3.Music in elt

PROS: highly memorable and motivating. Its patterning reinforces learning - music ‘sticks in the head’, works for both short and long term memory. It is a common experience that students might forget nearly everything they learn in another language but for a few songs.

Musical materials and songs are readily available for the teacher. In practical terms, they are short, self-contained texts easy to handle in a lesson. For the teacher, working with songs can also be a tremendous leaning experience in which students actually teach the subject matter, while the teacher is a resource for the language.

CONS: It is a stated fact that just listening and singing songs will not make students communicate in another language. It is doubtful, whether one can possibly exploit the material usefully. It is hard to be natural without being too schoolish, so most teachers would kill the material with too much work. One more concern is that adolescents are already using music as a vehicle for group identity and self-discovery. They often reject dated music. Teachers would have to depend on their students’ choice or have immense extra workload of search and preparation, often unappreciated by the class.

SONGS AND MUSIC: SPHERES OF APPLICATION

1) Songs and music are good for warm-up act-s, tuning in to the particular tastes and personalities of your students;

2) background music is an integral part of suggestopaedia, a teaching method developed by Dr. Losanov in Bulgaria. He claims background music produces hypermnesia - ‘excellent memory’. Besides, it engages the right hemisphere more, making the learning more holistic(five senses);

3) one should make use of the widespread availability of specialist magazines on artists and music industry;

4) it should be borne in mind that what you can do with a text, you can do with songs. That is, develop conventional skills of reading, writing, speaking and list., teach vocab. and grammar, or test your students;

5) using musical video clips, where students can be involved in predicting, describing, commenting and sharing perceptions;

6) activities designed for young children. There are collections of finger play songs, echo songs, refrain songs (Ten Green Bottles). Next here are TPR songs or total physical response songs (e.g. This is the Way, If You are Happy and You Know it). The idea is that if students can move and do what is said, matching words to their actions, language is learnt more deeply.

Using lit. versus a communic textbook changes the learning approach from learning how to say into learn. how to mean. Conversation-based prog-s tend to focus on 'formulas' used in contextual situations so there is little allowance for indepen. thought and adaptation of lang. On the other hand, lit.-based prog. focus on personal interpret-n of the lang. so students begin to experim. with the lang. This experimentation can be especially helpful to the students for use in diff. subj. such as science.

Per Carter and Long, the 3 main approaches to using Lit. in a lang. classroom are:

1.Cultural model - Based on the notion that lit. is the expression of: Socio-cultural attitudes. Aspirations of individ. societies, universal values. 2. Lang model – Lit. is taught for the promotion of: Vocab., Structure, Lang. manipul. 3. Personal growth model - Concerned more with student's: Maturity as individuals, Progress as individuals through reading

In order to teach lit., not just reading, effectively, one should have a clear pic of what actually happens when students struggle through a lit. work. The interactive-compensatory model of reading fluency (Stanovich 1980) provides useful insights for teachers of lit. This model is “interactive” in that it assumes that the reader makes sense of what s/he reads by (1) decoding the linguistic items on the page (“bottom-up processing”) and (2) relating this info. to what s/he already knows about the world (“top-down processing”). The model is “compens.” in the sense “that a deficit in any knowledge source results in a heavier reliance on other knowledge sources”. In other words, if a reader’s ling. knowledge is weak at any one point, s/he will compensate by drawing on background knowledge, and vice versa. Hence teachers should abide by the following principles: 1. Activate existing backgr. knowledge; 2. Encourage predict. It does not matter if their predictions are incorrect-the import. thing is that they will be alert to what does follow to see whether it matches their expect-ns or not. 3. Fill in backgr. knowledge where it is missing through explicit presentation of the cultural, historical, and/or social context of the text. 4. Make explicit, if necessary, the text’s discourse genre. 5. Assist word and sentence-level comprehend. through vocab. exercises.

Liter. circles, collages, board games.

Many published courses use real or simulated newsp. articles, and most schools maintain files of articles organized thematically. They provide one of the most obvious keys for opening up foreign society: its preoccupations, its habitual ways of thought, etc.

Teachers tend to use newsp. in 3 ways: to develop various lang. competencies, incl. reading comprehen. and grammar\vocab. work to focus on aspect of the target society and its culture and for discussion. Besides, if might be the only source of authentic, contemporary written Eng. Reading, list. and speaking are intergrated in a remarkable way here so we can speak about intergrated activities.

Most learners find newsp difficult. It is, however, not the job of the language teacher to provide missing cultural info. For this very reason, many activities allow the students to choose the text they wish to work with.

In general working with newsp. is centered about four groups of activities: shimming, scanning, reading for central details and guessing the meaning of words.

Here is the list of the better known activities: writing and replying to small ads; re-ordering jumbled paragraphs; re-ordering jumbled cartoon-strips; completing cartoon speech bubbles; predicting horoscopes; matching property ads with students needs; replying to job ads; devising appropriate penalties for criminals.

Newspapers: 1. Building familiarity nd confidence: mostly scanning reading ( What’s new? new names, things I want to know, culture and newspaper – item which is most American, british) 2. working with the text – extensive, reading for details: find sad, funny story and may organize own newspaper; . 3. working with pictures: appropriate pics for articles. 4. project work: activities can’t be completed within 1 lesson, there can be a gap between classes: rewrite a story in the article for more or less educated readers, complete the story. 5. personal responses – reading newspapers critically and explain how they play on readers emotions like text analyzing.

What’s a method? Edward Authony(1963) identified 3 levels of conceptualization and organization, which he termed approach, method and technique. An approach is axiomatic. It describes the nature of the subject matter to be taught.

Below is a description of the basic principles and procedures of the most recognized methods for teaching a second or foreign language. Approach deals with views; there is a structural view, functional view and interactional view. It sees the language as a vehicle for the realization of interpersonal relations and for the performance of social transactions between individuals. Method is an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material all of which is based upon the selected approach. A Technique is implementational – that which actually takes place in the classroom.

The Grammar-Translation Approach: (Karl Plotz, H.S.Ollendorf)

This approach was historically used in teaching Greek and Latin. The approach

was generalized to teaching modern languages. The goal is to learn a language in order to read its literature and to benefit from the mental discipline and intellectual development Classes are taught in the students' mother tongue, with little active use of the target language. Vocabulary is taught in the form of isolated word lists. Elaborate explanations of grammar are always provided. Grammar instruction provides the rules for putting words together; instruction often focuses on the form and inflection of words. The sentence is the basic unit of teaching and language practice. Reading of difficult texts is begun early in the course of study. Little attention is paid to the content of texts, which are treated as exercises in grammatical analysis. Accuracy is emphasized. Often the only drills are exercises in translating disconnected sentences from the target language into the mother tongue, and vice versa. Little or no attention is given to pronunciation.

Related theories in linguistics, psychology; important reference - The Direct Approach was developed initially as a reaction to the grammar-translation approach in an attempt to integrate more use of the target language in instruction.

The Audiolingual Method:

This method is based on the principles of behavior psychology. It adapted many of the principles and procedures of the Direct Method, in part as a reaction to the lack of speaking skills of the Reading Approach. New material is presented in the form of a dialogue. Based on the principle that language learning is habit formation, the method fosters dependence on mimicry, memorization of set phrases and over-learning. Structures are sequenced and taught one at a time. Structural patterns are taught using repetitive drills. Little or no grammatical explanations are provided; grammar is taught inductively. Skills are sequenced: Listening, speaking, reading and writing are developed in order. Vocabulary is strictly limited and learned in context. Teaching points are determined by contrastive analysis between L1 and L2. There is abundant use of language laboratories, tapes and visual aids. There is an extended pre-reading period at the beginning of the course. Great importance is given to precise native-like pronunciation. Use of the mother tongue by the teacher is permitted, but discouraged among and by the students. Successful responses are reinforced; great care is taken to prevent learner errors. There is a tendency to focus on manipulation of the target language and to disregard content and meaning.

Related theories in linguistics, psychology; important reference – The Audiolingual Method adapted many of the principles and procedures of the Direct Method, in part as a reaction to the lack of speaking skills of the Reading Approach.

There is abundant use of language laboratories, tapes and visual aids. There is an extended pre-reading period at the beginning of the course.