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Summary & Notes 1.

We discussed the experience of one Spanish secondary school student of English.

Some of the points which we will be looking at again are:

The role of non-native speaker teachers.
The language of the classroom - the target language or the students' native language.
The role of grammar and how best to teach it.
The function of practice. How useful, for example, are gap-filling tasks?
How to teach vocabulary.
Focus on the spoken language.
Summary & Notes 2
The Grammar-Translation Method has survived for 150 or more years despite its defects. Course-books published
today often use its deductive approach (rule, examples, exercises). The basic criticism of the method is that it does not
correspond to the way that we think human beings acquire language. However, an updated version of the method is
perhaps not an irrational response to situations in which teachers with an inadequate command of the target language
struggle with large classes of unmotivated students. Whether any of those students will learn to function effectively in
the target language is doubtful.
Summary & Notes 3.
In this lesson, I summarised and demonstrated the Direct Method and the Audiolingual Method. Both have their
merits. Both methods emphasized the spoken language. The idea underlying the Direct Method that learning a foreign
language is similar to learning a first language is partially true. And the idea that language production must become
automatised is an important insight. But neither method even began to address the complexity of what is involved in
second language learning.
You need to think about what the three methods we have discussed so far have in common and how they differ.
Summary & Notes 4.
Today's topic was the development of English language teaching over the last fifty years. The most important changes
derive from Chomsky's theory of first language acquisition and subsequent research into second language acquisition,
and the concept of communicative competence. The current theoretical view is that languages are learned through
doing tasks involving communication, supplemented by a focus on developing the language required to perform these
tasks.
This current position is remote from current practice in the majority of foreign language classrooms such as those in
Spain. It provides, however, theoretical support for immersion programmes and CLIL.
Communicative language teaching plus focus on form is an attractive combination but it is important to keep an open
mind about whether it really provides a solution to the problem of teaching a foreign language.
Summary & Notes 5.
The society in which we are living influences the way we teach and learn languages. In simple terms we can
distinguish English as a mother tongue, as a second language and as a foreign language. This corresponds roughly to
the division between inner circle, outer circle and expanding circle countries. The fact that English is a world language
should perhaps be reflected in classrooms, where students should at least be exposed to different geographical
varieties. It also raises important questions about the role of native speaker teachers, and which model of English
should be the target in the classroom. The general tendency is to downplay the importance of the native speaker and to
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reject native speaker models in the classroom. My own feeling is that in this as in many other cases opinion goes from
one extreme to the other.
Please read the two extracts which I have uploaded to Studium. You need to think about the meaning of the phrase
"the ownership of English", an about what the role of the native speaker in language teaching is. Can you also come to
class with the answers to the questions I have included at the end of the text on ESL and EFL?
Summary & Notes 6.
We discussed two issues: the merits of native and non-native speaker teachers of English and whether communicative
competence in English includes the ability to understand the huge range of varieties of World English. We decided
that native and non-native speakers have complementary qualities and that a total receptive knowledge of all varieties
of English is probably unrealistic.
Summary & Notes 7.
Langauge teaching and learning over the last four years has increasingly been influenced by European policy
initiatives. The most important of these is the Common European Framework, which provides guidelines for
langauge teaching, assessment, syllabus design and materials production throughout Europe. Objects and levels are
almost universally specified in terms of the six levels of the Framework. One advantage of this is that countries like
Britain and Spain, which are traditionally resistant to foreign language learning, will need to improve their language
teaching if they are to live up to the standards established in the CEF.
The document can be downloaded from internet - google "Common European Framework" and you will find the sites
for the document in English and Spanish.
Summary & Notes 8.
There is no one correct way to teach a foreign language. What works in a class of ten students in a private language
school may well not work in a class of twenty five or thirty in a State school. Areas like Castilla y Len, which are
monolingual and have historically been quite isolated from Europe share with countries like England a certain
resistance to foreign language learning. Recently the importance of English has been generally recognised and many
initiatives have been undertaken, without perhaps, as yet, having much impact on the generally low levels of
communicative skills in English.
Summary & Notes 9.
Classroom behaviours are difficult to change. Perhaps the most efficient stimulus to change is the test or exam. If we
want teachers and students to focus on oral production, reception and interaction we need a form of assessment which
tests these things. The current model of PAU in Castilla y Len has little relationship to the syllabus, and has changed
little in thirty years.
Teachers of foreign languages who visit Spain from other countries are amazed to discover that in many regions there
is no oral exam in schools.
An idea.
An idea for introducing World Englishes in the classroom
The teacher writes some English words and names currently used in Spain and asks the pupils to classify them into
categories. The pupils are then asked to record the use of English words and expressions in a notebook. The words
should be categorized into different groups - for example, sport, advertising, information technology, the brand names
of products, the names of shops, pubs and discos, the names of pop groups, etc. Pupils should identify a Spanish
equivalent where possible and discuss why English is used in each case.
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From this the discussion is widened to focus on the role of English in Spanish culture. Pupils should also consider
whether the increasing use of English is a positive or negative development. Finally, ways of utilizing the great
number of English words and expressions for developing pupils English should be discussed.
Luke Prodromou 1988. "English as cultural action." ELT Journal, 1988: 73-83.
Summary & Notes 10.
Generally speaking, linguistics has a theoretical orientation, while applied linguistics meidates between theory and
practice. The objective of this discipline, which is only half a century old, is to help solve language problems in the
real world. One of its main areas of application is the foregin language classroom. Sometimes its applications are
obviously beneficial - we teach better for example, if we know about the semantics of the verb phrase. But there is
a permanent temptation to assume that what linguists and applied linguists discover about language and language
learning can always be applied directly to the classroom. This is not necessarily the case.
Summary & Notes 11.
Grammar is central to our work as teachers of a foreign language and we need to experts in this area. Descriptive and
pedagogical grammars and manuals are essential resources. The central areas of grammar are syntax and morphology,
but we don't get very far if we do not take into account phonology, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and
sociolingustics. We have to teach not only syntactic and morphological forms, but also the typical meanings and uses
of grammatical constructions.
Summary & Notes 12.
Syntax and morphology are complex and are acquired or learned slowly even by children learning their first language.
It takes a long time to be able to produce questions using the present simple and the students can't be hurried.
The teacher should take into account semantic and discourse aspects of language, as well as syntax. A conjuror is a
person who performs magic tricks employs the present simple and a restrictive relative clause to express the meaning
of general truth and the function of giving a definition. Definitions are very useful for practising the third person
sinuglar forms of the present simple and reltive clauses.
Summary & Notes 13.
If we are to teach speaking effectively it is vital to be aware of our students' pronunciation. Pronunciation is one area
where younger students clearly have an advantage and where errors are difficult to remedy later. Teachers need to give
students an effective model of words and utterances. It is not necessary to a native speaker to do this, but your
pronunciation has to be good. In preparing your classes you should check the pronunciation of new words by checking
their phonemic transcription. The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary is an essential resource.
While in some ways English is similar to Spanish, in other ways it is radically different. Speech in particular is
structured quite differently. Instead of a series of more or less equal syllables, English has sequences of prominent and
weak syllables. The prominent syllables indicate what the speaker thinks is important information. This is partly
because Spanish can change the focus of information by syntactic means while English often can't. It would be nice to
say like Spanish "has come the doctor" but we can't. We have to say "the DOCtor's come".
Tones in English also function differently in some cases. The fall-rise tone doesn't seem to exist in Spanish while it is
quite common in English. Another area which causes difficulty is the fall on tag questions, and the fall on Wh-
questions.
Teaching speaking is the most difficult part of a teacher's job and few people do it well (some teachers don't do it at
all). One thing you can do immediately is to focus on my intonation in the classroom - notice the division of sentences
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into tone groups of five or six words, the alternation of falling and rising tones, and the prominent syllables which
occur in the tone groups.
You might want to identify the prominent syllable in this English saying, which I couldn't understand when I read it as
a child:
It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.