《英语教学法教程》(王蔷)考研笔记

Unit 1 language and language teaching

1. What makes a good language teacher?

● Ethic devotion

● Professional qualities

● Personal styles

2. Views on language learning and learning in general:

● Process-oriented theories: concerned with how the mind organizes new

information such as habit formation, induction, making inference, hypothesis testing and generalization.

● Condition-oriented theories: emphasize the nature of the human and physical

context in which the language learning take place, such as the number of the students and the kind of input learners receive, and the atmosphere.

3. How can one become a language teacher?

It involves more factors and longer learning time, and may never be finished.

Stage 1: all English teachers are supposed to have a sound command of English. Stage 2: learning, practice and reflection. ● Learning:

? Learning from others? experience (empirical knowledge gained

through reading and observation) ? Learning the received knowledge (language learning theories,

educational psychology, language teaching methodology, etc.)

● Practice

? Pre-service practice (pseudo practice)

? Real classroom practice

● Reflection: take on reflection seriously and keep reflection

Goal: (do not have an end) one can never become a perfect teacher. There is

always room for improvement.

language development other's experience

received knowledge

own experience Practice Reflectio Professional competence Stage 1 Stage 2 Goal

Unit2 communicative principles and task-based language teaching

1.What is communicative competence

●Linguistic competence

Knowledge of language itself

●Pragmatic competence

The choice of the vocabulary and structure depends on the setting, the

relative status of the speakers and their relationship.

●Discourse competence

The ability to understand or to express a topic logically and coherently by

effectively employing or comprehending the cohesive marks, such as first,

second.

●Strategic competence

Searching for other means of expression, such as using a similar phrase ……

●Fluency

the ability to link units of speech together with facility and without strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation)

CLT: communicative language teaching

2.Principles of communicative language teaching

●Communication principle

Activities that involve real communication promote learning.

●Task principle

Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning.

●Meaningfulness principle

Language that is meaningful to the learner support the learning process.

3.Main features of communicative activities

●Communicative purpose

There must be some information gap that students seek to bridge

●Communicative desire

A real need to communicate

●Content not form

They must have some massage they want to communicate

●Variety of language

●No teacher intervention

●No material control

TBLT: task- based language teaching

4.Four components of a task

● A purpose

Make sure students have a reason for undertaking the task

● A context

This can be real, simulated or imaginary, and involves sociolinguistic issues such as the location and the relationship of the speaker……

● A process

Getting students to learn some language strategies such as problem solving, reasoning……

● A product

5.Focus on individual language items –

Purposeful andcontextualized communication +

Then

Exercise → task

6.TBL:

●Pre-task

Introduction to topic and task

●Task cycle

?Task

?Planning

?Report

?Students hear task recording or read text

●Language focus

?Analysis and practice

?Review and repeat task

7.PPP

●Presentation

Of single new item; teachers introduces new vocabulary and grammatical structures.

●Practice

Of new item: drills, exercise, and dialogue

●Production

Activity, role play or task to encourage …free? use of language

8.How to design tasks

●Think about students? needs and interests and abilities

●Brainstorm possible tasks

●Evaluate the list

●Choose the language items

●Preparing materials

9.Constrainsof CLT:

●Whether it will meet the needs of learners from different contexts

●It is very difficult to design a one to one correspondence between a function a

form.

10.Constrains of TBLT

●Not effective for presenting new languages

●Time is limited: teachers are busy

●Culture of learning: some students may find it difficult to adapt to TBLT

●Level of difficulty: students may find task-base language teaching quite

difficult of they do not have sufficient linguistic resources.

Unit 4 lesson planning

1.Why is lesson planning important?

●It can make teachers aware of the aims and language contents of the lesson.

●It helps teachers distinguish the various stages of a lesson and see the

relationship between them so that activities of different difficulty levels can

be arranged properly and the lesson can move smoothly from one stage to

another.

●It gives teachers opportunity to anticipate potential problems that may arise

in class, and prepare some solutions to them.

●It builds teachers? confidence in class.

●Teachers can also be aware of teaching aids in class.

●Planning is a good practice and sign of professionalism.

2.Principles for good class planning:

●Aim

It means realistic goals for the lesson; the things students are able to do at the

end of the class.

●Variety

Planning a variety of different activities to introduce a wide selection of

materials, so that learning is always interesting.

●Flexibility

Preparing some extra and alternative activities and tasks as the class does not

always go according to the plan.

●Learnability

The contents and tasks planned for the lesson should be within the learning

capability of the students.

●Linkage

The steps and steps in each stage are planned in such a way that they are

someway linked with another one.

3.Macro planning

A planning over a longer period of time, for instance a whole-year course. It is

often done by a group of teachers who are to teach the same course.

●Knowing about the profession

Which language area and language stage should be taught?

●Knowing about the institution

The institution arrangements of the time, frequency of the class……

●Knowing about the learners

●Knowing about the syllabus

●Knowing about the textbook

●Knowing about the objectives

https://www.360docs.net/doc/8613328381.html,ponents of a lesson plan

●Background information

Who the students are. The time and date of the class.

●Teaching aims

What students are able to achieve at the end of the lesson

(Linguistic and language skills)

●Language contents and skills

●Stages and procedures

●Teaching aids

Teaching aids and resources, and how teachers will use them to aid learning ●End of lesson summary

Take some time to summarize what is learned in class.

●Optional activities and assignments

●After lesson reflection

Unit 5 classroom arrangement

1.Efficient classroom arrangement can be achieved when these six conditions are

met:

●The teacher plays appropriate roles.

●The teacher provides clear instructions

●Students are grouped in a way suitable for the learning activities.

●The teacher asks appropriate questions.

●There is discipline as well as harmony in the class.

●The students? errors are treated properly.

2.The different roles of teachers:

●Controller

?The teacher controls the pace so that the activities run smoothly and efficiently.

?The more communicative the activity is, the less control it needs.

●Assessor

?Correcting mistakes

?Organizing feedback

●Organizer

Design and organize the tasks

●Prompter

When students are not sure how to start an activity, or what to do next, the teacher give appropriate prompts. (and……/anything else?/yes, but why?)

●Participant

●Resource-provider

3.Rules to follow for making instructions effective:

●To use simple instructions and make them suit the comprehension level of the

students. (Also, make your comments as simple and as natural as possible)

●To use mother tongue only when it?s necessary.

●The best thing to do is to model the task/activity before letting students move

into groups and pairs.

●Demonstration is more effective than words.

4.Student grouping:

●Whole class work:

?Advantages:

Everyone feels being together with others.

It is good for teachers to instruction and explanation together, and also an ideal way to show materials and do presentation together.

?Disadvantages:

Individuality is not favoured in this sense.

Not everyone has an opportunity to express himself.

Some students feel nervous and anxious when they are asked to present in front of class.

It favors the transmission of knowledge from teacher to students rather than students discovering things by themselves.

It is not a good way to enhance real communication. Students cannot communicate with others in this sense.

●Pair work

?Advantages

It dramatically increase students? speaking time in class.

It allows students to work together rather than under teachers? guidance.

It allows teachers to work with the weak pairs when others are working on their own.

It can promote cooperation between students.

?Disadvantages

It is often very noisy and teachers are afraid of losing control of the class.

Some students may talk in native language or something not related to the topic. It is not very easy for teachers to monitor every pair.

Some students may not like to work with peers, and they, think they can only learn from their teachers.

So they refuse to participate in the activities.

The choice of pair is a problem. Some st udents don?t like to work with a particular partner while someone may dominate all the time.

●Group working

Some groups may finish the task fast while some may be very slow. Teachers may have to prepare some optional activities for the quick group and be ready to help the slower groups all the time.

●Individual study

Teachers need to prepare different tasks for different groups.

5.Measures for disciplined acts and badly behaving students:

●Acting immediately

Indisciplined acts should be immediately stopped, so that less damage is made.

●Stop the class

If the discipline is so disruptive as to hinder the progress of the whole class, the teacher should stop the class and make it clear what is wrong.

●Rearrange the seats

●Change the activity

●Talk to students after class

●Create a code of behavior

The teachers and learners can work together to create some rules for the class during activities.

6.Questioning in classroom

●Display questions: questions that are already known to teachers and they are

asking questions to check if students know the answer.

●Genuine questions: questions that are used to find new information. They are

often more communicative.

●Lower- order questions: questions that simply require recalling of information

or memorization of facts.

●Higher-order questions: questions requiring more reasoning, analysis, and

evaluation.

7.Dealing with errors:

●Dealing with spoken errors:

If the task is not focusing on accuracy or fluency, ignore it.

●When to correct:

It is best not to interrupt students during fluency work, unless communication breaks down. If there are some common mistakes that other students might also have problems with, the teacher can take a note in his/her mind and try to do the correction after the student?s perform.

●How to correct:

?Self-correcting is encouraged.

?Indirect correction: repeating; asking other students to answer again……

Unit 6 teaching pronunciations

1.Therole of teaching pronunciation

●Students need not able to read and write IPA and to know phonetics.

●Adult learners need focus on pro nunciations, but young leaners don?t.

●Learners who have more exposure to English need less focus on

pronunciation than those who only learn English in the class.

2.Realistic goal of teaching pronunciation:

●Consistency: the pronunciation should be smooth and natural.

●Intelligibility: the pronunciation should be understandable to the listeners.

●Communicative efficiency: the pronunciationshould help convey the meaning

that is intended by the speaker.

3.Focusing on a sound:

●Say the sound alone

●Get students to repeat the sound in chorus.

●Get individual students to repeat the sound.

●Explain how to make the sound.

If students can produce the sound correctly, after the teacher?s modelling, it is not necessary to explain …how?.

●Say the sound in a word.

●Contrast it with other sounds.

4.Perceptionpractice:

●Using minimal pairs:

will-well till-tell fill-fell lid-led (tell which one is read)

●Which order

Pit pet bet (1 3 2)

●Same or different

Met-meet well-well

●Odd one out

Bit bit bit pit (No.4 is different.)

●Complete:

_ate_ate_ate_ate_ate_ate

(late mate fate date hate rate……)

5.Production practice:

●Listening and repeat

●Fill in the blanks

?Children love to play games.

?Black and white make gray.

?After April comes May.

●Make up sentences

Last fast calm dark ……