Exploratory task 4.4

The task for the learners is: "Imagine that you are in the Zoo watching the monkeys and exchanging your comments. Imagine also that monkeys are watching you and exchanging their comments about people: "Look! This girl is making faces!" The grammar subject of this activity is Present Progressive (upper intermediate level). Design the pre-activity phase of this task. How are people similar to and different from the monkeys?

Micro-teaching 4.1

Compose or choose from a course-book and run a grammar activity with pre-activity, while-activity and post-activity phases. After micro-teaching with your peers, reflect on how the activity went on and what you would like to change in the future.

· Pre-activity (reviewing grammar rule, preparing for the language, preparing for the ideas)

· While-activity (doing the task)

· Post-activity (focus on the language, integrating with other material, setting a further task)

Indicate the following:

Goal of instruction (e.g. teaching to express future actions in conditional clauses “if”)_________________________________________________________________

Stage of teaching (e.g. material presentation, meaningful drill, communicative production etc)_________________________________________________________

Level of learner language(elementary, intermediate, advanced etc)______________

Integrated task 4.1

1. Describe your teaching situation

2. Supply the theoretical rationale for teaching

3. Design the activity and run it with your students or in your peer group

4. Reflect on the activity critically referring to external feedback as well.

5. Make suggestions for improvement

Answer keys

SAQ 0

1T Yes, grammar describes the rules of how the language produces sentences using the words and their morphology as the building blocks.

2D Grammars study and describe not only the mainstream norm of "correct language" (most typical cases) but also authentic varieties of language use.

3D Traditionally grammar theories studied the construction of written sentences, but recently grammar of speech has become the subject of studies

4F Grammars for academics, teachers and learners will be different. Academics will be interested in the grammar description. Teachers will be interested to know more about grammar instruction. Learners will want grammar for language use.

5D It is difficult in many cases to draw a line between correct and totally incorrect grammar. It is easier to do so in written language, than in oral utterances.

6D Yes, teaching grammar is teaching the construction of sentences but to be able to speak fluently it is also necessary to know the "ready made" language chunks

7F Bi-lingual exercises can be quite useful for the purpose of drill and testing

8D It depends on the individual cognitive style to decide whether rules or examples should come first. Deductive learners benefit from the rule coming first. Inductive learners are better able to induce the rule from language examples

9D Rules are indispensable in teaching grammar but there are so many exceptions to them in the real-world language

10D Drill is very essential in teaching grammar but learners also need analysis and comprehension of how the language works

SAQ 1.1

1T Yes, grammar describes recurrent language. The beginner learners are certainly given the most typical recurrent language structures, but the more they learn the language the more they know about numerous less typical recurrent forms.

2T Grammar gives classification of the language, which is based on the form, meaning and function. E.g. parts of speech are word classes with their typical forms, meaning and function in the sentences

3T An utterance can be grammatical but incorrect from the point of communicative meaning and language authenticity. E.g. "I study long hours of English" does not sound authentic though it is grammatical ("to work long hours" sounds better)

4T The so called "language inaccuracies" can be norms for certain age groups and dialects. E.g. "No nothing here" is the norm for spoken English meaning "There is not anything here"

5D Declarative knowledge can be that of rules and language samples

6F The term "procedural" is applied to language skill. The knowledge of rules is declarative, i.e. the learners can recite the rules without being able to perform the speech "procedure".

7D Explicit, i.e. declarative grammar knowledge can help develop implicit, i.e. procedural grammar skills, but explicit and implicit grammar knowledge are in a way autonomous from each other

8T The terms "grammatical" and "correct" are not synonyms. The phrase "He goed" can be considered ungrammatical but temporarily "correct" for the child language, because it is typical for very young native learners of English

9T Grammar of written and spoken texts is different. Spoken texts have many elliptical constructions, repetitions, self-corrections etc. Written texts have longer and better shaped phrases, more logic in dealing with the topic etc.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 797