Silent Way method

THE SILENT WAY
(Early 1960’s)

Origin:
The Silent Way method was created by Caleb Gattegno. The approach is called the Silent Way because the teacher remains mainly silent, to give students the space they need to learn to talk. In this approach, it is assumed that the students' previous experience of learning from their mother tongue will contribute to learning the new foreign language.

Characteristics:

√ A cardinal principle of the Silent Way is respect for the students’ capacity to work out language problems and recall information on their own with no verbalization and minimal help from the teacher.

√ Errors are indispensable and natural part of the learning process. Self-correction and peer-correction are emphasized. The teacher corrects the language only as a last resort.

√ Teachers can help more frequently and more effectively if they stop interfering.

√ Repetition consumes time and encourages the scattered mind to remain scattered. If the teacher avoids repetition strictly, this will force alertness and concentration on the part of the learners. By this way the efficiency in learning will be increased and the time will be saved for further learning (Gattegno 1972 as cited in Oller and Amato: 1983). This principle is against ALM.

√ Type of interaction: student-student verbal interaction is desired and encouraged. The teacher’s silence is one way to achieve this.

√ Students’ native language: native language can be used to give instructions when necessary. Also native language can be used during the feedback sessions (at least for beginner levels). If the native language is not very essential then it is avoided.

√ Evaluation: although the teacher does not have to give a formal test, s/he assesses student learning all the time. One criterion of whether or not students have learned is their ability to transfer what they have been studying to new contexts.

a) Advantages

√ This method fosters cooperative learning between individuals.

√ It embodies a new approach to education in general, a respect for the individual and an awareness of the individual’s extraordinary cognitive powers.

√ If it is succeeded to teach the language the by using the rods without repeating too much, it will really save time and energy for both teachers students. The advocates of the Silent Way claim that the short-term memory is used artificially but well. The self-esteem of the students will be increased and this will enhance learning. By this way students will say ‘I learned instead of I was taught well.’ (Demircan1990).

b) Disadvantages

√ It would seem necessary for a teacher to gain a good deal of training and skill in order to apply the Silent Way to the teaching of a total grammar in all its complexity, if such a broad application is, in fact, possible.

√ This method can be benefited by the teacher only in small groups of students. The teacher can gain ability in this method by trying. The teacher is expected to enrich the materials on his/her own.

√ For some teachers the rigidity of the system (no repetitions by the teacher, no answers by the teacher etc.) may be meaningless.

√ For some learners, one limitation is the approach to language basics which begins with seemingly irrelevant discussions about rods and which involves silence and concentration and games with the teacher about meaning. Students’ expectations and need for immediately relevant language learning may force teachers to abandon the approach (Celce-Murcia 1979).

√ How such a method would in the average classroom situation, or how successfully it might be used at more advanced levels is a question mark left in our minds.

√ Language is separated from its social context and taught through artificial situations usually by rods.

a) Teacher Roles

√ The teacher should be silent as much as possible in the classroom to encourage the learner to produce as much language as possible.

√ The teacher is expected to create an environment that encourages student’s risk taking that facilitates learning.

√ The teacher should give only what help is necessary. In other words, the teacher makes use of what students already know. The more the teacher does for the students what they can do for themselves, the less they will do for themselves (Larsen-Freeman 1986).

b) Learner Roles

√ The learner is expected to become ‘independent, autonomous, and responsible’ in language.

√ Learners are expected to interact with each other and suggest alternatives to each other. They must learn to work cooperatively rather than competitively. The teacher’s silence encourages group cooperation.

√ In order not to miss what the teacher says, learners must give the teacher their attention. Learner-attention is a key to learning.

suggestopedia

Suggestopedia
A REVOLUTION IN THE ART OF TEACHING

Suggestopedia (or Suggesto-pedagogy), created in Bulgary under the influence of a psychiatrist, Dr. LOZANOV, is a method to suggest and even more desuggest of very great efficiency, particularly on the level of memorization, as well as on the level of the development of the well-being of the student.
Learning a foreign language seems to get more difficult as you get older for many people. Before the age of 6, children can pick up multiple languages with little difficulty, so what happens to block this natural ability?
Well of course, the way your brain works changes as you grow older, but other barriers to learning also arise
These can be anything from lack of enjoyment of school, to poor focus and concentration. But whatever the reason, suggestopedia can help you maximize your ability to learn a foreign language.
Suggestopedia will help you create and maintain the perfect learning state.
The sort of selfless, effortless concentration that kids find so easy when they absorb themselves in something. And then a wonderful thing happens... you learn without realizing you're learning. Words and phrases come back to you without having to think.
Whereas teaching is traditionally applied to the left hemisphere, Suggestopedia also activates the right hemisphere, finding that this association eliminates intellectual fatigue and results in increased efficiency.
A quick, efficient and pleasant method of learning


These are some important methods used in Suggestopedia. But its main strength lies essentially in the harmonious synthesis which it evokes along with the techniques of learning, the possibilities inherent in the method of suggestion – de-suggestion, and the positive attitude of the teacher…
No repetitive exercises, no translations, no homework, no tiredness… The student learns with pleasure in a relaxed atmosphere, while retaining a high level of motivation right to the end.

teaching pronunciation

Teaching pronunciation involves a variety of challenges. To begin with, our sense of
self and community are bound up in the speech-rhythms of our first language
(L1). These rhythms were learned in the first year of life and are deeply rooted
in the minds of students. Therefore, it is common for students to feel uneasy
when they hear themselves speak with the rhythm of a second language (L2).
They find that they “sound foreign” to themselves, and this is troubling for
them. Although the uneasiness is usually unconscious, it can be a major barrier to improved intelligibility in the L2. A teacher can help overcome this psychological barrier and other challenges by thinking of the goal of pronunciation instruction not as helping students to sound like native speakers but as helping them to learn the core elements of spoken English so that they can be easily understood by others. In other words, teachers and students can overcome the frustrations, difficulties, and boredom often associated with pronunciation by focusing their attention on the development of pronunciation that is “listener friendly.” After all, English pronunciation does not amount to mastery of a list of sounds or isolated words. Instead, it amounts to learning and practicing the specifically English way of making a speaker’s thoughts easy to follow.

Communication in spoken English is organized by “musical signals.” There
are two aspects to these signals – rhythm and melody – and the combination of
these two aspects may be called prosody. Often, the term prosody is used to mean rhythm alone, while the term intonation is used to refer specifically to melody (or pitch patterns). The reason is that for the purposes of teaching
pronunciation, the teacher needs to understand that both these aspects of spoken English work together and are vitally linked. The term prosody provides us with a handy way to refer to the interconnected aspects of rhythm and melody with a single label. Any final sound can be practiced in a new way through linking words together. This kind of practice helps concentrate students’ minds on the particular sound.
numbers and sentences with more than one clause,
students should be given the opportunity to listen to (very) short lectures while
they read the script, marking with a slash (/) where they think they heard a
thought group ending. Pairs or small groups can mark dialogues this way. They can then read the dialogues aloud to the class, to see if others can recognize the thought group signals. The important thing is not where speakers divide the groups, but that they actively think about the need for grouping in order to help listeners follow. Practice helping listeners to follow is invaluable training for listening comprehension because it trains them to think in terms of chunks of thought, not just individual words.
Advanced students can learn a good deal by recording a conversation
of their own with somebody outside of a classroom setting, that is, in a live
context. When listening to the recording later, they can transcribe some of the
exchanges and then note where changing intonational emphasis and phrasing
could have improved communication. Traditional pronunciation training usually focuses on minimal-pair drilling of vowel and consonant sounds, concentrating on individual sounds that are hard for students to hear or produce, in the hopes of achieving “mastery of the English sound system.” Unfortunately, this kind of drilling often produces depressing results and tends to take up a great deal of available classroom time. Considering an approach to teaching individual English sounds that takes into consideration the larger prosodic framework of spoken English and sets some priorities for which sounds should be addressed first, and how. It is terribly inefficient to teach individual sounds without establishing some basic understanding of the English system of rhythm and melody. For one thing, without an understanding of English prosody, students will end up practicing English sounds in their L1 rhythm. This is a common problem in many ESL/ELT classrooms. The rhythmic structure of each language supplies a timing context that makes it easier to reach the target sound. So, learning about the L2’s rhythm will make it easier for students to pronounce L2 sounds. Conversely, not learning about the target L2 rhythm will make the task more difficult. It has been said, for instance, that it is hard to make clear Spanish consonants if you are speaking in a Portuguese rhythm. So rhythm training is a precondition to good, clear target sounds. Without a sufficient, threshold-level mastery of the English prosodic system, learners’ intelligibility and listening comprehension will not advance, no matter how much effort is made drilling individual sounds. That is why the highest priority must be given to rhythm and melody in whatever time is available for teaching pronunciation. If there is more time, then other lower priority topics can be addressed (e.g., the sound of the letters th, the difference between the sounds associated with r and l, etc.), but priority must be given to prosody.

Teachers are often hesitant to tackle rhythm and melody in class
because these topics are perceived as complicated and full of nuance. Textbooks on the subject tend to be intimidating because they present so many rules. However, while intonation analysis can get very complicated, teaching a threshold level of understanding of the core system is actually quite simple at its most basic level. If there is only time to teach awareness of the core system and practice these vital rhythmic and melodic cues, as well as certain critical sounds, students will have achieved a great deal of communicative competence. But if these prosodic cues are not taught, then efforts at achieving communicative competence by drilling individual sounds will prove frustrating. After all, practicing pronunciation by focusing only on individual sounds is like using only part of the language. As one teacher trainee put it after training course, “Practicing pronunciation without prosody is like teaching ballroom dancing, only the students must stand still, practice without a partner, and without music.” Second language learners do not hear intonation very well. When they listen to speech, they are powerfully distracted from paying attention to pitch changes because they are struggling to understand sounds, vocabulary, and grammar. Students need to use intonation interactively and not simply mimic melodic patterns. Therefore, an essential part of teaching the communicative value of intonation is to use exercises in which the listener’s answers depend on noticing the speaker’s choice of focus word. Such tasks give each student many opportunities to practice both speaking and listening. Pronunciation has traditionally been taught with a goal of “speaking like a native speaker,” but this is not practical. In fact, it is a recipe for discouragement both for teachers and for students. This has been referred to as “the perfection trap” . A more practical approach is to aim for “listener-friendly pronunciation”. This aim makes sense to a student who hopes to achieve something through conversations with native speakers, whether in the social or business sense. If the listener finds that it takes too much effort to understand, the speaker loses out. So mastering the basics of English communication is sensible. Refinements can come later if the student wants to put more effort and time into learning nuances of spoken English.
Unfortunately, the word pronunciation tends to make people think exclusively
of sounds that get confused, which has traditionally led to dependence on
minimal pair drills. Both because this is inherently an unengaging activity, and
because the results tend to be discouraging, it takes enormous effort on the
part of the teacher to keep a class enthusiastic. Also, teachers tend to think the
subject is very technical, since it is often presented that way in teacher training
courses. Some teachers try hard to teach pronunciation as if it was a course in
phonetics, and this also tends to discourage both teachers and students. Some
course books present impractical stress and intonation rules, further burdening
the teacher. Actually, the core prosodic structure of spoken English is quite
simple and requires little technical terminology. If teachers become aware of the importance of discourse intonation as a simple foundation system, pronunciation becomes much more rewarding for both teachers and students.

Teaching pronunciation

Teaching pronunciation
Speaking activities are probably the most demanding for students and teachers in terms of affective factors involved. Trying to produce language in front of others students can generate high levels of anxiety. Students may feel that they are presenting themselves a much lower level of cognitive ability than they really possess; they may have a natural anxiety about being incomprehensible; they may have culture inhibitions about losing face, or they may simply be shy personality who does not speak very much in their first language. It is therefore a major responsibility for the teacher to create a reassuring classroom environment in which students are prepared to take risks and experiment with the language.
For that reason the correction of pronunciation errors, therefore, needs to be done in as positive way as possible. In the use of correction techniques a balance is needed between accuracy and fluency, and many handbooks for teachers stress the importance of not impeding or distracting learners’ attempts to communicate during fluency activities. The teacher’s notes which accompany many coursebooks often instruct teachers to leave correction until the end in fluency activities.
There is a list of strategies for errors correction in a classroom.
1. The teacher frowns and says ‘No, you don´t say that’. What do you say?
Can anybody help Juan?
2. The teacher repeats a sentence the student has just said, which raising intonation up to the point of the mistake, and waits for the student to self-correct.
3. The student has just produce a present -tense answer to a past- tense question from the teacher. The teacher repeats the question, stressing the past- tense form, and waits for the student to self correct.
4. The student uses incorrect intonation, the teacher asks the class for a accurate version, then repeats it, asks the class for chloral repetition and individual repetition, and finally return to the original student.
There is always a need to balance negative feedback on errors with positive on the student’s attempts to produce the language, and this means consideration of affective factors and knowing when to push and when to stop.

Reading and writing skills

Reading can be a good starting point for writing. Students can often read and understand texts that are more complicated than the texts they can write. Give learners the opportunity to read a range of texts that are written for different purposes. Talk with the class about the writer's reasons for writing and about the vocabulary and grammar of a particular text. This will give learners a good foundation on which to build their own writing ability.Encourage learners to think about their own reading and writing priorities and their strengths and weaknesses.Encourage learners to read graded readers and write brief reviews on them when they are through reading them, always tell students to read everthing that catches their interest; they will improve their knowledge and ability to writing well when they read magazines, their favorite novels and others educated materials.


2.Writing is a productive skill and can therefore be more challenging, so it often follows on from reading. Frequently, when learners are more ambitious and try to write more complex language, the number of errors increases. Because of this always keep in mind the purpose of the exercise you are doing with your group. If you want them to take risks and try to be ambitious with their language and ideas, focus on the things they get right. If you pick out the mistakes they have made, it might be demotivating and prevent them from taking risks in the future.

Set up your high school students for writing success at the beginning of a new school year by providing a variety of writing assignments that focus on their experience being a teenager! they should also write how they spend thier holiday, this will encourage them to boost their writing skills.enourage students to boost their confidence by writing about what they know through personal experience. This shows students how to break down and organize the memorywriting process.

Magazines tend to have appeal for all students and have many advantages for struggling readers because of their interesting and current topics, large number of graphics, short articles, and "adult" look. There are some contemporary poets out there whose poems have mass kid appeal. And because poems, like magazine articles, are short, they are instantly gratifying and provide an immediate sense of accomplishment for all readers

how to teach grammar

Teaching grammar may be the thing that scares native speakers the most. Most people don’t have an in-depth understanding of the grammar of their own language. You may get mainly conversation classes and feel that you’ve lucked out, but teaching grammar doesn’t have to be horrible for you or for your students.
First of all, keep your expectations realistic. You will not have the time or resources to teach your students everything there is to know about tenses or word order or relative clauses, and you were almost certainly not hired to do so.

There are people who are walking dictionaries of grammar rules; most schools wouldn’t want to hire them and even if they did, most students wouldn’t want to be in their classes. Teach them what they need to know to do the practice exercises in the book or on the test and get them to speak. Many students have spent years in English classes in school, focusing on grammar rather intensively, and still need work. Don’t feel you need to finalize everything in your two-hour class.
Next, make sure you prepare so that you yourself understand the grammar point at hand. Check a reference book or ask other teachers – generally non-native speakers will have a better understanding of grammar than many native speakers. If there are practice exercises, do them yourself and THEN check the answers. This will help you anticipate students’ difficulties and avoid embarrassing yourself with a wrong answer…it happens.
Avoid getting into detailed explanations and try to get your students practicing and speaking as soon as possible. Answer questions to the best of your knowledge. It happens that teachers get creative when they don’t know the answer, but what you improvise is likely to come back to haunt you. It’s okay to say you need to check on it and get back to the student .

How phonetics works for me.

I remember the first time I noticed some weird symbols on the little brown pocket English-Spanish Dictionary given to me by my aunt when I was 11 years. A bunch of “reversed letters and numbers” and other kind of signs amazed me, making me wonder about their meaning. As the common dictionaries do, the first pages in my dictionary showed how those symbols work and what they were made for. The author called them “phonetic symbols” and he explained how they had to be pronounced, according to their relation with Spanish sounds. That day, I understood English doesn’t sound in the same way Spanish do, as much as the majority of the people think.

Phonetics actually works with speech sounds, that kind of sounds that people can produce using the vocal tract and can be heard by the ears. That is the game of communication. As Jakobson (1956) said:” We speak to be heard and need to be heard in order to be understood”. Phonetics had no sense if we humans didn’t communicate among us. We are the talkative animals of the planet, so we communicate with others every single day; we are talking and talking every time we want, because communication is part of our primary body functions, part of our own human development. Many of us not even would “exist” without a cellular phone or the internet; that is why communication is the motor of our modern social organization.

As an English and Education student, communication represents the backbone of my career due to English is just a language, a communication code and Education is a profession that uses all the communication features to bring and share knowledge with other people. On the basis of those reasons, I could state communication is very important in my own knowledge achievement process, but there is something else beyond this process: First, the courses of action that occur inside the brain in order to produce the speech sounds that will work in our communication acts. All those neuronal activities involved in the selection of the correct symbols to be arranged to produce a message. It is like to find the symbols into a file box or a computer. Next, all the nerve impulses transmitted by the brain to activate and coordinate the mechanisms and organs involved in the production of sounds. That is when the speech apparatus appears to bring us the show and to let the words fly away through the air on the sound waves. After those events, a listener catches the sound waves; the message arrives to the ears to be transformed in nerve impulses. Secondly, the listener brain starts to find into its own file box to identify the sequence of sounds that the speaker produced just an instant before, while the speaker is also hearing the same sounds produced by himself. They will both understand the sounds after they internally decode the nerve impulses received from the inner ear.

Phonetics studies how those above mentioned sounds are produced. Phonetics needs some related sciences to understand and study the speech processes, for instance: Anatomy, physiology, neurophysiology, physics, psychology, psychoacoustic, etc. Now, computing science is helping phonetics to smooth the progress of some studies by using some techniques of digital processing of acoustic signals. All these sciences all known as Speech Sciences, where phonetics stands at the intersection of all those concerned sciences, related in any way with the study of speech, with no boundaries. Consequently, Phonetics is related to education as another area of Neurosciences, that is, all the sciences related to the study of the brain activities, where phonetics has a lot of work to do.

Likewise, talking in a pragmatic way about English, there is a direct relation between phonetics and ESL. For instance, Professor Hector Palacios from UPEL, states “If you don’t know how a word is pronounced, please don’t utter it” The main reason stands on the way as our own ears catch the same sound waves we produced at first. Due to the comprehension is based on the listening; it works on the GIGO computing principle: Garbage in, Garbage out. If you send garbage to your brain, your brain will take revenge in your mouth. If you mispronounce a word, you have a high chance to say it in a wrong way the most of the future cases. This is a rule that must be observed in any moment if anybody wants to be a reputable English teacher. If he or she doesn’t want, he or she must go immediately to the Studies Control Office to ask for another career.

In the same way, a correct use of features of phonetics will help our English Language proficiencies to increase highly. For instance, Orthology defines how a specific language must be pronounced, so we are able to obtain a correct pronunciation of English if we pay attention to those rules. Another branch of phonetics studies the interesting history of language: Diachronic and Synchronic Phonetics (Llisterri, 2005) show us how English was developed until our days and how the sounds were described in a specific period of time, respectively. I am deeply convinced that one of the more interesting features of phonetics is seeing all the gestures made with the mouth when the correct pronunciation is intended to be shown. It is way too soon to say how far will the studies about phonetics go; I know I’m supposed to find more applications for it as a future English teacher, but I hope that the most of my classmates and the whole generation of students of English in UPEL were interested in a good pronunciation, the structure of the speech sounds and other features of phonetics. But above all this, I hope that phonetics worked for them in the same way that it works for me.

Teaching pronunciation.

From my point of view, pronunciation is one the most important component of the speaking skill. Students most practice it habitually in order to improve it. And they also need to have references to phonology, because it changes from the mother tongue to the specific foreign language they are learning. So, teachers have to take into account this aspect when they plan activities to develop the speaking skill.

However, teachers shouldn’t forget how important stress, rhythm and intonation are, because all of them are connected to pronunciation directly.

A foreign language learner has to master these components to success in their goal which is to speak the new language in the nearly natural way. That is not possible if learner is not totally related at all with them.

reading as an interactive process

Traditionally, English language learners have been prepared for reading through a focus on language knowledge , vocabulary usually , and sometimes structures .More recently , since the adaptation of the idea of reading as an interactive process, in which reading activities have been used to encourage learner to be active as they read, for exemple : student can be given activities which require them to do any of the following :follow the order of idea in the text : react to the opinions expressed; understand the information it contains; ask themselves questions; make notes .
There are just some of the activities now used by teachers and text books writers who believe that it might be useful to intervene in the reading process in some way. The reading lesson should aim to build learner’s abilities to engage in purposeful reading , to adopt a range of reading styles necessary for interacting successfully with authentic texts, and do develop critical awareness.
by Ninoska Gutierrez.

Teaching Reading
Traditionally, the purpose of learning to read in a language has been to have access to the literature written in that language. In language instruction, reading materials have traditionally been chosen from literary texts that represent "higher" forms of culture.
This approach assumes that students learn to read a language by studying its vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure, not by actually reading it. In this approach, lower level learners read only sentences and paragraphs generated by textbook writers and instructors. The reading of authentic materials is limited to the works of great authors and reserved for upper level students who have developed the language skills needed to read them.
The communicative approach to language teaching has given instructors a different understanding of the role of reading in the language classroom and the types of texts that can be used in instruction. When the goal of instruction is communicative competence, everyday materials such as train schedules, newspaper articles, and travel and tourism Web sites become appropriate classroom materials, because reading them is one way communicative competence is developed. Instruction in reading and reading practice thus become essential parts of language teaching at every level.
Reading Purpose and Reading Comprehension
Reading is an activity with a purpose. A person may read in order to gain information or verify existing knowledge, or in order to critique a writer's ideas or writing style. A person may also read for enjoyment, or to enhance knowledge of the language being read. The purpose(s) for reading guide the reader's selection of texts.
The purpose for reading also determines the appropriate approach to reading comprehension. A person who needs to know whether she can afford to eat at a particular restaurant needs to comprehend the pricing information provided on the menu, but does not need to recognize the name of every appetizer listed. A person reading poetry for enjoyment needs to recognize the words the poet uses and the ways they are put together, but does not need to identify main idea and supporting details. However, a person using a scientific article to support an opinion needs to know the vocabulary that is used, understand the facts and cause-effect sequences that are presented, and recognize ideas that are presented as hypotheses and givens.
Reading research shows that good readers
Read extensively
Integrate information in the text with existing knowledge
Have a flexible reading style, depending on what they are reading
Are motivated
Rely on different skills interacting: perceptual processing, phonemic processing, recall
Read for a purpose; reading serves a function
Reading as a Process
Reading is an interactive process that goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension. The text presents letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that encode meaning. The reader uses knowledge, skills, and strategies to determine what that meaning is.
Reader knowledge, skills, and strategies include
Linguistic competence: the ability to recognize the elements of the writing system; knowledge of vocabulary; knowledge of how words are structured into sentences
Discourse competence: knowledge of discourse markers and how they connect parts of the text to one another
Sociolinguistic competence: knowledge about different types of texts and their usual structure and content
Strategic competence: the ability to use top-down strategies (see Strategies for Developing Reading Skills for descriptions), as well as knowledge of the language (a bottom-up strategy)
The purpose(s) for reading and the type of text determine the specific knowledge, skills, and strategies that readers need to apply to achieve comprehension. Reading comprehension is thus much more than decoding. Reading comprehension results when the reader knows which skills and strategies are appropriate for the type of text, and understands how to apply them to accomplish the reading purpose.


Material for this section was drawn from “Reading in the beginning and intermediate college foreign language class” by Heidi Byrnes, in Modules for the professional preparation of teaching assistants in foreign languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998)

Teaching Speaking

Teaching Speaking
Many language learners regard speaking ability as the measure of knowing a language. These learners define fluency as the ability to converse with others, much more than the ability to read, write, or comprehend oral language. They regard speaking as the most important skill they can acquire, and they assess their progress in terms of their accomplishments in spoken communication.
Language learners need to recognize that speaking involves three areas of knowledge:
Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary): Using the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation
Functions (transaction and interaction): Knowing when clarity of message is essential (transaction/information exchange) and when precise understanding is not required (interaction/relationship building)
Social and cultural rules and norms (turn-taking, rate of speech, length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants): Understanding how to take into account who is speaking to whom, in what circumstances, about what, and for what reason.
In the communicative model of language teaching, instructors help their students develop this body of knowledge by providing authentic practice that prepares students for real-life communication situations. They help their students develop the ability to produce grammatically correct, logically connected sentences that are appropriate to specific contexts, and to do so using acceptable (that is, comprehensible) pronunciation.


Material for this section was drawn from “Spoken language: What it is and how to teach it” by Grace Stovall Burkart, in Modules for the professional preparation of teaching assistants in foreign languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998)

Teaching listening

Teaching Listening
Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability.
Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.
Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.
Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom.

Material for this section was drawn from “Listening in a foreign language” by Ana Maria Schwartz, in Modules for the professional preparation of teaching assistants in foreign languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998)

Teaching grammar

Teaching Grammar
Grammar is central to the teaching and learning of languages. It is also one of the more difficult aspects of language to teach well.
Many people, including language teachers, hear the word "grammar" and think of a fixed set of word forms and rules of usage. They associate "good" grammar with the prestige forms of the language, such as those used in writing and in formal oral presentations, and "bad" or "no" grammar with the language used in everyday conversation or used by speakers of nonprestige forms.
Language teachers who adopt this definition focus on grammar as a set of forms and rules. They teach grammar by explaining the forms and rules and then drilling students on them. This results in bored, disaffected students who can produce correct forms on exercises and tests, but consistently make errors when they try to use the language in context.
Other language teachers, influenced by recent theoretical work on the difference between language learning and language acquisition, tend not to teach grammar at all. Believing that children acquire their first language without overt grammar instruction, they expect students to learn their second language the same way. They assume that students will absorb grammar rules as they hear, read, and use the language in communication activities. This approach does not allow students to use one of the major tools they have as learners: their active understanding of what grammar is and how it works in the language they already know.
The communicative competence model balances these extremes. The model recognizes that overt grammar instruction helps students acquire the language more efficiently, but it incorporates grammar teaching and learning into the larger context of teaching students to use the language. Instructors using this model teach students the grammar they need to know to accomplish defined communication tasks.


Material for this section was drawn from “Grammar in the foreign language classroom: Making principled choices” by Patricia Byrd, in Modules for the Professional Preparation of Teaching Assistants in Foreign Languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998)

FUNNY PRONOUNCIATION

Sometimes,it i hard for students to keep in mind the sound of a lot of words,because, probably, they don't have an effective motivation which to put in practice their knowledge about it,one way of teaching pronounciation from a different perspective is using the TPR method,which is excellent for doing the class interesting and funny,through this method teacher gives some commands which have to be perform by the professor several times with the purpose that the students hear as much as possible the sounds that are being pronounced and after that to put in practice them.The brain is a wonderful store where are kept different sounds we had heard,once they are activated by the repetition of them,we can do relations between what we hear and what we have stored in our mind.Some activities appropriates for this purpose is to say simple commands such as "Let's go to read the following reading" or "Be quiet,please", they are simple phrases which can be perfectly practiced by students,also it is good to play a simple song many times with the purpose students familiarizes with the sounds they heard or simple dialogues.Of course,teacher has to select the most adequate tool which have to be related with common activities with understandable words,it is impossible to teach something in a direct way,the learning process has to be flexible progressive,that is, step by step,I'm sure, learning will be meaningful and significative.I know that it will hard for students memorize a lot of sounds,but with many practce and disposition,there will not any kind of barrier to learn them.