TECHING ENGLISH AS A SECONF OR FOREIGN LANGUAGE

CELCE-MURCIA, BRINTON, SNOW

UNIT 1 – FOUNDATIONS OF METHODOLOGY
1) An overview of Language Teaching Methods and Approaches
Anthony (1963)
- an approach  reflects a rhetorical model or research paradigm
- provides a broad philosophical perspective on language teaching, such as found in the
justifications for the direct method, the reading approach or the communicative
approach
- a method  a set of procedures  spells out precisely in a step – by – step manner
how to teach a second or foreign language (Silent Way…)  a method is more specific
than an approach but less specific than a technique
- a technique  a specific classroom activity  the most specific and concrete of the
three concepts that he discusses (e.g. dictation, listen drills)
- Richards and Rodgers (2001):
o Method, p. 15

APPROACH (theory) PROCEDURE (classroom techniques, practices and

behaviors observed when the method is used)

DESIGN(the general and specific objectives of the method)

- Comenius – Czech scholar and teacher (1631- 1658) – made an essentially inductive
approach to learning a foreign language  i.e. an approach based on exposure to the
target language in use rather than through rules, the goal of which was to teach the use
rather than the analysis of the language being taught (Kelly, 1969)
MAJOR APPROACHES  early and mid – twentieth century
1) The grammar – translation approach
- Instruction  in the native language
- Little use of the target language for communication
- Early reading of difficult texts
- Translation
2) The direct method  Berlitz method
- The goal  the ability to use rather than to analyze the language
 - No use of mother tongue permitted
- Grammar learned inductively
- Teacher  native speaker
3) The reform movement
- The spoken form taught first
- Teachers – solid training in phonetics
4) The reading approach
- Only the grammar useful for reading comprehension is taught
- Translation
- Reading  emphasized skill
5) The audiolingual approach
- Mimicry and memorization
- Accurate pronunciation
- Effort to prevent errors
6) The oral – situational approach
- The spoken language  primary
- Only the target language used
- New items practiced situationally (post -office)
MORE RECENT APPROACHES:
1) THE COGNITIVE APPROACH
- Cognitive psychology  holds that people do not learn complex systems like language
or mathematics through habit formation but through the acquisition of patterns and
rules that they can extend and apply to new circumstances pr problems
- Chomskyan linguistics: language acquisition is viewed as the learning of a system of
infinitely extendable rules based on meaningful exposure, with hypothesis testing and
rule inferencing, not habit formation, driving the learning process
- Language learning viewed as rule acquisition
- Grammar taught deductively (rules first, practice later) or inductively (rules can either
be stated after practice or left as implicit information for the learners to process on their
own)
- Pronunciation de-emphasized
- Reading and writing as important as listening and speaking
- Errors inevitable, to be used constructively for enhancing the learning process
( feedback and correction)
2) The affective – humanistic approach
- respect for each individual  emphasized
- communication that is personally meaningful to the learner is given priority
- work in pairs
3) The comprehension – based approach
 - Krashen
- listening  basic skill
- students begin with a silent period
- learners progress by being exposed to meaningful input that is just one step beyond
their level of proficiency
4) The communicative approach
- Advocates view language as a meaning – based system for communication
- Includes task – based language teaching and project work, content – based and
immersion instruction, and cooperative learning (Kagan 1994) among other
instructional frameworks
- The goal  the learner’s ability to communicate
- The content includes semantic and social functions as important as linguistic
structured
- Group/pair work  negotiation of meaning
- Role play/dramatization
- Authentic tasks + materials constructed for pedagogical purposes
- Skills integrated from the beginning
- P. 21
- Teacher’s role  facilitate communication
Designer methods  rather specific in terms of the procedure and materials that the teacher,
who typically required special training was supposed to use:
- Silent way  an array of visuals, students learn by saying very little in the process,
method – inductive; only the target language used
- Community language learning  sitting in the circle, teacher  counselor-
facilitator, translates and elicits material
- Total Physical Response  commands “Stand up”, learners demonstrate
comprehension
- Suggestopedia, Suggestology, accelerated learning  setting – living room, script
presented accompanied by music  choral reading  elaboration
The post – methods era  why there is no best method?
1) Different methods are best for different teaching/earning circumstances
2) All methods have some truth or validity
3) The whole notion of what is good/ bad method is irrelevant
- It has proven impossible to empirically demonstrate the superiority of one method
over another
Well established principles that teachers should apply in the post-methods era (our era)
( Kumaravadivela 1994):
- Macro strategies
1) Maximizes learning opportunities
2) Facilitate negotiated interaction  learners should initiate classroom talk
 3) Minimize perceptual mismatches  reduce mismatches between what the
teacher and learner believe is being taught or should be taught
4) Activate intuitive heuristics  teachers should provide enough data for learners
to infer underlying grammatical rules
5) Foster language awareness  learn the formal properties
6) Contextualize linguistic input  meaningful discourse – based activities
7) Integrate language skills
8) Promote learner autonomy
9) Raise cultural consciousness  cultural information
10) Ensure social relevance  acknowledge that language learning has social,
economic and educational dimensions that shape the motivation to learn the L2
K. suggests that teachers should have the independence to design situation – specific micro –
strategies, or materials and procedures, to achieve their desired learning objectives
- the post – methods teacher = reflective, autonomous, self – directed and able to elicit
authentic pedagogical interaction (van Lier, 1996)
CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS – P. 23
- 5 things that teachers should learn to do to make good pragmatic decisions
concerning the applications of an approach, a design or a method (including
teaching materials) and its techniques or procedures:
1) Assess student needs
2) Examine the instructional constraints
3) Determine the attitudes, learning styles and cultural backgrounds
4) Identify the discourse genres, speech activities, and text types that the students
need to learn
5) Determine how the students’ language learning will be assessed
ESL/EFL teacher’s responsibility  adapt, don’t adopt
FUTURE TRENDS: provide learners with the most effective and efficient language, learning
experiences possible, taking into account the learners’ goals, interests and learning context
- 6 areas to be researched: motivation, learner variability, discourse analysis, corpus-
based research, cognition, social participation + 7th – new technologies
- Language teacher must be ready to continually adapt to new and changing
circumstances since there is no fixed body of knowledge that one can master and
say: “Now I know everything!”
- Ideally L2 teachers will develop the goals, methods, materials and activities that
work best in their particular contexts,
- Today teachers have opportunities to creatively apply new findings and fine – tune
effective past practices to develop, reflection, and continuously improve their
classroom teaching
2 COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING, p. 27
- CLT is an approach to language teaching that emphasizes learning a language first
and foremost for the purpose of communicating with others
- E.g. communication includes finding out about what people did on the weekend –
interests, activities, opinions… current events, e -mail, book, articles, video clips…
- Teachers sometimes constrained by lesson length, materials prescribed, learning
outcomes…
- The ability to learn and use grammar effectively, though clearly important, is only
part of being able to communicate well
- Appropriate register and styles of speech
- Negotiation of meaning  effort to make yourself understood and to understand
others  to convey messages or meanings
- Critical meaning  the ability to analyze information rationally, solve problems and
discern and evaluate implicit assumptions…
- COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE FOR LANGUAGES
- The framework or model with communicative ability and proficiency at its core
originated in Europe
- An impressive functional approach to task – based teaching and assessment
- Collecting evidence of learners’ proficiency
- Statements/illustrations what learners can do
- Basic, independent and proficient user
- Learning outcomes
- E.g. A2 – can understand sentences and frequently used expressions
- C1 – can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts…
- Other curricular program types compatible with CLT:
1) Content – based language teaching  students learn curricular subjects through
the L2 following an initial period in which language arts and literacy are
introduced in that language
- Authentic texts  a core principle
2) Academic/professional purposes language teaching, e.g. pilots
3) Task – based language teaching  many subjects over an extended curricular
period
4) Service learning  students encouraged to use the language they are learning to
assist other speakers of that language living within that community
- Classroom applications:
1) Weather…
- Virtual worlds – games  provide a site for social, cultural and intellectual
networking mediated by language
- CONCLUSION:
- CLT typically integrates formal attention to language features in a variety of ways,
from direct instruction and metalinguistic awareness – raising to more inductive
learning through the use of language – corpus data
- L2 as lingua franca  suggests that a priority in LT should be to maximize the
speakers’ intelligibility and comprehensibility  real contexts of need and use
- SUMMARY
 - CLT focuses on helping language learners communicate effectively; interpret
messages and meanings of various types for various real, realistic purposes
- Principles – development of learners’ confidence fluency, resourcefulness
(strategies), autonomy in L2
- Teachers must ensure learning is contextualized in discourse relevant to learners
and appropriate to the curriculum; activities structured so that students have
means, motivation and assistance to carry out tasks on their own
3 – PRINCIPLES OF INSTRUCTED SL LEARNING (p. 43- 55)
- Evaluation is a key element of good teaching  to be effective it needs to draw on a
set of explicitly formulated principles of instructed language learning
- SLA – a subdiscipline of applied linguistics
- This model (Ellis) views acquisition as taking place in the mind of learners as a result
of attending to and processing the input that they are exposed to
- PRINCIPLES:
- 1) instruction needs to ensure that learners develop both a rich repertoire of
formulaic expressions and a rule-based competence
- Lewis (1993) – Language is grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar
2) Instruction needs to ensure that learners focus predominantly on meaning –
semantic (can =moći) and pragmatic(request) meaning
3) Instructions needs to ensure that learners also focus on form
- Schmidt  focus on form  awareness of some abstract rule, not to an awareness
and understanding of grammatical rules
- An inductive approach to grammar teaching is designed to encourage the noticing of
preselected forms; a deductive approach seeks to establish an awareness of the
grammatical rule by providing learners with an explicit explanation
- Many of the structures will be attended repeatedly over a period of time
4) Instructions needs to be predominantly directed at developing implicit
knowledge of the L2 while not neglecting explicit knowledge
- Implicit = procedural, held unconsciously, and can be verbalized only if it’s made
explicit
- Explicit = declarative knowledge of the phonological, lexical, grammatical, pragmatic
and socio – critical features of a L2 together with the metalanguage for labeling this
knowledge
- Analyzed knowledge (conscious awareness) and a metalingual explanation
(understanding the rules)
- Implicit knowledge underlies the ability to communicate fluently and confidently 
THE ULTIMATE GOAL
- Explicit knowledge serves as the foundation for developing implicit knowledge
- implicit knowledge  proceduralized through practice VS Krashen  seems implicit
knowledge as developing naturally from meaning – focused communication, aided
by some focus on form
- Teacher should not assume that explicit knowledge can be converted into implicit
knowledge because the extent to which this is possible remains controversial and it
is clear that it does not always happen
5) Instructions needs to take into account the learners’ built – in syllabus
- Natural order and sequence of acquisition  they master different grammatical
structures in a relatively fixed and universal order  “built – in syllabus” (Corder,
1967)
- Possibilities – Zero grammar approach, developmental readiness, explicit knowledge
(p. 50)
6) Successful instructed language learning requires extensive L2 input
- The more exposure the better
- Krashen – comprehensible input
- A) maximize the use of L2 inside the classroom – medium and object of instruction
- B) create opportunities for students to receive input outside the classroom
7) Successful instructional language learning also requires opportunities for output
8) The opportunity to interact in the L2 is central do developing L2 proficiency
9) Instruction needs to take into account individual differences in learners
10) In assessing learners’ L2 proficiency, it is important to examine free as well as
controlled production
- Norris and Ortega (2002) – four types of measurement:
1) Metalinguistic judgement – grammar
2) Selected response – multiple choice
3) Constrained constructed response – gap filling
4) Free constructed response – communicative task
- 3 ways of assessment:
1) Direct assessment  closed tasks
2) Discourse analytic measures
3) External ratings
4 – SYLLABUS AND CURRICULUM DESIGN FOR SL TEACHING – p. 58
- Syllabus  provides information about a course  depends on who the learners
are, their purposes for learning, and the context in which the course takes place 
the process of planning a course results in a written plan called syllabus
- Curriculum  a dynamic system of interconnected, interrelated and overlapping
processes (planning, enacting, evaluating)
- At the program level, a person or group of people designs a curriculum plan for an
educational program  teachers and learners enact the program over time
CURRICULUM
PROGRAM LEVEL
COURSES  SYLLABUS
UNITS
LESSONS
 - Both curriculum and syllabus are plans, but at different levels
- A syllabus describes what will be taught in a course in a practical sense  actual
plan for y course
- Curriculum is a broader concept because it goes beyond planning and beyond the
course level
- Types of syllabi: p. 62
1) Grammatical, formal, structural syllabus
2) Notional – functional syllabus
3) Task – based syllabus
4) Skills – based approaches <3
5) Lexical syllabus
6) Genre or text – based syllabus
7) Project – based language learning
8) Content – based instruction and content and language integrated learning
9) Negotiated syllybus

- Curriculum: The purpose of planning is to guide and support enactment

(provođenje) and to provide a basis for evaluation. The purpose of evaluating is to
determine the effectiveness of the learning and teaching in the classroom so that it
can become more effective. The findings of the evaluation affect future planning
which in turn affects enactment.
- Decisions about curriculum center on the teacher and learners who enact it.
Teachers are well informed about the plan, value the plan, and have the skills to use
it.
- Curriculum  a plan for an educational program
- CURRICULUM PLANNING – p. 65  to provide a framework for a course and unit
development, to guide and support teaching and learning in the classroom, and to
provide a basis for the evaluation of program effectiveness
- Outcomes = clear and realistic
- HOW TO DESIGN A SYLLABUS? – p. 67  goals, assessment scheme, materials,
timetable, specific skills to be used…
- Create a bridge between “what is” and “what is designed”
- Deciding on content and activities
- Outcomes  p.70  state what the learners will know and be able to do by the end
of the course
- Assessment is the gathering and interpreting of information about or evidence of
learning  p. 72
5- TEACHING ENGLISH IN THE CONTEXT OF WORLD ENGLISHES (pp. 75 -81)
ESL VS EFL (academic subject)
- Kachru (1985)
- The inner circle  the native language of the majority
- The outer circle  countries where English has had a long history of use
 - The expanding circle  English is a dominant foreign language used in limited
domains but is beginning to become or has become lingua franca
- Code – switching  using English and another language in the same discourse unit
- ELF features do not seem to cause communication problems (which/who…)
- McKay (2002)  COMITY  the efforts that interlocutors make to maintain cordial
relations with fellow EFL interlocutors
- Kachru (2005)  learners should be given the tools “to educate themselves further
about using their English for effective communication across varieties.”

UNIT 2 – LANGUAGE SKILLS

LISTENING – PP. 84- 98
- Listening is a demanding skill for many language learners, and it is also a skill that
many teachers find challenging to teach
- Processes that learners engage in during listening cannot be directly observed and
controlled
- To help learners develop their listening, teachers need to understand how
comprehension is achieved and recognize factors that can influence its outcome for
language learners
- Listening is an active process that may begin before the first speech signal is
recognized, and it may go on long after the input or spoken info has stopped
- Understanding is the result of active construction occurring at all levels of text
(sounds, grammar, lexis and discourse structure) and context (the topic, the
participants, the setting)
- ACTIVE LISTENER (Brown 1990)  someone who constructs reasonable
interpretations on the basis of an underspecified input and recognizes when more
specific information is required  He asks for the needed information.
- In face-to-face meaning can be facilitated by asking questions
- ACTIVE LISTENING: a) one-way (non - participatory)  no opportunity to interact
directly with the speaker and listeners have to rely on their linguistic knowledge 
e.g. recorded materials
- b) two-way (interactive and participatory)  listeners are participants in an
interaction where they alternate between the role of the listener and the speaker,
e.g. ppt where there are spontaneous interactions between the speaker and the
audience
- listening skills are acquired abilities that enable a person to listen without a great
deal of deliberate effort
- e.g. decoding skills for perception  automatized after frequent exposure to the
phonological patterns
- listening strategies  ways of listening that are planned and consciously adopted to
improve comprehension as well as cope with listening difficulties
- strategies that direct attention to the input and coordinate various cognitive
processes are often known as metacognitive strategies  consist of planning,
monitoring, evaluation  can be used before, during, after listening
- Pearson and Paris (2008) – listening strategies can be expected to develop into
automatized listening skills with time
- To provide interesting materials for learners to practice their listening in class
- COGNITIVE PROCESSES
- Anderson 1995 – 3 phases  perception  parsing (raščlanjivanje, analiza) 
utilization  all this can explain the function of cognitive processes during listening
- Perception matching sounds to words
- Parsing  analysis
- Utilization  processing information
- TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE THAT SUPPORT LISTENING COMPREHENSION
1) Schema  background knowledge about the world
2) Knowledge of language  phonological knowledge  facilitates perception,
grammatical knowledge, vocabulary knowledge
3) Knowledge of discourse and language use knowledge of language use,
pragmatic knowledge
4) CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
- Vandergrift and Goh (2012) – 6 core skills:
1) Listen for details (key words, numbers… specific info)
2) Listen selectively  pay attention to particular parts
3) Listen for global understanding  the general idea
4) Listen for main ideas  e.g. points in support of an argument
5) Listen and infer (izvedi zaključak)  make up for missing information by using
different resources (speaker’s tone)
6) Listen and predict  anticipate what is going to be said
- The use of the core listening skills is influenced by the purpose for listening  it
determines which skill is more relevant at a specific point in the listening event
- Vandergrift and Goh (2012)  12 strategies  p. 92
1) Planning  awareness of what needs to be done
2) Focusing attention
3) Monitoring  checking one’s comprehension during the task
4) Evaluation  checking the outcomes
5) Inferencing  using prior knowledge to guess unfamiliar words
6) Elaboration  using prior knowledge to extend an interpretation
7) Prediction
8) Contextualization
9) Reorganizing  transferring what is understood into another form to facilitate
understanding
10) Using linguistic and learning resources – relying on 1st language or additional
language
11) Cooperation
 12) Managing emotions  being aware of one’s negative emotions and finding ways
to prevent them from affecting comprehension and learning
- A PROCESS ORIENTED LISTENING PEDAGOGY
- Teachers can provide appropriate guidance
- 2 complementary methods for planning lessons to teach listening:
1) Task – based metacognitive instruction
2) Metacognitive pedagogical sequence
- TASK – BASED METACOGNITIVE INSTRUCTION
- Emphasizes the importance of communication goals between speakers and listeners,
and focuses on the comprehension of meaning according to learners’ purpose for
listening
- One-way listening tasks  the goal is to obtain information from the listening text
with a minimal or no interaction with the speaker
- Require learners to understand the meaning of what is said without the need to give
immediate response
- Two- way listening tasks engage learners in interactions where they alternate
between the roles of listener and speaker
- Respond directly to what they hear
- One- way examples: listen and restore, sort, compare, match, combine, compose,
evaluate, reconstruct  p. 94
- Two – way examples: dictate and complete, describe and draw, simulate and
discuss, take notes and clarify  p. 95
- By incorporating metacognitive activities into task-based instruction. Teachers can
develop learners’’ knowledge listening processes
- Metacognition  our own ability to think about our own thinking and learning
(Flavell 1979)
- Through metacognitive instruction – learners become aware how to develop their
listening
- METACOGNITIVE ACTIVITIES, p. 95: self – directed listening guide, listening diaries,
process – based discussions, self-report checklist
- LISTENING LESSONS  using a 3 – stage lesson structure of pre-listening, while
listening, post listening
- Pre-listening  brainstorming, reading, photos, discussions (define what the task
requires)
- Post -listening  write an e-mail to share their reactions to the text, focus on the
language to develop better decoding skills (guided reflections)
- METACOGNITIVE PEDAGOGICAL SEQUENCE FOR LISTENING  strategy – based
instructional method that weaves metacognitive processes into a listening lesson to
support learners’ listening
- 4 metacognitive processes that are considered to be crucial to successful listening
development:
1) Planning for the activity
2) Monitoring comprehension
3) Solving comprehension problems
 4) Evaluating the approach and outcomes
- 3 times listen to the text
7 – DIMENSIONS OF ACADEMIC LISTENING – P. 102
- Processing of spoken language in academic contexts
- Transmission and acquisition of knowledge
- Transmission and comprehension of attitudes, beliefs, values and culture
- Vandergrift (1997) – strategies, p. 104
- Richards (1983)
- A pedagogical Model for SL Listening (2005)
1) Bottom – up processing  listeners build understanding by making references to
individual sounds combined into words  phrases  clauses  sentences
2) Top – down processing  activating previous knowledge about the language;
personal/world knowledge
3) Interactive processing  making use of both processing, phonological/syntactic,
semantic and pragmatic interaction
- Listening is individualized, cross-cultural, social, affective, contextualized, strategic,
intertextual
8 – SPEAKING (pp. 116 -130)
- Speaking – fundamental skill
- The mail skill by which a language is acquired
- Act of speaking  complex  speech is segmental into thought groups rather than
single words, hesitation markers, pausing, colloquial language, suprasegmental
features (stress, rhythm, intonation) – Brown, 2007
- Involves interaction  the most perplexing skill
- 4 factors that are foundation of competent L2 speaking: fluency, accuracy,
appropriacy, authenticity
- FLUENCY VS ACCURACY
- Fluency = operating the language system quickly
- Accuracy = conforming to the language system itself
- Message oriented (use) VS language oriented(usage)
- Parish (2004)  “fluency as the goal of instruction”
- Ur (2012)  “the primary aim is to improve student’s fluency in informal
conversational interaction”
- EFL – fluency – based, meaning- focused tasks meant more attention
- APPROPRIACY
- Pragmatics  sociocultural context
- Learners must be competent socially and culturally
- Communicate “with the proper politeness, directness, formality” (Ishitara and
Cohen, 2010)
- SPEECH ACTS  the ways in which people carry out specific social functions 
greetings, thanking, disagreeing
- AUTHENTICITY – 2 meanings of authenticity:
 1) authentic teaching materials
2) “self-expression and the development of authentic voice” (Roberts and Cooke
2009)
- Spoken grammar VS written grammar
- Spoken grammar  unique, special qualities, we do not speak in sentences but in
phrasal chains connected by “and, but”, elliptical forms, hesitation markers,
discourse markers
- CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
- Seedhouse (2004)  direct correction is generally avoided
- Less direct strategies:
1) Indirect indication  “Excuse me”
2) Partial repetition
3) Repetition of the original question
4) Repetition of error using intonation
5) Provision of a correct version  “Do you mean…”
6) Indication of why an error is an error
7) Acceptance of the incorrect form and then giving the correct one
8) The invitation to other students to do the repair
- Whatever standards of accuracy are adopted for spoken English they cannot be
based solely on the norms of written language
- Explicitly teach those norms
- Authenticity of tasks, material, language
CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
- How to teach speaking skills?
- Brown (2002) – focus on both fluency and accuracy, motivate, encourage the use of
authentic language in meaningful contexts, give students opportunities to initiate
oral communication, encourage the development of speaking strategies
- Discussions and group work
- The most commonly used activity in the L2 classroom
1) Students are often introduced to a topic via reading/listening and then divided
into pairs or groups to discuss
2) Interactional skills necessary for task completion?  stating opinions, agreeing…
3) Make decisions about grouping/pairing to ensure a successful discussion
outcome  proficiency level/talkativeness
4) L2 students need to know  what, why, how long, what outcome? (guidance)
5) Plan for wrap-up time and feedback…
- Teacher  monitors, ensures students are on task…
- Fluency – based activities:
- Presentations  ensure that listeners take on some responsibilities during the ppt,
peer evaluation guided by evaluative criteria that the teacher, the students or both
develop, summarize content, note strengths and weaknesses, relate the
presentation topic to personal experience
- Group project  each group member states his/her contribution
 - Impromptu speeches
- Role – plays  prepared scripts, model dialogues
- Conversations  it is not always enough to have students produce a great deal of
language, they must also become more metalinguistically aware of the many
features of spoken language to become more competent speakers and interlocutors
in English
- ACCURACY – BASED SPEAKING ACTIVITIES
- Drills?  short and simple, yes/no and wh-questions, find someone who…
- Errors corrected?  not to interrupt the communication
- TEACHING SPEAKING IN AN EFL CONTEXT
- Large classes  limiting opportunities to speak and individual feedback
- EFL teachers need to be particularly adept at organizing class activities that are
authentic, motivating and varied
- Technology tools  videoconferencing tools, podcasts…
- Assessment

9 – FLUENCY – ORIENTED SL TEACHING – p. 132 -146

- Brumfit (1984) = in pedagogical contexts – accuracy will tend to be teacher-
oriented, and will tend to be form-based, fluency must be student – dominated,
meaning-based and relatively unpredictable towards the syllabus
- Brumfit – natural language use
- Fillmore (1979)  4 abilities:
1) The ability to talk without awkward pauses for relatively long periods of time
2) The ability to talk in coherent and semantically dense sentences
3) The ability to say appropriate things in a variety of contexts
4) The ability to use the language creatively and imaginatively
- Thornbury’s (2000)  4 features of fluency:
1) Pauses may be long but not frequent
2) Pauses are usually filled
3) Pauses occur at meaningful transition points
4) There are long runs of syllables and word between pauses
- Speech processing:
1) Conceptualization  notions made clear
2) Formulation of utterances
3) Articulation
- SPEAKING COMPETENCE
- Grammar and vocabulary  insufficient
- 4 skill areas of speaking competence are required for effective communication:
1) Phonological skills  stress, intonation
2) Speech function skills  agreeing…
3) Interactional skills  tone-taking, redirecting the topic…
4) Extended discourse skills  uninterrupted language
- + the use of conversation management strategies can lead to more effective
speaking  asking questions…
- SPEECH CONDITIONS  3 CATEGORIES: cognitive, affective, performance
- Cognitive factors: familiarity with the topic, genre (debate), interlocutors, processing
demands (description using a diagram)
- Affective factors: feelings toward the topic or participants, self – consciousness
- Performance factors: mode, degree of collaboration, discourse control, planning
time, time pressure, environmental conditions
- Developing fluency:
- Goh (2007)  3 ways to support learners during fluency activities:
1) Language support  preteach key vocabulary
2) Knowledge support  provide key background knowledge
3) Strategy support  paraphrase
- Pretask planning  provides learners with an opportunity to give attention to
language areas that have not yet been automatized
- Task selection criteria  types of tasks have an effect on fluency development
- Thornbury (2005)  criteria for selecting tasks:
1) Interactivity – discussions, role-play
2) Productivity – large amount of language used
3) Challenge
4) Safety – no judgement in failing
5) Purposefulness – outcome apparent to the learners
6) Authenticity – relevant to their lives
- Task repetition  repeating a task, the expectations become predictable,
- practice and improve  some processes automatized
- task repetition provides the basis for learners to integrate their fluency and accuracy
and complexity of formulation around what becomes a familiar conceptual base
- a word of caution  the more something is repeated, the less likely it will continue
to be seen as a message-focused activity
- the repeating of the task could occur in the next or subsequent class: reducing time,
a new audience, new but similar material, increasing the complexity of the task
- Feedback and correction: repeating, expressions or gestures, hinting, echoing,
reformulation
- It is generally accepted that the teacher should not interrupt students to point out a
grammar or vocabulary error, or to correct pronunciation it stops communication
- After the activity is completed
- CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
- Information – gap activities  those in which a student has information another
does not have  in the process they negotiate meaning
1) Complete the missing information – different maps
2) Find the differences
3) Role – play
 - JIGSAW PUZZLES (slagalice, puzzle)
- Strategies for cooperative learning
1) Jigsaw reading – p. 141
2) Jigsaw listening
- CONSENSUS – BUILDING ACTIVITIES – participants work together to come to an
agreement on something: agree on a solution
1) Problem solving: dinner-seating plan
2) Ranking – a good roommate is?
- FLUENCY CIRCLE – p. 142
- BOARD GAMES
- PROJECTS  extended assignment that usually lasts longer than a single lesson
- Hedge (1993)  features common to most projects: authentic material, student-
centered, planning, preparation, presentation, the use of a range of skills, “own time
used”
- FLUENCY IS A MATTER OF DEGREE, ALL LEARNERS CAN AHUEVE A LEVEL OF DEGREE
OF FLUENCY, AND THE TEACHER HAS S RASPONIBILITY TO HELP DEVELOP IT
- An improvement in fluency comes about more easily when they are relaxed and in
an environment that is non- judgmental
10 – TEACHING PRONUNCIATION, pp. 147-162
- Accent is a filter through which L2 speakers are viewed and frequently discriminated
against
- Sound system of English divided into 2 categories:
1) Segmental features – consonant and vowel sounds
2) Suprasegmental features – stress, rhythm, intonation
- The sound system occurs in the stream of speech
- THOUGHT groups  pauses to divide speech
- Logical breaks in the spoken texts
- PROMINENCE  one element that stands out
- Plays a significant role in intelligibility
- Intonation  rise or fall in pitch, creating a melodic line
- By offering learners continued exposure to authentic speech, we help them to
develop an awareness of the contextual meaning of intonational choices
- RHYTHM  created by the alteration of longer (stressed) syllables and shorter
(unstressed) syllables
- English speech rhythm  stress – times  semiregular intervals
- WORD STRESS  each multisyllabic word exhibits a pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables
- Crucial for intelligibility
- Learning vocabulary involves oral repetition practice to acquire its stress pattern
- CONSONANTS  characterized by place of articulation, manner and voicing
- VOWELS  characterized by tongue position, tongue and jaw height, degree of lip
rounding, and the relative tension of the muscles involved (15)
- Learners need to practice producing sounds in context using authentic materials
 - Some suggest there is a critical period after which the learner cannot achieve a
native – like accent while other point out cases of adult L2 learners who managed to
do so
- Evidence does suggest that the younger one begins learning an L2, the better one’s
accent will be
- More realistic goal is intelligibility in the real contexts in which learners need to
speak
- Pronunciation can be influenced by L1
- Being intelligible is not synonymous with being accent – free
1) Intelligibility resides in the interaction
2) If the listeners expect to understand, they will
- A well-placed gesture can make a prominent syllable more salient
- It is recommended that teachers focus on suprasegmental features, but include
segmental training
- Pronunciation instruction can be effective
- CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS – key steps:
1) Setting realistic goals  intelligibility
2) Planning instruction  integrated with listening, vocabulary…ž
3) Description and analysis
4) Listening discrimination  p. 156
5) Controlled practice
6) Guided practices
7) Communicative practice
- Traditional techniques  repeat, touch your tongue to the reef of your mouth,
minimal pairs (sheep, ship)
- Technology: audio recordings, video
- Feedback: point out their error silently?, peer feedback
- Focus on error that break communication, occur repeatedly, relate to the
pronunciation points being taught
- Effective pronunciation – teaching involves focus on form, feedback, context, strong
listening component…
11- READING, pp. 165 – 178
- “old” definition  literacy has referred not only to reading and writing skills but also
to a host of other related skills: the oral skills, critical thinking, critical reading
- Recently – “new” literacy now includes such skills and functions as the ability to find,
identity, evaluate, use, communicate using a wide variety of resources, including
text, visual, audio, and video (Leu et al., 2007)
- LITERACY INSTRUCTION for school – age children  think of it in terms of the need
to develop language and literacy skills while simultaneously learning content in
social studies, math, science and English language arts
- Literacy – necessary oral, written and visual skills involved in using text
(print/screen) for purposes of creating and interpreting meaning (including
messages) for various purposes
- Cummins (1981, 1984, 2002)  learning to read and write in one’s L2 involves
developing academic (cognitively demanding) language, as distinguished from
informal communication
- In reading and writing – no immediate feedback
- “the ability to make complex meanings explicit by means of language itself rather
than by means of contextual support or paralinguistic cues” (Cummins 2000)
- Chamot and O’Malley – academic language  used by teachers and students for the
purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills
- L2 literacy is similar to L1 literacy in certain basic ways, thus ELL’S L1 literacy
background is helpful for developing L2 literacy
- Although L2 learners may progress slower than native speakers their growth in
literacy generally follows similar developmental paths
- Children who already know how to read and write in their L1 can use it in a variety
of ways to learn to read and write English more quickly and easily than children who
do not have that knowledge
- Schecter and Bayley (2002)  being taught to read and write in their L1 serves as a
significant asset for children developing L2 literacy and children are able to
maneuver within 2 languages without becoming confused
- Reading and writing involve skills related to word recognition, understanding,
spelling, awareness of grammar and sentence structure + world knowledge…
- Integration of multiple skills  the more automatized they are, the stronger they
will be…
- L2 literacy VS L1 literacy
- L2 literacy  learners bring different background and world knowledge to literacy
processes
- Learners often develop basic oral language and vocabulary simultaneously, and
academic language in particular
- Learners need early, constant, and deep instruction in vocabulary
- CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
- Support knowledge and skills learned in and from the L1, and teach children to use
these resources in the L2
- ELLS at early literacy levels need explicit reading instruction in phonetics, phonemic
awareness, vocabulary comprehension, fluency
- Instruction should occur within a context that is meaningful, interactive
- Return to the same text
- Teachers should make connections to words and sound patterns in the ELL’S L1
- Goal  facilitate comprehension
- Develop independent readers
- Challenge  to deliver instruction that moves students toward higher – level skills
- Teach reading, writing, speaking and listening in an integrated manner
- Starting with informal oral listening, teachers can gradually introduce students to
more formal listening used in reading and writing
- ACTIVITIES FOR FOSTERING ELL’S READING COMPREHENSION: draw what you read,
retell events, clarify, make connections to their experiences
 - Build deep understandings of academic vocabulary constantly
- Effective vocabulary instruction provides multiple exposures to target word over
multiple days and across various reading, writing and speaking opportunities
- One of the best ways to do so  text sets (e.g. African folktales)  a wide variety of
texts  interesting, accessible
- By reading about a single content theme occurs multiple texts, ELLs get exposure to
key vocabulary repeatedly
- Emphasizes definitions in their own words (student – friendly)
- ACTIVITIES – p. 176 – activities that encourage students to use words meaningfully in
reading, writing, speaking and listening
1) Teach a small number of words (2-8 per day)
2) Teach multiple meanings  possibility
3) Emphasize the acquisition
4) Teach in multiple ways  preteach, discuss after reading, stop in the middle of
the story
12- DEVELOPING ENGAGED SL READERS 181-196
- Engaged reading  they read widely for different purposes, they read fluently and
use their cognitive capacity to focus on the meaning of what they read, they develop
their comprehension by using what they read, they are metacognitively aware as
they use a variety of strategies, they are motivated readers – engaged readers
- Learning to read  requires what the shapes and lines on the page mean 
conventions of reading
1) PURPOSES FOR READING  pleasure, information, something new
2) FLUENT READING  200 words per minute with 70 % comprehension
- Fluency  a combination of both reading rate and reading comprehension
(Anderson) VS Samuels (2006)  reading fluency is the ability to decode and to
comprehend the text at the same time
- Automaticity  one key element in fluent reading (automaticity in word
recognition)  the ability to perform a task easily, with little or no conscious
attention
- Developed through extensive practice
- Bottom – up reading  requires more attention from L2 teachers  focuses on
building meaning from the smallest units and leading to longer units  a letter 
syllables  words  expressions  phrases  sentences  paragraphs  texts
- How do we recognize reading comprehension?
- Engaged readers are able to do something with what they read
- Critical evaluation of the text
- READING STRATEGIES  being metacognitively aware
- Anderson (2005) defines strategies as the conscious (active involvement of L2
learner in their selection and use) actions that learners take to improve their
language learning
1) Preparing and planning for effective learning
2) Deciding when to use specific strategies
 3) Knowing when to monitor the use of strategies
4) Learning how to combine them
5) Evaluating the effectiveness of strategy use
- If we want engaged readers, all teachers should consider ways to motivate their
students
- MOTIVATION  the dynamically changing cumulative arousal in a person that
initiates and directs the cognitive and motor processes  central role (in the
development of positive reading habits)  learners with sufficient motivation can
achieve a working knowledge on an L2, regardless of their language aptitude or
other cognitive characteristics
- Teachers need to look for ways to increase the expectation of reward while at the
same time decreasing the effort required on the part of the reader
- Bottom – up reading  building meaning by making predictions and using
background knowledge to integrate both in comprehending text
- Reading comprehension  a family of skills and activities  interpretation of the
information in the text; at the core of comprehension is our ability to mentally
interconnect different events in the text and our ability to mentally interconnect
different events in the text and form a coherent representation of what the text is
about
- Key components of comprehension: decoding skills, vocabulary knowledge (best
predictor of a reader’s comprehension), grammar knowledge, world knowledge
- There is more to reading comprehension than just knowing the meanings of the
words being read?
- Teachers don’t teach vocabulary, learners learn it.  Teachers can teach
appropriate vocabulary.  learning strategies
- Metacognitive learning  learners are aware of what it takes to successfully engage
in a language learning task and they use a variety of strategies to accomplish it.
- Teachers play a central role in the development of motivated readers
- The combination of what the learner and the teacher can do together in the reading
classroom should be the focus
- Guilloteaux and Dornyei (2008)  motivational strategies refer to instructional
interventions applied by the Teacher do stimulate students’ motivation and self-
regulating strategies that are used by individual students to manage the level of
their own motivation
- Comprehension is the goal of reading
- Reading purposes: why?  reading in preparation for talking with a peer, for
information, for a summary…
- 5 reading strategies that readers can engage into practice being more
metacognitively aware:
1) Predicting
2) Making connections
3) Questioning
4) Visualizing
5) Summarizing
 - Summary: completeness, correctness, quality
- Dorney (2001) – motivational strategies – 4 categories:
1) Creating the basic motivational conditions
2) Generating initial motivation
3) Maintaining and protecting motivation
4) Encouraging positive retro-spective self-evaluation
13- TEACHING READING FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
- Pre-reading, during reading, post- reading
- How reading lessons should be structured
- Framework that prepares them for reading, helps them while reading and guides
them in reconsidering texts for a variety of purposes
- Reading lesson stage  p. 203
- Table 1  p. 206
- Main idea comprehension? Why?
- Rereading provides fluency and vocabulary recycling  p. 211
14- WRITING  p. 217
- -the skill of writing  special status
- via writing a person can communicate a variety of messages to a close, distant, known-
unknown reader
- goal of writing as well as initial audience
- it is important that the linguistic accuracy, clarity of presentation and organization of
ideas support the efficacy of the communicative act, since they supply the class for
interpretation
- early stage  the primary goal is to recognize and reproduce the elements of the target
language writing system (the letters or other graphic shapes)
- provides students with support in the acquisition of the mechanics of reading  they
gain a sound basis for letter and word recognition when reading
- EFL writing needs to be dealt with at the particular level of linguistic and discourse
proficiency that the intended students have reached  the proposed sequence of
activities will start with primary focus on the mechanical aspects of the writing skill and
move on to a more communicative goal
- WRITING SYSTEMS
- EFL learners usually acquire the mechanics of writing in English as an extension of their
ability to read and write in their first language
- Less transparent and has complicated rules for linking graphemes with phonemes
- The EFL learner usually knows how to read and write in hir/her own language but often
has to adjust to a new writing system while acquiring the first words in that new
language
- MECHANICS OF WRITING  we refer to the very early stage of letter recognition, letter
discrimination, sound – to letter correspondence, word recognition, and basic rules of
spelling
- Beyond this stage  spelling rules, focus on punctuation and capitalization, and cover
the comprehension and production of sentences and short paragraphs
- The interaction between reading and writing has often been stressed in language
teaching, yet it deserves even stronger emphasis at the early stage
- We need to focus on the unique features of the English writing system and its
irregularities  intensive writing practice
- CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
- How do we teach mechanics?  three goals:
1) To enhance letter recognition
2) To practice sound – spelling correspondences via all four language skills
3) To help the learner move from letters and words to meaningful sentences and larger
units of discourse
- The first step  recognition and writing drills
- Three major types of recognition tasks are used at the early stage of reading and
writing:
1) Matching tasks
2) Writing tasks
3) Meaningful sound- spelling correspondence practice
- MATCHING TASKS  to practice the quick and effective recognition of the English letters
 b: n,d,b
- WRITING TASKS  to allow students to practice the shapes of the letters both as a
recognition and a production task  c,c,c
- SOUND-SPELLING CORRESPONDENCE TASKS  for the learner to match individual
sounds or sequences of sounds and words with their written form  “Read the
following words out loud”
- Byrne (1988)  at the early stage we need to give learners “plenty of opportunities for
copying”  although copying may seem mechanical, it allows students to practice
words and sentences while gaining fluency in writing
- MORE ADVANCED WRITING TASKS that start shifting from a focus on the mechanics of
writing to basic process – oriented tasks need to incorporate some language work at the
morphological and discourse levels  the activities suggested for this part focus on both
accuracy and content, with a clear communicative goal
- Three types of writing tasks serve as the framework for communicative writing
activities: practical writing tasks, emotive writing tasks and school-oriented tasks
- To develop and use more demanding writing activities in the EFL classroom, we need to
develop a detailed set of specifications:
1) The task description
2) The content description
3) The audience description
4) Format cues
5) Linguistic cues
6) Spelling and pronunciation cues
- PRACTICAL WRITING TASKS  procedural in nature and have a predictable format
- Suitable for focusing on spelling and morphology
 - Writing lists (THINGS TO DO  practicing verb base forms and reinforcing various sound
– spelling correspondences) of various types, notes, categorizing, labeling  useful in
reinforcing classroom work
- EMOTIVE WRITING TASKS  personal writing
- SCHOOL – ORIENTED TASKS  much individual learning goes on while students are
writing assignments, summaries, answers to questions and essay- type passages
- Early stages  the assignments  short and simple
- Use a variety of writing tasks  particularly at the beginning level
15 – CONSIDERATIONS FOR TEACHING SL WRITING
- Central place in the curriculum
- The nature of L2 writing ability  2 perspectives:
1) As a cognitive ability (a set of skills and knowledge that reside within an individual),
2) as a sociocultural phenomenon (as a means of communication)
- COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE (SLW  a combination of L1 writing ability and L2 proficiency=
- SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE  writing is seen as part of a socially and culturally
situated set of literacy practices shared by a particular community
- VARIOUS STAGES OF WRITING:
1) Pre-writing  motivation  brainstorming
2) Writing  draft  ideas on paper
3) Response  reaction of a reader  peer feedback (development of critical thinking) VS
Students’ feedback not good?/ Seen as not useful?
4) Revising  second draft
5) Editing  attention to grammar and vocabulary
6) Post-writing  share?
7) Evaluating
- WRITING CYCLE Pre-writing, writing, Revising/Editing
- Pre-writing  input in the form of texts, videos… introducing and practicing specific
points of grammar or vocabulary + brainstorming
- Writing  this phase must include time for drafting, feedback (from peers) …
- Lower proficiency activities  picture description, giving advice/instruction…
16 – GRAMMAR IN SL WRITING  pp. 248-263
- In L2 grammar  the role of grammar  2 broad areas:
1) Instruction and practice in grammatical structures
2) Response to and correction of errors in students’ texts
- Grammar = resource for shaping effective written communication  not all kinds of
grammar instruction are useful in this context
- Ferris (2011)  without attention to errors and explicit instruction, adult learners may
fail to make progress
- “social purposes grammar” + narrative grammar (present tenses, past participle, noun
phrases)
- L2 writers may need to draft in stages, separating rhetorical work from editing
- Terminology  as simple as possible
 - Text – analysis  help learners who are familiar with prescriptive grammar rules but
who still have problems understanding certain grammatical features  present
perfect…  can also benefit learners with mostly implicit knowledge of grammar
- The level of difficulty of a grammatical feature should not be far beyond the learners’
developmental stage
- GUIDED PRODUCTION ACTIVITIES  provide practice in noticing structures that
students find difficult to produce  dictation (less advances students, reading X3),
creating cohesion, sentence combining, guided paraphrase…
GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY
17 – TEACHING GRAMMAR  P. 265
- Grammar is about the form of language, but it is also used to make meaning
- Grammar is not a static system of rules  grammar is a dynamic system  grammar is
used in meaningful and psychologically authentic ways
- Drills have a function, but mechanical drills rob students to negotiate their own
identities and to express what they want to say
- Often at a loss when they’re in a situation that calls for them to communicate
- Prescriptive grammar  how language should be used VS descriptive grammar 
description of how speakers of a language actually use the language, even when it does
not conform to what prescriptive grammars prescribe and proscribe
- Grammar is a system of word – based structures and patterns that are used to make
meaning in appropriate ways  Larsen – Freeman
- Grammar = constrictions in a language, structures and patterns that have meaning and
uses
- P- 267  pie chart
- Based on teacher’s past experience and on diagnosis of students’ performance 
identify learning challenges  KEY STEP THAT SHOULD BE UNDERTAKEN WHEN
PLAANING LESSONS
- Form + meaning + use  these dimensions of grammar need to be mastered by the
learner
- The learning process: learners do not learn constructions one at a time. Even when
mastered a construction, it is not uncommon to find new error being made.
- Language learners rely on the knowledge and the experience they already have  the
teacher can build on what the students already know, a step that is facilitated when the
students speak a common language
- Different learning processes such as pattern recognition association and discrimination
are responsible for different aspects of language
- Krashen (1981)  if the input is understood and there is enough of it, the necessary
grammar will unconsciously be acquired VS EFL limited time (classroom?)
- Focus and explicit information  desirable in learning/teaching L2
- DIFFERENT APPROACHES:
 1) Present, practice, produce (present  provide understanding  given rule 
declarative knowledge, practice  drill, practice automatization, produce
students given frequent opportunities to communicate)
2) Focus on form (within a communicative or meaning – based approach)  learners
are primarily engaged in communication with only a brief digression to grammar
when necessary (when learners commit errors)  Long (1991)
a) Enhancing the input  highlighting certain non-salient grammatical forms in a
reading passage  draws attention
b) Input flooding  choosing texts in which a particular construction is frequent 
enhance salience and noticing
c) Input processing  activities push learners to attend to properties of language
during activities where the structure is being used meaningfully
3) Grammaring
- Larsen – Freeman  engage students in meaningful production (2003)
- Grammaring = ability to produce grammar constructions accurately
- “ing”  emphasizes a dynamic process
- Practice using constructions to make meaning under psychologically authentic
conditions  creative automatization  given communicative context (Gatbonton and
Segalowitz 1988)
- Role-plays?
- Teachers should not assume that just because a textbook activity deals with the target
construction, it necessarily addresses the particular learning challenge that their
students are experiencing
- EXPLICIT GRAMMAR INSTRUCTION
- Consciousness – raising
- Older students might benefit from the explicit teaching of grammar rules and patterns
- Students induce a grammatical generalization from the data they have been given
- GARDEN PATH  giving a particular explanation and at the moment of
overgeneralization (when an error is made) correct them  they are likely to learn
“exceptions” this way
- Corpus – informed
- Collaborative dialogues  Donato (1994)  students’ participation in collaborative
dialogues through which learners can provide support for each other, has spurred their
language development; dialogues during which students explicitly discuss grammar
points
- Providing Feedback  essential function of language teaching
- Focused feedback  desirable
1) Recasting  reformulating correctly what a student said incorrectly (Long)
2) Repeat
3) Giving students an explicit role
- Inductive VS deductive
- Inductive = students infer the rule or generalization from a set of examples; nurturing
was of thinking
- Deductive = students are given the rule and then apply it to examples
18- SPOKEN GRAMMAR
- The grammar we find in regular and repeated use by the majority of native and expert
speakers of a language in the majority of their spoken interactions
- Spoken and written grammar may draw on the grammatical resources in different ways,
reflecting their different purposes and different contexts of use
- Spoken grammar  natural and essential component of students’ developing
proficiency
19 – TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY FOR SL LEARNERS, p. 297-310
- To know a word means to know its collocations, grammatical function, word parts
- Nation (1990)  world knowledge includes the mastery of the world’s meanings,
written form, spoken form, grammatical behavior, collocations, register, association,
frequency
- Vocabulary depth  the knowledge about the aspects of each word
- Vocabulary breadth  enormous number of words
- Work knowledge is further described by distinguishing between receptive knowledge
(recognizing a word in writing/speaking) and productive knowledge (using a word in
writing and speaking)
- 6 different approaches on presenting vocabulary:
1) Grammar- translation approach
2) Reform approach  phonetic training; carefully controlled spoken language
3) Direct method  Berlitz method
4) Reading approach
5) Audiolingualism  drills
6) Communicative language teaching  vocabulary chosen from authentic materials
according to their usefulness
- Intentional and incidental learning
- Intentional = the focused study of words; explicit language
- Incidental = words are picked up while one’s attention is focused on language use;
reading
- Current teaching methods favor meaning – based approaches, believing that language
features are acquired through use rather than only through direct instruction
- Nation (2001)  form/collocation/word class  best picked up incidentally
- Aspects of meaning, register  best picked up through explicit instruction
- A great deal of vocabulary growth is a direct result of reading  need to know 98% of
the words
- Word learning is incremental  gradual
- Repetition  word learning is dependent on repeated exposure to target words in
context
- Spaced repetition
- Opportunities to focus on both meaning and form
- Engagement  engaging topics and tasks  learners who used target words in a task,
remembered them better than those who saw them only in a reading task
 - Interaction and negotiation (oral)
- Schmitt (2008)  there are 4 partners in the vocabulary learning task  students,
teachers, research, material writers
- Salience in course content  of central importance in a given context
- CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS:
- Word – learning activities  prioritize repetition, engagement, interaction, provide
opportunities to focus both on form and meaning
- 3 levels of activities:
1) Word level  practiced in isolation
2) Sentence level  practiced using collocations
3) Discourse or fluency level  practiced in paragraphs, focusing on fluency and
accuracy
- Word level activities:
1) Ranking  difficulty, frequency…
2) Practice with word parts  a picture tells a story
3) How strong are these words?
4) Phrasal verb practice
- Sentence – level activities:
1) Strip stories
2) A picture tells a story  pp. 304-305
- Discourse – level activities:
1) How strong are these words?
2) Story re-working  hear and retell, read and retell, synonym search, register re-
word, informal  formal
- Dictation, games, speller line-up, hangman, password, adverbs in action, twenty-
questions
- Word-learning strategies students need to be equipped to continue vocabulary
development on their own: reflection, memory aids (word cards practice linking
meaning with form), vocabulary notebook, dictionary use, realia, gesture, pantomime,
demonstration, synonyms, antonyms…

ASSESSING THE LANGUGE SKILLS

20 – LARGE – SCALE SL ASSESSMENT
- Traditional classroom assessment  pre-unit checks, essays, homework, midterms, final
exams…
- LARGE-SCALE ASSESSMENTS (standardized tests)  prepared by professionals in testing
agencies, university, state board or ministry of education or SMALL-SCALE ASSESSMENT
 prepared by a teacher, group, committee…
- Norm- referenced testing approach (relative) VS criterion-referenced testing approach
(absolute)
21- ASSESSMENT IN SL CLASSROOMS
- Refers to the use of methods and instruments to collect information to inform decision
making about learning
- Classroom assessment provides useful information for learning and teaching when it is
integrated into a curriculum that links assessment to learning targets
- Categories: placement tests, diagnostic tests, proficiency tests, achievement tests
- CURRENT APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TESTING: focus on communicative effect,
integration of skill areas, process + product, clear criteria, open ended answers,
attention to context
- FORMATIVE PURPOSE FOR ASSESSMENT  for learning, ongoing feedback, self-
assessment
- SUMMATIVE PURPOSE  assessment of learning  diagnosis, determines a grade
- TYPES OF LANGUAGE ASSESSMENTS
- Typology  2 divisions  tools that require students to select an answer or response
and tools that require students to provide a response using language that they have
learned
- Selected response format  multiple choice, true/false matching, same/different,
grammatical/ungrammatical
- Constructed – response format  brief constructed response  gap filling, short
answer, cloze, label a visual, sentence completion, error correction
- P. 332
- Performance – based assessment
- Product – focused  essay, story, portfolio, project…
- Performance – focused  oral presentation
- Process- focused  journal
- Students provide evidence of how they can use that language
- 4 step assessment cycle :
1) Identify learning aims
2) Collecting and recording information about students’ learning
3) Examining the information
4) Using the information
- Black and William (2009)  5 key strategies for enacting formative assessment:
1) Clarifying and sharing learning intentions and criteria for success
2) Engineering effective classroom discussions and other learning tasks that elicit
evidence of student undertaking
3) Providing feedback that moves learners forward
4) Activating students as instructional resources for one another
5) Empowering students as the owners of their own learning
- Receptive skills: reading and listening  students receive or take in language sounds
and written symbols and then process them to create meaning
- Invisible processes  turn them into observable behavior
- Productive skills: speaking and writing  students produce language and in doing so,
crate meaning
- Language output  observable behavior
- Performance assessment  two components:
 1) A prompt
2) A way of scoring the language
- Holistic and analytic rubric
- Holistic = draws on a rater’s response to an entire performance produced by a language
user  single score
- Analytic  rate the various components of a language performance and provide scores
for each one
- Portfolios capture a more complete picture of where students are in their learning
process than any individual assessment can provide  samples of writing, key
homework, projects, self and peer assessments
- Students’ engagement in assessment  should take a more active role both in the
learning process and in the assessment
22 – TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES OF EFFECTIVE SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
- 3 main components of language teaching methods:
1) Approach the theories and language learning that guide the practices
2) Design  objectives, organization of language content (syllabus), role of the
teacher, students, materials…
3) Procedure  day-to-day classroom techniques and practices used in the teaching
and learning of a language
- CLASSROOM RESEARCH  research into the ways in which language instruction
patterns affect the teaching/learning process
- Quantitative (collecting data and analysis) VS qualitative (conducted by
observation or introspection)
- Pp. 350-366
- Pairing and grouping students  the surest way to foster SLA in the classroom
settings. This includes structuring tasks in such a way that learners are required
to interact with their peers, negotiate for meaning and formulate and share their
opinions on topics.
- Teacher classroom discourse  different types of teacher talk: prelesson
chitchat, lesson warm-up, teacher – questions, explanations, teacher-fronted
instruction, modeling language use, error correction and feedback and praise
and acknowledgement of students’ contributions.
1) Lesson warm – up (Crookes 2003):
- It sets a positive atmosphere
- Aids concentration
- Establishes routines
- Assists in getting attention, reducing anxiety, increasing motivation, establishing
the lesson theme
- Crookes adds that lessons should be considered as speech events, embedded in
the culture of pedagogy  require an opening and closing
2) Error correction and feedback
- Feedback  term preferred
- Explicit  overt correction
- Implicit  recast or rephrase
- Error interpreted as an indication that the learner is formulating creative
hypotheses about the L2
a) Recast  reformulation of students’ utterance  “He has 18  He is 18”
- Crookes and Chaudron (2001)  effective only 20-25%  students interpret as a
confirmation of what he/she said
b) Explicit correction  Crookes and Chaudron  considerably higher rate of
learner uptake (immediate recognition and acceptance)
3) Types of errors corrected  teachers following a communicative approach
are most likely to correct errors in content, in vocabulary, and finally errors in
grammar or pronunciation
4) Teachers – students interaction patterns  Lightbown and Spada (2006) 
the most common discourse sequence in the classroom is initiation –
response – evaluation (IRE), a teacher led discourse sequence. – p. 352
a) Teachers display question (one correct answer)  or a small, closed set
of possible answers
b) Students respond
c) Evaluation of the answer
- IRF  similar but more communicative classroom exchanges
a) Teachers  referential questions (multiple possible answers)
b) Students respond
c) Re-initation  moving conversation forward
- More naturalistic interaction
- CRITICISM: emphasizes the controlling role of a teacher
- Learners say what the teacher wants to hear
- Devoid of any real communication intent
- ALTERNATIVES: instructional conversation and collaborative dialogue
- Entail assisted learning? Teacher builds in opportunities for the learners to notice
new language features and encourages them to practice using  Learners
become more autonomous
- Learning mediated by the teacher or advanced learners
- Teacher questions  display (checking students’ comprehension) and referential
(to provide an authentic response) questions
- Wait time  L2 learners require significantly more processing time to formulate
their responses, allowing adequate time is essential
- 1-2 seconds  insufficient
- 3-5 seconds  sufficient
- Use of visuals  photos, graphics, posters, films, video
- Brinton (2001)  the use of visuals  lends authenticity to the language lesson
and serves as an important contextualizing device  a visual can serve as a
springboard for the entire lesson
- CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
 1) Pairing and grouping students  teachers need to decide which portions of
the lesson benefit from whole-class or individual work and which benefit
from pair/group work
- INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS  icebreaker activities
- LEARNER AUTONOMY  delegate authority and assign roles
- USE OF THE TARGET LANGUAGE?  decreases the amount of input
- ROLE OF THE TEACHER  participant ins a group or a resource to all
- PROFICIENCY DIFFERENCES  same level groups or mixed?
- ATTITUDES  explain the rationale before implementing pair/group work
2) TEACHER CLASSROOM DISCOURSE
- Warm-ups  allow students to focus on time, place, task, relax…
- Error correction and feedback  teacher responds to 48-90% errors
- Usefulness  students appreciate feedback
- Feedback options  p.360  over correction, recast, question, denial,
pinpointing, oral cueing, written cue, grammatical terms, paralinguistics, appeal
to peers
- FEEDBACK FOCUS: accuracy VS fluency
- Competence (no command of the form) VS performance (competence 
feedback appropriate, students focus on other issues)
- Global vs local errors
- Global = cause problems in comprehension (major error-lexical choice)
- Local = does not cause problems in comprehension (one element – does not
require correction)
- SLIPS, ERROS AND ATTEMPTS
- Slips = students can self-correct when the problem has been pointed out
- Errors= students cannot correct themselves and require explanation
- Attempts = students try to explain something they do not know how to say
- Teacher – student interaction patterns  IRF VS IRE IRF favored
- Inductive VS deductive  p. 361
- Inductive  favored but there are legitimate reasons for deciding to use a
deductive approach instead
- TEACHER QUESTIONS
- Serve a variety of roles, from classroom management, eliciting information,
checking comprehension
- Display (checking comprehension) VD referential (creative use of language)
- WAIT TIME
- Count to 3 before eliciting
- Avoid eye-contact
- Pose a question to the group
- USE OF VISUALS
UNIT 3 – SKILLS FOR TEACHER  PP.370-387
23- LESSON PLANNING IN S/FL TEACHING
 - the process of taking everything we know about teaching and learning, along
with everything we know about the students in front of us, and putting it
together to create a road map for what a class period will look like
- 7 elements: SLA theory, methodology (PPP  presentation, practice,
production, task-based  pretask, task, report, language analysis)
- Skill taught, audience, focus, context, philosophy of learning and teaching
- 3 things a term “lesson plan” refers to: 1) paper, 2) process occurring in teacher’s
head, 3)a model of what is supposed to happen in a class
- The Hunter Model (2004): 1) attracting attention, 2) stated the purpose, 3)
instructional piece, 4) guided practice and monitoring, 5) closure statement, 6)
find independent practice
- Harmer (2007)  PPP VS ESA (engage, study, activate)  more versatile
- 3 stage processes: before, during, after class
- Before= Objectives? Curriculum? Materials? Time?
- During= back-up activities
- “stirring activities” VS “settling activities”
24 – TEXTBOOKS
- Should be selected through a process of systematic analysis
- Essential features of a course
- Analysis of the entire book needed
- Textbook needs to be adapted to students, teachers, curriculum
- Supplements should cover missing content/or address students’ needs
25 – CULTURE AND PRAGMATICS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING
- Applied linguistics  specifically sociolinguistics and pragmatics is concerned
with the inextricable connection between language and sociocultural norms and
framework
- Language allows students to become more aware of the connection between the
culture of the community and the language of its speakers
- In language teaching “culture” deals with forms of speech acts, sociocultural
behaviors, the rhetorical structure of text and the ways in which in which
knowledge is transmitted and obtained
- To become proficient and effective communicators, learners need to attain
sociocultural competence
- Hymes (1996)  learning about culture is an integral part of language learning
and education because culture crucially influences the values of the community,
everyday interaction, the norms of speaking and behaving, and the sociocultural
expectations of an individual’s roles
- Literature, the arts, the architecture, history, styles of dressing, cuisine, customs,
festival, other  visible
- Norms, worldviews, beliefs, assumptions, value systems  invisible
- The purpose of teaching culture together with other language skills is to increase
learners’ interactional as well as linguistic competence
 - EFL  compare the politeness and conversational routines in the learners’ L1 to
those found in the English language materials (movie clips, type-dialogued-
texts…)
- Celce- Murcia and Olshtain (2000)  pragmatics deals very explicitly with the
study of relationship holding between linguistic forms and the human beings
who use these forms  intentions, assumptions, beliefs, goals, contexts,
situations  to use language in socioculturally appropriate ways
- Speech acts  various sets of conventionalized, repeated and routinized
expressions  requests, apologies, compliments, complaints
- L2 writing instruction focuses on such fundamental features of written academic
discourse as the organization (introduction, body, conclusion, the topic sentence,
avoidance of repetition, redundancy…)
- The values of explicit explanations in the Anglo-American rhetorical tradition
- Materials from textbooks  to develop learners’ reading tactics and strategies
and to improve their vocabulary base
- Authentic materials  variety of genres (articles, hobbies, health…)
- ESL/EFL teaching
- Interviews of native speakers
- Questionnaires
- Resources for examining the influence of a culture on language  movies, clips,
programs, sitcoms…
- Teacher  primarily concerned with cultural considerations that have a direct
impact on students’ ability to learn
- An awareness of the L2 sociocultural and pragmatic norms can allow learners to
make their own informed choices of what to say and how to say it
26 DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
- Refers to the use of systems that rely on computer chips, digital applications and
networks in all of their forms + projectors, whiteboards…apps…ppt
- The use of technology in English language teaching and learning can also
encourage the development of strategies necessary for modern survival:
communication, collaboration and information gathering and retrieval
- ELT materials available online  opportunities for reading and writing have
expanded dramatically VS online reading – slower, writing  susceptible to
plagiarism
- Teams  fluency in communication?
- Tie instructional decisions about technology to the goals and objectives of the
curriculum
UNIT 4
27 – TEACHING LANGUAGE THROUGH DISCOURSE
- Discourse= a unit of language consisting of more than one sentence  an
instance of spoken/written language with describable internal relationships of
 form and meaning (words, structures, cohesion) that relate coherently to an
external communicative function or purpose and a given audience or
interlocutor
- Pedagogical discourse analysis  in EFL- interaction between native and non-
native speakers
- Expository texts
- All contemporary instructional L2 programs should ne communicatively oriented
and discourse-based; the instruction begins with one/more examples of
spoken/written discourse that (topic + content) meets students’ needs and
interests
- Teacher activates background knowledge
- Follow-up activities to practice challenging language features + global
communicative activities, skill-based activities – listening, reading, speaking,
writing
- The ability to produce L2 discourse is a crucial part of communicative
competence
- Communicative competence  discourse-centered
28 – CONTENT-BASED AND IMMERSION MODES  P. 445
- Content – communicative approaches have defined content as the
communication purpose for which speakers use the SFL
- Content-based language teaching – CBLT  integration of language and content
teaching
- Offers plentiful input, output and interaction
29 – TASK – BASED TEACHING AND LEARNING
- TBLT is a methodological realization of communicative language teaching
- Focuses on the things that learners actually or potentially need to be able to do
in the target language rather than lists phonological, lexical, grammatical
functions of the language
- Process oriented
- Pedagogical task  what learners do in the classroom to develop language skills;
creating an inventory of real-world tasks  things they will need to perform
outside the classroom  a first step of development a TBLT curriculum
- Some relationship to real-world tasks
- EFL learners need to use the language for authentic communication
30 – ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: INTERNATIONAL IN SCOPE, SPECIFIC IN PURPOSE
- ESP programs are designed for a specific group of ESL/EFL students, usually
adults who have limited time to develop the competence needed to work or
study in identified contexts
 - Teachers need to be skilled at various approaches to needs assessments and
target situation analysis; adept at working with a variety of stakeholders; open,
observant, flexible
31 – LITERATURE
- Easily used to develop all four language skills
- Provides a context for developing cross- cultural awareness
32 – BILINGUALISM
- SLL combined with other school subjects  Canada

UNIT 5 – FOCUS ON THE LEARNER  P. 523

33 – MOTIVATION
- Responsible for why people decide to do something, how long they are willing to
sustain the activity, and how hard they are going to pursue it
- 3 areas of mental functioning: cognition, motivation, affect (emotions) 
primary organizing principles of learner characteristics
- Interests  significant motivational factors
- The learner’s ultimate success always depends on the level of motivation
- Gardner (1985)  integrative motivation (the desire to learn L2 of a community
to communicate with its members and to become like them)
- Noel (2001)  intrinsic motivation (to experience pleasure or to satisfy one’s
curiosity), extrinsic motivation (to receive some extrinsic reward such as good
grades or to avoid punishment)
- 1990 – motivation as a dynamic process  constant change
- Dornyei (2005)  L2 motivational self - system  emphasis on motivational,
cognitive and emotional conglomerates; applicable to classroom  this system
consists of 3 main constituents:
1) Ideal L2 self  “would like to become”  businessman
2) Ought to L2 self  concerns the attributes that the learner believes he/she
ought to possess to avoid possible negative outcomes
3) L2 learning experiences  concerns the situation-specific motives related to
the immediate learning environment and experience
- Prerequisites:
1) The learner has a desired future-self- image.
2) The learner’s future self is sufficiently different from the current self.
3) The learner’s future self- image is elaborate and vivid.
4) The learner’s future self - image is perceived as possible.
5) The learner’s future self- image is not perceived as being comfortably certain
to be reached, that is, to be within his or her grasp.
 6) The learner’s future self - image is in harmony (does not clash) with the
expectations of his/her family, peers and other elements of the social
environment.
7) The learner’s future self - image is regularly activated in his/her working self-
concept.
8) The learner’s future self - image is accompanied by relevant and effective
procedural strategies that act as a road map toward the goal.
9) The learner’s desired future self - image is offset by a counteracting feared
possible self in the same domain.
- MOTIVATIONAL PRINCIPLES:
1) There is much more to motivational strategies than offering rewards and
punishments.
2) Generating student motivation is not enough in itself – it has also been
maintained and protected.
3) It is the quality (not the quantity) of the motivational strategies that we use
that counts.
- The main components of Dornyei’s (2001) framework of motivational teaching practice
in the L2 classroom 4 successive stages (p. 530):
1) Creating the basic motivational conditions
2) Generating initial motivation
3) Maintaining and protecting motivation
4) Engaging positive retrospective self-evaluation
- The L2 motivational self-system suggests that motivational strategies can be divided into
2 groups:
1) Strategies focusing on the learner’s vision of the ideal and ought L2 selves
2) Strategies that concern the improvement of the learning experience (two levels) 
the first associated with the individual learner and the second related to the learner
group as a second unit
- 3 clusters vision, individual learner experience, learner group experience
- MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES FOCUSING ON THE LEARNER’S FUTURE VISION
- Attractive vision of their future language selves  p. 531
1) Creating the vision
2) Strengthening the vision
3) Substantiating the vision  realistic approach
4) Operationalizing the vision
5) Keeping the vision alive
6) Counterbalancing the vision
- MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES FOCUSING ON THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE:
- INDIVIDUAL LEARNER LEVEL:
1) Whetting the students’ appetite
2) Increasing the learners’ expectancy of success
3) Making the teaching materials relevant to learners
4) Breaking the monotony of learning
5) Making the learning tasks more interesting
 6) Increasing the learners’ self-confidence
7) Allowing learners to maintain a positive social image
8) Creating learner autonomy
9) Increasing learner satisfaction
10) Offering grades in a motivational manner
- LEARNER GROUP LEVEL (group cohesiveness  the strength of relationships, group
norms  explicit and implicit rules of conduct):
1) Learning about each other
2) Proximity contact, interaction
3) Shared group history
4) The rewarding nature of group activities
5) Group legend
6) Public commitment to the group
7) Investing in the group
8) Extracurricular activities
9) Cooperation toward common goals
10) Intergroup competition
11) Defining the group against another
12) Joint hardship and common threat
13) Teacher as a role model
14) Group norms

34 – LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES AND STYLES

- Learner strategies  thoughts and actions  part of strategic competence; critically
important when learning and using a SFL ability to plan, ask, prioritize…  thoughts or
behaviors used by learners to regulate SFL learning or use
a) Metacognitive strategies  mentally regulate actions or behaviors
b) Cognitive strategies  “doing” behaviors that learners invoke to understand,
remember, retrieve, or use new information (clarifying, inferring, meaning)
c) Social strategies  collaborative behaviors that promote positive interactions and
relationships
d) Affective strategies  behaviors that allow learners to identify and adjust their
feelings, beliefs, attitudes and impulses while learning and using a SFL
- Teachers need to know about strategic competence because it controls how learners
notice and understand new SFL input, organize new information mentally so it can be
remembered, and how they retrieve information from memory to communicate
- Many researchers believe learners use strategies to regulate their thoughts, actions,
interaction and affect in a purely conscious, intentional and goal – directed fashion,
especially when confronted with SFL challenges
- + automatic processing  nonconscious use of strategies
- Strategic processing varies across the stages of SFL processing: perceiving,
understanding, remembering, retrieving information
 - 7 characteristics of a “good” learner:
1) Willing guessers
2) Strong drive to communicate
3) Not inhibited
4) Constantly looking for patterns
5) Practice
6) Monitor their own speech
7) Attend to meaning
- 3 categories of learner styles:
1) Perceptual preferences (auditory, visual, kinesthetic)
2) Personality (extroverted, introverted)
3) Processing preferences (global-oriented, detail- oriented, inductive, deductive,
synthetic, analytic)
- Oxford (1990)  direct (memory, cognitive, analyzing, compensation strategies-coining
new words) and indirect (metacognitive- evaluating one’s recent interaction-planning
conversations, affective -encouraging oneself, social -cooperating) strategies
- Oxford (2011)  metacognitive, meta-affective, meta-sociocultural interactive
strategies -p. 538
- Information processing  relates to the developmental activities that learners engage
in as they are exposed to new linguistic input and as they develop the competence to
use new language features automatically in communication
35 – TEACHING YOUG LEARNERS IN ENGLISH AS A S/FL SETTINGS
- Fun songs with humor, dancing, movement (kinesthetic) and techniques to make input
comprehensible  gestures, pointing at visuals, explaining, demonstrating using realia
- The better the teacher, the less the children realize they are involved in a step-by- step
English lesson
- Learning through play
- Activities – meaningful, engaging, fun
- YL  5-12
- VYL  less than 7
- EFL  YLs  contexts lack an English-speaking environment outside the classroom and
YLs may find little to hear and read in English in their immediate surroundings
- Is the earlier start better?  children seem to pick up languages quickly and effortlessly
- Critical period for language acquisition that lasts until puberty (Lenneberg 1967) 
children’s mind  flexible and they can achieve native-like proficiency VS more recent
studies?
- GENERALLY ACCEPTED ADVANTAGES:
1) More time learning
2) Native-like proficiency, oral proficiency, confidence, morphology, syntax
- OPTIMAL ENVIRONMENT  depend on comprehensible input (Krashen 1991)
- I+1 (just above the current level of understanding)
 - Collier (2004)  child – directed speech  clear pronunciation, a slower rate of speech,
short and simple utterances, rephrasing, repetition, meaning- focused error correction
and modeling when necessary
- Important to provide opportunities for comprehensible output  to push students to
produce comprehensible utterances in the L2 that allow learners to test their
hypotheses about features of the language
- Create a comfortable environment in which they will not feel inhibited to speak – up
- Focus corrections on meaning and use choral repetitions of certain forms  songs,
chants, other…
- Nissani (1990)  developmentally appropriate teaching practice
- Puts a child at the forefront of the language process and stresses the importance of
nurturing YLs as they develop physically, cognitively and personally  Piaget gave roots
to this!
- Piaget (1970)  children are active learners and thinkers who make sense of the world
by interacting with their physical environment
- The interaction with the adult needs to support the learning process for the child to
acquire new knowledge and skills within a ZPD  which is the difference between what
a child can achieve alone and what a child can achieve with the help of the adult 
helps the YL learn the language through a process SCAFFOLDING (supporting) 
includes creating interest in a task, breaking it down into steps, modeling it, showing
alternate ways, keeping the child on track
- Teaching grammar should be limited
- Cameron (2003)  students should “notice” the grammar by focusing on form
holistically, without breaking the language into small parts
- Pinter (2006)  learning grammar is a messy process requiring the teacher to provide
lots of meaningful practice, recycling and guidance in attending to language form
- Thematic units <3  focus on content and communication than on language structure
- EFL specific
- The goal for early progress is to produce better speakers who will function in global
markets and build their countries’ economies, to create lifelong learners of English,
diverse cultural materials…
- Classroom instruction should be:  p. 563
1) Enjoyable and interesting
2) Active and hands-on TPR method
3) Supported and scaffolded
4) Meaningful and purposeful
5) Culturally appropriate and relevant
37 – NON-NATIVE ENGLISH-SPEAKING TEACHER IN THE PROFFESSION
38 – CLASSROOM RESEARCH
39 – REFLCECTION
40 – PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT