HBET1303

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Title:

The Principles of Communicative Language Teaching Methodology

Nama

Jamaliah binti Ahmad

No Matrik

700718025328002

No telefon

012-4321696

JANUARI 2012

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TABLE OF CONTENT PAGE

1. Question 1 1

1.1 Introduction 1

1.2 Fluency vs accuracy 2

1.3 Global errors vs locals errors 3-4

1.4 When and how to correct errors 4-5

2. Question 2 6

2.1 Lesson plan 6-7

2.2 Reflection 7

3. Question 3: The gist of KBSM 8

References 9

Appendices 10

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1. Question 1

1.1 Introduction

ESL learners have countless daily opportunities for listening and speaking in English as

they interact as students, workers, family members, community members, and other. Some

listening is non face-to-face, such as listening to movies and broadcast media, listening on the

phone, and listening to loudspeaker announcements. Most listening, however, combines short

bursts of face-to-face listening interspersed with speaking – such as discussions at the workplace,

social conversations with neighbours and colleagues, telephone conversations, and conversations

with the many service providers encountered daily – doctors, social workers, police officers,

store clerks, and school staff.

In each context, learners have a purpose for listening and a communication task. Listeners

may listen to obtain facts or to understand the main idea. They may need to distinguish question

words and respond appropriately. They may need to follow or give instructions or advice. Adult

learners may need to distinguish facts from opinions or express their own point of view. They

may need to relate what they hear to visual materials they are looking at. They may want to

connect with other people by sharing personal stories.

Many factors can interfere with listening and speaking to create confusions and

miscommunications. Misheard sounds and pronunciation errors, inappropriate word choices or

wrongly-used grammatical forms can lead to communication breakdowns. Breakdowns can have

significant consequences – embarrassment, unintended offense, missed appointments, inaccurate

processes, etc. ESL teachers have the opportunity to help adult ESL learners’ practice listening

and speaking in the safe environment of the classroom. Many textbooks contain listening

cassettes or CDs which give learners the opportunity to hear voices from a variety of speakers

engaged in conversations on a variety of life skill topics. In addition, teachers can facilitate

listening and speaking activities that utilize pair work and group work. Every listening/speaking

activity should require a response; the listener should answer a question, follow a direction,

choose the correct object from alternatives, write a message, etc.

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1.2 Fluency vs accuracy

English is an international language which people from all over the world learn in order to communicate with each other. Accuracy and Fluency are two factors which can determine the success of English language students in the future. As far as teaching methodologies are concerned, very broadly speaking the communicative approach is the one that favours fluency the most, while the audio-lingual and grammar translation approaches favour accuracy. Typically, at beginner level when the students don't have enough language to worry about fluency, teachers tend to focus on accuracy. This carries on through to pre-intermediate level when fluency activities like discussions and debates are introduced. At intermediate level, when the students are reasonably independent language users, a mix of accuracy and fluency is used, with the focus shifting to fluency as students advance.

Accuracy is the ability to produce correct sentences using correct grammar and vocabulary. Accuracy is relative. A child in early primary isn't capable of the same level of accuracy as an adult. Teachers who concentrate on accuracy help their students to produce grammatically correct written and spoken English. Typical accuracy activities are: grammar presentations, gap-fill exercises, frame dialogues.

Fluency is the ability to read, speak, or write easily, smoothly, and expressively. In other words, the speaker can read, understand and respond in a language clearly and concisely while relating meaning and context. Fluency generally increases as learner’s progress from beginning to advanced readers and writers. Language teachers who concentrate on fluency help their students to express themselves in fluent English. They pay more attention to meaning and context and are less concerned with grammatical errors. Typical fluency activities are: role plays, speeches, communicative activities, games. Taken as a given that students' needs should always dictate what you teach them, the question of whether it is more important to work on accuracy or fluency in the language classroom remains.

Many teachers believe that fluency is a goal worth striving towards only with students who are at a fairly advanced level. Other teachers, strong in the belief that the learning of a language is about communication, feel that fluency should be the main goal in their teaching and that it should be practiced right from the start. More traditional teachers give accuracy paramount importance and test their students for accuracy and accuracy only! Often rigid educational systems where tests and exams are the focus will have students (and their traditional teachers) believe that language accuracy is what matters most, and giving the "correct" answers often becomes an obsession. Students who have been taught this way can complete any grammar gap-fill you care to give them, but will struggle to order a coffee in a real English speaking situation.

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1.3 Global errors vs local errors

The field of error analysis in SLA was established in the 1970s by S. P. Corder and

colleagues. A widely- available survey can be found in chapter 8 of Brown, 2000. Error

analysis was an alternative to contrastive analysis, an approach influenced by behaviorism

through which applied linguists sought to use the formal distinctions between the learners’ first

and second languages to predict errors. Error analysis showed that contrastive analysis was

unable to predict a great majority of errors, although its more valuable aspects have been

incorporated into the study of language transfer. A key finding of error analysis has been that

many learner errors are produced by learners making faulty inferences about the rules of the

new language.

Error analysts distinguish between errors, which are systematic and mistakes, which are

not. They often seek to develop a typology of errors. Error can be classified according to basic

type: omissive, additive, substitutive or related to word order. They can be classified by how

apparent they are: overt errors such as “I angry” are obvious even out of context, whereas

covert errors are evident only in context. Closely related to this is the classification according

to domain, the breadth of context which the analyst must examine and extent, the breadth of

the utterance which must be changed in order to fix the error. Errors may also be classified

according to the level of language: phonological errors, vocabulary or lexical errors, syntactic

errors and so on. They may be assessed according to the degree to which they interfere with

communication: global errors make an utterance difficult to understand, while local errors do

not. In the above example “I angry” would be a local error, since the meaning is apparent.

From the beginning, error analysis was beset with methodological problems. In

particular, the above typologies are problematic: from linguistic data alone, it is often

impossible to reliably determine what kind of error a learner is making. Also error analysis can

deal effectively only with learner production (speaking and writing) and not with learner

reception (listening and reading). Furthermore, it cannot account for learner use of

communicative strategies such as avoidance, in which learners simply do not use a form with

which they are uncomfortable for these reasons, although error analysis is still used to

investigate specific question in SLA, the quest for an overarching theory of learner errors has

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largely been abandoned. Today the study of errors is particularly relevant for focus on form

teaching methodology.

1.4 When and how to correct errors

The correction of errors is sometimes necessary and positive but some other times it has a

negative effect. Being able to know about our students individual learning styles and

preferences will give us the clue so as to know whether we should correct them or not and how

error correction could improve their linguistic and communicative competence. This section

suggests some insights on different ways of correction and their positive and negative effects,

so that teachers can use the correct techniques for better results. So as to start, it is important to

distinguish that there are two types of correction, the implicit and the explicit one. The problem

with the first one, i.e. feedback on error which takes the form of recast or repetitions may be

interpreted by the learners as a continuation of the conversation, therefore, explicit correction

may also be needed and it is more effective sometimes. Another problem implicit correction

can mislead us to be that teachers sometimes do not highlight where the error is, therefore, the

student may not realize where the focus of difficulty is and changes other elements which are

completely right. The most typical way of correcting is by interrupting the student before he

has finished speaking. This could have a negative effect, especially among anxious students as

they normally loose the track, forget what they were talking about and their anxiety levels are

increased.

Some other times teachers do not wait the time necessary for the student to assimilate the

correction. A useful technique is to wait, write down the correction and find correction at a

later time. This issue has to do with the Incubation Hypothesis which accounts that students

need an incubation period before the new structure starts to appear in their performance. This is

also another reason why teachers should correct an error which is performed by the student

some minutes later. Another problem occurs when teachers correct students’ errors which are

beyond the students´ level. They just correct them because it is not the English standard form

without realizing that this correction is beyond the students’ capacity. The problem with this is

also that the teacher has to stop and explain the new concept. Therefore, only those errors

which correspond to the grammar it is being learning should be corrected. Moreover, emphasis

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on error should be done on the lexicon, intonation and pronunciation because they are the main

areas for the understanding of the message. According to Vázquez (1987) pragmatics and

semantics play a more important role than morph syntax in the comprehension of the message,

so we should take this into account when deciding which type of errors to correct. A very

useful, practical and effective way of correction is the use of an inductive method in which the

teacher asks the student to correct himself (self-correction) and realize on what he did wrong.

This way it will allow the student to carry out an error processing which actually helps him

more to retain the right form in his mind. Another effective way of correction, especially if we

think of the teacher not only as the great source of knowledge but as a moderator or guide in

the language classroom is to wait until someone comes out with the right answer. It is also

important to encourage self correction rather than teacher correction and it is also very useful

to discuss correction with students.

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2. Question 2

2.1 Lesson Plan

Date : 10th February 2012

Day : Tuesday

Class : Form 1

No. of pupils : 30 pupils

Time : 9.10am – 10.10am (1 hour)

Theme : World of Knowledge

Topic : Follow Instruction

Language Skills : Listening and Speaking

Grammar items : Tenses (simple present and simple past)

Learning Outcome : By the end of the lesson pupils should be able to:-

i) understand what instructions are.

ii) recognize the importance of sequencing them.

Materials : Clothes, things in the classroom

Strategies : Game, Direct Teaching, Individual Activity and Group Activity

Context : In this lesson, pupils can practice listening, speaking and writing.

Induction set (5 minutes):

1. Teacher teaches pupils to play the game ‘Leading the Blind’:

i. Blindfold Pupil A and get him to stand at a certain position in the classroom.

Then, get him to turn round twice.

ii. Get Pupil B to stand at a corner of the classroom.

iii. Place obstacles (tables and chairs) between Pupils A and B.

2. Pupil B is to give instructions to Pupil A to move towards him, without bumping into the

obstacles.

Rationale : to arouse pupils’ interest on the topic

Presentation Stage (15 minutes):

3. Teacher discusses with pupils on the importance of instructions. Ask pupils:

i. What happens if the instructions were unclear?

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ii. What happens if the instructions were wrongly sequenced?

Explaining Language Feature:

4. Teacher explains that the instructions give the recipients information on how something

should be done in order to achieve a goal.

5. Teacher to give examples of instructions: recipes, origami, etc.

6. Teacher also highlights that written instructions can involve number sequencing or words

such as; ‘First’, ‘Next’, ‘Then’, ‘Finally’, etc.

Rationale: to focus on the language items learn.

Practise stage (15 minutes):

7. Teacher demonstrates making of an ‘apple pie’.

8. After demonstration,

- the high ability pupils are to recall and write out the instructions for making the

‘apple pie’.

- the middle ability pupils are to fill in missing information in the set of instructions for

making the ‘apple pie’.

- the low ability pupils are to fill in missing information in the set of instructions for

making the ‘apple pie’ using helping words.

Production stage (10 minutes):

9. Teacher puts pupils into groups.

10. Each group is given two sets of instructions, all mixed up. The pupils have to sort out the

instructions and arrange them in the correct sequence.

Closure (5 minutes):

11. Teacher asks one of the pupils to explain their answer.

12. Teacher suggested the correct answer

2.2 Conclusions

The activities done in an hour lesson were focused on the listening and speaking skills

where pupils need to listen and follow to the instruction by their friends and the teacher based on

the instruction given. Individual and group works were practice during the engagement. The

teacher works as facilitator whereby the pupils will definitely work individually and groups.

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3. The gist of KBSM

I agree with the KBSM curriculum and the policy of the educational system. There has

been a long time that our students being exposed to KBSM curriculum that produced many

graduates with in many aspects of knowledge.

KBSM or known as Kurikulum Bersepadu Sekolah Menengah was introduced in 1980 by

the government to build a well established curriculum for all secondary school. It was introduced

for language subject in 1988 and to all subjects in 1989. KBSM was the continuation of KBSR

Kurikulum Bersepadu Sekolah Rendah that is based on 3M (reading, writing and calculating).

The aim of KBSM is similar to KBSR that is to expand the individual potential as a whole,

balance and integrated and it covers the aspect of intellectual, spirit, emotion and physical to

produce a well balance, harmonious and good moral values individual. It was mainly design to

achieve the aims of the National Education Philosophy.

The exam-oriented education system is one of the major issues in KBSR and KBSM

curriculum. Every year we can see quite a number of such untoward incidents as a result of

examination failure, which simply implies a failure of our education system. The cause which

brought in by the KBSM curriculum puts so much emphasis on academic excellence alone. The

teachers are not the only the community to be blame. We too as a parents and society as a whole,

share the blame for the obsession with (A)s. Today school examinations have become like a

competition where we’ve being batting on our children. We got all out spending money, time

and energy to ensure our children win the competition with flying colours. Most of the time,

those who excel in exam were being over glorifying and tremendous psychological pressure

being placed to on the majority. This will cause a great amount of stress on students in school

these days. Those with average or even above average result are made to be useless and a failure

in school.

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REFERENCES

Allwright, R.L. 1986. “Why don´t learners learn what teachers teach?”. In Singelton and Little.

(eds) Language Learning in formal and informal contexts. Dublin: IRAAL.

Bartram, M., & R. Walton. 1991. Correction: A positive approach to language mistakes. Hove:

Language Teaching Publications

Carroll, S. & S. Merrill. 1993. “Explicit and Implicit Negative Feedback: An Empirical Study of

the Learning of Linguistic Generalizations”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,

v15 n3 p357-86 Sep 1993

Doughty, C. & Varela, E. 1998. “Communicative focus on form”. En C. Doughty & J. Williams

(Eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 114-138).

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edge,J. 1989. Mistakes and Correction.. Longman Keys to Language Teaching. Harlow:

Longman.

Horwitz, E.K. M.B. Horwitz & J. Cope. 1986. “Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety”.The

Modern Language Journal, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 125-132.

Iwashita,N. 2003. “Negative feedback and positive evidence in task-based interaction”. Studies

in Second Language Acquisition (2003), 25: pp. 1-36.

Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and Practices in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.

Lightbown, P. M. & N. Spada. 1999. How Languages are Learned. Oxford U.P.

Norrish, J. 1983. Language Learner and their Erros. London: Macmillan.

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Instruction unclear

Instruction wrongly sequenced

APPENDICES

Appendix 1

The instruction

Firstly, you have to walk 10 steps forward and turn to your left.

Next, walk about 10 steps forward and turn to your right.

Then, walk about 5 steps forward and turn to your right.

Finally, you are standing beside me.

Appendix 2

Mind mapping

i. What happens if the instructions were unclear?

ii. What happens if the instructions were wrongly sequenced?

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