ENG514 Final Term Subjective 2024 by VSC

ENG514 · FINALS COMPILATION 2024 · Chapter Wise Short & Long Questions · Compile by VSC · CHAPTER 8 · Module_23

Q1. What is speaking ? OR define speaking?

Speaking is one of the four language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking). It is the means through which learners can communicate with others to achieve certain goals or to express their opinions, intentions, hopes and viewpoints. In addition, people who know a language are referred to as ‘speakers’ of that language. Furthermore, in almost any setting, speaking is the most frequently used language skill. As Rivers (1981) argues, speaking is used twice as much as reading and writing in our communication. Speaking has been classified to monologue and dialogue. The former focuses on giving an interrupted oral presentation and the latter on interacting with other speakers. Speaking can also serve one of two main functions: transactional (transfer of information) and interactional (maintenance of social relationships). Developing speaking skills is of vital importance in EFL/ESL programs. Nunan (1999) and Burkart & Sheppard (2004) argue that success in learning a language is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the (target) language.

Q2. Characteristics of speaking ?

 It is both time-bound, and dynamic.  The complexity and speed of most speech acts make it difficult to engage in complex advance planning.  Sentence boundaries are at best unclear though intonation and pause divide long discourse into more manageable chunks.  Participants are usually face-to-face and so can rely on feedback.  Spoken language makes greater use of shared knowledge than written language.  Negotiation of meaning is common and often a large part of any conversation.  Interruptions and overlapping are normal and are generally very common.  Frequently displays ellipsis.  Speech makes use of many formulaic expressions

Q3. Nature of speech?

speech research has often been focused on aspects with a linguistic function, speech conveys necessarily also several kinds of paralinguistic information: expressive (attitudes and emotions) and organic (reflecting the speaker's age, sex, etc.). In addition, there is perspectival information.

Q4. How speech is regarded in linguistics?

The spoken form is very highly valued in linguistics and applied linguistics where it is regarded as the primary form of a language and the source of innovation and language change. In the realm of second language teaching there is also a high degree of attention paid to the skill of speaking. Indeed, to be a fluent speaker in a language is often the lay person’s goal. The source of input in highly influential ‘communicative approaches’ is largely the spoken form, and there has been a conflation in linguistics of the term ‘language’ with ‘speech’ as if the two are entirely interchangeable. Speech is also quintessentially the form in which the inter-personal functions of language are carried out and the form is subject to the benefits and disadvantages that stem from the way it is produced Therefore, whereas the tangible, no ephemeral nature of writing lends it to logical and contractual functions in society, for example record keeping and legal tasks, the spoken form, being essentially more dependent on the time and place it is produced, is used for more informal or rhetorically based tasks.

Q5. Explain the paradigm of Chomsky about fitness of speech in language?

There is the paradigm set out by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s and which in turn has underpinned the greater part of second language acquisition studies, advances in grammatical models, and computer modelling in which a linguistic element is required. A central aspect to the discussion of speech is the dichotomy between the language faculty (‘competence’) and the way language is used in actual speech or writing (‘performance’). Essentially, this division stemmed from Chomsky’s questioning of how children can master language, and master it in such a way that, eventually, any speaker of a language can create and understand an infinite amount of discourse.

Q6. Transformational grammar movement?

The 1960s with the influence of the work of Noam Chomsky, and the 1970s and 1980s with the growth of ‘communicative’ approaches, marked two distinct sea changes in the field of language teaching both of which did much to underpin present attitudes to the spoken form. While these two threads are brought into commonality by research in the field of second language acquisition, they have marked differences in the emphasis they placed on speech in their thinking. On the one hand, the Transformational grammar movement internalized and made abstract the language system to such an extent that actual speech became something of an irrelevance. On the other, the tenets of the communicative movement held that language was acquired by meaningful and interesting communication in contexts which mimicked real communicative settings as closely as possible.

Module_ 24

Q1. Phonological loop?

the phonological loop is the brain saying a word or phrase over and over to itself in order to keep it in working memory or to help it move into long-term memory. A good example of this is the way we say a telephone number over and over to ourselves in order to keep it in memory while we go about dialing the number. If learners do not have a stable pronunciation for a word, it cannot easily enter longterm memory because it cannot be held in the phonological loop.

Q2. Define the term pronunciation?

Pronunciation includes the articulation of individual sounds and the distinctive features of sounds like voicing and aspiration, voicesetting features (Esling and Wong, 1983), and stress and intonation. Attention to these aspects also requires attention to the blending and omission of sounds, and the effect of the various aspects on intelligibility. Thus, although it can be very useful to provide practice