IOANA MURAR ANA-MARIA TRANTESCU

AN INTRODUCTION TO APPLIED LINGUISTICS.

A RESOURCE BOOK

2016

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IOANA MURAR ANA-MARIA TRANTESCU

AN INTRODUCTION TO APPLIED LINGUISTICS.

A RESOURCE BOOK

Editura UNIVERSITARIA
Craiova, 2016

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Referenți științifici:
Prof. univ. dr. habil. Mariana NEAGU (Universitatea ”Dunărea
de Jos”, Galați)
Conf. univ. dr. Titela VÎLCEANU (Universitatea din Craiova)

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 CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND

APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TEACHING………….….. 7
1.1. The history of the term ………………………..........7
1.2. Introduction to English Language Teaching ……...8
1.3. Approaches to language teaching ………………...10
Topics for discussion and exercises …………………...35

CHAPTER II. TEACHING THE COMPONENTS OF

LANGUAGE…………………………………………………….37
2.1. Teaching pronunciation ………………………….. 37
2.2. Teaching vocabulary ………………………………38
Topics for discussion and exercises ………………….. 56
2.3. Teaching grammar ……………………………….. 58
2.4. Teaching discourse ……………………………….. 84
Topics for discussion and exercises ………………….. 85

CHAPTER III. TEACHING AND DEVELOPING

LANGUAGE SKILLS…………………………………………. 89
3.1. Teaching listening ………………………………... 89
3.2. Teaching speaking ……………………………….. 105
3.3. Teaching reading …………………………………. 121
3.4. Teaching writing …………………………………. 134
Topics for discussion and exercises ……………..…… 146

CHAPTER IV. CLASS MANAGEMENT................................ 155

4.1. Classroom organization….……………………… 155
4.2. Classroom Interaction…..…………………………156
4.3. Teacher’s Resources….…………………………… 158
4.4. Disruptive behavior………………………..……… 161
Topics for discussion and exercises ……………...……163

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CHAPTER V. PLANNING....................................................... 165
5.1. Textbooks and the syllabus …………………….... 165
5.2. Why planning? ……………………........................ 167
5.3. Main principles of lesson planning …………….…168
5.4. Aims and objectives ……………………................ 169
5.5. Selecting activities ………………………………... 170
5.6. Sequencing the stages of a lesson …………………170
5.7. Transition/Continuity ……………………………..172
5.8. Teaching Aids …………………………………...... 172
5.9. Timing ……………………....…………………….. 172
5.10. Revision and recycling ……………………….......173
5.11. Homework……………………....…………..…… 173
5.12. Evaluation……………………....…………...…… 173
Suggestions of lesson plans ……………………............ 175
Topics for discussion and exercises ……………...……198

CHAPTER VI. EVALUATION................................................. 199

6.1. Terminology …………………………………….… 199
6.2. Why and what do we evaluate?…………………... 199
6.3. How do we evaluate……………………………….. 200
Topics for discussion and exercises……………………205

GLOSSARY OF SELECTED TERMS...................................... 211

BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................217

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 CHAPTER I

APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND APPROACHES TO

LANGUAGE TEACHING

1.1. The history of the term

Applied Linguistics is a multidisciplinary branch of

linguistics which investigates and attempts to offer solutions to
language-related real-life problems. Some of the research domains
related to applied linguistics are education, psychology,
communication research, anthropology, and sociology.
Thus, Applied Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of
linguistics whose main sub-branches include language pedagogy,
second language acquisition, language planning, language
assessments, bilingualism and multilingualism, conversation
analysis, contrastive linguistics, sign linguistics, discourse analysis,
stylistics, pragmatics, forensic linguistics, and translation.
McArthur (1992: 77) defined Applied Linguistics as “the
application of linguistics to the study and improvement of language
teaching and learning, language planning, communication between
groups, speech therapy and the management of language handicap,
systems of communications, translating and interpreting,
lexicography”.
The term owes its origin to US language teaching
programmes during and after the Second World War, largely based
on L. Bloomfield’s Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign
Languages (1942). In Britain, the first School of Applied Linguistics
was established by J.C. Catford at the University of Edinburgh in
1956, and the Center for Applied Linguistics was set up in

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Washington, DC in 1959. Similar institutes have since been set up in
various parts of the world.
The bulk of the work of applied linguists to date has related
to language teaching and language learning and especially English as
a foreign or second language.
At the inception in the late 1950’s, Applied Linguistics was
principally concerned with language teaching, especially second /
foreign language teaching, to the point that the two terms basically
became synonymous (P. Strevens, Applied Linguistics: An Overview,
1992: 11). As we have already mentioned, over time, the field grew
and expanded to include other sub-fields unrelated to second/foreign
language teaching, such as language policy and planning, critical
discourse analysis, translation and interpretation, and lexicography.
However, this close association with second / foreign language
teaching still remains, and it is not surprising that some introductory
books to applied linguistics deal exclusively with language teaching
(R. T. Bell’s An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: Approaches and
Methods in Language Teaching, 1981).
Other introductory books present a somewhat larger scope to
the field, yet still dedicate a large amount of space to second / foreign
language teaching (W. Grabe and R. Kaplan’s Introduction to
Applied Linguistics, 1992).

1.2. Introduction to English Language Teaching

Where there was once consensus on the ‘right’ way to teach

foreign languages, many teachers now share the belief that a single
right way does not exist.
Language teaching methods include several approaches to
language teaching that will be briefly presented in this course such
as, the Grammar-Translation Method, the Audio-Lingual Method,
the Communicative Approach etc. Of course, the methods described
in this course of lectures represent only an abstraction. How a

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method is manifest in the classroom will depend heavily on the
individual teacher’s interpretation of its principles. Some teachers
prefer to practise one of the methods to the exclusion of others. Other
teachers prefer to pick and choose in a principled way among the
methodological options that exist, creating their own unique blend.
According to St. Krashen (1982), each method will be
evaluated using the following criteria:
i. requirements for optimal input
ii. comprehensible
iii. interesting/relevant
iv. not grammatically sequenced
v. quantity
vi. low filter level: researchers believe that language learners all
possess an affective filter which affects language acquisition. If a
student possesses a high filter they are less likely to engage in
language learning because of shyness, concern for grammar or
other factors.
Students possessing a lower affective filter will be more
likely to engage in language learning because they are less likely to
be impeded by other factors. The affective filter is an important
component of second language learning.
vii. provides tools for conversational management.
It is considered that language acquisition/learning contexts
should be shaped by 12 principles (Richards & Renandya, 2002:
11ff):
i. Automaticity - control of a relatively infinite number of language
forms.
ii. Meaningful learning, as opposed to rote learning, grounded in
long-term learning strategies.
iii. The anticipation of reward – tangible or intangible, short- or
long-term. Extrinsic motivation is more likely to create short-
term rewards, whereas the intrinsic one envisages long-term
satisfaction.

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iv. Intrinsic motivation – not dependent on the presence of the
teacher or tutor, potentially more rewarding.
v. Strategic investment - the learner perceives his or her efforts to
be directed to the attainment of some future goal.
vi. Language ego contributing to the fully-rounding of the learner’s
personality.
vii. Self-confidence: – the learning of a foreign language boosts self-
esteem and self-confidence. Besides, it is commonly believed
that success engenders success.
viii.Risk taking: successful language learners are tolerant to
ambiguity, beyond absolute certainty.
ix. The language - culture connection: language and culture are
inextricably related. Teaching the cultural load becomes a must
as most communication breakdowns are caused by cultural, not
by linguistic misunderstandings.
x. The native language effect: the learner’s mother tongue will
serve as a reference point to predict the foreign language system.
In this respect, literature speaks of positive transfers and negative
ones (interference).
xi. Interlanguage: the learner passes through several developmental
stages until mastering the foreign language.
xii. Communicative competence as the end goal of language
learning, understood as the ability to apply knowledge in
unrehearsed real-life situations (a question of use rather than
usage).

1.3. Approaches to language teaching

This unit provides a brief listing of the salient features of the

methods used in language teaching, grouped in four sections: The
humanistic approach (Grammar Translation, The Silent Way,
Community Language Learning, Total Physical Response,
Suggestopedia); Behaviourism (The Audio-Lingual Method);

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Cognitivism (The structural situational approach); The socio-cultural
turn (Communicative language teaching)

1.3.1. Humanistic approaches

A humanistic approach to language learning allows for
personal growth orientation and for the development of learners’
responsibility; the learners are encouraged to use discovery
techniques, being no longer spoon-fed by the teacher.

1.3.1.1. Grammar translation

This approach is said to have a humanistic grounding
(Grenfell and Harris, 1999), although other scholars claim that it is
not based on any approach (notably Morgan and Neil, 2001).
Furthermore, it can be said to emphasize knowledge for knowledge’s
sake. It is heavily indebted to the teaching of classical languages and
it prevailed from the end of the 19 th century to the 1940s. Richards
and Rogers (1986) list several tenets of the Grammar Translation, as
follows:
i. The main goal of learning the language is to read the literature of
the foreign language and refine intellectually; secondly, learners
are expected to develop a greater understanding of L1; thirdly,
students will be able to cope with difficult learning materials and
situations;
ii. Reading and writing are taught to the detriment of listening and
speaking;
iii. Teaching vocabulary is reduced to the words encountered in the
literary texts; vocabulary items are listed and students are asked
to learn their translations;
iv. Translation skills, alongside reading and writing, are taught
using the literary texts;
v. Grammar is taught deductively, the presentation stage, consisting
of long explanations or rules and exceptions to the rules, is
followed by practice; learners follow the prescribed route to the

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 technicalities of syntax. The structures to be translated are
presented in a disconnected way, the learners being asked to
identify the grammar items used in the text and state the rule(s);
vi. English language teaching is done through English.
The Grammar-Translation Method focuses on developing
students’ appreciation of the target language’s literature as well as
teaching the language. Students are presented with target language
reading passages and answer questions that follow. Other activities
include translating literary passages from one language into the
other, memorizing grammar rules, and memorizing native language
equivalents of target language vocabulary. Class work is highly
structured, with the teacher controlling all activities.

Features of the Grammar-Translation Method:

Goals: to be able to read literature in target language; learn grammar
rules and vocabulary; develop mental acuity.
Roles: Teacher has authority; students follow instructions to learn
what teacher knows.
Teaching/learning process: Students learn by translating from one
language to the other, often translating reading passages in the target
language from the native language.
Grammar is usually learned deductively on the basis of
grammar rules and examples. Students memorize the rules, and then
apply them to other examples. They learn paradigms such as verb
conjugations, and they learn the native language equivalents of
vocabulary words.
Interaction: Student-Teacher & Student-Student: most
interaction is teacher to student; student-initiated interaction and
student-student interaction is minimal.
Dealing with Feelings: n/a (not available, not applicable)
Aspects of Language the Grammar-Translation Approach
Emphasizes:

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Vocabulary; grammar; reading, writing are primary skills;
pronunciation and other speaking/listening skills not emphasized
Role of Students’ Native Language: native language provides key
to meanings in the target language; native language is used freely in
class.
Means for Evaluation: tests require translation from native to target
and target to native language; applying grammar rules, answering
questions about foreign culture.
Response to Students’ Errors: heavy emphasis placed on correct
answers; Teacher supplies correct answers when students cannot.
According to St. Krashen (1981), Grammar-translation
usually consists of an explanation of a grammatical rule, with some
example sentences, a bilingual vocabulary list, a reading section
exemplifying the grammatical rule and incorporating the vocabulary,
and exercises to practice using the grammar and vocabulary. Most of
these classes are taught in the student’s first language. The grammar-
translation method provides little opportunity for acquisition and
relies too heavily on learning.
St. Krashen (1982) also made a distinction between
acquiring a language and learning a language: the acquisition of a
language is a natural process, whereas learning a language is a
conscious one. In the former (acquisition of a language) the student
needs to participate in natural communicative situations. Children
acquire language through a subconscious process during which they
are unaware of grammatical rules. This is similar to the way they
acquire their first language. In order to acquire language, the learner
needs a source of natural communication.
In the latter (learning a language), on the other hand,
language learning is not communicative. It is the result of direct
instruction in the grammatical rules of language - the study of
grammatical rules is isolated from natural language; error correction
is also present.

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 1.3.1.2. The silent way
The teacher keeps his/her talking time at a minimum (keeps
silent), yet, directing and controlling the learners. The input provided
by the teacher is reduced to model sentences that the teacher utters
only once and the learners are asked to repeat. Information
transmission and feedback are given through visual aids. A well
known technique includes Cuisenaire Rods, enabling the learners to
deduce meanings or forms: a set of coloured rods, wall charts and a
pointer. The teacher takes a rod and says “a rod” to the students.
Next, by using mime the teacher induces the students to repeat the
name of the object. The teacher combines the names of colours to the
object saying “a red rod”, “a blue rod”, etc. The students are
eventually expected to say “a red rod”, “a blue rod”, etc. without the
teacher’s model. With reference to the wall charts, the students are
made to form strings of words using the words they have learnt
orally by pointing to a series of words that then they read in the order
indicated.
The theoretical basis of Gattegno’s Silent Way (1972) is the
idea that teaching must be subordinated to learning and thus students
must develop their own inner criteria for correctness. All four skills –
reading, writing, speaking and listening – are taught from the
beginning. Students’ errors are expected as a normal part of learning:
the teacher’s silence helps foster self-reliance and student initiative.
The teacher is active in setting up situations, while the students do
most of the talking and interacting.
Goals: to use language for self-expression: to develop independence
from the teacher, to develop inner criteria for correctness.
Roles: Teaching should be subordinated to learning. Teachers should
give students only what they absolutely need to promote their
learning. Learners are responsible for their own learning.
Teaching/learning process: Students begin with sounds, introduced
through association of sounds in native language to a sound-colour
chart. Teacher then sets up situations, often using Cuisenaire rods, to

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focus students’ attention on structures. Students interact as the
situation requires. Teachers see students’ errors as clues to where the
target language is unclear, and they adjust instruction accordingly.
Students are urged to take responsibility for their learning.
Additional learning is thought to take place during sleep.
Interaction: Student-Teacher & Student-Student: The teacher is
silent much of the time, but very active setting up situations,
listening to students, speaking only to give clues, not to mode
speech. Student-student interaction is encouraged.
Dealing with Feelings: Teachers monitor students’ feelings and
actively try to prevent their feelings from interfering with their
learning. Students express their feelings during feedback sessions
after class.
View of Language, Culture: Language and culture are inseparable,
and each language is seen to be unique despite similarities in
structure with other languages.
Aspects of Language the Approach Emphasizes:
All four skills are worked on from beginning (reading, writing,
speaking, listening); pronunciation especially, because sounds are
basic and carry the melody of the language. Structural patterns are
practiced in meaningful interactions. Reading and writing exercises
reinforce oral learning.
Role of Students’ Native Language: Although translation is not
used at all, the native language is considered a resource because of
the overlap that is bound to exist between the two languages. The
teacher should take into account what the students already know.
Means for Evaluation: Assessment is continual; but only to
determine continually changing learning needs. Teachers observe
students’ ability to transfer what they have learned to new contexts.
To encourage the development of inner criteria, neither praise nor
criticism is offered. Students are expected to learn at different rates,
and to make progress, not necessarily speak perfectly in the
beginning.

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Response to Students’ Errors: Errors are inevitable, a natural,
indispensable part of learning.

1.3.1.3. Community language learning/ counseling

learning
Teaching languages is paralleled to psychotherapeutic
counseling, where there is concern with removing tension and
negative feelings. Admittedly, the teacher is the counsellor/knower
and the learner is the client. They gradually build a trusting or
maximum security relationship compared to the growth of the
individual from childhood dependence through adolescent rebellion
and self-assertion to adult independence. There is a high degree of
flexibility in the syllabus design, which virtually develops as the
teaching unfolds.

1.3.1.4. Total physical response (TPR)

Physical action and learning are linked in language teaching.
Production is delayed until learners feel confident (comprehension
skills are developed first). J. Roberts (1998: 35) states that “learners
execute teacher’s commands for about 120 hours before conversation
is encouraged”.
Imperative forms (commands) are used by the teacher to
elicit learners’ action. The teacher plays a traditional role (controller)
and the syllabus is grammar-based.
TPR is a method developed by James Asher, professor of
psychology, to aid learning second languages. Asher’s approach
begins by placing primary importance on listening comprehension,
emulating the early stage of mother tongue acquisition, and then
moving to speaking, reading, and writing. Students demonstrate their
comprehension by acting out commands issued by the teacher;
teachers provide novel and often humorous variations of the
commands. Activities are designed to be fun and to allow students to

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assume active learning roles. Activities eventually include games and
skits (= short performances).

Features of the Total Physical Response:

Goals: to provide an enjoyable learning experience, having a
minimum of the stress that typically accompanies learning a foreign
language.
Roles: at first the teacher gives commands and students follow them.
Once students are “ready to speak”, they take on directing roles.
Teaching/learning process: Lessons begin with commands by the
teacher; students demonstrate their understanding by acting these
out; teacher recombines their instructions in novel and often
humorous ways; eventually students follow suit. Activities later
include games and skits.
Interaction: Student-Teacher & Student-Student: Teacher
interacts with individual students and with the group, starting with
the teacher speaking and the students responding nonverbally. Later
this is reversed; students issue commands to teacher as well as to
each other.
Dealing with Feelings: The method was developed principally to
reduce the stress associated with language learning; students are not
forced to speak before they are ready and learning is made as
enjoyable as possible, stimulating feelings of success and low
anxiety.
View of Language, Culture: Oral modality is primary; Culture is
the lifestyle of native speakers of the target language.
Aspects of Language the Approach Emphasizes: Grammatical
structures and vocabulary are emphasized, embedded in imperatives.
Understanding precedes production; spoken language precedes the
written word.
Role of Students’ Native Language: method is introduced in
students’ native language, but rarely used later in course. Meaning is
made clear through actions.

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Means for Evaluation: Teachers can evaluate students through
simple observation of their actions. Formal evaluation is achieved by
commanding a student to perform a series of actions.
Response to Students’ Errors: Students are expected to make
errors once they begin speaking. Teachers only correct major errors,
and do this unobtrusively. ”Fine tuning” occurs later.
According to St. Krashen (1981), Total Physical Response
involves the students listening and responding to commands given by
the teacher such as “sit down” and “walk”, with the complexity of
the commands growing over time as the class acquires more
language. Student speech is delayed, and once students indicate a
willingness to talk, they initially give commands to other students.
Theory predicts that TPR should result in substantial language
acquisition. Its content may not be always interesting and relevant
for the students, but should produce better results than the audio-
lingual and grammar-translation methods.

1.3.1.5. Suggestopedia
Learning takes place in a tension-free atmosphere, special
attention being paid to furniture and surroundings. Music is played
(Baroque instrumental music) to enhance learning. The typical
scenario (“the concert”) runs as follows: students sit comfortably
while the teacher reads a lengthy dialogue. Students are provided
with the text and the L1 translation. Slow movement music is played.
After the interval (no smoking and no drinking), the teacher re-reads
the dialogue while students listen without reading the text this time.
Thus, learners are supposed to remember best from the teacher
playing an authoritative role.
Lozanov’s method seeks to help learners eliminate
psychological barriers to learning. The learning environment is
relaxed and subdued, with low lighting and soft music in the
background. Students choose a name and character in the target
language and culture, and imagine that person. Dialogues are

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presented to the accompaniment of music. Students just relax and
listen to them being read and later playfully practice the language
during an “activation” phase.
Features of the method:
Goals: to learn, at accelerated pace, a foreign language for everyday
communication by tapping mental powers, overcoming
psychological barriers.
Roles: Teacher has authority, commands trust and respect of
students; teacher “desuggests” negative feelings and limits to
learning; if teacher succeeds in assuming this role, students assume
childlike role, spontaneous and uninhibited.
Teaching/learning process: Students learn in a relaxing
environment. They choose a new identity (name, occupation) in the
target language and culture. They use texts of dialogues accompanied
by translations and notes in their native language. Each dialogue is
presented during two musical concerts; once with the teacher
matching his or her voice to the rhythm and pitch of the music while
students follow along. The second time, the teacher reads normally
and students relax and listen. At night and on waking, the students
read it over. Then students gain facility with the new material
through activities such as dramatizations, games, songs, and
question-to-answer sessions.
Interaction: Student-Teacher & Student-Student: At first, teacher
initiates all interaction and students respond only nonverbally or with
a few words in target language that they have practiced. Eventually
students initiate interaction. Students interact with each other
throughout, as directed by teacher.
Dealing with Feelings: Great importance is placed on students’
feelings, in making them feel confident and relaxed, in
“desuggesting” their psychological barriers.
View of Language, Culture: Language is one plane; nonverbal
parts of messages are another. Culture includes everyday life and
fine arts.

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 Aspects of Language the Approach Emphasizes: Vocabulary
emphasized, some explicit grammar. Students focus on
communicative use rather than form; reading, writing also have
place.
Role of Students’ Native Language: Translation clarifies
dialogue’s meaning; Teacher uses native language, more at first than
later, when necessary.
Means for Evaluation: Students’ normal in-class performance is
evaluated. There are no tests, which would threaten relaxed
environment.
Response to Students’ Errors: Errors are not immediately
corrected; teacher models correct forms later during class.
According to St. Krashen (1981), Suggestopedia classes are
small and intensive, and focus on providing a very low-stress,
attractive environment (partly involving active and passive “séances”
complete with music and meditation) in which acquisition can occur.
Some of the students’ first language is used at the beginning, but
most in the target language. The role of the teacher is very important
in creating the right atmosphere and in acting out the dialogues that
form the core of the content. Suggestopedia seems to provide close to
optimal input while not giving too much emphasis on grammar.

1.3.2. Behaviourism
The audio-lingual method/the aural-oral method
The approach is based on stimulus (eliciting behaviour) and
Response (triggered by a stimulus), endorsing habit formation
through frequent exposure (reinforcement, marking the response as
appropriate or inappropriate). In linguistics, it emerged in the 1930s:
language acquisition (mechanical nature) is another form of human
behaviour. The corresponding method is AUDIOLINGUALISM
/THE AURAL- ORAL METHOD (highly popular in the 1960s),
being complemented by the AUDIO-VISUAL METHOD. In relation

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to linguistic developments, the Audio-Lingual method is said to be
fed by phonetics.
i. Language learners are exposed to stock phrases presented in the
hierarchical order of difficulty (on tape or read by the teacher). The
principle is called incrementalism;
ii. Learners have to assimilate the language items (dialogues) via
imitation or repetition drills (individually and in chorus), with the
teacher modeling the learners (habit formation through repetition);
iii. The teacher provides immediate feedback on pronunciation,
intonation and fluency;
iv. Primacy is given to the spoken language over the written form,
yet spoken language samples do not draw on colloquial language in
authentic situations.
v. The degree of creativity allowed for students is reduced to the
changes of certain key words / phrases.
vi. There is separation of the four language skills – reading and
writing are developed in follow-up activities.
vii. Grammar is taught inductively after the selection of grammar
structures and the provision of minimal grammatical explanation.
viii. Error occurrence is eliminated through further controlled
practice.
ix. It contains, in embryo, many techniques later developed by the
Communicative Approach.
In psychology, behaviourism is a theory that presents
behaviour as the product of heredity and environment, and in
particular of a process of conditioning in which certain stimuli
promote certain responses. I. Pavlov, was a forerunner, and F.
Skinner was a major proponent of the theory. It influenced ESL
teaching from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, especially in the US,
part of an association of structural linguistics, behavioural
psychology, and language teaching promoted by L. Bloomfield. This
led in the 1950s to the audio-lingual method, in which human
learning was compared to that of rats in laboratory mazes and

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pigeons taught to play table tennis. Language learning was seen as a
process of habit formation. In 1959, Noam Chomsky challenged both
behaviourism and structuralism in a critique of Skinner’s work, as a
result of which the use of teaching techniques and materials based on
behaviourism had by 1980 greatly declined. The audio-lingual
method is based on the behaviourist belief that language learning is
the acquisition of a set of correct language habits. The learner repeats
patterns until able to produce them spontaneously. Once a given
pattern, for example, subject – verb – prepositional phrase – is
learned, the speaker can substitute to make novel sentences. The
teacher directs and controls students’ behaviour, provides a model,
and reinforces correct responses.
Features of the audio-lingual method:
Goals: uses the target language communicatively, overlearn it, so as
to be able to use it automatically by forming new habits in the target
language and overcoming native language habits.
Roles: Teacher directs, controls students’ language behaviour,
provides good model for imitation; students repeat, respond as
quickly and accurately as possible.
Teaching/learning process: new vocabulary, structures presented
through dialogues, which are learned through imitation, repetition.
The drills are based on patterns in dialogue. Students’ correct
responses are positively reinforced; grammar is induced from
models. Cultural information is contextualized in the dialogues or
presented by the teacher. Reading, writing tasks are based on oral
work.
Interaction: Student-Teacher & Student-Student: Students
interact during chain drills or when taking roles in dialogues, all at
teacher’s direction. Most interaction is between teacher and student,
initiated by the teacher.
Dealing with Feelings: not available, not applicable
View of Language, Culture: descriptive linguistics influence: every
language seen as having its own unique system of phonological,

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morphological and syntactic patterns. The method emphasizes
speech and uses a graded syllabus from simple to difficult linguistic
structures. Culture comprises everyday language and behaviour.
Aspects of language the approach emphasizes: language structures
emphasized; vocabulary contextualized in dialogues but is limited
because syntactic patterns are foremost; natural priority of skills –
listening, speaking, reading, writing with emphasis on the first two;
pronunciation taught from beginning, often with language lab work
and minimal pair drills.
Role of Students’ Native Language: Students’ native language
habits are considered as interfering, thus native language is not used
in classroom. Contrastive analysis is considered helpful for
determining points of interference.
Means for Evaluation: Discrete-point tests in which students
distinguish between words or provide an appropriate verb for a
sentence, etc.
Response to Students’ Errors: Teachers strive to prevent student
errors by predicting trouble spots and tightly controlling what they
teach students to say.
According to St. Krashen (1981), an audio-lingual lesson
usually begins with a dialogue which contains the grammar and
vocabulary to be focused on the lesson. The students mimic the
dialogue and eventually memorize it. After the dialogue comes
pattern drills, in which the grammatical structure introduced in the
dialogue is reinforced, with these drills focusing on simple repetition,
substitution, transformation and translation.
While the audio-lingual method provides opportunity for
some acquisition to occur, it cannot measure up to newer methods
which provide much more comprehensible input in a low-filter
environment.

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 1.3.3. The Direct Method
The Direct Method allows students to perceive meaning
directly through the language because no translation is allowed.
Visual aids and pantomime are used to clarify the meaning of
vocabulary items and concepts. Students speak a great deal in the
target language and communicate as if in real situations. Reading and
writing are taught from the beginning, though speaking and listening
skills are emphasized. Grammar is learned inductively.
Features of the Direct Method:
Goals: to communicate in the target language, to think in the target
language.
Roles: Teacher directs class activities, but students and teacher are
partners in the teaching/learning process.
Teaching/learning process: Students are taught to associate
meaning and the target language directly. New target language words
or phrases are introduced through the use of realia, pictures or
pantomime, never the native language. Students speak a great deal in
the target language a great deal and communicate as if in real
situations.
Grammar rules are learned inductively – by generalizing from
examples. Students practice new vocabulary using words in
sentences.
Interaction: Student-Teacher & Student-Student: Both teacher
and students initiate interaction, though student-initiated interaction
with teacher or among each other, is usually teacher-directed.
Dealing with Feelings: n/a (not available, not applicable)
View of Language, Culture: Language is primarily spoken, not
written. Students study common, everyday speech in the target
language. Aspects of foreign culture are studied such as history,
geography, daily life.
Aspects of Language the Approach Emphasizes:

24
Vocabulary emphasized over grammar; oral communication
considered basic, with reading, writing based on oral practice;
pronunciation emphasized from outset.
Role of Students’ Native Language: Students’ native language is
not used in the classroom.
Means for Evaluation: Students tested through actual use, such as
oral interviews and assigned written paragraphs.
Response to Students’ Errors: Self-correction encouraged
whenever possible.
According to St. Krashen (1981), using the “Direct
Method”, the teacher uses examples of language in order to
inductively teach grammar; Students are to try to guess the rules of
the language by the examples provided. Teachers interact with the
students a lot, asking them questions about relevant topics and trying
to use the grammatical structure of the day in the conversation.
Accuracy is sought and errors are corrected. This method provides
more comprehensible input than grammar-translation and audio-
lingual method, but unlike the communicative method, it still focuses
too much on grammar.

1. 3. 4. Cognitivism/Mentalism
The structural situational approach
The Chomskyan revolution discredits the development of
linguistic competence via the stimulus-response-reinforcement cycle
as creativity is part of this process: speakers are able to generate an
infinite number of novel sentences (performance, i.e. actual use of
the language) starting from a finite number of rules that they have
internalized (competence, i.e. knowledge about the language system).
He advocates the existence of universal grammar, i.e. of mental
blueprints or a mindset specific to human beings (innate competence
as opposed to skill-based behaviorism). Language competence is
somehow idealized, being linked to nativeness and perfect
knowledge of the language.

25
 Chomsky presents the ideal speaker-hearer in a completely
homogenous speech community, who knows his language perfectly
and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as
memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention or interests, or
errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the
language in actual performance (Chomsky, 1965: 48). Chomsky’s
ideal speaker-hearer is unaffected by limitations of memory,
distractions, shifts of attention, etc.
Chomsky’s notion of competence refers to language as a
merely abstract entity. Every speaker is believed to be able to
generate language through the absorption of examples (Language
Acquisition Device – LAD). What Chomsky does not put into this
equation is the socializing function of language, i.e. there is no
reference to socio-cultural embeddedness.
The Structural-Situational Approach/ Situational Language
Teaching has the following features:
i. It is a far-reaching 3-stage lesson template, labelled the P-P-P
cycle, consisting of presentation, practice and production.
ii. Grammar is central to language teaching (grammar-based
methodology).
iii. During the presentation stage, the teacher presents the new
grammar items, based on conversation or a short text. The
identification of the grammar structures is followed by the
teacher’s explanation and checking of students’ comprehension.
iv. The practice stage involves the use of drills (controlled or
mechanical practice).
v. There is smooth progress from semi-controlled/meaningful
practice to free/communicative practice.
The P-P-P cycle was seriously criticized as “fundamentally
disabling, not enabling” (Scrivener, 1994: 15). Johnson (1992) had
already suggested the deep-end strategy as an alternative: students
are pushed into immediate production (the deep end) and the teacher

26
decides to return to presentation or practice according to the
students’ performance.
Harmer (2007: 65 ff) endorses the ESA sequence: Engage →
Study → Activate. During the Engage stage, learners are engaged
emotionally in the process. The second stage corresponds to
Presentation and Practice, while Activation overlaps with
Production. The model is flexible enough to allow for the re-ordering
of stages: E → A → S (a “boomerang” procedure”), E → A → S →
A → E → S (“patchwork lesson”). The author concludes that the
approach is “extremely useful in focus-on-form lessons” with
beginners, and “irrelevant in a skills lesson”.

1.3.5. The socio-cultural turn: the Communicative

Approach/ Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
1.3.5.1. The positivist view in social sciences is replaced by
an ethnographia mundi concern in the 1960s. There is a shift of
emphasis from language per se to its instrumentalization (language
as a means of communication in social contexts) and to a more
naturalistic view. From a linguistic perspective, CLT draws on the
Speech Acts Theory (J. Searle, 1969), shifting attention to the
relationship between language and its users, from habit formation to
the real intended meaning.
R. Mitchell (1994: 38-39) points out some of the best
features of the CLT:
i. Classroom activities should maximize opportunities for
learners to use the target language for meaningful purposes,
with their attention on the messages they are creating and the
tasks they are completing, rather than on the correctness of
language and language structure.
ii. Learners trying their best to use the target language creatively
and unpredictably are bound to make errors; this is a normal part
of language learning, and constant correction is unnecessary,
and even counterproductive.

27
iii. Language analysis and grammar explanation may help some
learners, but extensive experience of target language use helps
everyone.
iv. Effective language teaching is responsive to the needs and
interests of the individual learner.
v. Effective language learning is an active process, in which the
learner takes increasing responsibility for his or her
progress.
vi. The effective teacher aims to facilitate, not control, the
language learning process.
According to Grenfell and Harris (1999: 21), the popularity of
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) lies in:
i. the status of the foreign language in the classroom, i.e. the
extent to which it is used in the instruction process.
ii. attitude to error: what, when and how to correct? In the
traditional model, error was seen as a heavy impairment, being
sanctioned immediately and error correction was the teacher’s
central pedagogic tool. In CLT, there is tolerance to error, which
is understood as a natural stage in the learner’s linguistic
development.
iii. authenticity of language: a wide range of authentic or real life
materials (realia) is used in the classroom. Besides exposing
learners to real life situational language, these materials also
immerse them in the foreign language culture and raise the
learners’ motivation for learning the language of the other speech
community.
iv. spoken and written language are treated as separate entities,
requiring different teaching techniques.
v. practice vs. real language: even if, to some extent, the learners
still perceive the classroom environment as not genuine, there is
meaningful interaction in and through the foreign language,
relating back to the intention to mean and legitimacy of tasks.

28
 1.3.5.2. Communicative language teaching is an approach to
the teaching of second and foreign languages that emphasizes
interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a
language. Communicative language teaching began in Britain in the
1960s as a replacement to the earlier structural method(s). This was
partly in response to Chomsky’s criticisms of structural theories of
language and partly based on the theories of British functional
linguists, such as J.R. Firth and M.A.K. Halliday, as well as
American sociologists, such as D. Hymes, J. Gumperz and W.
Labov, and the writings of J. Austin and J. Searle on speech acts.
Some of the areas of linguistic research in this view of language
are: functional grammar, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics.
Functional grammar: describes any approach in which the
notion of ‘function’ is central. Functional grammar (M.A.K.
Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 1994) was
devised as an alternative to the abstract view of language presented
by transformational grammar. Based on the pragmatic view of
language as social interaction, it focuses on the rules governing the
linguistic expressions that are used as instruments of this activity. In
foreign language teaching, a functional syllabus is one where the
syllabus content is organized in terms of language functions, such as
requesting, persuading, inviting, etc.
Sociolinguistics: is a branch of linguistics which studies all
aspects of the relationship between language and society.
Sociolinguists study such matters as the linguistic identity of social
groups, social attitudes to language, standard and non-standard forms
of language, social varieties and levels of language, and so on.
Pragmatics: this term is applied to the study of language
from the point of view of the users, especially the choices they make,
the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction,
and the effects their use of language has on other participants in an
act of communication. Pragmatics includes aspects of deixis, speech
acts and discourse structure.

29
 Speech act theory is associated with two linguistic
philosophers, J. L. Austin and J. R. Searle (J. L. Austin, How to do
Things with Words, 1965; J. R. Searle, Expression and Meaning:
Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, 1979). They developed a
functional view of language based on the notion that the social use of
language is primarily concerned with the performance of certain
communicative acts. There are a variety of reasons which may
prompt the act of communication. We use language for requesting,
informing, ordering, promising, reprimanding, to mention just a few.
In all these cases we could say that language is being used to perform
certain speech acts.
Semantics refers to the study of meaning in language.
Structural semantics applies the principles of structural linguistics to
the study of meaning through the notion of semantic relations (also
called sense relations), such as synonymy and antonymy. The theory
of semantic fields views vocabulary as organized into areas within
which words (lexical items) interrelate and define each other.
Approach: Theory of language: The functional view of
language is the primary one behind the communicative method. The
communicative or functional view of language is the view that
language is a vehicle for the expression of functional meaning. The
semantic and communicative dimensions of language are more
emphasized than the grammatical characteristics, although these are
also included.
Theory of learning: The learning theories behind the
communicative approaches are based on some principles:
- activities that involve real communication promote learning;
- activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful
tasks promote learning;
- language that is meaningful to the learner promotes learning;
Types of learning techniques and activities:
Communicative language teaching uses almost any activity that

30
engages learners in authentic communication. W. Littlewood (1981),
however, has distinguished two major activity types:
i. functional communication activities: those aimed at developing
certain language skills and functions, but which involve
communication;
ii. social interaction activities, such as conversation and discussion
sessions, dialogues and role plays
Procedure: it is difficult to summarize the procedure in
communicative classes because of the wide variety of activities used.
Nevertheless, there are some classroom activities frequently used in
CLT. Classroom should provide opportunities for rehearsal of real-
life situations and provide opportunity for real communication. There
is emphasis on creative role-plays, simulations, projects, interviews,
games, language exchange, surveys, pair work, plays, etc., - all
produce spontaneity and improvisation, not just repetition and drills.

1.3.5.3. Some Features of the Communicative Approach:

Goals:
- to become communicatively competent,
- to use language appropriate for a given social context; the approach
focuses on language as a medium of communication. Recognizes that
all communication has a social purpose: the learner has something to
say or find out;
- to manage the process of negotiating meaning with interlocutors.
Roles: The teacher facilitates students’ learning by managing
classroom activities, setting up communicative situations. Students
are communicators, actively engaged in negotiating meaning.
Teaching/ Learning Process:
- Activities are communicative – they represent an information gap
that needs to be filled; speakers have a choice of what to say and how
to say it; they receive feedback from the listener that will verify that
a purpose has been achieved.

31
 Communication embraces a whole spectrum of functions
(e.g. seeking information, apologizing, expressing likes and dislikes,
etc.) and notions, topics and situations (e.g. asking one’s way:
where the nearest post office is; shopping, hobbies, etc.) The teacher
should make use of topical items with which pupils are already
familiar in their own language. This motivates pupils, arouses their
interest and leads to more active participation.
- Authentic materials are used: The communicative approach seeks
to use authentic resources because they are more interesting and
motivating. In foreign language classroom authentic texts serve as
partial substitute for community of native speaker. Newspaper and
magazine articles, poems, recipes, videos, news bulletins discussion
programmes, etc., all can be exploited in a variety of ways.
The teacher should avoid age-old texts: the materials must
relate to pupils’ own lives, they must be fresh and real. That is why,
changing texts and materials regularly keeps the teacher on toes and
pupils interested.
It is important not to be restricted to the textbook. The
teacher should never feel that the textbook must be used from cover
to cover, the textbook being only a tool or a starting point. With a
little inspiration and imagination, the textbook can be manipulated
and rendered more communicative. The teacher must free himself
from it, and rely more on his own command of language and his
professional expertise as to what linguistic items, idioms, phrases,
words need to be drilled, exploited or extended.
- Grammar can still be taught, but less systematically, in traditional
ways alongside more innovative approaches. Communication
depends on grammar, and disregard of grammatical form will
virtually guarantee breakdown of communication.
- The use of visual stimuli, such as overhead projectors (OHP),
flashcards, etc., is important to provoke practical communicative
language, represented in 3 stages: presentation, assimilation and
reproducing language in creative and spontaneous way.

32
Interaction: Student-Teacher & Student-Student: The teacher
initiates interactions between students and participates sometimes.
Students interact a great deal with each other in many configurations.
Students usually work in small groups. More emphasis on active
modes of learning, including pair-work and group-work, are often
not exploited enough by teachers fearful of noisy class.
Dealing with Feelings: emphasis is on developing motivation to
learn through establishing meaningful, purposeful things to do with
the target language. Individuality is encouraged, as well as
cooperation with peers, which both contribute to a sense of
emotional security with the target language.
View of Language, Culture: language is for communication.
Linguistic competence must be coupled with an ability to convey
intended meaning appropriately in different social contexts. Culture
is the everyday lifestyle of native speakers of the target language. We
add that the culture-language connection should be envisaged across
cultures given the current status of English as an international means
of communication and that “English language teachers should show
not only willingness but also readiness to interculturalise English
language teaching” (Vîlceanu, 2016: 76).
Aspects of Language the Communicative Approach Emphasizes:
Functions are emphasized over forms, with simple forms learned for
each function at first, then more complex forms. Students work at
discourse level: they work on speaking, listening, reading and
writing from the beginning.
The communicative approach is not just limited to oral skills.
Reading and writing skills need to be developed to promote pupils’
confidence in all four skill areas. By using elements encountered in a
variety of ways (reading, summarizing, translating, discussion,
debates, etc), pupils’ manipulation of language becomes more fluent.
Role of Students’ Native Language: students’ native language
usually plays no role
Means for Evaluation:

33
- informal evaluation takes place when teacher advises or
communicates;
- formal evaluation is by means of an integrative test with a real
communicative function.
Response to Students’ Errors: errors of form are considered a
natural part of learning language: learners trying to use the language
creatively and spontaneously are bound to make errors. Constant
correction is unnecessary and even counter-productive. Correction
should be discreet, noted by the teacher who should let them talk and
express themselves. Students with incomplete knowledge can still
succeed as communicators.
The widespread of Communicative Language Teaching and
its lasting popularity makes us confident, in full consonance with
Vîlceanu (2010: 198) that “the communicative paradigm [...] will
continue to replicate endlessly, allowing for variation alongside
commonalities”. Therefore, the post-communicative turn can be
rightly considered one of such variations.

1.3.6. The Post-Communicative Turn

Jacobs and Farrell (2003) advocate a paradigm shift, which

led to 8 major changes in ELT:
i. Learner autonomy: learners are given a higher degree of
autonomy with respect to the learning content and process. Thus,
they are encouraged to develop self-assessment skills and the
ability to prioritize their language learning.
ii. The social nature of learning: there is no value-free
knowledge, but only knowledge serving individual and collective
needs or goals.
iii. Curricular integration: English is given a place in a coherent
whole, being connected to other subjects in the curriculum. For
instance, project work in English classes requires knowledge

34
 acquisition from other subjects or from the real world
(encyclopedic knowledge).
iv. Focus on meaning: meaningful content is of paramount
importance, being the driving force of learning.
v. Diversity: the teachers should be aware of the learners’ profile
(age, personality, type of motivation, learning styles, linguistic
proficiency, etc.) and try to cater to this diversity of needs and
interests.
vi. Thinking skills: language learning should foster critical and
creative thinking skills (cognitive development). For example,
learners should be able to select relevant information from a text.
vii. Alternative assessment: there is need for complementing
traditional forms of assessment (M/C, Reading comprehension
questions, Error correction exercises, etc.) by forms that assess
higher-order skills (e.g. portfolios, observation sheets,
interviews, etc.).
viii.Teachers as co-learners: teachers accrue experience (learning
by doing) and capitalize expertise, while also pursuing
professional development.

Topics for discussion and exercises:

1. Discuss the main characteristics of the Grammar-Translation

Method.
2. Enlarge upon the advantages of the Communicative
Approach.

35
36
 CHAPTER II

TEACHING THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

This unit briefly describes the components of language and

presents the main trends in these areas that have potential for
language teaching.

2.1. Teaching pronunciation

When we teach a foreign language we have to be sure that

our students can be understood when they speak, i.e. their
pronunciation should be at least adequate for that purpose. Thus, we
will help them to pronounce the sounds specific for English, to
differentiate between these sounds, especially where such
distinctions change meaning, and we will also help them to
understand and use certain sound rules- for example the different
pronunciations of the –ed past tense endings.
Students have to use rhythm and stress correctly and to
recognize intonation.
One problem that confronts us in the teaching of
pronunciation is that of accent. In other words, how important is it
for our students to sound like native speakers? Some teachers think
that students should aim for this ideal. But we must be aware that
some learners seem more inclined to native-speaker-like
pronunciation than others and that much depends on their contact
with native speakers.
Much more important is the goal of intelligibility and
efficiency. In other words the teacher’s aim should be to make sure
that students can always be understood to say what they want to say.
They will need good pronunciation for this, although they may not
need a perfect accent. The teaching of pronunciation should,

37
therefore, aim to give students communicative efficiency (Harmer,
1997: 22).
Learners need to hear the language used so that they can
both imitate the pronunciation and acquire the sounds and patterns.
One source of language they can listen to is the teacher, this
having a vital role, being a model for the students. But it is also very
important for them to be exposed to authentic native- speaker speech
through tapes, videos, television, radio and, whenever it is possible
through personal contact.

2.2. Teaching vocabulary

2.2.1. Overview
Harmer (1997: 153) metaphorically says that if grammatical
structures are the skeleton of a language, then it is vocabulary that
provides the vital organs and flesh. In the traditional model,
however, vocabulary was seen as incidental to the main purpose of
language teaching- namely the acquisition of grammar. Thus,
vocabulary was not the main focus for learning itself. Teaching
vocabulary used to be reduced to learners’ having to look words up
in the dictionary, write definitions, and use words in more or less
conventionalized sentences. Word lists, teacher explanation,
discussion, memorization, vocabulary books, and quizzes were often
used with a view to facilitating students to learn new words. As a
rule, the teaching of vocabulary above elementary levels was limited
to presenting new items encountered in reading or sometimes
listening texts. This indirect teaching of vocabulary was premised by
the idea that vocabulary expansion would happen through the
practice of other language components, which has been proved not
enough to ensure vocabulary expansion.
Recently, methodologists and linguists have increasingly
been turning their attention to the vocabulary, emphasizing the
importance of lexis in language teaching and reconsidering some of
the means in which it is taught and learnt. It is unanimously accepted

38
that the acquisition of vocabulary is equally important as the
acquisition of grammar- though the two are interdependent- and
teachers should have the same kind of expertise in the teaching of
vocabulary as they do in the teaching of language structure (idem:
154) In the current ELT methodology, it is widely accepted that
vocabulary teaching should be part of the syllabus and taught in a
well-planned and on a regular basis. Vocabulary is a principal
contributor to comprehension, fluency, and achievement. Vocabulary
development is both an outcome of comprehension and an input to it,
with word meanings making up as much as 70–80% of
comprehension.
Grammar provides the overall patterns, while vocabulary
provides the material to put in the patterns. To understand a sentence
such as “Tom sat on the floor” properly the listener needs to know
not only that “sat” refers to a physical state, but also that it is usually
preceded by a grammatical subject that is animate; “sat” is related to
other words such as “lie” and “stand”. All of these are part of the
speaker’s knowledge of the English vocabulary. Using “sat” properly
means not just knowing how it is defined in the dictionary, but how
it relates to all the other words in the language, and how and when it
may be used in sentences. Dictionaries can give a false idea that
vocabulary is a mere list of words, each with one or more meanings
attached to them. Instead, words are related to each other in many
ways, and this is how they are remembered and stored.
Some students still learn vocabulary lists in which each L1
word has a one-word L2 translation; English book is ‘carte’ in
Romanian and so on. Some teachers try to get the students to
associate each word with an image or an object; they hold up a
picture of a book or even show one and say “This is a book”. Both
these teaching techniques imply that learning vocabulary means
learning individual words one at a time. But the relationships
between words are as important as the meaning of the word in

39
isolation – how words contrast with other words is as important as
the meaning of the word itself.
Learning the vocabulary of a second language is not just
memorizing equivalent words between languages (“red” means
“roşu”), or learning the definition of the word (“red” is “a colour
typically seen in blood”) or putting it in context (“Rudolph the red-
nosed reindeer”), but learning the meaning relationships between
“red” and all the other words in English within the full context of
cultural life.
Selecting vocabulary
One of the problems in teaching vocabulary consists in the
fact that while there is a general agreement on what grammatical
structures should be taught and at what levels the same is hardly true
of vocabulary.
A general principle in the past was to teach more concrete
words at the elementary level and gradually become more abstract.
Other criteria are frequency (we should first teach the words which
are most commonly used) and coverage (a word is more useful if it
covers more things than if it only has a single specific meaning).
Harmer (1997: 156) considers that the decision about what
vocabulary to teach and learn will be heavily influenced by
information we can get about frequency and use, but this information
will be assessed in the light of other considerations such as topic,
function, structure, teachability, needs and wants.
When we come across a word and try to decipher its
meaning we still have to understand the context in which it is used.
Students need to acquire words in context and they need to know
sense relations (opposition of meaning, hyponymy, homonymy,
synonymy, etc.
Students need to recognize metaphorical and idiomatic
language and they need to know how the words collocate. They also
need knowledge about style and register.

40
 Learners have to understand problems concerning word
formation (derivation, compounding, conversion and other means of
word formation), since they can easily notice that there is a certain
connection between words like: happy, unhappy, happiness,
unhappiness, happily.
Students have to know the grammatical value of a word and
consequently its grammatical behaviour (knowledge concerning verb
complementation, complex verbs, the position of adjectives and
adverbs, etc).
Active and passive vocabulary: A distinction is frequently
made between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ vocabulary. The former refers
to vocabulary that students have been taught or learnt – and which
they are expected to be able to use – whilst the latter refers to words
which the students will recognise when they meet them but which
they will probably not be able to produce. This distinction becomes
blurred, however, when we consider what ‘knowing a word’ means
and when we consider the way students seem to acquire their store of
words.
It is true that students ‘know’ some words better than others,
but it has not been demonstrated that these are necessarily the words
which teachers have taught them, especially at higher levels. They
might be words that are often used in the classroom or words that
have appeared in the reading texts which students have been exposed
to. According to language acquisition theories, many words which
students know do come through that route rather than through
learning. Other words may be those that students have looked up
because they wanted to use them. Or they may be words that students
have met and somehow ‘liked’.
At beginner and elementary levels teachers provide sets of
vocabulary which students can learn. Most of these early words will
be constantly practised and so can, presumably, be considered as
‘active’. But at intermediate levels the situation is rather more
complicated. We can assume that students have a store of words but

41
it would be difficult to say which are active and which are passive. A
word that has been ‘active’ through constant use may slip back into
the ‘passive’ state if it is not used. A word that students have in their
‘passive’ store may suddenly become active if the situation or the
context provokes its use. In other words, the status of a vocabulary
item does not seem to be a permanent state of affairs.
The students who remembered the word ‘cuddle’ because
they liked the experience of learning it and because they liked the
word seem to provide another example of how students learn and
retain words (the example is offered by Harmer, 1997). We could
predict that ‘cuddle’ is a word they are going to remember for a long
time - though it may eventually fade through lack of use. This word
touched them in some way, it was a word that had personal meaning
for them. Not all vocabulary items have the warmth of a word like
‘cuddle’, however. But it would be nice if we could provoke some
kind of relationship with the words that we teach as those students
seemed to have had with their word.

2.2.2. Theories of teaching vocabulary

2.2.2.1. Components of meaning
One way of analyzing vocabulary is to break up the meaning
of a word into smaller, separate components. Thus the meaning of
“girl” is made up of “female”, “human”, and “non-adult” (or
“young”); the word “boy” has components “human”, “male” and
“young”; the meaning of “apple” is made up of “fruit”, “edible”,
“round” and so on.
A version of this component approach can be found in
textbooks such as The Words You Need (B. Rudzka, J. Channell, Y.
Putseys and P. Ostyn, 1981, London: Macmillan). Students look at a
series of ‘Word Study’ charts displaying the different components of
meaning of words. For example a chart gives words that share the
meaning ‘look at/over’ such as “check”, “examine”, “inspect”,
“scan”, and “scrutinize”. It shows which of them have the component

42
of meaning ‘detect errors’, which ‘determine that rules are observed’,
and so on. Students are encouraged to build up the idea of the
vocabulary as consisting of such components while reading texts.

2.2.2.2. The prototype theory of vocabulary

In the Prototype theory, words have whole meanings
divided into basic level (“table”), superordinate (“furniture”) and
subordinate (“coffee table”).
Many aspects of meaning cannot be split up into components
but are appreciated as wholes.
An influential approach of this type is Elinor Rosch’s
‘prototype’ theory (E. Rosch, Human categorization, 1977, London:
Academic Press.). English or a Romanian person who is asked to
give an example of a typical bird is more likely to say “sparrow”
than “penguin” or “ostrich”; sparrows are closer to the prototype for
“birds” than penguins and ostriches. Rosch’s theory suggests that,
rather than components of meaning, there is an ideal of meaning in
our minds - “birdiness” in this case – from which other things depart.
Speakers have a central form of a concept in their minds and the
things they see and talk about correspond better or worse with this
prototype.
Prototype theory also claims that children first learn words
that are ‘basic’ because they reflect aspects of the world, prototypes
that stand out automatically from the rest of what they see.
“Sparrow” is a ‘basic level’ term compared to a ‘superordinate level’
term like “bird”, or a ‘subordinate level’ term like “house sparrow”.
The basic level of vocabulary is easier to use and to learn. On this
foundation children build higher and lower levels of vocabulary.
Some examples of the three levels of vocabulary in different areas
are seen in the diagram at the end of this section. L1 children learn
the basic level terms like “dog” before they learn the superordinate
term “animal”, or the subordinate term “Labrador”. They start with
the most basic level as it is easiest for the mind to perceive. Only

43
after this has been learnt do they go on to words that are more
general or more specific. L2 learners first acquired basic terms such
as “table”, second more general terms like “furniture”, and finally
more specific terms like “coffee table”. Rosch’s levels are therefore
important to L2 learning as well as to first language acquisition.
This sequence, however, is different from the usual order of
presentation in language teaching in which the teacher or the
textbook introduces or practices a whole group of words
simultaneously: “You have just moved house. Decide which pieces
of furniture are to go in which room: armchair, television, bed…”
Here all three levels of vocabulary are being taught at
once - superordinate “furniture”, basic “bed”, and subordinate
“armchair”. According to prototype theory, this method is
misguided. The most important early words are basic level
terms. The human mind automatically starts from this concrete
level rather than from a more abstract level or a more specific
one. Starting by teaching vocabulary items, that can be easily
shown in pictures, fits in with Rosch’s theory. A drawing can
be readily recognized as a chair but it is less easy to see as
furniture. Hence prototype theory ties in with the audiovisual
method of language teaching that introduces new vocabulary
with a picture of what it represents, in an appropriate cultural
setting. This theory has particular implications for teaching
vocabulary at the beginning stages.
superordinate furniture bird fruit
terms
basic level table chair sparrow apple strawberry
terms
subordinate coffee table field sparrow Golden Delicious
terms armchair wild strawberry

44
 2.2.2.3. The lexical approach: The Lexical Approach puts
vocabulary acquisition in a central role in language acquisition.
During the 1990s interest in vocabulary teaching and research
increased, with Paul Nation’s book Teaching and Learning
Vocabulary (1990) as well as J. Sinclair’s book Corpus,
Concordance, Collocation (1991): these two books proved
influential in their review of research on vocabulary, providing at the
same time pedagogical guidance through interpreting the research in
terms of classroom applications.
During this same time, Michael Lewis began describing an
approach to language teaching, the Lexical Approach, which moved
vocabulary to the forefront of language teaching in his two books,
The Lexical Approach (1993) and Implementing the Lexical
Approach (Hove: Language Teaching Publications, 1997). The
collection of articles compiled by M. Lewis (Ed.) in the volume
Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical
Approach (2000) continues the development of this approach by
focusing on a key element in the approach, collocations. We shall
briefly discuss some theories of language which form the foundation
of the Lexical Approach to teaching English.
i. The principle of Grammaticalised Lexis
In recent years it has been recognised that native speakers
have a vast stock of lexical chunks which are vital for fluent
production. There are two types of lexical chunks:
- lexical chunks that are not collocations: if I were you, by the way,
upside down, up to now;
- lexical chunks that are collocations: totally convinced, terrible
accident, sense of humour;
Fluency does not depend so much on having a set of
generative grammar rules and a separate stock of words – the ‘slot
and filter’ or open choice principle – as on having rapid access to a
stock of chunks:

45
 “It is our ability to use lexical phrases that help us to speak
with fluency. This prefabricated speech has both the advantages of
more efficient retrieval and of permitting speakers (and learners) to
direct their attention to the larger structure of the discourse, rather
than keeping it narrowly focused on individual words as they are
produced” (Nattinger and DeCarrico, Lexical Phrases and Language
Teaching, Oxford: OUP, 1992).
According to M. Lewis, the basic principle of the Lexical
Approach is “Language is grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised
grammar” (Lewis, 1993). In other words, lexis is central in creating
meaning, grammar plays a subservient managerial role. If one
accepts this principle then the logical implication is that we should
spend more time helping learners develop their stock of phrases, and
less time on grammatical structures.
ii. Collocation in action
Collocations might be described as the words that are placed
or found together in a predictable pattern. Examples of collocations
range from two word combinations such as problem child to
extended combinations such as He’s recovering from a major
operation. M. Lewis’s volume Teaching Collocation: Further
Developments in the Lexical Approach (2000) presents ways of
integrating collocation into a reading and writing course, as well as
numerous classroom strategies, activities, and exercises.
Another important aspect of the Lexical Approach is that
lexis and grammar are closely related. Consider the sentences below
where several words can be completed:
(a) The theory has had a strong ..….on me.
(b) They…….to try out the theory.
If we look at the examples above, we will see in (a) that 3
semantically related words – impact, influence, effect – behave the
same way grammatically: have a/an impact, influence, effect on
somebody/something. In (b) verbs connected with initiating action –

46
encourage, persuade, urge, advise, etc. all follow the pattern verb +
object + infinitive.
This kind of ‘pattern grammar’ is considered to be important
in the Lexical Approach.
Indeed, an aspect of vocabulary that has become quite
important in recent years is the position of the word in the structure
of the sentence, putting words in structures. For example, the verb
“faint” can only occur with a grammatical subject such as “Mary” in
“Mary fainted”, never with an object “*Mary fainted Ann”. The verb
“meet” on the other hand has to have an object “He met John”, not
“*He met”. Some verbs are followed by subordinate clauses – “I
hoped Mary would go” rather than grammatical objects “*I hoped
Mary”.
A speaker of English knows not just what a word means and
how it is pronounced but also how it fits into sentences.

2.2.3. Techniques used in teaching vocabulary

In this section we will look at some of the techniques used in
teaching vocabulary, namely, Presentation techniques, Interaction
with words, Discovery techniques.

2.2.3.1. Presentation techniques

Not all vocabulary can be learnt through interaction and
discovery techniques. There are many occasions when some form of
presentation and/or of explanation is the best way to bring new
words into the classroom. There are several types of presentation
techniques: realia; pictures; mime, action and gesture; contrast;
enumeration; explanation; translation
Realia is a term used to refer to certain real-life objects. One
way of presenting words is to bring the things they represent into the
classroom. Words like ‘pen’, ‘ruler’, ‘postcard’, etc. can obviously
be presented in this way. The teacher holds up the object (or points to
it), says the word and then gets students to repeat it.

47
 Pictures: Bringing a pen into the classroom is not a
problem. Bringing in a car, however, is. One solution is the use of
pictures. Pictures can be board drawings, wall pictures and charts,
flashcards, magazine pictures and any other non-technical visual
representation. Such pictures can be used to explain the meaning of
vocabulary items, even of more abstract concepts such as ‘above’,
‘opposite’, ‘smiles’, ‘frowns’, etc.
Mime, action and gesture: it is sometimes impossible to
explain the meaning of words either through the use of realia or in
pictures. Actions, in particular, are probably better explained by
mime. Concepts like ‘running’, ‘walking’ or ‘smoking’ are easy to
present in this way; so are prepositions (‘to’, ‘towards’, ‘on’).
Contrast: Words exist because of their sense relations and
this can be used to teach meaning. We can present the meaning of
‘empty’ by contrasting it with ‘full’, or ‘cold’ by contrasting it with
‘hot’, ‘big’ by contrasting it with ‘small’. We may present these
concepts with pictures or mime, and by drawing attention to the
contrasts in meaning we ensure our students’ understanding
Enumeration: Another important sense relation is
represented by hyponymy: grouping words into general and specific.
We can give a superordinate word (or hypernym – the general word)
such as ‘clothes’ and explain this by enumerating or listing various
items (hyponyms - specific) included in it. Thus, one can introduce
the item ‘appliances’ (superordinate or hypernym) and then illustrate
by enumerating items such as refrigerator, microwave oven,
dishwasher, and such. The same is true of other hypernyms such as
‘vegetable’ or ‘furniture’.
Explanation: one of the most common presentation
techniques is explanation. Explaining the meaning of vocabulary
items can be very difficult, especially at beginner and elementary
levels. But such a technique can be used with more intermediate or
advanced students, who are able to grasp the explanation. We should
remember that when we explain the meaning of a word we also have

48
to explain aspects of use which are relevant for that word. Thus, if
we are explaining the meaning of ‘mate’ (= friend) we have to point
out that it is a colloquial word used in informal contexts and that it is
more often used for males than for females.
Translation: translation is a commonly used presentation
technique. It is a quick and easy way to present the meaning of words
but it is not without problems. In the first place, it is not always easy
to translate words (culturally complex concepts are often difficult to
accurately translate), and, in the second place, even where translation
is possible, it may make it a bit too easy for students by discouraging
them from interacting with the words. Where translation can quickly
solve a presentation problem it may be a good idea, but we should
bear in mind that using the mother tongue as little as possible is
helpful for both teacher and students.
Pronunciation: All of these presentation techniques, either
singly or in combination, are useful ways of introducing new words.
What must be remembered with vocabulary presentation, too, is that
pronunciation is just as important here as it is for structural material.
We should not introduce words without making sure that students
know how they are pronounced. Not only will this mean that they
can use the words in speech, it will also help them to remember the
words. There are a number of ways of presenting the sounds of
words:
i. Through modelling: Just as with structures, the teacher can
model the word and then get both choral and individual
repetition. When the teacher is modelling the word s/he can use
gesture, etc. to indicate the main stress in the word.
ii. Through visual representation: When teachers write up new
words on the board they should always indicate where the stress
in the word is. Teachers can do this in several ways:
- they can underline the stressed syllable, e.g. photograph
- they can use a stress mark before the stressed syllable, e.g.
̍photograph, photo ̍graphic

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 iii. Through phonetic symbols: some teachers get their students to
learn the phonetic symbols, at least for recognition purposes.
e.g. photograph [̍fəutəgra:f], photographic [fəutə ̍græfik]
Certainly for more advanced students a basic knowledge of
the symbols will help them to access pronunciation information from
their dictionaries.
There are several stages of presenting vocabulary
i. setting up a context, which is relevant to learners’ interest and
age, builds on or incorporates learners’ experience.
ii. elicitation of the target vocabulary item (i.e. trying to get the
target item from the learners first) in order to enhance their
involvement as well as to help them fit the new item in their
existing vocabulary knowledge.
iii. choral and/or individual repetition (this may be optional at higher
levels) in order to standardise pronunciation.
iv. consolidation/concept check questions, which are aimed to check
whether meaning has been properly understood and to provide
further meaningful opportunities for learners to use the item in
context.
v. board record for later reference

2.2.3.2. Interaction with words: Experiments on

vocabulary seem to suggest that students remember best when they
have interacted with the words they are learning. There is a definite
advantage in getting students to do more than just repeat them. Tasks
such as changing the words to mean their opposites, changing a noun
into an adjective, putting words together, etc., help to fix the words
in the learners’ minds. Somehow or other, then, it seems that we
should get students to interact with words. We should get them to
‘adopt’ words that they like and that they want to use, so that they
may become properly acquainted with them. Vocabulary learning
needs the ‘deep experience’.

50
 Learning and remembering vocabulary: As we previously
mentioned, the problem lies not just in learning L2 words, but also in
remembering them. How well people remember something depends
on how deeply they process it. Repeating words as strings of sounds
is low-level processing and badly remembered; working out how
words fit in the grammatical structure of the sentence is deeper and
leads to better memory; using the meanings of words together within
the whole meaning of the sentence is the deepest level of processing
and ensures the best memory. Research conducted by Harry Bahrick
(Semantic memory content, 1984) suggested that a word is
remembered best if it is practiced every 30 days rather than at more
frequent intervals. This contradicts the belief common among
teachers that every word should be practiced as often as possible
within a short time span. It is how the word is practiced that is
important rather than how often.
. 2.2.3.3. Discovery techniques go beyond simple modelling,
explanation, mime and translation. Especially at intermediate levels
and above, as an appropriate alternative to standard presentation
techniques, discovery techniques “aim to give students a chance to
take charge” (Harmer, 1997: 71) and ask students to discover how
language works, instead of simply furnishing meaning.
Students will often be asked to ‘discover for themselves’
what a word means and how and why it is being used, they will have
to work out rules and meanings for themselves rather than being
given everything by the teacher.
At intermediate levels we can assume that students already
have a considerable store of vocabulary. Rather than teach them new
words we can show them examples of words in action (in texts, etc.)
and ask them to use their previous knowledge to work out what
words can go with others, when they should be used and what
connotations they have.
Even at beginner levels, however, we may want to ask
students to work out what words mean, rather than just handing them

51
the meanings: when students have ‘had a go’ with the words we can
lead feedback sessions to see if they have understood the words
correctly.
Discovery techniques display from simple matching tasks to
more complex understandings of connotation and context. Discovery
techniques used with vocabulary materials allow students to activate
their previous knowledge and to share what they know (if they are
working with others). They also provoke the kind of interaction with
words.
Discovery techniques shift the emphasis from the teacher to
students and invites them to use their reasoning processes and
problem solving skills to learn the subtle nuances of the language
and, hence, to mimic the psycholinguistic approach utilized by native
language learners.
The conclusions we can draw from this discussion are best
summed up by a quote from Adrian Underhill: “engaging the learner
is essential to any activity that is to have a high learning yield”
(Underhill, 1985: 107)

2.2.4. Stages in teaching vocabulary

1st step: Encountering new words: if learners are motivated
to learn certain words out of interest or need, they are likely to be
learnt more easily. The way or context in which a word is presented
as well as the number of times a word is encountered will affect
whether it is learnt or not. Learners seem to need various encounters
with the same word in multiple resources rather than in just one
source.
2nd step: Getting a clear image of the form of the vocabulary
item: this image may be visual or auditory or both. Very often
learners tend to associate new words with words that sound / look
similar in their language. Problems for learners arising from words
similar in form have been found as a major problem for language
learners, especially in such cases where native language and the

52
language they study both use the Roman alphabet and the two
languages are closely related historically.
3rd step: Getting the word meaning: The level of distinctions
that must be made in word definitions vary across situations and
learner levels. Low level learners may be satisfied to grasp quite
general meanings while advanced learners need more specific
definitions in order to be able to see differences between near
synonyms.
4th step: Consolidation of form and meaning in memory:
various memory strategies are available that help consolidate the
connection between word form and meaning.
5th step: Using the words: this ensures that learners gain
confidence as autonomous language users, but at the same time they
can refine their language knowledge in general.

2.2.5. Practising vocabulary

Having used any of the vocabulary presentation techniques
in class, we cannot really say that learners have learnt the new items.
Encountering a new vocabulary item once will not guarantee that it
will be remembered. Learners need plenty of opportunities in order
to acquire a new vocabulary item. In a vocabulary presentation
lesson, the teacher should provide meaningful controlled practice for
learners so that they could recognise, manipulate and use the new
vocabulary items. Vocabulary practice should be regular, carefully
planned and should not involve too many words at one time. Many
simple vocabulary practice activities are based around the following
ideas (J. Scrivener, Learning Teaching, 1994: 83):
- discussions, communicative activities and role-play requiring use of
the words
- making use of the vocabulary in written tasks.
More specific exercise types:
- matching pictures to words
- matching parts of words to other parts, e.g. beginnings and endings

53
- matching words to other words, e.g. collocations, synonyms,
opposites, sets of related
words, etc.
- using prefixes and suffixes to build new words from given words
- classifying items into lists
- using given words to complete a specific task
- filling in crosswords, grids or diagrams
- filling in gaps in sentences
- memory games.
The importance of recycling previously presented
vocabulary is obvious. Revision activities can easily be incorporated
into the lesson by way of five-minute activities or warmers. These
activities can successfully aid students’ recall of the new words and
develop their retrieval systems.
Vocabulary revision activities: listing or categorising items,
vocabulary quizzes, crosses, brainstorming round an idea, guessing
games, etc.

Control factors in teaching vocabulary

We can synthetize the following control factors:
i. Rely on students’ prior knowledge and related experiences
before teaching new words to introduce a thematic area. For
example, before reading a text on Communication Cyberspace,
teach the word blog, define it (an online journal), specify that the
word is a blend (blog comes from web log), and show a picture
of someone seated at a computer composing an essay or report to
post on their personal website. Then, show students an actual
blog .
ii. Show form and content as well as aspects of the nature of
meaning and vocabulary networking/ word relations:
 Pronunciation and Spelling: ability to recognise and reproduce
items in the spoken and written forms.

54
 Denotation and Connotation: e.g. rose – denotative meaning:
reference to the flower; connotative meaning: passion (universal
symbol), the Royal House (as in The Wars of the Roses).
 Polysemy: distinguishing between the various meanings of a
single word form with several but closely related meanings (foot:
of a person, of a mountain, of a page).
 Homonymy: distinguishing between the various meanings of a
single word form which has several meanings not closely related
(e.g. file: used to put papers in or a tool).
 Homophony: understanding words that have the same
pronunciation but different spellings and meanings (e.g. wait-
weight).
 Synonymy: distinguishing between the different shades of
meaning that synonymous words have (e.g. small-little).
 Style, register, dialect: being able to distinguish between
different levels of formality, the effect of different contexts and
topics, as well as differences in geographical variation.
 Translation: awareness of differences (especially at the
connotational level) and similarities between the native and the
foreign language (e.g. false cognates).
 Chunks of language: set phrases (red-handed), collocations
(headache, pain in the back, sore throat), idioms (to carry coal
to Newcastle).
 Grammar of vocabulary: learning the rules that enable students
to build up different forms of the word or even different words
from that word (e.g. sleep, slept, slept; able, unable; disability).
iii. Irrespective of the learners’ level of proficiency, discovery,
guided discovery, contextual guesswork (inferencing skills) and
dictionary-building skills should be encouraged.
iv. Vocabulary selection should meet the following criteria:

55
- coverage: information should be provided about the various
meanings and uses of a word form (multiple meaning words prevail
over monosemantic items);
- frequency: the more the number of the word occurrences, the more
likely to be selected.
Estimates go that the list includes 2,000 words with semantic and
frequency information drawn from a corpus of 2 to 5 million words.
It is claimed that knowing these words gives access to about 80 per
cent of the words in any written text and thus stimulates motivation
since the words acquired can be seen by learners to have a
demonstrably quick return.
- universality: words useful in all English-speaking countries;
- utility: enabling discussion on as wide a subject range as possible.

Conclusions
Considering the role of lexis in the classroom, Scrivener
(1994:229) draws the following conclusions:
1. Lexis is important and needs to be dealt with
systematically in its own right; it is not simply an add-on to grammar
lessons.
2. Our job consists in helping students to practise, store,
recall and use the items of the new lexis.
3. Training in the use of English-English dictionaries
provides students with a vital tool for self-study.
Without words, it is possible to know everything about the
grammatical structure of a language, but, yet to be unable to make a
single meaningful utterance. Our role as teachers is to help, to
motivate and encourage (applying different techniques and media for
presenting vocabulary, making vocabulary memorable), and even to
inspire by encouraging in learners an appreciation of the origin,
sound and beauty of words (Bowen and Marks, 1994: 106).

Topics for discussion and exercises:

56
Activity 1 (Source: Harmer, 1997:171):

At the restaurant
Level: intermediate
Working with your partner, put the following events into the correct
order:
Look at the menu
Give the waiter a tip
Have dessert
Pay the bill
Book a table
Decide to go out for a meal leave the restaurant
Have the starter
Go to the restaurant
Have the main course
Sit down
Order the meal
Ask for the bill

Activity 2:
Level: upper intermediate
What vocabulary features are exemplified in the following groups of
words?
a. stride, walk, saunter, stroll, amble, stagger, trudge;
car, vane, ambulance, bus, taxi, vehicle, jeep.
b. blew/blue; bare/bear; peer/pier; plane/plain
c. difficult, hard, tough, demanding;
cross, irritated, furious, angry, apoplectic;
d. drunk/sober; hot/cold; alive/dead; buy/sell
e. sense, nonsense, senseless, sensible, sensitivity, sensor
f. bookshop, teapot, forget-me-not
g. ship, anchor, sailor, bridge, navigate, deck, cargo.

57
3. What kind of vocabulary teacher will you be?
How will you as future teachers help your learners to learn and
remember items of vocabulary? Where do you fit into the vocabulary
– learning process?
Tim Bowen and Jonathan Marks (1994: 92) talked to a number of
teachers about vocabulary teaching and these are some of the
comments they made. Make a note of those you identify with and
those you disagree with:
a. I always try to present new words in every lesson. I think my
learners expect it.
b. I give my students a translation of every new word. They need
it for their notebooks.
c. I present vocabulary in context wherever possible.
d. I often present words with their collocations.
e. I often show my learners the relationships between particular
items of vocabulary like opposites or synonyms.
f. I think texts are an excellent vehicle for introducing and
recycling vocabulary.
g. I try to encourage my students to become more independent by
making them guess the meaning of unknown words.
h. I encourage my learners to use dictionaries as much as
possible. I think it really helps in vocabulary development and
it can also make them much more autonomous.
i. I give students advice on how they can work on expanding
their vocabulary in their own time.

2.3. Teaching grammar

2.3.1. In the traditional model of ELT, grammar played a
central role to the detriment of the other language components. The
overriding importance attached to grammar was based on the
assumption that accuracy (grammatical correctness) secured
successful communication. The belief was challenged in the early

58
1970s with the realization that grammar knowledge was only one
component of the communicative competence (alongside discourse
competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence).
Consequently, grammar teaching was almost abandoned; it is only
recently that grammar has regained its rightful place in an integrated
approach to language teaching.
Grammar is defined as the study and practice of the rules by
which words change their forms and are combined into sentences.

Food for thought ( Source:T. Bowen and J. Marks, Inside

Teaching, 1994: 82):
How do you see grammar, and its significance to the
language learners? What do the metaphors proposed here suggest
about the nature of grammar?
Grammar is:
 an algebraic system;
 a scaffolding;
 a skeleton;
 a blueprint.
The question is WHAT to teach (what grammar items) and
HOW to teach grammar in an effective and efficient way.
The answer to the first question - WHAT to teach -
(selection of grammar structures to be taught) points out to
compliance with two criteria:
i. Comprehensibility – teachers should teach the functional load
of grammar, i.e. structures which enable meaning understanding in a
communicative situation: basic verb forms; affirmative, interrogative
and negative patterns, tenses and modals, etc.
ii. Acceptability – it is equated to an adequate level of correctness
and naturalness of the linguistic output.
With reference to HOW to teach grammar, there are two
lines of approach:

59
 i. form-focused instruction (highly valued in the traditional
model) – learners’ needs are pre-defined in the grammatical
syllabus. Admittedly, grammar teaching reflects the typical
classroom use of language, out of context in a rather non-authentic
way; focuses on well-formed sentences (which are not lengthy), on
language output as evidence of language learning; relies heavily on
explicit knowledge and on controlled practice.
ii. “fluency-first” pedagogy/ meaning-focused interaction
(contemporary approach) – learners’ needs are assessed based on
their performance during fluency activities. It underlies the natural
use of language in real-like communication settings; relies on
implicit knowledge and on automaticity (internalization of rules);
activates learners’ strategic competence (situation management by
paraphrasing, reorganization, remedial work), etc.

2.3.2. The typology of grammar activities falls into three

broad types:
i. controlled/mechanical practice (for example, repetition and
substitution drills).
ii. semi-controlled/contextualized/ meaningful practice: students are
encouraged to relate form to meaning by showing how the grammar
structures are used in real-life communication. For example, in order
to practice the use of prepositions to describe locations of places,
students are given a street map with various buildings identified in
different locations. They are also given a list of prepositions such as
across from, on the corner of, near, on, next to. They then have to
answer questions such as “Where is the book shop? Where is the
café?, etc. The practice is now meaningful because they have to
respond according to the location of places on the map.
iii. free/communicative practice (learners use the structures in
authentic communication while paying attention to this rule-
governed behaviour). For example, students are asked to draw a map

60
of their neighborhood and answer questions about the location of
different places, such as the nearest bus stop, the nearest café, etc.
Globally, grammar activities display the following features:
i. specific grammar structures are in focus and learners are
provided with explicit information about the rule;
ii. learners are asked to use the structures in sentences of their own;
iii. learners have the opportunity to use the structures repeatedly
during the English classes (there is need for reinforcement and for
building up on prior knowledge);
iv. learners are expected to understand the rule (via consciousness-
raising) use of the
grammatical structures in a successful way;
v. there is feedback on the learners’ performance (they get a sense
of their performance)

2.3.3. Control factors in teaching grammar

 constant exposure to language at an appropriate level of
difficulty (roughly-tuned input – the input is slightly above the
learners’ level of proficiency).
 building of meaning-focused interaction.
 opportunities for learners to identify and direct attention to
grammar structure form, semantics or meaning and pragmatic
conditions of their use before and while actually using the
language. For example, phrasal verbs: a) form of phrasal verbs:
they are two-part verbs comprising a verb and a particle (e.g. to
look up) or a verb, a particle and a preposition (e.g. to keep up
with). Phrasal verbs are transitive or intransitive. A distinctive
feature of phrasal verbs is that in many cases the particle can be
separated from the verb by an object (e.g. He looked the word up
in the dictionary); b) meaning of phrasal verbs: many of them are
multiple meaning structures – e.g. to put up: literal meaning and
figurative meaning – to stay at a hotel, etc; c) pragmatic use of
phrasal verbs: they mostly characterize the informal style.

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 To sum up, communication cannot take place in the absence
of structure, or grammar, a set of shared assumptions about how
language works, along with a willingness of participants to cooperate
in the negotiation of meaning. Hence, the goal of grammar teaching
is to enable learners to internalize rules so as to become efficient in
communication. Furthermore, communicative fluency does not
imply loss of grammatical accuracy, instead they are interrelated.

2.3.4. Learning different types of grammar

Language has patterns and regularities which are used to
convey meaning, some of which make up its grammar. Knowledge
of grammar is thought by many to be the central area of the language
system. In some ways grammar is easy to study in L2 learners,
because it is highly systematic. For these reasons much of L2
learning research of the 1980s concentrated on grammar. The term
‘grammar’ refers to a systematic analysis of the structure of a
language, a set of rules and examples dealing with the syntax and
morphology of a standard language, usually intended as an aid to the
learning and teaching of that language.
Prescriptive grammar attempts to establish rules for the
correct use of language in society. A prescriptive grammar is an
account of a language that sets out rules (prescriptions) for how it
should be used and for what should not be used (proscriptions) based
on norms derived from a particular model of grammar. For English,
such a grammar may prescribe I as in It is I (I should be used after
the verb be), and proscribe me as in It’s me.
It may proscribe like used as a conjunction, as in He behaved
like he was in charge, prescribing instead He behaved as if he were
in charge; or ‘Whom should be used as the relative pronoun in
objective function’, e.g. The man whom I saw, and so on.
Prescriptive grammars have been criticized for not taking
account of language change and stylistic variation, and for imposing
the norms of some groups on all users of a language.

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 Descriptive grammar provides a precise account of actual
usage, a description of linguistic structures, usually based on
utterances elicited from native-speaking informants. In a descriptive
grammar the author attempts to build a model of language which
represents his theory of language, i.e. he seeks to provide other
linguists with a specification of his insights into the nature of
language. Such a model must satisfy, or at least attempt to satisfy,
three criteria of adequacy: observational, descriptive and explanatory
(as outlined by Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965: 24-
27). It must, in simple terms, a) provide an analysis which is
minimally consistent with observed primary data; b) correspond in
its analysis to the innate knowledge of the ideal speaker-hearer; and
c) provide a means of selecting between rival models and theories so
as to choose the one which best explains the phenomenon of human
language.
Traditional grammar books have often, however,
combined description and prescription. A traditional grammar
concerns the parts of speech, e.g. “a noun is the name of a person,
place or thing”. Analyzing sentences means labeling the parts with
their names and giving rules that explain verbally how they may be
combined. While many grammarians today do not reject this type of
grammar outright, they again feel it is unscientific. While the concept
of ‘the parts of speech’ is indeed part of grammar, there are many
other powerful concepts that also need to be taken into account.
Since the late 1950s, it has become common in linguistics to
contrast descriptive grammars with generative grammars.
Generative grammar, introduced by N. Chomsky, concentrated on
providing an explicit account of an ideal native speaker’s knowledge
of language (competence) rather than a description of samples
(performance). Chomsky argued that generative grammars are more
valuable, since they capture the creative aspect of human linguistic
ability. Most linguists generally regard both approaches as
complementary.

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 Structural grammar: Language teaching has also made use
of structural grammar based on the concept of phrase structure,
which shows how some words go together into the sentence and
some do not. In a sentence such as “The man fed the dog”, the word
“the” goes with “man”: if we put “the” with “man”, we get one
structure “(the man)”, if we put “the” with “dog”, we get another
structure “(the dog)”. “Fed” belongs with “(the dog)” to get a new
structure “(fed the dog)”. Now the two structures “(the man)” and
“(fed the dog)” go together to assemble the whole sentence. A typical
way of representing this phrase structure is through tree diagrams
that show how the words build up into phrases and the phrases build
up into the whole sentence, such as:

the man fed the dog

Teachers have been using this directly in substitution tables: a
typical example can be seen in the course book English for the fifth
class (Nelson, 1990):

They black dog

I can draw a white cat
You red rose

Students form sentences by choosing a word from each

column: “I …can… draw… a… white… rose”. They are substituting
words within a constant grammatical structure. Such exercises have
long been a staple of language teaching in one guise or another.
Structure drills and pattern practice are based on the same idea.
Unlike a descriptive grammar, a pedagogical grammar,
seeks to present an existing model in a form which provides the
teacher or syllabus designer with access to the theoretical insights of

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the descriptive grammar in order to form the basis of language
teaching syllabuses and materials. The three criteria for adequacy
which apply to the descriptive grammar are not ignored by the writer
of the pedagogical grammar – they are of interest to him as criteria
for selecting which descriptive grammar he will present – but are, so
to speak, subordinated to the need to express the findings of the
linguistic theory in a practical way. In addition, the descriptive
grammar must be consistent in its choice of theory – one model–one
theory – but a pedagogical grammar can be eclectic and draw on
more than one theory.
A clear example of a non-eclectic pedagogical grammar
would be Owen Thomas (Transformational Grammar and the
Teacher of English, 1965) which is based exclusively on
Transformational-Generative Grammar, while R. Quirk and S.
Greenbaum (A University Grammar of English, 1977) can be taken
as representative of an eclectic model drawing on both systemic
grammar and TG.
Grammatical (linguistic) competence: There is another
meaning of “grammar”, namely the knowledge of language that the
speaker possesses in the mind, known as linguistic or grammatical
competence. All speakers know the grammar of their language in
this sense without benefit of study. A native speaker knows the
system of the language, even if s/he may not be able to verbalize this
knowledge clearly: it is ‘implicit’ knowledge. Nevertheless a single
sentence of English could not be produced without knowing English
grammar in this sense. A man who spontaneously says “The man fed
the dog” shows that he knows the word order typical of English, in
which the Subject “The man” comes before the Verb “fed”. He
knows the ways of making irregular past tenses in English - “fed”
rather than the regular “-ed” (“*feeded”); he knows that “dog”
requires an article “the” or “a”; and he knows that “the” is used to
talk about a dog that the listener already knows about. This is a very
different type of knowledge from the ability to describe the sentence

65
he has produced in terms of grammar, something only people who
have been taught explicit ‘grammar’ can do.
As well as grammatical competence, native speakers also
possess knowledge of how language is used. This is often called
communicative competence (i.e., the speaker’s ability to put
language to communicative use): it is not just knowledge of the
language that is important, it is how to use it appropriately for the
activities in which speakers want to take part – complaining, arguing,
persuading, and so on. Hence the more general term pragmatic
competence reflects all the possible uses of language rather than
restricting them to communication. Therefore, pragmatic competence
refers to the speaker’s ability to use language for a range of public
and private functions, including communication (N. Chomsky,
Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use: 1986).

2.3.5. Grammatical morphemes

Language teaching has often distinguished ‘content’ words
from ‘structure’ words.
Content words (alternative terms ‘lexical’ or ‘full’ words)
are words which have definable lexical meaning (e.g. book, boy, red,
run); that is, they have the kind of meaning that can refer to definable
things, concepts and can be looked up in a dictionary. Content words
represent an open class: they allow the unlimited addition of new
items.
Structure words consist of articles, pronouns, prepositions
or conjunctions (e.g. words like the, to). They represent closed-
system or closed class items: their membership is fixed or limited
(they are limited in number). A computer programme for teaching
English needs about 220 structure words. It is easier to look up
structure words in a grammar book than in a dictionary. The meaning
of structure words such as “the” or “to” depends on the grammatical
rules of the language, not on dictionary definitions. It is virtually
impossible to invent a new structure word because it means changing

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the rules of the language rather than adding an item to the stock of
words of the language.
The smallest unit of grammar is the ‘morpheme’: the
morpheme consists either of a word (“boy”) or part of a word (“’s” in
“the boy’s”). Morphemes are studied in a branch of grammar called
‘morphology’. Some words consist of a single morpheme - “to” or
“book” or “great”. Some can have morphemes added to show their
grammatical role in the sentence, say “tables” or “bigger”.
In the first language young children use content words more
easily than grammatical morphemes. Children commonly produce
sentences such as “Mummy go shop”, meaning something like
“Mummy is going to the shops”, where the adult sentence includes
the ‘missing’ grammatical morphemes: “is”, “-ing”, “to”, “the”, and
“-s”. It is as if the children know the structure for the sentence and
the content words, but either do not know the grammatical
morphemes or are incapable of using them.
In the early 1970s it was discovered that English children
learn these grammatical morphemes in a definite sequence of
acquisition (R. Brown, A First Language: The Early Stages, 1973).
Two researchers (H. Dulay and M. Burt, Should we teach children
syntax, 1973) decided to see what this meant for L2 learning. They
made Spanish-speaking children learning English describe pictures
and checked how often the children supplied eight grammatical
morphemes in the appropriate places in the sentence. Suppose that at
a rudimentary level L2 learners say “Girl go”. How do they progress
from this? The order of difficulty for the L2 learners is the following
sequence from (i) to (viii):
(i) plural “-s”: the easiest morpheme for the learners was the plural
“-s”, getting “Girls go”.
(ii) progressive “-ing”: next easiest for the learners was the word
ending “-ing” in present tense forms like “going”.
(iii) copula forms of “be”: next came the use of be as a copula, i.e. as
a main verb in the sentence (“John is happy”) rather than as an

67
 auxiliary used with another verb (“John is going”). Changing the
sentence slightly gets “Girls are here”.
(iv) auxiliary form of “be”: after this came the auxiliary form of “be”
with “-ing”, yielding: “Girls are going”.
(v) definite and indefinite articles “the” and “a”: next in difficulty
came the definite and indefinite articles “the” and “a”, enabling
the learners to produce “The girls go” or “A girl go”.
(vi) irregular past tense: ”: the next morphemes were the irregular
English past tenses, (those that do not have a form of “d” ending
pronounced in the usual three ways /d/, /t/, or /id/) such as
“came” and “went”, as in “The girls went”.
(vii) third person “-s”: the next in order of difficulty was the third
person “-s” used with verbs, as in: “The girl goes”.
(viii) possessive “-s”: Most difficult was the ending used with
nouns to show possession, as in “The girl’s book”.
L2 learners have least difficulty with plural “-s”, most
difficulty with possessive “-s”. It was not just Spanish-speaking
children had a sequence of difficulty for the eight grammatical
morphemes. Similar orders have been found for Japanese or Korean
children; the first language does not seem to make a crucial
difference: all L2 learners have much the same order. Nor does it
matter if the learners are children or adults: adults have roughly the
same order as children.

2.3.6. Learning grammar and L2 teaching

Teachers are often surprised by what grammar means in L2
learning research and how much importance is given to it.
Above all, grammar is competence in the mind rather than
rules in a book; one crucial end-product of teaching is that students
should be able to ‘know’ language in an unconscious sense, so that
they can put it to good use. Teaching has to pay attention to the
internal processes and knowledge the students are building up in
their minds.

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 Grammar is also relevant to the sequence in which elements
of language are taught. Of necessity language teaching has to present
the various aspects of language in order rather than introducing them
all simultaneously. The conventional solution used to be a sequence
of increasing grammatical complexity, teaching the present simple
first, and the past perfect continuous last, because the former is much
‘simpler’ than the latter.
When language use became more important to teaching, the
choice of a teaching sequence was no longer straightforward since it
was aspects of communication that now had to be sequenced. For
example, the textbook Opening Strategies (Abbs & Freebairn, 1982)
uses an order based on language functions: Lesson 1 “Ask for and
say numbers”, Lesson 2 “Ask about people’s nationality”, Lesson 4
“Say what you want”, Lesson 11 “Give permission”, and so on. Any
function-based order runs into problems in arriving at a logical
sequence: is ‘requesting’ simpler or more complex than
‘complaining’? Hence grammar began to creep back in to textbooks
because it was easier to arrange in order. Opening Strategies in
addition to its functional order, has a grammatical order, starting
with the present simple tense of “be”, going on to the present tense of
full verbs, then past simple of “be”, followed by present continuous,
and so on.
L2 learning research has often claimed that there are definite
orders of difficulty for learning language, such as the order for
grammatical morphemes.
An application to teaching is proposed by M. Pienemann and
M. Johnston (Factors influencing the development of language
proficiency, 1987) who suggest there are two types of acquisition
sequence: developmental and variational.
(i) A developmental sequence is caused by the learner’s problems
with processing language, particularly with sorting out strings of
words into sentences. According to Pienemann and Johnston,

69
developmental sequence is a consistent order in which learners
acquire the L2, based on difficulty of language processing.
The early sequence for English has five stages:
a. the learner produces single words or formulas: “I don’t know”
b. the learner then produces strings of elements, that is to say ‘simple
sequences of words’
c. the learner can identify different types of elements in the string,
and produces questions in which the verb is moved to the beginning
such as “Can you tell me?”
d. the learner can identify and move elements in the string, as in
questions with wh-words:
“What are you studying?”
e. the learner next acquires the ability to break a string into smaller
strings and recombine them in different ways, shown by complex
sentences such as “He asked me to go”.
(ii) A variational sequence incorporates factors which differ from
one situation to another. One example is the omission of items from
the sentence as in “I go station”. The converse example is the
oversupply of items such as the frequent use of the present
continuous “I am living in London” when “I live in London” is
intended.
This separation between two types of sequence is important
for language teaching as the implications of the two types can be
rather different:
- With developmental sequences the teacher has to fall in
with the sequence in some way; Pienemann (Psychological
constraints on the teachability of languages, 1986) puts this as the
Teachability Hypothesis: ‘the course of second language
development cannot be altered by factors external to the learner’.
- Variational sequences are much more under the learner’s
control and so can be changed by the teacher. The application of
sequences to teaching depends upon what kind of sequence we are

70
looking at, whether the developmental and variational sequences,
orders of difficulty or of acquisition, or others.
Fuller discussion of the implications of L2 order of learning
or difficulty depends on the rest of teaching. It must balance
grammar against language functions, vocabulary, classroom
interaction, etc. Teachers do not necessarily have to choose between
these alternatives once and for all. A different decision may have to
be made for each area of grammar or language and each stage of
acquisition.

2.3.7. Making grammar conscious

The question of whether grammar should be explained to the
students has been frequently raised: the use of explicit explanation
implies that L2 learning can be quite different from L1 learning. The
fact that children learn their first language without resort to
conscious understanding does not mean that adults cannot learn a
second language in this way. Justifying conscious understanding in
L2 learning involves separating L2 learning from L1 learning with
respect to whether the learners get explanations. The belief that L2
learning can potentially make use of explicit explanation underlies
distinctions such as those made by St. Krashen (Second Language
Acquisition and Second Language Learning, 1981) between
‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’ (the latter being conscious and available
only to older learners).
Mostly grammatical explanation has relied on the
assumption that rules that are learnt consciously can be converted
into processes that are known unconsciously. Thus, according to
Vivian Cook (Second Language Learning and Language Teaching,
1994: 28), the French subjunctive was explained to students at school
not just to give them academic knowledge of the facts of French, but
to help them to write French. After a period of absorption, this
conscious rule would become part of their unconscious ability to use
the language.

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 William Rutherford (Second Language Grammar: Learning
and Teaching, 1987) and others have been advocating
‘consciousness raising’ in teaching – the drawing of the learner’s
attention to features of the target language.
Stephen Krashen (1981), however, has persistently denied
that consciously acquired rules change into normal speech processes
in the same way as grammar acquired unconsciously.
More indirect uses for grammar have also been put forward
in recent years. One suggestion by Eric Hawkins (Awareness of
Language, 1984) is for language awareness: the learners’ general
awareness of language should be raised as a preliminary to L2
teaching, partly through grammar. If the students know the kind of
thing to expect, they are more receptive to it. Hawkins suggests ‘an
exploratory approach’ where the pupils investigate grammar by, for
example, deciding where to insert an adjective such as “see-through
(i.e. transparent)” in the sentence “She put on her cosy, old, blue,
nylon blouse”. Pupils invent their own labels for grammar, rather
than being taught a pre-established system. As Hawkins puts it,
‘grammar approached as a voyage of discovery into the patterns of
the language rather than the learning of prescriptive rules, is no
longer a bogey word’. It is not the teaching of particular points of
grammar that matters but the overall increase in the pupil’s language
sensitivity.
The textbook Learning to Learn English (Ellis & Sinclair,
1989) provides some exercises to make EFL learners more conscious
of their own predilections, for instance suggesting ways for the
students to discover grammatical rules themselves. Another
researcher, Philip Riley (Discourse and Learning, 1985) has
suggested ‘sensitization’ of the students by using features of the L1
to help them understand the L2. Increasing awareness of language
may have many educational advantages and indeed help L2 learning
in a broad sense.

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 2.3.8. Teaching techniques
2.3.8.1. General principles: Methodologists emphasize the
fact that although it is important to develop the students’
understanding of the grammatical facts of the language we are
teaching, it is not these facts that we wish our students to learn. We
are not interested in filling our students with grammatical paradigms
and syntactic rules. What we do hope to do is to cultivate linguistic
performance in our students which is consistent with the facts. In
other words, grammar teaching is not so much knowledge
transmission as it is skill development.
By recognising this, we can take advantage of several
insights from second/foreign language acquisition research
concerning how students naturally develop their ability to interpret
and produce grammatical utterances. Some insights are related to our
topic:
i. Learners do not learn structures one at a time. It is not the case
that a learner masters the definite article, and when that is mastered,
moves on to the simple past. From their first encounter with the
definite article, learners might master one of its pragmatic functions
– e.g. to signal the uniqueness of the following noun phrase. But
even if they are able to do this pragmatically appropriately, it is not
likely that learners will always produce the definite article when
needed, because learners typically take a long time before they are
able to do this consistently. Thus, learning is a gradual process
involving the mapping of form, meaning, and pragmatics; structures
do not emerge in learners’ interlanguage fully developed and error-
free. Recycling various aspects of structures over time seems a much
more reasonable alternative.
ii. Even when learners appear to have mastered a particular
structure, it is not uncommon to find backsliding occurring with the
introduction of new forms to the learners’ interlanguage. For
example, the learner who has finally mastered the third person
singular marker on present tense verbs is likely to overgeneralise the

73
rule and apply it to newly emerging modal verbs. Thus, teachers
should not despair at similar regressive behaviour on the part of their
students. Well-formed structures are usually restored once the new
additions have been incorporated and the system reanalysed.
2.3.8.2. Inductive versus deductive presentation. An
additional choice teachers face is whether to work inductively or
deductively during the presentation phase.
An inductive activity is one in which the students infer the
rule or generalisation from a set of examples. For instance, students
might infer the subject-auxiliary inversion rule in forming yes-no
questions, after having been exposed to a number of such questions.
In a deductive activity, on the other hand, the students are
given the rule and they apply it to examples.
If one has chosen an inductive approach in a given lesson, a
further option exists – whether or not to have students explicitly state
the rule. Some specialists consider that the use of explicit rules is
irrelevant, because, in their opinion, one certainly can teach grammar
without stating any explicit rules. They further argue that what we
are trying to bring about in the learner is linguistic behaviour that
conforms to the rules, not knowledge of the rules themselves. On the
other hand, there are other specialists who consider that there is no
reason to avoid giving explicit rules, except perhaps if one is
working with young children. Usually students request rules and
report that they find the rules helpful. Moreover, stating a rule
explicitly can often bring about linguistic insights in a more
efficacious manner, as long as the rule is not oversimplified or so
metalinguistically abstruse that students must struggle harder to
understand the rule than to apply it implicitly.
Returning now to the inductive versus deductive question,
we find that the choice is not one resolvable with an either/or
approach. There are many times when an inductive approach in
presenting a grammar point is desirable because by using such an
approach one is nurturing within the students a learning process

74
through which they can arrive at their own generalisations. Other
times, when one’s students have a particular cognitive style that is
not well suited for language analysis or when a particular linguistic
rule is rather convoluted, it may make more sense to present a
grammar structure deductively.
Indeed, one takes comfort from P. Corder’s sensible
observations: “What little we know about the psychological process
of second language learning, either from theory or from practical
experience, suggests that a combination of induction and deduction
produces the best result… Learning is seen as fundamentally an
inductive process but one which can be controlled and facilitated by
descriptions and explanations given at the appropriate moment and
formulated in a way which is appropriate to the maturity, knowledge,
and sophistication of the learner. In a sense, teaching is a matter of
providing the learner with the right data at the right time and
teaching him how to learn that is, developing in him appropriate
learning strategies and means of testing his hypotheses. The old
controversy about whether one should provide the rule first and then
the examples, or vice versa, is now seen to be merely a matter of
tactics to which no categorical answer can be given”. (Corder, Error
Analysis and Interlanguage, 1981: 133).

2.3.8.3. Grammar lessons are usually composed of three

phases: presentation, practice and communication (although all
three may not be conducted within one class period). Rather than
illustrating a single lesson plan from start to finish, it seemed more
beneficial to concentrate on characterising and exemplifying
activities that could be used during the practice phase. It used to be
that the practice phase of a lesson was devoted almost exclusively to
grammar drills. Ever since the ineffectiveness of using drills (which
do not engage students’ attention) was acknowledged, there has been
little by way of guidance offered on what to do during the practice
phase of a lesson.

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 Form: Once a particular grammar structure has been
analysed, a challenging teaching point for the particular class of
students should be chosen. The learning process associated with the
teaching point should also be identified. The nature of the learning
process and of the learning challenge gives important clues as to
activity characteristics.
For example, when dealing with the formal dimension of
grammar, it would appear that the major learning processes involved
would be stimulus-response learning for phonemic patterns and
verbal chaining or principle learning for morphemes or syntactic
patterns. Stimulus-response learning would be the type of learning
required for learning to pronounce an unfamiliar word. Chaining and
principle learning seem the applicable learning processes for
morphology and syntax since what we are attempting to have our
students learn is to comprehend and produce either verbal chains
between morphemes/words or rule-pattern governed syntactic
patterns. Identifying the type of learning involved helps us to think
about the desirable characteristics of any practice activity. Students
would have to be restricted to using just the particular target form; in
other words, structural diversity would not be permitted.
Let us take an example and see how these characteristics are
applied. If we were to teach yes-no question formation, we might
determine the immediate challenge to be linguistic form, based on
our analysis of the three dimensions.
The first step in the lesson is the presentation of the
linguistic rule. We have several options regarding the presentation
phase: the rule could be presented inductively or deductively. Also,
the rule could be made explicit or not.
We next will need to select an activity that encourages
meaningful repetition of the pattern, no verbatim repetition. We
want the students to concentrate on producing only yes-no questions.
A game like Twenty questions would appear to meet the criteria:
students get to ask 20 yes-no questions about an object or person in

76
an attempt to guess the identity; hence, they receive abundant
practice in forming questions, and the questions they produce are
meaningful. The game can be repeated as long as the students remain
interested.
Questions can also be used to elicit other structures. For
example, a variation on the same game might be to have students
guess “Whose_____________ is it?” Their responses (e.g., It’s
Maria’s, It’s Nike’s, It’s Grace’s) would provide an opportunity to
practise the 3 allomorphs of the possessive. Then, too, the responses
to the guesses would offer a good deal of practice with short forms
(e.g., No, it isn’t/Yes, it is).
Another example of a game which appears to meet the above
criteria is the Telephone game, which can be used to practise the
forms of reported speech. One student would whisper something to
another student (e.g. “I’m happy it’s Friday”). The second student
would whisper to a third student what s/he has heard from the first
student (Tom said that he was happy it was Friday).
In sum, certain games are good devices for practising
grammar points where the identified challenge resides in the formal
dimension.
Meaning: If the teacher has decided that the challenge of a
particular structure lies in the semantic dimension for the class, then
a different sort of practice activity should be needed. It would seem
that verbal association, multiple discrimination, and concept
learning would all come into play when working on the meaning of
a particular grammar structure. The major procedures would be for
the student to learn to bond the form to its meaning and also to
distinguish the meaning of one particular form from another.
Sometimes a single pairing of form and meaning suffices for
a student to make the bond. Due to memory constraints, it seems
prudent to restrict the number of new items being practiced at any
one time to between 2 and 6.

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 Sequencing: Grammar structures are not acquired one at a
time through a process of “agglutination” (W. Rutherford, 1987).
Rather, different aspects of form, meaning and pragmatics of a given
structure may be acquired at different stages of interlanguage
development.
Many teachers have little control over where they start a
grammar sequence. They must adhere to a prescribed syllabus or
textbook. But for those who have a choice, there are a few clear-cut
answers. The usual advice is to begin with the simple structure and
work up to the more complex.
Presenting a structure: Now we can briefly illustrate
options for presenting a structure during the initial phase of a lesson.
A necessary ingredient for this phase is having some language
sample/examples that illustrate the teaching point.
In the audiolingual method, grammar points are introduced
via a dialogue which students listen to, and subsequently memorize.
While dialogues are useful for introducing points of grammar, there
are a variety of other formats that can be used: songs and poems;
authentic texts (e.g. newspaper articles); segments of taped
radio/television broadcasts
Moreover, the person who selects these samples can be
varied, too. For example, if the grammar point has to do with the
distinction between mass and count nouns:
- The teacher could bring in an advertising circular from a local
supermarket. Or
- The students might be invited to bring in their favourite recipes. Or
- The teacher and students might generate a language sample
together which contained count and mass nouns (e.g. “I went to the
supermarket” game).
When practising an inductive approach, students would be
presented with the language sample, let’s say the advertising circular.
They then would be encouraged to make their own observations
about the form of mass and countable nouns. Now we can briefly

78
illustrate options for presenting a structure during the initial phase of
a lesson. A necessary ingredient for this phase is having some
language sample/examples that illustrate the teaching point.
If practising a deductive approach, the teacher would
present the generalisation and then ask students to apply it to the
language sample. This approach would be suitable for our example
of teacher-students generated language since students might be aided
in playing the game by having knowledge of the mass/count
distinction.
One advantage of using an inductive approach during the
presentation phase is that it allows teachers to assess what the
students already know about a particular structure and to make any
necessary modifications in their lesson plan.
2.3.8.4. Context. What we are suggesting here is that
students need to get an idea of how the new language is used by
native speakers and the best way of doing this is to present language
in context. The context for introducing new language should have a
number of characteristics:
- It should show what the new language means and how it is used.
That is why many useful contexts have the new language being used
in a written text or a dialogue.
- a good context should be interesting for the students. This doesn’t
mean that all the subject matter we use for presentation should be
wildly funny or inventive all the time. But the students should at
least want to see or hear the information
- a good context should provide the background for a lot of language
use so that students can use the information not only for the
repetition of model sentences but also for making their own
sentences.
Often the textbook will have all the characteristics
mentioned here and the teacher can confidently rely on the material
for the presentation. But the textbook is not always so appropriate:
for a number of reasons the information in the textbook may not be

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right for our students. In such cases we will want to create our own
contexts for language use.
Context means the situation or body of information that
causes language to be used. There are a number of different context
types, but for our purposes we will concentrate on three: the
students’ world, the outside world and formulated information.
The students’ world can be a major source of contexts for
language presentation. There are two kinds of students’ world.
Clearly we can use the physical surroundings that the students are in,
the classroom, school or institution. But classrooms and their
physical properties (desks, tables, blackboards, chairs, etc.) are
limited. The students’ lives are not constrained in the same way,
however, and we can use facts about them, their families, friends and
experiences.
The outside world provides us with rich contexts for
language presentation. For example, there is an almost infinite
number of stories we can use to present different tenses. We can also
create situations where people speak because they are in those
situations. This is especially useful for the practice of functional
language, for example. These categories - story or situation - can be
simulated or real. Most teachers are familiar with ‘made up’ stories
that are often useful for class-work.
Formulated information refers to all that information
which is presented in the form of timetables, notes, charts, etc.
The context we choose will depend on the type of language
being introduced.
One of the teacher’s jobs is to show how the new language is
formed – how the grammar works and how it is put together. One
way of doing this is to explain the grammar in detail, using
grammatical terminology and giving a mini-lecture on the subject.
This seems problematic, though, because many students may find
grammatical concepts difficult. A more effective way of presenting
form is to let students see and/or hear the new language, drawing

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their attention in a number of different ways to the grammatical
elements of which it is made. For, whilst advanced students may
profit from grammatical explanations to a certain extent, at lower
levels we must usually find simpler and more transparent ways of
giving students grammatical information.
It is undoubtedly important for the students to understand the
meaning of the new language they are learning. This is conveyed
during the lead-in stage where key concepts clearly demonstrate
what is going on. We also need to know whether the students have
understood the new language so that we can organise our teaching
accordingly. Not only is the lead-in stage vital, but it will also be
necessary for the teacher to check frequently that the students have
understood.

2.3.8.5. Checking meaning can be done in three ways:

information checking, immediate creativity and translation.
Information checking. The teacher will often need to find
out if students have understood the information in the lead-in, or
whether students understand what a model means.
Immediate creativity and different settings: We may ask
students to produce sentences of their own in order to check that they
have understood the new language
Translation: The main advantages of translation are that it
is quick and efficient. There is, however, a disadvantage to the use of
translation: it is not always possible to translate exactly.

2.3.8.6. Discovery techniques:

In our model for introducing new language, we saw how the
teacher creates a context (or uses one from some materials) and
elicits language which is then given as models for the students to
repeat. The whole procedure is basically teacher-led since it is the
teacher’s job to explain the language and conduct a cue-response

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drill before moving to immediate creativity and pair-work (where the
students start to take over control a bit).
Discovery techniques, on the other hand, aim to give
students a chance to take charge earlier. The idea is simple: give
students a listening or reading text – or some examples of English
sentences – and ask them to discover how the language works. We
might give students a text which is a story, for example, and we
could ask them to look at it again to see how many ways they could
find in it for referring to the past tense. Or, they could listen to a tape
and write down any sentences which had the conjunction ‘if’ in
them. Then they could see if there was any pattern to those
sentences.
What is being suggested is that there is a range of techniques
where the teacher gets the students to do most of the work. There are
good pedagogical and methodological reasons for this since the
students will be more involved and since this kind of activity invites
them to use their reasoning processes.
Of course, discovery techniques are not suitable for all
students on all occasions. Frequently, this problem-solving approach
takes more time than a more controlled presentation. It is also true
that designing material for discovery activities – or finding a text that
will suit this approach – is far easier at intermediate and advanced
levels than it is when teaching beginners.
In this chapter we have been advocating a primarily oral
approach in which the first thing students do with the language is to
say it. At any stage, however, the teacher may ask the students to
write the new language.
Often the teacher will use the writing as reinforcement for an
oral presentation such as the type we have so far described. Thus
either immediately before or after the immediate creativity stage the
teacher asks students to write sentences using the new language. The
sentences may be the original models the teacher used during the

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accurate reproduction stage, and the students might be asked to copy
these sentences from the blackboard.
They might see the same sentences, but the teacher might
leave out certain words (this is commonly called a fill-in exercise).
The students might be shown model sentences and then be
asked to write similar sentences of their own. This is a written
version of the immediate creativity stage.
The students might see a short piece of connected writing
using the new language and then be asked to write a similar piece.
This is often called parallel writing.
All of these techniques have their merits, although copying is
often unchallenging and boring. The main object, though, is to relate
the spoken and written forms of the new language and to enable the
students to write the new pattern as well as say it.
Encouraging students to discover grammar for themselves is
one valuable way of helping them to get to grips with the language.
The use of discovery techniques can be highly motivating and
extremely beneficial for the students, involving them in a fairly
analytical study of language (Harmer, 2001: 41).

2.3.8.7. Practice techniques

Harmer (idem) includes here four different types of oral
practice: drills ; interaction activities; involving the personality;
games and written practice. Students need to practise the grammar a
lot. Drills are useful, but we must always remember that they are
only a means to an end. As soon as possible they should be
abandoned in favour of creative activities.

2.3.8.8. Error correction

In his delineation of the function of a language teacher, P.
Corder (1981: 134). writes, “the function of the teacher is to provide
data and examples and where necessary, to offer explanations and
descriptions and, more important, verification of the learner’s

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hypotheses (i.e. corrections)”. Thus, Corder considers error
correction a necessary element of pedagogical practice, and we
would certainly concur. There are, however, those who would
proscribe it, believing that error correction will inhibit students from
freely expressing themselves. While there are clearly times that error
correction can be intrusive and therefore unwarranted (e.g. during
communicative phase activities), at other times focused error
correction is highly desirable. It provides the negative evidence
students often need to reject or modify their hypotheses about how
the target language is formed or functions. Students understand this,
which explains why they often deliberately seek error correction to
assist them with their language learning task.

2.4. Teaching discourse

What we say depends on a number of factors such as where
we are, what we want to say and who we are talking to. It also
involves our ability to structure discourse, to organize it into a
coherent whole.
Clearly students need to be aware of the different way
language is used in different situations. They need to know the
difference between formal and informal language use, they have to
learn language functions.
One of the variables which governs appropriacy is purpose.
People decide what they want to say on the basis of what purpose
they wish to achieve.
In deciding what language to teach when working with
functions we need to bear in mind the level of difficulty, the level of
transparency ( if the meaning is clear) and the level of formality
(Harmer, 1997:25)
At the same time as students are studying grammar,
vocabulary and language functions we can encourage them to work
on the way they structure their discourse, i.e on the way they
organize what they want to say and write. We should bring them

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authentic materials so that they can see how other speakers and
writers structure their discourse.
For students organizing written discourse is extremely
important and a special emphasis should be placed on cohesion.
We will deal with more aspects regarding discourse in the
next unit.

Topics for discussion and exercises:

1. Grammatical metalanguage:
i. Write a sentence that illustrates each of the following concepts:
a. embedding; b. genre; c. register; d. given-new;
ii. Illustrate the fact that a pragmatic function, such as a request,
doesn't always correspond to a particular sentence type;
iii. Indicate ways of achieving cohesion in discourse.
(Source Celce - Murcia, M., Larsen- Freeeman, D. 1999. The
Grammar Book. An ESL/EFL Teacher' s Course)

2. How would you answer a student who asks you what the
difference is:
i. among the following verbs: see, look, watch, stare, peer, glance?
ii. between owing to and due to?

3. Why are the following sentences ungrammatical? If your students

make these errors how would you make them aware of the errors,
and what activities would you provide to help students avoid these
errors?
i. Tom has bought it last Saturday.
ii. I'm believing you.

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4. Students have made the following errors. In each case explain the
nature of the error and state what activities you would provide to
correct it:
i. * You will can go there.
ii.* May you cash this check (cheque), please?
iii.*You should study a lot for that class last term.
iv. ?Excuse me, Mr. Smith, you gotta give us our homework
back.
v. Would you please close the window? *Of course I would.

5. If your students produce the following sentences, what errors have

they made? How would you make them aware of the errors and what
exercises will you prepare to correct the errors?
i.*We discussed about our plan.
ii.*Explain me that rule again, please.
iii.*The newspapers in Los Angeles have better international
coverage than in San Diego.
iv.*What happens if I pushed this button?
v. *Only if you help me I will study for this quiz.

6. One ESL teacher said he had his students memorize the verbs that
take gerund complements and told them to use infinitives
everywhere else. Do you think that this is a good teaching strategy?
Why or why not?

7. If your students produce sentences like this, what error(s) have

they made? How will you make them aware of the errors and what
activities will you provide to correct these errors?
i. *Tom can play sometimes handball after work.
ii. *Rarely we can eat outside in the garden.
iii. *I speak fluently French.

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8. Grammaticality of sentences:
i. A student tells you that he has been told that any is always used
in place of some in a negative sentence, but that he heard another
teacher say the following: I can't recall some of their names. The
student asks you if this is grammatical. What would you say?
ii. One of your students asks you why a certain grammar text
claims that English has no future tense. This student feels that
English has a future tense. How would you answer this question?

9. Design a context and presentation sequence for introducing one of

the uses of the Present Perfect Tense Simple.

10. Design a communicative activity for presenting the Present

Perfect Tense Simple and the Past Tense Simple in contrast.

11. Design a context for teaching the degrees of comparison.

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 CHAPTER III

TEACHING AND DEVELOPING LANGUAGE SKILLS

3.1. Teaching listening

3.1.1. Elements of listening
Most introductions to the comprehension of speech stress
three elements: (i) access to vocabulary, (ii) parsing, and (iii)
memory processes.
(i) Access to vocabulary / words
At one level, in order to comprehend a sentence you have to
work out what the words mean. The mind has to relate the words that
are heard to the information that is stored about them in the mind –
their meanings, etc. For example, a native speaker can answer the
question “Is the word ‘blish’ English?” almost instantaneously,
somehow working through many thousands of words in a few
moments. Such feats show the human mind is extraordinarily
efficient at organizing the storage of words and their
interconnections. The context automatically makes particular
meanings of words available to us. For example, to a person reading
a research article, the word “table” means a layout of figures. To
someone reading about antiques it means a piece of furniture. To
someone reading a surveyor’s report on a house it means the depth at
which water appears in the ground, and so on. Somehow the context
limits the amount of mental space that has to be searched to get the
right meaning.
(ii) Parsing
Parsing refers to how the mind works out the grammatical
structure and meaning of the sentences it hears. Take a sentence such
as “The man ate breakfast”. To understand the sentence fully means
being able to tell who is carrying out the action and what is affected
by the action and also to realize that “ate breakfast” goes together as

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a phrase while “man ate” does not. Even if our minds are not
consciously aware of the grammatical technicalities, nevertheless
they are working out the structure of the sentence automatically.
Grammar is not just in the back of our minds but is active while we
are listening.
The process of parsing can be either ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-
down’.
‘Bottom-up’ parsing means building the sentence up in our
minds bit by bit, putting the sounds into words, the words into
phrases, the phrases into a whole sentence. So “the” is put with
“man” to get a noun phrase “the man”; “ate” goes with “breakfast” to
get a verb phrase ““ate breakfast”; and the noun phrase “the man”
and the verb phrase ““ate breakfast” go together to yield the structure
of the whole sentence.
‘Top-down’ parsing on the other hand means starting from
the whole sentence and breaking it down into smaller and smaller
bits. Given a sentence like “The man ate breakfast”, the top-down
process tries to find a noun phrase, which in turn means trying to
find first an article “the” and then a noun “man”. If it succeeds, it
next tries to find a verb phrase, which means trying to find a verb
“ate” and a noun phrase “breakfast”. If the quest to find a noun
phrase and a verb phrase succeeds, it has found a sentence, complete
with its structure.
In principle, the mind could parse the sentence in either the
bottom-up or the top-down direction. In practice listeners get the best
of both worlds by using both types of process. Features such as the
intonation pattern allow them to fit words and phrases within an
overall structure, a top-down process. Particular words indicate the
start of a phrase and allow them to build it up word by word, a
bottom-up process.
(iii) Memory processes

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 The memory processes in listening are closely connected to those
discussed earlier. All comprehension depends on the storing and
processing of information by the minds.

3.1.2. Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching

listening (receptive language skill)
i. Behaviorism – Audiolingualism
Listening is a “taken for granted” passive process, a
mechanical process based on the stimulus (hearing spoken chunks of
language) - response pattern (identification and organization of these
into sentences, i.e recognition and discrimination of sounds and
words, recognition of intonation patterns, rhythm, rather than
understanding of meaningful language stretches). The techniques
used mainly consist in repeating, imitating and memorizing of
prefabricated language, while totally disregarding cognitive
processes.
ii. Cognitivism – Total Physical Response, The Natural
Approach
Listening is considered a more dynamic process of cognitive
nature. Therefore the development of Listening skills focuses on
comprehension (as a cognitive process) premised by the idea that
understanding language facilitates learning (rather than acquisition).
In point of techniques, learners are exposed to large amounts of
listening material while asked to decode meaning and perform
simple selection tasks (Audiolingualism); listening is immediately
followed by production (The Natural Approach).
iii. The Interactionist Approach (The Socio-Cultural
Turn): CLT, The Post-Communicative Turn
The interactive, social and contextualized perspective of
language learning focuses on connected speech (discourse) rather
than on isolated pieces. There is also a shift from centering on formal
aspects of language to content and meaning, to communicative intent
(purposeful listening). Information processing while listening

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(sequential order of input, perception, recognition, and understanding
stages) is coupled with a constructivist stance: listeners actively
construct meaning according to their own purposes for listening as
well as their own prior knowledge and experience. Prior knowledge
is identified to schemata, further subdivided into content schemata
(topic familiarity, cultural knowledge and previous experience with a
particular field) and formal schemata (knowledge about text types -
stylistic conventions as well as the structural organization/variety of
formats).
The socio-cultural context has gained ever increased
importance in language learning as the process does not take place in
a social vacuum. Admittedly, special attention is paid to the effects
that status relationship between participants had on language
behaviour (level of formality). In fact, it is pointed out that listeners
engaged in face-to- face interaction must pay attention to this
variable in order to determine which type of verbal behavior should
be appropriate when delivering a response. Non-verbal language is
equally part of the social context in which listening occurs: body
postures, body movements, facial expressions, facial gestures, eye
contact, the use of space by the communicators) as well as non-
verbal paralinguistic elements: tone, pitch of voice, etc.
Consequently, an understanding of all these aspects would provide
important clues for interpreting what is being listened to and, in turn,
facilitate the whole process of listening comprehension. Besides,
there is the question of the cultural load (intercultural pragmatics) –
different interpretation of non-verbal language, formulation of
different speech acts and politeness issues, such as the directness-
indirectness continuum.
To sum up, listening is considered as a primary vehicle for
language learning, achieving a status of significant and central
importance in both language learning and language teaching fields.

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 3.1.3. Listening skills and intercultural communicative
competence
Uso´-Juan, Martınez-Flor (Current Trends in the
Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills, 2006: 41-
42) provides a sample of intercultural communicative activity:

Activity
Select a representative scene from a film, brought in by the
learners, which shows a given cultural topic. Prepare a series of
questions divided into three phases (i.e., pre-listening, while-
listening and post-listening) with the aim of activating, developing
and reflecting on their cultural knowledge of such a topic while
practising their listening skills.
Visual listening
Pre-listening phase
- Do you think the topic of (…) is representative of the target culture
and of your own culture? Why or why not?
- Which ideas come to your mind when thinking about such a topic?
While-listening phase
- Can you identify elements such as pauses, changes of intonation,
tone of voice or periods of silence that involve cultural meaning?
- Which is the setting of the scene? Does it involve particular
implications for the development of the situation?
- What is the participants’ relationship in terms of social status and
power? Does such a relationship affect their communicative
interaction? Would such interaction be different in your own culture?
- Which non-verbal means of communication can be identified (i.e.,
body movement, facial expression, eye contact, etc.)? Are they
different in your own culture?
Post-listening phase
Reflect on the scene you have just watched and in small groups
discuss the cultural differences that would arise if the same situation
were to take place in your own culture.

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 3.1.4. Control factors in teaching listening skills
i. Accessibility of input: listening provides primary exposure to
L2, fostering language acquisition/learning. The quality of the input
is determined by relevance (fitness of purpose) translated into
sustainable effort to understand, roughly-tuned informational
complexity (measurable in point of length, speed, familiarity,
information density, and text organization); authenticity of listening
materials.
ii. Fostering top down processing (deductive reasoning):
activating background knowledge and expectations (schemata) in
detecting the speakers’ intended meaning. Nation and Waring (1997)
claim that a recognition vocabulary of 3000 word families is
necessary for comprehension of everyday conversations, if we
assume that a listener needs to be familiar with – and able to
recognize about 90% of content words to understand a conversation
satisfactorily.
iii. Fostering bottom up processing (inductive reasoning):
phonetic feature detection, metrical segmentation of the L input into
words and word recognition in meaning decoding/construction.
iv. Listener status: listener’s active engagement in the process
engenders successful
development of the Listening skills while experiencing lower
uncertainty and anxiety and higher self-confidence and tolerance of
ambiguity.

3.1.5. Some methods of teaching listening

Mary Underwood (Teaching Listening 1989) recognizes
three stages of teaching: pre-listening where the students activate
their vocabulary and their background knowledge; while-listening
where they develop the skill of eliciting messages; and post-
listening which consists of extensions and developments of the
listening task.

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 A development in the last few decades has been task-based
teaching of listening. The students carry out a task in which they
have to listen for information in a short piece of discourse and then
have to fill in a diagram, check a route on a map or correct mistakes
in a text. The COBUILD English Course I (J. Willis & D. Willis,
1987), for example, asks the students to listen to tapes of people
speaking spontaneously and to work out information from them.
Lesson 9 has a recording of Chris telling Philip how to get to his
house in Birmingham. The students listen for factual information,
such as which buses could be taken; they make a rough map of the
route, and they check its accuracy against the A-Z map of
Birmingham.
A teaching motivation for task-based listening activities is
that information is being transferred for a communicative purpose.
In the COBUILD example the student is practicing something that
resembles real world communication. As Vivian Cook points out
(Second Language Learning and Language Teaching, 1994: 61), it is
sad, however, that the information that is transferred in such
activities is usually about trivial topics or irrelevant to the students’
lives. The factual information the students learn in the COBUILD
exercise is how to get around in Birmingham, somewhere only a few
of them are ever likely to go. Often such exercises deal with
imaginary towns, or even treasure islands. On the one hand, task-
based exercises often neglect the educational value of the content
that can be used in language teaching. On the other hand, much
psychological research shows that, the more important the
information is to the listener, the more likely it is to be retained.
Listening-based methods of teaching: So far listening has
been taken as a process of decoding speech – working out the
message from the sentence you hear. However the main focus in
recent discussions of teaching methodology has been on listening as
a way of learning language rather than as a way of processing

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language. This process is called codebreaking: listening means
working out the language code from the ‘message’.
Therefore a distinction is made between (i) decoding speech
and (ii) codebreaking speech:
(i) Decoding speech has the aim of discovering the message using
processes that are already known (i.e. processing language to get the
‘message’).
(ii) Codebreaking speech has the aim of discovering the processes
themselves from a message (i.e. processing language to get the
‘rules’).
One of the first to interpret listening as codebreaking was
James Asher’s Total Physical Response Method (TPR) (Learning
another Language through Actions, 1986), which claimed that
listening to commands and carrying them out was an effective way
of learning a second language. A specimen TPR lesson reported by
Asher consists of the teacher getting the students to respond to the
commands:
Walk to the window; Touch the window; Walk to the table.
Touch the table; Juan, stand up and walk to the door.
Jaime, walk to the table and sit on the table.
The students follow the directions the teacher gives. TPR
came from psychological theories of language learning, its unique
feature being the emphasis on learning through physical actions.
Other listening-based methods have also been successful.
According to J. Gary and N. Gary (Comprehension-based language
instruction: practice, 1981) the benefits of concentrating on listening
are that students do not feel so embarrassed if they do not have to
speak, the memory loss is less if they listen without speaking,
classroom equipment such as tape recorders can be used more
effectively for listening than for speaking, and so on.
One of the major schisms in contemporary teaching
methodology is between those who require students to practice

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communication by both listening and speaking and those who prefer
students to listen for information without speaking.
Stephen Krashen (1981) brings these listening-based
methods together through the notion of ‘comprehensible input’. He
claims that acquisition can take place only when people understand
messages in the target language. Listening is motivated by the need
to get messages out of what is heard. L2 learners acquire a new
language by hearing it in contexts where the meaning is made plain
to them. Ideally the speech they hear has enough ‘old’ language that
the student already knows and makes enough sense in the context for
the ‘new’ language to be understood and absorbed. Krashen claims
that all teaching methods that work utilize the same fundamental
pedagogical principle of providing comprehensible input: ‘if x is
shown to be “good” for acquiring a second language, x helps to
provide CI [comprehensible input], either directly or indirectly.
Krashen’s codebreaking approach to listening became a strong
influence on language teachers in the 1980s. It is saying essentially
that L2 acquisition depends on listening – decoding is codebreaking.

3.1.6. Principles for listening comprehension in the

classroom
The research activities suggest a set of principles for
conducting listening activities in the second/foreign language
classroom:
i.. Increase the amount of listening time in the second language
class. Make listening the primary channel for learning new material.
Input must be interesting, comprehensible, supported by
extralingustic materials, and keyed to the language lesson.
ii. Use listening before other activities. Have students listen to
the material before they are required to speak, read, or write about it.
iii. Include both global and selective listening. Global listening
encourages students to get the gist, the main idea, the topic, situation,

98
or setting. Selective listening points student attention to details of
form and encourages accuracy in generating the language system.
iv. Activate top-level skills. Give advanced organizers or
discussions which call up students’ background knowledge. Do this
before students listen. Encourage top-down processing at every
proficiency level.
v. Work towards automaticity in processing. Include exercises
which build both recognition and retention of the material. Use
familiar material in recombinations. Encourage over learning through
focus on selected formal features. Practise bottom-up processing at
every proficiency level.
vi. Develop conscious listening strategies. Practise interactive
listening, so that they can use their bottom-up and top-down
processes to check one against the other.

3.1.7. Some dimensions of language and the listening act

3.1.7.1. Listening – a dynamic process, not a passive one
Listening along with reading has had a traditional label of
“passive skill”. Nothing could be further from the truth. A. Anderson
and T. Lynch (Listening, 1968) reject a conceptualization of listening
as a “passive act”. They argue that such a perspective on listening
fails to account for the interpretations listeners make as they “hear”
the spoken text according to their own purposes for listening, their
expectations and their own store of background knowledge.
Implications for instruction: One of the obvious
implications for instruction is to bring students to an understanding
that listening is not a passive skill, but one that not only is active but
very demanding. This can be done gradually as part of listening
activity work, especially activities that are in the communicative
modes. Learners can come to realize that just as it is “work” to
become better readers, writers, and speakers in a second language,
listening skill, too, doesn’t happen magically or as an overnight
phenomenon.

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 3.1.7.2. Listening in two active communicative modes:
i. Two-way communication: Every day we engage in
communicative listening in one way or another most of our waking
hours. Probably the first mode that comes to mind is listening in two-
way communication, or “interactive” listening. Here the reciprocal
“speech chain” of speaker/listener is obvious to us. Here there are
two (or more) active participants who take turns in speaker-role and
listener-role as the face-to-face (or telephone) interaction moves
along.
ii. One-way communication: A second mode is listening in
one-way communication. Auditory input seems to surround us as we
move through the day. The input comes from a variety of sources:
the media (e.g. radio, television, films); instructional situations of all
kinds; public performances (e.g. lectures, religious services, plays)
Implications for instruction: Second/foreign language
learners need to have instructional opportunities in both two-way and
one-way communicative modes.

3.1.7.3. Listening and language processing, bottom-up

and top-down
In accounting for the complex nature of processing spoken
language it has been hypothesized that “bottom-up” and “top-down”
modes work together in a combined cooperative process.
Bottom-up processing: Bottom-up comprehension of
speech refers to the part of the process in which the “understanding”
of incoming language is worked out proceeding from sounds, into
words, into grammatical relationship and lexical meaning, and so on.
Top-down processing: here the processing of language
comes from an internal source. Learners understand the incoming
speech from the context: the preceding linguistic context, the
situational context.

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 3.1.8. A developmental view of listening skills
3.1.8.1 Profile of the beginning-level student in listening
True beginners in a second/foreign language are lacking in
bottom-up processing skills because they have not yet developed the
cognitive categories against which the language must be heard. They
are not yet able to segment the speech stream into word units, to tell
where one word begins and another ends. The new phonemic system
is an unbroken code: Sounds which native speakers consider similar
may be perceived and classified as different; sounds which native
speakers consider different may be perceived and classified as the
same. Learners have no idea about phonological rules which change
sounds in certain environments, or cause reductions of sound. The
structural competence of beginners also places limitations on their
bottom-up processing skills. They are not familiar with rules for
word formation, inflections, or word-order rules. Their vocabulary
store is nonexistent and there is no area of grammatical
understanding that they could use to unlock the meaning of the
whole.
The true novice stage is of very short duration. After a few
hours of instruction, most learners can use their understanding of
linguistic categories to decode new utterances.
Despite its brevity, the novice stage is important for the
development of positive attitudes towards listening. Learners should
be encouraged to tolerate uncertainty, to use their real-world
knowledge and analytical skills, and to enjoy their success in
comprehension.
i. Techniques for global listening: one important usage of
global listening is the presentation of new material. Until the students
are skilled readers, it is best to present new material aurally.
Teachers may select any part of the lesson for a global listening
experience, or may write their own short text based on the lesson.
Texts for global listening should be short and preceded by a
pre-listening activity. Wherever possible, the theme and situation of

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the story should be presented visually by drawing on the blackboard,
overhead projector, or a large poster. New vocabulary can be used in
short, illustrative sentences before learners hear it as part of the
lesson.
The pre-listening stage should develop learners’ curiosity
about how all the phrases and words they have heard will fit together
in a context.
ii. Selective listening techniques: The teacher can bring
some patterns or structures into conscious awareness through
selective listening exercises. Listening goals for beginners are listed
below, with exercise types to promote them. The classification of
exercises as bottom-up or top-down does not indicate that only one
kind of cognitive activity can occur during each exercise, but rather
that some exercises promote predominantly bottom-up responses,
and some exercises promote predominantly top-down activity.
- An exercise is classified as bottom-up if focus is on the form and
the exercise deals with one of the structural systems of English.
- An exercise is classified as top-down if the focus is on meaning
and the listener uses global listening strategies.
- An exercise is classified as interactive if the listeners must use
information gained by processing at one level to check the accuracy
of their processing on another level.
Exercise types for beginning level listeners
Bottom-up processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Discriminating between intonation contours in sentences
Listen to a sequence of sentence patterns with either rising or
falling intonation. Place a check in column 1 (rising) or column 2
(falling), depending on the pattern you hear.
Goal: Discriminating between phonemes.
Listen to pairs of words. Some pairs differ in their final
consonant (stay/steak), and some pairs are the same (laid/laid).
Circle the word “same” or “different” depending on what you hear.
Goal: Selecting details from the text (word recognition).

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 Match a word that you hear with its picture
Top-down processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Discriminating between emotional reactions.
Listen to a sequence of utterances. Place a check in the column
which describes the emotional reaction that you hear: interested,
happy, surprised, or unhappy.
Goal: Getting the gist of a sentence.
Listen to a sentence describing a picture and select the correct
picture.
Goal: Recognize the topic.
Listen to a conversation and decide what the people are talking
about. Choose the picture that shows the topic.
Interactive processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Build a semantic network of word associations
Listen to a word and associate all the related words that come
to mind.
Goal: Following directions.
Listen to a description of a route and trace it on the map.

3.1.8.2. Profile of the intermediate-level learner

Intermediate-level learners continue to use listening as an
important source of language input to increase their vocabulary and
structural understanding. Although they may have internalised the
phonemic system of the language fairly well, they may have little
understanding of the complexities of phonological rules which
govern fast speech: reductions, elisions, etc. They need practice in
word recognition and in discriminating fine differences in word order
and grammatical form, registers of speaking, etc. Intermediate-level
learners have moved beyond the limits of words and phrases, their
memory can retain longer phrases and sentences. They can listen to
short conversations or narratives that are one or two paragraphs in
length. They are able to get the gist or to find the main idea.

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 i. Techniques for global listening: At the intermediate level, it is
no longer necessary to provide learners with simplified codes and
modified speech. Indeed, intermediate-level learners need to hear
authentic texts with reduced forms, fast speech features, hesitations,
some non-standard dialects, and a variety of different voices. There
are several definitions of authenticity in materials. D. Porter and J.
Roberts (Authentic Listening Activities, in ELT Journal, 1987, 36:1,
pp. 37-47) state that authentic texts are those “instances of spoken
language which were not initiated for the purpose of teaching…not
intended for non-native learners”. In contrast, teacher-made texts are
easily identified by limited vocabulary, complete sentences,
repetition of target structures, exaggerated intonation, clear
enunciation.
The need to introduce authentic material into students’
listening repertoire by the end of beginning level is supported by the
fact that most listening in the world outside the classroom does not
conform to simplified codes.
ii. Techniques for selective listening: Intermediate level students
who were trained with simplified codes and with clearly pronounced
models may not recognize the same words and phrases in normal fast
speech. At the intermediate level, accuracy in discriminating
grammatical features is very important, e.g. certain unstressed
endings, articles, inflections, function words.
Exercise types for intermediate level listeners
Bottom-up processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Recognizing fast speech forms.
Listen to a series of sentences that contain unstressed function
words. Circle your choice among three words on the answer sheet –
for example: “up”, “a”, “of”.
Goal: Recognizing pertinent details in the speech stream.
Listen to a short dialogue between a boss and a secretary
regarding changes in the daily schedule. Use an appointment

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calendar. Cross out appointments that are being changed and write in
new ones.
Top-down processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Listen to identify the speaker or the topic.
Listen to a series of radio commercials. On your answer sheet,
choose among 4 types of products and identify the picture which
goes with the commercial.
Goal: Discriminating between registers of speech and tones of voice
Listen to a series of sentences. On your answer sheet, mark
whether the sentence is polite or impolite.
Interactive processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Recognize missing grammar markers in colloquial speech.
Listen to a series of short questions in which the auxiliary verb
and subject have been deleted, e.g. Got a match? (have you…)
Goal: use cultural background information to construct a more
complete understanding of a text: Listen to one side of a telephone
conversation. Decide what the topic of the conversation might be.

3.1.8.3. Profile of the advanced-level learner

Advanced students are no longer simply learning to listen, or
listening to learn the language. They are listening in the language to
learn about the content of other areas. Advanced learners can listen
to longer texts, such as radio and television programmes. Their
vocabulary includes topics in current events, history and culture.
However, their understanding of the language remains on a fairly
literal plane, so that they may miss jokes, slang, and cultural
references.
Exercise types for advanced-level listeners
Bottom-up processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Become aware of sentence level features in lecture text.
Listen to a segment of a lecture while reading a transcript of
the material. Notice the incomplete sentences, pauses, and verbal
fillers.

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 Top-down processing goals and exercise types
Goal: Use the introduction to the lecture to predict its focus and
direction.
Listen to the introductory section of a lecture. Then read a
number of topics on your answer sheet and choose the topic that best
expresses what the lecture will discuss.

3.2. Teaching speaking

3.2.1. Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching
speaking skills (productive language skill)
i. Behaviorism - Audiolingualism
Within behaviorism, language is mainly spoken in nature. Thus,
developing Speaking skills is similar to any other type of learning,
based on a stimulus-response-reinforcement pattern which involves
constant practice and the formation of good habits. Therefore,
speakers are first exposed to linguistic input as a type of external
stimulus and their response consists of imitating and repeating such
input. If this is performed correctly, they received a positive
reinforcement by other language users within their same
environment. The techniques used refer to learners’ carrying out
repetition and substitution drills, practising grammatical structures
and patterns (pronunciation in focus) through intense aural-oral
practice.
ii. Cognitivism
In this type of approach, learners are provided with opportunities to
use the language more creatively and innovatively after having been
taught the relevant grammatical rules. There is recognition of the
dynamic nature of learning: speakers mentally construct the language
system in order to use it, yet speaking still occurs in isolation, it is
not part of a communicative event.
iii. The Interactionist Approach (The Socio-Cultural Turn):
CLT, The Post-Communicative Turn

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Speech production is context-embedded and presupposes interaction
as well as the capacity to integrate different interpersonal and
psychomotor aspects. Levelt (1989) endorses an automatic 4-stage
model of speech production: 1) conceptualization, i.e. selection of
the message content on the basis of the situational context and the
particular purpose to be achieved; 2) formulation, i.e. accessing,
sequencing and choosing words and phrases to express the intended
message appropriately; 3) articulation, which concerns the motor
control of the articulatory organs to execute the planned message;
and 4) monitoring, which allows speakers to actively identify and
correct mistakes if necessary.
In the CLT, speaking ranks topmost and learners are trained
so as to cope with real life situations. They are concerned with form,
i.e. how to produce linguistically acceptable utterances in point of
pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, and with accommodation /
appropriacy, i.e. selection of content and form given particular socio-
cultural settings and norms. Additionally, they need to be
strategically competent so that they can make adjustments during the
ongoing process of speaking (since in most cases there is immediate
feedback) and carry the message across.
The interactive, social and contextualized perspective of
language learning focuses on connected speech (discourse) rather
than on isolated pieces. There is also a shift from centering on formal
aspects of language to content and meaning, to communicative intent
(purposeful speaking). Speaking development underpins
constructivism: they actively use language according to their own
purposes for speaking as well as their own prior knowledge
(linguistic knowledge and extra-linguistic / encyclopaedic
knowledge) and protocol of experience. Prior knowledge is identified
to schemata, further subdivided into content schemata (topic
familiarity, cultural knowledge and previous experience with a
particular field) and formal schemata (features of the oral mode of

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communication: discourse, structures, and phonological and prosodic
systems of speaking).

3.2.2. Speaking skills and intercultural communicative

competence
Uso´-Juan, Martınez-Flor (Current Trends in the
Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills, 2006: 152-
153) provides an example of such an activity
Activity
Classify all culture-related materials brought in by all
learners (i.e., written passages, audio extracts, video scenes)
according to the particular cultural topic covered (e.g., family, law
and order, power and politics, etc.) and use them as resources for
further prasticing the speaking skill. Arrange learners in groups of
three or four members and ask them to select the materials that deal
with a given cultural topic they are interested in. After reading or
listening to the material they have chosen, they are asked to discuss
the topic by giving their own personal point of view and to record
their discussion.
The transcripts from these oral discussions can then be used
in the classroom as a starting point to deal with the cultural topic
with the rest of the class, as well as to analyze the oral features
employed by each particular group of learners (i.e., pauses,
repetition, pronunciation, turn-taking mechanisms, etc.).

3.2.3. Control factors in teaching speaking skills

The following factors are involved:
i. Features of oral discourse: the recurrence of speech events brings
with it the repetition of words and phrases (the feature is called
regularity); connections between context and utterance - for
example, opening and closing utterances tend to be standardized (the
feature is known as patterning).

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 ii. Sociolinguistic dimensions of talk: linguistic markers of in-group
membership, distance.
iii. Psycholinguistics of speech processing and language
development: the triad conceptualization - formulation – output.

Spoken vs. Written Discourse

Oral production is characterized by exclamations (geez),
repetitions (and…and), false starts (he’d…he came), fillers (hmm, uh,
yeah), etc.
The sentences in the written text are longer and more
complex than in the spoken text. The clauses making up the
sentences tend to be in an embedded (hypotactic) relationship
(complex sentences), whereas in the spoken text the speakers string
complete clauses together using simple conjunctions such as and and
but (paratactic relationship) (compound sentences).
The contracted forms (you’ve, he’d, didn’t) and elliptical
forms (if necessary) are rare if ever in written texts, where they are
fully spelled out. Also, the references to people and things in spoken
discourse rely on the immediate context and are implied or assumed
to be understood (what happened here). They are explicitly named as
referents in the written text, which must stand apart from the
physical context and be understood in contexts distant in time and
place from the actual events.
The spoken text is highly interactive and thus the
participants make personal references to each other (I, you, he),
features which are less prominent in the written text. There are also
direct questions and responses, which do not feature in the written
text because of its general rather than specific purpose and audience.
Similarly, the spoken text is much more interpersonally
focused, with speakers making direct references to their thoughts,
emotions and judgments relating to the events. The tone of the
written text is impersonal and factual with no evaluations concerning
the rights or wrongs of the situation. Grammatically, this is displayed

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by the use of the Active Voice in the spoken production whereas the
Passive Voice is preferred in written production.
Furthermore, the Present Perfect Tense is said to typify
spoken texts and the Present Simple Tense occurs frequently in
written texts. There is heavy use of modals and phrasal verbs in
speech while these are less intensively used in the written mode.
With respect to lexical choices, words of Anglo-Saxon origin
are encountered in speaking much more often than in writing, where
words of Latin and French origin prevail – for example, help vs.
assistance, way vs. manner, together with vs. in conjunction with,
etc.

3.2.4. Within the communicative framework of language

teaching, the skill of speaking enjoys special status. It has become
apparent in recent years that there have been marked changes in the
goals of language education programmes.
Today, language students are considered successful if they can
communicate effectively in a second/foreign language, whereas
several decades ago the accuracy of the language produced was the
major criterion of a student’s success or lack of success.
These developments in language teaching – called the
‘proficiency movement’ by some researchers and the promotion of
‘functional’ or ‘communicative’ ability by others – have moved us
away from the goal of accurate form towards a focus on fluency and
communicative effectiveness (Th. Higgs, Teaching for Proficiency,
1984).Thus, the teaching of the speaking skill has become
increasingly important.
Accordingly, rather than implementing activities and
exercises which focus strictly on accuracy (such as those using
memorization, repetition, and uncontextualized drills) many teachers
have concentrated on promoting communicative competence in
language learners by using “communicative activities” – those
which rely more on the students’ ability to understand and

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communicate real information. The aim of such “fluency activities”,
as C. Brumfit (Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching,
1984: 69) calls them, is “to develop a pattern of language interaction
with the classroom which is as close as possible to that used by
competent performers in normal life.” Informal, unrehearsed use of
language is encouraged, along with a relaxed classroom
environment.
However, this does not mean that a focus on accuracy has no
place in the communicative classroom. Some research, for example,
that carried out by Th. Higgs & R. Clifford, (Curriculum,
Competence and the Second Language Teacher, 1982) suggests that
forcing communication too early without any regard for accuracy can
result in early fossilisation. Since a linguistic or grammatical base
may be necessary before fluency can be attained, some researchers
believe that grammar should be explicitly taught and that this is
possible through communicative means.

3.2.5. Speaking activities (activities used for promoting

the skill of speaking)
The goal of a speaking component in a language class should
encourage the acquisition of communication skills which can foster/
promote real communication out of the classroom.
For use in the ESL/EFL classroom, there are as many
speaking activities and materials available as there are creative
teachers. For the purpose of this discussion, we have organised oral
skill activities into four distinct types: drills, or linguistically
structured activities, performance activities, participation activities,
and observation activities.

3.2.5.1. Drills (linguistically structured activities): Such

activities need not be void of meaning, as were some of the more
classic manipulative techniques associated with the audio-lingual
approach, with its repetition drills and pattern practices. Rather, it is

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possible to contextualise such activities and thus meet some of the
requirements of a communicatively oriented design.
In controlled practice the teacher can model the forms to be
produced, providing linguistically correct input. The students are
then allowed to practice the material, and the teacher follows up by
reinforcing the forms practiced. What is important is that the students
are allowed to speak about what is true, real, and interesting.
The structured interview is an example of this, where
students question each other and answer factually, thus exchanging
‘real’ information, while at the same time repeating and reinforcing
specific structures (e.g. yes-no, or wh- questions).
Some language games can also provide opportunities for
controlled practice. Again, it is important to model the structures for
beginning students, either verbally or by writing the forms on the
blackboard. Picture games which require students to match texts
with pictures are ideal for beginning students who need to practice
manipulating certain structures (e.g., the word ‘cup’ with a picture of
a cup; or, for more advanced students, a sentence which describes
one step in a process with its corresponding diagram).

3.2.5.2. Performance activities: ‘Performance’ activities are

those in which the student prepares beforehand and delivers a
message to a group. A good example of such an activity is the
student speech, which could be made as specific in content as
necessary: a course in conversational or social English might assign
students to simply tell a story from their own experience, in a casual,
social setting.
Peer evaluation can be a useful component of oral
performance activities since:
i. the “audience” becomes involved in such a way that
students, as members of the audience, become more than
simply passive listeners;

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 ii. the evaluation process helps students to gain confidence in
their own ability to evaluate language;
iii. the evaluation activity itself becomes an opportunity for real,
spontaneous interaction since the “message” (the evaluation)
is important to the student performer.
The evaluation sheet, drawn up by the teacher beforehand,
has the purpose to structure the evaluation so that it meets the goals
of the activity, with such criteria as:
- content: is it focused? clear? original? has enough detail been
provided?
- organisation: is it logical? are there appropriate transitions?
- delivery: is the volume adequate? are notes relied on too much?
- other comments could include specific points on grammar,
vocabulary, pronunciation
Self-evaluation: another follow-up activity involves
audiotaping or videotaping students during their initial performances
and allowing them to evaluate themselves. With self- evaluation,
students listen to or watch their recorded speeches and evaluate
themselves according to the same criteria the teacher uses. A useful
option for this follow-up task would be for students to look at their
transcription and rewrite it, correcting the grammar and vocabulary
errors.
A variation on the speech given by one person is assigning
two or more people to deliver a talk. This variation has certain
advantages: Not only does this allow more content to be conveyed,
but also it gives students needed practice in negotiating tasks and
sharing information. An additional benefit is that students are less
likely to feel nervous or pressured when the responsibility for giving
a good speech is shared among a group.
Role-plays and dramas, if performed in front of the class,
can also function as “performance activities”. In some cases, students
could write the role-plays or dramas themselves: this would be
appropriate in a course that is organised around speech functions or

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conversational strategies (.g. complimenting or thanking behaviour,
greetings and closings).
Finally, debates can serve as an opportunity for a classroom
performance activity for intermediate and advanced learners.
Students can select a topic, plan their research and information
gathering strategies, pool the results of this research, and plan their
presentations, making sure to anticipate questions from the other
team.

3.2.5.3. Participation activities

“Participation” activities can be some of the most diverse
and interesting in the oral communication repertoire. These are
activities where the student participates in some communicative
activity in a natural “setting”.
The guided discussion: one of the most commonly used
participation activities is the guided discussion, where the instructor
provides a brief orientation to some problem or controversial topic,
usually by means of a short reading. Students in small groups discuss
the topic, suggesting possible solutions, or resolutions.
Discussion-leading activity: alternatively, students
themselves can be assigned the responsibility of a discussion-leading
activity in more advanced classes. In this situation, they:
- select a topic
- find a short background article or write a summary of the topic
- draw up a list of questions for consideration by the rest of the class.
Some of the same evaluation techniques discussed above can
be used for this activity (peer evaluation, audiotaping or videotaping).
Recording a conversation: Another more innovative
participation activity requires students to audiotape/record a
spontaneous conversation that they have with a native speaker of
their choice. If this is difficult, students can converse with the most
advanced language students. The goal of these conversations is for
the student to obtain ‘data’ that are natural and spontaneous. After

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the conversation is recorded, the students transcribe, on their own, an
excerpt of the conversation that they find interesting. After the initial
conversation data are audiotaped, transcribed, and checked by the
teacher for faithfulness to the tape, there are many options for
activities based on them. One use of the material is for vocabulary-
building: the students note down unfamiliar words or idioms in the
native or fluent speaker’s language. This procedure can be used as an
exercise in discovering regularities of conversation strategies (how to
disagree, how to register surprise or sympathy).
The interview: Another participation activity that elicits
enthusiastic student response is the interview. In it, the students
interview their native speaker acquaintances about some meaningful
or memorable aspect of their lives. Another variation is to have
students interview native speakers for their opinions on a given
subject. After the interviews have taken place, the students organise
their information and present it to the rest of the class. This can be
particularly interesting when native speakers express conflicting
views when responding to the topic.

3.2.5.4. Observation activities These are activities in which

a student observes and/or records verbal interactions between two or
more native or fluent speakers of the target language. This technique
is useful for building student awareness of language as it actually
used in the real world, and since the student is taking the role of non-
participant observer, s/he is free to concentrate on the subject without
fear of performance errors, a problem for beginners, whose
productive skills usually lag behind their receptive capabilities.
There are many possibilities which can serve as the focus for this
assignment: how and when people greet each other, make requests,
thank each other, compliment one another, disagree, etc.

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 3.2.6. Acquisition of conversational discourse
3.2.6.1.. Interaction in discourse
Normally sentences are not said in isolation but spoken in a
particular situation. They do not mean much without knowing how
the successive sentences are linked together, and how they relate to
the situation. In one sense ‘discourse’ concerns how the participants
influence each other while talking. They interrupt, they ask for more
information; they adapt what they are saying, etc. This is called
‘interactive discourse’ as there is a give-and-take between the
participants. Hence interactive discourse, which is spontaneous
language with give-and-take, usually occurs in speech rather than
writing. But language can also consist of connected speech or writing
that has been prepared and gone over: usually this is written
language, for instance a set of instructions on how to work a video-
recorder, but sometimes it may be prepared speech such as talks or
lectures. This is ‘non-interactive discourse’ in that the reader or
listener cannot affect what happens.
A related distinction made by Gillian Brown and her
colleagues (Brown, G., Anderson, A., Shillcock, R., and Yule, G.,
Teaching Talk: Strategies for Production and Assessment, 1984) is
between listener-related talk and information-related talk.
Listener-related talk - ‘chat’ – forms the basis of social life.
People talk to each other to maintain social relationships.
Information-related talk however has the purpose of
transferring information from speaker to listener. It might be a doctor
directing a nurse how to treat a patient, or a teacher imparting
information in a classroom. Only information-related talk can be
non-interactive.

3.2.6.2. Discourse moves in conversation

If two people are talking, each of them has a choice of what
to say and how to say it. There are certain opening moves for the
conversation that can be chosen, then a choice of follow-up moves, a

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further choice of conversational moves linked to these, and so on
until the final exchange that ends the conversation. So a conversation
might start with ritualistic greetings:
Hello, John.
Hello, Mary.
Then one speaker broaches a topic of conversation, which
continues for a while:
Have you heard about Brian?
No. What’s happened?
Oh he’s gone off to Australia.
How amazing!
The conversation continues till the speakers signal a close:
Well I’d better be off now. Goodbye.
Cheerio.
Some of these exchanges are predictable: if one person says
a greeting – “Hello” – the other has to say a greeting in return –
“Hello”. Other exchanges come in ‘adjacency pairs’ with
straightforward linguistic connections between the moves
[Adjacency pair: a pair of discourse moves that often go together,
e.g. question and answer].
A question “What’s happened?” has to be followed by an
answer such as “He’s gone off to Australia”. Other connections are
less obvious: a move that gives information “He’s gone off to
Australia” – calls for a polite reaction “How amazing!”
Much of conversation is made up of such pairs of moves –
greeting and reply, question and answer, statement and reaction.
Some psychologists such as J. Bruner (Child’s Talk, 1983)
have suggested that a child learns the first language through such
routines. Conversational interaction is vital for children, not just for
the moves themselves that they are learning, but for the grammatical
rules and lexical items they are using in the moves. The components
of language are learnt through the moves of conversation.

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 Much of this knowledge of interaction is transferred from the
first language to the second: knowing how to construct a
conversation in one language means it can be done in another, to
some extent.
Languages do not differ over the moves themselves so much
as over what makes up the moves. We all greet each other; we all ask
questions and provide answers; but we do so differently in different
languages. For example, the main difficulty in going from one
language to another is represented by conventions over politeness.
In this respect, the Germans prefer more direct ways of making a
request than such indirect English forms as “Could you tell me the
way to the station please?” Or, the Japanese consider it polite not to
disagree with the speaker.

3.2.6.3. Teaching conversational discourse

Evelyn Hatch (Discourse Analysis and Second Language
Acquisition, 1978) has advocated an approach to L2 learning based
on conversation analysis – the analysis of conversations between
native and non-native speakers.
In native to non-native conversations the native speaker uses
more topic clarification moves than usual because of the increased
unintelligibility of L2 speech. The non-native needs particular moves
for stating topics unambiguously and for making certain they are
continuing to be understood. While all these indeed occur from time
to time in native-to-native speech, the proportions of each move
inevitably change in conversations involving non-native speakers.
Vivian Cook (Language functions, social factors and second
language teaching, 1985) found for instance that non-native speakers
are more formal and polite than native speakers when making
requests from strangers and when thanking them. They tend to say
“Thank you very much” rather than “Thanks” for example,
regardless of who they are speaking to.

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 Similarly, another researcher, P. Porter (1986) compared
natives and non-natives on the same discussion talks. The non-
natives had a smaller repertoire of ways of expressing themselves,
for example, not using the past tense for giving their opinions, and
expressing disagreement directly rather than through face-saving
‘hedges’.
The fact that conversation consists of moves and the idea
that learning takes place through conversational moves can come
together in teaching. V. Cook’s beginners book (People and Places,
1980) uses a teaching exercise called a ‘conversational exchange’.
The students, for example, are shown pictures of various clothes;
they hear model conversations showing two conversational moves,
stating opinion and reacting:
Jenny: Joe’s suit is very nice.
Edna: Is it?
Jenny: Peter’s jeans are horrible.
Edna: Are they?
Then they have to supply Edna’s side of the conversation
for a few exchanges, working out the appropriate answer according
to their opinion of the clothes. Finally the students supply both sides
of the conversation. The basic concept is indeed that learning takes
place through interaction in limited exchanges: conversation is taught
as linked conversational moves. As soon as possible in each exercise,
the students have to choose which expression to use and have to fit it
into the situation meaningfully.
Conversational Analysis comes close to some
communicative teaching through its belief that second languages are
learnt under the pressure of conversation. Interacting with other
people through a series of conversational moves is not just what the
learners are aiming at: it is the actual means of learning. But the
concept of a ‘move’ outlined here is not quite the same as the idea of
‘function’ in most communicative teaching, which is usually
concerned with functions such as ‘arguing’ or ‘apologising’ that

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might occur in several different conversational moves. A teacher
using a communicative method should remember that functions
never occur by themselves but always in a sequence of
conversational moves.

3.2.7. Language and input in the L2 classroom

3.2.7.1. Second language learning inside the classroom:
Let us start with the language interaction that occurs in all
classrooms: most face-to-face conversation is interactive and
listener-related. Some situations give one participant a more
directive role than the others: one person can be called the ‘leader’
who takes the initiative, the others are ‘followers’ who respond to it.
Let us take a short classroom exchange:
Teacher: Can you tell me why you eat all that food?
Pupil: To keep you strong.
Teacher: To keep you strong. Yes. Why do you want to be strong?
This exchange has three main moves:
i. Initiation (the opening move by the teacher): The teacher takes
the initiative by requiring something of the student, say through a
question such as “Can you tell me why you eat all that food?” The
move starts off the exchange; the teacher acts as leader.
ii. Response (the student’s response to the teacher’s opening
move): the student does whatever is required, here answering the
question by saying “To keep you strong”
iii. Feedback (teacher evaluation of the student response): the
teacher evaluates the student’s response
This three-move structure of initiation, response and feedback is
very frequent in teaching.

3.2.7.2. Language in the language teaching classroom

Several teaching methods have tried to maximize the amount
of speaking by the student:

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- the audio-lingual method approved of the language laboratory
precisely because it increased each student’s share of speaking time;
- communicative methods support pair-work and group-work partly
because they give each student the chance to talk as much as
possible.
Other methods do not share the opinion that teacher talk
should be minimized (teacher-talk: the amount of speech supplied by
the teacher rather than the students).
- conventional academic teaching emphasizes factual information
coming from the teacher.
- listening-based teaching sees most value in the students extracting
information from what they hear rather than in speaking themselves.
One argument for less speech by the students is that at least the
sentences that the students hear will be correct examples of the target
language, not samples of the interlanguages of their fellow students.

3.2.7.3. Authentic and non-authentic language

A further distinction is between authentic and non-authentic
language.
Here is a typical textbook dialogue taken from Flying
Colours I (Garton-Sprenger & Greenall, 1990):
Nicola: Do you like this music?
Roger: Not very much. I don’t like jazz.
Nicola: What kind of music do you like?
Roger: I like classical music.
This is non-authentic language specially constructed for its
teaching potential. People in real-life conversations do not answer
questions so explicitly, do not speak in full grammatical sentences,
and do not keep to a clear sequence of turns. Instead they speak like
these two people who were recorded while talking about ghosts for
the course-book English Topics (Cook, 1975):
Mrs. Bagg: Oh, how extraordinary.
Jenny Drew: So…’cos quite a lot of things like that.

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 Mrs. Bagg: I mean were they frightened? ’Cos I think if I
actually…
Jenny Drew: No.
Mrs. Bagg: … saw a ghost because I don’t believe in them
really, I would be frightened, you know…
This is an example of authentic language, defined by D.
Little et al. (Authentic Texts in Foreign Language Teaching: Theory
and Practice, 1988) as “created to fulfill some social purpose in the
language community in which it was produced”. Until recently,
teaching provided the students with specially adapted language, not
only simplified in terms of syntax and confined in vocabulary but
also tidied up in terms of discourse structure.
With the advent of methods that looked at the
communicative situation the students were going to encounter, it
began to seem that the students were being handicapped by never
hearing authentic speech in all its richness and diversity. Hence
courses have proliferated that turn away from specially constructed
classroom language to any pieces of language that have been really
used by native speakers, whether tapes of conversations,
advertisements from magazines, or a thousand and one other sources.
Two justifications for the use of authentic text in
communicative teaching are put forward by D. Little et al. (1988): i.
Motivation and interest: students will be better motivated by texts
that have served a real communicative purpose; ii. Filling in gaps:
designers of course-books may miss some of the aspects of language
used in real-life situations.

3.3. Teaching reading

3.3.1. Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching
reading skills (receptive language skill)
Perhaps more than the other language skills, reading is said
to pave the way to independent learning.

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 i. Behaviorism
Reading is conceptualized as a passive process: words acting
as stimulus and triggering response as word recognition, i.e.
recognition and discrimination of letters (graphic symbols) and
words. Frequently, reading was done by sounding out (reading
aloud). Similarly to teaching Listening skills, the techniques used
mainly consist in repeating, imitating and memorizing of
prefabricated language (for instance, word lists), while totally
disregarding cognitive processes.
ii. Cognitivism
Readers become active agents rather than passive recipients,
they guess or predict the meaning on the basis of textual data/cues
and activation mechanisms of background knowledge, then confirm
or correct their guesses, and thereby reconstruct the message with
respect to both morpho-syntactic and semantic levels. R is
considered a dynamical process of cognitive nature. Admittedly,
comprehension is of paramount importance based on the idea that
understanding language facilitates learning (rather than acquisition)
and that learners develop reading skills by reading intensively and
extensively (free voluntary reading).
iii. The Interactionist Approach (The Socio-Cultural Turn):
CLT, The Post-Communicative Turn
The interactive, social and contextualized perspective of
language learning focuses on connected speech (discourse) rather
than on isolated pieces. There is also a shift from centering on formal
aspects of language to content and meaning, to communicative intent
(purposeful reading). Information processing while listening
(sequential order of input, perception, recognition, and understanding
stages) is coupled with a constructivist stance: readers actively
construct meaning according to their own purposes for reading as
well as their own prior knowledge (linguistic knowledge and extra-
linguistic / encyclopaedic knowledge) and protocol of experience.
Prior knowledge is identified to schemata, further subdivided into

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content schemata (topic familiarity, cultural knowledge and previous
experience with a particular field) and formal schemata (knowledge
about text types - stylistic conventions as well as the structural
organization/variety of formats). The socio-cultural context has
gained ever increased importance in language learning as the process
does not take place in a social vacuum. Admittedly, special attention
is paid to the author – reader relationship in meaning construction
while readers read in a dynamic way (selectively). Reading is also
coupled with detecting and interpreting the cultural background.
To put it in a nutshell, reading, on a par with listening,
provides the input for language learning, acting as reference
framework in language production.

3.3.2. Reading skills and intercultural communicative

competence
Uso´-Juan, Martınez-Flor provides an illustration of reading
activity (Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the
Four Language Skills, 2006: 272-273):
Activity
Select a representative passage on a particular cultural topic
that has been brought in by the learners. Carry out critical reading
with your learners by encouraging them to answer the questions
presented below, which are grouped into the three phases of pre-
reading, while-reading and post-reading.
Critical reading
Pre-reading questions
 Do you think the topic of (…) is representative of the target
culture and of your own culture? Why or why not?
 What content do you think the text entitled (…) is going to
cover?
While-reading question
 How is content presented to deal with that particular topic?
Post-reading questions

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  What other aspects should be incorporated within the
passage to deal with this topic in a more comprehensive
way?
 How could the content of the text vary if it was written by
another writer or read by another reader in a different
context?

3.3.3. Control factors in teaching reading skills

i. Ensure word recognition fluency or automaticity, particularly in
the early developmental stages of reading skills, via extended
exposure to high frequency (printed) words
ii. Emphasize vocabulary learning and create a vocabulary-rich
environment: reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge are
inextricably linked. At this point, pre-teaching key vocabulary items
proves to be crucial.
iii. Activate background knowledge in appropriate ways (top-down
processing): familiarity with topic enables inferencing skills and
meaning disambiguisation (detection of the intended contextual
meaning). Text previewing secures the activation of specific
knowledge relevant to the reading of the text in question instead of
general background knowledge.
iv. Ensure effective language knowledge and general
comprehension skills: vocabulary items, grammar items, word
integration processes (from word units to the sentence level
meaningful units).
v. Teach text structures and discourse organization: familiarity with
text type, text layout, coherence and cohesive devices and other
textual parametres.
vi. Promote the strategic reader rather than teach individual
strategies: coordinated use of multiple strategies while students
actively seek to comprehend texts, i.e. teacher modelling, teacher
scaffolding and support, and gradual independent use of strategies to
increased text comprehension. The range of strategies includes

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summarizing, clarifying, predicting, imaging, forming questions,
using prior knowledge, monitoring, and evaluating.
vii. Build reading fluency and rate: it means efficiency in reading -
training for a rapid speed of processing across extended text.
viii. Promote extensive reading: there is a strong relationship
between reading comprehension abilities and extensive reading over
a long period of time.
ix. Develop intrinsic motivation for reading: motivation and
engagement with reading were significantly related to amount of
reading.
The goal in learning to read should be meaning. Whether the
teacher favours a skills-oriented approach (which advocates form
over meaning) or a communication approach (which stresses
function over form) is a personal decision, since experts disagree on
the merits of each. However, language teachers should remember
that the communication approach is of more recent theoretical
formulation, and this holistic, top-down approach may constitute the
wave of the future.

3.3.4. Developing reading skills

In the past language teachers typically gave students very
little assistance with reading other than to teach them grammar and
vocabulary. Conceiving of reading as an active mental process
greatly expands the reader’s role since primary responsibility for
meaning shifts from the text itself to the reader. Thus, language
teachers now have a much greater range of possible procedures to
follow prior to, during, and after the reading assignment to assist
students to read more effectively.
Viewing reading as a communicative process rather than as
a language learning process leads to several important conclusions.
Students do not need to know all the words/vocabulary and grammar
to comprehend a major portion of the text and to recreate the author’s
meaning. They can learn to read at a much higher level of

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proficiency than in the past when the preoccupation with grammar
deprived them of the opportunity to read for meaning. They can learn
reading strategies that enable them to read at much higher levels of
proficiency. Also, teachers can initiate activities that heighten
students’ motivation and increase their level of comprehension.
H. Loew (Developing Strategies Reading Skills, 1984) offers
practical advice for teaching reading skills. Thus, the researcher
urges language teachers to encourage students to guess, to tolerate
ambiguity, to link ideas, to paraphrase and to summarize, to stop
worrying when then come across isolated, unknown words, which
are sometimes not vital to comprehension. Teachers can also help
students by discussing the title, theme, and cultural background
before reading. Prior to the first reading assignment teachers should
teach students how to skim, find the main idea, and modify their
hypotheses. Teachers should give them practice using the dictionary,
taking notes, underlining, skimming and rereading. And before
making any reading assignment, teachers should be sure that the
reading task is clear to the students.
J.V. Aspatore (“But I don’t Know all the Words”, in J. C.
Alderson and A. H. Urquhart Reading in a Foreign Language, 1984)
describes a method of teaching reading skills in a second/foreign
language that focuses on:
i. eliminating the students’ fear of giving a “wrong answer”: an
important problem that students have with reading is that they
are afraid. They are more concerned with getting the correct
answer that than with the more important process of how to get
the answer
ii. discouraging overuse of a dictionary: they depend too much on
the dictionary, and have problems making the transition from
short readings to long ones.
iii. teaching recognition of cognates, roots and the use of certain
prefixes and suffixes: to help students overcome these problems,
she suggests that teachers ask them to read and underline

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 unknown words without looking up the meaning in the
dictionary; to use contextual clues to guess the general meaning;
to skip unknown words and to focus on cognates, roots, prefixes
and suffixes.
iv. using a variety of texts
v. utilizing skimming, scanning and decoding processes
F. Grellet (Developing Reading Skills: A Practical Guide to
Reading Comprehension Exercises 1981) discuses useful reading
practice techniques:
i. One technique is to have students work their way through
comprehension problems by inferring the meaning through
word formation and context. They should also learn to pick out
the important words that form the core of each sentence, and
they need to be aware of the use of referent and connecting
words to establish relationships in and among sentences and
paragraphs.
ii. Another technique is to practise timed readings to improve
reading speed.
iii. A third technique is to learn to use scanning and skimming
techniques to preview reading material, predict what the
selection is about, and develop expectations about the content of
the text.
St. Krashen and T. Terrell (The Natural Approach:
Language Acquisition in the Classroom, 1983) outline the following
communicative reading strategies:
i. read for meaning
ii. don’t look up every word
iii. predict meaning
iv. use context.

3.3.5. Reading activities

3.3.5.1. Pre-reading: The purpose of pre-reading (as with
pre-listening) activities is to motivate the students to want to read the

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assignment and to prepare them to be able to read it. Prepared
students can complete the assignment better with less effort, and they
are able to participate more fully and with greater satisfaction.
Prepared students rapidly gain confidence in their ability to learn a
second language, and they tend to be more highly motivated and
more enthusiastic than students who struggle to complete their
homework assignments.
L. Ringler and C. Weber (A Language-Thinking Approach to
Reading, 1984: 70) call pre-reading activities enabling activities
because “they provide a reader with the necessary background to
organize activity and to comprehend the material… These
experiences involve understanding the purpose(s) for reading and
building a knowledge base necessary for dealing with the content and
the structure of the material.” The two authors say that pre-reading
activities elicit prior knowledge, build background, and focus
attention.
3.3.5.2. Reading the assignment. Students may read the
assignment in or out of class. Initially, the teacher may have them
read the assignment or at least begin to read it in class so that s/he
can help those who need assistance to develop productive strategies
for recreating the author’s meaning. Normally, however, students
read assigned material as part of their homework because class time
is more valuable for communication practice that students cannot get
out of class.
When students read out of class, the teacher has no
opportunity to provide immediate assistance. However, s/he can help
students to read by giving them specific guidelines for what to do
while they are reading. During the preview, the teacher has
introduced the students to the topic and the related vocabulary. They
have made predictions about what might happen, and they have
created their own expectations about how the reading may develop.
Based on these predictions and expectations, they proceed through
the reading either confirming or rejecting their hypotheses. In case of

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errors they make new predictions based on the new knowledge they
have gained from the reading. This process of guessing, confirming
or rejecting, reformulation and comprehension continues until they
gain understanding.
The authors recommend that the teacher ask students to
underline the main ideas and supporting facts. They suggest that
the teacher implement this idea by first giving them a reading that
has already been underlined. The students read the underlined parts
and predict the rest of the reading based on this skeleton of
information. In subsequent readings the students themselves do the
underlining.
Another practice is to teach students to make a story map as
they read. Following this technique, they learn to show important
relationships in the reading by putting main ideas, events, and
characters in adjoining circles. The map may consist of main ideas
and sequential details, comparisons and contrasts, or causes and
effects.

3.3.5.3. Post-reading: The first step in post-reading

activities is to clarify the meaning of any unclear passages and their
relationship to the author’s overall message. The teacher should
encourage students to ask any questions that they may have about the
reading at this point in the class. The teacher’s task is to clarify
problem passages by focusing on meaning whenever possible
without calling the students’ attention to grammar and vocabulary
except as a last resort.
Russell Stauffer (The Language Experience Approach to the
Teaching of Reading, 1980) advocates three types of teacher’s
questions:
i. What do you think? (to make the students think)
ii. Why do you think so? (to cause them to think about their
opinions)
iii. Prove it! (to force them to present evidence for their conclusions)

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 L. Ringler and C. Weber (A Language-Thinking Approach
to Reading, 1984) divide post-reading activities into two basic
categories:
i. those in which students recall information from or react to the text;
ii. those designed to develop greater communicative fluency in the
four language skills. These activities may include dramatizations,
role-plays, simulations, reports, and debates.
Teachers should avoid fact questions that can be answered
directly from the text. It is preferable that students prepare a
summary or paraphrase of the content because these activities require
a global recall of relevant information. Further activities can focus on
the students’ ability to draw conclusions, or give opinions. An
effective post-reading activity requires students to reprocess the
material from the reading. They suggest identifying key ideas,
pointing out rhetorical devices describing the author’s biases,
comparing cultural differences, debating both sides of an issue
presented in the reading, and developing skits or plays based on the
reading.
During post-reading activities students have the chance to
have some fun participating in communication activities while
increasing their facility to use the reading to communicate their own
thoughts and feelings. The teacher should not move on to other
readings until the students have had sufficient time to explore the
topic from several perspectives and to use the language and ideas in
different communicative contexts. He should not permit students to
leave a reading until they have expressed their personal reaction to
the content. He should not feel obligated to rush from one story to
another in a prescribed period of time regardless of the students’
abilities and interests. The goal should be to use language to express
meaning in creative and stimulating ways, not to cover a preselected
quantity of material.

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 3.3.6. Discourse: script and schema theory
Reading is a cognitive process that is rather restricted in the
L2. Reading, like speaking, occurs in a context rather than in
isolation. The meaning of a text is not found just in the sentences
themselves, but is derived from the previous knowledge stored in the
reader’s mind and the processes through which the reader tackles it.

3.3.6.1. Schema theory

Schema (pl. schemas or schemata) refers to the background
knowledge on which the interpretation of a text depends.
A well-known experiment carried out by Bransford and
Johnson (1982) asked people to read texts such as the following:
The procedure is actually simple. First you arrange things
into different groups depending on their makeup. Of course, one pile
may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have
to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step,
otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any
particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do too few things at once
than too many…
To make sense of this text a particular piece of information
is required: the passage is about washing clothes. A person who
doesn’t have this information does not get much out of the text. If the
topic is known, the passage is straightforward and the
comprehension level is much higher. The sentences themselves do
not change when we know the topic, but the interpretation they have
in our minds does. The background knowledge into which a text fits,
sometimes called the schema, plays a large role in how it is read.
Lack of context affected readers’ comprehension; also, the
use of vague words (‘things’ or ‘facilities’ instead of ‘clothes’ or
‘washing machine’) was a hindrance.

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 3.3.6.2. Scripts and discourse
A crucial element in the understanding of discourse was
given the name of ‘script’ by R. Schank in the 1970s (R. Schank and
R. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding, 1977).
A script is according to Schank and Abelson “a
predetermined stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-
known situation”. While in recent years Schank has developed his
ideas beyond this, nevertheless the script has been a very influential
view of how memory is organised. Some scripts are virtually the
same for speakers of different languages; others differ from one
country to another. Thus, the script for eating-out may require all
restaurants to have waitress-service, or to be takeaway, or to have
cash desks by the exit or other variations. Many of the stereotyped
problems of foreign travel that people recount show conflicts
between scripts – eating sheep’s eyes, loos for mixed sexes, asking if
food tastes good, all are absent from the scripts in particular cultures.
Or indeed the script may be totally absent: most people have no
script for a Finnish sauna.

3.3.6.3. Scripts and schema theory in teaching

Patricia Carrell (Three components of background
knowledge in reading comprehension, 1983) has produced a set of
recommendations for language teachers: in addition to vocabulary,
Carrell sees teaching as building up the learner’s background
knowledge. Thus she stresses pre-reading activities that build up
background knowledge, partly through providing them with
appropriate vocabulary through activities such as word association
practice. The techniques she suggests develop processing strategies
for the text such as flow-charting or diagramming activities.
Materials should not only be interesting, but also be conceptually
complete; a longer passage or an in-depth set of passages on a single
topic is better than short unconnected passages.

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 Perhaps none of these ideas will be completely new to the
practicing teacher. Reading materials have after all been stressing
content background for some time. Pre-reading exercises are now
standard.
The benefit for the teacher is an increased awareness of the
difficulties that L2 learners face with texts. These are not just a
product of the processing of the text itself but of the background
information that natives automatically read into it. L2 learners have
‘cognitive deficits’ with reading that are not caused by lack of
language ability but by difficulties with processing information in an
L2. Even at advanced levels, L2 learners still cannot get as much out
of a text as in their first language, even if on paper they know all the
grammar and vocabulary. Cambridge university students tested by J.
Long and E. Harding-Esch (Summary and recall of text in first and
second languages: some factors contributing to performance
difficulties, 1977) for example remembered less information from
political speeches in French than in English. Furthermore, advanced
L2 learners still read their second language much more slowly than
they read their first. The problem with reading is not just the
language but the whole process of getting meaning from texts.
SCANNING = extracting specific information
Very often we read something or listen to it because we want
to extract specific bits of information - to find out a fact or two. We
may quickly look through a film review just to find the name of the
star. We may listen to the news bulletin, only concentrating when the
particular item that interests us comes up. In both cases we may
largely disregard the other information in the review or the news
bulletin. We will be aware of this information and may even at some
level take it in, but we do so at speed as we focus in on the specific
information we are searching for. This skill when applied to reading
is often called scanning (J. Harmer, 1997: 183).
SKIMMING = getting the general picture

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 We often read or listen to things because we want to ‘get the
general picture’. We want to have an idea of the main points of the
text – an overview – without being too concerned with the details.
When applied to reading this skill is often called skimming and
entails the reader’s ability to pick out main points rapidly, discarding
what is not essential or relevant to the general picture. Listeners often
need the same skill too – listening for the main message and
disregarding repetition, false starts and irrelevances that are often
features of spoken language. (Harmer, 1997: 183).

3.4. Teaching writing

3.4.1. Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching
writing skills (productive language skills)
i. Behaviorism
Within this theory of language learning, writing is
considered of secondary importance, being regarded as just its
orthographic representation. It is assumed that mastery of spoken
language and its orthographic conventions has to precede the
learning of written language because discrepancy between speech
sounds and orthography could cause interferences with the proper
learning of speech. Therefore, writing becomes a language skill
which serves as reinforcement of learning grammatical and
vocabulary knowledge, which in turn is meant to achieve overall oral
correctness. Furthermore, accuracy is overemphasized - writing is
tightly controlled to prevent errors caused by L1 interference.
ii. Cognitivism
It is assumed that the stages of writing are not lockstep or
sequential but rather recursive and creative. Scholars design a 3-stage
model of writing: 1. the planning stage, further subdivided into
smaller processes such as generating ideas, organizing these ideas
and setting the goals for writing; 2. the translating stage, in which
learners articulate and write down their thoughts generated in the
first stage; and 3. the reviewing stage, in which learners evaluate and

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revise/edit the text. Admittedly, the focus is placed on writing as a
process (grammatical accuracy is no longer at the core and error
correction is delayed until the final stage of the process of writing)
rather than as a product, learners’ creativity being encouraged.
iii. The Interactionist Approach (The Socio-Cultural Turn):
CLT, The Post-Communicative Turn
Similarly to the other language skills, writing does not occur
in a vacuum, learners draw on their conventionalized knowledge of
text patterns to infer the recognizable connectedness of text. What
makes writing coherent is not in the text but in the readers’ prior
knowledge of the formal and linguistic structure of different types of
texts or formal schemata alongside content schemata (familiarity
with the topic). Written production is context-embedded and
presupposes interaction as well as the capacity to integrate different
interpersonal and psychomotor aspects.
It has been recommended that three main phases should be
followed in teaching writing skills: 1) modeling, in which the
teachers provides an explicit explanation of the genre to be dealt
with; 2) negotiating, in which the teacher guides the class
composition by means of questions; and 3) construction, in which
the students construct the genre by working through several drafts in
consultation with the teacher.
Within the CLT framework, writing plays a crucial role in
the development of communicative competence. Consequently,
during the process of producing a coherent written text, learners are
expected to be actively engaged, selecting appropriate knowledge of
how to produce linguistically and pragmatically accurate sentences
given particular socio-cultural norms together with their ability to
marshal resources (grammar competence, discourse competence,
sociolinguistic competence) and use strategies to allow for effective
communication, i.e. activation of strategic competence.

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 3.4.2. Writing skills and intercultural communicative
competence (Uso´-Juan, Martınez-Flor, Current Trends in the
Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills, 2006: 411)
Activity
Select representative passages with cultural incidents, that is,
passages in which someone from a particular culture feels odd in a
situation interacting with someone from a different culture or with
intercultural misunderstandings, that is, passages that report an
intercultural misunderstanding given the beliefs and attitudes in
different cultures. Ideally, they should be narrative texts with
different paragraphs each leading toward the cultural incident or
intercultural misunderstanding. Cover all but the first introductory
chapter in which the situation is presented and then ask learners to
read this first paragraph and continue the story in the way they think
is most likely, bearing in mind the particular cultural context in
which the situation takes place. Encourage learners to plan, draft and
revise their versions in order to promote their writing proficiency.

3.4.3. Control factors in teaching writing skills

i. Topic selection: writing is not just an invitation to write, topics
should be relevant to learners’ needs and interests no matter if
teaching is process-oriented (focus on the developmental stages of
writing) or genre-oriented (there is the underlying assumption that
learning to write involves learning the characteristics of different
types of writing which serve particular purposes in specific
contexts).
ii. Close up on assignments: it seems reasonable to claim that there
are broad-based and generic guidelines for approaching the task of
creating any and all assignments. Teachers should pay attention to
purpose, structure, audience, and sources of information when they
design writing tasks.
iii. Patterns, models and genre approaches: need to ensure that
students become familiar with standard organizational patterns

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common to English writing and the specific genres, and that writing
patterns are flexible allowing for learners’ creativity incorporation.
iv. Content-focused reading to write tasks: the primary function of
the source text(s) here is not to serve as an example of a particular
type of writing (as in iii.) but rather to yield raw material derived
from the content of the reading(s).
v. “Student to world” tasks: students will learn best if they can
engage with the material in some way (personally) that allows them
to develop a high level of investment in their writing.
vi. A natural “life cycle”: writing occurs during the language class
in a life cycle including six steps: the teacher’s setting of an
assignment, students’ engagement in the preparatory work, students’
drafting the complete text, feedback provision, students’ revision of
the text, students’ submission of the final version of the text.

3.4.4. Within the communicative framework of language

teaching, the skill of writing enjoys special status: it is via writing
that a person can communicate a variety of messages to a close or
distant, known or unknown reader. Such communication is extremely
important in the modern world, whether the interaction takes the
form of traditional paper-and-pencil writing or the most advanced
electronic mail. Writing as a communicative activity needs to be
encouraged and nurtured during the language learner’s course of
study.
The view of writing as an act of communication suggests an
interactive process which takes place between the writer and the
reader via the text. Such an approach places value on the goal of
writing as well as on the perceived reader audience. Even if we are
concerned with writing at the beginning level, these two aspects of
the act of writing are of vital importance, in setting writing tasks the
teacher should encourage students to define, for themselves, the
message they want to send and the audience who will receive it.

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 The present sections focus on the gradual development of the
mechanics of writing, which is a necessary instrumental skill
without which meaningful writing cannot take place, then move on
to early functional writing, which can be carried out with a limited
level of proficiency in the target language. It is important to
remember that in the ESL/EFL context, writing, like the other
language skills, needs to be dealt with at the particular level of
linguistic and discourse proficiency which the intended students have
reached.
The proposed sequence of activities will start with focus on
the mechanical aspects of writing, as the basic instrumental skill,
and gradually move on to a combination of “purpose for writing” and
language focus.

3.4.5. Early writing tasks

3.4.5.1. What do we teach? The first steps in teaching
reading and writing skills in a second or foreign language classroom
centre around the mechanics of these two skills. By “mechanics” we
usually refer to letter recognition, letter discrimination, word
recognition, basic rules of spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, as
well as recognition of whole sentences.
The interaction between reading and writing has often
been a focus in the methodology of language teaching, yet it deserves
even stronger emphasis at the early stages in the acquisition of the
various component mechanics: in order to learn how to discriminate
one letter from another while reading, learners need to practice
writing these letters; in order to facilitate their perception of words
and sentences during the reading process, they might need to practice
writing them first. It is therefore the case that writing plays an
important role in early reading, facilitating the development of both
the reading and the writing skills.
Sound – spelling correspondences: English presents the
learner with a number of problems related to its orthographic rules; it

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is important for learners of English as a second or foreign language
to realise that English orthography is by no means a one-to-one
letter-sound correspondence system; it has its own consistency
embedded in the combination of letters with their immediate
environments, resulting in what we tend to call sound – spelling
correspondences. By practising the proper pronunciation of sounds in
relation to given spelling patterns, we can provide learners with a
good basis for pronunciation as well as for the skills of reading and
writing.

3.4.5.2. How do we teach them? The stage devoted to the

teaching of the mechanics of reading and writing aims at three
different goals:
i. to enhance letter recognition
ii. to practise sound – spelling correspondences via all four language
skills
iii. to help the learner move from letters and words to meaningful
sentences and larger units of discourse.
Recognition and writing drills constitute the first steps in
the development of effective reading and writing habits. However, in
order to acquire active mastery of the sound – spelling
correspondences, it is necessary for the learners to arrive at relevant
generalisations concerning these correspondences. Such
generalisations will lead to a better understanding of the systematic
representation of sounds in English orthography.
Three major types of recognition tasks are used at this early
stage of reading and writing, each type incorporating a great variety
of drills:
a. matching tasks
b. writing tasks
c. meaningful sound – spelling correspondence practice.
These tasks enable the learners to develop effective
recognition habits based on distinctive graphic features. Many of

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these have the form of games, puzzles, and other ‘fun’ activities.
While practicing sound – spelling correspondences, students can be
writing meaningful sentences, such as the following:
There is a cat on the mat and a cake on the plate.
The ball is near the tall boy next to the wall.
These sentences contain words which exemplify sound –
spelling correspondences, and, at the same time, they are words that
students have probably learned.

3.4.6. More advanced writing tasks

3.4.6.1. More advanced writing activities which start shifting
their goal from the focus on the mechanics of writing to basic
process-oriented tasks will need to incorporate some language work
at the morphological and discourse level. Thus, these activities will
enable a combination of focus on accuracy and content of the
message. In this section, since we are concerned with the beginning
level, we will work with categories of practical writing tasks,
emotive writing tasks, and school-oriented tasks.
In order to develop and use these more demanding writing
activities in the ESL/EFL classroom, we need to develop a detailed
set of specifications which will enable both teachers and students to
cope successfully with these tasks. Such a set of specifications
should include the following:
Task description: to present students with the goal of the task and
its importance.
Content description: to present students with possible content areas
that might be relevant to the task.
Audience description: to guide students in developing and
understanding the intended audience, their background, needs and
expectations.
Format cues: to help students in planning the overall organisational
structure of the written product.

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Linguistic cues: to help students make use of certain grammatical
structures and vocabulary selections.
Spelling and Punctuation cues: to help students focus their
attention on spelling rules which they have learned.

3.4.6.2. Practical writing tasks. These are writing tasks

which are procedural in nature and therefore have a predictable
format. This makes them particularly suitable for writing activities
that focus primarily on spelling and morphology. Lists of various
types, notes, short messages, simple instructions, and other such
writing tasks are particularly useful for reinforcing classroom work.
Lists can be of various types: “things to do” lists, “things
completed” lists, shopping lists. Each of these list types provides us
with an opportunity to combine spelling rules with morphological
rules and with the logical creation of a meaningful message.
“Things to do” lists are useful for practising verb bases.
When assigning such an activity, the teacher will have to indicate
whether the list is personal or intended for a team. The content
specification will have to indicate whether this is a list of things to do
in preparation for some event or more of a plan for someone’s daily
routine. For example, a list for a group of students who are preparing
a surprise birthday party might look like this:
Things to do
1. Buy a present for Ann (Sharon)
2. Call Ann’s friends (Mary)
3. Write invitations (Tom) etc.
Following up this type of list, we can easily move on to the
“things completed” list, which specifies the things that have already
been taken care of and is therefore useful for practising past forms of
verbs. As part of this activity students will need to review the regular
past formation of verbs where –ed is added and its exceptions in
spelling are taught, such as deletion of a final e before adding –ed, as
in lived; the doubling of the last consonant in monosyllabic bases of

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the form CVC, as in planned, and the same doubling rule when the
final syllable of a polysyllabic verb is stressed, such as in occurred
but not in opened; the replacement of y with i when the base ends in
C + y, as in tried. Such an activity also enables students to practise
the spelling of irregular past-tense formations. For example, the
above list might look like this when partially completed:
Things completed
1. Planned the games for the party
2. Wrote the invitations
3. Bought the present
4. Called the friends
Shopping lists provide us with a very good opportunity to
practise the spelling of the plural ending of countable nouns and the
use of quantifiers. The sound – spelling correspondences here consist
of the plural inflection with two of its three phonetic variants - /s/, /z/
- which can be combined with the spelling pattern s as in pens,
pencils, whereas in words like brushes or oranges the plural takes
the phonetic form /iz/, an additional syllable, with such words ending
in the spelling pattern –es.
Another type of practical writing task is notes and short
messages that are left for another person. These allow students to
practise brief and simple sentences with a meaningful message. To
make the activity more interesting, students can design their own
message headings and then fill them in. Here is an example:
Messages for my little sister.
Wash the dishes in the sink.
Feed the dog.
Watch your favourite programme on TV and have a good
time.
Other types of practical writing activities might include the
filling-in of forms and the preparation of invitations, “greetings”
and “thank you” notes, and other such written communications.

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 3.4.6.3. Emotive writing tasks. Emotive writing tasks are
concerned with personal writing.
Such personal writing includes primarily letters to friends
and narratives describing personal experiences, as well as personal
journals and diaries. When dealing with letter writing, emphasis can
be placed on format, punctuation and spelling of appropriate phrases
and expressions. When writing about personal experiences – usually
done in a narrative format - spelling of past-tense forms can be
reviewed and practiced.
It seems that emotive writing, in order to serve the personal
needs of the learners, has to be quite fluent. The question is: How
can this be done in the early stages of the ESL/EFL course of study?
The different emotive types of writing activities are, of course,
suitable for the more advanced stages of the course, but they can be
carried out, in a more limited manner, even at the initial stages. Thus,
letters can be limited to the level of structural and vocabulary
knowledge of the students at each point in time. Similarly, journals,
diaries and personal writing activities can reflect the learners’
proficiency level.

3.4.6.4. School-oriented tasks. One of the most important

functions of writing in a student’s life is the function it plays in
school. It is still the case that much individual learning goes on while
students are writing assignments, summaries, answers to questions,
or a variety of essay-type passages. In most cases, the audience for
these writing tasks is the teacher, but gradually students must learn to
write to an unknown audience who needs to get the information
being imparted exclusively via writing. Here again, at the early
stages of ESL/EFL learning, the assignments might be short and
limited. Answers might be single phrases or sentences, summaries
might be a listing of main ideas. However, all of these writing
activities should be given attention both at the linguistic-accuracy
level and at the message-transmission level. It is the combination of

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content and organisation with accepted formal features that will lead
learners to better utilisation of the writing skill in their future use of
English.

3.4.7. The pre-writing stage: Techniques for getting

started
Regardless of the type of writing tasks that a teacher might
assign, a good place to begin class-work is to explore the prewriting
stage. The goal of the teacher should be to expose students to a
variety of strategies for getting started with a writing task and to
encourage each student to try to discover which strategies work best
for him or her. Several heuristic devices (or invention strategies)
which can be explored in class for the purpose of providing students
with a repertoire of techniques for generating ideas are the following:
i. Brainstorming [Brainstorming = a way of developing new
ideas, through a discussion in which several people make lots of
suggestions]
This is often a group exercise in which all of the students in the
class are encouraged to participate by sharing their collective
knowledge about a particular subject. One way to structure this is for
the teacher to suggest a broad topic, such as reasons for choosing a
particular career/job, and have students call out as many associations
as possible which the teacher can then write on the board. The result
would be far more material generated than any one student is likely
to think of on his/her own, and then all students can utilise any or all
of the information when turning to the preparation of their first
drafts.
ii. Listing: Unlike brainstorming, listing can be a quiet and
individual activity. As a first step in finding an approach to a
particular subject area (such as ‘the use and abuse of power’, to cite
an example), the students are encouraged to produce as lengthy a list
as possible of all the subcategories that come to mind as they think
about the topic at hand.

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 iii. Free writing: This technique was suggested by P. Elbow
(Writing without Teachers, 1973) for helping native speakers break
through the difficulty of getting started. The main idea of this
technique is for students to write for a specified period of time
(usually about 5 minutes) without taking their pen from the page. As
Elbow (1973: 3) puts it, “Don’t stop for anything…Never stop to
look back, to cross something out, to wonder what word to use…If
you get stuck it’s fine to write ‘I can’t think what to say’ as many
times as you like”. Freed from the necessity of worrying about
grammar and format, students can often generate a great deal of
prose which provides useful raw material to use in addressing the
writing assignment at hand.
For ESL/EFL students, this technique often works best if the
teacher provides an opening clause or sentence for the students to
start with. So, for example, if the next assignment is to write a paper
about one’s personal philosophy of life, a short free writing session
can begin with the words “Life is difficult but it is also worthwhile.”
The free writing generated after the students copy this sentence and
continue to write down whatever comes into their heads can be kept
private or shared with other students.
iv. Clustering: Another technique for getting many ideas down
quickly, clustering begins with a key word or central idea placed in
the centre of a page (or on the blackboard) around which the student
(or teacher using student-generated suggestions) jots down all of the
free associations triggered by the subject matter – using simple
words or short phrases. Unlike listing, the words or phrases
generated are put on the page or blackboard in a pattern which takes
shape from the connections the writer sees as each new thought
emerges. Completed clusters can look like spokes on a wheel or any
other pattern of connected lines, depending on how the individual
associations are drawn to relate to each other. By having students
share their cluster patterns with other students in the class, teachers

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allow students to be exposed to a wide variety of approaches to the
subject matter, which might further generate material for writing.
It is very important that students experiment with each of
these techniques in order to see how each one works to help generate
text and shape a possible approach to a topic. The purpose, after all,
of acquiring invention strategies is for students to feel that they have
a variety of ways to begin an assigned writing task.

Topics for discussion and exercises:

1. Here are some examples of different types of drills. Match

them with the names and explanations you think describe them best.
Examples of drills:
Drill i. T: I went to the cinema. SCHOOL
S: I went to school.
Drill ii. T: You went to the cinema. QUESTION
S: Did you go to the cinema?
Drill iii. T: I went to the seaside in my childhood. OFTEN
S: I often went to the seaside in my childhood.
Drill iv. T: I went to the market yesterday. THERE
S: I went there yesterday.
Drill v. T: I read a book. It was amusing.
S: I read an amusing book.
Drill vi. T: Helen, ask Tom if he has a pen.
S: Do you have a pen?

Types of drills:
a) Substitution: Students are encouraged to use another word of
the same class in the place of a word in the sentence (a verb is
replaced by a verb etc.);
b) Directed Practice: A student is directed to ask another
student a question;

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 c) Transformation: Students have to change from affirmative
to negative or interrogative, from present to past;
d) Integration: Students are asked to join two short sentences
to make one;
e) Reduction: Students have to reduce the sentence by
changing a phrase/part of a sentence to a word;
f) Expansion: Students have to add a word/phrase to the given
sentence.

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using drills

to teach speaking?

3. What situations would you set up for the should structure

(function: giving advice)?

4. We have to expose our students to linguistic material in

sequences so that they can link forms with functions and meanings.
When we speak we have a purpose in mind: ask for advice, accept,
refuse an invitation, etc. We call the purposes the functions of a
language.
Match the lines of the following dialogue with the function
each of them expresses.

A: Why don’t we have a Refusing + giving a reason

barbecue this Saturday? for his refusal
B: Thank you, but I’m working Accepting
on Saturday
A: Let’s have it on Sunday. Making a suggestion
B: Yes, all right. Making another suggestion

5. If the pictures show a room, what would be the stages of this

activity, the vocabulary and structures your students need to be
equipped with?

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 6. As forms of communicative interaction in the classroom,
simulation and role-play activities have increasingly become the
most frequently used techniques.
What is the difference between role-play and simulation?

7. Place the following activities on the continuum line in

terms of teacher control and learner creativity: role-playing, drills,
guided dialogues, contextualized dialogues, memorized dialogues,
information gap activities.

8. Consider what you might do in order to cope with

speaking problems.

9. Considering the script of the following listening material,

what question would you ask your students to make them have their
predictions about the text? Reflect on its effect on the students:
Journalists should act as the eyes and ears of the society.
They should see and inform the people as accurately and impartially
as possible, without any political bias. In an open society they also
have to raise people’s awareness about what is happening in order
to satisfy people’s appetite for information. Basically, it is a
journalist’s duty to be alert and vigilant. He needs curiosity and an
inquiring mind. A journalist is someone who acts quickly and is a
good listener.

10. Read the following text and write down the speech
phenomena you come across.
A: By the way, why did you take up karate?
B: Why did I take up karate? Well, that’s a difficult question.
You know, a friend of mine…emm, invited me to go to his club. I
watched him and kind of liked what I saw and I asked him if I could
come again.

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 11. Read the following text:
“A: Where are you going?
B: I am going to school.
A: Are you going by car?
B: No, I am not going by car. I am walking.
A: What animals do you like?
B: I like dogs.”
Now tick the statements which indicate that the text uses
artificial language.
i. Both speakers use full sentences all the time.
ii. Speakers repeat certain structures.
iii. Students do not know all the words.
iv. The language presents speech phenomena (interruption,
hesitation, rephrasing)
v. Students change the topic in a sudden and artificial way.

12. Can you think of activities that link reading and

speaking? Give a few examples.

13. Written discourse has a variety of text types. These can

be grouped into the following categories:
i. Literary texts;
ii. Specialised or technical texts;
iii. Correspondence;
iv. Journalistic literature;
v. Informational texts;
v. Miscellaneous.
These are known as different genres.
Group the text types listed below according to the categories
given above:

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accounts, advertisements, biographies, business letters, cartoons,
catalogues, charts, comic strips, diagrams, diaries, dictionary
entries, directions, editorials, essays, flow charts, forms (e.g.
application forms), graffiti, guidebooks, instructions, legends (of
maps),letters, maps, menus, notes, notices, novels, postcards,
posters, précis, price lists, puzzles, recipes, reports, reviews, rhymes,
signs (e.g. road signs),statistics, stop press, summaries, tales,
telegrammes, telephone directories, tickets, timetables, etc.

14.What is usually meant by authentic texts?

15. Could you identify some of the cohesion markers in the

following extract from Bill
Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods?
Consider this: Half of all the offices and malls standing in
America today have been built since 1980. Half of them. Eighty
percent of all the housing stock in the country dates from 1945. Of
all the motel rooms in America, 230,000 have been built in the last
fifteen years. Just up the road from Gatlinburg is the town of Pigeon
Forge, which twenty years ago was a sleepy hamlet – nay, which
aspired to be a sleepy hamlet – famous only as the hometown of
Dolly Parton. Then the estimable Ms. Parton built an amusement
park called Dollywood. Now Pigeon Forge has 200 outlet shops
stretched along three miles of highway. It is bigger and uglier than
Gatlinburg and has better parking, and so of course gets more
visitors.

16. Here is a short paragraph made up of seven well-formed,

temporally accurate and meaningful sentences:
I don’t know what to do for my holiday. It will start at the
beginning of October. I saved enough money for a really nice trip.
Last year I went to the Black Sea coast. It will be too late to go to the
mountains. I worked hard all year. I really need a break.

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 i. Comment on its authenticity, cohesion and coherence.
ii. What point(s) do you think the teacher wants to make starting
from it?

17. Each of the following four descriptions refers to one kind

of reading (intensive, extensive, scanning, skimming). Write down
the name of the kind of reading in the space provided:
a) You read a poem that you like and enjoy paying close attention to
the poet’s use of language. You do……. reading;
b) You need bibliography for a research assignment and you look
quickly through the books and articles that you find in the library
to see whether they contain information about your research
topic. You do……. reading;
c) You are on holiday and you read an adventure story. There is no
pressure on you to finish the book quickly. You do……. reading;
d) While waiting for an appointment with your dentist, you pick up a
magazine and discover an article that interests you. You know
you do not have enough time to read the article in detail but you
try to extract as much information from it as you can in the time
you have. You do……. reading.

18. Can you list the criteria you might employ in either
selecting supplementary materials for developing and practicing
reading skills or assessing the materials presented in the textbooks in
use.

19. Let us look at this short newspaper note from The

Observer, 25 March, 2001.
Blair rejects Marbles plea
Tony Blair yesterday rejected long-standing demands by Greece
for the return of the sculptures removed from the Parthenon200
years ago. In an interview with the Athens daily “To Vima” he said
the Elgin Marbles “belong to the British Museum…, which does not

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intend to return any part of the collection to its country of origin”.
Greece had hoped to have the pieces returned by 2004, when it will
host the Olympics.
What kind of knowledge is necessary to understand this?

20. Could you work out the advantages of the top-down

approach to reading, which starts from the global understanding of a
text?

21. In which of the three phases, pre-reading, while-reading

or post-reading, would you use the following activities:
i. Do-it-yourself questions. The pupils compose and answer their
own questions;
ii. Responding. The text is a letter or a provocative article; the
pupils discuss how they would respond, or write an answer;
iii. Signpost questions. A general question is given before
reading, asking the pupils to find out information central to the
understanding of the text;
iv. Continue. If the text is a story, the pupils are asked to suggest
what might happen next;
v. Provide a title. The pupils suggest a title or an alternative title;
vi. Summarise. The pupils summarise the content in a sentence
or two;
vii. Preface. If the text is a story, the pupils are asked to suggest
what might have happened before;
viii. Comparison. There are two texts on a similar topic; the
pupils note points of similarity or difference of content;
ix. Gapped text. Towards the end of the text, 4-5 gaps are left
that can only be filled in if the text has been understood.

22. Point out some of the reasons why you ask your pupils to
write in English.

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 23. What are, in your opinion, the disadvantages of
dictation?

24. In writing English, which appears to create more

difficulties to pupils, cohesion or coherence?

25. Before asking your pupils to write an example of a

particular text type, you might want to go with them through some
stages. Put the stages suggested below into an appropriate order and
justify your decision:
a) practising guided writing which follows prompts (e.g. pictures or
sentences that summarise paragraphs);
b) doing exercises that practice characteristic features of text type
(e.g. passive voice);
c) reading examples of text type;
d) analyzing a sample text to isolate typical features.

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155
 CHAPTER IV
CLASS MANAGEMENT

This chapter is focused on various aspects of class

management: student groupings, the roles of the teacher and
disruptive behavior.
By Class Management we mean a collection of techniques
and organizational practices that the teacher can use to organize the
classroom and the classroom activities to maximize the effectiveness
of the teaching process.

Food for thought

What elements besides the activities in the lesson are
important for a successful class?

4.1. Classroom organization

A shelf or bookcase with English books, reference books and
dictionaries would mean a great advantage for students.
In many classrooms the student’s desks are bolted to the
floor and cannot be moved. In others this mobility exists and it can
be used to create different interactional activities and better studying
conditions.

Food for thought

Imagine you could move the desks in your classroom. What
sort of desk arrangements would you use for the following activities?
- pairwork
- groupwork
- roleplay
- individual writing
- a test

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 Then imagine that the desks are fixed in your classroom.
How would you organize your students for the above activities?
(Source: Ciută, C. in Bălan, R. et al., In- service Distance Training
Course for Teachers of English, 2003, p.46).

4.2. Classroom Interaction

When we consider interaction in the classroom we have to
take into account two basic types of relationship: Teacher – Student
and Student-Student.
The variety of interaction in the language lesson is
important. It ensures that students are involved actively, it allows for
different learning styles and it helps to keep student’s attention by
varying the pace of the lesson.
The following patterns of interaction are possible (Ciută in
Bălan et al., 2003: 46-47):
T  whole class
T  individual student (in whole class activity)
T  individual student (pair or groupwork)
Student  student (open pairs)
Student  student (closed pairs)
Students working individually
Students working in groups
Student  whole class

4.2.1. Lockstep
Lockstep is the class grouping where the whole class is
working with the teacher. All the students are “locked into” the same
rhythm, pace, or the same activity (Harmer, 1997:243). This means
the traditional way of teaching, where the teacher is the controller.
These types of activities present certain advantages: there is less
noise, the teacher can usually be sure that everyone hears what

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he/she is saying, the teacher, usually offers a good language model to
his/her students.
However, lockstep has some disadvantages: the students
cannot practise much; the lesson goes at the wrong speed for
everyone, as either the teacher is not fast enough for the good
students, or he/she is too speedy for some students, in which case
they may not learn what they are being taught. We can conclude that
lockstep involves too much teaching and too little learning (Ciuta,
2003:48).

4.2.2. Student Groupings

In Student – Student interaction, pairwork and groupwork
are basic interaction patterns.

4.2.2.1. Pairwork
For question and answer practice, information gap exercises,
simulations, students can be placed in pairs for a variety of work,
including practising writing and reading skills.
Ciuta (2003:49) presents the advantages and disadvantages
of pairwork:
Advantages:
- Immediate increasing of the amount of student practice;
- Communicative efficiency is encouraged;
- Student cooperation is encouraged  this is important for:
- the atmosphere of the class;
- the motivation it gives to learning with others;
- Students feel secure as the teacher does not criticize them.
Disadvantages:
- Student can make mistakes;
- They may use their native language during the activity;
- There can be a lot of noise, as everybody is talking at the
same time; possible lack of discipline.

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 4.2.2.2. Groupwork
Groupwork proves to be more dynamic than pairwork; there
are more students involved and there are more opportunities for
discussion. This is a more relaxing activity as compared with the
previous one.
Flexible groups represent a great possibility for groupwork.
Students start in set groups and as activity goes on, the groups split
up and re-form.

4.2.3. Individual work

Our students must also be allowed to work on their own at
their own pace. Individual work is a good idea because students can
work in a relaxed way and they can rely on themselves rather than
the others. Reading, writing and speaking activities can be the focus
for individual work.

4.2.4. Types of Interaction Involved in Error Correction

The following stages should be used when correcting
mistakes:
- the teacher indicates the error;
- the student has the chance to self-correct;
- if she/he cannot do this, other students try to correct;
- if necessary, the teacher corrects the error;
- the student repeats the corrected answer.
There are mainly three types of correction: self-correction,
peer correction and teacher-correction.

4.3. Teacher’s Resources

Teachers use a variety of teaching aid to explain language
meaning and structures. These resources are textbooks, reference
books, as well as audio and visual aids. Pictures can be: flashcards,
wall pictures, cue cards, photos, projected slides etc.

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 In the light of the new curriculum, the teaching of a textbook
is not necessarily rigid. The syllabus has to be taught by everybody,
but we can adapt, replace or even omit some units, in order to
comply with the requirements of the syllabus according to the grade,
types of classes or number of lessons we teach a week and to our
objectives. (Ciuta, 2003:52)
Other resources are: time, space and human resources (the
influence of the community, the students and the teachers).

4.3.1. Teacher’s Roles

a) The teacher as controller
Teachers as controllers are in complete charge of the class.
Certain stages of a lesson lend themselves to this role very
well. The introduction of new language, where it makes use of
accurate reproduction and drilling techniques, needs to be carefully
organized. The instruct – cue - nominate cycle is the perfect example
of the teacher acting as controller (Harmer, 1977: 236).
Where teachers are addicted to being the center of attention
they tend to find it difficult not to perform the controlling role and
this has both advantages and disadvantages, since the students are to
be allowed a chance to learn rather than be taught.
b) The teacher as assessor
In the teaching process, all control must have finality, which
is usually the assessment. There are two types of assessment:
correction and organizing feedback.
The teacher gives feedback to let the students know how
well they have performed the activity. A distinction between two
different kinds of feedback should be made: content feedback and
form feedback. The first one concerns an assessment of how well the
students performed the activity as an activity rather than as a
language exercise. Form feedback tells the students how well they
have performed linguistically. The focus is on accuracy (Ciută, 2003:
53-54).

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 c) The teacher as organizer
Perhaps the most important and difficult role the teacher has
to play is that of organizer, as the success of many activities depends
on good organization.
It is essential you plan exactly what you are going to teach,
what information the students will need, then give the instruction
clearly.
It is also extremely important for the teacher to be well
organized in using different teaching aids. The blackboard is
considered to be the most important, always available for several
purposes.
d) The teacher as prompter
As a prompter, the teacher suggests to the students how to
continue their activities. This role has to be performed with
discretion, as the teacher should help only when it is necessary.
e) The teacher as participant
Teacher’s participation in the activity will probably improve
the atmosphere in the class and will also give the students a chance
to practise English with someone who speaks it better than they do.
f) The teacher as a resource
The teacher should always be ready to offer help if it is
needed. After all, we have the language that the students may be
missing, so why not make ourselves available so that they can
consult us when they need us (Harmer, 1997:242)?
g) The teacher as tutor
The students may want to prepare a contest, a festival, edit
an English magazine or do some project work. They ask the teacher
for advice. He or she is their tutor in the sense of someone acting as a
coach and as a resource where the students are involved in their own
work.
The tutorial role (quite close to a counseling position) is
often appropriate at intermediate and advanced levels and it is a
broader role than the others.

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 h) The teacher as investigator
This role relates to the teacher themselves and to teacher
development.
If the teachers do not investigate the efficiency of new
methods, if they do not seek continually their personal and
professional development, their job will become boring,
monotonous.
i) The teacher as motivator
There are several ways we can increase the students’
motivation in learning a foreign language (Ciută, 2003: 58):
- being motivated and interested yourself;
- involving as many students as possible in classroom
activities;
- giving students interesting, relevant, necessary tasks;
- giving prompt feedback;
- positive attention to students;
- maintaining discipline and a reasonable working
atmosphere.

4.4. Disruptive behaviour

At some stage of their lives all teachers encounter disruptive
behaviour, that is a student or students frequently hostile to either the
teacher or to other students. These troubles can be difficult to deal
with.
One way of avoiding most disruptive behaviour is by
agreeing on a code of conduct, which means establishing some
ground rules that both teachers and students must obey. We do not
accept (Harmer, 1997: 249):
- arriving late;
- interrupting other people when they speak;
- bringing drink and food in the classroom;
- using cell phones;
- forgetting to do homework on time;

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 - not paying attention.
Causes of discipline problems:
According to Harmer (idem: 249-252), it seems that there are
three factors involved in these problems:
a) The teacher:
Do’s and don’ts:
- Don’t go to class unprepared;
- Do plan a range of activities suitable for everybody;
- Don’t threaten;
- Don’t raise your voice;
- Do keep an eye on the time;
- Don’t give boring classes;
- Don’t be unfair;
- Don’t have a negative attitude to learning;
- Don’t break the code;
- Don’t give the homework in the last few seconds of the
lesson;
- Do conclude the lesson;
- Do leave the classroom in good order;
- Do ask for help when you need to;
- Do evaluate your lessons;
b) The students:
Harmer also defines the reasons for students’ disruptive
behaviour:
- Time of the day (the students may be tired);
- Two’s company. Teacher must separate the disruptive
students;
- The students’ opinion of the teacher, the subjects being
studied and of the class;
- Intimidating attitude;
- Students playing truant;
- The desire to be noticed.
c) The school.

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 A lot depends on the attitude of the school to disruptive
student behaviour. If there is no recognized policy for dealing with
discipline problems, the teacher should insist on such a system, as in
the end a student causing a severe problem has to be handled by the
school authority rather than by the teacher.

Topics for discussion and exercises:

1. One of the problems students might cause while working

in pairs and groups is the possible use of Romanian. This makes the
communicative activity rather pointless.
What can you do in order to discourage this?
2. What types of interaction can there be in a class?
3. What are the basic uses of the blackboard?
4. Give suggestions for an encouraging atmosphere in the
class.
5. Design a groupwork activity.
6. Present the advantages and disadvantages of the teacher as
controller.

164
165
 CHAPTER V
PLANNING

In this chapter we shall consider some issues concerning

lesson planning and present the main principles governing this
activity.
Even the best techniques and activities will be pointless if
they are not integrated into a program of studies and few teachers
would take an activity or piece of material into class without first
having a reason for doing so. The best teachers are those who think
carefully about what they are going to do in their classes and who
plan how they are going to organize the teaching and learning
(Harmer, 1997: 256).
“It is our firm belief that if teachers do not plan for success,
teaching practice is not likely to result in any.” (Vîlceanu, 2013:
878).

5.1. Textbooks and the syllabus

Many institutions present the syllabus in terms of the main
textbook to be used: by a certain date teachers are supposed to have
covered a certain number of units/lessons in the textbook. At the
same time teachers are often provided with a list of supplementary
material and activities that are available.
If a textbook is involved there are obvious advantages for
both teachers and students. Reliable textbooks contain authentic and
interesting material; they present the language items in a logical
progression, clearly showing what has to be learnt and in some cases
summarizing what has been studied so that the students can revise
the essential items. Textbooks can be systematic about the amount of
vocabulary presented to the students and allow students to study on
their own. Good textbooks also relieve the teacher from the pressure
of heaving to think of original materials for every class. Nowadays

166
there is a great variety of published material for teaching and
learning English.
Yet, textbooks can also have a negative impact on teaching.
They tend to concentrate on the introduction of new language and
controlled work: a teacher relying to heavily on the textbook will
often not be encouraged to provide enough input or output practice.
The similarity of their format generally involves a rigid sequence.
Most teachers are under considerable pressure both because
they are obliged to complete the syllabus and because they teach a
number of classes. They are also influenced by the attitude of the
institution, their colleagues and the students who sometimes see the
textbook as a programme of study and activities that has to be strictly
followed.
There are two major reasons why such an attitude may not
be in the best interests of either students or teachers. In the first place
teachers who over-use a textbook and strictly follow the sequence in
each unit may became boring since they teach the same type of
activities. Thus, the study of English is becoming routine and the
students are becoming less and less motivated. The other main
reason for worrying about textbooks is that they are not written for
your class. Each class is different and most published textbooks are
written with a prototypical student audience in mind.
As to syllabus design, Aloisia Șorop (1996: 86) quotes M.
P. Breen (1987: 2; 82-83) and his classification of syllabi into
Propositional plans and Process plans. The former further subdivide
into formal (structural/grammatical) syllabi and functional syllabi.
Process syllabi, in their turn, subdivide into task-based syllabi and
process syllabi proper. She further introduces her Alternatives
Syllabus, a variant of the process syllabus, which consists of an
online bank/pool of materials, activities and tasks that all teachers
contribute to and are entitled to use: “it gives teachers and students
freedom of selection, ordering, adaptation and implementation”

167
(idem: 91). The keyword of this type of syllabus is classroom
negotiation.
Harmer (1997: 258) does not suggest the textbooks are
destructive since the better ones are written by teachers with
considerable knowledge and experience. But he emphasizes that the
textbook is an aid (often the most important one there is) and not a
sacred text. Teachers will have to think of the best ways to use their
textbooks and not to let the textbook use them, or dictate all the
decisions.
N. Grant (1998) shows how teachers can adapt the textbook
material to the needs of their students and S. Duller (1990) gives a
graphic example of how stages of a unit in a textbook can be adapted
and added onto with extra and more student centered activities.

5.2. Why planning?

Lesson planning is essential both for the teacher and for the
students. For the teacher planning ensures efficient language
teaching, helps the teacher to avoid inadequate, improvised activities
and also gives a real picture of how much the teacher has done and
how much remains to be taught. Lesson planning tells the teacher
what changes he/she should make when teaching again the lesson
and enriches the students to progress gradually, avoids boredom, lack
of interest and motivation. It also avoids wasting time and effort,
contributes significantly to students’ systematic knowledge and
linguistic ability, ensuring maximum development in the time
available.
Designing the lesson and outlining its plan means
anticipatory teaching because the learning situation is lived through
mentally in advance. You will have clear in mind what you will be
doing every minute in the class, how and why, what you will ask
your students to do, on what content, with what sources, in what
order and with what purpose. In order to be able to design a good
lesson plan, the teacher needs to have a good command of

168
methodology and content, to know the students very well and to have
a creative imaginative mind (Olaru in Bălan, R., et al., 2003: 81).
First you have to study the material to be taught from
scientific and methodological points of view. Then set up clear-cut
objectives, having in view the knowledge and skills essential for
understanding the lesson. The following step is to think of the means
which will help you attain them: select adequate teaching aids;
choose the best suited procedures and techniques of teaching;
prepare adequate examples; decide evaluation procedures; assign the
students homework; last but not least, write down all these in a
lesson plan.
The ingredients of a good lesson are:
 clear appropriate objectives;
 a wide and adequate range of activities;
 variety of pace;
 involvement of students in many student-centred activities;
 motivate students through the sense of achievement.
The lesson plan should give a real picture of what teacher
intends to do in the lesson.
The introductory page should contain:
 facts about the class;
 aims and objectives;
 teaching aids;
 assumption about the students;
 anticipated problems.

5.3. Main principles of lesson planning

The main principles of lesson planning are variety and
flexibility (Harmer, 1997: 258).
Variety means involving the students in a number of
different types of activities and using a wide selection of materials.

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Thus, learning will become interesting and never monotonous, since
the learning experience should be stimulating and interesting.
Flexibility is the characteristic we should expect from the
genuinely adaptable teacher. Good teachers are focusing on the
students and on what they need and thus, they are able to react
quickly to an unplanned event. A flexible teacher will be able to
adapt the plan.

5.4. Aims and objectives

Two main questions are generally asked at the begriming of
the lesson planning:
1) The aims: “What will the students learn in the lesson?
What topic, grammar, vocabulary, function, etc.?”
2) The objectives: “What is it that my students will know or
be able to do at the end of the class?
In order to get better results by means of clearly defined
aims and objectives, you should tell the class or write on board what
these are at the beginning of the lesson, what kind of activities they
will be asked to perform and by what means they and the teacher will
know in the end whether the goal has been attained.
In conclusion, we may say that the careful thinking out of
detailed and well-defined objectives is a fruitful aid to better
teaching. It leads (Olaru in Bălan, R., et al., 2003: 86):
- for the students, to:
- more concentration;
- better understanding and awareness;
- a stronger feeling of accomplishment;
- success in learning;
- increased motivation;
- for the teacher, to:
- precision in planning;
- good organization of the activity;
- success in teaching.

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 5.5. Selecting activities
Each lesson consists of a series of activities that make up the
stages of a lesson. These activities may appear in the plan in another
order than that in which they appear in the textbook. It is teacher's
task to decide the suitable order and which activities to select. The
teacher has to take into account:
- What is the learning value of each activity?
- What skills does it develop?
- What stages of the lesson is it suitable for?
- How much time is worth spending on it?

5.6. Sequencing the stages of a lesson

Activities are generally organised into stages, according to
what their role is in the teaching - learning process (idem: 89-90):
- Presentation of new language (functions, grammar,
vocabulary, phonology, discourse features);
- Controlled pre-communication practice-usually focused on
accuracy;
- Free practice (Production) - focused on fluency and content
of ideas;
- Checking and discussing outcomes(s) after doing a
communicative task;
- Systematization/Globalization of linguistic content or
content of ideas.

5.6.1. Teaching Models

5.6.1.1. Presentation, Practice, Production
In PPP sequences the teacher presents the context and
situation, explains and demonstrates the meaning and form of the
new language structure. The students practise making sentences and
then the production stage follows in which they talk more freely
about themselves.

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 The PPP model is very effective for elementary level and
beginners.

5.6.1.2. Task - based learning (TBL)

In TBL model the focus is on the task rather than on the
language. It is tasks that generate the language, not vice-versa.
TBL syllabus: organized on the basis of tasks to be done.
Basic point of organization TASK, e.g. students will talk
about their last vacation.
Main language point necessary to do TASK: Past Tense
Simple
After final tasks have been decided on, and objectives have
been settled, the next question is: "What do students need to
learn/revise in order to carry out the final tasks?"

5.6.1.3. Engage, Study, Activate (ESA)

ESA (Harmer, 1997) is a model based on surveys which
have proved that the factors for a successful language learning are:
motivation, exposure to language and chances to use it.
In the Engage stage, the teacher tries to arouse the students'
interest by involving their emotions. This can be done by using
games, music, discussions, pictures, jokes, etc.
Study is the stage of a lesson in which students are asked to
focus on language structure. Successful language learning in a
classroom depends on a judicious blend of subconscious language
acquisition (through listening and reading) and "study" activities
organized by the teacher.
Activate is the stage where the students are led to use the
language as freely and communicatively as they can.
Ur (1996) offers some guidelines for sequencing the
components of a lesson:
1. Put the harder tasks earlier (when the students are fresher
and energetic);

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 2. Have quieter activities before lively ones (it can be quite
difficult to calm down a class after a lively, exciting activity);
3. Think about transitions (i.e. the link between two activities
or two stages);
4. Pull the class together at the beginning and at the end (this
contributes to a sense of structure);
5. End on a positive tone (summary of what you have
achieved, a positive induction, a joke).

5.7. Transition/Continuity
The lesson should be coherent and should have a logical
pattern. The activities should be linked by transitions.
Transition does not mean only to signal the beginning or the
end of an activity. It also means connecting the activities of a lesson
in a whole which should be like the scenario of a film. For this, the
teacher should prove his/her mastery in smoothly leading the
students into the exciting world of the lesson (Olaru, 2003: 93).

5.8. Teaching Aids

Visual aids such as objects (realia), pictures, charts, word
charts, maps, books, magazines etc., and audio aids, such as a tape
recorder can be used during all the stages.
The board is maybe the most precious teaching aid of all, as
it is always available and it does not require much special
preparation.
The teacher is actually the most important factor in
achieving effectiveness.

5.9. Timing
Thinking about how long an activity will take is essential for
planning.

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 During the class the teacher should keep a watch or clock
visible. Use your experience to plan better if you discover that the
time allocated to an activity was not realistic.

5.10. Revision and recycling

Teachers have to include in their lesson plan short revision
activities based on problems which have been already studied and
which are essential for students to understand the new material.
Recycle grammatical structures and vocabulary as much as
possible in different activities, using different skills. Thus, your
students will be able to integrate new knowledge into their already
existing knowledge and they will reinforce their skills through
practice.

5.11. Homework
The main purpose of assigning homework is to give the
students additional practice in developing their skills, their language
competence. That is why, homework has to be centred on the
objectives of the lesson.
As homework should be clearly explained, sometimes
followed by some examples do not leave the assigning of it to the
last minute! At the end of the class students' attention is at a low
level.

5.12. Evaluation
Evaluation as an information gathering procedure which
offers feedback about a process, applies to planning as well.
If the teaching process is a student - centred one, the teacher
will have much more opportunity to monitor students’ work. In this
way he/she will have a clearer idea to what extent the objectives have
been attained.
Feedback on the effectiveness of your lesson can also be
obtained by reflection. After teaching the lesson it is important that

174
you stop and think whether it was good or not, and why, in order to
learn from reflection, from experience and make the necessary
changes.

Conclusions
Plan your classes carefully and responsibly if you want to be
successful as a teacher and reflect on the following questions before
teaching a lesson (Olaru, 2003: 99):
- Does my lesson have clear objectives? Can they be
attained?
- Are the methods and techniques adapted to the objectives,
to the students and to the type of lesson?
- Have I chosen appropriate teaching aids?
How am I going to make the content interesting, understood
and practised by all the students in the class?
- Have I designed activities which will involve the students
in different ways?
- Have I included activities to evaluate the students'
performance?
- Do I know how long, approximately, each activity of the
lesson will take?
- Have I planned evaluation activities that will help me to
check whether by the end of the lesson, the students will be able to
attain the objectives of the lesson?

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Suggestions of lesson plans:

LESSON PLAN

Date: the 5th of December 2012

Teacher :
Class: the 6 Form A
School:
Time: 50 minutes
Text Book: ENGLISH FACTFILE: Title: It's made of……
Type of lesson: Grammar
Aims: By the end of the lesson, the students will have:
- practiced, the skills of listening, reading, speaking, and
writing;
- presented, practiced and produced some forms of Present
Simple Passive and Past Simple Passive
- checked certain vocabulary items;
- created interest in the topic.
Skills covered: L., S., R., W.
Aids: bb. Text book, photocopied worksheets photos, objects,
drawings, coloured chalk.
Methods: Conversations, Observation, Discovery

Assumptions: The Ss are familiar with the vocabulary related to

music, films.
Anticipated problems: Some Ss may have difficulties in
understanding the explanations or in doing the exercises / the
activities.
Classroom management: There will be posters, maps, pictures on the
walls and on the blackboard.

176
 There will be slips of paper, photocopied
with parts of different activities for each
student or pair of students.
The desk will be removed in order to form
groups or pairs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 Harmer, Jeremy. 2000. The Practice of English

Language Teaching London: Longman.
 Vizental, Adriana. 2007. Metodica predării limbii
engleze. Strategies of Teaching and Testing English as a Foreign
Language. Iasi: Polirom.

ACTIVITY 1: WARM-UP
AIMS:
 to get Ss involved into the topic
 to use properly the vocabulary related to materials
 to present and practice The Past Simple

Procedure Interaction Timing

T asks Ss several questions about
weather and their mood.
Chatting in English at the beginning of
the lesson, T creates an 'English
language' atmosphere, establishing
contact between his/ her and SS, and
helps SS to feel relax.

177
Check up: SS read their homework.
T asks Ss to take a look at a series of
objects on the desk. The T writes on the
blackboard a series of words
representing different items. He/She T-Ss 10 min.
asks the Ss to pay attention as they are Ss-Ss
going to participate in a game named Frontal
"What is it made of?" (a pen, a book, a Speaking
glass, etc.) Reading
They are asked what they are made of? Individual
What they are used for?
Ss try to answer what they think that the
objects are used for. They give other
examples. The teacher gives the Ss
handouts containing a chart. There are
four groups of materials.
a) plastic
b) metal
c) glass
d) paper/cotton
T checks comprehension by asking
some questions:
What is the pencil made of?
Who discovered America?
Where was Coca Cola first produced?
When was the Eiffel Tower built?

ACTIVITY 2: PRESENTATION
AIMS:
 to express their own opinions
 to practice The Present Simple Passive
 to practice the listening and speaking skills

178
 PROCEDURE INTERACTION TIMING

T invites Ss to talk about this T-Ss

topic starting from their own Ss-Ss
opinions. T reads a couple of Listening 15 min.
sentences containing the Present Reading
Passive forms and then she asks Frontal
the S to write the rule: Group work
"BE + Past participle"

-T makes appreciations and

checks Ss' pronunciation
-T supervises / supplies error
correction T and Ss debate the
topic, involving the whole class,
somehow.

The teacher gives each pair of Ss

an envelope with several
unjumbled words.
Bananas/ are/ grown / in /
tropical areas.
coffee/grown/Brazil
glasses/make/plastic
letters/deliver/postman
milk/give/cows
- T asks the Ss to reorder the
words to form correct sentences.

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 ACTIVITY 3: PRACTICE
AIMS:
 to practice the Past Simple Passive
 to find the main ideas from the debate
 to identify the differences between Present and Past
Simple Passive
 to express their opinions

PROCEDURE INTERACTION TIMING

T asks Ss to complete the T-Ss
chart on their notebooks. Individual
 Ss find other examples of Speaking 15 min.
the past simple passive. Writing
Ss-Ss
T gives Ss another worksheet
with some activities related
to the topic:
 Write sentences using the
prompts.
 Match the Column A to
the Column B and then
write sentences
-T makes appreciations and
checks Ss' pronunciation.
-T supervises / supplies error
correction
Ss debate the topic, read
through the passage and then
write it in their note books
using the correct form
involving the whole class,
somehow.

180
ACTIVITY 4: FEED-BACK
AIMS:
 to read a description of a story told in pictures
The TITANIC Story
 to practice the present and The Past Simple
Passive
 to answer questions using The Past Simple
Passive and by agent
PROCEDURE INTERACTION TIMING

T asks Ss to read the passages T-Ss

and write the correct form of the Individual 10 min.
verbs. Speaking
T gives Ss a short time and Writing
checks orally their answers.

HOMEWORK:
Ss are asked to find a report in
their local paper of a football
match / film. They write a short
description of it in English using
The Past Simple Passive.
T explains the topic of the
homework and gives examples.
(2 min): The match was
played….Goals were scored…
etc.
T makes remarks about the Ss'
activity and marks pupils with
grades.

Greetings
LESSON PLAN

181
 TEACHER:
SCHOOL
GRADE: 8th
NO. OF HOURS PER WEEK: 2
NO. OF STUDENTS: 24
TEXTBOOK: SNAPSHOT - intermediate
DATE: May, 20th 2013
LESSON: “I don’t believe it” (4 hours - 1st hour)
TYPE OF LESSON: acquisition of new knowledge
TOPIC: Verbs (modals) for drawing conclusions –
“must/might/can’t” + perfect infinitive
VOCABULARY:
 Verbs of speaking
STRUCTURES:
 “must/might/can’t” + perfect infinitive how much/many
 None and any specifically
FUNCTIONS/COMMUNICATION:
 Speculating about past
 Agreeing and disagreeing with speculations
 Giving reasons and expressing opinion
SKILLS: integrated
AIMS:
 students read the text and gist it for specific information;
 students listen to the tape and answer questions about the
listened text;
 students practice the new language structures;
 students write the new grammar structure in their notebooks;
 students learn how to agree and disagree with speculations
OBJECTIVES
COGNITIVE: by the end of the lesson students will be able to

182
 understand and react adequately to complex questions and
statements;
 express information explicitly;
 introduce a point of view;
 become aware and show understanding of the forms;
 understand, produce and use the stated information;
 skim to obtain a general impression of the text;
 scan to locate specifically required information;
 respond in different situations (agree and disagree);
 express themselves in free writing and speaking.
AFFECTIVE:
 making students confident in their ability to use the
language;
 creating interest in the topic of the lesson;
 creating a relaxed atmosphere, proper for studying;
 foster learner independence and cooperative learning;
 stimulating students’ imagination and creativity;
 having fun.
TEACHING AIDS:
 SB/TB/Language boosters
 Worksheets, prompts
 Class CDs
 CD player
 Blackboard
TEACHING METHODS AND TECHNIQUES:
 Communicative approach
 Exercise; questions and answers; gap-filling exercise;
drilling; sentence writing; conversation; dialogues; dramatized
situations and role-play
ORGANIZATION AND TIME:
 Whole class

183
 Individual work
 Pair work
 50’

ASSUMPTIONS:
I assume that most of the vocabulary to be taught is already known
to my students.

ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS:
Students might not be very eager to participate as they have been
mainly preoccupied by their written tests lately.

STAGES OF THE LESSON

Activity 1: Warmer
Aims:
 to review the previously learnt material
 to motivate and involve students by means of personalization.

Procedure Interactio Timin

n g
T greets Ss and asks about their T-Ss
state of mind and how they feel. 3min.
T checks attendance. Ss answer.

T asks Ss to check their T-Ss

homework.
Ss read their homework.

Activity 2: Lead-in
Aim:

184
 to prepare the context of the lesson by means of picture
exploitation
Procedure Interactio Timin
n g
T asks Ss to make guesses about the
pictures in the textbook. T-Ss 4 min.
(ex.1/page 104). Ss make assumptions
about the pictures.
- Where is Miss Carr? Ss-T
- Who is she talking to?
- What is she giving to Ian?
- What do you think she is talking
about?

T reads the title of the text and makes a T-Ss

brief survey with the class about what
they think it happened.

T elicits ideas from the whole class and

Ss advance ideas.

Activity 3: Listening for specific information

Aim:
 to listen and grasp relevant information from the text
Procedure Interactio Timin
n g
T plays the tape (ex. 1/page 104). T-Ss 3 min.
Ss listen and read the text in the SB.

T asks Ss questions about the read text

and Ss answer giving their opinion.
- What do you think it happened to

185
Matt, Kelly and Zoë?
- Where do you think they are
now?
- Do you think they’ll be in time
for the rehearsal?

Activity 4: Reading comprehension

Aim:
 to check understanding of the text

Procedure Interactio Timin

n g
T asks Ss to read the text again if T-Ss 8 min.
necessary and answer the questions IW
(ex.2/page 105). T checks the answers Ss-T
with the whole class.

T writes some prompts on the blackboard

for the useful phrases Ss read in the text
and asks Ss to fill in the gaps. T plays the
tape again after Ss fill in the gaps. T-Ss
Ss fill in the gaps and check their answers
with the tape and then they practise the Ss-Ss
mini dialogue across the class in open
pairs.

Activity 5: Presentation, isolation and exemplification

Aim:
 to introduce the new language structures

Procedure Interactio Timin

n g

186
 T asks Ss to look at the examples in the T-Ss 12
book (Grammar flash) and checks min.
understanding by asking questions. T
encourages Ss to give reasons for their
answers.
T writes examples on the blackboard and T-Ss
Ss copy them in their Notebooks.

Activity 6: Practicing structures – semi controlled practice

Aim:
 to provide opportunity to use recently learnt material
 to produce and use explicitly the recently learnt material
Procedure Interactio Timin
n g
T asks Ss to solve ex.4, page 105 after T-Ss 8 min.
she first reads the example.
Ss complete the sentences
individually. Ss-T
T goes through the answers with the
whole class.

Activity 7: Practising structures

Aim:
 to produce and use explicitly the recently learnt material
 to show understanding of the new forms
Procedure Interactio Timin
n g
T asks Ss to listen and read silently the T-Ss 10min.
structures used to agree and disagree with
speculations. Across the class, in open
pairs, Ss practice the new structures.
Using the clues given in the book Ss Ss-Ss

187
make short conversations in groups of
three and one group acts out their
conversation for the whole class.

Activity 8: Assigning homework

Procedure Interactio Timin
n g
T explains homework. Ss write the T-Ss 2 min.
assignment in their notebooks.
(Exercise 2, page 76 in LB).
T praises Ss for their work and gives
grades.
APPENDIX

BB map

1) Verbs “must/might/can’t” followed by Perfect Infinitive

to draw conclusions about past

Must/might/can’t + have + verb3rd

- draw conclusions about the past
They must have forgotten about the rehearsal.

Must/might/can’t + verb (be or another main verb in the base

form)
- draw conclusions about present
She must be Kate Winslet.

2) Useful expressions and structures to speculate about the

past, to agree and disagree with speculations
Speculating about past
- Must/might/can\t + perfect infinitive
- Perhaps/Maybe/Probably

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Agreeing with speculations
- Maybe you’re right.
- You could be right.
- I suppose so.
- I think you’re right.
- Subject + must have.
Disagreeing with speculations
- That can’t be the reason.
- Surely not!
- I don’t believe it.
- Subject + can’t have.

LESSON PLAN

TEACHER:
SCHOOL:
DATE: 24th of May 2016
CLASS: 3rd
NO.OF Ss: 21
LEVEL: beginners (1st year of study)
TEXTBOOK: Way Ahead, Macmillan
UNIT 18: She can run
TYPE OF LESSON: revision
FUNCTIONS:
 To express ability
 To identify and to locate
 To describe things and places
 To identify movements
AIMS OF LESSON: by the end of the lesson students will be
able:
 To talk about what animals can/can’t do

189
  To identify animals
 To locate animals
 To describe animals and parts of the body
 To describe locations and places
 To identify activities
SKILLS: Integrated skills
GRAMMAR:
 modal verb “can”
 personal pronouns
 have/has
 there is, there are
 verbs of movement
VOCABULARY:
 animals
 colors
 parts of the body
OBJECTIVES:
A. Cognitive objectives:
 to check and improve vocabulary;
 to encourage students to talk freely;
 to help students talk about abilities;
 to give students more practice on
pronunciation, vocabulary and the structures
previously taught.
B. Affective objectives:
 making students confident in their ability to use the
language;
 creating interest in the topic of the lesson;
 creating a relaxed atmosphere, proper for studying;
 foster learner independence and cooperative learning;
 stimulating students’ imagination and creativity;

190
  having fun.

DIDACTIC STRATEGIES:
 methods and procedures: explanation, dialogues,
conversation, pair work, independent work, elicitation,
game, brainstorming;
 materials and equipment: pictures, flashcards, worksheets,
textbook, workbooks, posters, flipchart, a dice
 organization: lockstep, individual work, pair work
LOCATION: the classroom
TIMING: 50 min
ASSUMPTIONS: I assume that most of the vocabulary and
structures to be revised are already known to my students.
ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS: Some students might need further
help and extra indications in solving the tasks and they may also
need some of these indications to be given in Romanian.

PROCEDURE

ACTIVITY 1: WARM-UP
AIMS:
 to focus the Ss’ attention
 to get Ss involved into the topic

PROCEDURE INTERACTION TIMIN

ORGANIZATIO G
N
- Introductory conversation T-Ss 5 min.
- Game: Ss throw a dice which has Ss- T
6 animals drawn on it, they have to
name the animal and say what it lockstep
can do.

191
-Ss write the sentences on the Bb
Parrots can fly. Hippos can swim.
Monkeys can jump.
Rabbits can hop. Lions can run.

SKILLS: speaking, writing

TEACHING TECHNIQUES: explanation, instructions, game
AIDS: pictures, a dice

ACTIVITY 2: Game - Guess the animal

AIMS:
 to revise parts of the body
 to revise animals and colors
 to use the verbs of movement
PROCEDURE INTERACTION TIMIN
ORGANIZATIO G
N
- T asks one student to come to her T-Ss 5 min.
desk and to choose one picture from Ss-Ss
there. The student describes what
she/he sees using colors and parts of
the body and what they can/can’t do lockstep
- Ss guess the animals
SKILLS: speaking
TEACHING TECHNIQUES: conversation, game
AIDS: pictures

ACTIVITY 3: Game – Animal jigsaws (matching)

AIMS:
 to revise parts of the body
 to revise animals and colors
 to use the verbs of movement

192
PROCEDURE INTERACTION TIMIN
ORGANIZATIO G
N
- T gives students sheets of paper T-Ss 10 min.
and some jigsawed pictures of Ss-T
animals and asks pupils to stick Whole class
them together on the sheets to
discover what animal it is
- Ss stick the parts on the sheet of
paper and discover the animal then
they make statements about it using
the model on the previous activity
- T asks one of the pupils to write
the description of his/her animal on
the blackboard
SKILLS: listening, speaking
TEACHING TECHNIQUES: explanation, conversation, game
AIDS: worksheets, pictures

ACTIVITY 4: Revising verbs of movement - Riddles

AIMS:
 to express ability, using can/can’t
 to revise personal pronouns

PROCEDURE INTERACTION TIMIN

ORGANIZATIO G
N
- Teacher sticks three written riddles T-S 10 min.
on the flipchart and asks Ss to read Ss-Ss
the riddles and to guess the animal
- Ss answer and stick on the poster

193
the picture of the guessed animal IW
- T gives students a worksheet
asking them to answer the questions
using the given cues
- Ss answer the questions and then
read their answers
SKILLS: reading, speaking, writing
TEACHING TECHNIQUES: explanation, conversation
AIDS: pictures, poster, flipchart, worksheets

ACTIVITY 5: Production - listening, reading, writing

AIMS:
 to talk about things using the learnt structures
 to differentiate between persons
 to make negative statements

Procedure Interaction Timing

Organization
- T gives students a worksheet with T-S 10 min.
some pictures and reads them what
Andy can see
- Ss listen and tick their answers on IW
the worksheet
- T asks Ss to say what Andy cannot
see Ss-Ss
- Ss solve the task and write the
sentences on the Bb and on their
worksheets
SKIILS: listening, writing
TEACHING TECHNIQUES: exercise, conversation, questions and
answers
AIDS: worksheets

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ACTIVITY 6: FEED-BACK – speaking, writing
AIMS:
 to ask about what their classmates can do
 to talk about what their classmates can/cannot do

Procedure Interaction Timing

Organization
- T gives the Ss worksheets with Tell me T-S 10 min
what you can do and explains that they
have to ask their deskmate if they can Ss-Ss
do one or more of the things on the
worksheet and write the answer next to PW
the action
-When they finish Ss report to the class
what they have found
SKILLS: writing, speaking
TEACHING TECHNIQUES: explanation, conversation, exercise,
questions and answers
AIDS: worksheets
ASSIGNING HOMEWORK: to provide consolidation of language
and grammar so far
Write 5 things that you can do and 5 things that you cannot do.
T. assigns the homework by giving clear instructions.
ASSESSMENT: T. praises all the Ss for their participation during
the entire lesson. T gives a “plus” to the most active
Ss.

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196
 LESSON PLAN

TEACHER:
SCHOOL:

DATE: 17th of May 2016

CLASS: 7
NO.OF Ss: 19
TEXTBOOK: English Scrapbook
LESSON: ENIGMAS
STRUCTURES: should have+past participle
Shouldn’t have+past participle
OBJECTIVES
By the end of the lesson, my students will be able to:
 Talk about past events
 Express criticism and regret about past situations

TEACHING AIDS:
 textbook
 Blackboard
 Worksheets
 Cd-player

ASSUMPTIONS:
I assume that students have already watched the film “Titanic”.

ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS:
Students might have some difficulties in understanding the listening
part of the lesson.
Time: 50’
Activity 1: Warmer

197
Aims:
 to create a pleasant atmosphere for learning
 to involve sudents by means of personalisation

Procedure Interactio Timin ’

n g
T greets Ss T-Ss 2 min.
T asks questions: Who is absent today?
How are you today?
Are you ready for the T-Ss
lesson?
What is your lesson for
today?
Ss answer.

Activity 2: Checking homework

Aim:
 to check understanding of previous lesson
Procedure Interaction Timing
T asks Ss to read their T-Ss 10 min.
homework and after that they will Ss-T
talk about it.

Activity 3: Reading
Aim:
 to talk about past events
 to talk about the Titanic and its story.

198
Procedure Interaction Timing
T announces the students that they T-Ss 15 min.
will read a text about the Titanic.
They are asked to translate the text
and after that they will talk about it,
asking and answering questions. Ss – Ss
Activity 4: Writing
Aim:
 to write down regrets using should have/shouldn’t have
Procedure Interaction Timing

The teacher asks the students to put IW

themselves into the Titanic’s captain
shoes and write his regrets about the 10 min.
situation.
Eg: I should have taken as many T-Ss
lifeboats as needed.
The students write on the blackboard
their sentences
Activity 5: Listening and speaking
Aim:
 to discuss and give reasons about the situation
Procedure Interaction Timing

The teacher asks the students to listen T-Ss 5 min.

to a tape about the premonitions
before the accident and to solve ex.
5/75. IW 5 min.
After that the students are given
some worksheets and are asked to
complete the text of the song “My
heart will go on” while they listen to

199
it.

Activity 6: Assigning homework

Procedure Interaction Timing

The teacher asks the students to solve T-Ss 2 min.
ex 6/75.

Topics for discussion and exercises:

1. Make a list of reasons why it is advisable to do lesson
planning.
2. Write down a checklist of questions you will ask yourself
while planning a lesson.
3. Have a look at the following possible stages of a lesson.
Try to label them (Presentation, Practice, Production) and put them
in the order in which you would teach them. Write numbers showing
the order in the boxes.
a) ……. Students use language they have learnt to express
themselves more freely, e.g. talk or write about their own lives and
interests, express opinions, imagine themselves in different
situations.
b) ……. Teacher presents new words or structures, gives
examples, writes them on board, etc.
c) ……. Students use words and structures in a controlled way,
e.g. making sentences from prompts, asking and answering
questions, giving sentences based on picture (oral or written).
4. Suppose the theme of the lesson is “Our Town”. What
could the final task be? What stages would you plan for this lesson
and in what order?
5. Why do we use teaching aids during the lesson?
6. Write down some of the benefits of pair- and group work.
7. Think of and write down how you are going to prepare
students to write a composition as a homework assignment.

200
 8. Design a lesson plan for teaching The Article.
9. Design a lesson plan for teaching Uncountable Nouns.
CHAPTER VI
EVALUATION

6.1. Terminology
Dascălu (in Bălan et al., 2003: 215) defines the three
concepts of evaluation, assessment and testing as they can cause
some confusion in their use. Testing is generally understood as
giving a test, while the other two are sometimes used
interchangeably.
Evaluation expresses a final judgment about a student's level
of performance which has been measured by using different "tools".
Evaluation refers to the extent to which the teaching/ learning
objectives stated at the beginning of a school year, term or lesson
have been achieved. This judgment is formally expressed in numbers
or marks (from 1 to 10, in the Romanian system), grades (e.g
"excellent", "very good", "poor", etc. or letters such as "A","B", "C"
etc.) or, informally in scores or points, which eventually can be
converted into marks.
On the other hand, according to Vîlceanu (2012: 1449),
learners "perceive, to a more or less extent, their ownership of
learning by reducing certain aspects of professional and social life to
a manageable level. Learning potentialities and marshalling and
channeling resources take place" in evaluation, too, if we place it
within formative environments.
Assessment is referred to in terms of the process which will
eventually lead to evaluation. This process of assessing students’
performance is done by using a variety of techniques, among which
testing is just one of them.

6.2. Why and what do we evaluate?

201
 The main purpose of this activity is to gather information
about our students’ language skills. This should be made in an
appropriate, consistent and encouraging to learning manner.
After assessing, we will know if we have been successful as
teachers and what remedial measures should be taken, and our
students will find out if they are progressing, and what areas of
language they need to focus their attention on.
It is necessary for us to evaluate each language component
and skill.

6.3. How do we evaluate?

There are various techniques of assessing students’ language
and abilities, their performance. No matter what technique we use,
the main principle which must govern our choice, is to assess our
students’ knowledge in such a way that it enhances further learning
and motivation, or, briefly, this assessment must have a positive
washforward effect (idem: 218).

6.3.1. Testing
A test is a sample of behavior. In order to make inferences about
students’ competence, two important assumptions must first be made
regarding the test itself (Savignon, 1983: 232)
1. The test score is an accurate and stable measure of
individual performance. The same test given to the same person on
another day, in another sitting, or scored by different rater is likely to
yield the same similar results. In other words, the test is reliable.
2. The test is a real reflection of the underlying competence
the test is designed to evaluate. For example, performance on a
reading test requires reading ability. This refers to the validity of the
test.
Reliability can be defined in terms of accuracy, stability and
error of measurement.

202
 The validity of a test is the extent to which a test measures
what it is supposed to measure and nothing else. To be valid, a test
must first be reliable. However, a reliable test is not necessarily a
valid one for a given purpose. Savignon (1983: 236) quotes Davies
(1968), Cronbach (1971), Palmer and Groot (1981) describing five
different kinds of validity:
Face validity. The test looks as though it measures what it is
supposed to measure. It is perceived as a reasonable, fair, or
appropriate test by those who take it, as well as, by those who
interpret the results.
Content validity. The tasks included are representative of
the larger set of tasks of which the test is supposed to be a sample.
For example, the test faithfully reflects the syllabus or instructional
programme on which it is based.
Predictive validity. The test predicts performance in some
subsequent situation, such as job success, performance on another
test, or grade in a course.
Concurrent validity. The test gives results similar to those
obtained from another measure taken concurrently – for example, job
success, performance on another test, grade in a course.
Construct validity. The test in an accurate reflection of an
underlying theory of what it is supposed to measure. The question in
this case is “What do scores on this test mean?”
Bell (1981: 200) adds another quality of a good test:
practicality.
When we write a test we have to be realistic. What aids do
we need? Are they available? Do we need a special arrangement in
the classroom? How long will it take to mark the test? How long will
it take the students to complete it? How much will it cost? These are
only some of the questions we shall have to ask ourselves if we want
to prepare useful and appropriate tests. Taking into account that there
are four reasons for having a test: to indicate future ability, to
discover what is already known, to discover what has been learned

203
and to discover what is still to be learned, Bell (1981: 192-193)
considers that there are four test types which seek to answer these
questions:
a) Prognostic (or aptitude) tests: these attempt to discover
an individual’s potential for acquiring a particular skill;
b) Proficiency tests: these attempt to discover what the
testee already knows. Language tests of this type are not based on the
content of any particular course or skill, but aim to assess global
activity. Typically, proficiency tests are much used in the placing of
individuals in learning groups appropriate to their level of
knowledge: beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc.
c) Attainment (or achievement) tests: these, in contrast
with the aptitude and proficiency tests, seek to determine the extent
to which a learner has mastered the contents of a particular course.
Many textbooks contain tests of this kind.
d) Diagnostic tests: these may be thought of as the converse
of the proficiency test since their aim is to discover not what is
known by the testee, but what he does not know. Indeed, a
proficiency test might be used as a diagnostic test if the intention of
the tester was to discover what needed to be learned and should
therefore be included in future teaching.

6.3.1.1. Traditional vs Communicative Testing

Testing is the most widely spread technique used for
assessing students in the classroom. Many teachers use tests just to
mark their students. These tests usually take the shape of isolated,
context-free gapped sentences which students have to complete with
the right verb form, or some sentences to translate from Romanian
into English, or change a text from Direct Speech into Indirect
Speech, etc. How many of these test items show us that our students
can really use English in real world?
The evolution of language testing is inevitably linked with
the evolution of language teaching. As we have already mentioned in

204
a previous chapter, there have been three main stages in the teaching
of foreign languages:
Stage 1 (traditional) – Grammar – translation approach;
Stage 2 (modern) – Audio – structural approach;
Stage 3 (post-modern) – Communicative approach.
Tests of grammar, vocabulary, listening and reading are
objective in their scoring, while tests of speaking and writing are
scored more subjectively.
Tests associated with translation tend to be subjective in
their scoring. Translation is an integrative type of test, where
knowledge of the language as a whole is being tested (knowledge of
grammar, vocabulary, reading, skills, writing skills and knowledge
of culture). Audio lingual era is associated with discrete point tests.
This type of test consists in a large number of separate disconnected
items, each testing a different aspect of language (e.g : battery tests).
These tests language are scored objectively.
Communicative language tests combine the two techniques
in the following way (Dascălu in Bălan et al., 2003: 220):
a) integrative + objective (e.g. dictation, cloze, etc.)
b) integrative +improved subjective (e.g. role play, letter writing,
following instructions, problem- solving, oral interview).
If we teach communicatively, we should test
communicatively.
A communicative test is a test which approximates to real
language use in a real situation, in the real world. Thus, dictation and
cloze tests are considered non-communicative types of tests, while
role-play, letter writing, following instructions, problem-solving, oral
interview are communicative tests.
Keith Morrow (quoted by Richard West, 1993) lists seven
features of communicative tests which follow communicative teaching:
1. interaction – based;
2. unpredictability;
3. content;

205
 4. purpose;
5. performance;
6. authenticity;
7. behavior – based .

6.3.1.2.. Testing Language and Skills

A. Testing Grammar and Vocabulary
a) Testing Grammar
The separate testing of grammar has been a controversial
problem since it may seem that testing the students’ mastery of
grammatical elements contradicts the main principles of
communicative testing.
Still, there are reasons why a grammatical component should
be kept in any proficiency tests. Grammar tests have the advantage of
practicality and the issue of content validity is as important in that if
we test the writing ability directly, we are limited by the topic, style
and format which cannot include all possible grammatical elements
that we have taught.
b) Testing vocabulary
There are two main ways of testing vocabulary: recognition
and production
B. Testing skills
Traditionally, language skills have been thought of, taught
and consequently, tested as fourfold:
a) Productive skills: speaking and writing
b) Receptive skills: listening and reading
The four-way division has been recognized as a convenient
fiction not only because actual language use necessarily involves
the ability to integrate several skills at once, but also because within
each gross skill there are several subskills which are called upon
simultaneously (Bell, 1981:194).

6.3.2 Alternative Means of Evaluation

206
 a) The portfolio is a systematic collection of the students’
work and other information about the students in order to determine
whether they have maintained progress.
b) Projects, either individual or group ones, help bridge the
gap between language study and language use at all levels of student
language proficiency. The teacher works with the students during
each stage, acting as a counsellor and consultant, not as a provider of
information or controller (Dascălu, 2003: 248)
c) Self – evaluation is a complex mental process useful in
any learning event. Students who perform self – evaluation
understand their goals, monitor their success in achieving these
goals. Consequently, self – evaluation leads students to analyze their
progress and plan the improvement of their performance.

Topics for discussion and exercises:

1. Enlarge upon: “Assessment is an integral part of teaching

and learning, but it should be subordinated to both” (K. Bailey,
1998)
2. There are seven features of communicative tests which
follow communicative teaching:
i. interaction-based;
ii. unpredictability;
iii. content;
iv. purpose;
v. performance;
vi. authenticity;
vii. behaviour-based.
Here are the above seven features defined. Write the number
of the feature corresponding to the definition in the spaces provided:
a) the language used in the test should replicate the language used in
real world because what we need to measure is our students’
ability to perform in realistic language situations;

207
b) the success or failure in a communicative test should be judged on
the basis of outcomes, i.e. students should genuinely produce
language or (physically) react to it…….;
c) students’ performance should also be measured in terms of
appropriateness to the topic, register and the roles they assume
during interaction which simulates real situations.…;
d) a test item, especially of speaking or writing, should have in view
the expectations of a known/unknown addressee………;
e) the test should measure the students’ ability to use both their
knowledge of language and strategies for dealing with real life
conditions such as lapses, misunderstandings caused by
distractions, shift of attention/interest and errors……;
f) any communicative situation as a test item has to have a reason
and the students should demonstrate their ability to recognize and
use it…….;
g) the test items should be designed in such a way as to offer
students the opportunity to give appropriate responses to
unexpected input under time pressure…..;
3. Here are some techniques for testing structures which are
most widely-used by teachers and testers:
i. multiple-choice; ii. modified-cloze; iii. test completion; iv.
paraphrase.
Match each technique with the following test samples:
A. …………….
Complete the following story with was, were, wasn’t or
weren’t:
He (1)…..at the Science Museum and (2) ….late for dinner
again. Howard and Sally (3)….happy. Peter (4) …sure he (5) ….in a
crash etc.
B. ………………
Choose one word that correctly completes the following text:

208
 The modern Olympic Games (1).….nearly 100 years old. The
first modern Olympic Games (2)……in 1896 in Athens. There (3)
….any prize-money and there (4) …any women competitors etc.
(1) A are B were C was D aren’t
(2) A was B were C are D weren’t
(3) A was B wasn’t C were D weren’t
(4) A was B wasn’t C were D weren’t
C. ……………
Complete each sentence so that it means the same as the
preceding one:
i. His sound system isn’t as good as mine.
My………………
ii. Haven’t you got any larger sweaters?
Is this……………
iii. Jill plays the piano better than Simon.
Simon is not………..
D. Complete the following interview with the missing
questions:
Man: (i) …………………..?
Jan: Jan.
Man: (ii) …………………..?
Jan: I’m seventeen years old.
Man: (iii) …………………..?
Jan: I’m from York.

4. There are two main ways of testing vocabulary;

recognition and production.
Here are five examples of test items. Group them under:
recognition test items production test items
A. Synonyms
Choose the alternative A, B, C, or D, which is closest in
meaning to the word on the left:
gleam A. gather B. shine C. welcome D. clean

209
 B. Definitions (multiple choice)
Choose the right definition A, B, C, or D for the words on
the left:
loathe means A. become seriously ill
B. search carefully
C. dislike intensely
D. look very angry
C. Definitions
A……….is a person who flies a plane.
……….is frozen water.
D. Gap-filling
Fill in the gaps with one word:
Because of the rain we had to ….….the picnic.
E. Gap-filling (multiple choice)
He …….a match to see in the dark.
A. lit B. stroke C. burnt D. hit

5. Which of the following techniques can you use to test the

students’ listening comprehension skills?
a) summarizing information
b) filling in a grid
c) information transfer
d) True/False/NM (not mentioned)
e) multiple choice
f) matching (speakers and topic)
g) fill-in gaps in the text
h) answering specific questions (NOT open-ended questions)
i) recognizing /ordering pictures
j) focused dictation
k) structured note-taking (one, two or three words to be used
or numbers)

210
 6. Testing reading comprehension implies testing macro skills
and micro skills.
Macro skills: - skimming to obtain the general idea (gist) of a
text;
- scanning to locate specific information in a text;
- identifying the stages of an argument;
- identifying examples in support of the argument
in the topic sentence.
Micro skills: - identifying referents of pronouns;
- infer the meaning of words using the text as context;
- understanding text structure.
Here are some test items described. Write the macro skill or
micro skill each item tests in the space provided.
a) Multiple-choice (a complete text followed by a series of 6
to 10 questions each with 4 different answers from which only one is
correct, and the other 3 are distractors).
………………………………….
b) Cloze or modified-cloze (short text with 1or 2 paragraphs
which contain gaps that students are requested to fill in with one
word that grammatically or/and logically completes it; generally the
missing words are pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, rarely verbs,
nouns or adjectives).
………………………………….
c) Summary cloze (the students are given a full text and a
summary of that text which contains gaps; students are asked to fill
in the gaps of the summary with a word or a short phrase from the
original text; the words chosen to complete the gaps refer to the
relevant information in the text).
………………………………….
d) Information transfer (this is one test item that minimizes
the students’ writing in a reading text; the text to be used for such a
test item has to be descriptive of a person, place, process, route,
picture, statistics, etc.; students are required to label a drawing/

211
picture/map/graph etc. or fill in a grid).
………………………………….
e) Identifying order of events/topics/arguments (the text
for this item should contain a larger number of paragraphs which are
numbered; the text is followed by a number of main ideas/ arguments
in random order, labelled a), b), etc. which are to be found in each
paragraph plus an extra one; students are required to match the
number of the paragraph with the main idea a), b), etc. and write N/A
for the extra one).
………………………………….
f) Matching titles with paragraphs or short texts (this test
item consists of a number of 5 or 6 short texts labelled A, B, etc.
followed by a number of titles, usually outnumbering the texts by
one labelled 1, 2, etc.; students should match the paragraphs with the
titles).
………………………………….
g) Identifying referents (the given text is followed by a
series of questions such as:
“What does the word “it” – line 22 – refer to?”).
………………………………….
h) Guessing meaning of unfamiliar words from the
context (this is a variant of the previous test item, but this time the
questions will be “What word in the paragraph 3 means ‘lawyer’?”).
………………………………….
i) Gapped text (the text given contains gaps numbered 1, 2,
etc. to be filled in with whole sentences; the missing sentences and
an extra one are given in a jumbled order after the text and are
labelled A, B, etc.; students are required to match the number of the
gaps with the letters corresponding to the sentences; there will be a
letter which will not be used).
………………………………….
j) Find information (this test item contains a number of
very short texts labelled A, B, etc., generally grouped around a main
topic, e.g. holiday places, and a number of questions such as “Which

212
text refers to winter sports?”; students must answer the questions by
writing the letter corresponding to the text in the spaces provided).
………………………………….
7. Dictation is a test of integrative language skills. What
elements of language competence (skills and subskills) does it
involve?
GLOSSARY OF SELECTED TERMS

accuracy = correctness of the language used.

appropriacy = language use is only correct if the utterances are
appropriate to the situations in which they are used. The roles and
status of the language users, the roles and relationships of any other
participants, the topic and the setting are some of the situational
factors that determine appropriacy of language use.
cline = a graded scale (indicating a slope) e.g. vast – huge – large –
fair-sized – small – tiny.
cloze test = consists of a written passage in which, after the first,
introductory paragraph, every fifth (or sixth or tenth) word is left out
for the student to supply. Used to measure the readability of texts,
reading and listening comprehension, and general proficiency in
English.
coherence = the way in which utterances or strings of utterances, or
sentences in a discourse make sense in the relationship to each other.
cohesion = grammatical and lexical relationships between the
different elements of a text, including relationship between different
sentences or between different parts of a sentence. Cohesion also
involves the ordering of sentences, and the use of cohesive devices.
connectors = words or phrases that serve as links, and indicate the
relationship between what they are linking. For instance, as and
because indicate cause, consequently indicates result, although
indicates contrast, and and moreover indicate addition, then indicates

213
sequence, etc. Connectors act as signposts and help the readers to
anticipate and find their way through a text.
controlled composition = oral or written composition in which the
students follow exact instructions and should produce error-free
writing , e.g. filling in blanks, combining sentences, etc.
deictics = terms that cannot be interpreted without an immediate
context, words that have a “pointing” function in a given discourse
context. Deictic expressions are typically pronouns, demonstratives,
certain time and place adverbs (here and now), some verbs of motion
(come and go), and even tenses. These words cannot be given a
precise meaning in a dictionary because they are dependent on
context for interpretation.
discourse = language (spoken or written) that has been produced as
the result of an act of communication.
drills = language practice exercises designed to give learners many
opportunities to use the correct forms and thus to establish correct
habits. They are designed to demonstrate the regularity of the rule
they exemplify and to fix it through repetition in the learner’s mind.
E.F.L. = English as a Foreign Language
E.L.T. = English Language Teaching
error = systematic deviations from the norms of the language being
learned. They are usually caused by false generalizations about the
language by the learner and are inevitable and essential part of
language learning. Many such errors are developmental and
disappear as the learner gains more exposure to the language in use.
fluency = ability to speak or write as naturally and easily – but not
necessarily as accurately – as the native speaker can.
follow-up lesson = a lesson developing from something done before
which needs practice.
free composition = that kind of composition in which the students
write without controls and with minimum guidance.
gap-fill(ing) = a text with empty spaces (gaps) which must be
completed/filled in.

214
genre = different text types (spoken or written) with particular and
distinctive similar characteristics in terms of structure, style, content,
and intended audience, used in different social activities, e.g. recipes,
letters of complaint, essays, reports, etc.
groupwork = independent work carried out simultaneously by
groups of three or more students on a task or tasks.
guided composition = composition in which students are given
detailed guidance and advice but can use their own words.
interaction = communication between people involving the use of
language (e.g. between two people having a conversation, between
writer and readers, between speaker and listeners etc.).
learner-centred approaches = approaches to a language teaching
based on the needs and interests of the learner rather than on a fixed
syllabus or coursebook and the dictates of a teacher. Such
approaches would ideally involve the learners in decisions about
what and how they learn and would require the teacher to be an
organizer and guide rather than an instructor.
lexical item = a word or group of words used in a particular
utterance with a specific meaning, for example wonderful and piece
of music in: “That’s a wonderful piece of music”.
lockstep = a pattern of teaching in which all pupils move forward at
approximately the same rate, carrying out the same tasks and
procedures at the same time – like soldiers marching together.
mistake = deviation from the norms of a language caused by such
non-linguistic factors as carelessness, tiredness, boredom, tension,
etc.
open-ended question = a question which allows the pupils to answer
in their own way, in contrast to questions with limited multiple-
choice possibilities.
pairwork = independent work carried out simultaneously by groups
of two students on a task or tasks.
paralinguistic features = not a systematic part of language. Include
such features as: the way someone is speaking – loudly or softly,

215
shouting or whispering, the facial expression and physical gestures
they use when they speak.
peer group = the group of people which occupies the same position
in the hierarchy as the person being talked about; in an educational
context, usually students of the same age and level.
practice stage = in most language teaching, follows the presentation
stage and consists of opportunities for students themselves to master
the new item.
presentation stage = the point (usually at the beginning of the
lesson) when new material is introduced by the teacher. Followed by
practice stage.
production stage = the part of the lesson where students use
language meaningfully, following presentation and practice stages.
Sometimes used for any occasions when students either speak or
write, however uncommunicatively.
productive skills = speaking and writing, i.e. those skills requiring
production of language.
realia = objects from real life used in the language classroom as aids
(e.g. a table menu, a table cloth, knives and forks, etc. for a practice
activity based on ordering food in a restaurant).
receptive skills = listening and reading, i.e. those skills requiring the
ability to receive communication, but not to produce it. These skills
used to be referred to as passive skills.
reference = the relationship between a word or phrase and an entity
in the external world. Reference covers all the devices that allow
lexical relationship within a text: words that refer to, or are used
instead of other words (pronouns, demonstratives, comparatives).
Reference also covers such lexical relationships as substitution,
ellipsis, synonymy, hyponymy, anaphora and cataphora.
remedial work = in language teaching, generally all work which is
aimed at putting right existing mistakes – hence most work after the
earliest stage is arguably remedial. Often, used outside language
teaching, only for work for particularly backward learners.

216
role-play activity = activities in which the learners play parts (e.g.
waiter, customer, policeman, wife etc.) and practice appropriate to
the situations they are placed (e.g. customer ordering a meal in a
restaurant). In this way the learners often lose their inhibitions and
are usually less frightened of making mistakes.
scanning = speedy reading to extract specific bits of information.
schema (pl. schemata) = an underlying structure or general way of
organizing ideas which provide a basis for the listener’s and reader’s
expectations of how a text will develop.
simulation = a teaching technique in which students act out
language-using situations with or without preparation. Sometimes
distinguished from role-play in that in simulation students are
expected to behave appropriately in the setting, but the emphasis is
not on the adoption of a different personality.
skimming = reading to get the general picture, without paying
attention to details. Skimming entails the reader’s ability to pick out
main points rapidly, discarding what is not essential or relevant to
that general picture.
substitution = a device to demonstrate and practice a number of
structurally related utterances displayed in a table; replacing a word
or phrase that has already been mentioned, e.g. use of pronouns, so,
not, etc..
teacher-centred approaches = approaches to a language teaching
based on a fixed syllabus or coursebook and the dictates of a teacher.
TEFL = Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

217
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