Methods

6.Вr and Ame. Method-ts consider our approach atomistic. They claim that reading doesn’t boil down to ability to identify words on the card. It is ability to decode a text (reading without decoding exists in some religions where texts are learned and recited by rote and... in some Russian schools). TESOl app. to read. (Smith and Goodman) is based upon treating reading as a unitary process.

Types of reading are classif as to reading purpose. There exist 3 pragmatic reasons:

1. Read for survival;

2. Read for acad purp – in case it is reading and acquiring facts and opinions. 3. Read for pleasure (readers who don’t do that in their mother-tongue are unlikely to do so in a second or foreign language.

Alderson distinguished b/w 2 approaches to read. – a product and a process approach, that is dealing with a text or with discourse. Method-lly this term is used to describe the meaning which the reader constructs from the text during the reading process. It is essentially social rather than individual; it is conventional way of writing about persons, places, beliefs, which is in tern associated with key concepts and institutions (e.g. institutionalized ways of writing about foreigners in newspapers) within this or that culture. So discourse or process reading is asking oneself why it is written about; how it is written and whether there are other ways of writing about things.

What chiefly characterizes effective readers is an ability and to reflect on what they are reading (hence there are submissive and resistant readers – e.g. remember soap bubble companies of the beginning of perestoika and their shattering effect upon family budgets of many naive readers of ads). In general, reading may be efficient and inefficient notwithstanding language proficiency; language, speed, attention, overcoming incomprehensible vocabulary, ability to make predictions, ability to implement background info, motivation, purp, command of all strategies make up an efficient reader. Naturally, they can be trained and developed.

Reading as a psycholing. process was described by Smith as ‘the reduction of uncertainty’ , where the reader makes use of 3 systems represented by 3 levels of lang. within the text (graphophonic, syntactic and semantic). Hence reading out loud can mark miscues.

criteria for selecting texts for reading:

it should be a vehicle for teaching specific grammar and lexis; it should give an opportunity to promote key reading strategies; it should have interesting and familiar content; it should be appropriate for the language level of students; Alan Maley: Good teaching has always been based on a dialogue b/w teacher and learner. And a staple element in that dialogue is questions. Good teachers know how to ask the right ?s at the right time so as to gradually extend their learners' ability. They know how to challenge their learners to think, while showing through their manner of questioning that they value the answers their students give. .There are at least 7 types of question we can ask about a written text: Factual ?s: the answer to such questions can be found, like a mirror image, in the text itself; Cause/effect questions: here the answer can be found by putting together info. from diff parts of the text. ; Inference questions: here the answer cannot be found directly in the text, by 'reading between the lines', ;Opinion questions; Interpretation questions; Personalised questions: here the reader has to project herself into the shoes of a character and give a pers. response, Speculative questions: the reader has to speculate about things which are unknown, because they are outside the text. Yet the text may well provide some indications, Focus on the students as the main content area: their lives outside school, their interests, their problems, and to build around this activities.

1. Component skills of listening. Organization of listening process (requirements, tips). Russian versus British approach to teaching listening.

Teaching Aural Comprehension.

Russian methodological tradition did not treat listening as cornerstone for speech competencies formation: L- S – R-W. What is specific? Complexity of the process from psycholinguistic point of view; approach is theoretically biased and rather atomistic. It boils down to the following:

Russian methodologists stress the importance of intonation as the instrument of differentiating between communicative types of sentences. Intonation awareness is also a condition for successful operation of short term memory. Intonation awareness is interdependent on ear for music and is formed at about 9 (with girls 1,5 years earlier).

Secondly, they emphasize anticipation or oral foresight as a foundation for listening competencies. The foundation of it is syntactic links and structures. It exists at sentence level and text level.

Thirdly, they expound upon redundancy as a tool and condition for listening competencies; that’s why it is methodologically faulty to read out loud a text; this would be hardly a real listening situation as redundancy norms are different. Usually what’s lacking is paralinguistic (extralinguistic means of communication):

a) acoustic: interjections, rhythm, lowering and elevation of the tone, pauses;

b) visual (mimics, gestures, stance of interlocutors );

c) tactile: handshakes, patting.

British methodologists go a step further and focus upon modulated speech of the teacher (Alan Maley “Teacher’s Voice”).

Texts for listening within Russian tradition are subdivided into authentic, adapted and didactic

According to there exist 4 levels of comprehension:

a) fragmentary (level of words);

b) general (level of sentences);

c) level of syntactic unity;

d) text level, which is analytic.

Activities in Russian methodology are classified into 2 types:

1/ a) training the ear for lexis;

b) teaching to anticipate;

c) training short-term memory;

d) coping with proper names, abbreviations;

e) using contextual clues and otherwise guessing.

2/ a) semi-guided listening;

b) unguided listening;

c) developing information processing skills and note-taking.

As to requirements for organizing listening practice, they boil down to the following:

a) one should operate with texts that correspond to the age-level and proficiency of students;

b) activities should correlate with other types of speech activities (part of a process);

c) the process of listening should be guided.

Let’s juxtapose the above said with British methodological approach:

I. Real-life listening ? authentic since many “authentic” texts take place against a silent background, the participants are of indeterminate age and character, speak in a standard accent, display no emotion and discuss something that has nothing to do with them personally. What are the prerequisites for real-life listening?

1) Purpose and expectation (the knowledge we possess in advance about the subject matter or context of the discourse)

Thus it is a very good idea to give students some information about the ?ontent, situation and speakers before they start listening.

2) Most life situations require immediate response from the listener ( verbal or non-verbal) so most listening tasks should be based on short, active responses during or between parts of listening.

3) Visibility of the speaker ( for the age group)

4) Environmental clues ( noises, smells and other stimuli ) in classroom can be represented by visual materials: illustrations, diagrams, maps and so on.

5) Shortness ( the head discourse is usually divided into chunks and so rarely is a memory test)

6) Informal speech: most of the discourse we hear is quite informal, being both spontaneous and colloquial in character. Redundant utterances may take form of repetitions, false starts re-phrasings, elaborations, tautologies. Auditory character-means, among other things, that people quickly gabble through what is unimportant.

II. Component skills of listening:

2.1 Hearing the sounds. ( hearing sounds non-existent in mother tongue, distinguishing between phonemes and allophonic variations, sequences and combinations of sounds typical of English, esp. Consonant-clusters; the student is not used to the stress and intonation patterns in English. By the way, practicing detailed intonation models is considered a dubious practice - the way here is exposition to plenty of informal native speech.

2.2 Coping with redundancy and noise – that is ability to match predictions and retroactive guesses as to what was missing (the same as in reading). ‘I don’t understand a thing’ problem teachers encounter might signalize lack of this particular skill; listening to every single word might prove counterproductive . Most predictions depend on the obvious choices in vocabulary and grammar.

2.3 Understanding colloquial vocabulary – identification of what has been learnt in a swift flow of speech. The main problem here are small functional words, the so-called ‘weak forms’; also colloquial collocations – words that through regular occurrence together become so merged that are related to as a single item.

2.4. Fatigue and frustration fighting techniques.

2.5 Understanding different accents – the basic should be provided – the rest can be introduced just to open students’ eyes to possibilities.

2.6. Using visual and environmental clues – linking things to context. The trouble is that if we increase the number of details students take in, we’ll make them even more strained and frustrated. So we should teach to skim for important information, gather general import and ignore details.

III. Organization of listening.

The question that arises first is whether authentic discourse really provides the best training for real-life listening; it has been proved that students who learn from English native speakers do not seem to acquire noticeably better accents than those who learn from non-natives. Also, live speech does on the whole seem to be more useful, recordings should be used for definite specific purposes (to concentrate on one particular listening skill or for testing).

All listening should be task-oriented; even native speakers find it difficult to do too many multiple choice tasks: they focus more on written skills than listening. So, one should give tasks with which 100% native speakers cope.

Listening tasks are meant to train not to test; the task itself should be relatively easy and the focus remain on listening itself; not too much logical inference or too many items of information to be memorized – this is a common fault.

Feedback should be immediate: if a student is given answers with corrections a day later he’ll reap too little benefit from it. So clues should be provided. Contextualization is also necessary in the form of pictures, diagrams, graphs – which might serve as task bases too. So a distinction should be drawn between tasks visual oriented and visual aided. Diagrams are most valuable for the former, as one simple diagram can generate a large amount of language to explain, describe or comment.

represented by visual materials: illustrations, diagrams, maps and so on.

5) Shortness ( the head discourse is usually divided into chunks and so rarely is a memory test)

6) Informal speech: most of the discourse we hear is quite informal, being both spontaneous and colloquial in character. Redundant utterances may take form of repetitions, false starts re-phrasings, elaborations, tautologies. Auditory character-means, among other things, that people quickly gabble through what is unimportant.

II. Component skills of listening:

2.1 Hearing the sounds. ( hearing sounds non-existent in mother tongue, distinguishing between phonemes and allophonic variations, sequences and combinations of sounds typical of English, esp. Consonant-clusters; the student is not used to the stress and intonation patterns in English. By the way, practicing detailed intonation models is considered a dubious practice - the way here is exposition to plenty of informal native speech.

2.2 Coping with redundancy and noise – that is ability to match predictions and retroactive guesses as to what was missing (the same as in reading). ‘I don’t understand a thing’ problem teachers encounter might signalize lack of this particular skill; listening to every single word might prove counterproductive . Most predictions depend on the obvious choices in vocabulary and grammar.

2.3 Understanding colloquial vocabulary – identification of what has been learnt in a swift flow of speech. The main problem here are small functional words, the so-called ‘weak forms’; also colloquial collocations – words that through regular occurrence together become so merged that are related to as a single item.

2.4. Fatigue and frustration fighting techniques.

2.5 Understanding different accents – the basic should be provided – the rest can be introduced just to open students’ eyes to possibilities.

2.6. Using visual and environmental clues – linking things to context. The trouble is that if we increase the number of details students take in, we’ll make them even more strained and frustrated. So we should teach to skim for important information, gather general import and ignore details.

III. Organization of listening.

The question that arises first is whether authentic discourse really provides the best training for real-life listening; it has been proved that students who learn from English native speakers do not seem to acquire noticeably better accents than those who learn from non-natives. Also, live speech does on the whole seem to be more useful, recordings should be used for definite specific purposes (to concentrate on one particular listening skill or for testing).

All listening should be task-oriented; even native speakers find it difficult to do too many multiple choice tasks: they focus more on written skills than listening. So, one should give tasks with which 100% native speakers cope.

Listening tasks are meant to train not to test; the task itself should be relatively easy and the focus remain on listening itself; not too much logical inference or too many items of information to be memorized – this is a common fault.

Feedback should be immediate: if a student is given answers with corrections a day later he’ll reap too little benefit from it. So clues should be provided. Contextualization is also necessary in the form of pictures, diagrams, graphs – which might serve as task bases too. So a distinction should be drawn between tasks visual oriented and visual aided. Diagrams are most valuable for the former, as one simple diagram can generate a large amount of language to explain, describe or comment.

The process of teaching creative writing includes familiarization with similar pieces of writing, creation of written discourse and sharing pieces of writing in the group. It is organized according to the three-phase framework: pre-writing, while-writing and post-writing. Prewriting can be defined as a system of activities that ensure students’ thinking, talking, structuring the topic under focus in a writing lesson productively. Prewriting is a way to stimulate and motivate students to write better essays. It is crucial for success in writing for both native speakers and non-native speakers. Activities most commonly used are:

1). Oral Group Brainstorming: this involves the use of leading questions to get students thinking about a topic or idea which is under focus. The questions can be written on the chalkboard.

2). Looping: this entails writing non-stop (without fear of errors or self-censorship) on anything that comes to students’ minds on a particular topic. After writing for a limited period of time the writer stops, reads, and sums up what he has written in one sentence.

3) Dicto-comp: here a paragraph is read at normal speed; then the teacher puts key words from the paragraph, in sequence, on the blackboard and asks the students to rewrite the paragraph from the best of their recollection.

4) Writing letters to an author: can be form of reviewing home-reading novels or accounting for extensive reading tasks.

While-writing usually comprises the following steps:

* List possible ideas: you may find it helpful to make an Idea’s Chart; if one idea doesn’t work, you can easily go back and develop other things { }.

* Write a draft.

* Correct and Improve (check for mistakes, improve correction and organisation). This might be organized as a narrow-point activity, e.g. improving cohesive devices: addition, comparison, contrast and concession, enumeration, exemplification, summary, time, result, reformulation, transition to the next item (Self-access: illustrate these groups with examples of words and phrases)

* Write final version.

Post-writing should comprise reflection on the spelling and reasoning errors, sharing the writing with the group mates, redrafting and peer-editing. In order to encourage reflection and self-censorship, errors in students' written works should be charted: each time a student makes an error, a tick is marked in a corresponding box. Students keep the record sheet with them so that when they are writing next they should check which problem they should be careful of. Charting errors will help to define the stage a student is in: pre-systematic (random errors), systematic (persisting in a particular error, often fossilized), postsystematic (reducing his errors substantially, is able to correct his work). In order to work with the chart, students should get familiar with the following widely accepted correction symbols: ? - meaning unclear; ART - article problem; PR - incorrect preposition; ST - improve style. Recommended form of acquisition - lexical dictation on the given abbreviations.

Evaluation of Student Writing

Six general categories are taken for its basis:

Content (which is sum of clear thesis statement, ability to develop ideas through personal experience , illustration; presence of consistent focus on the theme in question);

Organisation ( there should be an introduction, ideas should be logically connected, conclusion should be in evidence as well; the written work should be of appropriate length);

Discourse (topic sentences in every paragraph; cohesion - that is use of cohesive devices - pronouns, articles, conjunctions, demonstratives, synonyms and repetition of key words ; reference; variation of expression - constructions, lexis);

Syntax; Vocabulary;

Mechanics (spelling, punctuation, neatness and appearance).

Evaluation of written works should be summative and content-based, a single overall score should be avoided.