Sunday 30 November 2008

Plan for the assignment

Topic: language policy in Japan
1 Introduction
2 English as a global language
Globalisation (economic merit), parentocracy, national curriculum, variety of English
3 Ainu and Okinawan as minority languages
Authority, language maintenance, language death
4 Conclusion

Friday 28 November 2008

Yet Another Early-Start Languages Policy in Europe

Yet Another Early-Start Languages Policy in Europe: Poland This Time! By Janet Enever (2007)

New Words
-It is mandatory for blood banks to test all donated blood for the virus.
-The trade balance has been in deficit for the past five years.
-We couple the name of Aomori with the idea of apples.
-Social engineering is the attempt to change society and to deal with social problems according to particular political beliefs, for example by changing the law.
-Newspaper propagates news and ideas.
-He agreed to their visit with the proviso that they should stay no longer than one week.
-She was standing amid the ruins of the castle.
-Power can be intoxicating.
-The President’s inaugural address was great.
-This painting is indisputably one of his finest works.

Summary
A majority of European countries have started to teach language at school earlier because of the economic merit, the EU recommendations and the parentocracy. Early start has advantages in that children will acquire better pronunciation, learn faster and more efficiently and achieve a higher language skill at last. It is difficult to choose a language for some countries. They left the choice to the regional or local authorities. On the other hand, Poland decided to introduce only English at early schooling stage, though some Poles considered that German is also an important language.

Liberalisation, privatisation, modernization, and schooling in India

Liberalisation, privatisation, modernization, and schooling in India: an interview with Krishna Kumar by Chaise LaDousa (2007)

New Word
-She wrested a secret from her friend.
-The only stipulation is that the topic you choose must be related to your studies.
-The road follows the natural contours of the coastline.
-These issues resonated with the voters.
-He is seeking after a better life.
-These discoveries raise intriguing questions.
-Our society is secular.
-He endowed each son with a million dollars.
-They began to lose momentum in the second half of the game.

Summary
People in the low status think that they can overcome poverty due to the education. Children worked before instead of studying at school because parents didn’t know the importance of education. Now the situation has changed dramatically. A large number of children go to school which is in bad situation. Parents started to focus on private school. States schools remain bad, but children may get a chance at a private school. People started to notice that the God cannot help them nor save a small child life. They feel the politics or governance is bad. This leads to secularization, though Hinduism and castle levels were important before. Globalisation has a great impact on Indian society and education. The spread of the new technology such as television and the Internet has changed the roles of parents and teachers and people now can access to privacy.

Wednesday 26 November 2008

Variations of RP

Accents of English 2: The British Isles by J. C. Wells (1982)

Gimson’s varieties of RP (1980)
Conservative RP is ‘used by the older generation and, traditionally, by certain professions or social groups’.
General RP is ’most commonly in used and typified by the pronunciation adopted by the BBC’.
Advanced RP is ‘mainly used by young people of exclusive social groups-mostly of the upper classes, but also, for prestige value, in certain professional circles’.

Wells’s varieties of RP
RP consists of mainstream RP (U-RP and adoptive RP) and Near-RP
Upper-crust RP (U-RP) is accent for upper class people
Adoptive RP is ‘variety of RP spoken by adults who did not speak RP as children’. The speaker of adoptive RP tend to retain their native accent of English and the both native and adoptive accents often appear in the case of informal or formal situation. It is not easy for them to control elision, assimilation, smoothing, /r/,/hw/, /t/. /i:/, /u:/ and diphthongs.

Near-RP is accent which doesn’t apply to the definition of RP but includes regional one slightly.

Received Pronunciation (RP)

Accents of English 1: An Introduction by J. C. Wells (1982)

RP
The meaning of “received” is “generally accepted”. RP is the accent which has the highest prestige in England. It is also the most general type of educated British pronunciation. It is characteristic of the upper and upper middle class socially. From the perspective of occupations, barrister, stockbroker and diplomat tend to speak RP. Less than 10% people in England could be RP speakers. There are 19 vowels in the RP system. On the other hand, General American has 15 vowels.

Intereference, Transfer and Universals

Bilingualism Second Edition by Suzanne Romaine (1995)

-Bilingual children aged 3 or under cannot differentiate their two languages.

Studies of Type 6 Child Bilingualism

Bilingualism Second Edition by Suzanne Romaine (1995)

Burling’s Study (1959)
It is a child who heard only English until he was about 17 months. After that, he went to India and Garo was his dominant language there because there were only monolingual Garo speakers in his environment. When he was nearly 3 years, he had clearly separate vowel systems, but he never acquired the consonant systems. Replacements of the English consonants were used for the Garo ones.

Three articles for the second assignment (Issue)

Current Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills by Eli Hinkel (2006)
The article focuses on L2 speaking, listening, reading and writing from the four current perspectives on L2 teaching; the decline of methods, bottom-up and top-down skills, new knowledge about English, and integrated and multiple skills taught in context. The author deals with teaching to young learners.
Complexities of Identity Formation: A Narrative Inquiry of an EFL Teacher by Amy B. M. Tsui (2007)
The article is about Minfang’s experience both as an English learner and an English teacher. It deals with Wenger’s theory, CLT in China and Minfang’s identity. I will choose this article because it is easier for me to comment and link with my experience in Japan. In addition, I can use other articles about CLT which I read already.
Mapping the Scope of Theory in TESOL by Tim McNamara (2008)
The article is quite short, but focuses on a lot of various theories; psycholinguistics, individualistic psychology, sociology, anthropology and social psychology. You need to deal with Chomsky, Hymes, Fishman and so forth.

Sunday 23 November 2008

Language ideology, ownership and maintenance

Language ideology, ownership and maintenance: the discourse of the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua
Opportunities and Challenges of Bilingualism edited by Li W, Dewaele and Housen, A (2002)

New Words
-She seems to feel ambivalent about her new job.
-He succeeded by dint of hard work.
-These results accord closely with our predictions.
-He exerted all his authority to make them accept the plan.
-The election victory is a clear endorsement of the policies.
-Her second marriage was likewise unhappy.
-There will be only about 500 applicants at best.
-Sociolect is a variety of a language that the members of a particular social class or social group speak.
-Japan is prone to earthquakes.
-He is always telling jokes at the expense of others.

Summary
Quechua is thought to be a language of the noble in Cusco under the Incas and the true native tongue of all Peruvians. The Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua (the Academia) contributed to the language maintenance. The official status was established by the Academia. Quechua started to be incorporated in the school curriculum. However, daily Quechua speakers are regarded as peasants. And the role of the Academia is different from a language academy as commonly understood. As a result of this, the support for the language maintenance is complex and unclear.

Saturday 22 November 2008

Language as a Contributing Factor in Conflicts

Language as a Contributing Factor in Conflicts Between States and Within States
Language and Conflict edited by Sue Wright (1998)

New Words
-Etymology is the study of the origin and history of words and their meanings.
-He is demonized by the media.
-It is impossible to discern a number of different techniques in her work.
-A number of the monuments are of considerable antiquity.
-The declaration proclaimed the full sovereignty of the republic.
-The country has a quota system for accepting refugees.
-These changes are bound to have widespread social ramifications.
-Though a talented player, he was completely eclipsed by his brother.
-The President’s visit was intended to cement the alliance between the two countries.
-The government’s economic policies have created a marked cleavage between the rich and the poor.
-He took these actions purely in the furtherance of his own career.
-The crisis helped to weld the party together.
-The rebels finally managed to oust the government from power.
-I have a provision of food against a disaster.
-South America is really the most homogeneous in a way of populations.

Summary
Language has played an important role in nation building and warfare. There are two important European models for the nation building process; France as the contractual nation and German as the ethno-linguistic nation. In France, territory is thought to be important. Linguistic and cultural cohesion and unification were promoted through warfare and primary education given by the medium of French. In German, blood and belongings were the important factors as membership when Germany consisted of 350 small states and cities. Now language as mother tongue is more important marker. In terms of warfare, the novel and newspaper as well as army played key roles to promote a single lingua franca and form national identity. At the end of the 21th century, trend of devolution, autonomy and secession are prevailing. In the case of the collapse of Yugoslavia, there was a lack of communication. They were different politically, not linguistically because the majority of four different varieties speakers could do. On the other hand, devolution of political power causes the revival of the minority languages such as Welsh and Lallans, which is a dialect in the central Scotland, particularly in Glasgow. People in Wales and Glasgow will not be monolingual because they need English for wider communication. The languages are used as a marker of identity.

Friday 21 November 2008

Vowel harmony and agglutinative language

A dictionary of Linguistics & phonetics fifth edition by David Crystal (2003)

Vowel harmony
All the vowels in a word share certain features. For example, they are all articulated with the front of the tongue, all are rounded and so forth. It is found in Turkish or Hungarian. And Japanese language has vowel harmony partly. The same vowel sound continues in a word such as ka ra da (body) and ko ko ro (heart).

Agglutinative language
It is a type of language and focuses on the characteristics of the word. A word can be divided into a few morphemes such as dis/establish/ment. It is seen in Turkish and Japanese.

Types of Bilingual Acquisition in Childhood

Bilingualism Second Edition by Suzanne Romaine (1995)

Type1: ‘One Person-One language’
Type2: ‘Non-dominant Home Language’/’One language-One environment’
Type3: ‘Non-dominant Home Language without Community support’
Type4: ‘Double Non-dominant Home Language without Community Support’
Type5: ‘Non-native Parents’
Type6: ‘Mixed languages’

Ebru’s case-Type6
Parents: The parents are bilingual.
Community: Sectors of community may also be bilingual.
Strategy: Parents code-switch and mix languages.

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Similarities between Turkish and Japanese

-Atlac Languages (SOV structure, agglutinative language, vowel harmony)
-A few words have both same meaning and pronunciation.
-The pronunciation of the progressive form
-Pro-drop language

Creating the basic motivational conditions

Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom by Zoltan dornyei (2001)

New words
-A good dictionary is indispensable for learning a foreign language.
-I soon discerned from her silence that she was angry.
-Her opinions are embodied in this book.
-The mayor enlisted every citizen in the clean-up campaign.
-These children have a huge reserve of latent talent.
-Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.
-Some girls formed a clique that shut out other students.
-He is a computer nerd.
-He’s a nasty little creep!

Interesting points
-Students motivation is influenced by a teacher.
-It is important to express enthusiasm such as positive attitudes and interests in the topic and share them with the students.
-‘All for one and one for all!’ is the three Musketeers’ motto, which sounds a bit trite.
-Pygmalion effect refers to there is a good chance that your students can reach high levels of achievement if you have high expectations about them.
-It is important to ‘establish relationship of mutual trust and respect with the learners’.
-Three linchpins of Carl Roger’s humanistic psychology area acceptance, empathy and congruence, which is very important in the development of student-centered teaching.
-The use of humour is a good way to improve the classroom atmosphere.

Tuesday 18 November 2008

Background knowledge of motivation

Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom by Zoltan dornyei (2001)

New Words
-A number of pupils have been truanting regularly.
-He is sullen about the results of the examination.
-Sit up straight. Don’t slouch.
-The weather made her lethargic.
-Teachers need a skill to deal with anti-learning influences of deviant children.
-She understood the importance of establishing a close rapport with clients.

Main points
-‘The learner’s enthusiasm, commitment and persistence are key determinants of success or failure’.
-‘Motivation is a convenient way of talking about a concept which is generally seen as a very important human characteristic but which is also immensely complex’.
-‘Motivation is a general way of referring to the antecedents (i.e. the causes and origins)’.
-‘Motivation explains why people decide to do something, how hard they are going to pursue it and how long they are willing to sustain the activity’.
-‘Classroom is the place where they grow up. They acquire skills and learn about the world, make friends, fall in love, rebel against the previous generation, find out who they are and what the purpose of life is…’
-‘Learning a foreign language always entails learning a second language culture to some degree’.(Douglas Brown, 1989:65)
-‘Facilitation, not control, should be the guiding idea in attempts to motivate humans‘.
-‘Motivational strategies are techniques that promote the individual’s goal-related behavior and refer to those motivational influences that are consciously exerted to achieve some systematic and enduring positive effect’.

Monday 17 November 2008

Introduction of motivation

Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom by Zoltan dornyei (2001)

New Words
-The only way to improve is through hard work and dogged perseverance.
-He worked with renewed vigour and determination.

Main points
-Motivation has a ‘very important role in determining success or failure in any learning situation’.
-Motivational strategies are ‘methods and techniques to generate and maintain the learners’ motivation’.

Attitudes, Orientations, and Motivations

Attitudes, Orientations, and Motivations in Language Learning: Advances in Theory, Research, and Applications by Zoltan Dornyei

-Three different forms of Gardner’s (1985) motivation theory is integrative orientation, integrativeness and integrative motive.
-Alternative theoretical approaches are cognitive approaches in psychological research such as self-determination theory (intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, student autonomy), attribution theory (causal attribution) and goal theory (specificity and frequency of the goal) and Schumann’s neurobiological theory (stimulus appraisal in novelty, pleasantness, good/need significance, coping potential and self-and social image; mental foraging).
-The classroom environment such as course-specific motivational components, teacher-specific motivational components and group-specific motivational components started to be examined. These situated approaches have three research directions; the willingness to communicate (WTC), task motivation and learning strategies.
-A process-orientated approach is needed to capture dynamic character and temporal variation. In the motivational process, there are three phases; preactional stage, actional stage and postactional stage.
-Research on L2 motivation have two areas; the systematic development of motivational strategies and the formulation of self-motivating strategies. Motivational strategies have four parts; creating the basic motivational conditions, generating initial student motivation, maintaining and protecting motivation as well as encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation. Self-motivating strategies consist of five classes; commitment control strategies, metacognitiue control strategies, satisfaction control strategies, emotion control strategies and environmental control strategies.

Saturday 15 November 2008

Bilingualism and Language Cognitive Development

Bilingualism and Language Cognitive Development by Elena Nicoladis
An Introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes edited by Jeanette Altarriba and Roberto R. Heredia (2008)

Delay in Language Development
-Vocabulary size of bilingual children in a language is smaller than that of monolingual children because of the less frequent experience and the delay may be limited to the first five years of acquisition.
-Bilingual children need more time to interact in either language than monolingual children for acquisition.
Acceleration in Language Development
-When bilingual children have two similar underlying structures in both languages, the knowledge of one language can accelerate the usage of the other language. The linguistic development of bilingual children might be faster than that of monolingual children.
Cross-Linguistic Transfer
-It means “the structural influence of one language on another”. When bilingual children have two different language structures, they have to choose between them. Cross-Linguistic Transfer appears in their speech production, especially word order and pronunciation.
Cognitive Differences

-There are cognitive differences between monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingual children have advantages in terms of communicative competence, theory of mind, gesture use and control of attention.

Canterbury Cathedral

It was established in 597AD when St Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory the Great as a missionary. There was a struggle between church and king for control of the country and Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in the Cathedral in 1170. Since his canonization, Canterbury has attracted thousands of pilgrims, as told famously in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Friday 14 November 2008

Language Europe?

Language Europe? By Kirk Sullivan & Janet Enever
Globalisation and Europeanisation in Education in Europe editied by Robertson, S.L. & Dale, R (2008)

New Words
-We heard every strand of political opinion.
-The bank had no mandate to honour the cheque.
-We had doubts about the validity of their argument.
-A degree is an essential prerequisite for employment at this level.
-These tasks were repetitive, lengthy and lacking any intrinsic interest.
-Please keep your comments pertinent to the topic under discussion.
-Our confidence in the team has been seriously undermined by their recent defeats.
-The team needs players who complement each other.
-Appearances can often be deceptive (things are not always what they seem to be).
-The constant presence if the media was very intrusive.
-Doctors are not infallible.
-With this new movie he has consolidated his position as the country’s leading director.
-His resignation precipitated a leadership crisis.

Summary
In Sweden, which is one of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), the use of English has been increased in higher education due to the Bologna process. There are a few negative effects of this. A Swedish lecturer who teaches in English has a frustration of the quality of the job because of the use of English. And using English by non-English native speakers could lead to students misunderstanding. The student’s low English competence could accelerate it. Supporting and training lecturer and student are needed for a success. At primary school level, English has been chosen as a foreign language in the former Soviet satellite countries. In addition, English has started to be taught at earlier age in most of the European countries. However, policies of early language learning (ELL) are not the same among the countries. Rural areas have difficulties with teacher training and attracting qualified teachers.

The Bologna Process

The aim is to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and to promote worldwide through international cooperation and academic exchange of European students and staff as well as those who from other parts of the world. It started with 29 European countries in 1999 and now it consists of 46 countries. By 2010, it will remove the obstacles to student and education staff mobility, offer their future career or support their development and establish a high-quality higher education across Europe.

Thursday 13 November 2008

Language Development in Bilingual Children

An Introduction to Bilingualism: principles and processes edited by Jeanette Altarriba and Roberto R. Heredia
Bilingual Research Methods by Victoria Marian

Positive effects
-Metacognitive skills are increased and can be thought differently and flexibly.
-Comprehension can be better.
Negative effects
-Lexical acquisition is slow.
-The number of vocabulary is smaller than monolingual children, though the technique of assessment is often against bilingual children because they are assessed in only one of their two languages.

Wednesday 12 November 2008

Types of Bilingualism

Bilingualism Second Edition by Suzanne Romaine (1995)

Weinreich (1968)
-The coordinate bilingual has two sets of concepts and two lexicons connected to them.
-The compound bilingual has one set of conceptions and two lexicons connected to them.
-“The sub-coordinate bilingual has a primary set of meaning established through their first language, and another linguistic system attached to them.”

Lambert, Havelka and Crosby (1958)
-“The coordinate group was represented by bilinguals who had acquired their languages in separate contexts such as at home vs outside the home, those who had used different languages with their parents and those who had acquired their languages in distinct national or cultural settings. It would have a similar or the same set of connotative meanings for the equivalent items in their two languages.”
-“The compound bilingual group contained individuals who used both languages indiscriminately with both parents, or inside and outside the home, or who had learned the second language at school through traditional methods of vocabulary drill and translation. It would show more divergences in their associations. There was no difference between compound bilinguals and those coordinate bilinguals who had learned the two languages in the same cultural setting. The two types of language systems had been given empirical support.”

Lambert and Fillenbaum (1959)
They compared compound and coordinate bilinguals who had suffered brain damage and were aphasic. In the coordinate group, the damage tended to be limited to either language. The trouble in compound bilinguals had a tendency to take place in both languages.

-The difference between compound and co-ordinate bilingualism is not clear.

Monday 10 November 2008

Creating word-meaning awareness

by Paula Jullian (2000)

New Words
-The new car design incorporates all the latest safety features.
-Inflation has reached a plateau.
-This word has several shades of meaning.
-The storm resumed with even greater intensity.
-The word ‘professional’ has connotations of skill and excellence.
-Her latest novel was dissected by the critics.
-He shows great discernment in his choice of friends.
-Science can penetrate many of nature’s mysteries.
-Prefix ‘un’ is a classifier that shows the word is negative.
-‘Dog’ and ‘cat’ are hyponyms of ‘animal’.
-‘Fruit’ is the superordinate/hypernym of ‘apple’, ‘orange’, etc.
-The theory of natural selection was first propounded by Charles Darwin.
-Patience is one of the most important attributes in a teacher.
-His actions are in contradiction to his words.
-The advertisements depict smoking as glamorous and attractive.
-They tried to discern what really happened.
-She went on to elaborate her argument.

Summary
This activity for creating word-raising awareness has 6 steps; collecting lexical sets, classification, word mapping, contextualization, using the new words and presentation of the research. It helps upper-intermediate and advanced learners expand their vocabulary. Their vocabulary is limited and they tend to overuse simple terms on the production side and misunderstand on the reception side. Through this activity, they learn to approach new alternative terms.

Saturday 8 November 2008

Beyond single words

Beyond single words: the most frequent collocations in spoken English by Dongkwang Shin & Paul Nation (2008)

New words
-Cities are designated on this map by red dots.
-The money is left at my disposal.

Summary
This study offers a list of the most frequent spoken collocations. Collocation is a combination of two or more words frequently used together. A collocation consists of a pivot word and another word or other words. Ten million words from the spoken section of British National Corpus (BNC) were used as the data source. The top collocation is ‘you know’ with 27,348 times and the third frequent collocation is ‘a bit’ with 7,766 occurrences in the list. Interjection and amplifies are used much more frequently. Therefore, the most frequent collocations could be helpful for improvement of ‘the learners’ language fluency and native-like selection of language use’, especially in an elementary speaking course.

Grammar and vocabulary

Grammar and vocabulary: showing the connections by Suzan Hunston, Gill Francis, and Elizabeth Manning (1997)

New words
-He amassed a fortune from silver mining.
-We did not want to put away any undue pressure on them.
-Polio has been virtually eradicated in Brazil.
-Over-cultivation has impoverished the soil.

Summary
Teacher should pay attention to patterns as an important aspect of grammar and vocabulary. A pattern consists of a combination of words and a word has a particular meaning in a particular pattern. Patterns promote understanding because some of them have a clear meaning. Learners can guess the meaning through the pattern when they come across an unfamiliar word. In addition, the knowledge of pattern promotes accuracy, fluency and flexibility.

Friday 7 November 2008

Some misconceptions about communicative language teaching

Some misconceptions about communicative language teaching by Geoff Thomson (1996)

New Words
-Poverty is a recurrent them in her novels.
-From the vintage point of the present, the war seems to have achieved nothing.
-How do you put this into words?
-Colours like red convey a sense of energy and strength.
-With hindsight it is easy to say they should not have released him.
-The excellent menu is complemented by a good wine list.
-I came to London for preliminary survey.
-The product was called in because of a defect in construction.

Communicative language teaching (CLT)
-‘It is established as the dominant theoretical model in ELT’.
-There are a lot of confusion and completely different perceptions in CLT.

Misconception1-Explicit grammar teaching is avoided.
Grammar is essential to communicate effectively. Learning grammar through CLT leads a natural development. Learners could communicate quite naturally by being conducted in English.
Misconception 2-Only speaking is emphasized.
It is thought teacher talking time (TTT) should be reduced and student talking time (STT) should be increased. However, communication should be thought broadly because ‘communication does not only take place through speech’.
Misconception 3-CLT means pair work (role play)
Role play is useful as a follow-up pair work, but pair work can be used for a preliminary activities as well such as doing a grammatical exercise and analyzing the new language structures.
Misconception 4-CLT depends on the teacher’s language proficiency.
‘CLT is an approach developed by and for native speaker teachers’. However, teachers need a different balance of proficiency skills and they have an opportunity to develop their skills.

Thursday 6 November 2008

How culturally appropriate is the communicative approach?

How culturally appropriate is the communicative approach? By Greg Ellis (1996)

New words
-The astronaut was attuned to weightlessness in space.
-Shyness inhibited the new student from talking freely in class.
-They needed to assimilate their way of thinking to new surroundings.
-Promotion is dependent on ability. (=Promotion depends on ability.)
-She was vacillating between two possible courses of action.
-The movie based on the novel distorted the original story.

Summary
Communicative approaches help students communicate with native speakers and communicative competence is regarded as linguistic knowledge and ‘the skill in using this knowledge’. This is used for Asian students as well. However, it has unsuitable aspects because groups are focused, process is important, meaning is emphasized rather than form and approach is teacher-centered in Asia. There is misunderstanding between ESL and EFL. English as a second language (ESL) is for development of communication competence within an English-speaking environment. The role of the ESL teacher is a facilitator using student-centred approach. On the other hand, English as a foreign language (EFL) is designed for the national curriculum or government policy and students don’t have to communicate using the target language outside the classroom in a daily life. Due to the cross-cultural interaction, students tend to experience culture shock and various kinds of responses are observed; ‘over-assimilation’ and ‘self-segregation’ (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 1983), rejection or exaggerating their first culture; rejecting or exaggerating their second culture; vacillating between the two culture or synthesizing them (Bochner, 1982), and so forth. Therefore, the ideal role of the EFL teacher is a cultural mediator. ‘Integration between Western and Eastern teaching practices’ can be useful in an Asian setting.

Tuesday 4 November 2008

Learning and teaching different types of grammar

Second Language Learning and Language Teaching by Vivian Cook (2008)

Keywords
Focus on FormS
by Long (1991): deliberate discussion of grammar without reference to meaning
Focus on form (FonF): discussion of grammar and vocabulary arising from meaningful language in the classroom

Interesting points
-Prescriptive grammar (spelling and punctuation), traditional grammar (school grammar), structural grammar (phrase structure), grammatical competence (knowledge in the mind)
-‘Japanese does not have plural forms for nouns.’
-content words (in a dictionary), function words (in a grammar book)
-‘The morpheme is the smallest element that has meaning.’
-Universal Grammar (UG) is ‘the knowledge of grammar in the mind as made up of two components: ‘principles’ that all languages have in common and ‘parameters’ on which they vary’.
-Children start to say sentences without subjects at the beginning.
-Japanese is a pro-drop language. Japanese sentences do not have to have subjects.
-‘Japanese has the order phrase + head of phrase. e.g. noun phrase followed by postposition ‘Nihon ni’ (Japan in)’

The order of difficulty for the eight grammatical morpheme
plural ‘-s’, progressive ‘-ing’, copula forms if ‘be’, auxiliary form of ‘be’, definite and indefinite articles ‘the’ and ‘a’, irregular past tense, third person ‘-s’, possessive ‘’s’
-‘L2 learners have the same order’ regardless of the first language.
-‘Adults have roughly the same order as children.’
Principles of language
-locality (how to make questions)
-‘Japanese does not form questions by moving elements of the sentence around.’
Parameters of variation
-pro-drop parameter
-In ‘non-pro-drop’ languages such as English and German, the subject is needed in declarative sentences.

Monday 3 November 2008

Background to second language acquisition research and language teaching

Second Language Learning and Language Teaching by Vivian Cook (2008)

Keywords

Second language: ‘A language acquired by a person in addition to his mother tongue’ (UNESCO)
Contrastive analysis: this research method compared the descriptions of two languages in grammar or pronunciation to discover the differences between them; these were then seen as difficulties for the students that needed to be overcome
Second and foreign language: broadly speaking, a second language is for immediate use within the same country; a foreign language is for long-term future use in other countries

Interesting points
-‘Language is at the centre of human life. We use it to express our love or our hatred, to achieve our goals and further our careers, to gain artistic satisfaction or simple pleasure, to pray or to blaspheme. Through language we plan our lives and remember our past; we exchange ideas and experiences; we form our social and individual identities. Language is the most unique thing about human beings.’
-‘Knowing another language may mean: getting a job; a chance to get educated; the ability to take a fuller part in the life of one’s own country or the opportunity to emigrate to another; an expansion of one’s literary and cultural horizons; the expression of one’s political opinions or religious beliefs; the chance to talk to people on a foreign holiday. A second language affects people’s careers and possible futures, their lives and their very identities.’
-Children who learn a second language can understand better in their first language.
-‘People who speak a second language are more creative and flexible at problem solving than monolinguals.’
-‘The majority of an English class will be conducted in English’ (MEXT, 2003) in Japan. MEXT stands for Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, science and Technology.

Meaning of ‘language’ (Cook, 2007)
-Lang1: a representation system known by human beings-‘human language’
-Lang2: an abstract entity-‘the English language’
-Lang3: a set of sentences-everything that has been or could be said-‘the language of the Bible’
-Lang4: the possession of a community-‘the language of French people’
-Lang5: the knowledge in the mind of an individual ‘I have learnt French as a foreign language for eight years’

Useful links
www.hoddereducation.com/viviancook.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SLA/index.htm

Introduction to the Study of Bilingualism

Bilingualism by Suzanne Romaine (1995)

New Words

-The book was written for professional and layman alike.
-Yoruba is a language spoken by the Yoruba people of Africa, now an official language of Nigeria.
-He was stigmatized as a coward and a liar.

Main Points
-‘Bilingualism exists within cognitive systems of individuals as well in as families and communities’
-‘Bilingualism has been treated as a special case,’ but from a global societal perspective, most of the world population speak more than one language. Therefore, monolingualism is a special case.
-‘Many bilinguals might know one language better’.
-Bilinguals tend to lack in some aspects of communicative competence including phonology, grammar, lexicon and semantics for one of the languages.
-Bilinguals might not know when and where their speech style should be changed.

Sunday 2 November 2008

The concept of ‘World English’

The concept of ‘World English’ and its implication for ELT by Kanavillil Rajagopalan (2004)

New Words
-The cat was poised to jump on the bird.
-Some children undergo a complete transformation when they become teenagers.
-He had long coveted the chance to work with a famous musician.
-The monarchy is seen by many people as an anachronism in the modern world.
-This taste evades explanation.
-Make a note of it lest you might forget (in order not to forget).
-This is a history book sui generis.
-It was an altogether different situation.
-There are phenomena in nature that seem to defy logic.
-It is by no means possible to finish this work today.
-The newspaper has become the official mouthpiece of the opposition party.
-The constitution vests in the Japanese people the right of free speech.
-I would like to convey my gratitude to you on behalf of my family.
-No matter what happens, do not lose hope.

Summary
World English (WE) is a language spoken all over the world and nobody’s mother tongue. In other words, WE has no native speakers. It is estimated that WE speakers are twice as many as English native speakers and the number of WE speakers is growing faster and faster. WE is a completely unique linguistic phenomenon in that more and more people will use WE to communicate with non-English speakers rather than native English speakers. Now we need to cope with a large variety of accents of WE, though English has been studied in order to communicate with English native speakers,. WE is a mishmash of a wide variety of dialects and accents. Therefore, English native speakers will lose the status as EFL professionals because they are no longer model speakers of WE.