loadingUnit 1 Language and Learning
1. Language:” Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.” It can be understood in the following six aspects:
Language as system; Language as symbolic; Language as arbitrary; Language as vocal; Language as human;
Language as communication 2. Structural view:
The structural view sees language as a linguistic system made up of various subsystems: from phonological, morphological, lexical, etc. to sentences.
3. The functional view:
The functional view sees language as a linguistic system but also as a means for doing things. Most of our day-to-day language use involves functional activities: greetings; offering, suggesting, advising, apologizing, etc.
4. The interactional view:
The interactional view considers language as a communicative tool, whose main use is to build up and maintain social relations between people. 5. The language learning theory underlying an approach or method usually answers two questions:
1) What are the psycholinguistic and cognitive processes involved in language learning?
2) What are the conditions that need to be met in order for these learning processes to be activated?
6. Although these two questions have never been satisfactorily answered, a vast amount of research has been done from all aspects, which can be broadly divided into process-oriented theories and condition-oriented theories.
1) Process-oriented theories are concerned with how the mind processes new information, such as habit formation, induction, making inference, hypothesis testing and generalization.
2) Condition-oriented theories emphasize the nature of the human and physical context in which language learning takes place, such as the number of students, what kind of input learners receive, and the learning atmosphere. 7. Two theories:
Some researchers attempt to formulate teaching approaches directly from these theories.
1) The behaviorist theory( Skinner)-- a stimulus-response theory of psychology
The key point of the theory of conditioning is that \animal to do anything (within reason) if you follow a certain procedure which has three major stages, stimulus, response, and reinforcement\ 2) Cognitive theory( Noam Chomsky):
The term cognitive is to describe loosely methods in which students are asked to think rather than simply repeat.
8. A variety of elements that contribute to the qualities of a good language teacher:
1) ethic devotion,道德素质
2) professional qualities专业技能 3) personal styles个人修养
Adjectives which describe further qualities
Ethic devotion Professional personal styles qualities warm -hearted creative Flexible灵活的 hardworking enthusiastic Caring kind well-prepared准备充分的 disciplined Resourceful知识渊博的 authoritative well-informed见多识广的 accurate speaking clearly Dynamics有动力的 patient Attentive专心的 Intuitive有洞察力的 humorous Personally-trained 经过专业训练的 9. How can one become a good language teacher? Wallace?s(1991)\professional competence(两种测试法：叙述/填表)
Wallace?s(1991)\
Stage 1 Stage 2
Goal
From the above model, we can see the development of professional competence for a language teacher involves Stage 1, Stage 2, and Goal. The first stage is language training. All English teachers are supposed to have a sound command of English. Of course, language is always changing so language training can never come to an end. The second stage seems to be more complicated because it involves three sub-stages:learning, practice, and reflection. The learning stage is actually the specific preparation(that a language teacher should make before they go to practice.)This preparation can be: 1). learn from others' experience (empirical knowledge来自经验的知识)
2). learn received knowledge (such as language theories,
psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, educational psychology, language teaching methodology, etc.) 3). learn from one's own experience
Both experiential knowledge (others' and one's own) and received knowledge are useful when the teachers go to practice. This is the combination of \followed by practice. The term \In one sense, it is a short period of time assigned for student teachers to do teaching practice as part of their education, usually under the supervision监督 of their instructors. This practice is also called
pseudo practice. The other sense of \teacher undertakes when he finishes his education.
Unit 2 Communicative Principles and Activities
10. The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to enable the students to use the foreign language in work or life when necessary.
11. The goal of CLT
The goal of CLT is to develop students' communicative competence, 12. Communicative competence:
Competence simply means knowledge of the language system: grammatical knowledge in other words.
13. Hymes (1979), communicative competence includes four aspects: 1) knowing whether something is formally possible (grammatically acceptable), which is roughly equivalent to Chomsky's linguistic competence交流内容是否规范
2) knowing whether something is understandable to human beings;
3) knowing whether something is in line with与、、、有关 social norms; 4) knowing whether something is in fact done: Do people actually use language this way?
14. Based on the concept of communicative competence and aiming at developing such competence, communicative language teaching has the following features:
1) It stresses the need to allow students opportunities for authentic and creative use of the language.
2) It focuses on meaning rather than form.
3) It suggests that learning should be relevant to the needs of the students. 4) It advocates提倡 task-based language teaching. Students should be given tasks to perform or problems to solve in the classroom.
5) It emphasizes a functional approach to language learning (i.e. what
people do with language,
such as inviting, apologizing, greeting and introducing, etc.).
15. Richards and Rodgers(1986:72)three principles of Communicative language teaching
1) Communication principle: Activities that involve real communication promote learning.
2) Task principle: Activities in which language is used for carrying out
meaningful task promote learning.
3) Meaningfulness principle: Language that is meaningful to the learner supports he learning process.
16. Littlewood’s (1981)classification of communicative activities: 1). Functional communicative activities: 2). Social interaction activities:
(1). Functional communicative activities: ~ Identifying pictures
~ Discovering identical pairs
~ Discovering sequences or locations ~ Discovering missing information ~ Discovering missing features ~ Discovering \
~Communicating patterns and pictures ~ Communicative models ~ Discovering differences ~ Following directions
~ Reconstructing story-sequences
~ Pooling information to solve a problem (2). Social interaction activities:
~ Role-playing through cued dialogues
~Role-playing through cues and information ~Role-playing through situation and goals --Role-playing through debate or discussion ~ Large-scale simulation activities ~ Improvisation
17.Ellis (1990) has listed six criteria for evaluating communicative classroom activities:
1). Communicative purpose: 2). Communicative desire: 3). Content, not form: 4). Variety of language: 5). No teacher intervention:
Unit 3 Lesson Planning
18. Lesson planning
Lesson planning means making decisions in advance about what techniques, activities and materials will be used in the class. 19. Why is lesson planning necessary?
Proper lesson planning is essential for both novice/beginner and experienced teachers.
20. Benefit from lesson planning in a number of ways
1). A clear lesson plan makes the teacher aware of the aims and language contents of the lesson.
2). It also helps the teacher to distinguish the various stages of a lesson and to see the relationship between them so that the lesson can move smoothly from one stage to another.
3). The teacher can also think about how the students can be fully engaged in the lesson.