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Post by Dee Broughton on Jun 30, 2015 10:39:34 GMT 5
This week's reading comes in two parts. It's Michael Swan's, "A Critical Look at the Communicative Approach" (Parts 1 and 2) found here at Part 1 and Part 2.
This text was written in 1985, just a few years after Krashen began publishing work on the input hypothesis. Swan wrote this in response to the feeling that the Communicative Approach was already becoming dogma at that time and he had some serious problems with it. The communicative approach is now even more widespread and still has some of these problems. Let's look at the text and discuss which of these are still problems and what we can do about them in our own teaching and materials design. In this video, Swan is much older and wiser and tells us that teachers can only do so much.... Part 2
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Post by Dee Broughton on Jun 30, 2015 16:39:35 GMT 5
In the writing tip for reading #3, we tried a template that we called "Yes, but...," a way of partially agreeing, while explaining where you disagree. For reading #5, I suggest we try a "Yes, and..." response. This type of response agrees and adds evidence to make the argument even stronger. Because Swan's writings are fairly old, this is a good source to try with this template.
Find some portion of Swan's criticism that you agree with, but when you discuss it, add evidence from a more recent source.
Here's an example of the "Yes, and..." response using reading #4. Notice the frame and referencing for the source that is being responded to, as well as the framing and referencing for the source used as evidence. Notice how the writer's response comes after both framed quotes.
1)Introductory/transition sentences to let the reader know why the quote is used 2) referencing 3) quote 4) paraphrasing to show what the writer thinks the quote means 5) writer's response
Teachers may believe that students can guess meaning from context, but this does not seem to to be the case. Jenkins (2002) warns, "when the receiver and speaker are both NNSs, the receiver tends to focus on the acoustic signal and direct his or her effort to decoding what has been heard. Where this does not tally with visual and other extralinguistic cues, or with the cotext then, time and again in my ILT data, the receiver adjusts the context and/or cotext to bring them into line with the acoustic information rather than vice versa" (p. 90). That is, NNSs relied heavily on acoustic data (pronunciation), so much so that they ignored or changed their idea of context to fit what they believed they had heard. This resonates well with our knowledge of the unreliability of guessing vocabulary among learners. As Kaivanpanah (2008) showed,"learners' assessments are not reliable. Moreover, it was found that proficiency in the L2 and gender influence learners' self-assessment." In other words, not only could learners not guess rightly, but they didn't know when they had guessed wrongly. It seems evident to me that teachers cannot rely on context to carry as much meaning for learners as the teachers may intuitively believe.
Jenkins, J. (2002). A sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for English as an international language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 87-90. Kaivanpanah, S. (2008). Deriving unknown word meaning from context: Is it reliable? RELC Journal, 39(1), 77-95.
As you write, obviously not every quote will have every part of the frame, but do consider every part of the frame every time. Every part should logically be there, so if you leave a part out, do it on purpose! Do it because it's not needed for some logical reason. Give this technique a try and you'll find your writing quickly and easily becomes much clearer and much better developed!
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margarita
New Member
" ONLY THOSE WHO RISK GOING TOO FAR CAN POSSIBLY FIND HOW FAR THEY CAN GO."
Posts: 8
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Post by margarita on Jul 21, 2015 11:20:00 GMT 5
For some reasons I can't find this week's reading. There is no link or anything which leads to the article.
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Post by Dee Broughton on Jul 22, 2015 12:14:46 GMT 5
For some reasons I can't find this week's reading. There is no link or anything which leads to the article. It's in the first line that says "Part 1" and "Part 2". I guess I made the links a little too small for you to see easily. I'll edit them to make them more obvious.
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Post by ninaev on Aug 17, 2015 20:20:25 GMT 5
Hi everyone. Creating sensible teaching program is a complicated process. Swan in his speech asks a question: “What can a teacher change in the work?”. I change the question :”What I have change in the school course books to make them more efficient”. The modern text books are designed on the basic of the communicative approach. The textbooks are mainly focus on the improving speaking skills at the expense of writing and reading. Semantic syllabus organizes the textbooks in inconvenient way and put meaning and vocabulary on one site and grammar and pronunciation on another site. For example, countable and uncountable nouns are taught in the 6th form age 11, but in the 9th form age 14 the students operate with such words as Experience and advice. What should teacher do at the higher level of language acquisition? Nina
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Post by Dee Broughton on Aug 21, 2015 12:29:28 GMT 5
Hi everyone. Creating sensible teaching program is a complicated process. Swan in his speech asks a question: “What can a teacher change in the work?”. I change the question :”What I have change in the school course books to make them more efficient”. The modern text books are designed on the basic of the communicative approach. The textbooks are mainly focus on the improving speaking skills at the expense of writing and reading. Semantic syllabus organizes the textbooks in inconvenient way and put meaning and vocabulary on one site and grammar and pronunciation on another site. For example, countable and uncountable nouns are taught in the 6th form age 11, but in the 9th form age 14 the students operate with such words as Experience and advice. What should teacher do at the higher level of language acquisition? Nina Ninaev - You raise a few different points here. The structure of the books seems to cause you some difficulty, but you also seem to be touching on the topic of vocabulary level. What level do you find "experience" and "advice" to be? Are the appropriate for the CEFR level you want your students to achieve? In other words, how high is this "higher level" that you mention? Also, you mention that the text books are improving speaking skills at the expense of writing and reading. This may be more than a skills issue. It is likely that the books are not providing enough input, so that what appears to be improvement in speaking is actually increased fluency at a low level rather than a large rise in level. Do you think that could be the case? Then again, you mention the teaching of a grammar rule long before the students have enough vocabulary comprehend much of what they read or hear. What do you think of that? As you begin to write about and articulate your teaching philosophy, it may be helpful to separate the different issues.
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