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Behaghel's second principle and two corollaries An additional factor that must be taken into consideration when one is making typological studies or mastering the basic structure of a language is the matter of stylistics. In order to put this into perspective, let us repeat Behaghel's first principle and add to it his second principle and two important stylistic corollaries which affect the OV and VO relationships in human languages. Principle 1: That which goes together semantically is put together syntactically. (Hence, human languages generally tend to be either OV or VO, or an admixture such as modern German, which is basically VO in independent clauses and OV in dependent clauses.) Principle 2: Topics (themes) tend to precede comments (rhemes) in ordinary unmarked sentences. (Topics typically contain old information whereas comments tend to contain new information.) Corollary 1: Heavy topics may be optionally shifted into the comment field (for example, by the process of extraposition) for emphasis. Corollary 2: A comment (or part of a comment) may optionally be shifted into the topic field for the sake of emphasis (for example, by the passive process or by a general movement process sometimes called topicalization) We illustrate these processes below as Structures N through S. N. THAT GRAMMAR BE DULL is not necessary. (Heavy Topic)
VO LANGUAGE OV LANGUAGE A. Verbs precede ob- A. Objects precede jects. verbs. B. Adpositions are B. Adpositions are preposed. post-posed. C. Degree precedes C. Standard precedes pivot which pre pivot which precedes standard. cedes degree. D. Titles precede fam D. Family names preily names. cede titles. E. Given names pre E. Family names precede family names. cede given names. F. In teen numbers, F. In teen numbers, digit precedes dec decade precedes ade. digit. G. Head nouns pre G. Relative clauses cede relative precede head clauses. H. Head nouns pre H. Genitives precede cede genitives. head nouns. I. Head nouns precede I. Attributive adjectives attributive adjectives. precede head nouns. J. A phonetic question J. A phonetic question marker may precede marker may follow a a sentence. sentence. K. Negative precedes K. Verbals precede verbals. negative. L. A phonetic question L. A negative marker marker precedes a precedes a question negative. marker. M. A main sentence M. An embedded (cauprecedes an embed sative) sentence ded (causative) sen precedes a main tence. sen nce. continued on page 27 5. Other typological characteristics may be phonological or semanto-syntactic. Among interesting tendencies discussed by Lehmann (1978) are the following: Adverbials are a VO characteristic and the favored position is preverbal. In the case of an OV language, the element is postverbal. • Verbal qualifiers precede verbs in VO situations and follow in OV situations. Prefixes are common in VO languages whereas OV languages favor suffixes. • OV languages tend to have transparent case systems. Compounds in English tend to be OV (Cheshire Car, baby-sii). There are suffixes for complex words, but prefixing is also prominent (insolence, adjourn, abound). • Generally, OV languages favor progressive assimilation and vowel harmony whereas VO languages favor regressive (anticipatory) assimilation and umlaut. • OV languages favor open syllables and are often agglutinative whereas VO languages favor closed syllables. Stress systems are common in VO languages whereas OV languages tend to favor pitch systems. VО languages tend to have larger sets of vowels than OV languages. • OV languages tend to favor coordination over subordination, which VO languages favor.
O. It is not necessary THAT GRAMMAR BE DULL. (Extraposed Heavy Topic)
P. The linguist FLOODED THE AUDIENCE WITH INFORMATION (Plain Comment)
Q. THE AUDIENCE was flooded with information by the linguist. (Topicalized Comment)
R. I LIKE MATHEMATICS. but I DON'T LIKE ENGLISH.
S. MATHEMATICS I like; ENGLISH. I don't (like). (Topicalized Comments)
Summary and conclusions In this article, we have presented a basic outline of the notion of syntactic typology, and our spade of inquiry has turned over ground in an important field which is worth the tilling, planting, and reaping by theorists and practitioners alike. We conclude our discussion with a table of characteristics which we suggest are basic to typological relationships that hold for VO and OV languages, relationships which have great significance for Page 3
All this is not meant to confuse; it is meant to show that the work done with language in interactions is not so easily related to such well-known code facts as interrogative, imperative, and so on. The functional context is independent of but closely related to the code, and it must be noted separately when one is accounting for contexts. It should be clear from the example given here that the mismatch between function and code is not limited or metaphorical, but that it is central to even the most simple, everyday uses of language.
some elements of the code, the linguistic form suited to "preventing someone from doing something" should be easy to find. In fact, there are two apparently essential code notions-negative and imperative. A typical combination of function and code (if what the speaker wants to prevent someone from doing is “leaving”) could be Don't leave yet! The problem with this is that the original function (to prevent someone from doing something) is contextless—at least in terms of the dialectal and diatypic contexts considered so far. Add the following information: Anna is having a party; Thelma has been an especially popular guest, entertaining others, making the party lively. Anna and Thelma are acquaintances but not close friends. Thelma announces, suddenly, that she has to leave. Anna, who wants her party to continue to be successful, is just in the position described above—she wants to prevent someone from doing something. Oddly enough, rather than Don't leave yet!, Anna is much more likely to say some such thing as Can't you stay a little longer? If Thelma has already said that she must go, the question is a silly one, but the real confusion lies in the apparent inappropriateness of asking a question at all if the intention is to prevent someone from doing something. The direct route is negative plus imperative in terms of the code (certainly not interrogative plus negative). Something must mediate between the interactional function and the code-level sentence structure, and that mediation must be sensitive to an enormous number of contextual facts, just the sorts discussed in this article. Pretend that some sort of thing called a “semantic interpreter” is just so powerful. Compare two situations (the second very like the Anna-and-Thelma story told above):
Code contexts The code facts are those things traditionally sought. What are the performance standards for this or that construction? This or that pronunciation? This or that word? This or that way of saying things? It is sometimes overlooked, however, that part of the code may be context for another part, even at the same level of linguistic analysis. I will divide code contexts into the following four levels: 1. Phonological 2. Morpho-syntactic 3. Semantic 4. Textual I will not detail the importance of considering phonological and morpho-syntactic environments; such research has been the focus of linguistic research for its entire lifetime. It is perhaps only necessary to restate that such contexts must be observed to account for language performance no matter what other contexts are catalogued. The example given above of the fluctuation between d and j and 1 and ch before y shows the impor y tance of characterizing phonological contexts. Phonological facts may be influenced by morpho-syntactic ones as well. For example, the group have to may be pronounced /hæftəl if it is used as an auxiliary verb (in place of the modal must), e.g., I have to leave. If have is a main verb, however, even if it is in front of the same sound (e.g., I have two dollars), the final v of have may not be pronounced as f. Perhaps even less well-known and certainly less wellused in language teaching and learning is the fact that larger and larger code contexts must be observed to determine if linguistic units are acceptable, or more or less likely. One such consideration is based on the amount of information that has already been given in a text or conversation. Question: Who went to Salvador? Answer(s): a. Dennis Preston.
"Prevent someone from doing something." One that suggests that the speaker has the right to give orders to another. Has little to do; the normal interpretation of a negative imperative is that it is a command. "Don't leave yet!"
Oddly enough, in much language teaching and learning such answers as c are often prized because they utilize so-called “full forms." What they use, from the point of view of an analysis of the conversation based on information, is completely unnecessary items—items that represent information already given in the conversation. In the above, after the question, the assumption that “someone went to Salvador" is "old" information. An answer that repeats both the “going” and the "place" (as does c) is a special answer, one which, for some reason, ignores the information that has already occurred. Attention to informational contexts will allow for eventually sounder generalizations about language
tive speaker imaginable—asking for the single, correct answer. It is naive to think that a native speaker could provide sensitive answers in the face of all this variation. Furthermore, concentrating on language makes the report of usage or the usage itself distorted. Observation is obviously the solution, but there may be many opportunities for the observation of natural language in some contexts and few in others. To the extent that those others are important, the elicitation of natural language data needs to be taken into consideration.
Linguists recognize now that speech and writing are related but distinct systems. To discuss such differences, at least two sub-contexts are required: 1. Mode 2. Channel Mode is relatively easy; language is either written or spoken. Historically, however, in language teaching there has been little recognition of the divergence between structures that are appropriate to one mode or the other. Hardly had a day gone by Seldom had we thought that ... I am not aware of any natural use of such forms in speech, unless it is the extremely formal (frozen) use of speech which tries to imitate writing. The language observer should be on the lookout for forms exclusively or predominantly in the domain of one mode or the other. Such forms may even be larger than sentences; an "essay" is different, for example, from a “lecture." The channel may also influence language use. One does not say, at the end of a face-to-face interaction, "Well, I've got to hang up now." Normally one would not say at the end of a telephone conversation **I've got to be running along." It would be equally odd to find a grocery list carved in stone, and it would be unusual to find a statue in honor of a national hero with a poem in his or her honor glued to the base, written on a scrap of notebook paper. Even lowly channels, then, need to be taken into consideration. The first part of the successful milking of the native speaker, then, is noting a wide range of contexts-dialectal, diatypic, code, and realizational. The understanding that all these environmental factors influence the shape of language from the smallest detail of pronunciation to the highest level of textual or conversational organization will help those interested in English avoid using the most inappropriate approach to the na
To get to different dialect contexts the teacher can (and should) do nothing. If a younger native speaker is not available, do not ask an older one what a younger one would say. (Remember, the older one can't even be trusted to give an accurate report of his or her own usage. Imagine what creativity the speaker might use to report the usage of others! For dialectal contexts, then, the teacher is stuck with such speakers as are available. There are several things that may be done to help get around this problem. First, for some reason the performance of the native speaker has always been overvalued. The nonnative speaker often assumes that only native speaker usage holds the ultimate answer to questions about a particular language. Ultimate answers, however, are not so easy to find about language use. Variation rather than uniformity or inflexibility is often the key to an accurate description of language performance. Why not monitor the successful bilingual's language use as well as that of the native speaker? In particular, if there are a limited number of native speakers available for observation, would it not serve the teacher well to study the performance of nonnative speakers of English who have proven competence in the language? (Of course, "proven competence" is a difficult notion, and the question of language assessment is not raised in any detail here. There is, however, a practical level of proven competence—successful interaction with speakers of the language in question.) In some ways, since speakers and hearers are extremely sensitive to language variation, including the variation of the nonnative speaker, it might even be assumed that the performance of a successful bilingual is more appropriate as a model for learner behavior than the performance of a native speaker. Second, the elicitation of dialects may actually go on in all sorts of non-face-to-face environments. Literature, the press, radio, television, film, and audio recordings are often used for comprehension practice and "culture learning.” To the extent, however, that such popular, artistic, and academic vehicles carry the language use of speakers who represent different dialectal (and for that matter diatypic, code, and realization) contexts, they are valuable language examples as well.
Although one cannot literally control dialect contexts—they are either there or they are not-one must make an effort to experience a variety of such types in non-face-to-face situations if other opportunities do not exist.
Some ideas from recent research The greatest richness in the last several years of sociolinguistic research has been in the controlling of diatypic facts, particularly those that have to do with the category distance. William Labov pioneered research that displayed sensitive and systematic phonological variation in such diverse tasks as the following: 1. Reading minimal pairs, e.g., late-let, bait-bet 2. Reading lists of isolated words 3. Reading connected texts 4. Having formal or “self-conscious” conversations 5. Having relaxed or informal conversations The teacher is not much concerned with the measures Labov and others use to get at the formal ends of the distance spectrum, such as techniques (1) through (4) above, for those are, presumably, the facts reported in most texts and grammars. I say “presumably," for it is important to realize that even at the formal ends of the distance spectrum the comments of sociolinguists are based on actual performances from contexts that are carefully specified. What may be more interesting to the teacher are some of the techniques used to elicit casual or informal parts of the spectrum, for it is usually this English (not to be confused with slang or nonstandard usage) that is least known to teachers and learners, but it is often just such performance that makes up a great deal of language in real-life situations. There are at least three important (and practical) suggestions in sociolinguistic work which aid the elicitation of casual language data. Labov observes that suggesting certain topics may help move language use in the direction of the casual end of the distance spectrum. Two of his suggestions may be easy to use in some kinds of conversational interactions. The danger of death is a label Labov gives to a any narrative by a speaker which is a personal account of a situation in which the speaker might have lost his or her life. Labov claims that speakers providing such narratives are almost certain to use casual, informal language, most likely a result of the vividness required in re-living the experience. Of course, the elicitation of such data is somewhat sensitive, but, in general, Americans would not avoid telling or resent being asked to tell about such an experience. Childhood games and experi
ences is a less sensitive and equally powerful distancelowering topic, according to Labov. Perhaps age is the dominating context that demands informality, or perhaps it is due to some perception of the non-seriousness of the topic. This device is an obvious natural in crosscultural communication; the teacher may give examples from his or her childhood and ask the native speaker for a like experience in return. Of course, one may fail to elicit casual language if other facts of the situation dominate. If you walk the American ambassador, you in your black tie, she in her gown, at an embassy cocktail party, waiters and waitresses moving about, soft (but live) background music being played, the mighty affairs of state or world economy being discussed, and ask about childhood games, the performance may not be at a casual or informal level. A second notion introduced by Labov (but known to eavesdroppers the world over for a long time) is the particular value of "asides” or the remarks made in passing to family members and others more familiar to the speaker than the person with whom he or she is having a conversation. Such conversational interruptions are often performed by the speaker as if the other contexts were momentarily suspended. They offer excellent opportunities for insight into ordinary usage at the more casual level. More recently, Lesley Milroy has introduced the notion of social networks into sociolinguistic research.? Her idea is a straightforward one. If one who seeks authentic linguistic performance can be vouched for or guaranteed by one member of a close network, after a short period of time such a person can observe (even using a tape recorder) authentic language use by members of that network. Observers who are not known to all members of the network will cause the language use of the entire interaction to stay at the more formal end of the distance spectrum. All these suggestions by Labov and Milroy, but particularly the latter two, suggest that the observer do something to manipulate the setting, or, at least, seek out certain types of settings. Speakers are much more likely to perform casually on familiar territory or home ground, but native speakers abroad (valued, it seems, for their linguistic performance) are more often invited to formal gatherings, dinners at fancy restaurants, and just the sorts of settings in which language is likely to be guarded and in which little or no opportunity for asides or conversations with members of the speaker's own network is likely. Native speakers might be better observed for casual language use if they were more often at typical family gatherings; meetings or sessions that focus on interests restricted to an age, sex, or even professional group; or entertainments of a “simpler” sort.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the behaviorist approach was widely accepted in language teaching. At that time the audiolingual method was popular, and learning was believed to occur when associations were formed between stimuli and responses. Over the past fifteen years or so, however, there has been a gradual change from strictly behavioral views of learning to the point where learning psychology is now dominated by cognitive theories. These theories aim to explain the learning of meaningful material-material which cognitivists say cannot be explained by operant conditioning. Cognitive psychologists define learning as a reorganization of cognitive structures. They believe that learning is an active process. This means that there is a constant interaction between the individual and his environment. Knowledge does not lie exclusively in either the object or the learner, but rather in this interaction. Perception, for example, is not a passive absorption of external stimuli; it is an interaction in which incoming stimuli are selected and related to the cognitive structures that the person possesses. What a person perceives and learns depends on the cognitive structures he possesses and into which he can fit the new information.
CHERYL L. CHAMPEAU DE LÓPEZ began teaching English at the Centro Venezolano-Americano in Caracas. She has also taught at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and since 1970 has been a member of the language department of the Universidad Simón Bolívar. Her main interests lie in the areas of psychological learning theories applied to language teaching and teaching reading to science students. She recently received her M.A. degree in education from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia.
The information processing model When discussing the acquisition of meaningful verbal material, cognitivists frequently refer to an information-processing model of memory. This model compares the brain to a computer, in that both deal with the processing and storage of information. In this model, short-term memory is equivalent to the RAM (Random Access Memory) of the computer, and long-term memory corresponds to the computer's ROM (Read Only Memory). There are a number of variations of this model (see Gage and Berliner), but the simplified one below shows the principal components.
(NO REHEARSAL) + FORGOTTEN INFORMATION
In this model, physical stimuli, such as sound, light, temperature, etc., are transmitted to the sensory system of the person. From there, they enter the short-term memory or storage system. This system stores a limited number of items (about seven "chunks”) for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Short-term memory is highly sensitive to interference, and if new information enters, it "pushes out" the previous information. In this case, if the previous information has not been rehearsed, coded, and passed on to the long-term memory, it is forgotten. Rehearsal generally takes the form of verbal repetition, since the major coding used in short-term memory seems to be acoustic coding, and one of the main purposes of rehearsal appears to be to maintain the information in the short-term memory long enough for it to be encoded and passed on to the long-term memory. While in the short-term memory information can be "pushed out" and forgotten, in the long-term memory information is apparently never forgotten. It is in the brain—the problem is finding it and getting it out. The long-term memory stores a large amount of information permanently.
A specific example of how these initial-learning techniques can be used is an advanced reading class I recently taught to a group of university freshmen majoring in the sciences. In this class, my objective was that the students should learn to identify and understand definitions of new words they might encounter in their reading. This, I hoped, would help them understand the overall reading selection and also save time, since they would not have to recur to the dictionary for the meaning of a word if they were able to recognize and understand the definition given in the selection. I began the class by writing the word STRIKE in large block letters on the blackboard, and I gave the following sentence so the students would understand the meaning: "The employees of this university are on strike.” At that time, that happened to be true. In fact, there was a strong possibility that the strike would spread to the professors and students and the university would be paralyzed, so obviously this word had strong emotional meaning for the students, and everyone's attention was captured. We then proceeded to brainstorm in order to write a definition of this word that was based on their very real and immediate experience, and from there to discuss different kinds of definitions and the main components of each.
Classroom applications What effect does this psychological model have on what we as teachers actually do in the classroom? How can we help our students remember important information? Or, as a cognitivist would say, how can we help students get information into their long-term storage systems in such a way as to be able to retrieve it at will?
1. Initial Learning. The first thing the teacher wants to do is make sure the information enters the short-term memory clearly and correctly; therefore he must motivate the student to pay close attention, i.e., he must elicit an orienting response (OR). This can be done in a variety of ways, from making a blatant statement such as “Pay attention! You'll have a quiz on this at the end of the hour!” to using more subtle techniques such as choosing examples with emotional properties, using attractive visual presentations (charts, pictures, colored lettering, etc.), changing volume and intonation of the voice, etc. Once the teacher has gotten the students' attention, he must make sure they have the adequate cognitive structures (“'schemata”) into which to fit the new information; otherwise, no new learning can take place. One way to do this is to present the topic to be discussed and have a "brainstorming" session in which students simply give all the background information they already have on the subject. In this way, the teacher becomes aware of how much background knowledge the students possess; consequently, he can deduce what the appropriate starting point for the lesson is. Brainstorming also helps to “equate" the class; that is, students learn from each other, and therefore all start the new lesson with the same amount of basic knowledge.
2. Retention. Once the information has properly entered the short-term memory, the next step is to assure that it passes into the long-term memory. There are several ways that this can be done. a. First, the material should be meaningful to the students and should build on previous knowledge whenever possible. In long-term memory, the more associations there are, the easier it is to retrieve information when it is needed. Analogies may be used; for example, “Long-term memory is like a file cabinet." This enables the student to relate new information and fit it into established schemata. In the class referred to above, I chose the word strike to define because this word was very meaningful to the students at that time. It also built on previous knowledge, since they knew what the word meant in Spanish and were at the time very personally involved in what the word signified. b. Second, the teacher should present information in an organized way. There is extensive research indicating that information in long-term memory is stored in structures or schemata (see Bousfield, Cohen, and Whitmarsh; Deese; and Tulving). Presentation of new material in an organized form will thereby save the learner from having to structure it before storage. The teacher may use advance organizers, i.e., may give a general overview of the information that will be presented (a type of outline) and later fill in the details; or he may begin with the lower level of a hierarchy and build up to the higher levels. The important thing is that there be structure and organization in the presentation. In the class on definition, I used an advance organizer Page 4
in the form of a brief outline of the kinds of definitions we would be studying: 1. Formal definitions a. Real definitions b. Nominal definitions 2. Informal definitions a. Definition by function c. Definition by process After this, we began to give meaning to this outline by going from general to specific, progressively adding on new information. First we talked about the differences between formal and informal definitions. Then we went into a discussion of the features that distinguish real from nominal definitions, and finally, we briefly differentiated between definition by function, description, and process, analyzing examples of each. c. Finally, new information should be presented in small amounts so that students can learn the material thoroughly, and it should be reviewed frequently. Distributed practice promotes greater learning than “cram" sessions, and review promotes overlearning, which also helps assure less forgetting. In the class on definition, students were assigned homework specifically connected to what we had done in class. The homework consisted of new selections in which the students had to identify definitions, their components, etc. The subject matter of these new selections was closely connected to subject matter they saw in other courses, so the material was meaningful for them and would be more easily transferred to new situations when the time came. Also, in other units of the course, definitions frequently appear in the reading selections. For example, the following unit is on comparison and contrast, and several of the readings in this unit give definitions of the terms being compared. When we read these selections, I ask students to identify the definitions, giving component parts, type, etc. 3. Transfer. While the immediate and most obvious objective of education is to help students learn new material and retain that material over a period of time, the long-range objective of most learning should be transferability. Since the circumstances encountered by the student in his life outside the school will rarely be the same as those of the classroom, he must be able to apply the skills and information acquired to practical situations and future learning conditions. How can teachers promote transferability? a. An important technique is the teaching of general rules and principles, rather than just details. Research has shown that principles are remembered longer and are more easily transferred (see Gage and Berliner; Biehler). An example of this may be given for the teaching of prefixes and suffixes. Instead of simply defining a word such as unchanged as referring to something that has not undergone transformation, explain that the prefix negates the root word change and the
suffix converts it to the past participle, in this case used as an adjective. b. The teacher should point out differences as well as similarities between the information presented and similar information. This will facilitate positive transfer and prevent negative transfer. Returning to my example of the definition of the word strike, I pointed out that the definition we had given was just one possible meaning of strike. From there we proceeded to give the other common definitions, so the student would be able to choose the appropriate meaning when he encountered the word in his reading. c. Finally, the teacher should give many different examples, using real situations the student may encounter, and should give the student as much practice as possible. In a lesson on definition, the teacher could bring several objects to class and have the students divide into groups and write several different kinds of definitions (formal, informal, structural, functional, etc.) of the same object. Or a game might be used in which one group would read its definitions and the others would have to guess what the object was. Conclusion To summarize: according to cognitive learning theory, there are a number of things a teacher should keep in mind when preparing and teaching a lesson. First, the stimuli that will be presented to the students should be attractive, stimulating, and appropriate for the level of the students, so the new information will enter the short-term memory clearly and correctly. Once the material has entered the short-term memory, the teacher should provide opportunities for rehearsal (i.e., examples, exercises, active involvement, etc.) which enable the students to encode the material and pass it on to the long-term memory. But even here the process doesn't stop. The teacher should review the material frequently, tying it in with new information and helping the students to form new associations and apply their knowledge to new situations. According to the cognitivists, learning is an active and continuing process. The cognitive structures or schemata we all possess are not static structures, but rather systems of organization that are constantly being modified in order to incorporate the new information with which we are continually being bombarded by our ever-changing environment. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baddeley, A.D. 1972. Human memory. In New horizons in psychology 2, ed. P.C. Dodwell. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Baddeley, A.D., and Karalyn Patterson. 1971. The relation between long-term and short-term memory. British Medical Bulletin, 27, pp. 237–42. Biehler, Robert F. 1974. Psychology applied to teaching, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Bousfield, W.A., B.H. Cohen, and G.A. Whitma 'sh. 1969. Associative clustering in the recall of differen: words of different taxonomic frequencies of occurrence. In Verbal learning and memory, ed. Leo Postman and Geoffrey continued on page 31 Page 5
Having processed the data collected, our next step was to translate needs into language and language-related skills through analyzing the linguistic realizations of each of the job-related activities specified above. This, in turn, permitted us to single out, select, and grade the linguistics items to be taught in their relevant contexts, to design teaching activities to re-create and simulate real-life situations, and to specify the level of performance to be attained. The scheme below sums up the steps of the process explained above.
1 Identification of target group and institution
to international conventions. B. Speak and understand the language to converse professionally and socially with English-speaking clients and visitors. C. Attend seminars or international events when the firm so determines. D. Carry on business correspondence with counter parts abroad. E. Write technical reports assessing the financial sit uation of other firms. At this stage, interviews with senior members of the institution were held with the following purposes in mind: 1. To assess the institution's expectations and further specify the communicative needs of the target group in terms of levels of performance expected. 2. To agree upon resources and facilities the institu tion was willing to grant to both participants and course designer. 3. To obtain authorization to utilize letters, docu ments, and the literature available in the office as raw data to prepare teaching materials. In relation to the first of the purposes mentioned above, it was evident that all ten candidates were expected to become fluent readers of material related to their specialization, with such variations in range and scope as had already been detected. With respect to oral language, it was specified that seven of them (the accountants excluded) were expected to be able to discuss professional issues with Englishspeaking clients. Furthermore, three of them were scheduled to attend international events in a year's time if they had sufficient command of the language. With regard to technical-report writing, all ten participants should be familiar with layout, terminology, and specialized labels, but this was especially important for the auditors and accountants as the persons directly in charge of the work. Seven of them (all except the accountants) were in charge of conducting business correspondence and should therefore be acquainted with standard formulas used. As to the second aspect mentioned above-resources and facilities—it was agreed that the course designer would have ample liberty in the development of the course and could hire other teachers, if necessary, while retaining full responsibility for it. On the other hand, the institution would absorb the cost of the course (salaries, typing and duplicating facilities, etc.) and classes would be offered within office hours. Naturally, the course designer was expected to report periodically on the activities carried out and the progress made. It was also agreed that the sources of information available in the office could be used, with the sole exception of confidential files and documents. While these interviews were being conducted, the target group was being subjected to language tests. Several testing instruments were used, both written and
2 Assessment of communicative needs ! 3 Translation of needs into language and languagerelated skills
4 Translation of skills into detailed linguistic and other specifications
5 Suggested activities to develop language and language-related skills
Partial results of the analyses conducted for this particular case are presented below as a table of specifications.
TABLE OF SPECIFICATIONS Example of translation of needs through skills into language and suggested language-learning activities: Page 6
should be able to read and understand the Michael Redfield is presently teaching at the BOLIVIA written questions without too much difficulty. Manebi Language Institute, Hyogo, Japan. He began his TEFL career Testing reading and writing in Spain after graduat- ing from the University The reading part of our written exam conMICHAEL REDFIELD of Montana and study sists of several short passages, each on a uniBolivian-American Center, La Paz ing foreign languages fied topic and followed by eight multiple in Germany, Spain, choice questions to check the student's read. Among the more recent developments in for and France. He has an ing comprehension. The topics are interesteign-language teaching, including EFL, is the M.A. in foreign-lan- ing, but do not require an extensive knowlfunctional syllabus (see FORUM, Vol. XVII, guage education from edge of the world in order to be understood. Stanford University No. 2). In the Centro Boliviano-Americano and has taught and The comprehension questions are all phrased we have recently switched over to a function served as director of in a form different from that found in the text, based text, In Touch, for our basic English courses at language centers throughout the so that true comprehension is required to an. courses. world, including the Bolivian-American Cen swer them correctly. A typical question might In line with this change, we have had to re- ter in La Paz, where this article was written; be "What is the main idea of the second parawrite our final certificate examination. The the Centro Colombo-Americano in Barran- graph?” or “What would be a good title for certificate is awarded to students who have quilla; and the American English Language this passage?" Services International School in Jakarta. successfully completed 800 contact hours of We also take a functional approach to testEFL at the Center and have passed the final ing the student's ability to write in English. exam. When we used a modified audiolingual scholarship, etc. They do this extemporane- We either have the students fill out a typical text, our exam was of the discrete-point vari- ously, without a prepared script, in order to job application, complete with a section askety, but that kind of exam seems inappropri- expose the students to real, informal speech. ing the applicant to write a paragraph stating ate for a functionally based curriculum. The In the second part of the tape, we film their why he would like this particular job, or else purpose of this article is to describe our new individual interviews with the vice-president we have the student write a short letter or certificate exam, in the hope that it might give for financial affairs. This is, of course, carried postcard in response to a letter or postcard resome ideas to others who are contemplating out in a much more formal register. We run ceived. A typical exchange would be between adopting a functional approach in their lan- the tape only once for the students taking the friends on vacation who want to tell each othguage program. final exam, and then administer a twenty- er a little about what they are doing. The final certificate exam is divided into question multiple-choice test based on the in- As in the listening section, we find it approtwo sections: written and oral. The written formation exchanged in the tape. priate to adopt an integrative approach. In orsection is, in turn, divided into three parts: lis Our second tape is similar, the formal part der to fill out an application or answer a lettening, reading, and writing. We use a discus- being an interview between a graduate stu- ter, the student must first understand what is sion format in the oral section. dent who will not be able to take her M.A. written. We are therefore not testing "pure" comprehensives on schedule because of a writing ability (or pure listening ability in the Testing listening comprehension health problem and a university professor “listening" section). Nevertheless, we feel In the first part of our written exam, we who is the president of the M.A. committee, that this is the only approach to take if we have a listening-comprehension section, in but not personally well-known to the student. want to test functional abilities in English, bewhich we use videotapes that we have pre- The informal part is a discussion of the case cause in the real world the four skills (listenpared here at the Center. So far we have com- among professors on the committee. ing, speaking, reading, and writing) are rarely pleted two tapes, and we plan to make more We realize that the listening section is not 100% distinct. Since our goal is to produce in the future. The basic format is as follows: ideal, in that the students themselves are not graduates who are capable of functioning in using the same cast of characters, recruited participating directly in the various scenes de- the real world, we must teach them to do so from the native speakers on the staff, we film picted in the videotapes. The situations, how- and test them in the same way. two scenes, one formal and the other infor- ever, are quite real, and some of our students So much for the form of the written section mal. In the first section of one of our tapes, we might conceivably find themselves in similar of the final exam, which makes up 50% of the have two supposed graduate students meeting situations. A further problem is that the lis- final grade, the other 50% being the oral exin the waiting room of the university vice- tening-comprehension questions are written amination. (20% of the total grade is given for president for financial affairs. The grad stu- in English, which presents a possibility that the listening section, 20% for the reading secdents are friends, and both are applying for a the student may indeed understand the con- tion, and 10% for the written section, correscholarship to do advanced graduate work versations on the tape but not understand the sponding to the importance we place on each overseas. Meeting unexpectedly, they chat in- written questions. However, since our stu- particular—though not really isolable-informally about their own lives, happenings at dents have studied English for almost two separable skill.) Let us now turn to the oral the university, their chances for obtaining the years prior to taking the test, it is felt that they section of the exam. Page 7
named first (Adrienne Rich or the poet Rich) before they can be referred to by the last name only. Note that further reference must be by the last name and not the first, unless you personally know the person (Rich, not Adrienne). I have had an Icelandic student who, following Icelandic custom, referred to Martin Luther King as Martin Luther! First names are used between friends and acquaintances, and also often for servants, and always for rulers. Note that Elizabeth II must be read as “Elizabeth the Second."
ly, our students need to understand some- thing of the subtleties of how we address each During graduate training Terry G. Lacy began other and how they should introduce them- teaching technical and business writing at Colorado State Uniselves. Here are some suggestions of what to explain. versity. A Fulbright lectureship in Iceland Formally, we are known and listed by our in 1973 opened the last names. Telephone directories and busi door to other opportunesses, for example, alphabetize us by last nities. “Frankly," she name, typically Jones, John C. in the United writes, “I found teachStates and Jones, J.C. in Britain and Canada. ing technical writing At embassy and other formal functions, we worthwhile but too are introduced by our title and name, and easy. I much prefer the called by our title and last name. American challenge of coaxing Icelanders into a more businessmen who travel abroad often fall into natural English." Though her main job has the European habit of saying "I'm Smith." been teaching writing in English at the UniverFor one thing, their strange-sounding names sity of Iceland, for the last several years Dr. are thereby reduced to fewer syllables with Lacy has been equally occupied as senior auless chance of confusion. thor (with Thorir Einarsson) of the first EnExcept for lists and formal affairs, howev- glish-Icelandic dictionary of business terms. er, we are usually introduced by our first and last names. Many Americans, when introducing themselves, repeat the first name: "I'm the person has asked to be called by his first Betty. Betty Edwards.” If we meet as equals, name. On the other hand, beware of salesmen we expect to be called by our first name—and in the States who try to ingratiate themselves "equal" has a broader interpretation than by using your first name without an introduc tion! many nonnative speakers expect. Note that we are called by the name we give rather than On the telephone, Americans may answer a legal name—a nickname if we are known by the phone with “Robertson residence” or, at one. Nonnative speakers who insist on using work, “This is Robertson in Sales.” The more William for Bill usually embarrass the person. usual reply is “This is Jack Robertson," or Similarly, especially in Britain, a Peter is not “This is Betty,” if the caller has asked to Pete. Tradesmen and salesclerks (British, speak to Betty. The British typically say shop assistants) use the title and last name—in “Erica here” or “Cartwright here.' other words, use of your last name may mean A word about titles is in order. Physicians the person is trying to make money off of you! are always Dr. (except for surgeons in BritAfter the introduction, the non-English ain, who are Mr). In replying to a letter, if in speaker may freely ask, “What should/may I doubt as to whether the writer is a man or a call you?" Similarly, when introducing him- woman, use Mr. (in British omit the full stop self, the non-English speaker should give the after the abbreviations). For a woman, espefirst and last parts of his name and then say, cially if you do not know her preference or “Please call me ," or give only the her marital status, use Ms. (increasingly writname he wishes to be called. Icelanders, ten though not commonly spoken). To men Thais, and others whose last name is not a you don't know by name and will probably family name can then get around the problem never be introduced to, such as customs offiof being called something meaningless. Many cials, Americans especially say "Sir." It is my Arabs have been called Al, but this is the impression that we are less apt to use a title to equivalent of the in English! The Arab can women in the same positions, but may say say, “Well, al just means the. Please call me “Ma'am.” One "title" is suffixed: Junior/Sen ior. Americans indicate that the son has the Even when Americans, especially, wear same name as his father by adding a Jr. after name tags and meet at church or professional the name (Charles G. Williams, Jr.). The son meetings, they expect to be called by their may also be nicknamed Junior so as not to first names or nicknames. Younger people al have two Charleses or Charlies or Chucks in ways use first names. Formerly, children ad the house. dressed their parents' friends as Mr. and Mrs. In private conversation, in the newspapers, Williamson, but now they often say Ted and and in commenting on the famous, we often Jean. They also sometimes use the first name refer to a person by last name only. It is, howonly to relatives, rather than Uncle George ever, grossly impolite to look for a person or and Aunt Mary. The elderly, however, may address him to his face by his last name withnot have changed with the times, and the Brit- out the title, perhaps doubly so if the person ish are sometimes more formal than Ameri- addressed is a woman. A visitor should ask cans. A foreigner coming as a student would for Mr. Wheelwright or Miss Maclver (or Saldo well to address his landlord/host by ly Maclver). The very famous, especially Mr./Mrs. and last name, unless told to do oth- those with a unique name, are usually reerwise. The title and last name show respect, ferred to by the last name: Shakespeare, Volbut become awkward rather than respectful if taire, Hemingway. Others must be fully
How we get our names Non-English-speakers can perhaps cope better with the huge diversity of our names, first and last, if they can understand something of the origins. The old names have mostly disappeared from the language (Garmundi: spearhand/protection, Daeg-Hrefn: day-raven); in some cases they occur as surnames (Wolf, Goodwin: good friend). The Norman Conquest in 1066 brought a French and Latin influence that is still with us, giving us some of today's commoner names (William, Robert, Richard, Henry). At the same time the Anglo-Norman upper classes were identified by place names, reflecting the belief from classical times that identity lay in the land owned. The original Old English patronymic -son disappeared in time, but the Anglo-Norman equivalent remains a modern surname (Fitzwilliam, Fitzhugh, where filz is cognate with modern French fils/son). Church insistence on Christian names toward the end of the twelfth century brought Mary, John, etc., into prominence. Increasing urbanization and the use of records also required identifying someone more fully, so that surnames became commoner, though in the eighteenth century surnames were still not everywhere in use in the Celtic fringe of Britain. A family could be named for where they had once, or still, lived (Thorpe/town or village, Atwater, Hill, Holt); or for their occupation (Carter, Wright/worker, Miller). Nicknames proliferated, some of which became surnames (Dick, Little). By 1850, a second given name became commoner, partly to further identify the individual. Today the upper classes in Britain sometimes have three given names. The Scots and the Irish have clan names. The O (of) is Irish (O'Neill, O'Reilly). Commonly Mc is Irish and Mac Scottish (Macfarlane, MacDonald). English law required the Welsh to have “proper" surnames rather than continue to be known as the son or daughter of their father. They complied by sometimes suffixing s to stand for son (Edwards, Jones, Jenkins). Through Scandinavian influence, the suffix -son was reborrowed in the north of Britain (Robertson). In the United States, there are over one million surnames on the social security rolls. Page 8
Chomsky, Carol. 1976. After decoding: what? Lan guage Arts, 53 (March), pp. 288-96, 314. Cortez, Emilio. 1975. Snap reading. RELC Journal, 6 (June), pp. 17-20. 1976. Incidental learning via pedagogic dialogues. TESL Reporter, 10 (Fall), pp. 12–13. 1980. Limericks revisited. Modern English Teacher, 7 (February), pp. 10–11. Gomberg, Adeline. 1976. Freeing children to take a chance. The Reading Teacher, 29 (February),
Dennis J. Bixler-Márquez, a native of México, Translated Latin American Magazines D.F., received a B.A. in political science and Spanish and an M.E. in in the ESL Classroom: A Motivational reading and elemenand Learning Tool for Hispanic tary education from Adolescents the University of Texas at El Paso. He also obDENNIS J. BIXLER-MÁRQUEZ tained an M.A. in University of Texas at El Paso Spanish and a Ph.D. in bilingual multicultural education from StanMuch has been written about the need to pro ford University. Dr. vide students with reading materials that ap Bixler-Márquez is the peal to their tastes and interests (Carmine and author of several artiSilbert 1979). This need to motivate students cles on bilingual education and language planto read, particularly beyond the required ning. He is at present conducting a sociolinreading series that often comprise the reading guistic assessment of an English-Spanish bilincurriculum, has brought about the develop gual community in northern México. ment of several new educational approaches and products. One salient example is the cur- quickly pointed out that the American rorently popular high-interest, low-level read- mance comics for adolescents had plots that ing series. This approach takes into consider- were not as mature as those in Spanish, and ation that the reader who is two or three years the characters were not photographed movie behind grade level would prefer to read mate- stars. rials suitable to his level of intellectual and so- The above results led me to purchase severcial development. The above approach, var- al Spanish romance novels and other Latin ious modes of "language experience,” and American periodicals normally read by the other strategies have also been suggested for students. I translated their Spanish dialogue the development of English reading proficien- and narrative into English and covered up the cy in America's linguistically and culturally spaces with Spanish print. The English transdifferent children (Van Allen 1976; Thonis lation was simplified, but not so much that it 1976). It is increasingly recognized in contem- would detract substantially from the original porary reading texts that the cultural charac- meaning. The periodicals were then made teristics of the learner should be considered in available as optional/leisure reading material the development of reading materials and in- to Hispanic students. These translated verstructional methods (Harris and Sipay 1980; sions were received with considerably more Dallman, Rouch, Char, and DeBoer 1978). enthusiasm than the English romance comics. The students consistently preferred them over Exploiting the students' preferences the conventional English reading materials at I noticed that in some schools in the south- their disposal. western United States, Hispanic adolescents Initially, the students were a little exasperwho were recent immigrants and literate in ated because they frequently had to resort to Spanish frequently read periodicals in Span- a Spanish-English dictionary in order to capish. A sizeable portion of this population ture the entire meaning of the dialogue, but found the content of their reading material in they soon developed strategies to compensate English immature and/or culturally unappeal- for their lack of vocabulary or general profiing. In contrast, the Spanish periodicals they ciency in English. Reading comprehension preferred were romance, history, science fic- was aided by the pictorial representations and tion, and mystery magazines; all had mostly the forced use of other context clues. Some Hispanic-culture themes. The vast majority of stúdents read them orally in groups of two or the characters in the romantic novels were three, each contributing his own expertise in movie and/or television stars, sports figures, English. and singers from Mexico and Latin Ameri- The motivation of Hispanic adolescent stuca—their photographs usually accompanied dents to read in English increased substantialthe text. The science fiction and mystery pub- ly when the reading matter reflected their lications were also illustrated. preferred cultural context. The reading comI recognized the potential for a reading-in- prehension of those students also improved struction strategy for these adolescents simi- with the use of the translated readers. The lar to the use of comic books in the classroom. strategy of using culturally relevant and soMy first attempt to use pictorial magazines cially appealing reading materials contributed consisted of making available to the female to the formation of a Spanish-to-English acstudents the English counterparts of the quisition bridge in the ESL program. Spanish romance novels, i.e., English romance comics written for teenagers. The idea A suggested procedure was not very successful in attracting readers I would encourage teachers concerned with because the students did not find the cultural the development of literacy skills in Hispanic content of the comics relevant. Also, they or in other nonnative English speaking ado
Goodman, Y., and D.J. Watson. 1977. A reading program to live with: Focus on comprehension. Language Arts, 54 (November/December), pp. 868-79. Hoskisson, Kenneth. 1974. Should parents teach their children to read? Elementary English, 51 (February), pp. 295-99. Pack, Alice. 1973. Cloze testing and procedure. TESL Reporter, 6 (Winter), pp. 1-2. Pikulski, John. 1976. Using the cloze technique. Language Arts, 53 (March), pp. 317-18, 328. valid reading comprehension test. English Lan guage Teaching, 30 (January), pp. 151-55. Propst, Ivan K., and Richard Baldauf. 1978. Pre liminary evidence regarding the validity of a modified cloze procedure for lower elementary E.S.L. students. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 38 (Summer), pp. 451-55. 1979. Using matching cloze tests for elementary E.S.L. students. The Reading Teacher, 32 (March), pp. 683-90. Page 9
to Ridjanović's method. Believe it or not, on Christmas day I was reading chunks from the easier parts of the Greek Testament without too many discouraging hitches! Perhaps I should not hide from you that there was an- other important variable at work, too: I often got absorbed in the book and my little "study" was inaccessible to the unfortunates in the house for an hour in the morning. And sometimes I “read myself to sleep” into the small hours of the night. Had I really learned Greek in a week? How turned to a Latin New Testament without any On “How to Learn a Language ... in a glosses, and found that I could read it someCouple of Months" what better than the Greek! I concluded that, Central Institute of English if I might be irreverent, I still had small Latin and Foreign Languages and less Greek. I guess that what I learned in Drik Hyderabad, 7, India five days was how to learn Greek through 4 March 1983 reading. I was now using my little Greek Dear Editor, “communicatively.” (How that modish word I think that Midhat Ridjanović's article on gives me the confidence I badly need!) My How to Learn a Language ... in a Couple of learning process, I guess, had reached the Months” (January 1983) contains some im- “take off"'stage and has been happily “selfportant ideas (not to mention that it was de- sustaining" ever after. ightful reading). His bilingual, comparative I remember (and I later started noting in a nethod agrees with the experience and intu- diary) how the little grammar I learned (espe: tions of many of us in Hyderabad. And I can cially from the rapid survey of grammar in offer some confirmation of what he says from Hudson's Teach Yourself N.T. Greek, which ny personal and professional experience. I got at the same time as the Interlinear Greek-English New Testament) often eased Greek in a week? my problems of comprehension. So, after all, Recently I made an attempt to learn New it was not all done in five days. I believe with Testament Greek. I worked at it for 15-20 Ridjanović that comparative grammar should ninutes every day (that is, about the time I have an important place in such a bilingual iel pend in the least respectable room in my method. house daily) using Wenham's self-instruction- Surely my familiarity with the subject matal Elements of N.T. Greek, and covered 10 ter of the New Testament helped me, too. But out of the 44 lessons in it, in two (or three?) instead of blaming me for using that advannonths. (You are probably thinking I am not tage, why not let other motivated learners i quick learner of language. Well, the facts have the same advantage, too? Why not add it are against me.) Time and again, I turned to to the method? I am for sometimes using fathe Greek Testament to see if I could read, miliar and worthwhile subject matter that and found I could not. Then, as the good Lord bears repeated reading, especially if one has in his mercy (or would you prefer to say luck, no teachers. The Bible seems to me to be ador serendipity?) would have it, five days be- mirable for the purpose, because close transfore Christmas, 1982, I got what I was longing lations and cheap editions are available in for, an Interlinear Greek-English New Testa- most languages. (By the way, my colleague 31. ment, which gives a word-by-word interlinear S.V. Pradhan assures me that many mission translation with grammatical notes and a free aries in India learned Sanskrit by this methNo marginal translation—which answers closely od.)
Burling's outlandish proposals Many people do not seem to know that Robbins Burling has developed a self-instructional bilingual method closely similar to Ridjanović's, but only to learn to read. (See his "Some Outlandish Proposals for the Learning of a Foreign Language" in Language Learning, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1968.) But why "outlandish”? How apologetic one has to be to the ruling theoretical clique when one is going to tell the truth! (See also his Reading Français if you can get a mimeographed copy from him, as I have done.) My former colleague R.K. Tongue, and P. Felix, a researcher at our institute, have developed this method in their own ways and produced course materials embodying it. P. Felix tried out his course on some school dropouts; while, statistically, the number was not large enough to prove anything, all his six learners learned to read simple English in just twenty lessons. (See his forthcoming article in CIEFL Bulletin, Number 17, page 2: "The Manipravalam' Way of Learning a Language.”) The characteristic feature of Burling's and (especially) Felix's courses, is the easy gradation of target-language features, beginning with syntax, in "code mixed" or glossed texts, which is similar to Ridjanović's method. Almost afraid of captious criticism, they have let speech alone. The new thing I have got from Ridjanović is the proposal to use the method to teach speech (and presumably writing), too. And now that he has stood the egg straight up, it looks to be the most obvious thing to do. And there, if you like, you have the outline of a simple method for crash courses in English, especially ESP, for thirdworld countries! Not to be beaten at it, I would like to propose the addition of the intensive study of some good pieces of literature that can bear repeated reading, e.g., Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan in modern English, and then texts from the literature of the specialized subject the learner is interested in.
ANSWERS TO ALPHABETIC WORDS Plural letters
The emperor's not-so-new clothes I was delighted to read the home truths Ridjanović tells about “Co-Co” (that abbreviation really communicates my own feelings) and about some theorizers who, he says, have a little too much spare time on their hands. But I don't fully agree about that last one. Ridjanović perhaps does not understand that the theorizers do not have the time to come down and understand the real problems of ELT in some underdeveloped (I mean "developing”) countries where more youngsters learn English than there are people in some of the English-speaking countries. If these masses clamor for bread, why, let them eat cakes or even Co-Co. (Am I forgetting people like Michael West, and the less C.P. Masica and others who saw these as human problems? May their tribe increase!) Over the last thirty years how many invisible fabrics the theorizers have woven-the "context" in which meaning lies, “register,” the syntax of “scientific English," "use" versus usage, “Co-Co,” and what next? They only have to coin some new terms like that and some of us in India thereafter will assume that the things named must exist in reality or have important applications to ELT here. I must blame the buyers, i.e., ourselves; it is the seller's business to sell. But occasionally one hears a child's voice blurting out, “The emperor is naked!”—and Ridjanović's is one such voice. I add my little voice to his. Page 10
Volume XXII April 1984 Number 2
Interaction and Communication in the ESOL Classroom 2 MARIANNE CELCE-MURCIA, University of California, Los Angeles A Preliminary Checklist for Materials Development 8 MARGARET DWYER, Fulbright Lecturer, Algiers How the Writer Gets His Message Across 11 CHRISTOPHER CLEARY, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey JESUS A. BASTIDAS A., University of Nariño, Colombia Analyzing the Reading Process 25 32 36 D. M. ALLISON Brazil. Understanding and Following Directions, CHARLES W. LEVESQUE 36 Improving Your Students' Speaking Skills, CLAUDIO PICOLLO 37 China. A Uniqueness-Guided Approach to Teaching English as a Foreign 39 Language, LIU YUJUN Netherlands. Eighteenth International IATEFL Conference 40 Portugal. Drama in EFL, MARIA HELENA SALEMA and ALVARO J. M. MARTINS 40 Saudi Arabia. A TESOL Language Arts Bank, WILLIAM T. CASON 42 Singapore. RELC Regional Seminar 43 Thailand. Buzz-Group Activities, HUGH LEONG 43 United States. East-West Center Seminar 45 Venezuela. A Rationale for Materials Production in ESP, DOLORES N. CURIEL 45 and IAN P. MURRAY TEACHER CORRESPONDENTS 46 LETTERS 47 PERIODICALS RELATED TO TEFL/TESL (UPDATE) 48 BOOKS RECEIVED 48 THE LIGHTER SIDE inside back cover Page 11
Two other things that impinge on the social climate and that the teacher should attend to are (a) being fair and (b) making the class relaxed and enjoyable. Being fair involves distributing turns equally among students and not showing any favoritism or bias. Some teachers can do this instinctively; others have to work at it systematically, e.g., they use a stack of cards with the students' names so that they can shuffle and work through the cards to be sure that they involve the shy students and don't let the aggressive ones dominate the class. Making the class relaxed and enjoyable involves smiling and laughing when appropriate humor occurs spontaneously. Some teachers are good joke-tellers, natural comedians; this is a definite advantage. However, even teachers who are not born comics should be able to appreciate those students in the class who have this kind of talent. So long as the teacher makes it clear that humor must not put down or poke fun at anyone in the class, the presence of humor, smiles, and laughter can only enhance the social climate. How good is the social climate in your ESOL class? If you want to consult a good, comprehensive reference that addresses this area, see Moskowitz (1978). Variety in Learning Activities. The preceding discussion on social climate describes how improving the social dynamics in a language class will help encourage communication. This is a form of “internal” motivation, since the teacher motivates the students indirectly by promoting good feelings in the class. Introducing variety into learning activities is a more external form of motivation. If the teacher can use some variety in each lesson to make the class more enjoyable and less routine, this will also motivate the students to learn. Variety can be introduced on many different levels. One way is to make effective use of all four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing). Another way is to move as quickly as possible from manipulative drills to communicative activities; these communicative activities, in turn, can include a variety of tasks (problem solving, roleplaying, values clarification, skills competition, etc.). The teacher can vary the stimulus that s/he uses to set the stage for communication; for example, a tape recording of a radio broadcast might be useful one day, whereas a set of pictures or a grab-bag full of objects might be the best teaching aid the next day. Using the overhead projector as a change from the blackboard, or a movie or filmstrip as a change from the textbook are other ways of introducing variety. Likewise, the teacher
should constantly be looking for ways of effectively integrating everyday realia such as clocks, calendars, mirrors, etc. into meaningful classroom activities. Using a song or a game every now and then to reinforce a language point that has just been covered in class will also provide variety. Finally, teachers should try to expose their students to a variety of native speakers. (Students should hear many voices in addition to the teacher's.) This can be done using tape recordings or videotapes, radio or television, or-more effectively—with "live" speakers who are class guests. When students are either advanced or sophisticated enough to permit related outside-of-class assignments, the teacher can have them interview native speakers in the community and report back, or—if they are in an English-speaking country—have them telephone various agencies for information (e.g., the bus terminal: How much is a one-way ticket to Las Vegas?) and report back. How much variety do you include in your class? If you feel you could use some help in this area, see Olsen (1977) or Celce-Murcia (1979). Opportunity for Student Participation. Social climate and variety indirectly encourage communication in that they set the stage and provide motivation. The most direct way to facilitate communication is to provide ample opportunity for student participation, which has as its correlates (a) little or no teacher domination and (b) minimal teacher talking time. At the most general level, student participation means allowing students to have as much input as possible into the class itself (e.g., syllabus, activities, assignments, grading, management, etc.). More specifically, the teacher can have the students work in pairs or groups whenever useful. This permits the teacher to be a resource person rather than the dominant figure. Communicative activities lend themselves well to work in pairs or groups. In pairs, students can carry out interviews, write or complete dialogues, and have one-on-one conversations or do roleplays. In groups, they can do problem solving, values clarification, or roleplaying, and can prepare group outlines or compositions. In order for such activities to be fruitful, the activity must be carefully planned, the students must have a specific task, there should be a limited but reasonable period of time for completing the task, and there must be time allowed for feedback, i.e., correction, checking, and reconciliation of the various responses. There are other things the teacher can do to minimize his/her domination of the class and to stay out of the discussion unless needed. For example, students can answer each other's questions, students can regularly take over the teacher's (i.e., leader's) role, and the teacher can arrange for relevant team competitions, during which time s/he can be in the background as the judge, scorekeeper, timer, etc. Page 12
The establishment of a materials file in some easily accessible location is an excellent idea. In this way we can easily share with our colleagues and benefit from their efforts as well. As EFL instruction grows in magnitude and importance, it becomes more and more critical that we work together towards the establishment of systematic methodologies of materials development in order to ensure consistent quality in teacher-prepared materials. I hope that this checklist can serve as a basis for discussion in our effort.
Interaction and Communication continued from page 7
render meaningless otherwise well-designed materials. 8. Are the items unambiguous? Materials must be clear. This means, for example, that in testing items there must be one clear answer. Items in which myriad responses are possible are not acceptable unless the purpose of the exercise is for students to heighten their awareness of the variety possible in a situation. It further means that we must ask students clearly for the information or performance we want. It is not valid—or fair—to ask a general question such as “What can we learn from this text?” when we really want some very specific information, yet this is something I am sure we have all witnessed time and time again. Well-designed materials do not leave the students guessing what the teacher wants. Our efforts towards clarity notwithstanding, we will all occasionally write sentences with multiple possible interpretations. It is therefore imperative that we ask colleagues to read and critique our materials before we give them to our students. Finally, we must recognize that writing means rewriting. Ambiguities that escape our notice until our students' responses point them out to us will have to be corrected in subsequent drafts of our work. 9. Across exercises, is a variety of techniques employed? To be a skilled materials writer, one must develop a broad repertoire of strategies, for two reasons. First, we want always to use the most appropriate type of exercise for each specific task; using only one or two exercise types to reach a wide variety of goals can't be done effectively. Second, our students are individuals with personal learning strategies. Overemphasis on a limited number of types of exercise cannot help but favor some students while failing to appeal in the least to others. We may feel very comfortable within our limited range of activities we design, yet we owe it to ourselves and our students to break out of our routines and vary our techniques. 10. Has adequate use been made of printed and human resources? Finally, it is crucial not to write in a vacuum. Thousands of textbooks exist for our perusal, evaluation, and adaptation. We should not hesitate to examine other people's materials and adapt their techniques and approaches to our own situation. Why should we constantly reinvent the wheel? A second, vital resource for all materials writers is our colleagues. Very few of us work in areas so remote that there are no other EFL teachers for miles and miles. A good practice is to show our drafts to our colleagues before we prepare them for our students, since our fellow teachers will surely be able to help us spot weaknesses, ambiguities, or opportunities for practice that we have overlooked.
Celce-Murcia, M. 1979. Language teaching aids. In Teaching English as a second or foreign language. See Bailey and Celce-Murcia 1979. Chaudron, C. 1977. A descriptive model of discourse in the corrective treatment of learners' errors. Language Learn ing, 27, pp. 29–46. Chomsky, N. 1959. Review of Verbal behavior by B.F. Skin ner. Language, 35, 1, pp. 26–58. Dubin, F., and E. Olshtain. 1977. Facilitating language learn ing. New York: McGraw-Hill. Flanders, N. 1960. Interaction analysis: A manual for observ ers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hymes, D. 1962. The ethnography of speaking. In Anthropol ogy and human behavior, ed. T. Gladwin and W. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington. Joiner, E. 1977. Communicative activities for beginning lan guage students. English Teaching Forum, 15, 2 (April), pp. 8–10. Reprinted in A TEFL anthology: selected articles from the English Teaching Forum. Washington, D.C.: International Communication Agency, 1980. Lee, W.R. 1979. Language-teaching games and contests, 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press. Long, M. 1977. Group work in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. English Language Teach ing Journal, 31, 4, pp. 285–91. Madsen, H., and J. D. Bowen. 1978 Adaptation in language teaching. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Miller, G. 1967. The psychology of communication. New York: Basic Books. Moskowitz, G. 1971. Interaction analysis—a new modern lan guage for supervisors, Foreign Language Annals, 5, pp. 211-21. 1978. Caring and sharing in the foreign language class. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Munby, J. 1978. Communicative syllabus design. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Olsen, J. 1977. Communication starters and other activities for the ESL classroom. San Francisco: The Alemany Press. Prator, C. H. 1965. Development of a manipulation-commu nication scale, NAFSA Studies and Papers, English Lan guage Series No. 10. Savignon, S. 1972. Communicative competence: An experi ment in foreign language teaching. Philadelphia: The Center for Curriculum Development. Schachter, J. 1981. The hand signal system. TESOL Quarter ly, 15, 2, pp. 125–34. Page 13
relation to the unit as a whole. Its function is very often to locate the head, in time or space. G looks more like a proposition than any of the others because it contains a finite verb and appears to say something. However, the relative pronoun who subordinates the verb phrase began civilization in the same way that of subordinates the second concept in F. The function of the relative clause is to define the head—to say in what way it differs from the other members of its class. Let us summarize the principal functions of the main components of a concept.
different: I would have a basis for action, and head for the nearest fire escape. When reading, we may take notes, underline, exclaim, laugh, or amuse our neighbor with quotations. But not all our actions need be physical. We may memorize, refute, doubt, qualify, support, or expand what we are reading. All these are, I take it, forms of nonphysical action. And our progress through a written text should be seen as a series of stages at each of which we feel able to perform, or refrain from performing, one or more of the above actions. But we anticipate. The practicing reader must first be able to distinguish between units of reference and units of communication, so we shall look at their salient characteristics, and begin with concepts. The most salient feature of a concept is its head. The head of a concept is normally a noun or a pronoun. It is the focus of that aspect of the world that is being referred to. The reference may be quite specific (e.g., Mao Tse-tung, Baghdad), or it may be general (e.g., history, society). The reference of a general head may be made more specific by additional words, placed either before or after it. There is no upper limit to the number of words in a concept, i.e., to the degree to which the reference of the head is made specific. But however many words there may be, so long as we take it as one unit, there will only be one head. Each of the following is a concept-a single unit of information. The head of each one is people. A. people B. the people C. the few million people D. the few million small people E. the few million small city people F. the few million small city people of the first civil- izations G. the few million small city people who began civil ization Notice that none of the above actually says anything about the world, though they refer to an aspect of it with increasing precision. Let us comment on them in turn. In A, people refers to people in general. In B, the tells us that a definite group of people is referred to. In C, the group is quantified. In D, the adjective small attributes a property to the group. In E, the noun city tells us to which class the group belongs. In F, there appear to be two concepts—the few million small city people, and the first civilizations-each with its own head. But a concept beginning with a preposition (in this case, of) is to be taken as subordinate in
The functions above are not the only ones performed by these components, nor is the list of components exhaustive.
Activity 1 Identify the head in each underlined concept. 1. He owns an automobile factory. day left his card.
The concepts we have been looking at have a noun as their head. We shall call them entity concepts to distinguish them from two other kinds of concepts which lack the referential permanence of entities: attribute concepts, whose head is an adjective or adverb, and event concepts, whose head is a verb of action (e.g., sing), process (e.g., melt), or experience (e.g., dream). These few concept types are the building bricks of propositions, and when they are combined they will account for most of what you read. Let us refine our earlier definition of a proposition: a proposition is a unit of communication which consists of a minimum of two concepts in meaningful relation. Here are the basic types of proposition, with examples. Type A: Entity + Entity Page 14
fact, and hypothetical with a greater or lesser degree of probability. he had Che would have saved money. Unless he works hard 다. - he will not save money. If he works hard he will save money. - If he worked hard he would save money.
ID The main proposition is compared or contrasted with the support proposition. Hubert is a more diligent student Hubert is tall. additional detail by the support proposition. The tribe put aside their gods, which they had worshipped for centuries. The relative clause is the usual vehicle for a descriptive support proposition. It should be carefully distinguished from the defining relative clause that we have seen as part of a concept. The difference is usually signaled by the presence of a comma before the descriptive proposition. The second group comprises what may be called logical relations, since they are all based on the notion of cause-and-effect. These logical relations are interdependent: the existence of one unit entails the existence of the other. In this respect they differ from expansion relations: a writer is not constrained to expand a main proposition. 2A Reason-Result It is cold. The water is freezing. Here are four common ways of showing a reason-result relation between the above pair. It is so cold
Activity VIII Identify the type of logical relation: 1. He saw the procession by climbing a tree. 2. As the results were ambiguous, the experiment had to be repeated. 3. They were saving money so as to get married. 4. Put on your glasses; then you will be able to read the small print. The third group consists of relations which may be called rhetorical. Rhetorical relations enable a writer to present an argument or put forward a case. 3A Contrast Here, the information content of the main unit is presented as unexpected in the light of the support unit, or simply as in polar contrast to it. Although the water was dirty, Humphrey drank it thirstily. - I had a report to write, but I watched TV instead. 3B Concession-Counterassertion This is a variant of 3A. A writer will explicitly concede a point (i.e., an objection that he thinks might occur to his readers) only to reinforce his own argument. Of course, all men are equal, LI accept/admit that but not all men are equally gifted. 3C Evidence-Conclusion/Claim Compare the following: A. Tim failed to jump because he was scared. B. Tim was scared because he failed to jump. In A, the two propositions are related causally: Tim's fear caused him not to jump. In B, however, there is no causal relation (in spite of the presence of because"): we cannot say that Tim's failure to jump caused his fear! Rather, B consists of a claim (Tim was scared), and evidence to support it. Evidence will usually be an observation (as in the example above), an established fact (as in the following example), or a generally accepted belief. in : the sun sets the west.
[Consequently , the water is freezing.
. 2B Means-Purpose This relation shows how a purpose is to be achieved. Bear in mind that a purpose is an intended result. The fulfillment of the purpose is left open. -(In order) to save money, he works hard. He worked hard [ so that he could save money. . By working hard,
2D Condition-Consequence There are two types of condition relation: contrary-to
CWe are walking die the wrong direction:
Activity IX Identify the type of rhetorical relation. 1. Harold may not be intelligent, but he has a heart of gold. 2. I am in command of this ship, so you will have to obey my orders. 3. He'll never learn Thai: you can't teach an old dog new tricks. 4. Horace looked strong and healthy, even though he hadn't eaten for days. You will have noticed in several of the preceding examples that the finite verb of the support proposition becomes non-finite (e.g., By working hard, ...), or is governed by a relative pronoun (e.g., 1E), or disappears completely (e.g., Unlike his sister, ...). We call these reduced propositions, to distinguish them from demoted propositions. They represent, if you like, an intermediate rank between concepts and propositions. They are still communicative, but are marked as supporting. Compare the following: A. Being married is an advantage. B. Being married, he was unable to travel. In A, Being married is an entity, functioning as the topic of a single type-A proposition. In B, Being married is a proposition which supports the other in a reason-result relation. We could rephrase B: Because he was married, he was unable to travel.
P2 The ideal will never be realized from man
P4 He should do his best to imitate the in sect P5 The gulf would remain P6 They try hard P7 Men cannot create a social organism P8 They can create an organization P9 (They) try to create an organism P10 They will create a totalitarian despo tism
Larger units of discourse It is possible to see the structure of larger units of discourse—such as the paragraph-in terms of the support relations we have been looking at, rather than in terms of a "topic sentence" analysis. Paragraphs governed by a topic sentence occur most frequently in ESL textbooks and in handbooks on “rhetoric.” Such paragraphs mostly appear to have been specially written or highly simplified to illustrate patterns which are largely fictitious. An inspection of real written language reveals that only a minority of paragraphs in fact conform to prescriptive types. The majority exhibit a great variety of propositional relations, and fail to offer us a neat topic sentence, let alone one in the "right" position. Nevertheless, if we shift the focus from sentence to proposition, it is possible in most cases to identify, among the varied internal relations, one dominant support relation which encapsulates the essence of the paragraph's information content. The following paragraph has been adapted for the purpose of exemplification. The termitary has come to seem a realizable, and even desirable, ideal. Needless to say, the ideal will never be realized. A great gulf separates the social insect from man; and even though he should do his best to imitate the insect, the gulf would remain. However hard they try, men cannot create a social
It is a demonstrable fact that, with sufficient motivation, one can acquire a reading knowledge of a FL without learning to speak it. Vast numbers of FL learners have in fact no alternative: for the purposes of practice and consolidation native speakers are seldom available; books almost always are. Given that languages organize information in much the same way (i.e., into communicative combinations of referential units), it seems highly probable that a reading knowledge is largely achieved through a transfer of the skill that enables the reader to recognize this organization in his native language. If this is the case, there emerge some pedagogical implications for the teaching of reading for academic purposes. 1. Teachers should not shy away from emphasizing the similarities between the written modes of the native and target language. 2. There is no particular advantage in using the FL as a medium of instruction for students who need only reading skills. They have enough to cope with in the teaching texts themselves, without the additional burden of having to approach them indirectly via the target language.
7. They: agent their house: affected last summer: time 8. The saying “He who laughs last laughs long est”: described IV. 1. make: non-finite; is: finite understand: non-finite; being: non-finite 2. show: finite; can: finite are: finite; remember: non-finite V. 1. Muscles contract. 2. He drives dangerously. 3. We prepare in advance. 4. They exiled criminals. 5. John betrayed his friends. VI. is absorbed, disappear, reaches, is blue, are propositional in this context. The other finite verbs are governed by relative pronouns and are thus part of concepts. VII. Light that passes through perfectly clear water / is absorbed progressively. The low-energy wave- Therefore, any reflected light that has made a double journey from the surface to the depths andback again / is blue. These topics are long and complex, but this is quite common in academic or technical writing. VIII. 1. result-means 2. reason-result 3. means-purpose 4. condition-consequence IX. 1. concession-unexpected/counterassertion 2. evidence-conclusion 3. claim-evidence 4. unexpected-concession
3. Information in spoken language is structured by intonation; in written language by the patterns discussed in this paper. If we believe in teaching basic intonation patterns to students learning to speak a foreign language, then we ought to be equally in favor of making reading students aware of the basic semantic constituents of the written mode.
Answers to Activities I. 1. factory 2. Cat 3. painting 4. He 5. salesman II. 1. A 2. C; 3. C 4. B 5. C2 III. 1. Whales: classified2. John: agent a house: product his mother: beneficiary 3. Everyone: patient the explosion: content 4. He: patient pink elephants: content every night: time 5. He: agent a letter: product his family: beneficiary the plane: location 6. My maiden aunt: possessor
The Cloze Procedure as a Teaching Technique to Improve Reading Comprehension
Although a number of articles that discuss some aspect of cloze testing have appeared in the Forum during the past dozen or so years, a perusal of those issues shows that, as Mr. Bastidas mentioned in his letter to us, we have never presented an article on the cloze procedure itself. We hope, therefore, that the information in this article will be of interest to a number of our readers. -ED.
JESUS A. BASTIDAS University of Nariño, Colombia
Many native speakers of English, and especially typesetters and editors, are surprised at the spelling of the word cloze. According to Oller (1979), the spelling is a corruption of close as in close the door. Cloze is a term "gestalt psychology applies to the human tendency to complete a familiar but not quite finished pattern—to “see" a broken circle as a whole one, for example, by mentally closing the gaps. ... The same principle applies to language” (Taylor 1953). The Cloze Procedure is a process of systematically deleting words from a passage and replacing them with blanks to be filled by the student. It has been used as a testing technique since its inception (Taylor 1953). Originally concerned with English as a mother tongue, it soon came to be employed as a measuring technique in foreign-language learning (Anderson 1971, 1972; Levine 1971; Oller et al. 1972; Oller and Conrad 1971; Spolsky 1969). It has been most effectively used in testing reading comprehension.
JESUS ALIRIO BASTIDAS A. is presently teaching English, linguistics, foreign-language methodology, and EFL reading comprehension at the Universidad de Nariño and at the Universidad Mariana, both located in Pasto, Nariño. He has recently graduated from Ohio University, where, as a Fulbright scholar, he received his M.A. in TEFL. Mr. Bastidas has spent many years teaching Spanish and English at the high-school and university levels both prior to and since receiving his "licenciado" in education in 1972. He has published several highschool textbooks on technical English and is an active member of the Association of Colombian Teachers of English (ASOCOPI).
The cloze procedure and the psycholinguistic principles of reading Goodman (1967) refers to reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game." The reader is always making guesses, which may be correct or incorrect; the efficient reader is the one who, with some consistency, guesses correctly. In using the Cloze Procedure as a teaching technique, we are training our students to guess. They are encouraged to take risks, to take a chance, and this means that sometimes the guesses will be wrong. As Smith (1978) says, “Reading can be a risky business." But one often gets useful information when errors appear, and they may provide a good opportunity to learn.
mantic, syntactic, and graphonemic cueing systems (Cambourne 1977).
the words that might fill the blanks. In order to answer those questions and supply the missing words, the student must sample the graphic display, make educated guesses (predictions), and test and confirm hypotheses. This process constitutes the act of reconstructing the writer's message (Goodman 1971). One way to succeed in reconstructing the writer's message is to take advantage of the redundancy of language—that is, the provision of information by more than one source. This redundancy is realized through various types of contexts, i.e., repetitions, synonyms, antonyms, metaphors, examples, definitions, details, comparisons, facts, interpretations, etc. These contexts make available to the reader alternative sources for the meaning of an unfamiliar word. In the process of pleting a passage with systematic deletions, the reader is trained to use all his background knowledge as well as the redundancy of language, which helps him eliminate “unlikely alternatives” and fill in the blanks with the appropriate words. As Smith points out, comprehension of the whole can contribute to comprehension of the parts, and unfamiliar words are often deciphered and even learned in this context. When using the Cloze Procedure, the student is guided to see the passage as a whole and to refer back or ahead into the text in order to find a clue to meaning. The same process occurs in reading, since when we read, our eyes move in saccades (small, jerky movements) which progress in a forward direction and, when necessary, in regressions in order to get the visual information that goes to the brain.
Developing meaning identification The Cloze Procedure can be used effectively to develop letter identification, word identification, and meaning identification. Since the purpose here is to demonstrate its use in developing reading comprehension in an advanced EFL/ESL class, we will emphasize meaning identification. When working with a cloze passage containing systematic deletions—deletions occurring every fifth, sixth, seventh, ... or tenth word, the students are being trained to predict the meaning of a phrase in order to identify the missing word or words in the phrase. This meaning identification is immediate in the sense that it does not require individual word and letter identification. The student is working with the contextua cues, which according to Bortnick and Lopardo (1974) are "a powerful word-recognition strategy and basic to the extension of a meaningful vocabulary." In using the Cloze Procedure, one can see that reading is not a passive activity, but a very active one, in which the student must make a number of predictions or ask specific questions for each deletion. Every time he answers these questions correctly, the process of successful comprehension is taking place.
USING THE CLOZE PROCEDURE TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION IN AN ADVANCED EFL/ESL CLASS
Using nonvisual information In addition, and most importantly, the reader must have a knowledge of the language (semantic, syntactic, and graphonemic systems), a knowledge of the story or topic being read, and an understanding of what has happened previously in the story (Goodman 1973). These previously stated factors, plus the knowledge of how to read, are termed by Smith (1978) the nonvisual information, which is essential in order to reduce uncertainty in advance and to make decisions with less visual information. In filling the blanks in a Cloze Procedure, the student will be more successful if he has this nonvisual information available. EFL/ESL teachers must encourage their students to do more extensive reading at home, both in their native language and in English, since this will increase their general knowledge, an indispensable factor in becoming a better reader. In the classroom, the teacher can sequence the cloze passages in such a way that they become progressively more difficult and are based on previously studied passages. This permits the students to make use of prior knowledge in every new cloze exercise. Another important point to emphasize is that the Cloze Procedure may be manipulated in order to reveal a reader's use of se
In the previous section, it was shown that the Cloze Procedure is congruent with many important principles of the psycholinguistic approach to reading, which gives it a prominent place among techniques used to increase reading comprehension. Some ESL/EFL standardized proficiency tests, especially in Great Britain, are already using the cloze test as part of the reading-comprehension section. This means that the cloze technique should become an essential ingredient of our methodology for teaching English; our students should always practice something before being tested on it. If this is not done, they will do poorly when they face proficiency tests that include the cloze variety. The Cloze Procedure as a teaching technique has been used since about 1970, and since then many studies have demonstrated its effectiveness. Richardson (1980), for example, concludes: The cloze procedure provides both the teacher and the pupil with a new and stimulating way to acquire and apply skills. The myriad uses of the cloze procedure coupled with the simplicity of construction makes it a very useful tool for each classroom. I hope that from this brief analysis of the use of the Cloze Procedure in the classroom, the EFL/ESL teacher will be motivated to include it in his teaching. At this Page 15
The psycholinguistic principles of reading have contributed to an understanding of the reading process; they do not constitute a "psycholinguistic method" for the teaching of reading (Clarke and Silberstein 1977). However, ESL/EFL teachers can take advantage of these principles and draw inferences that are very important in the preparation and application of materials. The Cloze Procedure appears to be a good example of a technique that can effectively contribute to the realization of the psycholinguistic principles of reading in an advanced EFL/ESL class. It is advisable to use the Cloze Procedure to increase reading comprehension in an EFL/ESL class, since its use as a testing technique for proficiency in English is becoming popular. Sequencing materials according to difficulty, length, or purpose provides better results than undifferentiated exercises. Materials prepared for this technique draw on the language itself, and it deals not with isolated language structures but always with structures in meaningful contexts. The Cloze Procedure itself cannot do all the work. It requires active participation on the part of both the teacher as a facilitator and the student as a learner, pecially since the success of the latter depends in part on how much nonvisual information he has stored in his brain. The Cloze Procedure must be viewed as a supplement to other techniques for improving reading comprehension, and it must not be overused, since this will lead to frustration and boredom on the part of the students (Jongsma 1980). The flexibility of the Cloze Procedure as a teaching technique for reading comprehension in the EFL classroom affords an excellent challenge for both teachers and students. It enhances the teacher's ability to make up Cloze Procedure tests, and provides the student with familiarity and confidence in taking them. It is hoped that future research and application will combine a theoretical basis with practical studies in the EFL/ESL classroom in order to make the Cloze Procedure a powerful testing and teaching technique for reading comprehension. In this way, the usefulness and attractiveness of the Cloze Procedure as both a teaching and testing technique will be strengthened, so that it will become an effective tool in the teacher's methodology.
1972. The application of the cloze procedure to English learned as a foreign language in Papua and New Guinea. English Language Teaching Journal, 27, 2, pp. 66–72. Bortnick, R., and G. S. Lopardo. 1973. An instructional ap plication of the cloze procedure. Journal of Reading, 16, pp. 296,300. 1974. The case for cloze in the classroom. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the international reading association, New Orleans. ERIC ED 094 327. Cambourne, B. 1977. Some psycholinguistic dimensions of the silent reading process: A pilot study. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Australian reading conference, Melbourne. ERIC ED 165 087. Clarke, Mark A., and Sandra Silberstein. 1977. Toward a re alization of psycholinguistic principles in the ESL reading class. Language Learning, 27, 1. Goodman, Kenneth S. 1967. Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist, 6, pp. 126–35. 1971. Psycholinguistic universals in the reading process. In The psychology of second language learning, ed. Pimsleur and Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, Kenneth S., and C. Burke. 1973. Theoretically based studies of patterns of miscues in oral reading performance. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Education. Johns, J. L. 1977. An investigation using the cloze procedure as a teaching technique. Paper presented at the meeting of the National Reading Conference, New Orleans. ERIC ED 159 656. Jongsma, Eugene A. 1980. Cloze instruction research: A sec ond look. Newark, Del.: International Reading Associ ation. ERIC ED 194 881. Levine, H. F. 1971. Linguistic and paralinguistic changes in Spanish speakers learning English. English Language Teaching, 25, 3. Neuwirth, S. E. 1980. Guessing game. The Reading Teacher, 33, pp. 591–92. Oller, John W., Jr. 1979. Varieties of cloze procedure. In Lan guage tests at school, pp. 340–79. London: Longman Group. Oller, John W., Jr., and C. Conrad. 1971. The cloze proce dure and ESL proficiency. Language Learning, 21, pp. 183–96. Oller, John W., Jr. et al. 1972. Cloze tests in English, Thai, and Vietnamese: Native and nonnative performance. Language Learning, 22, pp. 1–15. Porter, Don. 1976. Modified cloze procedure: A more valid reading comprehension test. English Language Teaching Journal, 30, pp. 151–55. Richardson, Donald C. 1980. Cloze procedure. Bismarck, N.D.: International Reading Association. ERIC ED 197 298. Smith, Frank. 1978. Understanding reading: A psycholinguis tic analysis of reading and learning to read. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Spolsky, B. 1969. Reduced redundancy as a language testing tool. ERIC ED 031 702. Taylor, Wilson L. 1953. Cloze procedure: A new tool for mea suring readability. Journalism Quarterly, 30, pp. 415–33.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Jonathan. 1971. A technique for measuring read ing comprehension and readability. English Language Journal, 25, 2, pp. 178–82. Page 16
Q. 15. (See Fig. 7.) Answers to this question revealed that: (a) the interested students understood more of the passage, (b) the uninterested students understood a lot of the passage, (c) there was an overall increase in understanding because the students answered the questions on the worksheet, and so increased their awareness of the reading process. (Cf. Fig. 8, which breaks down the responses to Q.7.)
student did change his expectation when he shouldn't have. This probably happened because their original answers to Q.1 had been misinterpreted and classified incorrectly. The remainder of the analysis was carried out using the figures 27 interested students and 13 uninterested students, as shown in the responses to Q.4. The results of Q.5, which is still about expectation, showed that interested students not only expected a greater range of words, but also more words per student were expected by this group. It was not a case of the interested students already knowing more words, because as will be seen later, difficulty of the passage did not affect interest. When the students read the passage they checked to see if the words they expected were in the passage. Q.6. This question was given to set up the rest of the experiment, as later the students had to try to work out the meanings of the unknown words, using strategies such as referring to the outside world, etc. The average number of unknown words per student didn't differ between the interested and uninterested groups, although a greater range of unknown words was found in the uninterested group. So, again the figures show that lack of interest was not caused by greater difficulty. The interested students found more points of a personal interest, and their points of interest were of a more demanding and searching nature. Q.7. The answers to this question show that the students who were generally interested, because of their expectation, understood more. Thus, the student who is interested will make himself understand, no matter what the difficulty. He will more readily apply strategies associated with the reading process. Qs. 8, 9, 10. The answers to these questions showed that students who were not generally interested lost interest earlier, but they didn't lose interest because of greater difficulty. (See Fig. 5.) Interest overcomes difficulty. (Cf. Q.5 above.) Qs. 11, 12. The students dealt with unknown words only. They were given the table. (See Fig. 6a.) The purpose of Q.12. and the table is to help make the students aware of strategies for dealing with unknown words and ambiguities. The table could have been expanded to direct attention to other strategies. For “ex-MP” an analysis of what the students did has been given. (See Fig. 6b.) It shows that, generally, interested students were more successful at working out the meaning. Qs. 13, 14. The making and answering of questions about points of personal interest highlighted the role played by this type of interest in reading. When there are ambiguities, or points of personal interest, the reader formulates mental questions and answers them. The technique of finding points of personal interest makes the students aware of this mental process.
Conclusions Before stating the conclusions, it should be remembered that the teacher did nothing in the course of the experiment. The students did all the work, being guided towards awareness of, and use of, the self-access strategies associated with the three selected areas of the reading process. The only words used by the teacher, other than those needed to explain the worksheet, were, “I'm telling you nothing. The results certainly show that making students aware of the process of reading by focusing on the areas of the process chosen led to greater understanding. This suggests that greater time needs to be spent on teaching the process. In such a way the final product of being able to read would be more successful. Once students know the strategies and the process, they will be able to read by themselves with little teacher help. The rate of learning, and of using the language, will be greater after an initial period of teaching based on self-access and process. What does this mean for the teacher who is using a course book with reading passages that set up an expectation that the passage is uninteresting, or for the teacher who is preparing students for an examination where he cannot predict whether the passage will be interesting or not? Certainly he can adapt the exercises in the course book, so as to place emphasis on the processes and strategies associated with dealing with ambiguity. He may even be able to make the students find points of personal interest in the passage, even though it was shown in the results to question 6 that students whose expectation led them to be generally uninterested, didn't find so many points of personal interest. As for the examination candidate, as examinations stand at the moment, he can be made to realize that although his expectation is of general uninterest, in the examination he will still be able to use the strategies of self-access associated with the processes of handling ambiguity and finding personal interest which he has been taught and has developed. In this way he can read the passage with greater understanding, and so be more successful in the examination. Finally, the worksheet used above makes a very good lesson in itself. Remember, the students were able to read a difficult passage and understand it by themselves. Page 17
tle and class mark, (4) finding the book on the BOTSWANA shelves and not being distracted by an adja cent book with similar author and title, and Library Induction and Performative (5) as proof of having found the correct volTesting ume, noting down the last word on page 37. The question "According to Basutoland RecR. D. WEBBER and D. M. ALLISON ords what happened to Sawana?” involves the University of Botswana student in (1) selecting the author/title section of the catalogue, (2) finding the title and class This article describes a teaching situation mark, (3) finding the book on the shelves, (4) where performative testing has been of great discovering that it is a multi-volume work and value in assisting learning. From direct obser- finding the index in the final volume, (5) using vation we have noted that students' command the index to find in which volume and on what of library skills increased greatly as a result of page Sawana is mentioned, and (6) turning up performative testing, although we have no the appropriate page and noting the fate of statistically verifiable data to substantiate Sawana. The above two questions are clearly this. However, we do have data regarding stu- very similar to following up genuine academic dents' attitudes to library-induction sessions." references. Other questions, such as “Who is A more detailed analysis of our understand- the tallest librarian at the University of Boting of performative testing per se can be swana Library?” and “How many doors are found elsewhere (Allison & Webber, forth- there in the room containing the Botswana coming). Collection?” aim to familiarize the student We will give a brief description of how li- with the library and its staff, although acabrary induction is carried out at the Universi- demic reference-type questions may also partty of Botswana. Topics covered include phys- ly fulfill this function. ical layout of the library, use of the catalogue, Advantages and disadvantages of performaand basic reference works and periodicals. tive tests This is covered in two sessions in the English Department's first-year study skills program The main advantage of performative items such as those described above is, as noted preand in three sessions by the Pre-Entry Science Course. Induction is carried out by the library For the last three years Richard Webber has staff with groups of fifteen or fewer students. lectured in ESP and English for academic purHowever, the academic staff is closely in poses at the University volved, in that lecturers attend Ll with their of Botswana. He has students, conduct follow-up performative also taught EFL in Entests, and discuss possible answers with their gland, and ESP in medicine and science students. The necessity of academic staff co in Saudi Arabia and operation and associated problems are dis Kuwait, and has recussed at length in Webber (1982). cently taken up an asPerformative test items: some examples signment for the Brit ish Council in Syria. Test items are designed to cover what has Dr. Webber's interest been taught in library-induction sessions and in library induction has are of an exclusively performative nature. been stimulated by his graduate librarian wife. They are, however, not wholly identical to ac- Desmond Allison is a lecturer in English and tual library research, in that students are re study skills for the pre-entry science departquired only to locate information, not to ment, University of Botswana. He has also evaluate it. A sample question is "What is the taught EFL/ESL in sevlast word on page 37 of a book by Neil en countries at the secAdam?” This may involve the student in (1) ondary-school and uniselecting the author/title section of the cata versity levels. In 1980– logue, (2) searching for the name “Adam, 81 he was one of four N.” rather than “Neil, A.,” (3) noting the ti
viously, that they are extremely useful in teaching students how to use the library confi- dently and effectively. This effectiveness can be enhanced if scores obtained are subject to the possibility that they may be used for com- puting continual-assessment scores for an aca- demic subject like English or Liberal Studies. Follow-up discussions of possible answers fur- ther reinforce effectiveness. If we compare the performative items above with cognitive ones, such as “What section of the catalogue would you use if you knew only the title of a book?," it is evident that cognitive items may test only a student's ability to remember what he has learned in the library-induction session and not, as in the case of performative items, his ability to actually locate information in the library. Conclusion It should be added, however, that the reliability of such performative items as indicators of the effectiveness of library-induction sessions is extremely doubtful, because of (1) possible content variation if more than one librarian conducts the sessions, (2) the possibility of students assisting one another, and (3) the small possibility of exact replication of tests, owing to day-to-day variation in book stock, especially in a small and young library. While some of these difficulties could be eliminated or minimized, it is doubtful that they could be entirely overcome. Nevertheless, it is clear that performative library-induction tests at the University of Botswana have been extremely effective as a means of reinforcing techniques taught in library-induction sessions.
CHARLES W. LEVESQUE
One of the best indicators of foreign-language fluency is the ability to give and understand directions. It is also one of the most useful language skills—as anyone who has been lost in a foreign city will testify. Unfortunately, Page 18
tures, so as not to make the students think that learning a foreign language is simply learning how to speak it. When human beings are put together for a purpose for which they are motivated, they feel the necessity of interacting. Interaction creates sociability and, consequently, affective links, which are perpetuated throughout the course and sometimes throughout their lives.
PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
Uniqueness-Guided Approach to Teaching English as a Foreign Language
LIU YUJUN
Human languages are the same the world over. They all have been, throughout human history, a means of communication; they are tied up alike with human society; they all have as their ingredients vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. But against this sameness, the differences between them stand out all the more sharply. Every language has its own particular vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation: it is unique. You can never view one language in terms of another. It is not that you mustn't; you simply can't. Every foreign language, viewed against the learner's mother tongue, has its uniqueness; mastery of a foreign language is the conquering of that language's uniqueness. Therefore, teaching a foreign language should be uniqueness-oriented; i.e., the uniqueness of that language should direct the whole course of teaching. This is where my years of experience in teaching English as a foreign language in Chinese universities has brought me. To a university student in China, English is so strange and difficult that it seems the language of moonlings. The student all too often speaks Chinese in English: he speaks everything English except the language. Why? Because of his ignorance of the uniqueness of English. Our entire teaching should be aimed at this uniqueness. How? Here are a few examples of how we can do it. Words of addition or exception In Chinese, there is a word chule, which has as its English equivalents in addition to, except, aside from, apart from, besides, but, on top of, except for, barring, into the bargain, etc. When a student wants to express the idea of chule, all these equivalents swim in his mind, and he usually chooses the wrong word or phrase. The uniqueness of the English words and phrases has trapped him. To help
causing his troubles. “Oh! I didn't know that Liu Yujun has been a lecturer in the Foreign each of the English words and phrases had its Languages Department of Shaanxi Teachers own peculiar meaning and usage like that!" University since 1968. he exclaims. He teaches intensive The third step is to have the students make reading, writing, translation, and grammar up sentences modeled on the examples, and to senior undergrad to discuss in class the mistakes in the senuates. Mr. Liu received tences they have made up, in order to deepen a diploma in 1963 from their understanding of the correct ways to use the Xian Foreign Lan- the words and phrases. The teacher should guages Institute after conclude the discussion by pointing out what having also studied at is right and what is wrong. After all this, the the Peking Foreign student knows not only in theory but in pracLanguages Institute. tice how to use the words and phrases correct ly. He has conquered their uniqueness. him out of this trap, I suggest the following steps: Some other examples of uniqueness 1. Write the words and phrases on the If the student says “He persuaded me to go, blackboard in groups: but I wouldn't listen to him," the teacher in addition to aside from except (for)' should tell him that in spite of the fact that on top of apart from but dictionaries give the closest Chinese equivainto the bargain besides barring lent to persuade, this "equivalent" and per2. Explain the meanings and usage of each suade are in fact quite different. The Chinese word or phrase: equivalent means "to try to get somebody round," while the English persuade means Phrases in the left-hand column mean “as well as” or “as well," e.g., "to try to get somebody round and succeed." So, He persuaded me to go means "he told a. In addition to teaching the students, he me to go, I took his advice, and I really went”; looks after the children. thus it contradicts but I wouldn't listen to him. b. He teaches night school on top of his reg What the student should have said is He tried ular job. to persuade me to go, but I wouldn't listen to c. The man is inadequate, and into the bar him. gain unable to take criticisms. If the student takes Here is a pretty go for Phrases in the right-hand column all mean “Somebody goes away politely," the teacher "excluding," e.g. should tell him that Here is a pretty go means a. He can speak all Chinese regional dia- “There are a lot of difficulties in the accom lects except the Shanghai dialect. plishment of it.” The word go in the sentence b. His words are anything but the truth. means the progressing of a thing, and pretty c. We shall arrive at noon, barring an acci- suggests difficulties or troubles in its progressdent. ing. Go here is different from what the stu dent imagines from its Chinese equivalent. The phrases in the middle column are twopronged. They can mean “in addition to” as The English word go has a range of meanings, well as “except (for),” depending on the con- and the student should thread his way through these many meanings by looking closely at the text, e.g., a. Apart from the table, the only furniture for example, go in He is full of get up, specific meaning it carries in a given context. and go was a few chairs, the usual kang, and means either “energy" or “ambition," and in several well-filled bookshelves. Give a go to our program it means “Nod your b. He received no education apart from mu consent and give your support to our prosic. gram.” So go and what is believed to be its c. Aside from being fun and good exercise, Chinese equivalent overlap only in a very swimming is a useful skill. limited area, as shown here: choice. is also a good footballer. supposed The student listens to the teacher attentive- Chinese ly, studies the examples carefully, and under equivalent English go stands the correct ways to use the words and of English phrases. Immediately he figures out what was go Page 19
line” and “on-line” research, in that our initial course design is based on the teacher's impression off-line—but as the course advances, the teacher notes areas of difficulty for the students on-line. Interestingly, we have found that projected areas of difficulty prove relatively easy for the students, while areas overlooked by the teacher sometimes prove to be rather difficult. The next time the course is offered, it is modified according to those areas of difficulty. It is this on-line research that Swales (1980) regards as the potential common factor in separate efforts: the linguistic and functional characteristics of these disciplines and subdisciplines are being arrived at, concurrent with course production. Thus we see our work as supplementary to, rather than isolated from, other work carried out along similar lines in other places. Does this mean that an end-point to materials production is likely? Theoretically yes, but realistically no, since teaching the same materials over and over again invites teacher boredom. As lines of communication are opened within the field and teachers are prepared to share their ideas and findings with others, we hope that the purposefulness of our task will be borne out.
over their career plan with teachers in the areas of specialization.? Even so, the teach Dolores Nachman Curiel is involved in course er's diagnosis does not guarantee a perfect so design, materials production, and the teaching lution to the problem, since the student still of English for specific purposes at the Unimay not see the need of what he is taught, or versidad Simón Bolíits application or relevance. Mead (1978) var and at the Instituto points out that “the efficacy of ESP materials Universitario Pedagóshould be measured by the degree to which gico de Caracas. In adthe student recognizes their relevance to his dition, she teaches immediate needs." courses in communicaOur contention, therefore, is that, since the tive competence to fustudent is not intrinsically motivated, to pres ture teachers of Enent him with a series of thematically boring glish. Ms. Curiel previ ously taught at the Intexts might discourage him from further read teramerican University of Puerto Rico, the ing rather than stimulate him towards it. Even Mission English Language Center in San Franif the teacher selected readings that presented cisco, California, and at the Universidad Methe appropriate functions, the long-term use- tropolitana in Caracas. She received her B.A. fulness of these texts could not be taken for in Spanish and her M.A. in TEFL from the Unigranted. Textbooks in the areas of specializa- versity of Michigan. tion are changed according to a teacher’s par- lan Murray received his M.A. in applied linticular bias, become outdated, or may be guistics from New York University, where he translated into the student's native language. taught ESL for a year We feel that motivation plays such an impor before leaving for Ven ezuela in 1980. Since tant part in our ESP work that materials that then he has worked at generate interest among the students must be the Universidad Simón given top priority; materials production Bolívar, where he therefore becomes indispensable. The task of teaches EST to enterchoosing appropriate texts is a delicate one, ing freshmen, and ESP when we remember that the reader must have courses to more ada reason for reading. To be successful, a text vanced students. His must incorporate an interesting topic about principal area of rewhich the student has some prior knowledge search has been in com(so that he can relate to it conceptually), with municative syllabus design and its relation to L2 acquisition processes. Together with Dolores a linguistic level that is not so difficult as to Curiel, he has presented several papers on this discourage him from attempting to extract the theme at local and foreign conferences. information. The process of selecting such materials is so delicate and specific to a par mine what is or is not authentic for them; he ticular academic setting that commercially should, rather, discover this from student prepared textbooks usually do not even come close to satisfying student needs or providing aspect of the readings is of first importance, feedback. Since emphasizing the functional sufficiently motivating materials at the correct the teacher is obliged to compile and maintain level. an ongoing collection of readings that illusThe teacher's task trate these functions, in the event that they be What does this self-imposed task require of needed. Fortunately, since the students need the language teacher? First, it means that he to be familiar with the rhetorical styles of textdoes not arrive at a series of “most perfect books as well as journals in their specific texts” the first time the course is offered, but areas, the teacher has a wide spectrum to choose from. that this comes with subsequent offerings of the course. It is of crucial importance that the Some final questions course have the potential to be altered (i.e., reading texts can be added or deleted) accord Two questions remain. First, have we total ly rejected textbooks? A functional approach ing to the students' response (needs), so that gradually the course evolves to reflect not the to reading does not exclude the teaching of teacher's assumptions, but what is truly inter language, which is still the principal goal of the ESP teacher. However, the paths leading esting to the students. Once a series of moti towards that end are various, and one's choice vating readings is developed, we can hope that what is interesting for one group will hold is totally conditioned by one's circumstances. We teach language without ever making the , thereby eliminating the necessity for major al point that it is the main focus of our teaching. terations to the course. Such evolution is nec Useful exercise types and some readings can essary if we hope to achieve “authenticity" (à be gathered from textbooks and kept as secla Widdowson) in the materials chosen. It is ondary reference sources. Secondly and finalunjust to the students for the teacher to deter ly, is ours a never-ending task that pushes us
Hutchinson, T., and A. Waters. 1980. ESP at the crossroads. English for Specific Purposes, 36 (March). Mead, R. 1978. Student needs and the authenticity of ESP materials. ESP-MALS Journal, Sum mer. Munby, J. L. 1978. Communicative syllabus design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, P. 1980. E.S.P. (English for specific pur poses). Oxford: Pergamon Press. Sinclair, J. M. 1978. Issues in current ESP project design and management. ESP-MALS Journal, Summer ESP Journal, 1, 1, pp. 11–23. Wardhaugh, R. 1976. Reading technical prose. In Reading: Insights and approaches, ed. M. An- thony and J. C. Richards. Singapore: Singa- pore University Press. Widdowson, H. G. 1978. Teaching language as communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1979. Explorations in applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilkins, D. A. 1976. Notional syllabuses. London: Oxford University Press.
I'd like to be included in the list of teachers who want to correspond with English teachers around the world. LAKSHMI WIJESINGHE 344 High Level Road Mahalwarawa Pannipitiya Sri Lanka Page 20
Rules for Correspondence?
SMA Masehi Jl. K. Wahid Hasyim 51 Kudus-Jateng. Indonesia 5 September 1983 Dear Editor: I've been teaching English at private senior high schools since 1982. I haven't met with any serious problems except one in teaching “general correspondence.” My pupils keep asking whether there are any general rules to be paid attention to. I would be very grateful to have some suggestions from you or from other readers that might be published in a future issue of the Forum. Also, I'd like to be included in the list of readers who would like to have other teachers as correspondents.
Faithfully yours, HERI SUBIYAKTONO
Japanese Tales in English
Publishers, P.O. Box 167, Q.C., Metro Ma- HUIZENGA, Jann. Looking at American Food ries had been told to him by his mother in Jap- Kitao, KENJI et al. American Holidays. Japan International Center, 1983. vi + 146 pp. Educators interested may see Mrs. Hashi- KRAMSCH, CLAIRE J. Discourse Analysis and moto at 501-10-17 Suido, 2 Chome, Bunkyo Second Language Teaching (Language in ku, Tokyo, Japan. Book dealers may write Education: 37). Washington, D.C.: Center New Day Publishers for details. for Applied Linguistics, 1981. vi + 100 pp. The thirty-five tales are divided into five KRULIK, DAVID. and BARBARA ZAFFRAN. Enbooklets with respective titles: glish with a Smile (a graded reader for beginBook One: The Mirror of Matsumoto and ning students). Lincolnwood, III.: Voluntad Other Tales Publishers, 1984. x + 121 pp. Everyday English. Book 2. Lincolnand Other Tales wood, III.: Voluntad Publishers, 1980. 124 pp. Book Three: The Adventures of One-Inch Magos. MARGARET Martin. English SurvivBoy and Other Tales al Series (Recognizing Details, 1982; Building Book Four: Princess Brilliant and Other Tales Vocabulary, 1983; Identifying Main Ideas, Book Five: A Husband for Miss Mouse and 1984). Lincolnwood, Ill.: Voluntad PublishOther Tales ers. 60 pp. ea. English across the Curriculum: PreVery sincerely yours, paring for Other Subjects in English. Book 2. JEAN EDADES Lincolnwood, III.: Voluntad Publishers. 1983. iv + 60 pp. MUMFORD, SUSAN. Conversation Pieces: Ex- PERIODICALS RELATED TO TEFL/TESL (UPDATE) ercises in Elementary Listening Comprehen- 53 pp.). Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983. The EFL Gazette. Maxwell House, 74 Worship Street, London EC2A 2EN. EDITOR: Stu SALAMA, NANCY, and Mary Ghali. Ameriart Little. can and British English Preferences. Cairo: Arab Renaissance Publisher, 1982. viii + 358 pp. 00153 Roma. EDITOR: Wanda D'Addio Colo- simo. SKIRBLE, ROSANNE. Washington, D.C. (a con versation book for intermediate English lanBOOKS RECEIVED guage learners). Skokie, Ill.: National Text book Co., 1982. Discover America Series. DUNSEATH. KEVIN. Writing English. Dhahran: University of Petroleum and Minerals, SMITH, Larry E., ed. Readings in English as 1983. Part 1, 74 pp.; Part II, 70 pp. an International Language. Oxford: PergaECKARD, RONALD D., and MARY ANN KEAR- mon Press, 1983. World Language English SeNY. Teaching Conversation Skills in ESL ries. viii + 179 pp. (Language in Education: 38). Washington, SPEARS, RICHARD A., ed. Everyday AmeriD.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1981. can English Dictionary. Lincolnwood, III.: Voluntad Publishers, 1984. xiii + 389 pp. GARFINKEL, ALAN, ed. ESL and the Foreign VIA, RICHARD A., and LARRYE. SMITH. Talk Language Teacher (selected papers from the and Listen: English as an International Lan1982 Central States Conference). Skokie, III.: guage via Drama Techniques. Oxford: PergaNational Textbook Co., 1982. x+ 117 pp. mon Press, 1983. World Language English SeHITCH, NORMA SCHIER. The New York Con ries. xvi + 64 pp. nection (Cultural Adventures for Building WEINER. Eva S., and Larry E. SMITH. EnEnglish Skills). Lincolnwood, III.: Voluntad glish as an International Language: A Writing Publishers, 1984. Passport to America Series. Approach. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983. World Language English Series. X+91 pp.
P.O. Box 442 Davao City 9501 Republic of the Philippines July 12, 1983
Dear Ms. Newton: These many years I have been reading and benefiting from the Forum. As the 21-yearold bride of the Filipino artist, Victorio Edades, I came to the Philippines in 1928 and started teaching English on almost the day of arrival. I still write a monthly section called “Correct English” for the Philippine Journal of Education and often get ideas from the articles in the Forum. Sometimes I wonder why one seldom sees letters from teachers of English in Japan. I should like very much to give the following information to educators in Japan who teach English to children and young teenagers: Mrs. Yasuko Hashimoto, when in the Philippines, told me thirty-five fairy tales her grandmother had told her. Together, we put them into English for Filipino children and children everywhere to read. Illustrations are by a Japanese artist. Tales of a Japanese Grandmother was published by New Day
The ENGLISH TEACHING FORUM, a quarterly journal for the teacher of English outside the United States, is distributed abroad by American embassies. Questions about subscriptions should be addressed to the American Embassy in the capital city of the country in which the inquirer resides. Only manuscripts and letters to the editor on topics other than subscription may be sent to Room 312, 301 4th Street S.W., Washington, D.C. 20547. To be considered for publication, manuscripts should be typewritten, double-spaced, and have margins of at least three centimeters.
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English usage, (4) student teaching experience, (5) conversation-specific training. (6) testing and evaluation, (7) writing—specific training, (8) reading-specific training, (9) pronunciation specific training, and (10) language learning. Noting that not one item from the Methods category made the top ten, Henrichsen states: "Perhaps it would be correct to conclude that the respondents overall feel prospective teachers' training should include less of what Anthony [has called) approach and method and more of what he calls technique. Somewhat surprising to us, as to those conducting the survey, is the fact that "Winitz and Reeds's aural approach to language learning is ranked above more widely known innovative methods such as Curran's Counseling Learning, Gattegno's Silent Way, and Lozanov's Suggestopedia." Henrichsen concludes, quite reasonably, that "this ranking may reflect a general concern for training in listening comprehension, demonstrated by a similar response in the specific training area." In our view, this emphasis on training in how to teach listening comprehension, an area too often neglected in teacher-training courses, is perhaps the most interesting bit of information to emerge from the survey. The question of teacher preparation is of practical importance to nearly every teacher and administrator involved in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language anywhere in the world. Is it a matter of interest to readers of this journal? We think it is. And we would be glad to receive communications containing readers' ideas on any aspect of this subject, with a view to publishing them, in whole, in part, or in summary, as may seem appropriate.
Volume XXII July 1984 Number 3
Pronunciation Activities with an Accent on Communication TERESA PICA, University of Pennsylvania The Medium and the Message W. BUTZKAMM, Rhine-Westphalia Technical University, Aachen The Teacher, the Student, the Classroom, and Communication Activities JAMES WARD, Huffco, Balikpapan, Indonesia Developing Paragraph Organization Skills at the College Level NATSUMI ONAKA, Japan Institute for International Study, Osaka PETER WIESE, American University in Cairo The Teacher's Mediation in Students' Vocabulary Learning BOGDAN KRAKOWIAN, University of Lódź NEWS AND IDEAS Algeria. Picture-Based Drills and Exercises, ROBERT J. NIELSEN China. Communicative Interaction Activities Using Human-Interest Stories, SONG SHUNLING Mathematical Games as a tool in EFL, ZHANG CHUAN-DE Finland. The Blurred Slide, ROLF PALMBERG Nigeria. Teaching Writing, YEMI ABODERIN Poland. Thinking in English, EWA ŁATKA-GAJER United Kingdom. Developing Your Own Classroom Teaching Materials, LIZ HAMP-LYONS CLAIRE YVETTE ROLNIK DE BARGRASER CANDACE A. DICKINSON Zaire. Some Suggestions for Teaching Reading, NSAKALA LENGO LETTERS
Anne Covell Newton Editor
Mary Jo llacqua Boya Managing Editor
Candace Davis Production Assistant
Acknowledgments and copyright notices, when necessary, appear with the articles
Pronunciation Activities with an Accent on Communication
The following pronunciation activities are based on sociolinguistic perspectives on the nature of language and theoretical claims regarding the importance of conversational interaction to second-language acquisition. By engaging learners in meaningful experiences and interactional tasks, these activities offer an alternative to traditional pronunciation lessons that focus on modeling and practice of speech sounds at word and sentence levels. In each activity, the student's attention is directed toward conveying a message to classmates. Accurate pronunciation of key words in the message is often crucial to how effectively the message is conveyed. Getting one's message across to others thus serves as the focus for achieving accurate pronunciation, and, hopefully, as the basis for acquiring the speech sounds of English.
TERESA PICA is assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in second language acquisition, TESOL methods, English for Specific Purposes, and classroom discourse analysis. She has also taught English at the university's English program for foreign students. Dr. Pica received an M.A. in speech pathology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published many scholarly articles based on her research on the effects of formal instruction on second language acquisition and on student-teacher interaction in the ESL classroom.
The increasing emphasis in TESOL textbooks on a communicative approach to language teaching owes much to evolving perspectives on both the nature of language and the conditions for successful second-language acquisition. Linguistic descriptions by Halliday (1970, 1973) and Hymes (1964, 1972) have shown that the formal system of a language cannot be separated from the ways in which people use language in social interaction. Theoretical claims from second-language research (Hatch 1979, Krashen 1981, Long 1981) have emphasized that the system of a language is acquired through meaningful experiences and conversational exchanges rather than through practice of isolated structures and forms. In pedagogical terms, these insights from linguistic theory and second-language acquisition research have contributed to a shift away from explicit instruction in what Widdowson has labeled rules for language "usage” and toward active participation by the learner in rules for language “use” (Widdowson 1978). Learning materials that reflect this communicative approach to language teaching thus engage learners in a discovery of the rules of the formal system of English through participation in group activities focused on information exchange and problem-solving tasks. While a number of current TESOL textbooks incorporate and contextualize the rules of English grammar into meaningful experiences and interactive tasks (see, e.g., Castro and Kimbrough 1980, Ferreira 1981, and Lozano and Sturtevant 1982), comparable communicative activities have been sorely lacking in materials for the development of English phonological rules. Teachers wishing to develop pronunciation skills among their students have had to rely on traditional, noncommunicative resources. Since most currently available teaching aids (e.g., Crowell 1961, English Language Series
A version of this paper was presented at the 1982 TESOL Convention, Honolulu. The author would like to acknowledge Michael H. Long, Cynthia Watson, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
1966, and Trager and Henderson 1956) were published prior to the trend toward communicative methodology, they focus on discrete points of articular placement and acoustic features pertinent to speech-sound production, and emphasize decontextualized practice and drill. Even more recent, partially contextualized pronunciation programs such as Morley (1979) follow a basic format of presenting minimal pairs and isolated words, phrases, and sentences, explaining techniques for correct production and providing opportunities for modeling and practice. Current pronunciation materials thus offer nothing in the way of learner involvement in meaningful exchange and problem-posing tasks. This is perhaps why research by Purcell and Suter (1980) revealed explicit instruction in pronunciation to be a negligible factor in predicting pronunciation accuracy. When the effects of native language, skill in oral mimicry, length of stay in an English-speaking country, and concern for pronunciation accuracy were allowed for, these "acquisition variables" (Purcell and Suter 1980:286) accounted for over two-thirds of the variance in prediction power. Formal instruction contributed nothing. The following pronunciation activities are therefore based on the premise that formal instruction in pronunciation, in its current state, may have had no effect on pronunciation accuracy, because it fails to involve learners in active exchange of ideas, and thus contradicts basic tenets of linguistic and second-language acquisition theory. These activities have, accordingly, been designed to provide second-language learners with experiences in the pronunciation of English, embedded in the context of meaningful communication. In each activity, students' attention is focused on conveying a message rather than on practicing sounds in isolation. How clearly that message is understood depends, to a considerable extent, on the accuracy of their pronunciation of key words in the message.
Activity 1: Deciding and reporting on word meaning Pronunciation Point: The teacher explains that when a noun and a verb are spelled the same, their pronunciation is usually the same. The students are asked to listen for similarities in the pronunciation of the following noun-verb pairs, then repeat them after the teacher: control-control, award-award, preview-preview, section-section, process-process. The teacher then explains that occasionally, when a noun and verb are spelled the same, they have different pronunciations. For example, in the following words, the noun is accented on the first syllable, while the verb is accented on the second syllable: conduct-conduct, conflict-conflict, contrast-contrast convert-convert, increase-increase, incline-incline. Students are asked to listen to the pronunciation of these words, then repeat them. Communication Activity: Working with a partner or in a group, students must decide on the meaning of the nouns and verbs in the sentences below. Following their decision, they are asked to explain the meanings of these words to the class. 1. The usher will conduct you to your seat if you display good conduct. Therefore you must remain quiet at all times in the theater. 2. The university plans to award prizes to three professors for their research findings. The award will be in the amount of five thousand dollars. 3. The movie theater invited me to a preview of two new films. I'll be able to preview them three weeks before everyone else. 4. Jane has a conflict in her schedule: English Literature and Modern History conflict with Biology. They're all given on Mondays at 3:00 P.M. 5. The repair shop on Spruce Street will service my radio. Their service is excellent. After I had my stereo repaired there it sounded like new. 6. We need to shovel the snow from the sidewalk. Go and get a shovel so we can begin. 7. They often contrast their present life with their previous one: Two years ago, they lived in a small, quiet town. Now they are living in a crowded and noisy city. The contrast between their former life and their present one is striking. 8. His parents are Jewish, but he is a Catholic convert. Four years ago, he decided to convert to the Catholic religion. 9. The store is going to increase the price of apples from 99¢ a pound to $1.50. That will be too great an increase for me. I won't be buying apples once that hap
Classroom guidelines Each of the activities presented below has a four-step format: 1. The teacher introduces a pronunciation point and models representative examples for the class to repeat. 2. The teacher gives the class directions on the communication activity that incorporates the pronunciation rule. 3. Students then meet in pairs or small groups to work on the activity while the teacher circulates among them, monitoring their activities and answering their questions. 4. The class reunites to hear the individual pairs or groups present their decision or report on their activity."
11. The university has to process my application before they can accept me as a full-time student. The entire process will take about two weeks. 12. I'm inclined to agree with you about the amount of incline in the stairs. They're much too steep. Anyone could easily fall and get hurt.
B: In just a bit. Please wait. O.K.? A: Sure. A: Is Dad mad at you? grades. A: Why have you done so badly? B: I can't seem to pass Math. And Spanish is hard for me, too. A: Perhaps you need to study a little more. B: That's too much to ask. I can only do two hours of work a night. I need to relax. A: But how can you relax when you know you still have work to do? Dialogue 4 A: Have you seen my roommate Peter? He was going to meet me here. B: No. Maybe he's been delayed at a meeting. A: I'm afraid I can't wait much longer. He's already fifteen minutes late. carrying a box of raisins.
Activity 2: Forming relevant questions from a dia logue Pronunciation Point: The teacher explains that some word pairs sound almost alike except for differences in a single vowel. It is important to pronounce these words differently, as misunderstandings can occur if they are pronounced the same. The students repeat these word pairs after the teacher: pin-pen, chick-check, cheapchip, eat-it, beet-bit, cheek-chick, mad-mud, Dandone, match-much, he-hey, meet-mate, me-may, reason-raisin. Communication Activity: Pairs of students are given a dialogue containing some of the words the teacher has just modeled for them. They read the dialogue to each other, then compose two questions based on the readings to ask the class. When the class reunites, each pair of students must provide a background on their dialogue—who the characters are (i.e., their relationship to each other) and when and where the dialogue takes place. They then read the dialogue aloud and ask the class the comprehension questions they have composed. If the class members are unable to answer these questions, the students must reword them through paraphrase, offer clues, or, if necessary, re-present the dialogue. Dialogue 1 A: I'm looking for the pins. Can you help me? to Aisle 6.
Activity 3: Sharing notes to answer questions Pronunciation Point: The teacher explains that spelling distinctions between or and er signal pronunciation differences when these sounds occur in stressed syllables such as pork-perk, porch-perch, or port-pert. The teacher then points out that when or and er are found in unstressed syllables at the ends of words that name professions or jobs, these endings are pronounced the same. For example, in the words lawyer, doctor, manager, and director, both or and er are pronounced with the unstressed laul. Students repeat these words after the teacher. Communication Activity: Students must take notes on the meanings of the professions that the teacher describes to them in a mini-lecture. The teacher writes these names on the board as s/he describes them. Following the lecture, students meet in pairs to complete a test about the meanings of the professions given in the lecture.
Dialogue 2 A: Did you eat lunch yet? beet salad. A: How would you feel about eating again around three o'clock? There's a new place down the street. I'd like to try it. B: I'd like to go, but I really can't afford it. A: I hear it's quite cheap. You can get a chicken or veal dinner for only a few dollars. B: In that case, I'll go. A: When can you be ready?
Words used in the lecture: Page 22
Radio Summary: A parade of about 150 boats arrived at Seaview Harbor on Saturday for the annual Festival of the Sea. The boats started to arrive at 2:00 P.M., and were greeted by the Seaview City Band, who played until dark. On Sunday, events started at 1:30 P.M., with another parade of boats. Twenty-five steamships arrived at 1:30, followed by fifty smaller vessels at 3:00. At 8:00 P.M., several local rock groups presented a concert at the harbor.
have great appeal for students, and stimulate considerable verbal interaction in the classroom. The small group component is especially effective in classrooms with large enrollments. Students who ordinarily would not have many opportunities for class participation and group interaction find such experiences here. Most importantly, students have an opportunity to work on important points of English pronunciation, not only in isolated practice with their teacher, but in meaningful interaction with each other. Accurate pronunciation is an important component of this interaction, as the success of each communicative activity depends, at least in part, on how accurately certain key words are produced. Getting one's message across to others thus serves as the focus for achieving accurate pronunciation and, one hopes, the basis for acquiring the speech sounds of English. REFERENCES Castro, Oscar, and Victoria Kimbrough. 1980. In touch. New York: Longman. Crowell, Thomas L. 1961. Modern spoken English. New York: McGraw-Hill. English Language Services. 1966. Drills and exercises in En glish pronunciation. New York: Collier-Macmillan. Ferreira, Linda. 1981. Notion by notion. Rowley, Mass.: New bury House. Halliday, M. A. K. 1970. Language structure and language function. In New horizons in linguistics, ed. J. Lyons. London: Penguin. 1973. Explorations in the functions of language. London: Edward Arnold. Hatch, Evelyn. 1979. Simplified input and second language acquisition. Paper presented at the LSA winter meeting, December, 1979, Los Angeles. Hymes, Dell. 1964. Introduction: Toward ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist, 66, 6, pp. 12– 25. 1972. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In Directions in sociolinguistics, ed. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Krashen, Stephen. 1981. Adult second language acquisition and learning: A review of theory and applications. In Proceedings of the Fiftieth Congress of l'Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA), ed. Jean-Guy Savard and Lorre Laforge. Quebec: Les Presses de l'université Laval. Long, Michael. 1981. Input, interaction, and second language acquisition. In Native language and foreign language acquisition, ed. H. Winitz. Annals of the New York Acade my of Sciences, 379, pp. 259–78. Lozano, Francisco, and Jane Sturtevant. 1982. Life styles. New York: Longman. Morley, Joan. 1979. Improving spoken English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Purcell, Edward T., and Richard W. Suter. 1980. Predictors of pronunciation accuracy: A reexamination. Language Learning, 30, 2, pp. 271–87. Trager, Edith, and Sara Henderson. 1956. Pronunciation drills. Culver City, Cal.: ELS Publications. Widdowson, Henry. 1978. Teaching English as communica tion. London: Oxford University Press.
Activity 6: Placing an order Pronunciation Point: The teacher explains the pronunciation rules for forming plurals: (1) If a noun ends in /s/, /z/, /š/, /d/, or /]], the plural ending is pronounced as an extra syllable. For example, the plural of glass is glasses and the plural of dish is dishes: After he ate two dishes of ice cream, he drank two glasses of soda. (2) If a noun ends in any voiceless consonant (except /s/, /š/, or lči, the plural is pronounced as /s/, as in hat-hats, sock-socks: She bought two hats and four pairs of socks. (3) If a noun ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant (except /z/ or /j/), the plural ending is pronounced as /z/, as in egg-eggs, potato-potatoes: He ate eggs and fried potatoes for breakfast. Communication Activity: There are two activities for this Pronunciation Point: A. Students meet in groups of three. The teacher gives them two menus and a small note pad. One of the a students is the waiter/waitress and the other two are customers. One customer orders the same menu items for both him/herself and the other customer, e.g., two tuna salad sandwiches, two cokes, two pieces of apple pie, etc. The waiter/waitress writes down the order, then reads it back to the customers for verification. Roles can be exchanged, so that the non-ordering customer has an opportunity to place or receive and repeat an order. B. Students meet in pairs. The teacher gives them two of the same catalogues or newspaper advertisements. One student, as the customer, places an order of ten items, requesting at least two of each. Depending on the nature of the catalogue or advertisement, orders could be placed for two pairs of socks, three pounds of potatoes, a dozen wine glasses, etc. The other student, as telephone salesperson, writes down the customer's order, then reads it back to the customer for verification. Roles can be reversed in this activity as well. These activities can be used with students of proficiency levels from low intermediate to advanced. They Page 23
Here the teacher responds to the idea the second pupil has expressed, and he really means what he says. He does not evaluate the sentence as a grammatically correct contribution, but generates a brief conversation before the exercise proper is resumed. In fact, he deliberately overlooks what is generally considered a fundamental mistake (don'tdoesn't). If he had first dealt with this error, it would have been almost impossible for him to refer back to the idea expressed and react to it in a natural way. By the mere fact that he picks the error first, form has taken precedence over content, and the teacher has made it sufficiently clear that he is more interested in the former. This brings us to an important point: the distinction between form-orientation and message-orientation has a bearing on the correction of errors. Roughly speaking, immediate correction of errors is acceptable—and is often expected, even welcomed, by the pupil—in medium-oriented communication; but it is usually resented by the pupil and therefore not to be recommended in what amounts to messageoriented communication. Infuriating is just what it is. We all know the kind of person who is quick to interrupt whatever we are saying to correct some unimportant mistake. Strangling seems much too good for him. I blush to think how long it took me to break myself of just that habit. Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children. (Holt 1970:74) There need be nothing forced or affected in starting a brief conversation in the middle of a formal exercise. A class was practicing a dialogue that contained the tongue-twister hippopotamus. Naturally, some students found it difficult to imitate, and one asked the teacher: "Some people say 'hippo'. Is that correct?” The teacher, who did not happen to know the answer, asked where he had heard or seen that word, and a brief conversation ensued. This example is simple enough, but the point is that there is hardly a language lesson where the sentences or text used could not give rise to a number of authentic questions, comments, or wisecracks. It all depends on our attitude, whether we not only accept such interruptions, but welcome them and are ourselves on the lookout for any interesting asides. From observation and experience we will learn how to make the most of the many occasions that present themselves. In the elementary grades some teachers make it a regular feature of their lessons to allow the children some time to report about anything they want. The children rarely run out of things to talk about. In the foreign language, topics and ideas are often used as pegs on which to hang grammatical explanations. Why not reverse the procedure and use (necessary) grammar and vocabulary work as a peg on which to hang brief conversational exchanges whenever an opportunity presents itself?
Application phase Such communicative interludes, which could occur at any time during a lesson, should not preclude the incorporation of a regular, extended phase of message-oriented communication towards the end of a lesson or lesson cycle. “The teacher cannot afford to wait for free conversation, but should develop it from the very first lesson. The attitude that the language is a means for communicating the pupils' own ideas should be established during the first few days” (Ostojić 1975:312). As a rule, the class should be able to use the content of a lesson cycle to express their own needs and ideas before going on to the next lesson cycle. For this to happen, sufficient time must be set aside. Unless such application activities are regularly built into the course, the material can never be said to be really mastered. Roleplay, at least partially created by the learners themselves, is a good solution. This has been aptly demonstrated by Zimmermann (1969) in his analysis of what brings about transfer of learning. Students put their own skits together in groups and present them to the class. Teaching games are a viable alternative because they normally distract the learners from form by getting them to accomplish some purpose. Because of the intrinsic interest of some games, and the element of competition, players can become so engrossed in a game that they forget about the linguistic ends of the activity. The same effect is achieved in project work where the students are engaged in, say, preparing real American hamburgers (Klyhn 1976) or learning about photography. Simply listening-perhaps because the text is fun or contains interesting information about the foreign country—is another activity of language application. In short, this should be the phase where the students can reap the benefits of previous medium-oriented workthe fun phase. The most important lesson to be learned from skills psychology is that we learn what we practice. If we make our students supply missing words or change active sentences into passive sentences, they will learn how to fill in gaps and make grammatical transformations. If we arrange opportunities for them to focus on message and communicate ideas, they will learn just that. Searle once contrasted "serious utterances”-i.e., speech acts having illocutionary force—with teaching a language (Searle 1969:57). It is up to us to make sure that foreign-language teaching will no longer be equated with communication where the medium is the only message and we do not mean it seriously.
Butzkamm, W. 1980. Praxis und Theorie der bilingualen Methode. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer. continued on page 25
the Student, , the Classroom, and Communication Activities
JAMES WARD
A class is being drilled on a structural point: Teacher: Was the house easy to find? (ask) A group discussion about corporal punishment has been underway for about ten minutes: Student 1: You don't think corporal punishment in school is right but it's OK at home, right? Student 2: No, I didn't say that. I said that I'm against hitting students too often. Student 1: I don't understand you. Student 2: The cane I am against; the slaps I am for. Student 1: I think I'm beginning to see now. In which classroom are students really learning English? Which instructor is providing students with genuine opportunities to communicate? In which classroom are students asking as well as answering questions? Indeed, in which setting are questions being asked because the answers are really not known beforehand? Which classroom has students elaborating on their answers? And in which situation are students actually "talking things over"? Clearly, the second classroom is promoting true communication: students are initiating as well as replying to statements as they actively discuss, clarify, and expand on their ideas. And now the most important question. Which sample conversation is typical of the average EFL or ESL classroom? Sadly, we must admit that the first is: the teacher dominates most classrooms. Indeed, Flanders (1967) estimates that in the average American setting teachertalk amounts to 75% of classroom time. What learning strategies are employed by instructors as they talk? And just how inhibiting and counterproductive can the domineering teacher actually become? While there are several possible negative teaching strategies (dismissal of correct but unexpected answers and unintentional use of difficult words and concepts, for example) that can occur in the teacher-dominated classroom, the first part of this paper will discuss the most common counterproductive teaching strategies: the question-answer-evaluate pattern of most classrooms (Barnes 1976:108–14). The second part of this article will provide examples of several communication-based activities for intermediate and advanced students that avoid the problems created in the normal teacher-dominated classroom and its question-answer-evaluateOK-let's-go-on pattern.
JAMES WARD is currently employed by Overseas Technical Service as an EFL curriculum consultant to Huffco, an American petroleum company operating in Indonesia. He has also served as an EFL consultant for the United States Information Service in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bolivia, and Uruguay, and as a teacher supervisor at the American University Alumni Association Language Center, Bangkok. Mr. Ward has an M.A. in TESL and an Educational Specialist degree (Ed.S.) in curriculum and instruction. He has also completed coursework toward a doctorate in education.
PART ONE: THE TEACHER, THE STUDENT, AND THE CLASSROOM
In short, because EFL students are not given the opportunity to expand their ideas, initiate questions, reinterpret what has been presented to them, and generally behave in a more natural way, they cannot communicate in English. Our challenge now becomes one of designing activities which encourage natural communication patterns.
PART TWO: COMMUNICATION ACTIVITIES
This section will examine four possible activities for providing intermediate and advanced students with opportunities to communicate and reevaluate the grammatical, lexical, and social rules of language. It is extremely important to notice that the teacher must set up the activity so that students clearly understand what is expected of them. If teachers fail to define the task and how to accomplish it, students will not communicate effectively. They will either sit and not say anything or they will quickly come to a consensus and move on (Stubbs 1976). As Barnes (1976:38) says, “The group finds nothing to encourage active engagement, nothing to provoke questions or surmises."
The most common classroom procedure is for the teacher to ask a question for which he already knows the answer (What's his name? Are you wearing a green shirt now?), to call on a student to answer the question, to correct or evaluate the reply, and then begin the cycle again (Barnes 1976; Mishler 1972; Gumperz and Herasimchuk 1972; Stubbs 1976). This pattern is deficient for two reasons: it is found only within classrooms and courtrooms, and is thus alien to the real communicative needs of students; secondly, it fails to provide students with the necessary opportunities to reevaluate and synthesize the information that has been presented to them. The question, answer, and evaluation pattern described above is totally divorced from a normal conversational setting. The emphasis in a non-classroom setting is not on how an idea is expressed-whether the structure and pronunciation are correct—but on what is being said. The content is the heart of any true conversation. In the average discussion, the speakers comment on and/or reply to the ideas being discussed. This exchange of ideas is accomplished by a heavy use of hypothetical statements (If we do this, then -), probability statements (We may/might/could -), requests for further explanations (What do you mean? I don't understand), restatement of ideas (What I mean is -; What you mean to say is -), and true questions asked to gain information (Stubbs 1976). Douglas Barnes, in his excellent book From Communication to Curriculum, writes that students must also be given an opportunity to reevaluate and reinterpret what has been presented to them. They must be given an opportunity to talk things over and explore in order to relate the teacher's knowledge to their own world. Consider what can happen when students are not given an opportunity to synthesize the material and relate it to their own needs. Pedagogically, they listen, repeat, and respond, but they fail in what Rivers calls “the great leap forward" to communication. Linguistically, they cannot create novel utterances. Communication becomes an echo of a previously memorized dialogue. They fail to master the social rules of language use. (I know of one foreign student who used profanity in front of a priest.) This interrogation pattern of classroom teaching, devoid of interest in what the students are saying, adversely affects student attitudes. For example, students differentiate between teacher-talk and communication. (“Only Mr. Brian uses words like terrainI don't have to remember it.") Second, because instructors seem to demand perfect English most of the time and constantly correct discrete points of syntax and pronunciation, student fluency decreases as they mentally type out what they are going to say. (Barnes calls this "the final draft version of English.")
1. Teacher responses The teacher should actively reply to the message students are attempting to formulate. This is not to say that instructors should not respond to how they are communicating by correcting discrete-point errors. A balance must be struck between form and content. The teacher should use these and similar expressions as often as possible: I don't understand. What do you mean? Please explain. Please summarize what you mean. Can you sum up this conversation? Thus, students will be encouraged to think aloud, and explore both form and content in diverse ways. More importantly, instructors should teach these expressions to students and encourage their use in student-student exchanges.
2. Half-open dialogues As a read-and-look-up exercise, half-open dialogues provide students with a minimal amount of control and can be used to highlight effective conversational strategies which must be employed in improvisations, interviews, and group and panel discussions. (In the example below, the speaker uses restatement: I have to take English 1510, 1520, and one elective, right?) Half-open dialogues also require the student to see language within a context dependent on what comes both before and after an utterance. Notice also in the example below how the dialogue is based on a short reading which requires the students to ask each other questions. (Teacher: Find out how many English courses are required. Student One: How many English courses are required? Student Two: Three. 1510, 1520, and 1530, and one elective.) The questioning activity is set up with a natu
ral statement beginning with find out, rather than with the very unnatural command "Ask a question beginning with how many."
Reading Activity Below is part of a page from a college catalogue. Look at it and find out: • how many English courses are required. • how many English electives a student can take. • how many math courses must be taken. • an example of a natural science. • an example of a social science. • what 1510 means. • what 1840 means. • how many total English credits are required. • how many total math courses are required. • how many total credits are required for a freshman.
3. Interviews The interview below follows a reading activity similar to the excerpt from the college catalogue discussed under Half-Open Dialogues. The reading selection has not been included, but it is a Thai International Airlines newspaper job advertisement for hostesses and stewards. Notice that the interview is set up for students: the information to be discussed is listed, but exact question formulation and response is left up to the students. Following pair work, the teacher should ask a few students to report the results of their interviews (or group or panel discussions) to the whole class. This follow-up is crucial. As Barnes (1976:192) writes, “A first requirement for successful group work is that teachers show that they value their pupils' contributions. Otherwise, students are apt to view the activity as a waste of time regardless of how well they are communicating.” An Interview Orally create interviews between an applicant for the Thai International Airlines job and some Thai International officials. Find out: • the applicant's name, age, height, and weight. • his educational background. • about his health. • if he speaks a foreign language. • where he learned a foreign language. • his past work experience. • how well he can swim. • what his hobbies are. • what he does in his leisure time. • if he has any special talents like singing. • his reasons for wanting to join Thai International. • about his future plans. • what he would do if a passenger drank too much. • what he will do if he doesn't get this job.
4. Group discussions Notice how clearly the task below is defined for students.
Dialogue Siriphon is talking to her professor about her courses. Use the information in the reading and complete the dialogue. Siriphon: How many English courses are required? 1520 and one elective, right? And how about a social science? Dr. Myers: Siriphon: Well, thanks a lot. You've been very help ful. Dr. Myers: Siriphon: Bye! Dr. Myers:
Group Discussion and Making Decisions You are students in a local secondary school. You are planning an orientation program for newly arrived AFS (exchange) students. In small groups, plan the following: • where they can learn your language and who can teach them. • what classes they should take in your school and why. • what classes they should not take in your school and why. • what local customs they should be told about. (Include social taboos as well as local foods, music, dances, etc.) continued on page 30
Developing Paragraph Organization Skills at the College Level
NATSUMI ONAKA
For a considerable period, the grammar-translation method of teaching English has enjoyed general acceptance in Japan. A writing course in college, required for students who major in English and American literature, is organized mainly around translation activities: the students find the most appropriate English expressions by which to translate a particular Japanese paragraph. Since they are given a well-organized Japanese paragraph to translate, they don't have to be concerned about the sequence or organization of the paragraph. Therefore, they have no opportunity to learn how an expository paragraph in English should be developed. If a student can write a good composition in Japanese and translate it "perfectly” into English, it is assumed that he can write a good English composition. However, students experience frustration at the end of their college education when they are required to write a graduation thesis. This is their first experience in attempting to write something logical, and they receive no instruction in how to organize a paragraph in English at the discourse level. The purpose of this article is (1) to identify some pedagogical problems of teaching writing at the college level, and (2) to suggest appropriate techniques for their solution.
PEDAGOGICAL PROBLEMS CAUSED BY RHETORICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN L, AND L2 One assumption of the translation method of teaching writing is the universality of paragraph organization. The rhetoric (i.e., a particular style of paragraph organization) of one language is assumed to be transferable to any other. Kaplan states: A fallacy of some repute and some duration is the one which posits that because a student is believed to be capable of writing an adequate essay in his native language, he can necessarily write an adequate essay in a second language. That this assumption is fallacious has become more and more apparent. Students who have mastered the syntactic structures of a second language have still demonstrated inability to compose adequate themes, term papers, theses, and dissertations. Instructors have written, on the writing efforts of such students, comments like: “The material is all here, but it seems somehow out of focus,” or “Lacks organization,” or “Lacks cohesion.” And these comments are essentially accurate. The student's perception appears out of focus because the student is employing a rhetoric and a sequence of thought which violate the expectations of the native reader. (Kaplan 1972:8-9) What is the difference in rhetoric that Kaplan is insisting on? The Japanese paragraph usually employs a variety of metaphors and euphemistic expressions. The writer paraphrases his idea repeatedly throughout a paragraph in a quite arbitrary style. As Kaplan says: Some Oriental writing ... is marked by what may be called an approach by indirection. In this kind of writing, the development of the paragraph may be said to be “turning and turning in a widening gyre.” The circles or gyres turn Page 24
forts defeated by events occurring in a larger context. A farmer's carefully maintained fields can be destroyed by an international war. During the Vietnam War, the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta were obliterated. Also, local officials' plans can be overturned by a national policy. A decision at the national level that relocates a major highway away from a town can mean ruin to the unwary gas-station operator or restaurant owner. Further, a country's economic development can be thwarted by a lack of world demand for its products. The coffee-growing regions of Brazil or Uganda could suffer if people stopped drinking coffee. Indeed, there is increasing concern today that most personal and national objectives may ultimately be frustrated by long-term global trends. (Johnston and Zukowski/Faust 1981:42) Cause and Effect. A paragraph developed by cause and effect shows the relationship between two statements; that is, one element results from the other. In the sample paragraph below, by listing many physical conditions and concomitant behaviors, the writer shows how climate affects the culture of a country. That is, the topic sentence Climate affects the culture of a country is developed by supporting sentences illustrating effects. In this style of development, the writer can list several effects resulting from one cause, as in the sample paragraph below, or he can list several causes to support one effect. Sample Paragraph Climate affects the culture of a country. Men must learn to live within the limitations of their environment, and climate is an important part of the physical environment. Life in a tropical country is less strenuous and more casual than it is in a temperate one. Men work shorter hours and less vigorously in a hot climate. They cannot play hard either. They tire easily. They can relax by reading, by sipping cool drinks, or by listening to soothing music. They must try to conserve their energy. The wisest ones learn to respect the demands of Nature. (Friend 1971:43) Comparison and Contrast. A paragraph developed by comparison and contrast identifies the similarity or difference between two items by pointing out several elements of both. In the following paragraph, the author writes about two kinds of elephants. They look alike; however, the author tries to convince his readers of the distinction between them by pointing out a list of differences, such as the color of the body, the size of the ears, and other characteristics. Sample Paragraph There are two kinds of elephants—the African and the Indian. The African elephant is larger and darker; it also has larger ears and a more sloping forehead. Both can be tamed, but the Indian elephant is more easily trained to do work. When an African elephant sleeps, it usually stands up, but its Indian cousin usually sleeps lying down. (Yorkey 1982:124) Definition. When a writer uses a word that might cause confusion or misunderstanding, he must clarify the meaning for the reader. In the sample paragraph, the writer defines the meaning of compassion. He gives
many synonyms, several examples, and an explanation of the meaning. Sample Paragraph Compassion is the ability to understand another person's misfortunes. It is kindness, tenderness, mercy, pity, and sympathy. A nurse may have compassion for an irritable patient by understanding that the illness may be the cause of that patient's behavior and by treating that patient with kindness and sympathy. An airline stewardess displays compassion for her passengers by considering the fact that they may be nervous about flying and by answering their questions in a patient, sympathetic manner. In the same way, a judge may have compassion for a juvenile offender by taking his age into consideration and setting the punishment accordingly. Compassion is not merely a verbal expression of sorrow. It is not begrudgingly contributing money to charitable causes out of a sense of duty. Compassion is putting yourself in another person's situation and treating that person the way you would want to be treated. (Donald et al. 1978:200) Analogy. Instead of explaining the idea directly, as in paragraphs of example or comparison and contrast, the writer may use an analogy—a simple situation that has some similarities to the main idea of the paragraph. In the sample paragraph, the writer explains the distinction between Newton's and Einstein's ideas about gravitation. Instead of using technical terms, he tells the story of a little boy with some marbles. The significant feature of this sort of paragraph is that the reader can easily grasp the main idea because of the familiarity of the simple symbolic story, or analogy.
Sample Paragraph The distinction between Newton's and Einstein's ideas about gravitation has sometimes been illustrated by picturing a little boy playing marbles in a city lot. The ground is very uneven, ridged with bumps and hollows. An observer in an office ten stories above the street would not be able to see these irregularities in the ground. Noticing that the marbles appear to avoid some sections of the ground and move toward other sections, he might assume that a “force” was operating which repelled the marbles from certain spots and attracted them to others. But another observer on the ground would instantly perceive that the path of the marbles was simply governed by the curvature of the field. In this analogy Newton is the upstairs observer who imagines a "force" is at work, and Einstein is the observer on the ground, who has no reason to make such an assumption. (Barnett 1950:91)
Transitional devices There are, indeed, many techniques for developing a paragraph. However, to compose a good paragraph a writer needs additional special tools: TRANSITIONAL DEVICES. They often appear between sentences or between paragraphs and serve to link them, so that the direction of ideas becomes clear and their sequence flows smoothly. Transitional devices (or discourse markers) are divided into two groups according to function: one group is called SENTENCE LINKERS and the other, PARAGRAPH LINKERS. Page 25
people in almost any part of the world may watch the Olympic Games as they happen. The type of television program is the news program. newspapers used to be the chief source of news for many people. television brings world events in pictures and sound into people's living rooms. In some countries, such as England and Italy, the state owns and operates one or more television stations. no revenue-producing advertising appears on these channels. advertising is an essential part of the commercial television industry in the United States. This is not true, of American educational television. Early television sets produced a black-and-white picture. sets receive pictures in color. Further advances are being made in television technology. Scientists are adapting television so that people having a telephone conversation will be able to see each other on a small television screen. it seems probable that we will watch television more often in the future than we do at the present time. (Bander 1978:94)
Step 3. At this final step, a student connects two paragraphs by means of an appropriate transitional device. At this point, the student must demonstrate his awareness of the relationship between two paragraphs as well as the organization and meaning of each paragraph.
Arnaudet, Martin L., and Mary Ellen Barrett. 1981. Para graph development. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Pren tice-Hall. Bander, Robert G. 1978. American English rhetoric. 2nd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Barnes, Don et al. 1978. Drifting snowflakes: Reading, think ing, and reasoning skills program. Austin, Texas: Steck Vaughn. Carr, Donna H. 1967. A second look at teaching reading and composition. TESOL Quarterly, 1, 1. Chaplen, Frank. 1970. Paragraph writing. London: Oxford University Press. Dehghanpisheh, Elaine. 1979. Bridging the gap between con trolled and free composition: Controlled rhetoric at the upper-intermediate level. TESOL Quarterly, 13, 4. Donald, Robert B. et al. 1978. Writing clear paragraphs. En glewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Donley, Michael. 1976. The paragraph in advanced composi tion: A heuristic approach. English Language Teaching Journal, 30, 3. Dubin, Fraida, and Elite Olshtain. 1980. The interface of writ ing and reading. TESOL Quarterly, 14, 3. Erazmus, Edward T. 1960. Second language composition teaching at the intermediate level. Language Learning, 10, 1 & 2. Friend, Jewell A. 1971. Writing English as a second language. Glencoe, Illinois: Scott, Foresman. Horn, Vivian. 1977. Composition steps. ed. Esther Rosman. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Johnson, Keith. 1981. Communicate in writing. Essex: Long man Group. Johnston, Susan S., and Jean Zukowski/Faust. 1981. Keys to composition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Kaplan, Robert B. 1966. Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language Learning, 16, 1 & 2. 1967. Contrastive rhetoric and the teaching of composition. TESOL Quarterly, 1, 4. 1972. The anatomy of rhetoric: Prolegomena to a functional theory of rhetoric. In Language and the teacher: A series in applied linguistics, 8. Philadelphia: The Center for Curriculum Development. Martin, Anne V. et al. 1977. Guide to language and study skills for college students of English as a second language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Pincas, Anita. 1970. Writing in paragraphs. English Language Teaching Journal, 24, 2. Taylor, Barry P. 1981. Content and written form: A two-way street. TESOL Quarterly, 15, 1. Watson, Cynthia B. 1982. The use and abuse of models in the ESL writing class. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 1. Yorkey, Richard C. 1982. Study skills for students of English. New York: McGraw-Hill. n.d. An unpublished handout for the TESL program at St. Michael's College, Winooski, Vermont.
Directions: Read the following two paragraphs, and connect them by adding an appropriate transitional device. Add proper punctuation if necessary. English is an international language. Not only the people who live in English-speaking countries such as the United States, England, Australia, and New Zealand, but also the people whose native language is not English speak English for business or education. so many people go to language institutes in Japan. Although they eagerly hope to learn to speak English, it is not easy to become fluent in another language; in fact, many of them give up studying English.
Arapoff, Nancy. 1968. Controlled rhetoric frames. English Language Teaching Journal, 23, 1. 1968. The semantic role of sentence connectors in extra-sentence logical relationships. TESOL Quarterly, 2, 4. 1970. Writing: A thinking process. English Teaching Forum, 8, 3. Page 26
quired by the complex group of attitudes and expressions about future time that we have in English. As we have seen, our idea of the future is not one, but several, and there are probably additional finer shades within the ones I have described. I hope that what I have suggested here will stimulate further thinking about the complexities of the tense most of us assume our students know so well.
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offer some suggestions for classroom activities that may help toward this end. I don't claim originality for most of these activities, but rather seek to pass on activities that I have used successfully in the classroom relating to these future tenses. I hope that teachers may find them useful. As a way of having students work with present assertions about future occurrences, getting students to explain to (and ask) each other about intended activities tomorrow, next weekend, or next holiday can provide ample opportunities for practice of this future notion. Practice of the marked intonations denoting resolve or promise will probably require more elaborate activities, such as roleplays or skits. One such roleplay involves going to a fortune teller, hearing one's fortune, and then challenging its accuracy, whereupon the fortune teller reacts with a strong marked future in defense of his forecasting abilities, such as You will meet a handsome stranger next month! In setting up such a roleplay, students themselves can construct the "fortunes” that the "clients" are going to hear. This roleplay also lends itself nicely to practice of the continuous future, making use of such utterances as This time next year you'll be traveling. ... The possible "predictable" situations are limited only by your and your students' imaginations. For arranged or scheduled future actions, television and radio program schedules from the daily newspapers serve as current and topical material for students to work with in the classroom. What's on this evening at five P.M.? Another possibility is for the students to write out their own personal agendas for the next day (week) and then have students try to pick out arranged and scheduled activities from others by using the current expression. To give students practice in making more matter-offact pronouncements about the future, roleplays such as “weather forecaster” could serve the purpose. Tomorrow in the eastern part of the country there will be rain . . . For more advanced classes a roleplay involving a computer-dating agency is suggested. Have students construct informal "personality profiles” and then act out the situation where such personalities come into the computer dating service asking for a dating partner. The "dating counselor" is then led to produce utterances such as Oh, you'll want a man (woman) with ... or You'll like someone with . . The constructing of these personality profiles has a great deal of “fun potential,” along with its learning potential. Finally, the notion of speculation could be elicited by a roleplay involving two inmates in a prison who are about to be released, and who are speculating about what they'll do when they attain their freedom. I envision utterances along the lines of Tomorrow I think I'll first go and have a good meal or I think I'll look up my buddy Fred as being produced from this kind of activity. I'm sure that these activities are not the only possibilities for eliciting the varied responses from students re
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