ENG515 Midterm Past Papers

1. Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive analysis is the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies.

2. Methods for text comprehension

Text comprehension requires both a) language knowledge and b) recognition of key ideas and their relationships (through various comprehension strategies). Language knowledge, for purposes of this review, primarily involves vocabulary knowledge (see above) and grammar knowledge. There is a range of research that argues for a strong relation between grammar knowledge and reading. Furthermore, research on syntactic processing, or word integration processes (integrating lexical and syntactic information into clause-level meaning units), also suggests significant relations between syntactic processing abilities and comprehension abilities (Fender 2001).

Q3. Importance of background knowledge in reading?

In recent decades a great deal of attention in the applied linguistics view of reading has been devoted to “background knowledge”, particularly under the label “schema theory” (the terms “script” and “framework” are also used for what is essentially the same notion). Whatever labels may be used, the effects of prior knowledge have been frequently demonstrated in both L1 reading (Anderson et al. 1977), and L2 reading, where Steffensen and Joag Dev (1984) have demonstrated the importance of “general” or “cultural knowledge, while Alderson and Urquhart (1988) have done so for academic knowledge

Q4. Strategies of reading?

To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing.

Q5. Term cohesion?

The classic text on cohesion is Halliday and Hasan (1976) Cohesion in English. Their categorisation of the major cohesive devices is the model for the following activities. The arguments for focusing on cohesive devices are that they occur in every text so the learning from one text should readily transfer to the reading of another text, and that they focus learners’ attention on the message of the text at a level beyond the sentence level. Cohesion involves the devices of reference words, substitution and ellipsis, comparison, conjunction relationships, and lexical cohesion.

Q6. Role of motivation in fluency building?

The motivation for a fluent reading program must be nurtured, modeled, and reinforced by the teacher, but the motivation must come from within the student. Motivation is energy transformed into constructive, methodologically sound, efficient and productive activities. It needs to be reinforced regularly by work with peers, rewards, and recognition of progress. Integrate motivational elements into the programs – team goals, a buddy system, posting of goals, posting of timed reading scores, posting of books or materials read, individual record keeping, reading logs, and anything that helps keep the learners’ energy levels high.

Q7. What is Grammar Knowledge?

Grammatical ability refers to knowing how grammar is used in communication. ...

Grammatical competence: the knowledge of grammar, lexis, morphology, syntax, semantics and morphology.

Sociolinguistic competence: the knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and rules of discourse.

Q8. Name 3 reading strategies?

There are three different styles of reading academic texts:

i. skimming, ii. scanning, and iii. in-depth reading.

Q9. What is inductive guessing?

An inductive guessing procedure involves looking at the available clues—the part of speech of the unknown word, its immediate context, and the relationship between the clause with the unknown word and the adjoining clauses (for a detailed description, see Nation, 2001; Nation, 2008). It is worth spending small amounts of time over several weeks or months on practicing guessing because it is a very powerful and useful strategy.

Q10. Teaching phonics to students?

i. Gather the materials listed below and store them together in a box. ... ii. Teach the 5 short-vowel sounds and consonant sounds. ... iii. Practice two-letter blends. ... iv. Practice three-letter blends. ... v. Teach the twin-consonant endings, plurals, and two-consonant blends. ... vi. Teach the digraphs (ch, sh, th, wh, ng, nk).

Q11. Interactive model answer in 5to 6 lines?

This interactive model was first elaborated by Rumelhart (1977), and it proposes that graphemic input (i.e., the marks on the page) passes to a visual information store, where “critical features” are extracted. The information extracted is then operated upon by what the reader knows about language, syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge, lexical knowledge, orthographic knowledge as well as pragmatic information “about the current contextual situation”.

Q12. Academic and non-academic material?

Academic articles are written by professionals in a given field. ... Non-Academic articles are written for the mass public. They are published quickly and can be written by anyone. Their language is informal, casual and may contain slang.

Q13. Constrative analysis answer in 5 to 6 lines?

Contrastive analysis hypothesis is an area of comparative linguistics which is concerned with the comparison of two or more languages to determine the differences or similarities between them, either for theoretical purposes or purposes external to the analysis itself.

Q14. Define term Motivation?

The amount of time and effort that an intermediate-to-advanced students need to devote to becoming a fluent readers of English is substantial. Only students with high motivation, self discipline, and clear goals will achieve the levels they envision. Motivating students to do this much work is not easy, especially if they have not traveled or lived in the L2 environment at all. Fear and threats seldom work, and none of us want to teach in such a manner anyway. The motivation that will transform their wishes into the actions they must take to become fluent readers have to be internal, positive, and sustained. Day and Bamford’s (1998) chapter on motivating students to do extensive reading provides excellent suggestions that apply to a fluent reading program as well. Motivation that arises from stress, worry, or fear is exhausting, shortlived, and usually external. No matter how high the motivation, learners must have a realistic understanding of the time and effort it will take them to become fluent readers. In addition, they must be willing to adjust their learning methods, to accept that fluency is acquired gradually, and to know that fluent reading cannot be dependent only on translation.

Q15. Define Pragmatics Competence?

Pragmatic competence involves an understanding of the illocutionary force of an utterance by being aware of situational and participant variables within which the utterance takes place, as well as politeness issues. This competence has been regarded as essential to understanding spoken communication in which the social contextual factors are explicit (see Martínez-Flor and Usó-Juan this volume). However, this information is missing when interpreting the