ENG514 Midterm Short Notes by MAS All Rounder

Lecture: 1-01

The Four Strands

A well-balanced language course should consist of four roughly equal strands:

1. Learning through meaning-focused input - learning through listening and reading where the learner’s attention is on the ideas and messages conveyed by the language.
2. Learning through meaning-focused output - learning through speaking and writing where the learner’s attention is on conveying ideas and messages to another person.
3. Language-focused learning - learning of language features such as pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and discourse.
4. Fluency development - developing fluent use of known language items and features over the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Meaning-focused Input - Activities

Extensive reading Shared reading Listening to stories Watching TV or films Being a listener in a conversation

Meaning-focused Output – Activities

Talking in conversations Giving a speech or lecture Writing a letter Writing a note to someone Telling a story

Language-focused learning - Activities

Pronunciation practice Using substitution tables Learning vocabulary

Fluency development - Activities

Reading Repeated reading Repeated retelling Skimming and scanning Ten-minute writing Language learning goals Learning of:

Language items i.e. sounds, vocabulary, grammar The content of the subject Language skills i.e. listening or writing The organization of discourse

Lecture: 02

Five Principles for Teaching Beginners

1. Meaning: Focus on meaningful and relevant Content The main focus should be on language that the learners can use quickly for their purposes rather than on too much grammar explanation or on words that are not directly useful. 2) Interest: Maintain interest through a variety of activities

To maintain learners’ interest, activities need to be short and varied:  Do activities that involve movement  Use real objects and pictures  Plan trips outside the classroom  Use songs

3. New language: Avoid overloading learners with too much new language Avoid introducing too much new language without giving learners enough opportunities to gain control over this language. A simple rule to keep in mind is “learn a little, use a lot”.
4. Understanding: Provide plenty of comprehensible input The language teachers use in class should be with the aim of keeping their talk simple but not simplistic or ungrammatical. One way to do this is to always use one form for one meaning.
5. Stress-free: Create a friendly, safe, cooperative classroom environment

Activities and Approaches for Teaching and Learning in a Beginners’ Course

Memorizing Useful Phrases and Sentences Guiding Listening and Speaking The teacher writes some sentences on the blackboard. The sentences describe something or someone. The teacher shows the learners how to change the sentences to talk about different things.

Lecture: 03

Benefits of delaying speaking and concentrating on listening

The learner is not overloaded by having to focus on two or more skills at the same time Speed of coverage—receptive knowledge grows faster than productive knowledge Listening activities are well suited to independent learning through listening to recordings

Factors that Influence Listening Success

1) Cognitive factors

 Vocabulary Knowledge  Syntactic Knowledge  Discourse Knowledge

 Metacognition  Prior Knowledge

2) Affective Factors

 Anxiety  Self-Efficacy  Motivation

3) Contextual Factors

 Interactive Listening  Listening in Informal Learning Contexts  Listening in Formal Learning Contexts

Types of Listening

 One-way listening—typically associated with the transfer of information (transactional listening).  Two-way listening—typically associated with maintaining social relations (interactional listening).

Listening Processes

Bottom up processing - perceiving and parsing the speech stream at increasingly larger levels beginning with auditoryphonetic, phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional, pragmatic Top-down Processes - Top-down processes involve the listener in going from the whole—their prior knowledge and their content and rhetorical schemata—to the parts.

Top-down strategies

Listener based Listening for the main idea Predicting Drawing inferences Summarizing

Bottom-up strategies

listening for specific details recognizing cognates (equivalents) recognizing word-order patterns

Lecture: 2-04

Intention - an acknowledgement of a distal source and a willingness to be influenced by this source Human

auditory system consists of:

The outer ear The middle ear