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DOCENTI DI CONVERSAZIONE IN LINGUA STRANIERA
ENGLISH
ULTIME NOTIZIE
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There is so much authentic material for learning English on the internet today. Authentic material can be found from virtually every area and community of the English speaking world. On this page all icons and buttons will take you to English learning sites where there will be material for both teachers and students of English.
Through this material, we can see how very quickly the English language is now changing and how many 'Englishes'--as David Crystal puts it--there are. None of us, even as mother tongue or bilingual speakers, can say we know 'all the words', but fortunately we can keep up to date, on the internet, with our own language, our own particular variety, and thus our origins. I think we need to bear in mind, however, that no 'Englishman'--or any other person, for that matter--has the exclusivity of speaking 'the right' English--which again, does not exist.
Later on, the English Conversation Teachers in our group will publish their own material, including uploading both lesson plans and exercises based on different methods and methodological experiments used in class and which we are continually trying out and perfecting. Needless to say, if you would like to participate with your own material and any research you have been doing, this will be greatly appreciated! Please see the English Resources page.
Who Owns English?
© 2003 by Orin Hargraves all rights reserved
“For God's sake, do not speak of British English!
The English of Britain is the Queen's English, otherwise known as English – of which there are many variants commonly denominated to the area in which they are spoken or perhaps misspoken!”
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING
Content: Methods and Approaches to English language teaching
There are many methods of teaching languages. Some have had their heyday and have fallen into relative obscurity; others are widely used now; still others have a small following, but contribute insights that may be absorbed into the generally accepted mix. Here are the most common methods used by English Conversation Teachers.
Communicative Language Teaching with Functional Approach
It is well-known that it is the trend to use Communicative Language Teaching (and Functional Notional Approach ) nowadays in ELT books, seminars etc. Many believe that our students need this approach to develop their language skills. The concept of communicative language teaching points out that solely teaching grammar is not enough to prepare students for using the language independently. This method of teaching proposes that students need to understand the meaning and the communicative function of a language in order to learn the language. Krashen and Terrell (1983) suggest that basic communication goals can be expressed in terms of situations, functions and topics. Some functions are as follows: apoligising/asking for information/offering help/giving advice/asking for information/making complaints/asking for help/giving warning /guessing/comparing and contrasting ideas/expressing preferences. These functions are the main target of our lessons. It is up to the teacher to plan the situations within which students will be able to use their language for a real social purpose in the classroom context. To get a list of all the functions the Common European Framework can be consulted.
Content-based Instruction
The focus of a CBI lesson is on the topic or subject matter. During the lesson students are focused on learning about something. This could be anything that interests them from a serious science subject to their favourite pop star or even a topical news story or film. They learn about this subject using the language they are trying to learn, rather than their native language, as a tool for developing knowledge and so they develop their linguistic ability in the target language. This is thought to be a more natural way of developing language ability and one that corresponds more to the way we originally learn our first language.
There are many ways to approach creating a CBI lesson. This is one possible way.
Preparation
Choose a subject of interest to students.
Find three or four suitable sources that deal with different aspects of the subject. These could be websites, reference books, audio or video of lectures or even real people.
During the lesson
Divide the class into small groups and assign each group a small research task and a source of information to use to help them fulfil the task.
Then once they have done their research they form new groups with students that used other information sources and share and compare their information.
There should then be some product as the end result of this sharing of information which could take the form of a group report or presentation of some kind.
It can make learning a language more interesting and motivating. Students can use the language to fulfil a real purpose, which can make students both more independent and confident.
Students can also develop a much wider knowledge of the world through CBI which can feed back into improving and supporting their general educational needs.
CBI is very popular among EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teachers as it helps students to develop valuable study skills such as note taking, summarising and extracting key information from texts.
Taking information from different sources, re-evaluating and restructuring that information can help students to develop very valuable thinking skills that can then be transferred to other subjects.
The inclusion of a group work element within the framework given above can also help students to develop their collaborative skills, which can have great social value.
While CBI can be both challenging and demanding for the teacher and the students, it can also be very stimulating and rewarding. The degree to which you adopt this approach may well depend on the willingness of your students, the institution in which you work and the availability of resources within your environment. It could be something that your school wants to consider introducing across the curriculum or something that you experiment with just for one or two lessons. Whichever you choose to do I would advise that you try to involve other teachers within your school, particularly teachers from other subjects. This could help you both in terms of finding sources of information and in having the support of others in helping you to evaluate your work.
Lastly, try to involve your students. Get them to help you decide what topics and subjects the lessons are based around and find out how they feel this kind of lessons compares to your usual lessons. In the end they will be the measure of your success.
Task-based Learning
In task-based learning, the central focus of the lesson is the task itself, not a grammar point or a lexical area, and the objective is not to ‘learn the structure’ but to ‘complete the task’. Of course, to complete the task successfully students have to use the right language and communicate their ideas. The language, therefore becomes an instrument of communication, whose purpose is to help complete the task successfully. The students can use any language they need to reach their objective. Usually there is no ‘correct answer’ for a task outcome. Students decide on their own way of completing it, using the language they see fit.
Different teachers use TBL in different ways. Some integrate it into the existing syllabus, some use it to replace the syllabus altogether, some use it as an ‘extra’ to their traditional classroom activities. But generally, teachers using a TBL approach divide their task-based classes into three stages:
Stage 1: The pre-task. The teacher introduces the topic and familiarizes students with situations/lexical areas/texts (reading and listening)). This draws the students into the topic and brings up language that may be useful. The teacher then explains what the task is and sets up the activity.
Stage 2: Students perform the task in pairs or groups. They may then present their findings/conclusions to the rest of the class. In this stage, mistakes are not important; the teacher provides support and monitors. The learners focus on communication, perhaps at the expense of accuracy, but this will be dealt with in the next stage.
Stage 3: The teacher works on specific language points which come up in stage 2. (During the monitoring stage, most teachers make notes of common errors and students’ particular learning needs). Students reflect on the language needed to complete the task and how well they did. This is their opportunity to concentrate on accuracy and make sure they resolve any doubts or problems they had.
Tasks can be as simple as putting a list of animals in order from fastest to slowest and then trying to agree with a partner on the correct order. Or it could be something more complicated like a survey to find out which parts of town your classmates live in and how they get to school, ending in visual information presented in the form of pie charts and maps. Or it could be something really complicated like a role-play involving a meeting in the Town Hall of the different people affected by a new shopping centre development and the consequent demolition of a youth centre and old people’s home. Whatever the task, it should always have some kind of completion; and this completion should be central to the class - the language resulting naturally from the task and not the other way round.
The advantage of TBL over more traditional methods is that it allows students to focus on real communication before doing any serious language analysis. It focuses on students’ needs by putting them into authentic communicative situations and allowing them to use all their language resources to deal with them. This draws the learners’ attention to what they know how to do, what they don’t know how to do, and what they only half know. It makes learners aware of their needs and encourages them to take (some of the) responsibility for their own learning. TBL is good for mixed ability classes; a task can be completed successfully by a weaker or stronger student with more or less accuracy in language production. The important thing is that both learners have had the same communicative experience and are now aware of their own individual learning needs.
Another advantage of this approach is that learners are exposed to a wide variety of language and not just grammar. Collocations, lexical phrases and expressions, chunks of language, things that often escape the constraints of the traditional syllabus come up naturally in task-based lessons. But this can also be a disadvantage. One of the criticisms of TBL is this randomness. It doesn’t often fit in with the course book/syllabus, which tends to present language in neat packages. Some teachers (and learners) also find the move away from an explicit language focus difficult and anarchistic. Many teachers also agree that it is not the best method to use with beginners, since they have very few language resources to draw on to be able to complete meaningful tasks successfully.
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