HBET1303 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Title:

The Principles of Communicative Language Teaching Methodology

Nama Jamaliah binti Ahmad

No Matrik 700718025328002

No telefon 012-4321696

JANUARI 2012
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TABLE OF CONTENT 1. Question 1 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Fluency vs accuracy 1.3 Global errors vs locals errors 1.4 When and how to correct errors 2. Question 2 2.1 Lesson plan 2.2 Reflection 3. Question 3: The gist of KBSM

PAGE 1 1 2 3-4 4-5 6 6-7 7 8

References Appendices

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1. Question 1 1.1 Introduction ESL learners have countless daily opportunities for listening and speaking in English as they interact as students, workers, family members, community members, and other. Some listening is non face-to-face, such as listening to movies and broadcast media, listening on the phone, and listening to loudspeaker announcements. Most listening, however, combines short bursts of face-to-face listening interspersed with speaking such as discussions at the workplace, social conversations with neighbours and colleagues, telephone conversations, and conversations with the many service providers encountered daily doctors, social workers, police officers, store clerks, and school staff. In each context, learners have a purpose for listening and a communication task. Listeners may listen to obtain facts or to understand the main idea. They may need to distinguish question words and respond appropriately. They may need to follow or give instructions or advice. Adult learners may need to distinguish facts from opinions or express their own point of view. They may need to relate what they hear to visual materials they are looking at. They may want to connect with other people by sharing personal stories. Many factors can interfere with listening and speaking to create confusions and miscommunications. Misheard sounds and pronunciation errors, inappropriate word choices or wrongly-used grammatical forms can lead to communication breakdowns. Breakdowns can have significant consequences embarrassment, unintended offense, missed appointments, inaccurate processes, etc. ESL teachers have the opportunity to help adult ESL learners practice listening and speaking in the safe environment of the classroom. Many textbooks contain listening cassettes or CDs which give learners the opportunity to hear voices from a variety of speakers engaged in conversations on a variety of life skill topics. In addition, teachers can facilitate listening and speaking activities that utilize pair work and group work. Every listening/speaking activity should require a response; the listener should answer a question, follow a direction, choose the correct object from alternatives, write a message, etc.

1.2

Fluency vs accuracy

English is an international language which people from all over the world learn in order to communicate with each other. Accuracy and Fluency are two factors which can determine the success of English language students in the future. As far as teaching methodologies are concerned, very broadly speaking the communicative approach is the one that favours fluency the most, while the audio-lingual and grammar translation approaches favour accuracy. Typically, at beginner level when the students don't have enough language to worry about fluency, teachers tend to focus on accuracy. This carries on through to pre-intermediate level when fluency activities like discussions and debates are introduced. At intermediate level, when the students are reasonably independent language users, a mix of accuracy and fluency is used, with the focus shifting to fluency as students advance. Accuracy is the ability to produce correct sentences using correct grammar and vocabulary. Accuracy is relative. A child in early primary isn't capable of the same level of accuracy as an adult. Teachers who concentrate on accuracy help their students to produce grammatically correct written and spoken English. Typical accuracy activities are: grammar presentations, gap-fill exercises, frame dialogues. Fluency is the ability to read, speak, or write easily, smoothly, and expressively. In other words, the speaker can read, understand and respond in a language clearly and concisely while relating meaning and context. Fluency generally increases as learners progress from beginning to advanced readers and writers. Language teachers who concentrate on fluency help their students to express themselves in fluent English. They pay more attention to meaning and context and are less concerned with grammatical errors. Typical fluency activities are: role plays, speeches, communicative activities, games. Taken as a given that students' needs should always dictate what you teach them, the question of whether it is more important to work on accuracy or fluency in the language classroom remains. Many teachers believe that fluency is a goal worth striving towards only with students who are at a fairly advanced level. Other teachers, strong in the belief that the learning of a language is about communication, feel that fluency should be the main goal in their teaching and that it should be practiced right from the start. More traditional teachers give accuracy paramount importance and test their students for accuracy and accuracy only! Often rigid educational systems where tests and exams are the focus will have students (and their traditional teachers) believe that language accuracy is what matters most, and giving the "correct" answers often becomes an obsession. Students who have been taught this way can complete any grammar gapfill you care to give them, but will struggle to order a coffee in a real English speaking situation.
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1.3 Global errors vs local errors

The field of error analysis in SLA was established in the 1970s by S. P. Corder and colleagues. A widely- available survey can be found in chapter 8 of Brown, 2000. Error analysis was an alternative to contrastive analysis, an approach influenced by behaviorism through which applied linguists sought to use the formal distinctions between the learners first and second languages to predict errors. Error analysis showed that contrastive analysis was unable to predict a great majority of errors, although its more valuable aspects have been incorporated into the study of language transfer. A key finding of error analysis has been that many learner errors are produced by learners making faulty inferences about the rules of the new language. Error analysts distinguish between errors, which are systematic and mistakes, which are not. They often seek to develop a typology of errors. Error can be classified according to basic type: omissive, additive, substitutive or related to word order. They can be classified by how apparent they are: overt errors such as I angry are obvious even out of context, whereas covert errors are evident only in context. Closely related to this is the classification according to domain, the breadth of context which the analyst must examine and extent, the breadth of the utterance which must be changed in order to fix the error. Errors may also be classified according to the level of language: phonological errors, vocabulary or lexical errors, syntactic errors and so on. They may be assessed according to the degree to which they interfere with communication: global errors make an utterance difficult to understand, while local errors do not. In the above example I angry would be a local error, since the meaning is apparent. From the beginning, error analysis was beset with methodological problems. In particular, the above typologies are problematic: from linguistic data alone, it is often impossible to reliably determine what kind of error a learner is making. Also error analysis can deal effectively only with learner production (speaking and writing) and not with learner reception (listening and reading). Furthermore, it cannot account for learner use of communicative strategies such as avoidance, in which learners simply do not use a form with which they are uncomfortable for these reasons, although error analysis is still used to investigate specific question in SLA, the quest for an overarching theory of learner errors has

largely been abandoned. Today the study of errors is particularly relevant for focus on form teaching methodology.

1.4 When and how to correct errors

The correction of errors is sometimes necessary and positive but some other times it has a negative effect. Being able to know about our students individual learning styles and preferences will give us the clue so as to know whether we should correct them or not and how error correction could improve their linguistic and communicative competence. This section suggests some insights on different ways of correction and their positive and negative effects, so that teachers can use the correct techniques for better results. So as to start, it is important to distinguish that there are two types of correction, the implicit and the explicit one. The problem with the first one, i.e. feedback on error which takes the form of recast or repetitions may be interpreted by the learners as a continuation of the conversation, therefore, explicit correction may also be needed and it is more effective sometimes. Another problem implicit correction can mislead us to be that teachers sometimes do not highlight where the error is, therefore, the student may not realize where the focus of difficulty is and changes other elements which are completely right. The most typical way of correcting is by interrupting the student before he has finished speaking. This could have a negative effect, especially among anxious students as they normally loose the track, forget what they were talking about and their anxiety levels are increased. Some other times teachers do not wait the time necessary for the student to assimilate the correction. A useful technique is to wait, write down the correction and find correction at a later time. This issue has to do with the Incubation Hypothesis which accounts that students need an incubation period before the new structure starts to appear in their performance. This is also another reason why teachers should correct an error which is performed by the student some minutes later. Another problem occurs when teachers correct students errors which are beyond the students level. They just correct them because it is not the English standard form without realizing that this correction is beyond the students capacity. The problem with this is also that the teacher has to stop and explain the new concept. Therefore, only those errors which correspond to the grammar it is being learning should be corrected. Moreover, emphasis
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on error should be done on the lexicon, intonation and pronunciation because they are the main areas for the understanding of the message. According to Vzquez (1987) pragmatics and semantics play a more important role than morph syntax in the comprehension of the message, so we should take this into account when deciding which type of errors to correct. A very useful, practical and effective way of correction is the use of an inductive method in which the teacher asks the student to correct himself (self-correction) and realize on what he did wrong. This way it will allow the student to carry out an error processing which actually helps him more to retain the right form in his mind. Another effective way of correction, especially if we think of the teacher not only as the great source of knowledge but as a moderator or guide in the language classroom is to wait until someone comes out with the right answer. It is also important to encourage self correction rather than teacher correction and it is also very useful to discuss correction with students.

2. Question 2 2.1 Lesson Plan Date Day Class : 10th February 2012 : Tuesday : Form 1 : 9.10am 10.10am (1 hour) : World of Knowledge : Follow Instruction : Listening and Speaking : Tenses (simple present and simple past) : By the end of the lesson pupils should be able to:-

No. of pupils : 30 pupils Time Theme Topic

Language Skills Grammar items Learning Outcome i) ii) Materials Strategies Context

understand what instructions are. recognize the importance of sequencing them. : Clothes, things in the classroom : Game, Direct Teaching, Individual Activity and Group Activity : In this lesson, pupils can practice listening, speaking and writing.

Induction set (5 minutes): 1. Teacher teaches pupils to play the game Leading the Blind: i. Blindfold Pupil A and get him to stand at a certain position in the classroom. Then, get him to turn round twice. ii. iii. Get Pupil B to stand at a corner of the classroom. Place obstacles (tables and chairs) between Pupils A and B.

2. Pupil B is to give instructions to Pupil A to move towards him, without bumping into the obstacles. Rationale : to arouse pupils interest on the topic Presentation Stage (15 minutes): 3. Teacher discusses with pupils on the importance of instructions. Ask pupils: i. What happens if the instructions were unclear?
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ii.

What happens if the instructions were wrongly sequenced?

Explaining Language Feature: 4. Teacher explains that the instructions give the recipients information on how something should be done in order to achieve a goal. 5. Teacher to give examples of instructions: recipes, origami, etc. 6. Teacher also highlights that written instructions can involve number sequencing or words such as; First, Next, Then, Finally, etc. Rationale: to focus on the language items learn. Practise stage (15 minutes): 7. Teacher demonstrates making of an apple pie. 8. After demonstration, the high ability pupils are to recall and write out the instructions for making the apple pie. the middle ability pupils are to fill in missing information in the set of instructions for making the apple pie. the low ability pupils are to fill in missing information in the set of instructions for making the apple pie using helping words. Production stage (10 minutes): 9. Teacher puts pupils into groups. 10. Each group is given two sets of instructions, all mixed up. The pupils have to sort out the instructions and arrange them in the correct sequence. Closure (5 minutes): 11. Teacher asks one of the pupils to explain their answer. 12. Teacher suggested the correct answer

2.2 Conclusions The activities done in an hour lesson were focused on the listening and speaking skills where pupils need to listen and follow to the instruction by their friends and the teacher based on the instruction given. Individual and group works were practice during the engagement. The teacher works as facilitator whereby the pupils will definitely work individually and groups.

3. The gist of KBSM

I agree with the KBSM curriculum and the policy of the educational system. There has been a long time that our students being exposed to KBSM curriculum that produced many graduates with in many aspects of knowledge. KBSM or known as Kurikulum Bersepadu Sekolah Menengah was introduced in 1980 by the government to build a well established curriculum for all secondary school. It was introduced for language subject in 1988 and to all subjects in 1989. KBSM was the continuation of KBSR Kurikulum Bersepadu Sekolah Rendah that is based on 3M (reading, writing and calculating). The aim of KBSM is similar to KBSR that is to expand the individual potential as a whole, balance and integrated and it covers the aspect of intellectual, spirit, emotion and physical to produce a well balance, harmonious and good moral values individual. It was mainly design to achieve the aims of the National Education Philosophy. The exam-oriented education system is one of the major issues in KBSR and KBSM curriculum. Every year we can see quite a number of such untoward incidents as a result of examination failure, which simply implies a failure of our education system. The cause which brought in by the KBSM curriculum puts so much emphasis on academic excellence alone. The teachers are not the only the community to be blame. We too as a parents and society as a whole, share the blame for the obsession with (A)s. Today school examinations have become like a competition where weve being batting on our children. We got all out spending money, time and energy to ensure our children win the competition with flying colours. Most of the time, those who excel in exam were being over glorifying and tremendous psychological pressure being placed to on the majority. This will cause a great amount of stress on students in school these days. Those with average or even above average result are made to be useless and a failure in school.

REFERENCES Allwright, R.L. 1986. Why dont learners learn what teachers teach?. In Singelton and Little. (eds) Language Learning in formal and informal contexts. Dublin: IRAAL.

Bartram, M., & R. Walton. 1991. Correction: A positive approach to language mistakes. Hove: Language Teaching Publications Carroll, S. & S. Merrill. 1993. Explicit and Implicit Negative Feedback: An Empirical Study of the Learning of Linguistic Generalizations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, v15 n3 p357-86 Sep 1993 Doughty, C. & Varela, E. 1998. Communicative focus on form. En C. Dought y & J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 114-138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edge,J. 1989. Mistakes and Correction.. Longman Keys to Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman. Horwitz, E.K. M.B. Horwitz & J. Cope. 1986. Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety.The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 125-132. Iwashita,N. 2003. Negative feedback and positive evidence in task-based interaction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (2003), 25: pp. 1-36.

Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and Practices in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.

Lightbown, P. M. & N. Spada. 1999. How Languages are Learned. Oxford U.P.

Norrish, J. 1983. Language Learner and their Erros. London: Macmillan.

APPENDICES

Appendix 1 The instruction Firstly, you have to walk 10 steps forward and turn to your left. Next, walk about 10 steps forward and turn to your right. Then, walk about 5 steps forward and turn to your right. Finally, you are standing beside me.

Appendix 2 Mind mapping i. What happens if the instructions were unclear?

Instruction unclear

ii.

What happens if the instructions were wrongly sequenced?

Instruction wrongly sequenced

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