Chapter Highlights/Vocabulary

Part IV

Chapter 14

Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying.

Five major factors affect listening comprehension:

- Text characteristics (listening passage/text or visual supplements)

- Interlocutor characteristics (speaker's persona; character)

- Task characteristics (purpose and associated)

- Listener characteristics (listener's personal response)

- Process characteristics (listener's cognitive activities and the nature of

interaction between speaker and listener)

Cognitive Processing:

Top-Down Processing - refers to listener's understanding the big picture of the message. Listeners utilize the schemata or background knowledge they have of the subject in interpreting the message.

Bottom-Up Processing - the meaning of the message is interpreted based on the incoming data from sounds, to words, to grammatical relationships, to meaning. Stress, rhythm and intonation also play a role in bottom-up processing.

Research on Listening Instruction

- A stategy-based approach

- Using advanced organizers

- Using DVDs with Captions

- Using bottom-up skills

- Using Metacognitive Strategies

Tips on Selecting Listening Techniques and Activities

- Listening should be purposeful and interesting.

- Materials should be authentic.

- The development of listening strategies should be encouraged.

- Activities should teach, not test.

Language Proficiency Stages Tasks

Preproduction - Students listen to commands and

act out commands.(TPR)

- Students select a picture that

shows the word they hear.

Early Production - Students listen to a dialog and

provide one- or two-word

responses. Listeners use

duplicating strategy; they repeat

or translate the message.

- Students check off items--this

usually involves a list of words

that the learners listen to and

check off or categorize as they

hear them (e.g. picture bingo).

- Picture dictation--students draw

pictures from verbal dictation.

Speech emergence - Students highlight key points of

lecture they listen to.

- Listeners model a similar task

(e.g., they reproduce what they

hear).

Intermediate fluency - Conversing--students are asked

to be active participants in a

face-to-face conversation.

Chapter 15

Second Language Oral Development and Instruction

Teachers should provide English language learners with classrooms that are rich in oral language.

Speaking, an interactive process of constructing meaning, involves producing, receiving, and processing information and requires learners not onlyl to know how to produce specific points of language such as grammer, pronunciation, or vocabulary (linguistic competence), but also to understand when, why, and in what ways to produce language (sociolinguistic competence).

Spoken language has two main functions: transactional and interactional. The primary goal of the transactional function of oral language is transference of information, and it is message oriented. The primary goal of interactional spoken language is to maintain social relationships and therefore, is listener oriented.

Second language learners display their competence of the second language through speaking. Unfortunately, not all of their competence can be seen through their performance. One of the difficulties that second language learners face is the actual pronounciation of the sounds of the language.

Spoken language has "short turns" and "long turns." A short turn consists of one or two utterances, whereas a long turn consists of a string of utterances that may be as long as an hour's lecture. Short turns demand much less of a speaker in the way of producing structures.

Comprehensible input and social interaction are important elements in a classroom that provides a natural environment for oral language development.

Strategies for oral language development include use of games, songs, poetry, and a recording studio; technologies such as television, VCR, audiotape recorder, and computers; and show-and-tell and choral reading.

Oral language assessment includes SOLOM, observation checklists, and anecdotal records.

Oral language development should be an important part of teaching content area lessons such as math, science, and social studies.

There are two types of error; global and local. Teachers should spend more time correcting global errors because they impede meaning. Local errors do not hinder communication.

Chapter 16

Second Language Vocabulary Development and Instruction

Vocabulary learning involves more than learning individual words in a word list.

Second language learners experience difficulties in learning L2 vocabularies because the relabeling of concepts they have acquired in the native language with foreign terminologies makes it difficult for them to retrieve the newly learned words in the target language.

The three approaches to vocabulary development are incidental, explicit, and independent strategies.

Incidental learning of vocabulary is an approach that requires extensive reading and listening. Explicit instruction involves diagnosing the words learners need to know, presenting words for the first time, elaborating word knowledge, and developing fluency with known words. Independent strategy is an approach that involves practicing guessing from context and training learners to use dictionaries. There are three steps to this strategy:

- Identify the vocabulary words that students will need to comprehend the reading.

- Pre-teach only three to five words (more than five words will confuse or bore students).

- Connect the new words to concepts that students already know.

Explicit instruction is best for beginning and low-intermediate students, whereas high-intermediate and advanced students can learn vocabulary through the use of extensive reading and listening. Training students to use the dictionary earlier in the curriculum is highly encouraged.

Vocabulary development is promoted through Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) and word-pair translation.

Teachers should also consider receptive and productive knowledge when teaching vocabulary. Students with receptive knowledge recognize new vocabularies through reading and listening, and students with productive knowledge can use the vocabulary words through speaking and writing.

Students can be taught to elaborate word knowledge by expanding the connections between learners' knowledge and new information. Exercises that can deepen students' knowledge of words include sorting lists of words and deciding on the categories; making semantic maps; and generating derivatives, inflections, synonyms, and antonyms of a word.

Beginning-level students may either have no recognition or a very limited amount of word recognitioin, spoken or written; they also often misuse words making communicating with others difficult. To promote word recognition at this level, teachers can use word families, cognates, and words that have root meaning from students' L1 and adapt the amount of words students learn at a time.

Teachers can be creative in teaching students to use the mnemonic associations to develop their vocabulary.

Techniques that teachers can use to teach vocabulary include picture flash cards; "beep it, write it, and frame it"; enrichment packets, semantic maps, or webs; and songs, games, and teaching vocabulary through TPR.

Intermediate learners frequently use wrong words, and their vocabularies are inadequate for a smooth conversation. Strategies to be used with this group include structural analysis, semantic feature analysis, categorization, and dictionary use.

Content area teachers should teach to two objectives: language and content.

Teachers should use both standardized and alternative assessments to evaluate students' vocabulary development.

Chapter 17

Second Language Reading Development and Instruction

Reading is an interactive process consisting of various subskills: automatic recogniton skills, vocabulary and structural knowledge, formal discourse structure, and content/world knowledge, synthesis and evaluation skills, and metacognitive knowledge and skill monitoring.

Research has identified some characteristics of fluent readers: They have greater automatic skills in word recognition and knowledge of text structures that allow them to read at a rapid rate, freeing them to focus on conceptual ideas at the deeper level. On the contrary, less-fluent readers do not have a sound foundation of automatic skills and tend to focus on word level, which limits their ability to use their content or previous knowledge to facilitate comprehension.

ESL students may have different expectations of text structures in their primary language that would influence what they do in reading and what they understand. As such, these students could benefit from instruction that highlights and enhances their awareness of text features such as cohesive ties and text organization. Awareness of text structures can help readers to develop a purpose for reading and match their strategies to their purpose. Consequently, readers become actively involved in their reading.

Readers interact with texts in different ways. They may take an aesthetic and efferent stance, both of which can influence the strategies they use during reading and their comprehension.

Scaffolding strategies are sheltering techniques that support students' language and academic learning. These strategies serve to help learners acquire content knowledge by varying the levels of linguistic and cognitive demands. When students are given challenging content, instructional delivery and materials must be adjusted for linguistic difficulty so that students can understand. Teachers must employ effective strategies such as visual organizers and cooperative learning structures.

Reading assessments must come from a variety of sources that afford information about the strategies students use in reading, their attitudes about their reading, and their comprehension. To do this, authentic assessments should reflect instructional activities that students are doing so that the desired learning behaviors can be observed directly and measured. Students' self-assessment should be used to help them develop good metacognitive and monitoring skills, which are vital to helping them become independent readers.

Chapter 18

Second Language Writing Development and Instruction

Second language writing research has largely been influenced by L1 writing research. Research in both L1 and L2 writing suggests a shift in the development of writing from an expressive activity in which the product is emphasized to a more balanced writing approach that encompasses both the product and the process.

Writing research in L1 and L2 had identified similar finding about writing:

- Writing is a recursive and not a linear process; the stages of prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing overlap and intertwine.

- Writing is viewed as a social activity; in other word, writers' approach to writing is influenced by their previous situations and the experiences in which writing is performed.

- Writing is seen as an invention and discovery process; teachers must assist learners in generating and discovering content and purpose for writing and attending to audience.

- Beginning second language writers exhibit characteristics similar to those of English-speaking children who are first learning to write. They generally do not have a wide knowledge of vocabulary and sentence patterns; they also use invented spellings and demonstrate developmental scripting strategies similar to those of first language writers. Their written language also resembles their oral language.

- Intermediate second language writers have a more developed knowledge of simple sentences and mechanics and use more conventional spellings. They may still make errors in grammar, spelling, and vocabulary when expressing difficult content. They do need further practice in using complex sentences, and organizing and developing ideas when writing in English.

- Process writing is an effective approach for teaching writing to all learners because it breaks down the process into small, manageable components. These components, or stages, allow developing writers to focus on specific aspects of composing, one at a time and, thus, make it easier for writers to juggle with the constraints of writing in a new language.

Because text organization is culturally determined, second language writers must learn the organizational scheme of English rhetoric. Students can learn about English rhetorical organization by reading and analyzing models of English texts and outlining their texts before and after they write.

Children develop literacy in first and second lanuage writing before they enter school. Their early literacy products show their understanding about the concept of print and print conventions, which are similar in both first and second language writing. Children with a strong literacy experience in their first language are more likely to become successful at reading and writing in the second language then their counterparts with limited first language literacy experience.

Second language writing is difficult for second language writers because:

- They have not grasped the formality levels of structures and vocabulary expected in academic writing.

- They find a mismatch between form and function in learning English grammer, making English writing quite difficult and confusing.

- They have to learn the conventions of English rhetoric, which may be different from those in their first language. These conventions include the structural forms as well as the social attitudes, values, and roles of writing in English and other cultures.

Part III

Chapter 12

Integrating Language and Content

When integrating language and content, the second/new language is developed at the same time that subject matter content is being taught.

There are numerous advantages of integrating language and content:

- Language is not taught in isolation; it is taught in context.

- English language learners acquire new vocabulary and lanaguage structures as they are immersed in interesting academic content.

- The language acquisition process is an integral part of the social-cognitive development.

- English language learners acquire language concepts that are tied to the subject content.

There are numerous models of integrated approaches. The following are just a few:

- Experimental learning

- Content-based language learning

- Sheltered English, or specially designed academic instruction in English (SDAIE)

- Language experience approach (LEA)

In experimental learning, English language learners acquire English by "living" the experience; it is characterized by "adverturous" learning.

In content-based language learning, the emphasis is on developing language while an academic subject area is employed.

In SDAIE, subject matter is taught in the second language by employing sheltering techniques.

In the language experience approach, the teacher employs the dictated story to develop lessons that address students' language deficiencies.

Chapter 13

Curriculum Design and Day-to-Day English Language Instruction

Planning for ESL instruction must be organized around communicative principles.

Language development and subject content goals must go hand in hand.

Interdisciplinary, content-based thematic teaching allows students to develop language proficiency as they acquire subject matter content.

Interdisciplinary, content-based thematic teaching takes into account students' interest and teacher interest, as well as curricular demands.

Interdisciplinary, content-based thematic teaching provides for numerous meaningful encounters with the same content from different perspectives.

Elements of interdisciplinary thematic content-based unit planning include identifying a theme, formulating goals and instructional objectives, conceptualizing the content, developing the instructional procedures, developing assessment procedures, and reflecting on each individual lesson.

Bloom's taxonomy includes three domains of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.

Bloom's cognitive domain includes six levels of learning: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Bloom's affective domain includes five levels of learning: receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, internalizing.

Bloom's psychomotor domain four levels of learning: moving, manipulating, communicating, and creating.

Gardner has identified eight multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual/spacial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.

Teachers must incorporate activities in daily planning and in units of instruction to appeal to multiple intellegences.

Part II

Chapter 9

Teaching for Communication

Communicative competence requires mastery of all four language processes: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Aspects of language encompass phonology (sound system of a language), morphology (rules of word formation), syntax (order of words in a sentence), discourse (rules for processing beyond the sentence level), and pragmatics (sociolinguistic rules governing language use in communicative contexts).

Behaviorists explained first language acquisition as a process of imitation of the caregiver.

Behaviorists could not explain novel utterances.

Innatists claimed that first language acquisition resulted from an innate ability.

Innatists hypothesized that infants were born with a biological language acquisition device (LAD) that equipped them for linguistic analysis.

Innatists could not explain how children/adults who were not exposed to language could not develop language.

Interactionists explain first language acquisition as a result of the interaction between nature (innate ability to acquire language) and nurture (the role of the social environment).

Much research is needed in the field of first and second language acquisition.

Stepheh Krashen's monitor model for second/new language acquisition encompasses five hypotheses: acquisition versus learning, monitor, natural order, comprehension, and affective filter.

Krashen's monitor model has impacted the field of second/new language teaching. It has tremendous implications for the ESL teacher.

Chapter 10

Methods/Approaches of Teaching ESOL: A Historical Overview

In the grammer-translation method (also known as the classical method), the emphasis was on teaching grammer and employing translation to ascertain comprehension.

The grammer-translation method did not produce speakers of the languages studied.

In the grammer-translation method, much use of the native language was employed because the goal was not oral proficiency.

In the grammer-translation method, teachers did not necessarily have to be fluent speakers of the target language because the focus was not on communication.

The grammer-translation method dominated public schools and university language teaching in the United States until World War II.

Today, unfortunately, there is still some evidence of the use of the grammer-translation method in some public schools.

The direct method was a complete departure form the grammar-translation method.

The direct method did not allow for the use of the native language in the classroom.

The direct method required the use of visuals in order to convey meaning in an effort to eliminate translation.

The emphasis in the direct method was on developing proficient thinkers and speakers in the target language.

The direct method takes its name from the emphasis in the "direct" use of the target language.

The most widely known application of the direct method is practiced at the Berlitz language schools.

The audio-lingual method (based on behavioristic psychology) emphasized the use of habit forming as a way to develop language proficiency.

The main goal of the audio-lingual method was to develop fluent speakers of the languages studied.

In the audio-lingual method, the emphasis was on the rote memorization of dialogues.

In the audio-lingual method, the belief was that much oral practice (dialogue memorization) would result in communicative competence.

The audio-lingual method was unsuccessful since students could recite the dialogues but could not "communicate" in the target language.

TPR stands for total physical response.

In TPR, students are actively engaged in the language acquisition process by responding nonverbally (physically).

TPR is an effective method to employ while second language learners are in the silent (comprehension/preproduction) period.

The TPR method allows teachers to ascertain comphrehension long before second language learners are able to respond verbally.

TPR is an effective method of including second language learners in lessons while in the silent period.

TPR helps second language learners develop a sense of belonging and accomplishment while still in the silent period.

Pictures, objects, and realia are effective to enhance and expand the use of TPR in the classroom.

The natural approach is based on Krashen's monitor model.

The natural approach respects the second language learner's silent period.

Error correction is discouraged in the natural approach.

In the natural approach, the emphasis is on developing oral language proficiency.

In the natural approach, the teaching of grammer/language forms is discouraged.

In the natural approach, TPR is widely employed.

The communicative approach emphasizes meaningful communication in the ESL classroom.

The communicative approach requires the use of varied activities where authentic communication takes place.

The communicative approach embraces the principle of "learning by doing."

Cooperative groups provide a vehicle for language acquisition in the communicative approach.

The communicative approach is based on the need for an "information gap" as a means to encourage meaningful communication.

Chapter 11

Principles of Communicative Language Teaching

The framework for understanding the communicative language teaching approach can be understood by conceptualizing four interacting aspects:

- What is the goal of language learning?

- In what does the goal interface with the types of input that will be used for teaching language?

- What are the roles of teachers and learners?

- How do these roles impact classroom organization and types of instructional activities?

Communicative language competence requires learners to draw from four knowledge domains: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic. Learners must have knowledge of grammer, pronounciation, spelling, and phonology and be able to use these forms of knowledge to transform a string of utterances into a coherent written or conversational discourse. Learners must also have knowledge of how speakers use language to express different things. At the same time, learners must develop effective strategies for problem solving and coping with difficulties in comprehension and communication so that they will maintain an interest and motivational levels in learning the language.

Although grammer teaching has been largely ignored in language practices, there is a pedagogical rationale for including some level of explicit grammer instruction. When determining what type of grammatical instruction is most effective for each learner, teachers must bear in mind a few simple rules such as the brevity and simplicity of the rule, the age of the learners, the learner's previous language training and views about grammer instruction, and when to introduce grammar explanation.