basis of the other propositions in the argument. These other propositions, which are affirmed (or assumed) as providing support or reasons for accepting the conclusion as true, are the premises of that argument (p. 3).

As seen in the definition, an argument has two parts, one of which is a premise or premises supporting the other part, namely conclusion. So as to critically examine and evaluate an argument, we should be able to realize the existence of an argument in a discourse first. Walton (2006) states that ―The ability to identify an argument by stating its premises and conclusions is a very valuable skill of critical argumentation. Only when an argument has been thus identified can it be critically examined in a clear and objective fashion‖ (p. 7). The order of the premises and conclusion may change; in other words conclusion may be stated at the beginning or at the end. There are some words that signal premises and conclusions and they are called as premise and conclusion indicators in several references. A compilation of these indicator words from different resources are listed below (Bowell &

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Kemp, 2002, 2005; Boyd, 2003; Copi & Cohen, 2004, 2005; Hurley, 2000; Jason, 2001; Walton, 2006): Premise Indicators as assuming that follows from given that insofar as may be inferred from on the assumption that since

as indicated by because for in view of the fact that may be deduced from my evidence for this owing to the reason is that

Conclusion Indicators accordingly therefore hence so thus as a result in consequence it follows that proves that it is clear that for these reasons I conclude that which entails that which implies that bears out to the point that leads me to believe that that which allows us to infer that which points to the conclusion that

as shown by due to for the reason that inasmuch as may be derived from my reason is seeing that this is so because

consequently then in summary entails that for this reason we may infer which means that suggests very strongly which shows that

In the light of the given indicators we can consider these examples:      

You should graduate from college because you will earn more money with a college degree. The need for the United States to send troops to Central America is indicated by the build up of armed rebels in countries neighboring those with civil wars. Seeing that the current policy of supplying organ transplants is benefiting the rich, a new program is needed. Based on all of the reasons just stated, we can conclude that the flow of illegal drugs must be stopped. In summary, postal rates must be increased because we can no longer afford to run the postal system with a deficit. We have had very little rain this season. Consequently, water will have to be rationed.

In the above examples underlined words show the premises of arguments, on the other hand italicized words show the conclusions. These indicator words can help us to determine the parts of arguments; nonetheless, Jason (2001) warns us that these indicator words do not always signal an argument (p. 37). For example: I have been working here since 2005. Besides, there may be arguments without indicators or even without premises or conclusions

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and they want us to deduce it. E.g. this shampoo makes my hair feel so soft. In this example, there is an argument, that is, this shampoo makes my hair soft and it will make your hair soft, too. Therefore you should use it. After identifying arguments, we should evaluate and be critical about them. As Hurley (2000, p. 1) states, arguments can be classified into two basic groups. The first group includes the arguments whose reasons actually support the conclusion and the other includes the arguments whose reasons do not. The first group is called as good (cogent) arguments, and the latter is called as bad (fallacious) arguments.

CONCLUSION Reading is not simply a matter of absorbing individual words; rather, it is a progressive effort to construct a model of the meaning of the text (Armbruster, as cited in Kurfiss, 1988, p. 32). The expression ‗reading between the lines‘ has been developed for this reason. As Kahane and Cavender (2006) explain that ―this phrase has several meanings one of which captures the idea of understanding the intentions which are not clearly expressed. The other meaning is getting more information from less, and noticing the rhetorical devices‖ (p. 13). Wallace and Poulson (2004, p. 7) illustrates the critical approach to reading as follows: Table 2. A critical approach to reading

          

As a critical reader you: consider the authors‘ purpose in writing the account examine the structure of the account to help you understand how the authors develop their argument seek to identify the main claims the authors make in putting forward their argument adopt a skeptical stance towards the authors‘ claims, checking whether they support convincingly what they assert question whether the authors have sufficient backing for the generalizations they make check what the authors mean by key terms in the account and whether they use these terms consistently consider whether and how any values guiding the authors‘ work may affect what they claim distinguish between respecting the authors as people and being skeptical about what they write keep an open mind, retaining a conditional willingness to be conceived check that everything the authors have written is relevant to their purpose in writing the account and the argument they develop expect to be given the information that is needed for you to be in a position to check any other literature sources to which the authors refer

Thorndike (as cited in Nielsen, 1989, p. 2) claims that critical reading is a form or instance of critical thinking which is consistent with the more general assumption that reading is thinking. Since thinking is an active process, it can be said that reading is also active; actually, reading must be active not to be deceived.

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In summary, it can be said that as critical readers and teachers we should know how to unearth senders‘ intentions which are committed particularly to persuade others, and try to model our students develop an understanding of critical reading and also listening.

FURTHER READING Nation, I.S.P. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. New York: Routledge. This reference book is a useful source for teachers who teach reading in foreign language classrooms. The first six chapters of the book are devoted to reading, specifically, the first chapter deals with learning to read in another language. Copi, I.M., & Cohen, C. (2005). Introduction to Logic (12th ed.). New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall Education, Inc. Carter, K.C. (2004). A First Course in Logic. New York: Pearson Longman Education. Starkey, L. (2004). Critical Thinking Skills Success in 20 Minutes a Day. New York: Learning Express LLC. All these three books give explicit and clear information about critical thinking and reasoning, and these books offer some classifications for reasoning fallacies. The last book also has practical exercises for classroom use.

SAMPLE LESSON PLAN

While

Pre

A SAMPLE LESSON for FACT and OPINION Type An inductive approach to the teaching of identifying facts and opinions in written texts Goals Students will have  distinguished between facts and opinions in written texts  developed an insight in identifying whether a statement is a fact or an opinion  recognized signal words commonly found in facts and opinions Materials Written text samples. PowerPoint slides. Teaching Modes Group work, lecture, classroom discussion Time 45 + 45 (90 minutes approximately) Procedure 1. Students are given three sets of five sentences and asked to determine which one of five sentences is different from others. 2. Students are asked to determine what makes the sentence they have chosen different from those of others. 3. The answers are elicited by using guided discovery method. 4. The students are introduced to definitions of facts and opinions.

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Post

A SAMPLE LESSON for FACT and OPINION 5. The students are exposed to some of the common signal words utilized in fact and opinion sentences. 6. Students are given new sentences to be identified as fact and opinion by referring to the key signal words. 7. Students are given some fact sentences and asked to turn them into opinions. 8. Students work in groups of four. Each group is given a written text to be analyzed in terms of fact and opinion statements.

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Shen, M.Y. (2009). Technical University Learners‘ Ability, Difficulties in Lexical Inference and Perception of Strategy Use. Applied Sciences Journal of Kaohsiung University, 39. Retrieved [May 12, 2014] from http://academic.kuas.edu.tw/ezfiles/1/1001/attach/64/ pta_1325_ 8033969_69968.pdf. Scrivener, J. (1994). Learning-Teaching. UK: The Bath Press. Simcock, M. (1993). Developing productive vocabulary using the ask and answer technique. Guidelines 15: 1–7. Simensen, A. M. (2007). Teaching a Foreign Language - Principles and Procedures (2 ed.). Oslo: Fagbokforlaget. Singhal, M. (1998). A comparison of L1 and L2 reading: Cultural differences and schema. The Internet TESL Journal 4(10). Retrieved [January 10, 2010] from http://iteslj.org/ Articles/Singhal-ReadingL1L2.html Stanovich, K. E. (1980). Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Reading Research Quarterly 16, 32-71. Starkey, L. (2004). Critical Thinking Skills Success in 20 Minutes a Day. New York: Learning Express LLC. Swinburne, L., & Warner, J.F. (1992). Reading Skills for Adults/ Red Book (Updated ed.). Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn Company. Tindale, C.W. (2007). Fallacies and Argument Appraisal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Upton, T. A. (1997). First and second language use in reading comprehension strategies of Japanese ESL students. Teaching English as a Second Language Electronic Journal 3(1). Retrieved [January 10, 2012] from http://tesl-ej.org/ej09/a3.html Wagoner, S. A. (1983). Comprehension monitoring: What it is and what we know about it. Reading Research Quarterly, 18, 328-346. Wallace, M., & Poulson, L. (2004). Critical Reading for Self-critical Writing. In A. Goodwyn, & A. Stables (Eds.), Learning to Read Critically in Language and Literacy (pp. 3-38). London: Sage Publications. Walton, D. (2006). Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, E. (1984). Reading in Language Classroom. London: McMillan Publisher Ltd. Willis, J. (2008). Teaching the Brain to Read: Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Yorke, C. (n.d.). FCAT Reading Skill: Distinguishing Facts and Opinions. Retrieved [December 20, 2008] from http://www.palmbeach.k12.fl.us/Multicultural/ Multicultural New/FCATSkill/ FCAT%20 DistinguishingFactOpinion.pdf.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 10

TEACHING GRAMMAR Banu Inan Karagul and Dogan Yuksel Kocaeli University, Faculty of Education English Language Teaching Department, Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1. identify the significance of grammar in language teaching. 2. familiarize with the different ways of teaching grammar in the language teaching classroom. 3. list advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches. 4. familiarize yourself with different techniques of teaching grammar. Study Questions 1. What is the role of grammar in language teaching? Is it necessary to teach grammar? 2. What are the different ways of teaching grammar in the language classroom? 3. How would you prefer to learn the grammar: from examples or rules?

INTRODUCTION In the language classroom, one of the most important parts of being a teacher is presenting new language, supplying some opportunities to practice it and make revisions when necessary. Whether to teach grammar or not has always been a controversial issue among researchers and practitioners of language teaching. Even though it is acknowledged that people learn languages differently, the process of learning becomes easier if they are able to perceive regularities and patterns (Gower, Philip & Walters, 1995). However, we are all familiar with students who are really good at identifying grammatical structures and who can

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list the basic usage related to each of them but who cannot use them in real communication. As suggested by Larsen-Freeman (2001), grammatical knowledge is important as long as it enables learners to communicate ―correctly, meaningfully and appropriately‖. In order to emphasize the inadequacy of form-based teaching and going beyond form, she suggested her three-dimensional framework including ―form‖, ―meaning‖ and ―use‖. Larsen-Freeman (2001) pointed out that if students are not aware of the fact that grammatical structure has these 3 dimensions, they are prone to making mistakes even if they know the rules of the target language. In order to explain the connection between these dimensions, Savage et al. (2010) give the following example: Form: MUST + the base form of the verb (infinitive without to) Meaning: obligation or necessity Use: formal, used much more in writing than in speaking. In speaking, people tend to use ―have to‖. According to Freeman‘s this three-dimensional framework, when students are aware of all these three dimensions of modal verb ―MUST‖ in English, they will be able to use it correctly, meaningfully and in appropriate situations.

The Place of Grammar in the History of Language Teaching Grammar has always been considered to be an important component of language since the emergence of first language teaching methods. In the 19th and mid-twentieth century method, The Grammar-Translation Method (GTM), grammar rules were taught explicitly and a lot of attention was paid to language forms. However, because of the lack of communicative practice, students were not able to use them successfully. For this reason, a new method appeared in the first part of the 20th century, which was The Direct Method. In this method, grammar was taught inductively, which was found to be inappropriate for some adult learners; therefore, led to failure. Between 1950s and 1960s, Audiolingual Method appeared which emphasized the importance of developing aural-oral skills. In Audiolingual Method, the syllabus was structural and there was the use of drills to reinforce grammatical patterns. Students were really good at these drills; however, when it came to producing new sentences, they were not able to transfer their classroom skills into the outside world. In 1970s, in Cognitive Approach, it was claimed that grammar needed to be taught either deductively or inductively because it was considered to be an indispensable part of the language learning process. But again communicative practice was neglected. In 1980s, Natural Approach appeared thanks to the theories of Stephen Krashen. First language acquisition was taken into consideration and it was thought that grammar should not be taught overtly; instead necessary input should be supplied so that learners can grasp the grammatical structures from this oral and written input. However, many adult learners wanted and needed grammar instruction; that‘s why, it was not very effective. While the discussions related to Cognitive Approach and Natural Approach were going on, in 1970s, other important methods, the influence of which is still going on, appeared. It

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was Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), in which communication was the main goal of instruction and for the sake of this communicative focus, grammar was ignored. Because fluency was important, some students could never master the grammar of the target language. As can clearly be seen from the important changes mentioned above, the role of grammar was either over-emphasized or it was neglected and both of these attitudes might be observed in the written works of educational researchers and practitioners. As suggested by Hedge (2000), if it is believed that there is a necessity of a focus on grammar, the following issues will be related to integrating grammar teaching into a communicative methodology paying attention to all aspects of communicative competence and the precise forms that teaching should take. Hedge also states that there will also be some further questions about the choice of grammatical structures to be presented, the forms of grammatical description, whether to use ‗deductive‘ or ‗inductive‘ approaches, the role of practice and the forms of practice appropriate for different types of learners. Major parts in a grammar lesson consist of the following:

PRESENTATION TASK 1: Think of the grammar presentation techniques you know. In your opinion, which one has got most benefits and why?

TASK 2: Choose one of the grammar topics given below and think of a technique that you use to present it to your students: - the difference between SOME and ANY - Tag Questions - the difference between Simple Past Tense and Past Continuous Tense Your lesson must last 10 minutes only. While preparing your mini-lesson, please think about the aims of your presentation, the stages of your presentation and effective techniques of presentation. (adapted from Tanner and Green, 1998)

Deductive vs. Inductive Grammar Presentation In deductive (explicit) grammar presentation, the teacher states the name of the grammar topic to be studied and explains it. The teacher first says, ―Today we are going to study Present Continuous Tense‖. After introducing the subject, the teacher usually writes the conjugation of the words on the blackboard and asks the students to copy them to their notebooks. After mastering this part, sentence level examples are provided in various forms. A chain of drills is followed after this process. The drills start from simple and go further to more complex structures. Finally, some production exercises can be used with higher proficiency levels. This sequence is also named as the PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production) Model.

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Hedge (2000) explains the purpose of the each stage of activity and the teacher‘s roles in the model given above in the following way: STAGE PRESENTATION

PRACTICE

PRODUCTION

PURPOSE – to present new language in context so that meaning is clear – to link the new form to what students already know – to check comprehension – to help students memorize the form – to give intensive practice through repetition – to provide opportunities for feedback and error correction – to develop confidence – to reduce control and encourage students to find out what they can do – to encourage students to use the forms in expressing their own content – to help students see the usefulness of what they have learnt – to check what has been learnt and diagnose problems

TEACHER’S ROLES Instructor Corrector

Manager Evaluator Corrector

Monitor Resource Diagnoser

According to Widodo (2006), advantages of deductive approach in grammar teaching are as follows: 1. It is time-saving. 2. Rules are simply and clearly explained 3. Immediate application of the rules through direct examples is provided. 4. It respects the intelligence and maturity of the adult learners 5. It meets the expectations of those learners who have analytical style Inferring the grammar rules according to some examples provided is the main premise of an inductive approach. This is also how most native speakers acquire the syntax of their own languages. It is also called rule discovery learning (Widodo, 2006). Direct Approach and Natural Approach followers would use it frequently. Thornbury (2002, p.65-66) provides the following example of inductive grammar presentation.

TEACHING VERBS THAT TAKE BOTH GERUND AND INFINITIVE FORMS USING CONCORDANCE DATA One persistent headache for learners is knowing which verbs in English are followed by the infinitive. This problem is complicated because sometimes both are possible with a subtle

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difference in meaning.In this sample lesson, the teacher has decided to use concordance data to guide the students towards discovering these differences for themselves. STEP 1: The teacher divides the class into three groups (A, B, and C), and gives each group a different set of concordance lines as shown here:

She tells the groups to study their lines, and divide them into two patterns. If they find it difficult, she suggests that they look at the form of the verb that immediately follows the word in the central column of each set of lines. They are then instructed to try to work out the differences in meaning between the two patterns, still in their groups. The teacher monitors the group work, offering assistance where necessary.

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STEP 2: The teacher then re-groups the class so that at least one member of each of the former groups A, B, and C, is in each of the new groups. Their task is to explain to each other the patterns of form and meaning that they have found for their particular verb, and then, as a group, to work out a general rule that holds for all three verbs. They then report to the class. STEP 3: The teacher summarizes by drawing the following timelines: 1 remember doing something

forgot doing something

doing

stop doing something

remember forget stop

2 remember to do something forgot to do something

remember

stop to do something

forget

to do

stop In order word, in the case of 1 the doing precedes the remembering, forgetting and stopping. In the case of 2, this sequence is reversed. STEP 4: To check their grasp of rule, the teacher then hands out a discrimination exercise. For example: 1. I went to the post office but I forgot to post/posting the letter. 2. I don‘t remember to see/seeing the Millers at the party. Previous literature on inductive and deductive approaches to teaching grammar also highlights the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. For example, Widodo (2006) lists the following advantages and disadvantages of an inductive approach to grammar. TASK 3: Choose a grammar topic and prepare a similar lesson plan based on the one above. You can make use of the following websites to reach examples from corpus: -

www.americannationalcorpus.org www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk corpus.byu.edu www.americancorpus.org

Advantages 1. Learners are trained to be familiar with the rule discovery; this could enhance learning autonomy and self-reliance. 2. Learners‘ greater degree of cognitive depth is ―exploited‖.

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3. The learners are more active in the learning process, rather than being simply passive recipients. In this activity, they will be motivated. 4. The approach involves learners‘ pattern-recognition and problem solving abilities in which particular learners are interested in this challenge. 5. If the problem-solving activity is done collaboratively, learners get an opportunity for extra language practice.

Disadvantages 1. The approach is time and energy-consuming as it leads learners to have the appropriate concept of the rule. 2. The concepts given implicitly may lead the learners to have the wrong concepts of the rule taught. 3. The approach can place emphasis on teachers in planning a lesson. 4. It encourages the teacher to design data or materials taught carefully and systematically. 5. The approach may frustrate the learners with their personal learning style, or their past learning experience (or both) would prefer simply to be told the rules A caveat we should keep in mind is the fact that most skilled teachers use both approaches efficiently while teaching grammar. They sometimes present the grammar rules explicitly (deductive) and in some other occasions, they help their students discover the grammar rules from the examples provided. The combination of the both approaches is also used in Grammar Based Teaching (GBT) which uses grammar as a springboard for meaning, communicative practice opportunities (Azar, 2007).

DISCOVERING GRAMMAR Instead of starting teaching grammar by introducing the rules, making students work out for themselves how language forms are constructed and used is another possibility in teaching grammar. Afterwards, students might be asked to do exercises related to that specific grammar rule. There are multiple ways of doing this such as starting the lesson with examples, with a reading passage, with a listening exercise including a dialogue which contains the target grammar rule, etc. In the following example, students are given a short reading text and they are supposed to identify the target grammar form, which is ―The Simple Past Tense‖, and then, a practice part follows:

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Reading Text When I woke up this morning and opened the door, I found a letter coming from my aunt. In the letter, she said she was in Hawaii for vacation. She also wrote that she liked the island very much; she swam in the sea, sunbathed on the Waikiki Beach and took part in some local tours around the island. And then she wrote about the friendly people of the island. After reading the letter, I really wanted to see this island. I called my travel agent and wanted him to book a flight for me. Afterwards, I booked a hotel room for a week for myself. I feel really excited because I am going to join my aunt and spend good time in that place.

Students read the text above in pairs and they are asked to underline the structures that they are not familiar with and then, to work out the rules of The Simple Past Tense in English. Afterwards, the teacher states that there are two types of verbs in English; namely, ‗regular‘ and ‗irregular‘. Students are also asked to identify which verbs in the text are regular and which of them are irregular. And then, practice activities follow.

PRACTICE After the presentation part is over (either deductively or inductively), there is a need for students to practice the newly-learnt items. In this part, as also suggested by Hedge (2000), students not only find the chance to get some feedback from the teacher in order to reformulate their utterances, but they also develop confidence. However, not all the activities are appropriate for the practice part. Thornbury (2002) mentions two important principles that should be kept in mind: THE E-FACTOR (Efficiency= Economy, ease, efficacy)

THE A-FACTOR (Appropriacy)

The efficiency of an activity might be discerned via answering the following questions:

The appropriacy of an activity pays attention to the following concepts:

- How time-efficient is it? - How easy is it to set up? - Is it consistent with good learning principles?

- learners‘ needs and interests - learners‘ attitudes and expectations

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GRAMMAR GAMES Use of games in grammar teaching is a recently trending issue. There are volumes of books that specifically focus on the issue of grammar games (e.g., Rinvolucri & Davis, 1995; Johnson, 2003). Many games from television and radio as well as games people play at home in their everyday lives can be adapted for classroom use as well (Harmer, 2007). Many experienced teachers can also prepare some grammar games with ease. The following sample is adapted from Harmer (2007). Asking the right question Language Level: Any Age: Older children (+) Level: Elementary (+) Instructions: Students sit in two teams. There is a pile of cards between them. On each card there is a word or phrase. The cards are face down. A member of team A picks up the first card and then has to ask the other team members questions until they give the exact answer that is written on the card. university

teaching

hot

summer

Yes, I did

The focus: The game should push students to think extremely carefully about the exact construction of the questions they are asking.

CONCLUSION Two questions are commonly asked about teaching grammar: Should we teach grammar or not? and How we should teach grammar? The issue of teaching grammar or not is a hot debate and addressing it requires a theoretical focus which was not the scope of this chapter. Instead, in this chapter, we tried to focus on the intricacies of how we should be teaching grammar. Advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to grammar have been highlighted by presenting various examples.

FURTHER READING Green, C. & Tanner, R. (1998). Tasks for Teacher Education. A Reflective Approach. Longman. Harmer, J. (2007). The practice of English Language Teaching. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford University Press. Thornbury, S. (2002). How to teach grammar. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

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REFERENCES Azar, B. (2007). Grammar-based teaching: A practitioner‘s perspective.TESL-EJ, 11(2), 1– 12. Gower, R., D. Phillips & S. Walters (1995) Teaching Practice Handbook. Oxford: Macmillan Education Green, C. & Tanner, R. (1998). Tasks for teacher education. A Reflective Approach. Longman. Harmer, J. (2007). The practice of English Language Teaching. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Johnson, P.F. ( 2003). 50 quick grammar games. East Moline: Linguisystems, Inc. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2001). Teaching Grammar. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language, Third Edition. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. Rinvolucri M., & Davis, P. (1995). More grammar games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thornbury, S. (2002). How to teach grammar. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Savage, K. L., Bitterlin, G., and Price, D. (2010). Grammar matters: Teaching grammar in adult ESL programs. New York: Cambridge University Press. Widodo, H. (2006). Approaches and procedures for teaching grammar. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 5(1), 122–141.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 11

INTEGRATED SKILLS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Andreea Nicolaescu Kocaeli University, Faculty of Education, English Language Teaching Department, Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1. define the concept of integrated skills as it currently applies to language teaching. 2. indentify various types of and approaches to integrated skills instruction. 3. design and evaluate practical activities for implementing integrated skills into your lesson plans.

INTRODUCTION Realistically, how often do you talk without listening? Or write without reading? For just about most situations we can imagine from our daily lives, several language skills are used simultaneously for communicative purposes. In the past several decades, much evidence has emerged that, in order for learners to attain competence in a language, teaching needs to integrate both linguistic and communicative skills (Hinkel, 2009). STUDY QUESTIONS Before you start reading this chapter, try to reflect on the following questions: 1. What does integrated skills in language teaching refer to? 2. What might be some reasons for using integrated skills in a language curriculum? 3. What are some principles and techniques for designing lessons based on integration of various skills?

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Rebecca Oxford compares the idea of teaching English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) to the image of an intricate tapestry woven from many strands which include the teacher, the learner, the setting, and the primary language skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing (Oxford, 2001). The skill strands of the tapestry lead to optimal ESL/EFL communication when the skills are all interwoven during instruction, a practice known as the integrated-skills approach. In other words, when several of the language skills are utilized within a lesson or activity, more authentic communication and more effective and meaningful learning occurs. A typical instructional paradigm found in many locations around the world focuses on employing learners' receptive skills in order to provide input and modeling for their productive skills. For instance, in the spoken medium, listening selections are used as models for speaking, interaction, or pronunciation skills, whereas in the written medium, reading input provides models for writing. The central innovative characteristic of the communicative approach in ESL or EFL teaching has been the integration of the four primary skills and their components. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) emphasizes the teaching of listening, speaking, reading, and writing within content and task-based activities (Richards and Schmidt, 2002). Prior to communicative language teaching approaches, the prevalent attention to the grammatical forms of language prompted curriculum designers and instructors to focus on the separate language skills, a practice referred to as the segregated-skill approach. Many pre-university intensive skills courses still use a separate skills approach, probably mostly due to administrative considerations, which make it easier to program separate courses. In the segregated-skill approach, the mastery of discrete language skills such as reading or listening is perceived as the key to successful learning, and language learning is typically separate from content learning (Mohan, 1986). Specialized, subject-specific courses may be practical when meeting the needs of higher proficiency learners who might need to focus their attention on improving one specific skill. However, if communicative, interactive use of the target language is the primary objective, then skill integration is, according to Brown, ―the only plausible approach to take‖ (Brown, 2001). The four macro skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) are all an integral part of typical language proficiency and use. Separating the core skills is counterintuitive to the integrated way that people use language skills in natural communication, and it conflicts with the direction in which language teaching experts have been proceeding in recent years. Research indicates that even if it were possible to fully develop one or two skills in the absence of all the others, such an approach would not ensure adequate preparation for future success in academic communication, career-related language use, or everyday interaction in the language. ―Despite our history of treating the four skills in separate segments of a curriculum, there is a recent trend toward skill integration‖ (Brown 2001). Even if a course title indicates a discrete skill such as ―Academic Reading,‖ for example, it would be more beneficial to integrate various skills in addition to the primary focus on the reading component. For example, in preparation for reading a text, the instructor could facilitate an activity in which the students employ their speaking and listening skills by activating their background knowledge of the topic through a paired brainstorming activity or a class discussion. Following the reading of the text, the students could be asked to employ their writing skills by paraphrasing, summarizing or evaluating the reading in a written format.

Integrated Skills in Language Teaching ACTIVITY 1

STATEMENT

Exploring Your Beliefs: Reflect on how you feel about each of the statements below and find out whether your classmates agree or disagree with the statements. Choose three issues and discuss them with at least three students in the class. Make sure to provide a rationale for your answers. I AGREE because… I DISAGREE because… I AGREE WITH RESERVATIONS because…

1. People have learned languages for centuries, so the methods we use do not really matter. 2. The most important thing is to let students experiment with the language (spoken and written). They learn the language by using it and need to be given many opportunities to do so. 3. Students learn best when they are first presented with a clear explanation of grammar rules. Then, they can apply the rules and use them freely. 4. Class time should mostly be spent focusing on language structures. Meaning can be added later on, once students can express themselves. 5. Accuracy develops naturally. We should not worry too much about students producing perfect structures right away. It is best for teachers not to overcorrect. 6. Language is best learned interactively, in a social environment. In an ideal class, students work together a lot. 7. Student motivation does not matter. They will learn regardless of their motivation.

Source: Hedwige Meyer, University of Washington.

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Nunan (1989) believes skills integration to be an important feature of language learning, which appeals to interaction, task continuity, real world focus, language and learning focus and task outcomes. In other words, when several of the language skills are incorporated into a lesson or activity, the task become more holistic and reflective of real-world language use.

ADVANTAGES OF THE INTEGRATED SKILLS APPROACH Communication, by definition, requires the integration of the main language skills; in integrated- skill instruction, learners are exposed to authentic language and are involved in activities that are meaningful and interesting (Shen, 2003 qtd. in Akram and Malik, 2010). In order to facilitate meaningful activities which highlight real language in use, educators emphasize the importance of implementing content-based and task-oriented instruction. By using the integrated skills approach in a language classroom, learners experience the language in a natural and authentic way, benefitting from a true perspective of the rich intricacies of language as it is applied in genuine communication. In addition, by integrating the language skills, learners progress not only in their acquisition of the various skills but also in increased knowledge of subject-specific content, as opposed to just focusing on discrete language forms. When a language instructor teaches a language by introducing meaningful and engaging class activities incorporating the various skills, it enhances the focus on realistic communication, which also leads to intrinsically motivating and encouraging the students to want to learn the language and be more involved in classroom activities.

LIMITATIONS OF THE INTEGRATED SKILLS APPROACH A potential limitation of the integrated skills approach might be that some learners will have disproportionately developed proficiencies across the four primary language skills. For example, second language learners who live in English- speaking countries may have stronger skills in listening and speaking and social discourse than in reading and writing in academic settings. On the other hand, English as a foreign language learners are likely to be better readers and writers than listeners and speakers since typically their primary learning of these skills occurs within the classroom. For this reason, the teaching of integrated skills can become somewhat complicated, when instructional materials and practice have to account for a considerable variance in learners' abilities. In addition, since the primary focus of integrated instruction emphasizes purposeful communication and discourse competence, the teaching of grammar as well as accuracy in learner language production may receive less emphasis than it should (Richards, 2005 qtd. in Hinkel, 2009).

OVERCOMING THE LIMITATIONS With the current emphasis on both fluency and accuracy in language production, integrated language teaching and learning, as well as integrative instructional models, will need to continue to be refined and developed (Swain, 1991 qtd. in Kaplan, 2010). Lessons

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which provide explicit instruction in both language forms as well as how to accurately use those in the context of communicative tasks would enable the students to have more command of the target language. All things considered, after decades of research in language teaching and learning, it becomes evident that in many cases and for many purposes, the separation of the four primary language skills is likely to be less effective than integrated instruction simply because, in reality, communication does not take place in terms of discrete linguistic skills (Hinkel, 2009). Even if it were possible to develop one or two skills effectively in the absence of the other language skills at the beginning stages, this does not ensure adequate preparation for real international communication, in which not only language skills but also communicative skills are employed simultaneously (Akram and Malik, 2010). When a language teacher approaches a language by introducing authentic and thoughtprovoking class activities encompassing the four skills, it enhances the focus on realistic communication, motivating the students to learn the language and be more enthusiastically involved in classroom activities.

TYPES OF INTEGRATED SKILLS INSTRUCTION Integrated language instruction that engages learners in meaningful communication and enables them to attain their learning objectives can be found in a practically unlimited array of models, teaching materials and techniques.

ACTIVITY 2

Think of the language skills that might be used in the following situations. Put a check mark in the appropriate columns. Then add four more situations and put a check mark under the skills that might be involved.

SITUATION: 1.Holding a map and asking someone for directions 2. Applying for a bank account 3. Inviting a friend to an event 4. Conducting a questionnaire/survey 5. Your example: 6. Your example: 7. Your example: 8. Your example:

LANGUAGE SKILL: Reading

Writing

Listening

Speaking

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Content Based Instruction (CBI) Content-based instruction (CBI) involves the studying of some specific subject-matter content in combination with the learning of a second or foreign language. The target language is the medium which is used in order to convey informational content of interest and relevance to the learner. CBI enables students to acquire both practical knowledge as well as language skills, which becomes more relevant to students‘ long-term goals, which in turn fosters their intrinsic motivation. For example, in a history, science, or literature course, the students would be learning subject-specific material pertaining to the course as well as engaging in language skills objectives such as developing their reading strategies and their vocabulary, and their grammatical and writing skills through the context of the content itself. There are many topics that can be considered ‗content‘; what is important is that what is being taught or discussed through the content leads to opportunities for language development as well, promoting student engagement and intrinsic motivation.

Theme Based Instruction Theme-based or topic-based instruction is considered a more specific form of contentbased instruction, as it places an equal value on both content and language objectives. Language skills are enhanced though attention to both topic and language. The rationale is that language is used to explore a particular theme, and language growth emerges as students need to comprehend or produce language related to that theme. In theme-based instruction, many different activities are linked together by their theme, so the topic is frequently addressed through everything that happens in the classroom, and it acts as a connecting thread for the students. An example course for pre-university students might focus on topics of current interests/themes such as public health, multiculturalism or any societal trends. English for specific purposes (ESP) is an example of theme-based instruction, as it caters to specific learners‘ needs on a particular topic such as Business English, Legal English, or Medical English, and the students focus on learning content and terminology pertaining to that topic while also developing their linguistic skills.

ACTIVITY 3

Imagine you are teaching the past verb tense to your students. Brainstorm and write down 5 content subjects, topics, or themes that are related to your target language that you could use to practice this grammar concept (i.e. Teaching about a historical event).

ACTIVITY 4

Pretend that in your classroom, the new theme you are focusing on is ―Social Media.‖ Create an outline of a lesson on this theme that integrates the students‘ use of at least 3 language skills.

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Task Based Instruction Task-based instruction involves the centrality of the task itself in a language course. This implies that meaning is primary, communication must be employed for the purpose of engaging in the task, there is some relationship to comparable real-world activities, and task completion typically has priority. Task based instruction focuses on a variety of real-world tasks and the functional purposes for which language needs to be used. Course goals tend to center on learners‘ pragmatic language functions. For example, in a task-based lesson or activity, students might be asked to conduct an interview, collaborate on possible solutions to an issue in their community, or simply participate in creating a class presentation. The following criteria (Willis and Willis, 2007) should be included in order for an activity to be considered a meaningful task: -

The activity or task should engage learners‘ interests The primary focus should be on meaning There should be a goal or an outcome and effectiveness of the task should be judged in terms of the outcome The activity should relate to real-world activities

An example task-based activity you could use with your students is having them think of a city where there is too much pollution. In pairs, students should list three alternative solutions to this problem. With their partnerr, they should compare the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. Then the students should discuss and decide which alternative would be the most cost effective, the most innovative, and the most environmentally friendly. Finally, the students should report their decisions to another pair and have a whole class discussion on which solution would be the best one to write a letter about to the mayor of the city.

Experiential Learning In experiential learning, one learns best by ―doing,‖ in which inductive learning activates strategies which enable students to monitor their own learning progress and gradually become more independent learners. Experiential learning places an emphasis on the psychomotor aspect of language learning, and through action, students utilize multiple skills. For example, the language experience approach (LEA), is a relatively popular type of experiential learning approach in elementary school teaching. The language experience approach is a whole language approach that promotes reading and writing through the use of personal experiences and oral language. Beginning literacy learners relate their experiences to the teacher who transcribes them and writes them on the board for the students to visualize.

ACTIVITY 5

Based on the above example, how might the activities integrate the four criteria listed by Willis? What types of language forms might the students need to be using during the task?

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ACTIVITY 6

Reflect on the four types of integrated skills instruction. Based on the grade, subject, and proficiency level of the students you are currently teaching or plan to teach, which of these types of integrated skills approaches would you implement for your classroom? Provide a brief example of how this type would be used for a lesson or activity.

These transcriptions are then used as the basis for other reading and writing as well as listening and speaking activities. Krashen and Terrell 1983 (qted. in Taylor, 1992) recommend two criteria for determining whether reading materials are appropriate for ESL learners: First of all, the reading must be at a comprehensible level of complexity and additionally, it should be interesting to the reader. Reading texts originating from learners' experiences meet these two criteria because the degree of complexity is determined by the learner's own language, and the texts relate to the learner's personal interests.

PRACTICAL TIPS FOR INTEGRATING THE LANGUAGE SKILLS In order to effectively integrate the language skills in ESL/EFL instruction, teachers should consider these suggestions: -

-

-

Learn more about the various ways to integrate language skills in the classroom (e.g., content-based, task-based, or a combination). Reflect on their current pedagogical approach and evaluate the extent to which the skills currently are or could become integrated. Develop and use exercises and activities involving active student participation, interaction and collaboration. Choose instructional materials, textbooks, technology, and activities that promote the integration of listening, reading, speaking, and writing, as well as the associated skills of syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation, for example. Even if a given course is labeled according to just one skill, remember that it is feasible and more beneficial to integrate the other language skills through appropriate tasks. Explicitly teach language-learning strategies and emphasize that a particular strategy can often enhance performance in multiple skills.

In addition to the aforementioned suggestions for teachers, students should have abundant opportunities to be exposed to the language in as many authentic mediums as possible. For example, students could listen to the new academic language of the lesson as the teacher uses visuals, manipulatives, realia, and other means to physically convey the meaning of the academic language. Since it is important to vary instruction and adapt it to multiple learning styles, students should also be able to see and read, for instance in posted graphic organizers or categories the new academic language. Furthermore, genuine learning is reinforced when students are provided with opportunities to practice and apply their newly acquired linguistic

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content; therefore, they should be encouraged to actually use the new academic language through active learning instructional activities. As another opportunity for students to reflect on their learning, teachers can facilitate tasks in which students write about what they have learned through expressive writing or answer questions using their very own words. Only when students have been offered fully integrated listening, speaking, reading and writing instructional activities would they be able to provide sufficient evidence of learning the language of the content areas. -

Keep in mind that a language instructor needs to constantly use a combination of these two sets in order to properly enable his or her students to use language confidently and effectively. Depending on the purpose of each particular task or lesson, the instructor may concentrate more in-depthly on either the ―accuracy‖ or the ―fluency‖ set, but a combination from both categories can effectively be implemented into practically any lesson.

SAMPLE INTEGRATED-SKILLS LESSON PLAN BASED ON THE NOVEL THE ALCHEMIST The following lesson has been developed based on Paolo Coelho‘s novel, The Achemist. It includes pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading activities, each integrating various language skills. Pattison, 1987 (qtd. in Akram, 2010) identified two sets of teaching having opposing goals:

ACTIVITY 7

Study Pattison‘s table below and design an activity that would combine at least 2 elements from both the accuracy and the fluency categories. What are some reasons for integrating components from both teaching approaches?

Set 1 Accuracy Knowledge about language Academic achievement Cognitive aims

Set 2 Fluency Skill in using language Social and personal development Affective aims

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Andreea Nicolaescu 1) Pre-Reading: Write-Pair-Share: Think about 1-2 proverbs from your culture, write them in your notebook, and pair with another student to discuss the implied meanings and contexts associated with your proverbs. (Use of skills: writing, listening, and speaking) 2) While-Reading: Read the excerpt below from Paolo Coelho‘s The Alchemist and highlight any words or sentences containing references to hardship or the testing of one‘s courage.

Infer and discuss the possible meanings of the proverb ―The darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn.‖ (use of skills: reading and speaking) "So, what should I do now?" the boy asked. ―Continue in the direction of the Pyramids," said the alchemist. "And continue to pay heed to the omens. Your heart is still capable of showing you where the treasure is." "Is that the one thing I still needed to know?" "No," the alchemist answered. "What you still need to know is this: before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we've learned as we've moved toward that dream. That's the point at which most people give up. It's the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one `dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.' "Every search begins with beginner's luck. And every search ends with the victor's being severely tested."

The boy remembered an old proverb from his country. It said that the darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn. 3) Post-Reading: Free-write about a time when you were faced with an obstacle or diffcult challenge and what measures you took to overcome it. Were you successful? What lessons did you learn? (use of skills: writing)

Read the following passage and design: ACTIVITY 8

1) a pre-reading activity integrating the listening and speaking skills and 2) a post-reading activity integrating the writing and speaking skills.

Richard Brautigan, "The Scarlatti Tilt" "It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin." That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver. (from Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970)

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CONCLUSION This chapter has provided an overview of the rationale for implementing an integrated skills approach within a language-learning classroom. It is safe to assume that most language teachers desire to promote genuine learning - the ability for students to actually use the language and to interact with a reasonable degree of fluency as well as accuracy. However, despite many teachers' efforts, learners often leave school ―knowing‖ a lot of grammar and vocabulary but unable to speak with confidence. They can construct sentences, read texts relatively well and even pass exams, but cannot effectively manage situations which require spontaneous spoken interaction. It is important to emphasize skill integration and meaningful communication through contextualized, theme-based, whole-language approaches so that learners may use higher-level skills rather than simply focusing on discrete language structures. Integrating the language skills also promotes the learning of real content, not just the dissection of language forms. More importantly, the integrated-skill approach, whether found in content-based or task-based language instruction or another form, can be highly motivating to students of all ages and backgrounds.

FURTHER READING Dixon, C. N., and Nessel, D. (l983). Language Experience Approach to Reading (And Writing). Eric Digest. Hayward, CA: Alemany Press. (ERIC No. ED 236 933). Hinkel, E. (2006). Current Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills. TESOL Quarterly, 40 (1), 109-131. Available at http://www.elihinkel.org/downloads/CurrentPerspectives.pdf Nunan, D. (1991). Communicative tasks and the language curriculum. TESOL Quarterly, 25, 279-295. Available at http://tesolexpert.com/home/ CommunicativeTasksAnd The LanguageCurriculum.pdf Stoller, F. L. (2002). Content-Based Second Language Instruction: What is it? TESOL. Available at http://www.carla.umn.edu/cobaltt/CBI.html

REFERENCES Akram A., and Malik A. Integration of Language Learning Skills in Second Language Acquisition. International Journal of Arts and Sciences, 3(14): 231-240 (2010) CDROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 InternationalJournal.org Brown, H. D. (2001). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. (2nd ed.) New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Hinkel, E. (2009). Integrating the Four Skills: Current and Historical Perspectives. In R. B. Kaplan (Ed.), Oxford Handbook in Applied Linguistics (2nd ed., pp. 110-126). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mohan, B. (1986). Language and Content. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Nunan, D. (1989). Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Oxford, R. L. (2001). Integrated Skills in the ESL/EFL Classroom. ESL Magazine, 16(1).

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Richards, J. C., and R. Schmidt, 2002. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. 3rd ed. London: Longman. Taylor, M., 1992. The Language Experience Approach and Adult Learners. ERIC Digest, Retrieved online from files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED350887.pdf Willis, Dave and Jane, (2007). Doing Task-based Teaching. Oxford University Press 2006 Retrieved online from http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/criteria-identifyingtasks-tbl

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 12

USING LITERATURE TO TEACH LANGUAGE SKILLS Aşkin Haluk Yildirim1 İzmir Katip Çelebi University, School of Foreign Languages, Izmir, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to : 1- have comprehensive background information on the use and benefits of using literature in EFL/ESL settings. 2- be informed about the practical uses of literature in teaching mainly four basic language skills. 3- be familiar with the ways of assessing the appropriate use of literature in different EFL/ESL settings. Study Questions 1. Discuss the possible pros and cons of using literature for language learning purposes. 2. In what ways do you think literature can serve as a tool to teach different language skills? 3. Compare and contrast the efficacy of traditional classroom materials and works of literature in terms of the means they provide in teaching a foreign/second language.

INTRODUCTION Using literature to teach language skills has been a matter of discussion since the 1960s. However, the use of literary works to teach languages dates back to a much earlier period. During the 19th century the primary means of language teaching was the grammar translation 1

E-mail: [email protected].

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method. The practitioners of this method would view and exploit literary texts as rich sources of translation. During this period works of literature were regarded as efficient pedagogical materials (Prodromou, 2000). Through the translation of literary texts in their mother tongue, the students were made to practise such language skills as grammar and vocabulary (Liaw, 2001). However, the onset of direct and audio-lingual methods during 1960s and 1970s brought about a radical change of opinion as to the use of literature as a language teaching tool. These methods that seemed to rise upon structural approaches put heavy emphasis on form thereby dismissing the role of literature in teaching a foreign language. From this point onwards purely linguistic concerns overshadowed the use of literary works for language teaching purposes. Even the emergence of CLT in the late 1970s and early 1980s could not prevent the exclusion of literature from the language teaching curricula. According to Maley (2001), one of the main reasons of this trend against the utilization of literature as a pedagogical tool was the lack of empirical research that would manifest the potential of literature as a beneficial language teaching source. Following a long period of silence, the use of literature in the language classroom experienced a revival starting from the middle of the 1980s. Under the influence of communicative trend, literature started to be regarded as a tool to assist the development of mainly communicative competence as well as ―a springboard for the development of critical thinking and aesthetic appreciation‖ which also contributes to the students‘ awareness on the culture and society of the relevant country (Bretz, 1990, pp. 335338). Recognizing their potential, many linguists began to view literary works in the classroom as authentic, pleasurable and cultural material (Hall, 2005, pp. 47-57). Since this reemergence of literature in the realm of language teaching, not only the use of literary works but also research, both empirical and theoretical, as to their role in language teaching has gradually gained momentum. Today, particularly the popularity of interdisciplinary studies has brought about an even greater focus on the pedagogical potential of literature particularly for language teaching purposes. Despite the difficulties of incorporating literary works in ELT curriculum, works of many scholars in the field strongly argue for the benefits that inclusion of literature would potentially bring. Many studies conducted by Lazar (1993), Cook (1994), and Shanahan (1997) draw attention to the potential that literature holds as a language teaching tool. Despite the concerns stated by a few linguists and educators, there has been a great deal of research that speaks in favor of literature as a pedagogical tool. Bradford (1968) introduces three ways through which works of literature are likely to be conducive to success in language teaching. First of all, literature provides a rich of source of vocabulary for the language learner. The second contribution of literature according to Bradford is the exceptional sentence structures that it hosts. Getting familiar with these structures in authentic settings is an advantage for language learners. Povey (1972) holds a similar view asserting that with its rich vocabulary pool and complex syntactical patterns literature helps language learners develop the extent of their proficiency levels both in terms of language use and linguistic competence. Finally, literary works introduce new cultural perspectives and give the chance to have a language experience in real life settings. As McKay (1982) states literature can be used to enhance awareness of students as to the diverse uses of language. Another important contribution of literature to language learning is regarded as its effect on critical thinking skills of students. Oster (1989) suggests that literature provides students different perspectives, which in turn extends students‘ vision and encourages critical thinking. Lazar (1993) draws attention to a similar potential by pointing out that literature might

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become a language teaching tool by fostering discussion, controversy and critical thinking. Another important benefit of literature is that through exposure to language intended for native speakers, students have the chance to learn different forms and conventions (Collie and Slater, 1991, p. 4). In this respect, literary works become real and meaningful models for language learners. One of the most detailed accounts trying to justify the role of literature in language teaching comes from Maley (2001), who lays out a number of reasons to use literary works in EFL/ESL settings: 1. Universality: All cultures and languages follow a certain literary tradition, which involve common themes such as nature, death, love and separation.2. Non-triviality: Literary texts present real and meaningful materials unlike the artificial trivialized language teaching resources. 3. Personal relevance: the events, views and emotions embedded in literature are relevant to learners‘ own experiences, so they can find or imagine correlations to their personal lives in works of literature. 4. Variety: Literary texts appear in a multitude of different forms and contents. This makes them enjoyable and motivating for language learners. 5. Interest: Literature deals with familiar subjects in an interesting and appealing manner 6. Economy and suggestive power: Through literary devices, literature has the power to say much with a minimum amount of expression. 7. Ambiguity: The perceived meaning in literary texts can vary from individual to individual, which makes it an invaluable source for discussion and interaction. In today‘s text books students have little opportunity to be involved in authentic use of language. The settings and activities provided by these materials are mostly artificial and remote from real communication. Literature requires students to actively participate in meaningful activities and eliminates the disadvantages of mechanical process which is unfortunately still predominant in EFL/ESL classrooms worldwide. Duff and Maley (1991) bases the need for the incorporation of literature into language teaching curriculum upon its ―linguistic, methodological and motivational‖ potential (p. 48). Unlike the referential features of traditional text books and materials, literary texts are representational, which helps learners to use and develop their cognitive skills (McRae, 1996).

USING LITERATURE TO TEACH LANGUAGE SKILLS Literature is a rich source hosting numerous characteristics of original language which can serve a useful purpose for the development of reading, writing, speaking and listening skills (Stern, 1991). Literary texts supply diverse linguistic input and creative stimuli that engage students in meaningful, real life settings thereby becoming an effective source of motivation. They appeal not only to receptive but also to productive skills. Today, the use of literary works in the language classroom can turn into an amazing learning experience. These texts can become even more attractive and motivating by the support of movies, music videos, audio texts and podcasts. Along with the mastery of grammatical patterns and new vocabulary items, literary texts provide opportunities for extensive practice in all four basic language skills. Works of literature can both be used for classroom activities and for activities outside the classroom. Simplified and abridged versions of literary texts enable their use for all proficiency levels. Genres of literature that we can use as a pedagogical resource in the language classroom are novels, plays/drama, short stories, poems and songs.

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GENRES OF LITERATURE USED IN TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS Novels Why Use Novels Novels are potentially rich sources of literature that may be used for language teaching purposes. They may be beneficial either as an intensive or extensive means of study. Widdowson (1984) suggests that novels contribute to ―meaning making processes and language capacity in our learners‖ (p. 246). From a similar perspective, Hardison and Sonchaeng (2005) notes that the texts offered by novels are more meaningful and students have the chance to be exposed to ―authentic communicative events‖ instead of the monotonous dialogues practiced in most EFL/ESL classes (p. 594). Compared to traditional classroom texts, most of which offer mechanical means of practice within a limited and largely artificial context, novels create a learning environment that enables the practice of a wide range of creative and life-like activities. The major concern regarding the use of novels in the classroom is that they may be hard to handle in the limited course hours. However, this is a drawback that can easily be overcome by careful planning. Provided that the teacher chooses the right material and plan wisely, the benefits of using novels will far outweigh the risks. Helton, Asamani and Thomas (1998) outline the possible benefits of using novels in the classroom as follows: Novels,   

   

stimulate students‘ imagination, help students to identify the emotions of the characters so that they can learn how others cope with situations and problems similar to their own experiences, help them master the skills that will enable them to acquire information, process this knowledge, identify problems, formulate alternatives, and arrive at meaningful, thoughtful, effective decisions and solutions, develop oral and written language skills, serve as a springboard for a multitude of holistic learning and critical thinking activities beginning with basic comprehension and writing, present a unique way of teaching reading by getting students involved and excited about the reading process, motivate students to become a lifelong reader, since literature provides students with a wide range of language varieties like sociolects, regional dialects, jargon, idiolects, etc., it develops their sociolinguistic competence in the target language. Hence, incorporating literature into a foreign language teaching program as a powerful source for reflecting the sociolinguistic aspects of the target language gains importance (pp. 1-5).

Target Skills Novels can help students to improve all language skills. Although their benefits are mostly associated with reading and writing skills, novels with audio scripts, graphics, movies, theatrical adaptations can offer a much wider range of activities involving speaking and listening skills. As Povey (1979) suggests that using authentic literary texts like novels for

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teaching purposes helps students improve all language skills "because literature will extend linguistic knowledge by giving evidence of extensive and subtle vocabulary usage, and complex and exact syntax" (p. 162). Of all the genres used as teaching materials, novels have the most extensive potential to contribute to different aspects of the language learning process provided that the material chosen fits into the needs and proficiency levels of the learners.

Role of the Teacher During all language learning activities based on a novel the teacher should refrain from being the sole authority in the classroom. Whatever the type of the activity is, students should be allowed to learn by active participation. During the whole process, depending on the type of activity, the teacher may act as a guide, facilitator, organizer or prompter. The teacher only acts as a controller during the presentation stage if necessary. Activity 1 Compare and contrast the potential difficulties and benefits of using novels as language teaching materials.

Drama Why Use Drama Drama is one of the most enjoyable literary resources that can be used in EFL/ESL settings. As Fleming (2006) maintains drama is by nature student-centered. It calls for the active participation of all students in activities conducted in the classroom. Through activities based on a work of drama learners can have the chance to act, move, play and learn simultaneously. As Phillips (2003) notes drama has the potential to get the students involved in various aspects, ―through their bodies, minds, emotions, language and social interaction‖ (p. 6). On the other hand, the main practice of drama is acting out, which may be difficult to organize in crowded groups. However, the teacher can deal with this difficulty by arranging group work activities. Thus, this argument cannot be solely a reason to exclude drama from the language classroom as its gains are too valuable to be overlooked. Maley (2005) summarizes the educational benefits of drama as follows: 



 

It integrates language skills in a natural way. Careful listening is a key feature. Spontaneous verbal expression is integral to most of the activities; and many of them require reading and writing, both as part of the input and the output. It integrates verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication, thus bringing together both mind and body, and restoring the balance between physical and intellectual aspects of learning. It draws upon both cognitive and affective domains, thus restoring the importance of feeling as well as thinking. By fully contextualizing the language, it brings the classroom interaction to life through an intensive focus on meaning.

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   

  

The emphasis on whole-person learning and multi-sensory inputs helps learners to capitalize on their strength and to extend their range. In doing so, it offers unequalled opportunities for catering to learner differences. It fosters self-awareness (and awareness of others), self-esteem and confidence; and through this, motivation is developed. Motivation is likewise fostered and sustained through the variety and sense of expectancy generated by the activities. There is a transfer of responsibility for learning from teacher to learners which is where it belongs. It encourages an open, exploratory style of learning where creativity and the imagination are given scope to develop. This, in turn, promotes risk-taking, which is an essential elements in effective language learning It has a positive effect on classroom dynamics and atmosphere, thus facilitating the formation of a bonded group, which learns together. It is an enjoyable experience. It is low-resource. For most of the time, all you need is a 'roomful of human beings' (p. 1-2).

Target Skills Drama can provide the means to practice all four language skills. Yet, mainly it is effective in developing listening and speaking skills. Apart from its contribution to oral skills, drama can also help students discover their potential and capabilities. Through activities of this type students are likely to develop a positive attitude towards language learning. Role of the Teacher Because drama activities are inherently learner-centered, the teacher should avoid having the dominant role in the class during these activities. Rather, the teacher needs to act as a guide and/or facilitator. Hoetker (1969) draws attention to this point by stating that "the teacher who too often imposes his authority or who conceives of drama as a kind of inductive method for arriving at preordained correct answer will certainly vitiate the developmental values of drama and possibly its educational value as well." A strictly teacher- centered attitude may seriously hamper the progress of the students expected to take part in drama activities. Activity 2 Do you agree with the notion that drama can be more effective in teaching productive skills rather than receptive ones? Why or why not?

Short Stories Why Use Short Stories Of all literary genres, short stories are generally regarded as the most effective and employable teaching resource in the classroom. Poetry is found risky because of its

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metaphoric nature as well as nonstandard use of language, while novels, on account of their length, may be hard to incorporate into the language teaching syllabus. Drama is also viewed as less suitable for teaching purposes than short stories on the grounds that acting out a play or a similar activity may be difficult to perform in a large student group. In this respect, Poe describes the short story as a narrative ―that can be read at one sitting of from one-half hour to two hours and is limited to a certain unique or single effect to which every detail is subordinate‖ (as cited in Abrams, 1981, p. 76). Compared to novels in particular, short stories have a much easier plot for students to follow. They also contain fewer characters and less complex literary devices than novels. These and some other factors make them easier to incorporate into language curricula and syllabi. From a similar point of view Collie and Slater (1991) notes the benefits of short stories as follows:    

One or two class hours are generally sufficient to introduce a short story. Students can study on short stories without strict supervision or assistance because of their relatively simple nature. There are many types of short stories available that appeal to different tastes and interests. Finally, short stories can be utilized at all proficiency levels, beginner to advance (p. 196).

Target Skills Just like novels, short stories can be used as effective teaching tools for all language skills. They can be good models for writing activities and their length allows the teacher to perform intensive reading activities within course hours. Today, there are numerous short story audio books, which can be used to perform listening activities. The dialogues in short stories and their simple story line provide a rich and practical source for communicative activities. Drawing attention to their overall benefit, Murdoch (2002) states that ―short stories can, if selected and exploited appropriately, provide quality text content which will greatly enhance ELT courses for learners at intermediate levels of proficiency‖ (p. 9). Particularly for the teacher who sets out to use literary texts in his class for the first time, short stories may be a good option to begin with. Role of the Teacher Using a short story for language teaching purposes is probably the easiest among the other genres of literature. The teacher‘s role as controller is normally limited to clarifying few literary devices and if needed a set of new vocabulary items. During the rest of the course hours the teacher acts mainly as an organizer. The activities based on the short story are carried out under his/her guidance with minimum amount of interference. When students encounter difficulties while performing the assigned tasks or roles, the teacher may also act as a facilitator by providing positive and encouraging feedback. Activity 3 Short stories are believed to be the most appropriate literary works to use in EFL/ESL classrooms particularly at lower proficiency levels. Discuss the reasons in groups.

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Poems and Songs Why Use Poetry In the realm of language teaching the definition of poetry covers a broader spectrum. For teaching purposes, pop-songs, haiku, pattern poems, picture poems, nursery rhymes and folksongs can all be regarded as poetry. Poetry is generally viewed as the most difficult genre that can be used as a language teaching tool. Brindley (1980) argues that poems often deal with geographical or social settings remote to the students' experience. However, probably, the greatest barrier to understanding poetry is its elliptical, metaphorical, and highly allusive language. Poetry, from this perspective (i.e. as a high-level, individual reading activity), has little to offer the EFL classroom, especially at middle school and high school level (Brindley, 1980, p. 1). As Brindley states poetry presents many difficulties for EFL/ESL learners due largely to its metaphoric nature and irregular use of language. In view of these reservations, poetry has not been considered ―as ‗proper‘ material for foreign language learning‖ (Maley & Duff, 1989, p. 6). However, largely as a result of the changing tendencies in language teaching such as the shift from form-based learning to meaning-oriented acquisition and from product-oriented learning towards process-oriented learning, use of poetry for teaching purposes are now supported by many scholars. Some of the benefits of using poetry and/or songs in language teaching are as follows: 

 



 

Learning to read and write poetry can be an effective tool for developing English literacy, in that, from time to time it is used to express feelings in texts such as birthday cards, love letters. Understanding the meaning in a favorite song or just being able to utter its rhyme is almost a daily activity of many teenagers nowadays, which makes understanding poetry essential for the social aspect of language learning. Listening and pronunciation activities based on poetry or songs are not only enjoyable but also efficient in developing listening comprehension skills. Exposure to the sounds of poetry and songs increases the awareness and unconscious absorption of language patterns and vocabulary. Whereas the stylistic characteristics of a poem leave a trace on readers‘ eyes, the sounds of language such as the rhyme and rhythm in poetry and songs penetrate into the mind and enhance the language learning process (Maley & Duff, 1989, pp. 10-11). Poetry allows the formation of a safe learning community where learners gain the self-confidence to act without constraints and feel free from the fear of being ridiculed. In this way, ―free communication can take place‖ among learners (Arnold & Brown, 1999, p. 10). Poetry can stimulate group discussions and activities, Carefully-selected English poems offer a wide range of themes that appeal to the interests and likes of learners since they supply them with ―meaningful and memorable contexts for processing and interpreting new language‖ (Lazar, 1993, p. 17).

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Role of the Teacher Since poetry as a pedagogical tool is usually used for upper-intermediate and advanced learners, the roles of the teacher are more varied and challenging. The metaphorical nature of poems and songs often requires feedback or presentation from the teacher. The discussion sessions are generally stimulated and moderated by the language teacher so that students can perform the activities more efficiently. In order to trigger interaction through use of poetry in EFL/ESL classroom, depending on the difficulty of the text and level of students, the teacher may sometimes have to act as a controller and/or facilitator. As in the implementation of activities based on other genres of literature, teacher‘s role as organizer is essential from the beginning to the end of the teaching process. Activity 4 Using poetry in the language classroom might require more effort than the other genres on the part of the teacher. Make up a to-do list for the teacher who wants to use poetry in the language classroom.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO TEACHING LITERATURE Below you will find a fairly detailed account of existing approaches and models developed by different scholars and linguistics. Although each of them is based on a theoretical assumption and has a contribution to make to language development, only some of them are actually appropriate for language teaching purposes in general.

The Critical Literary Approach The main focus of this approach is on literary elements in the text. The students are required to be informed about the literary devices and peculiarities. Students taught through this approach should have intermediate or above intermediate language proficiency (Maley, 1989).

The Stylistic Approach According to Maley, the characteristic of the stylistic approach better fits the requirements in a EFL/ESL classroom because it deals with literature as a text and analysis of language is given priority (Maley, 1989).

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Language-based Model In this model, literary texts are mainly used for language development. From this perspective it resembles Maley‘s stylistic approach. Although literary merits of a work should not be totally ignored, the texts are viewed and studied in terms of the linguistic elements they involve (Carter & Long, 1991).

Literature as Content or Culture Model In this model, literary materials serve as a catalyst that would make students familiar with the cultural notions of the language like the history, literary theories, theory of genres, and biography of the authors (Carter & Long, 1991; Lazar, 1993).

Literature as Personal Growth or Enrichment The main purpose of teaching through Personal growth model is not to develop language proficiency but to create awareness as to the association of literary experience with the students‘ real-life experience (Carter & Long, 1991).

The Story Grammar Approach (SGA) Story grammar originated in the early twentieth century as a result of the analyses of folktales by anthropologists. The Story Grammar approach aims to create genre-awareness in textual analysis, which in turn is expected to enhance comprehension of the target text (Amer, 2003).

Reader Response Approach (RRA) In this approach, learners study literature as an end itself, not for language learning purposes. Therefore, it is similar to Maley‘s critical literary approach (Amer, 2003).

New Criticism New criticism generally focuses on the analysis of long texts from Old literature. It does not address learners‘ real language needs (Van, 2009).

Structuralism Structuralism involves the utilization of linguistic and structural aspects of a text (Van, 2009).

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Stylistics This approach is based on the notion that studying the linguistic features of a literary text should lead to aesthetic experience (Van, 2009).

Reader-Response In this approach the reader‘s interactions with the text result in the interpretation. In other words, the interpretation is achieved through the interaction between the text and the reader (Van, 2009).

Language-based Language based approach involves the use of literary texts for language teaching through activities such as cloze procedures, brainstorming, summarizing, jigsaw reading, etc. (Van, 2009).

Critical Literacy Critical Literacy approach calls for in-depth analysis of literary texts. Students are supposed to discover and comprehend the underlying meanings in a work of literature so that they can reach critical awareness (Van, 2009).

Integrated Approach Integrated approach is one of the most effective ways that can be adopted by language teachers willing to use literary text as a tool in EFL/ESL classrooms. It provides a coherent model through which all language skills are taught by incorporating a set of text- based, student – centered activities which as Collie and Slater (1987: 8) suggest ―add fresh momentum into the teaching of literature by stimulating students‘ desire to read and encouraging their responses‖. Savvidou (2004) suggests a plan where the integrated teaching process is explained stage by stage: Stage 1: Preparation and Anticipation Stage 2: Focusing Stage 3: Preliminary Response Stage 4: Working at it – I Stage 5: Working at it – II Stage 6: Interpretation and Personal Response

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Within the framework offered by Savvidou any literary genre can be used as a language teaching resource as long as the material chosen appeals to the needs, proficiency levels and interests of the learners. Activity 5 Of all the above approaches and models, which one(s) do you think is/are likely to be effective in EFL/ESL classrooms. State reasons for your choice(s).

Activities Among the activities listed below you can choose the ones that you think will be most appropriate for your group of students. You can also create your own activities or modify an existing one according to your needs. Some of the activities listed under a certain type of skill below may be used to teach different skills at the same time. For example, note-taking can be regarded both as a listening and writing activity. You decide which activity to use at which stage of your lesson plan with regards to your methodology, course objectives, the literary text, the needs and proficiency levels of your students. As it covers all language skills, adopting the integrated approach can help the students at all levels to get the utmost benefit out of the literary text that is being used as a pedagogical tool. The most common activities used to develop language skills are as follows:

Reading   

  

Skimming: skimming is reading rapidly to get only the main idea or a general overview of the text. It is a particularly useful activity in pre-reading stage. Scanning: scanning is reading the text for specific information. The teacher asks students to find out a specific point by reading the text quickly. Making inferences: students are asked to make inferences from a specific section or part of the text. The teacher wants them to identify what lies beneath the stated meaning. Predicting: After reading a fragment of the text, students are asked to make predictions about the rest of the story. This can also be used as a speaking activity. Sequencing: Students are asked to put, for example, lines from a jumbled poem in the correct order. Previewing: previewing activities are used to build background knowledge before reading the main text. Previewing can be achieved through charts, quizzes, movies, pictures or through other means created by the teacher.

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Listening   





Listening for the main idea: Students listen to the texts focusing on the main idea of the literary text. Note-taking: Students listen and take notes. This can be used as a writing activity as well. Summarizing the passage: Students listen to the literary text or a fragment of the literary text. Afterwards, they are asked to make a summary of what they have heard. Summarizing phase might be written or spoken. Therefore, it is not just a listening comprehension activity. It can also be used for the development of speaking and writing skills. Predicting content: Students listen to a fragment of the literary text, after which they are asked to make predictions about the topic or story presented. As they also need to talk about their predictions, this type of activity can also be used to practice speaking skills. Listening for specific information: Students listen to the literary text or a fragment of the literary text to identify specific information the teacher asks them to find out.

Speaking 

Role Play: Role-play is the general term for a set of activities in which students act out the role of an imaginary person either in a supposed or real situation (Venugopal, 1986). According to Livingston (1983) through role-play activities learners get the chance to practice language aspects of role-behavior, which involves the actual roles outside the classroom. Role Play activities are effective means of exploration for the students. Through these activities they can find out what lies beneath the complex social situations presented in a literary text (Blatner, 2002). Role play activities create an environment that is not only enjoyable but also productive. Most teachers, at some point in their career, experience the disappointment of asking their pupils to discuss a particular topic and get nothing in return. Assigning roles to the students makes them a part of the story and thus they become an actor rather than a spectator. In this way, they understand what it feels like to be on the other side (Wrentschur & Altman, 2002). The types of role-play activities are as follows: o Dramatic plays o Story dramatization o Sociodrama o Seminar style presentation o Debates and interview As long as the literary text chosen is carefully graded, these activities can be used at all proficiency levels. From beginner to advanced role-play activities will contribute to the overall development of language proficiency.  Mime: Mime can be defined as "a non-verbal representation of an idea or story through gesture, bodily movement and expression" (Dougill, 1987, p. 13). Students simply act out a story or an idea through bodily movements, gestures and mimics

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



  

without resort to oral expressions. Mime helps students develop self-confidence, creativity and imagination. Used appropriately mime can be ―a source of great enjoyment‖ for the learners (Hayes, 1984, p. 28). Feeling that they can even express themselves without the help of spoken language acts as a catalyst to produce and encourage interaction before or after the actual mime activity. As a warm up activity you may ask your students to act out a couple of concepts relevant to the actual literary text you intend to use. This would provide an insight and facilitate the process before going through the actual text itself. Simulation: Jones (1982) describes simulation as a ―reality of function in a simulated and structured environment‖ (p. 5). Generally role-play and simulation activities overlap, that is, it is almost impossible to draw a clear line of distinction between the two. However, this doesn‘t seem much of a concern for the teacher as both groups of activities are likely to contribute much to students‘ progress in the target language. In simulation activities students act out either themselves or an imaginary character in a predefined setting. For example, if you are teaching through a short story, a dialogue in a specific part of the story may be simulated by assigning roles to the students. The events may be arranged identically or in a different course. Oral activities in general may be practiced in various forms of dialogues such as invitations, introductions, complaints or greetings. The approach should be in parallel to the literary text that is being used as a pedagogical tool. Improvisation: Hodgson and Richards (1974) define improvisation as "spontaneous response to the unfolding of unexpected situation‖ (p. 2). During improvisation activities the teacher usually acts as a guide with minimum amount of directions. Improvisation takes place spontaneously. At the initial phase these types of activities may seem difficult for the students, most of whom would probably feel anxious and reluctant. However, in time as they discover their potential and capabilities, they will get involved more enthusiastically. Before beginning improvisation the teacher informs students about the setting they are in and the characters they are supposed to portray. The rest is entirely built upon students‘ imagination. For example, the teacher tells the students that they are a team of adventurers getting ready for a challenging journey in their base camp. Taking this information as their point of departure the students are free to create a world of their own, even something totally different from the actual story in the target literary text. These activities may be organized in groups or as a whole class activity. Discussion: students are asked to discuss independently a relevant topic or given clues to trigger discussion on a specific aspect of the issues in the literary text. Oral reading: Making the students read texts aloud helps the development of pronunciation. It is also a motivating activity particularly at low proficiency levels. Presentations: The students are assigned to make presentations on the topics relevant to the ones mentioned in the literary text.

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Writing 

Controlled Writing: Controlled writing activities are particularly appropriate for beginners who need to recognize and practice certain grammatical patterns in the target language. Among the specific techniques used in this type of activity we can mention the following:  discussions  debates  brainstorming  asking information questions on the target text  clustering  conference  Guided Writing: Guided writing activities are most effective when used at intermediate levels. In this type of activity students are generally expected to respond to a set of input provided by the teacher or his/her peers. For example, a group of questions may be directed to the students and they may be asked to reconstruct a text through the answers of these questions. Another option might be to provide the topic and/or the concluding statement of a paragraph and ask them to generate the supporting statements. Most common techniques in this respect are as follows:  Using a shared approach (Shared writing is a joint writing approach in which both tutor and learners contribute to the plan, the ideas, and the language of the text they construct together. As they work with the tutor to construct a text through shared (or guided) writing, learners brainstorm ideas, plan an outline, and draft a piece of writing for a particular purpose in a specific form.)  Acronyms (Acronyms provide reminders of different text structures.)  Templates (Templates provide an outline or prompts for a piece of writing.)  Writing frames (Writing frames provide a skeleton or outline of a planned text that includes prompts for learner writers.)  Reproducing the Model: Activities based on reproduction of the literary texts that are being used in the classroom help EFL/ESL students, particularly those at high proficiency levels, to improve their writing skills to a great extent. Paraphrasing, summarizing and adaptation are among the most beneficial and popular techniques used for this type of activities.  Paraphrasing (Students restate the meaning of a text or passage using their own words. During the restatement process students also need to alter the structures used in the original sentence.)  Summarizing (A summary is a collection of the most essential points of the original information in a nutshell. Students are instructed to write a summary of a chapter or the specific part of a novel they have read or heard.)  Adaptation (Students are asked to rewrite prose fiction into dialogue or, reversely, rewriting a play or a scene into narrative. This activity helps students to become aware of the variations between written and spoken English (Stern, 1991, p. 333).

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SAMPLE LESSON PLAN Course material: ‗Everyday Use‘ by Alice Walker (Short Story) Course Objectives:  

To develop reading, writing, speaking and listening skills of students through integrated activities based on the literary text, To create an awareness about racial discrimination.

Age group: 15-18 Proficiency Level: Intermediate Duration: 2-3 hours (may change depending on the pace of the students) Social Issue for discussion: racial discrimination Literary devices: metaphors and symbols Suggested Strategy: Integrated Approach Warm-up (Suggested Activities)  Drawing Game: Start with a drawing game. Choose the items you want them to guess from the story. (Suggestions: dasher, polaroid, quilt)  Charade: Give students flashcards and ask them to pantomime what is written on the card. Try to choose the words that will be helpful while reading the main text. Pre-reading Stage Previewing: Establishing the necessary background knowledge  Students watch a short video clip about American civil war.  Pictures about Black Pride movement are shown so that students get informed about the setting and time of the story, all of which help them to understand the overall context.  A brief biographical information about Alice Walker is given by the teacher Prediction: Arousing interest  Students try to make guesses about the content of the story by looking at its title. Tell them to make predictions considering the background knowledge they have just been given during previewing activity.  Students watch a fragment of a video clip in which racial discrimination is introduced through a short drama. Afterwards, they are asked to guess what happens next in the clip. First, they write down what they think. Then, they speak about it. Vocabulary in Context: teaching new vocabulary items  Some of the key vocabulary items are presented in sentences and the students guess the meaning of these words. The sentences should not be taken from the text itself. If the students fail to guess the meaning of any vocabulary item, teacher gives a definition or provides more examples, similar words or pictures to make them guess or learn the meaning. (Suggested words from the story: furtive, recompose, doctrine, heritage)

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While-Reading Stage Skimming: reading for the main idea  Students read the story quickly to identify the main idea. Model reading: Reading for pronunciation  The teacher model reads the story paying attention to pronunciation, intonation etc. Silent reading: Intensive reading for details  Students read the passage silently paying attention to plot and characters. Presentation: Helping students with language, vocabulary, plot and characters.  The teacher clarifies the meaning of passive vocabulary items and some grammatical structures for recognition if any. Cultural meanings, concepts or events are also explained if necessary.  The teacher helps students to have a deeper understanding of plot, characters and main theme(s) of the story.

Post-Reading Stage Note-taking and summarizing: integrated listening and writing practice  Students listen to the audio version of the short story and take notes.  By making use of the notes they take, students write a brief summary of the story Role Play: integrated writing and speaking practice  Students work in pairs/groups and write short dialogues based on the key actions or events in the story.  Students act out the roles of some characters from the story in the form of dialogues they write beforehand. (For example between Dee and her mother) Discussion: integrated listening and speaking practice as well as work on narrative point of view  Students work in groups.  Students discuss the main theme of the story (Racial Discrimination), during which they ask and answer questions. The teacher acts as the moderator during the whole discussion session. Activity 6 Design your own lesson plan based on any of the genres presented in this chapter making use of the suggested activities and the lesson plan sample presented above.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, we focused on the use and role of literature in the language classroom. There is surely more to discuss as to why and how we can make use of literature as a language teaching tool. However, even the limited amount of information presented here clearly indicates the fact that works of literature have so much to offer in the EFL/ESL classroom. Such a rich source can help generate a much more effective learning outcome provided that the teacher is equipped with the necessary knowledge to use it pedagogically. Lazar (1990) suggests that teachers who would like to use literature as a teaching tool should assess both the possible drawbacks and educational benefits along with linguistic opportunities (pp. 204-205). Using literature in the classroom has its risks as well as benefits. Teachers should be aware of both and take careful steps in order not to hamper the language learning process. Whatever the genre is, the material the teacher intends to use in the classroom should be in line with learners‘ needs and proficiency levels. The activities must be designed to reveal the interactive, creative and motivating potential of literary texts so that students can have a more powerful learning experience than the one promised in traditional texts. Although it may be difficult to build a curriculum in a particular sequence that is entirely made up of literary texts, works of literature can accompany textbooks in various ways and are potentially capable of contributing to the development of all language skills. For example, using a novel as a textbook might be too radical a decision unless there is a perfect match between the literary text and course objectives. However, using a novel to support and enrich classroom practice and activities may help the teacher immensely to achieve his/her goals. Literature will help the practice of language in a meaningful context. Literary texts help students master both receptive and productive language skills. Teachers using literature for language learning purposes should be informed about the approaches and models they can use. Of all the approaches presented in this chapter, you can use the one that best suits your needs. However, in general it is advised that using an integrated approach will render literary texts and the learning outcomes produced through them much more efficient.

FURTHER READING Bassnett, S., & Grundy, P. (1993). Language through literature. London: Longman. Brumfit, C.J. & Carter, R.A. (1986). Literature and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carter, R, & McRae, J. (eds.) (1996). Language, Literature and the Learner. London and New York, Longman. Collie, J. & Slater S. (1990). Literature in the language Classroom: A Resource Book of Ideas and Activities. Cambridge, CUP. Duff, A & Maley, A (2007). Literature (Resource Books for Teachers). Oxford University Press. Hall, G. (2005). Literature in Language Education. New York: Palgrave. Lazar, G. (1994). Literature and Language Teaching: A guide for teachers and trainers. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Maley, A. (2001). Literature in the Language Classroom. In R. Carter and D.Nunan (eds.). The Cambridge Guide to TESOL, 180-185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRae, J. (1994). Literature with a small "I", London, Prentice Hall. Stern, S.L. (1991). An integrated approach to literature ESL/ EFL. In M. Celce- Murcia (ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (2nd ed). New York: Newbury House, 328-346.

REFERENCES Abrams, M.H. (1981). A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Amer, A. (2003). Teaching EFL/ESL literature. The Reading Matrix, 3 (2), 63-73. Arnold, J. & Brown, H.D. (1999). A map of the terrain. In J. Arnold (Ed.). Affect in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-24. Blatner, A. (2002). Role playing in education. Retrieved from www.blatner.com/adam/pdntbk /rlplayedu.htm. Bradford, A. (1968). Reading literature and learning a second. Language Learning, 18, 199– 210. Bretz, M. L. (1990). Reaction: Literature and communicative competence: A springboard for the development of critical thinking and aesthetic appreciation. Foreign Language Annals, 23(4), 335-338. Brindley, D. J. (1980). Breaking the Poetry Barrier: Towards Understanding and Enjoying Poetry. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Conference on the Teaching of English. Sydney, Australia, 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-24. Carter, R. & Long, M.N. (1991). Teaching Literature. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Cook, G. (1994). Discourse and literature: The interplay of form and mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collie, J., & Slater, S. (1991). Literature in the language classroom. (5th ed.). Glasgow: Cambridge University Press. Culler, J. (2002). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Revised edition: Routledge Classics. Dougill, J. (1987). Drama Activities for Language Learner. Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London. Duff, A. & Maley, A. (1991). Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fleming, M. (2006). Drama and language teaching: The relevance of Wittgenstein's concept of language games. Humanizing language teaching Magazine, 4. Retrieved from http://www.hltmag.co.uk/jul06/mart0l.htm. Hall, G. (2005). Literature in Language Education. New York: Palgrave. Hardison, M. D., & Sonchaeng, C. (2005). Theater Voice Training and Technology in Teaching Oral Skills: Integrating the Components of a Speech Event. System, 33 (3): 593-608.

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Hayes, S. K. (1984). Drama as a second language: A practical Handbook for language teachers. National Extension College. Helton, C.-A., Asamani, J., & Thomas, E.D. (1998). ―A ‗Novel‘ Approach to the Teaching of Reading‖. Tennessee State: Tennessee State University, p.p: 1-5. Hodgson, J., & Richards, E. (1974). Improvisation. London: Eyre Methuen. Hoetker, J. (1969). Dramatics and the teaching of literature. Champaign, Illinois: national Council of Teachers of English. ERIC clearinghouse on the teaching of English. Jones, K. (1982). Simulations in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lazar, G. (1990). Using novels in the language-learning classroom. ELT, 44/3: 204-214. Lazar, G. (1993). Literature and language teaching: a guide for teachers and trainers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liaw, M.-L. (2001). Exploring Literary Responses in an EFL Classroom. Foreign Language Annals, 34, 35–44. Livingston C. (1983). Role Play in Language Learning. Longman, Essex, Harlow. Maley, A. (1989). Down from the pedestal: literature as a resource. In Brumfit, C.J. & Carter, R.A. (Eds.), Literature and the Learner: Methodological Approaches (pp. 10-23). London: McMillan. Maley, A. (2001). Literature in the Language Classroom. In R. Carter & D.Nunan (eds.). The Cambridge Guide to TESOL, 180-185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maley, A. & Alan D. (1989). The Inward Ear: Poetry in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Maley, A. & Duff, A. (2005). Drama Techniques: A resource book of communication activities for language teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKay. S. (1982). Literature in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 529-536. McRae, J. (1994). Literature with a small 'l'. Macmillan Education. McRae, J. (1996). Representational Language Learning: From Language Awareness to Text Awareness. In: Ronald Carter and John McRae (Eds.). Language, Literature and the Learner: Creative Classroom Practice. London: Addison Wesley Longman Limited. 1640. Murdoch, G. (2002). Exploiting well-known short stories for language skills development. IATEFL LCS SIG Newsletter, 23, 9-17. Oster, J. (1989). Seeing with different eyes: another view of literature in the ESL class. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 85-103. Philips, S. C. (2003). Drama with children. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Povey, J. F. (1967). Literature in TESOL Programs: The Language and the culture. TESOL Quarterly, 1, 40-46. Povey J. F. (1972). Literature in TESL Programmes: The Language and the Culture. Teaching English as Second Language: A Book of Readings. Eds. Harold B. Allen, and Russel N. Campbell. Delhi: Tata McGrawHill. 185-191. Povey J. F. (1979). The Teaching of Literature in Advanced ESL Classes. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Eds. Marianne Celce-Murcia, and Lois McIntosh. Rowley: Newbury House Publishers. 162-186. Prodromou, L. (2000). Reason not the need: Shakespeare in ELT. IATEFL, 156. Retrieved from: http://www. iatefl.org/archives/Texts/156Prodmorou

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Savvidou, C. (2004). An integrated approach to the teaching of literature in the EFL classroom. The Internet TESL Journal, 12. Shanahan, D. (1997). Articulating the Relationship Between Language, Literature and Culture: Toward a New Agenda for Foreign Language Teaching and Research. The Modern Language Journal. 81, 2, 164-174. Stern, S.L. (1991). An integrated approach to literature ESL/ EFL. In M. Celce- Murcia (ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (2nd ed). New York: Newbury House, 328-346. Topping, D. M. (1968). Linguistics or Literature: an approach to Language. TESOL Quarterly 2 (2): 95-100. Van, T. T. M. (2009). The relevance of literary analysis to teaching literature in the EFL classroom. English Teaching Forum, 3, 2-9. Venugopal, S. (1986). The use of drama in ELT: A perspective. The English teacher Journal, 15:1. Widdowson, H. (1984). Explorations in Applied Linguistics 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wretschur, M. & Altmann, P. (2002). Enhancing cultural awareness through cultural production theater. Retrieved from http://www.akutemia.org/eca/articles/opressed.html.

In: Teaching Language Skills Editors: Banu Inan-Karagul and Dogan Yuksel

ISBN: 978-1-63321-797-3 © 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 13

USING TASKS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Gokce Bayraktar1* Kocaeli University, Faculty of Education English Language Teaching Department, Kocaeli, Turkey

THE GOALS OF THE CHAPTER After reading this chapter, students will be able to: 1. Describe a task and the basic task cycles of Task-Based Learning and Teaching (TBLT). 2. Classify different types of tasks that should exist in a TBLT lesson. 3. Carry out analyses of TBLT activities. 4. Reflect about TBLT approach in relation to other approaches within the English Language Teaching (ELT) field.

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. How can we characterize a task? 2. What are the basic task cycles and classroom activities used during the inclass language learning period through task-based approach? 3. Which aspects of TBLT differ from the other approaches in ELT?

I. INTRODUCTION Although Task-Based language learning (TBLL), also known as task-based language teaching (TBLT) or task-based instruction (TBI), is quiet a popular term in ELT field, this

*

E-mail: [email protected]

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methodology do not seem to have a fixed definition. However, it can be defined in general terms as Foster (1999:69) suggests: TBLL methodologies share a common idea: giving learners tasks to transact, rather than items to learn, provides an environment which best promotes the natural language learning process.

This method has become a corner-stone of many educational institutions and ministries of education around the world (Nunan, 2004: 13). This might result from the fact that it gives an emphasis on ―means‖ rather than ―product‖. It has gained popularity as it also encourages learners to be reflective learners, and welcomes a wide range of learning styles. Learning with an explicit sense of purpose is key to student motivation and involvement and, thus it is consistent with current theories of education. Another reason for TBLL to be a keystone approach might be the fact that learning occurs most effectively when related to the real-life activities performed by the learner. Focusing on the use of authentic language and asking learners to do meaningful tasks such as visiting a doctor, calling customer service for help or conducting an interview, while using L2, this method enables students to investigate the language in a non-threatening environment and teachers to achieve initiating reflective learning and teaching.

II. THE MAIN ISSUES OF TBLL a) What Is a Task? Both the research and pedagogic literature provide various definitions of a task. These definitions address a number of dimensions: 1. the scope of a task, 2. the perspective from which a task is viewed, 3. the authenticity of a task, 4. the linguistic skills required to perform a task, 5. the psychological processes involved in task performance, and 6. the outcome of a task. (Ellis, 2003:2). Kumaravadivelu (1993) lists a collection of ―task‖ definitions as follows: ... one of a set of differentiated, sequencable, problem-posing activities involving learner and teachers in some joint selection from a range of varied cognitive and communicative procedures applied to existing and new knowledge in the collective exploration and pursuance of foreseen or emergent goals within a social milieu (Candlin, 1987:10). ... a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right. ... When tasks are implemented in the classroom an observer of participants' judgment will determine the degree of completeness as much as the characteristics of the task itself (Nunan, 1993:59)

Using Tasks in Language Teaching A language learning task is also about communication and its codes and conventions; its content can offer data on language and information about language. The content of language tasks can, therefore, be metacommunicative because its subject-matter is directly or indirectly about the means of communication and about the workings of language in use. A grammar exercise, a graded reading, or a written dialogue will serve to exemplify the workings of language by using messages to carry and reveal the code. Alternatively, a problem-solving task based upon a sample of target language in use may exploit the code as a means to involve the learner in interpreting and expressing meanings (Breen, 1987a:17). ... any structured language learning endeavor which has a particular objective, appropriate content, a specified working procedure, and a range of outcomes for those who undertake the task. 'Task' is therefore assumed to refer to a range of work plans which have the overall purpose of facilitating language learning - from the simple and brief exercise type to more complex and lengthy activities such as group problem-solving or simulations and decision-making (Breen, 1987b:23) ... for present purposes a task is taken to be an activity in which: i) meaning is primary; ii) there is some sort of relationship to the real world; iii) task completion has some priority and iv) the assessment of task performance is in terms of task outcome (Skehan, 1996:38) An activity which required learners to arrive at an outcome, from given information through some process of thought, and which allowed teachers to control and regulate the process, was regarded as a "task" (Prabhu, 1987:24). ...a piece of work undertaken for oneself or others, freely or for some reward. ... In other words, by 'task' is meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between. Tasks are the things people will tell you to do if you ask them and they are not applied linguists (Long, 1985:89). ...a piece of work or an activity, usually with a specified objective, undertaken as part of an educational course or at work (Crookes, 1986:1). ... a range of work plans which have the overall purpose of facilitating language learning - from the simple and varied exercise type to more complex and lengthy activities such as group problem-solving or simulations and decision-making (Breen, 1987:23).

b.) Task Sequences The figure below is a brief outline of a task-based class structure (Willis, 1996:52): Pre-Task Introduction to topic and task instructions -Task Cycle Task > Planning > Report (Listen to task recording) -Language Focus Analysis and practice

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1. Pre-task: This serves as an introduction to the topic and task. This might involve brainstorming, a pre-task, introduction of useful words and phrases, preparation time or listening to native speakers doing the task. New structures are not pre-taught at this stage. 2. The Task Cycle: This cycle has three major stages and one further optional stage. Task: Learners begin by fulfilling a communication task, using whatever language they already have, in pairs or groups. A task is a goal-oriented activity in which learners achieve a real outcome. At this stage, the teacher monitors and encourages learners‘ attempts to communicate meaning in the target language. While helping them systematize what they want to say, the teacher does not correct errors. The emphasis is on spontaneity and fluency. Planning: Learners prepare to report on the outcome after the completion of the task. The emphasis is on organization and accuracy later on. The teacher advises students on language and helps them correct any errors they make during this stage. Reporting: Some or all of the groups report briefly to the whole class. The others listen in order to compare findings or to conduct a survey. The teacher may express things differently but not correct the language. Optional post-task listening: This stage allows students to listen to native speakers do the same task and to compare the language. 3. Language Focus Analysis: Learners focus on form and ask questions about language features. Practice: Teacher conducts activities based on the analysis work or examples from the text or transcript.

c) Task Types According to Willis, (1996:26-28), there are six main types of task: 1. Listing: You can list people, places, things, actions, reasons, everyday problems, things to do in various circumstances. Examples: a) In pairs, agree on a list of four or five people who were famous in the 20th century and give at least one reason for including each person; can you remember your partner‘s busiest day? b) On your own, make a list of all the things he/she did. Then check with your partner. Were there any things you forgot? 2. Ordering and sorting: This can be sequencing, ranking or classifying. Examples: a) In pairs, look at your list of famous people. Which people are most likely to remain popular and become 20th century icons? Rank them from most popular to least popular, and be prepared to justify your order to another pair. b) Look at the four pictures. They are mixed up. Work in pairs. Put the four pictures in a sequence so that they tell a story. Prepare to tell your story to another pair. 3. Comparing: Comparison tasks can be based on two quite similar texts or pictures or places or events that learners have experience of. Learners can also compare their own work with that of another learner or another pair or group. Examples: a)

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4.

5.

6.

7.

Compare your list of possible 20th century icons with your partner‘s list. Did you have any people in common? Tell each other why you chose them. How many reasons did you both think of? Finally, combine your two lists, but keep it to five people. b) Tell your picture story to another pair and listen to theirs. Compare stories – make a list of the main similarities and differences. Problem solving: Text-books often contain activities based on common problems: pollution, relationships, noisy neighbours and so on. The instructions for the town center traffic problem in the example below incorporate six or seven ways of generating richer interaction: -Think of a town center where there is too much traffic. In pairs, think of three alternative solutions to this problem. List the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. Then decide which alternative would be the cheapest one, the most innovative one, the most environmentally friendly one. Report your decisions to another pair/group/the class, and discuss with them which solution would be the best one to put forward to the local government. Sharing personal experiences: Activities where learners are asked to recount their personal experiences and tell stories are valuable because they give learners a chance to speak for longer and in a more sustained way. Besides it is something we often do in real-life. However, in order to encourage richer interaction, we usually need to add a clear goal, make instructions more precise and give clear completion points. Creative tasks: Projects and creative tasks contain doing and reporting a survey, producing a class newspaper, planning a radio show, designing a brochure.

d) Other Task Types Information gap, jigsaw and dictogloss activities are other task types of TBLT.

Information Gap activities Each student has information that the other student(s) don't have. The objective is for students to ask questions to find out what they can from the other(s). Example A's Information: Person's Name

From

Occupation

1. Jill (female)

doctor

2.

professor

3. Jared (male)

Cincinnati

4.

Cleveland

5. Janet (female)

Dayton

Weekends

Movies romance

go fishing action

banker

play cards

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Gokce Bayraktar B's Information:

Person's Name

From

1.

Toledo

2. Jason (male)

Columbus

3.

Occupation

Weekends relax at home

horror mechanic

play baseball

4. Jenny (female) 5.

Movies

drama lawyer

read novels

comedy

Sample Questions: What is the first person's name? How do you spell it? Where is he/she from? What is his/her occupation? What does he/she do on weekends? What kind of movies does he/she like? After completing the chart, discuss with your partner: Which person would you like as a friend? Why?

Dictogloss Activities Dictogloss is a form of dictation, in which the students hear and reconstruct the whole text rather than doing so line by line. Dictogloss is useful in that learning becomes an active involvement and that it stimulates motivation, which can be used as a pre-reading activity, to present grammar and vocabulary, to name a few examples. Steps: 1. Create a short text (4 to 5 sentences), that has the language item you will focus on, for instance ―comparatives‖, ―would for past habits‖, ―personality adjectives‖, etc. 2. Prepare students with a warm-up. Introduce the topic and pre-teach some vocabulary if needed. 3. After chatting about it for a few minutes, read the story twice at normal speed. The first time, they should not write anything but just listen. Remember to pause between sentences. Read it out the second time and ask students to note down the key ideas. 4. Have students reconstruct the story. Underline that the aim is not to write the story word for word, but to write the key ideas. 5. Students, then work in groups, compare their notes and try to reconstruct the text on OHT strips (you could have students write on the board if technology is not available). 6. Chose a volunteer group to display the story and ask other groups to give feedback, make necessary changes. 7. Finally, project the original text and ask students to identify any differences between the two texts. 8. Depending on the text and language, proceed accordingly. If it is for pre-reading purposes, ask them what they think the text could be about. If your aim is to present a language item, ask students to discover the rule, etc.

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9. As a follow-up activity, students may write a similar text. An example text: ―When I was a child we used to go camping every summer. We‘d choose a different place each year, and we‘d drive around until we found a beach we liked. Then, we‘d pitch our tent, as near as possible to the beach. We‘d usually spend most of the time on the beach or exploring the country round about. We never went to the same beach twice.‖

Jigsaw Activities In a jigsaw task, students work in pairs or small groups. They each have different information and they have to exchange their information so that they each have all the information. Often they then have to answer questions or do other tasks based on the complete information. Example A pair of students are each given a partially completed chart giving different information about three people – Tane, Pita and Moana. The information might be about where they come from, how many other people live in their house, how many pets they have, what their favourite sports are, and what music they like best. The students take turns to ask and answer questions regarding the three people without looking at their partner's chart. Both partners must request and supply missing information in order to complete all the details about Tane, Pita & Moana. Open and Closed Tasks Open and Closed tasks are minor types of tasks. Closed tasks are highly structured with specific goals and relatively predictable language forms. Open tasks are less structured with less specific goals and less predictable language forms. An example of a closed task would be the well-known information gap activity, in which, for example, two students determine whether they have the same picture. Students may not look at their partner‘s picture but must ask whether it includes a specific element. They take turns asking and answering questions. This task requires them to use the nonreferential there structure in questions and answers (e.g., Is there a chair in your picture? No, there isn‘t. Yes, there is.). It is communicative in the sense that the participants must use English to accomplish something, and it promotes an awareness of the form of nonreferential there sentences. A closed task is also collaborative, since two students work together to achieve successful communication. The aim of the task based learning framework is to create the optimum conditions for language learning. Willis (1998:3) identifies these four essential conditions as:    

Exposure to the target language Opportunities to use the target language for expressing meaning Motivation to engage with exposure and use what they know Focus on language form to prevent fossilization

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Gokce Bayraktar Here is a checklist that can help you work out if task based learning is achieved or not: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Does the activity engage learners‘ interest? Is there a primary focus on meaning? Is there an outcome? Is success judged in terms of outcome? Is completion a priority? Does the classroom activity relate to real world activities?

III. SAMPLE ACTIVITIES STRICT PARENTS

This lesson is taken from the book, Doing task-based teaching (Willis&Willis: 2007), but it is described in more detail here. The lesson is built around a discussion. The question for discussion is:

Whose parents were the strictest?

1. Introduction You might lead into the discussion by telling students about your own childhood. Look at the student questionnaire below to give you some ideas as to what to include in this introduction.

2. Student Questionnaires Here is a possible questionnaire to guide the student discussion. It is intended for discussion in groups of three or four. You may want to leave out some of the items. For example c) may be inappropriate in some settings. You may want to include other items, for example Did you have to look after brothers and sisters? The questionnaire and the discussion were designed for an adult class who were asked to look back on their childhood. If you are teaching a high school class you may want to ask them questions relevant to their earlier childhood. Instead of b) for example, you might ask What time did you have to go to bed? Instead of c) you might ask Did they let you stay overnight with friends?

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When you were a child: a) b) c) d) e) f) g)

Do you think your parents were strict or easy-going? Did they allow you to stay out late at night? Did they let you go on holiday on your own? When you went out did you always have to tell them where you were going? Did you always have to do your homework before supper? Did your parents make you help about the house? Did you have to help in the garden? h) What jobs did they make you do?

You can vary the demands you place upon the class. With an advanced class you could begin by going straight into the questionnaire without further introduction. With a weaker class or an intermediate class you might begin with a teacher led discussion of each question. Here are some options you might consider going from least to most teacher support: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

Go straight into the questionnaire without any further introduction. Show students the questionnaire, give them two minutes or so to read through it, then ask them if they understand everything. Show students the questionnaire then read through it with them explaining any possible difficulties. As 3. As you read each question tell them briefly about your own experience. As 4. At each stage after relating your own experience ask a student to tell you what they think. As 5. Finish by adding a summary of what has been said.

If you go for option 1 this means that students will have to rely almost entirely on their own resources, although the fact that they will be working in groups will mean that they can help one another. If you go for a lower option, number 5, for example, this will give you an opportunity to help with the kind of vocabulary they might need. You might want to make a list of new words down one side of the board. You should not worry about grammar at this stage. Students will find their own ways of expressing the meanings they want. You may quickly rephrase some of the things they say to make them more comprehensible, but do not spend time correcting grammar and do not spend time at this stage on grammatical explanation or practice. That will come later (see 5 below)

3. Discussion Put students into groups of about four and ask them to decide whose parents were the strictest. Tell them they can use the ideas in the questionnaire, but they may want to add to them. As they are involved in the discussion go round the groups listening to what they have to say. It is better not to correct students at this stage, but if they are having problems expressing themselves you might want to help out. During the discussion you should appoint one student for each group as spokesperson. Their job is to report the findings of the group to the class as a whole after the discussion.

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You may want to allocate other roles as well. One possibility is to make one student the group secretary. Their job is to take notes to summarise the discussion for other group members.

4. Post-Discussion After the discussion give the groups a few minutes to brief their spokesperson before that person reports back to the class. Choose one or two of the groups and ask them to report. Ask the other groups to listen carefully and compare with the strictest parents from their own group. After the discussion you may want to summarise what the groups have told you and to ask the other groups for their comments.

5. Language Focus a.

Give students a copy of the questionnaire. Ask them to underline all the expressions about what people were forced to do and what they were allowed to do. b. Tell them to turn over their copy of the questionnaire so that they cannot see it. Show the following on OHT or PowerPoint, or give it to them as a handout: When you were a child: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

Do you think your parents were ------ or ---- - -----? Did they ----- --- -- stay out late at night? Did they --- --- go on holiday on your own? When you went out did --- always --- -- tell them where you were going? Did you always ---- -- do your homework before supper? Did your parents ---- --- help about the house? Did you ---- -- help in the garden? What jobs did they ---- --- do?

c. Ask them to work in pairs to fill in the blanks. d. Tell students to put their worksheets away. Put numbers 1-8 on the board. Ask students to work in pairs to see how many of the 8 sentences they can recall. You may want to make this recall exercise easier. You can do this by leaving a few key words in: 1. Do you ----- ---- parents ---- ------ or ---- - -----? Etc. Or you can give them a version of each sentence with all the grammatical words and markers removed: 2. they/you/stay/late/night 3. they/you/go/holiday/own

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Etc. You can ask them to pause after five minutes and listen, without writing, while you read the sentences out to them. They can then go back to work. Students usually enjoy the challenge of this kind of exercise.

6. Controlled Practice You may want to round off the lesson with some controlled practice. This will help to fix the forms in learners‘ minds, making it more likely that they will become a natural part of their productive repertoire. Here are two possible exercises practising make and do, and the verbs force, allow and suppose in the passive, which is how they are very frequently used:

Complete these to make true sentences: 1 When I was a child my parents made me …. 2 They let me …. 3 I was forced to …. 4 I was allowed to …. 5 I was supposed to ….

Think about your schooldays… 1 List three things you had to do or were forced to do. 2 List three things you weren’t allowed to do. 3 List three things you were supposed to do but didn’t.

As students read out their sentences you may want to incorporate listen and repeat drills. After students have compose their sentences you can ask one or two of them to read out one of their sentences, then, after four or five ask the rest of the class to see how many sentences they can recall. You can make this easier for them by writing clues up on the board:

Miguel: Wear uniform Juan: Homework Maria: High heels

Students will then recall: Miguel had to wear a uniform. Juan was supposed to do his homework every night. Maria wasn‘t allowed to wear high heels.

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7. Follow-Up You should try to follow up in a subsequent lesson within a week. With a general class you could remind them of the discussion and ask them to recall their conclusions in a teacher led discussion. With an exam class you might follow this with a gap filling exercise or give a few multiple choice items which feature these grammatical items and reproduce the format of their exam. Another possibility would be to have a skills lesson focusing on the same topic. Here are extracts from two interviews recorded by Tim Marchand, which you could use as the basis of a listening skills lesson: A. My Dad is a quiet man really, so he didn't really make me do much at home. He sometimes asked me to wash his car or cut the grass, but I was never forced to do it, and I could usually get some pocket money for it as well. I think my Mum was also pretty easy-going; she let me stay out late with my friends. As long as she knew where I was, she wouldn't mind so much what I did. B. My father was definitely stricter than my Mum. If I had been in trouble at school, it was always left up to him to tell me off. But I wouldn't say that my Mum was easygoing exactly. She would sit me down sometimes and make me do my homework in front of her, or force me to eat my greens, things like that. I guess I was just more scared of my father.

IV. A SAMPLE LESSON PLAN Robbery in a Sweet Shop Tell learners that this lesson is based on a true story which was reported in The Guardian newspaper a few years ago. The first stage (steps 1 to 3) involves encouraging learners to speculate on the story on the basis of a few clues. At the next stage (steps 4 and 5) they make up their own stories to fit the clues. At step 4 learners should ideally work in pairs or groups, but if they are not used to this they could work first as individuals, perhaps making up their story for homework, and then get together in groups to share ideas. At steps 6-9 they compare stories. At the end of this they should be keen to and/or hear read the newspaper story (step 10) to find out what really happened. 1. Write up on the board:

The Characters: A shopkeeper Her two children A young man An eight-year-old boy

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The police The Setting: A corner shop in Ashton-under-Lyme, Manchester. The Props (things used in the story): A balaclava A packet of Smarties A plastic bag A gun Some phrases from the story: A young man came in to buy a newspaper He pointed a gun at her and told her to fill up the bag I pretended to reach for some money They are taking the case very seriously, like all cases which involve a firearm, fake or not

2. Explain some of the words and phrases which might cause difficulties. A balaclava is like a ski mask. It covers someone‘s face so only their eyes can be seen. Smarties are small brightly coloured sweets with chocolate covered in a thin layer of sugar. A fake is something which is imitation, which is not real. 3. Ask learners what they think happened in the story, but do not tell them if their guesses are right or wrong. 4. Ask them to try to guess what happened in the story. Tell them to use as many of the ideas on the board as they can. The best thing is for them to work in pairs or groups and discuss their ideas. This will give them a lot of speaking practice. 5. Tell them you are going to ask some of them to tell their stories to the class. Give them some time to prepare their stories. Go round and listen as they work. 6. When they have had enough time to prepare their stories appoint a spokesperson for each group. Ask the groups to work with the spokesperson to prepare the final version of their story. 7. Ask one of them to tell the story. Try to choose someone who thinks the young man is the robber. 8. Ask the others if their stories are the same or different. Choose someone who has a different story and ask them to tell it. Try to choose someone who thinks the eight-year-old is the robber. 9. Engage the class in a discussion as to whose story is the most likely. 10. Hand out the story for them to read. Or, if you want them to have some listening practice you can read the story out before they read it.

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Gokce Bayraktar Eight-year-old tries to rob sweet shop. Manchester police are looking for an eight-year-old boy who attempted to hold up a sweet shop last night in the suburb of Ashton-under-Lyme. The boy, who was wearing a balaclava, went into the corner shop and bought a packet of Smarties for 25p. As the shopkeeper gave him his change a young man came in to buy a newspaper. The boy waited until the man had gone then threw a plastic bag at the shopkeeper. At the same time he pointed a gun at her and told her to fill up the bag. ―I‘m not sure whether he wanted me to fill it with sweets or with money,‖ said the shopkeeper, who did not want to give her name. ―I didn‘t know if the gun was real or not, but it certainly looked more real than the guns my little boy plays with. I was quite frightened because I had my children with me. I pretended to reach for some money, but I pressed the alarm instead. When it went off he turned and ran out of the shop.‖ She described the boy as 1.2 meters tall, and dressed in jeans and a dark coat. The police are asking the public to help. They say they are taking the case very seriously, like all cases which involve a firearm, fake or not.

10. Language Work 10.1. Identification Ask learners to underline all the phrases with to: tries to rob sweet shop; attempted to hold up a sweet shop; to buy a newspaper; told her to fill up the bag; whether he wanted me to fill the bag with sweets or with money; who did not want to give her name; I pretended to reach for some money; asking the public to help.

10.2. Analysis. Ask them to look at these patterns PATTERN A

VERB

to

VERB

tries attempted (not) want pretended

to to to to

rob hold up give reach for

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Using Tasks in Language Teaching PATTERN B

VERB

NOUN

to

VERB

told wanted asking

her me the public

to to to

fill up fill help

Look at these sentences. Are they pattern A or pattern B? a. I need to borrow some money. b. We need someone to help us. c. The boy ordered her to fill up the bag. d. We always had to get up early. e. Can you help me to carry these boxes?

10.3. Help your learners to organise their knowledge of verbs followed by to

These are the commonest verbs with pattern A: agree, appear, attempt, begin choose, continue, decide, expect, forget, happen, hate, help, hope, intend, love, live, learn, mean, plan, prefer, pretend, promise, refuse, remember, seem start, try, want, would like. How many of these verbs are to do with speaking? How many are to do with thinking? Can you find other words in the box which mean the same as: appear, attempt, begin, intend, like, want?

These are the commonest verbs with pattern B: advise, allow, enable, expect, help, intend, invite, mean, order, prefer, tell, want warn (usually warn someone not to), wish, would like. Can you find eight words that are also used with pattern A? How many words are to do with speaking? How many words are to do with wanting or liking?

10.4. Practice Lead class discussions based on this: Choose either: 

Three things you want/would like to do over the next year.

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

OR Three things you hope/intend/plan to do over the next year.

Write down the three things in your book. Close your book. See How many things you can remember.

You can listen to a few sentences before learners close their books, then make sure they all have their books closed and lead a class discussion about what people want to do and about what they hope to do. These sentences will generally be pattern A. Lead more class discussions based on this:

Choose either  

Three things your teacher doesn’t allow you to do in class. OR Three things you would like someone to give you

Write down the three things in your book. Close your book. See how many things you can remember.

Again you can listen to a few sentences before learners close their books, then make sure they all have their books closed and lead a class discussion about what people want to do and about what they hope to do. All these sentences will be pattern A.

11. Round-up Ask learners to read the story for homework and be ready to tell the story next lesson. It is useful to build up a repertoire of stories so that in future lessons you can ask learners who can remember the story about … and ask them to tell one of the stories that they have studied. This is a good way of getting them to remember the useful language they have encountered. 12. Vanishing words a) Take a sentence from the text. For example: As the shopkeeper gave him his change a young man came in to buy a newspaper. b) Write the full sentence on the whiteboard1. c) Ask one or two learners to read it out. d) Rub out two or three words:

1

You can use Power point very effectively for this activity if you have the facilities.

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___ the shopkeeper ___ him his change a young man came in ___ buy a _____________. e) Ask learners to work in groups of three or four. Tell them to work as a group to recall the sentence. Ask a learner to recall the sentence. Ask the class if the recall is correct. If they are not satisfied, they can go on guessing until they are content. f) Remove more words: ___the shopkeeper ___ ____ his ________ a ________ man _____ in ___ buy a _____________. g) Repeat e). h) Go on until you have removed all the words. You can make this activity more difficult: 1 By choosing a more complex sentence: Manchester police are looking for an eight-year-old boy who attempted to hold up a sweet shop last night in the suburb of Ashton-under-Lyme. 2 By removing several words at each stage: Manchester _______ are _________ for an eight-year-old boy ___ ___________ to hold up a _______ shop last night in the _________ of Ashton-under-Lyme. 3 By asking learners to work in pairs or individually instead of groups of three or four.

CONCLUSION Having examined the task-based instruction method briefly, including some definitions, types, sequences and implementation of tasks, the subject of this chapter, it is appropriate at this stage to review the study questions and to consider how TBLL differs from the other approaches in ELT. Task-based language learning method contradicts with the teacher-controlled and linear approaches, and do not support transferring information, but developing skills and strategies. It seems to offer an understanding of a complete body of language learning. For this reason, learning can be seen as a shared action, in which a great deal of negotiation between the teacher and learners can easily be observed. It can be deduced that TBLL offers action whereas other approaches are relatively low in action. As a learner-centered method, TBLL draws on the learner‘s knowledge, and therefore course materials are selected on the basis of both their needs and interests. Still and all, when considering TBLL it is significant to work out the context in which it is to be used, and also the feedback of the learners. Such questions like ―Are the learners familiar with the methodology?‖, ―If not, are they willing to accept a methodology that is

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alien to them?‖ will probably be useful. Accordingly, negotiation with learners, so as to make sure that they are pleased to learn through this method, can motivate the learners to become involved in the process and the approach. It is therefore vital for teachers to take into account their teaching environments and apply this new approach sensitively. As Vygotsky (1986:99) states, ―the English teacher can provide the appropriate learning experience for the appropriate student at the appropriate time, by promoting awareness (and acquisition) of learning strategies, by encouraging learners to investigate the language through meaningful interaction in a non-threatening environment, and by initiating reflective self-evaluation‖.

REFERENCES Breen, M.P. (1987a). Contemporary paradigms in syllabus design, part I. Language Teaching, 20/2, 81-91. Breen, M. (1987b). Contemporary paradigms in syllabus design, part II. Language Teaching, 20/3, 158-174. Candlin, C.N. (1987). Towards task-based learning. In C.N. Candlin & D. Murphy (Eds.). Lancaster Practical Papers in English Language Education. Vol. 7. Language Learning Tasks. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 5-22. Crookes, G. (1986). Task classification: a cross-disciplinary review (Technical Report No. 4). Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa, Social Science Research Institute, Center for Second Language Classroom Research. Ellis, Rod (2003). Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford, New York: Oxford Applied Linguistics. Foster, P. (1999). Key Concepts in ELT: ―Task-based learning and pedagogy‖. ELT Journal, 53/1, 69-70. Kumaravadivelu, V.B. (1993). The name of the task and the task of naming: methodological aspects of task-based pedagogy. In G. Crookes & S.M. Gass (Eds.). Tasks in a Pedagogical Context. Cleveland, UK: Multilingual Matters. 69 - 96. Long, M. H. (1985). A role for instruction in second language acquisition: task-based language teaching. In K. Hyltenstam & M. Pienemann (Eds.). Modelling and Assessing Second Language Acquisition. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. 77-99. Nunan, David. (1989). Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge University Press. Nunan, D. (1993). Task-based syllabus design: selecting, grading and sequencing tasks. In G. Crookes & S.M. Gass (Eds.). Tasks in a Pedagogical Context. Cleveland, UK: Multilingual Matters. 55-66. Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press. Prabhu, N.S. (1987). Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.38-62. Skehan, P. (1996). Second language acquisition research and task-based instruction. In Willis J. & D. (Ed) Challenge and Change in Language Teaching, Macmillan Heinemann Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and Language Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Willis, Jane (1996). A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Longman. Willis, J. (1998). Task-based learning. ETP (Executive Training Program), Issue 9.

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Willis, J. & D. (1998). A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Longman Willis, D. & Willis, J. (2007). Doing task-based teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Useful Websites An excellent introductory article on TBL by Richard Frost: http://www. teachingenglish.org. uk/think/articles/a-task-based-approach Four articles on TBL by Jane Willis can be found at:http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/ articles/criteria-identifying-tasks-tbl Free sample task-based lesson plans at http://www.willis-elt.co.uk/taskbased.html

EDITORS’ CONTACT INFORMATION Dr. Banu Inan, Asst. Professor Kocaeli Universitesi Egitim Fakultesi Y. Diller Egitimi Bolumu Umuttepe 41380 Kocaeli Turkey Tel: +90 262 303 24 87 Email: [email protected]

Dr. Dogan Yuksel, Asst. Professor Kocaeli Universitesi Egitim Fakultesi Y. Diller Egitimi Bolumu Umuttepe 41380 Kocaeli Turkey Tel: +90 262 303 24 69 Email: [email protected]

INDEX # 20th century, 160, 206, 207

avoidance, 44 awareness, 9, 12, 13, 26, 43, 44, 47, 48, 61, 77, 78, 85, 87, 104, 123, 131, 133, 140, 142, 154, 182, 186, 188, 190, 191, 196, 201, 209, 220

A abstraction, 6 academic settings, 172 access, 2, 4, 11, 50, 54 Accuracy, 36, 171, 177 adaptation(s), 35, 100, 195, 185 adolescents, 3, 4 adult(s), 2, 3, 4, 6, 46, 111, 157 advertisements, 121 aesthetic, 182, 191, 199 age, 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, 20, 37, 105, 116, 117, 127, 128, 129, 130, 140, 150, 167, 196 aggression, 83 Aims, 21, 69, 130 airports, 68, 147 amalgam, 93 anthropologists, 190 anxiety, 8, 9, 15 apples, 116 appraisals, 9 aptitude, 2, 4, 5, 10, 62 articulation, 82, 83, 85 Asia, 80 assessment, 9, 34, 36, 113, 119, 121, 126, 133, 134, 136, 205 assets, 9 assimilation, 41 atmosphere, 11, 25, 37, 73, 108, 124, 129, 186 atrocities, 83 attitudes, 10, 52, 73, 161, 166 authenticity, 38, 95, 110, 204 authority, 185, 186 autonomy, 164

B background information, 32, 139, 181 Balkans, 83 ban, 87 base, 45, 46, 160, 194 Behaviorism, 9 behaviors, 3, 9, 102 benefits, 29, 50, 161, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188, 198 birds, 48 boredom, 4, 20 bottom-up, 67, 137, 139 brain, 6, 107 brain functioning, 6 brainstorming, 61, 118, 170, 191, 195, 206 Brazil, 120 brothers, 129, 210 buyer, 88

C capital punishment, 21 cartoon, 120 catalyst, 190, 194 categorization, 44 challenges, 42 Checklist, 125 Chicago, 77 chicken, 37, 120 childhood, 3, 6, 210

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Index

children, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 48, 59, 117, 143, 167, 200, 214, 216 China, 14, 114 chunking, 50 circulation, 89 cities, 83, 130, 131, 132 civil war, 151, 196 civilization, 12 clarity, 12, 82, 87, 144 class size, 35 classes, 3, 39, 42, 45, 47, 53, 84, 99, 100, 117, 127, 128, 184 classification, 6, 220 classroom activity, 210 classroom environment, 6, 45 classroom management, 11, 36 classroom skills, 160 climate, 149 close relationships, 99 Closing, 43 closure, 36 clustering, 195 coding, 4 cognition, 5 cognitive abilities, 10 cognitive skills, 137, 183 cognitive style, 5, 14 coherence, 20, 127, 133 collaboration, 176 common sense, 95, 96, 102 communication, 6, 7, 11, 14, 37, 40, 43, 44, 45, 49, 62, 65, 66, 73, 79, 84, 95, 125, 136, 160, 161, 170, 172, 173, 175, 179, 183, 185, 188, 200, 205, 206, 209 communication skills, 62, 84 communication strategies, 7, 8, 14, 49 Communicative language teaching, 45 community, 10, 36, 84, 95, 175, 188 competition, 46 compilation, 151 complexity, 136, 176 compliance, 7 complications, 107 composition, 12 comprehension, 8, 12, 67, 70, 74, 77, 80, 84, 89, 96, 98, 109, 110, 126, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 154, 155, 162, 184, 188, 190, 193 compulsory education, 80 computer, 50, 60, 85, 116, 118, 121, 128 Concise, 154, 155 concordance, 105, 111, 162, 163 conference, 195 confinement, 88

conflict, 9, 123 conjugation, 161 conscious awareness, 47 consciousness, 145 consensus, 52 construction, 4, 137, 167 consulting, 142 contextualization, 8 Controlled writing, 195 controversial, 117, 159 convention, 108 Conversational rules, 43 conversations, 40, 43, 50, 54, 60 cooperation, 8, 83 Corpus, 99, 105, 111 correlations, 183 cost, 60, 175 Council of Europe, 134 course content, 63 covering, 76 creative potential, 133 Creative writing, 119 creativity, 46, 69, 73, 186, 194 crimes, 150 Critical reading, 156 critical thinking, 36, 153, 182, 184, 199 criticism, 12, 34, 190 cues, 50, 86 cultural differences, 51, 138 cultural norms, 9 cultural values, 73 culture, 1, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 68, 73, 138, 178, 182, 200 curricula, 136, 182, 187 curriculum, 1, 10, 12, 116, 125, 126, 169, 170, 179, 182, 183, 198 customer service, 204 cycles, 203

D dairies, 126 damages, 100 dance, 24, 25 danger, 67, 139 data gathering, 118 database, 93, 99, 101, 102 deaths, 100 decoding, 137, 148 decontextualization, 97 deduction, 8 Deductive, 161 deficiency, 82

227

Index deficit, 151 delusion, 92 depth, 95, 99, 105, 138, 164, 191 designers, 170 Devoicing, 82, 83 dialogue(s), 3, 37, 66, 72, 85, 115, 184, 187, 194, 197 diamonds, 57 Dictation, 47, 115 digital technologies, 105 diplomacy, 83 Direct Method, 160 disappointment, 193 discrimination, 86, 87, 164, 196 distracters, 69 distribution, 101 dogs, 57 dominance, 6 draft, 118, 195 Drama, 185, 186, 187, 199, 200 drawing, 47, 69, 71, 123, 136, 146, 164, 196 dream, 59, 147, 178 drugs, 151

E economics, 85 Editing, 125 education, 2, 11, 13, 30, 35, 38, 69, 78, 80, 133, 139, 168, 199, 204 educational institutions, 204 educational materials, 37 educational research, 161 educators, 172, 182 EFL, v, 5, 15, 22, 39, 80, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 100, 108, 110, 111, 114, 116, 135, 137, 138, 141, 148, 153, 155, 156, 170, 176, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199, 200, 201 elaboration, 8 election, 156 electricity, 57 elementary school, 175 ELT, v, 29, 30, 62, 63, 79, 80, 88, 134, 156, 182, 187, 200, 201, 203, 219, 220 e-mail, 115, 121, 130, 131, 148 embassy, 83 emotion, 5, 19 emotional information, 6 emotional reactions, 6 empathy, 8, 9, 14 employees, 81 encouragement, 81, 123 energy, 26, 83, 165

England, 62, 63, 220 English Language, 1, 14, 17, 26, 29, 62, 77, 80, 110, 111, 113, 134, 135, 155, 156, 159, 167, 168, 169, 203, 220 environment(s), 10, 11, 30, 31, 80, 93, 100, 193, 194, 204, 220 episodic memory, 110 equipment, 23 etiquette, 51 everyday life, 205 evidence, 2, 32, 150, 151, 155, 169, 177, 185 evil, 178 exclusion, 182 exercise, 21, 54, 118, 144, 164, 165, 205, 212, 214 Experiential Learning, 175 explicit knowledge, 93 exposure, 54, 117, 121, 183, 209 Expressive devices, 40 extracts, 214 extrovert, 9

F Facebook, 61 face-to-face interaction, 40 facial expression, 8 Fact, 148, 150 faith, 85 families, 61, 94 favorite son, 188 fear(s), 2, 75, 101, 119, 148, 188 Feedback, 33, 54, 60, 122, 125 feelings, 6, 9, 34, 54, 74, 76, 122, 147, 148, 188 fillers, 44, 48 films, 24, 49, 65, 73, 74 fishing, 24, 207 flexibility, 100 flight, 68 flowers, 76, 86, 150 Fluency, 24, 39, 140, 157, 177 food, 37, 57, 120 force, 213, 214 foreign exchange, 80 foreign language, vii, ix, x, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 39, 40, 43, 53, 79, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 107, 110, 135, 136, 138, 143, 144, 153, 156, 168, 170, 172, 174, 182, 184, 188, 199, 201 foreign language vocabulary, 91, 98, 99 foreign policy, 80 formal education, 5 formation, 11, 136, 186, 188 freedom, 25

228

Index

G gambling, 7 gel, 85 general intelligence, 4 genre, 121, 188, 190, 192, 198 geography, 12 gestures, 8, 193 God, 104, 121 grades, 62 grading, 127, 220 grass, 214 grids, 110 group work, 45, 46, 120, 163, 185 grouping, 8, 82, 97, 98 growth, 9, 174, 190 guessing, 14, 51, 69, 102, 110, 155, 219 guidance, 3, 118, 128, 187 Guided writing, 195 guidelines, 43

H hair, 152 handwriting, 114 Hawaii, 13, 220 headache, 162 health, 85 hemisphere, 6 hierarchy of needs, 10 high school, 188, 210 higher education, 69 history, ix, 12, 170, 174, 190 Holistic rubric, 127 homework, 20, 21, 126, 134, 210, 212, 213, 214, 218 Homework, 77, 125, 134, 213 Hong Kong, 14, 89 hotel, 85, 132 House, 35, 38, 156, 199, 200, 201 human, 120, 186 husband, 59 hypothesis, 139

imitation, 215 immersion, 139, 143 immigrants, 63 Improvisation, 194, 200 impulsive, 7 impulsivity, 14 independence, 14, 15 individual differences, 13, 102, 157 individual students, 21 individuals, 5, 20, 46, 94, 214 Inductive, 4, 14, 161 Inference, 142, 157 inferences, 69, 94, 140, 192 information exchange, 41 Inhibition, 8, 9, 45 initiation, 42 instinct, 136, 156 institutions, 20, 83 instructional activities, 177 instructional materials, 10, 172, 176 instructional planning, 136 integration, 169, 170, 172, 176, 179 intelligence, 107, 162 Intelligibility, v, 79, 84, 89 Intensive reading, 140, 143, 197 Interaction, 25, 41, 130, 133 interference, 187 internalization, 40 international communication, 173 Interrupting, 43 intonation, 12, 49, 197 intrinsic motivation, 10, 174 introversion, 9 introvert, 9 investment, 106 isolation, 99, 104 issues, ix, 2, 3, 5, 10, 11, 26, 52, 61, 62, 66, 93, 96, 114, 127, 161, 171, 194

J Japan, 80, 114 justification, 41, 82

I ideal, 5, 60, 84, 171 identification, 9 identity, 2, 3, 9, 10, 89 ideology, 148 image(s), 6, 61, 86, 97, 98, 105, 170 imagery, 97 imagination, 8, 47, 184, 186, 194

K Kosovo, 80

L labeling, 6 language acquisition, 160, 220

229

Index language development, 99, 114, 139, 174, 189, 190 Language focus, 140 language proficiency, 11, 39, 139, 170, 189, 190, 193 language skills, vii, ix, 11, 39, 132, 139, 140, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 198, 200 languages, 50, 52, 53, 84, 91, 93, 99, 102, 114, 121, 133, 136, 138, 159, 162, 171, 181, 183 LEA, 175 lead, 5, 9, 10, 20, 62, 104, 114, 124, 133, 141, 165, 170, 191, 210, 218 learning environment, 3, 5, 6, 9, 53, 62, 184 learning outcomes, 198 learning process, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 30, 97, 160, 165, 185, 188, 198, 204 learning styles, 5, 7, 10, 176, 204 learning task, 8, 36, 205 left hemisphere, 6 leisure, 125 lesson plan, vii, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 30, 31, 33, 44, 74, 108, 113, 164, 169, 192, 197, 221 lexical processing, 155, 156 Lexicon, 93 Lexis, 40 light, 57, 147, 149, 151 linguistics, 12, 45, 100, 110, 111, 156, 189 literacy, 114, 115, 136, 143, 175, 188 Literature, v, 111, 181, 183, 184, 189, 190, 198, 199, 200, 201 local government, 207 long-term memory, 50, 96 love, 37, 77, 124, 125, 183, 188, 217 lying, 125

M Macedonia, 80 majority, 80, 83, 84, 96 man, 19, 75, 76, 77, 86, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 120, 146, 178, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219 management, 8, 21, 23, 50 manipulation, 8, 10 mapping, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 110 masterpieces, 12 materials, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 30, 37, 48, 66, 95, 100, 108, 110, 111, 133, 139, 142, 145, 165, 173, 176, 181, 182, 183, 185, 190, 219 mathematics, 101, 102 matter, 9, 17, 20, 21, 23, 26, 45, 57, 80, 108, 114, 145, 152, 171, 174, 181, 205 meaningful tasks, 45, 204 media, 61, 99, 148

medicine, 35 memory, 2, 4, 50, 75, 97, 122 mental image, 98 mental representation, 47 Message Adjustment, 44 messages, 116, 127, 137, 205 metaphor, 31 methodology, 2, 18, 25, 43, 161, 192, 204, 219 microscope, 31, 35 Microteaching, v, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38 Mime, 193 misunderstanding, 44, 139 mobile phone, 61 models, 14, 80, 88, 121, 170, 172, 173, 183, 187, 189, 192, 198 modifications, 41 momentum, 182, 191 morphology, 136, 142 mother tongue, 37, 45, 50, 92, 99, 127, 182 motivation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 37, 45, 46, 52, 62, 79, 95, 111, 119, 140, 171, 174, 183, 186, 208 Motivation, 9, 14, 68, 186, 209 multiculturalism, 174 multiple-choice questions, 70 murder, 57 music, 24, 25, 125, 183, 209 music videos, 183

N naming, 220 negotiating, 83 negotiation, 42, 60, 102, 219, 220 Negotiation of language, 42 nervousness, 9 New criticism, 190 New Zealand, 146, 147 Nigeria, 80 North America, 89 Novels, 184, 185

O objectivity, 127 obstacles, 155 officials, 107 omission, 41 operations, 6 Opinion, 148, 150 opportunities, 2, 5, 10, 11, 13, 40, 44, 66, 84, 107, 124, 139, 144, 159, 162, 165, 171, 174, 176, 183, 186, 198

230

Index

organ, 18, 151 organize, 18, 61, 116, 185 orthography, 95, 114, 136 overlap, 137, 194 ownership, 83 ox, 164

P Pacific, 14 pain, 76 paired reading, 140 parallel, 143, 194 Paraphrase, 44 parents, 210, 211, 212, 213 participants, 11, 13, 29, 42, 204, 209 pedagogy, 18, 62, 100, 220 Peer feedback, 124, 131 personal contact, 12 personal development, 177 personal learning, 165 personality, 5, 8, 46, 129, 208 personality factors, 8 personality type, 5 Philadelphia, 156 phonemes, 41 phonology, 136, 142 pitch, 40, 209 Planning, v, 17, 19, 23, 25, 27, 55, 205, 206 playing, 148, 199 pleasure, 66, 93, 110, 128, 145, 146 poetry, 187, 188, 189, 199, 200 Poland, 80 police, 178, 214, 216, 219 policy, 151 pollution, 175, 207 population, 18 portfolio, 128 practical knowledge, 108, 174 predictability, 20 Predicting, 192, 193 Pre-listening, 69 preparation, 12, 31, 37, 47, 53, 74, 170, 173, 206 pre-planning, 18 president, 149 press conferences, 49 Pre-Task, 23, 205 Previewing, 192, 196 principles, 19, 36, 62, 104, 139, 144, 145, 166, 169 prior knowledge, 99, 137 problem solving, 36, 165, 205 problem-solving task, 205 processing stages, 4

Productive vocabulary, 93 professional development, 30 project, 80, 115, 208 pronunciation, ix, 8, 12, 34, 37, 40, 44, 66, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 95, 170, 176, 188, 194, 197 proposition, 150 psychological processes, 204 psychology, 11, 13 public health, 174 public policy, 106

Q qualifications, 45 query, 106 questioning, 30, 140, 148 questionnaire, 173, 210, 211, 212 quizzes, 192

R race, 51 radio, 167, 207 readership, 117, 119, 132 reading comprehension, 137, 138, 142, 155, 157 reading skills, 61 reality, 48, 66, 80, 173, 194 reasoning, 5, 7, 153 recall, 56, 99, 110, 212, 213, 219 Receptive vocabulary, 93 recognition, 87, 101, 110, 165, 197 recombination, 8 Reflection, 14, 33, 37 reflectivity, 38 reforms, 83 rehearsing, 31 reinforcement, 35, 104 relevance, 174, 183, 199, 201 relief, 88 repair, 46, 48 repetitions, 49, 67, 100 representativeness, 94 reproduction, 195 requirements, 11, 18, 33, 116, 189 researchers, ix, 91, 99, 100, 137, 140, 141, 142, 159 resolution, 49 resources, 18, 30, 31, 35, 89, 151, 183, 185, 211 response, 26, 43, 56, 69, 85, 97, 106, 194 responsibility for learning, 186 restrictions, 33, 34, 81 rhythm, 188 right hemisphere, 6

231

Index risk, 8, 9, 184, 186, 198 risk-taking, 8, 186 Role-play, 193 routines, 40, 41, 43 rubric(s), 31, 33, 127 rule discovery, 162, 164 rules, 39, 42, 43, 44, 49, 96, 114, 126, 136, 138, 159, 160, 162, 165, 166, 171 Russia, 114

S safety, 61 Scanning, 141, 142, 192 schema, 110, 137б 138, 157 schemata, 137 school, 11, 21, 34, 41, 63, 72, 80, 81, 104, 119, 120, 121, 128, 132, 138, 150, 179, 188, 214 science, 35, 81, 107, 174 scope, 7, 167, 186, 204 scripts, 72, 185 second language, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18, 45, 107, 142, 154, 155, 156, 157, 172, 181, 200, 220 secondary schools, 81 security, 10, 44, 80 seed, 123, 124 selective attention, 8 self-actualization, 10 self-assessment, 133 self-awareness, 186 self-confidence, 37, 188, 194 self-doubt, 9 self-esteem, 3, 8, 10, 186 self-expression, 9 self-monitoring, 8 semantics, 92, 136 seminars, 18 sensation, 97 senses, 3, 102 sensitivity, 4 sequencing, 206, 220 sex, 20, 140 shape, 30 Short stories, 188 showing, 58, 106, 178 signals, 8, 43 simulation(s), 194, 205 Singapore, 56, 57, 147 skeleton, 195 skimming, 102, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 192, 197 SLA, 18 social context, 10, 40 social environment, 171

social learning, 106 social situations, 12, 193 social status, 40 socialization, 5 society, 11, 182 software, 118, 127 solution, 119, 175, 207 Spain, 52, 53 speech, 2, 11, 12, 37, 40, 41, 42, 49, 62, 63, 79, 80, 81, 82, 88, 89, 92, 95, 96, 97, 100, 102, 109, 149 speech sounds, 41 spelling, 114, 115, 116, 121, 125, 126, 127, 133, 140 spending, 97 spontaneity, 206 Spring, 150 SS, 22, 25 state(s), 9, 10, 13, 19, 23, 31, 43, 44, 47, 123, 144, 146, 150, 152, 161, 166, 182, 187, 188, 220 stimulation, 10 storage, 4 Story writing, 120 storytelling, 140 strategy use, 15, 154, 155 stress, 40, 49, 74, 82, 95 Structuralism, 190, 199 structure, 6, 18, 26, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 69, 96, 114, 126, 127, 130, 133, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 152, 160, 205, 209 student motivation, 204 student teacher, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 133 style(s), 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 34, 127, 162, 165, 186, 193 stylistic characteristics, 188 Stylistics, 191 subjective experience, 8 supervision, 80, 187 supervisor, 32, 33 surface structure, 143, 148 Survey, 5, 128 Swahili, 92 Syllabus, 18, 19

T tactics, 150 target, ix, 9, 10, 11, 45, 46, 49, 50, 62, 80, 81, 86, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 137, 138, 160, 161, 165, 170, 173, 174, 184, 190, 194, 195, 204, 205, 206, 209 Task, 19, 23, 46, 51, 53, 54, 55, 175, 180, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 219, 220, 221 task performance, 204, 205 Task-based syllabus, 220

232

Index

Task-cycle, 23 taxonomy, 142 TBI, 203 teacher assessment, 144 teacher attitudes, 89 teacher preparation, 30 teacher support, 49, 211 teacher training, ix, 7, 35, 38, 81 teaching experience, 26, 29, 30 teaching scenarios, 108 team members, 167 teams, 61, 167 technician, 34 techniques, vii, 11, 12, 13, 22, 30, 32, 73, 97, 99, 107, 133, 140, 142, 159, 161, 169, 173, 195 technology, 11, 142, 148, 176, 208 teens, 46, 47 tempo, 11 tension, 9 testing, 14, 81, 107, 154, 156, 178 textbook(s), 18, 176, 198 theatre, 57 therapist, 85 therapy, 85 thoughts, 6, 12, 42, 148 time constraints, 20 top-down, 67, 137, 139 training, 5, 13, 30, 35, 38, 46, 67 traits, 5 transcription, 105 translation, 8, 12, 103, 107, 111, 139, 182 transparency, 54, 98 transportation, 43 treatment, 5 trial, 50 true/false, 147, 148 tuition, 128 Turkey, vii, 55, 65, 79, 80, 91, 113, 131, 135, 142, 150, 169 Turn-taking, 43

U UK, 14, 26, 51, 52, 61, 63, 134, 157, 179, 220 uniform, 213 United States, 151 universities, vii, 150

urban, 82 USA, 27, 57, 130, 132, 134

V variables, 5, 138, 139 variations, 94, 100, 195 varieties, 184 vegetables, 59 Videorecording, 34 videos, 61 vision, 73, 182 voicing, 88 vote, 52, 55, 61 Vygotsky, 220

W waking, 66 walking, 57, 86 Washington, 130, 132, 155, 156, 171 waste, 84 watches, 73 water, 138, 151 wear, 24, 213 web, 5, 142 web sites, 142 websites, 120, 164, 221 well-being, 36 White House, 132 word meanings, 95, 136 word processing, 119 word recognition, 139, 140 work activities, 53 working memory, 50, 137 workload, 114 World War I, 142, 149 worldwide, 35, 73, 80, 183 worry, 9, 66, 171, 211 writing process, 118, 133 writing tasks, 50, 114, 116, 119, 128, 133

Y yield, 106