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on November 03, 2020 0

 Methodology in the classroom


Extract :1

T stands for teacher. S represents a particular student. Ss stands for students.

S1: Tourist, visitor, traveler, student.

S2: Student.

S1: Yeah.

S2: Must be that one, yeah.

T: Why do you think—why is student the odd one out?

S2: Oh, tourist, visitor, traveler ... They are moving.

S3: Yeah.

S1: They are going.

S2: They have something in common, no?

T: Yeah, yeah. But I’d like you to say what it is that they have in common, you know? How would you describe it?

S3: OK, second. Investigate, determine, explore, inquire. I think, determine ...

S1: Determine.

S3: Yeah, because investigate, inquire, explore is ...

S1: Synonymous, synonymous.

S3: ...means to know something. Mmm. OK.

S1: Third. Elderly, intelligent, stupidly, and talkative. Intelligent and stupidly, you know. I think they have, er, some relations between because there is the opposite meanings.

S3: How about, er, elderly and talkative?

S2: Talkative—what means talkative?

S1: Yeah, too much.

S2: Talkative.

S1: How about the elderly?

S3: Adjective.

S1: Had a more experience and they get the more ...

S3: Intelligent, stupidly—maybe that the part of the human being ... which is, I think ... OK. Oh...

S1: Wait. Wait a minute. OK, this is, this is different ad ... kind of adjective that the....

S2: OK, all right.

T: So, which one did you decide?

Ss; Elderly, elderly.

T: Why’s that? S2: Because, er, it’s quite different this, because this match with your age, with your age, and the other one is with your... kind of person that you are.

T: Personality.

S2: Personality, yeah.

S1: Er, utilize, uncover, reveal, disclose. Yeah, this is utilize. Uncover, reveal, disclose—all of them the same meaning. Uncover, reveal, disclose.

S2: Uncover? What’s uncover?

S1: You know, cover and uncover (gestures).

S2: Oh. Reveal. OK.

S3: Good.

T: But how would you define ... how would you define those three words? What is ... what would be the dictionary definition of those three words?

S3: You mean the uncover and reveal? T: Reveal and disclose. What is the ... what is the meaning that they share? 

S2: To find something and to...

S1: Uncover, revealed.

S3: And the other one doesn’t have anything to do with find. The other one means the opposite of doing something.



Commentary The sequence is taken from a pretask designed to present and review some key vocabulary that the students would encounter in the task proper—a selective listening task. Here is the handout they were working from:



Extract:1 is interesting from a number of perspectives. The students negotiate and collaborate well to complete the task. The teacher also does a good job of keeping the students on track and pushing them to describe what the words have in common. 

    In the extract, the two participants have heard two different interviewing committees discussing the relative merits of three applicants for a job. Their task is to share their information and decide which of the three would be the best person for the job.


Extract:2

A: Are you talking about Alan or Geoffrey? Just the first name.

B: Well, I understood I was talking about Geoffrey, yeah? Is that correct?

A: Not at all.

B: Not at all. So I have confused the man, have I? I’ve made a mistake here. Who ... who are you ... can you ... ? What notes do you have on Richards? See if we can get this sorted out first.

A: Were talking about Geoffrey, right? And he’s certainly the man that had a very good report. He knows the job, and I don’t see why we should at all discuss this because it is so obvious to me.

B: Well, it could very well be that I'm confusing the names of the people involved, so let’s make sure we’re talking about the same people. A: How about Alan?

B: But he’s a foreman rather than a supervisor, I understand, and this is basically a union job ...I mean I... my information is that all these people are occupying more or less the same rank.

A: Yes, but I mean, er, I agree, they are all, erm, foremen. Supervisor, by the way, is the same to me. Isn’t it to you?

B: Um, no, it’s not quite the same thing to me. A foreman is, uh, somewhat lower on the range, right?


Reflection:

    In Extract 2, the learners seem confused about the identities of the individuals. In what ways does this help their language development? In what ways does it hurt it?

Commentary At first sight, it appears that the teacher in Extract 2 has probably not set up this task very well. There is considerable confusion over the identity of the individuals being interviewed. However, this was exactly the purpose of the task. Both students had different, and slightly conflicting, information on the three participants, and this led to considerable negotiation between the two students. As we saw in the background section, such negotiation is hypothesized to be healthy for language acquisition.

Reflection:
    Extract 3 is a feedback session following a task. What do you think the task was? What do you notice about the way the teacher conducts the session? What is the purpose of the follow-up?


Extract:3

T: OK, let’s check your responses. At school?

Ss: Yes, yes.

T: At a party?

S: Yes.

S: No. T: Never been to a party? Oh, you poor thing, (laughter,) At the movies?
 
Ss: No, no.

T: No? Why not? Ss: (Inaudible comments and laughter.,)

T: What about at a shopping center?

Ss: No.

T: Sports event?

Ss: Yes. No.

T: Why?

S: Not at sports event.

S: What sports event?

S: Baseball game. Stadium.

S: Stadium. Stadium. Yes.

T: You mean watching?

S: Watching, yeah.

S: Or playing tennis.

(There is some confused discussion among the students.,)

T: OK, difference of opinion there. What about at a concert? S: No.

T: No?

(Laughter)

T: What about at a friend’s house?

Ss: Yes. Yes. S: No. (Laughter,)

T: No as well. Don’t you have any friends either?

S: I didn’t meet new people.

T: New people. OK. What other, what other places can you meet?

S: Part-time job.

T: Part-time job.

(Excited murmuring)

T: Yeah! Good one. Yeah. Any more?

S: Church.

T: Church.

(Scattered Laughter)

S; Travel, travel, traveling.

T: Traveling.

S: Some people meet new people at beach or, er, swimming pool.

T: OK.

(Laughter and teasing of student making this remark.)

T: Is this where you meet new people? (Laughter)

S: Huh?

T: Is this where you meet new people? S: Yeah. (Laughter)

T: Any others?

S: Er... organizations.

T: Organizations? What kind?

S: Oh, like, er, environmental group or...

T: Environmental groups—that’s good. OK. I think I’ll have to put some of these on my list because they’re very interesting.

Commentary In this section, the teacher is conducting a debriefing and eliciting feedback from the students. Students had completed a reading task about how and where single men and women in the United States meet each other and then took part in a pair and group work task based on the following worksheet.


6. Conclusion:

    In this section, I have provided a basic introduction to language teaching methodology, sketching out how the field has evolved over the last forty years, and then looked at contemporary approaches within the context of a communicative approach to language teaching. This had to be a selective introduction. A comprehensive text on language teaching methodology would be hundreds of pages in length. I hope, however, that it provides a platform you can build on when you read the rest of the chapters in this volume.


Further readings:
Celce-Murcia, M. (ed.) 2001. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Third Edition. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
    This edited volume is one of the standard works in the field. It covers all aspects of 
language teaching methodology, and many chapters would be excellent follow-up 
reading to the chapters in this volume.

Nunan, D. 1999. Second Language Teaching and Learning. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
    This book provides an introduction, rationale, research basis, and classroom proce
dures for task-based language teaching.

Richards J. and W. Renandya (eds.) 2002. Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    An edited collection of reprints on all aspects of methodology, this volume provides 
an overview of current approaches, issues, and practices in teaching English to 
speakers of other languages.


Helpful Web site:
Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington DC (http://www.cal.org/e riccll)
    This Web site has many useful resources, including papers, bibliographies, and 
links to other Web sites of relevance to language teaching methodology.




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on November 03, 2020 0


Classroom techniques and tasks


In this section, we look at some of the techniques and ideas that have been introduced in the preceding sections. There are so many of these that I have had to be highly selective. I have chosen to organize this section in terms of pretask, task, and follow-up.

Pre-task As we have seen, pretasks have several functions: to create interest, help build students’ schema in relation to the topic, introduce key vocabulary, and revise grammar items prior to the introduction of the task proper. There is almost no limit to the number of things that can be done at the pretask stage. Here are some examples:

Have students

• look at a list of comprehension questions and try to predict the answers before carrying out a listening task; 

• classify a set of words for describing emotions as “positive,” “negative,” and “neutral” before reading a magazine article about emotions; 

• practice a model conversation and then introduce their own variations before doing a role-play;     

• study a picture of a group of people at a party and try to guess which people are married/going out with each other before hearing a conversation about the couples;

• brainstorm ways in which cities of the future will be different from now before writing a newspaper article; 

• match newspaper headlines and photos before reading articles;

• check off words in a vocabulary list that are associated with living in a foreign culture before listening to a person recounting their experiences of living abroad; 

• rank from most to least important a list of factors predicting if a relationship will last before listening to a mini-lecture on the subject; 

• discuss the best year they ever had before taking part in an information gap exercise; 

• look at pictures taken from advertisements and guess what the ads are trying to sell before listening to the ads.

Task 

    The number of tasks that can be used to activate language in the classroom is also large. Some of the more popular task types in the communicative classroom include: role-plays, simulations, problem-solving, listening to authentic audio/video material, discussions, decision-making, and information gaps. Information gap tasks in which two or more students have access to different information that they have to share in order to complete the task are popular because,

• they work well with learners at most levels of proficiency from post beginner to advanced;

• students participate actively;

• all students have to take part if the task is to work;

• they work well with mixed level groups.

Here is an example of an information gap task. This task is personalized in that the students create their own information gap based on content from their own lives.

Jobmcqs15.blogpost.com


Reflection:

1. What level of proficiency do you think the task above is designed for?
2. What language do you imagine that students will need to use?
3. What language functions are the students practicing?


Design your own information gap task. Specify the vocabulary, grammar, and structures that you think the students will need in order to complete the task.

Follow-up As already indicated, the follow-up phase also provides lots of scope. The teacher can give feedback to the students, debrief them on some aspect of the preceding task, or encourage them to reflect on what they learned and how well they are doing.

Here are some examples of reflection tasks.

Example:

1. Write down five new words you learned in today’s lesson. Write sentences using three of these new words. Write down three new sentences or questions you learned.

2. Review the language functions you practiced in this lesson. Circle your answers.

Can you
            ... talk about past events?                 Yes         A little         Not yet 
            give and receive messages?            Yes         A little          Not yet

3. What would you say?

Your best friend invites you to his/her birthday party but you can’t make it. 

You say__________________________________________________.



You want someone to get you a book from the library. 

You say__________________________________________________.


4. Review the language we practiced today. In groups, brainstorm ways to use this language out of class. Imagine you are visiting an English- speaking country. Where and when might you need this language?



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