Lense 2 Resumen

RESUMEN PLAN LIBRES 2019
MODULE 1: CURRENT TRENDS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

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1. Characterise Task Based Approach. How is the Communicative Competence achieved?
One characteristic of task based is that it provides adequate exposure to language. Students are able to learn
the language in real life situations. Another characteristic is that students are encouraged to use language
creatively and spontaneously through tasks and problem solving. Moreover, TBLT is student centred and
leads to more interaction among students. As it focuses more on meaning than on the form of the language,
students are able to communicate spontaneously in their day-to-day interactions. The task should be adapted
to the student's needs and age. The tasks should be challenging so students are motivated.
Learning through doing, learners’ own experiences as a point of departure, focus on learning strategies, task
authenticity, text authenticity.
The communicative competence is achieved through the balance and combination of two types of tasks:
enabling and communication tasks. That is also the fusion of formal knowledge (linguistic factors, thematic
knowledge, attitudes, values, etc.) and instrumental knowledge (procedural knowledge involved in spoken
language. Also known as informal knowledge)
It is composed by four aspects or elements:
1. Grammatical competence which involves the knowledge of lexical items, morphology,
syntax, semantics and phonology.
2. Sociolinguistic competence which involves the sociocultural use and rules of discourse.
3. Strategic competence: It involves overcome language gaps, achieve conversational fluency
and modify text for the audience.
4. Discourse competence: It includes how ideas are connected through patterns of organization,
cohesive and transitional devices.
2. How to plan a unit/ plan a class in task based approach according to Estaire and Zanon.
● The first step to plan a class in a task based approach is to determine the theme (You have to take into
account student’s needs, level and experience).
● The second step is to plan the final task to be done at the end of the unit.
● The third step is to determine the objectives of the unit.
● The fourth step is to determine contents which are necessary to carry out the final task.
● The fifth step is to plan the process and select the material.
● The sixth step is to evaluate the process and the product.
Example:
● Fourth year primary school. Elementary level.
● Theme: school objects.
● Final task: students, dressed in a costume as school objects, do a play in which they have to play hide and
seek. (collaborative work)
○ Context: the setting is a pencil case that lost its elements so it asks questions to other students to know
where the elements are using the target language.
● Objectives: students will be able to say where the school objects are.
● Contents:
○ Thematic aspects: recycled: colours, numbers. New: school objects.
○ Linguistic aspects: prepositions of place, wh-questions, verb to be, can you see...?
● Process: Students will be introduced to the vocabulary and to the target language through a video, then there
will be games and different types of activities, as finding school objects in a poster, count and colour,
matching pictures to words. Then, they will be given a short play where school objects are missing and the
pencil case has to find them. With the play, first they will have to do activities, and then they will practice it to
perform to the whole school.
● Evaluation: there will be an assessment task programme.
3. Define Project Work and explain the benefits of implementing it in the language classroom.
Why is it useful for the language? Characteristics and steps.
Project Work is like a supertask which integrates language and meaningful content. The final product comes
from the realization of the final task. Students learn content knowledge, linguistic knowledge and functional
language. CONTENT knowledge (food & drinks) LINGUISTIC knowledge (present simple) &
FUNCTIONAL knowledge (what you like/don’t like)
Projects help to provide a topic and situation to consolidate language and provide practice of specific tenses
and lexis.
It is useful for language because the project is the vehicle for teaching the important knowledge and skills a
student needs to learn.
Characteristics:
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○ It encourages emotional and personal development
○ It integrates language knowledge, content and skills.
○ It promotes responsibility and cooperation.
○ It encourages learner’s independence.
○ It caters for mixed-ability classes.
○ It educates the whole child (intellectually and socially)
○ It allows for flexibility within the curriculum.
○ It takes into account the learners’ needs and characteristics
○ It provides close-to-real life and problem solving
○ activities.
○ It enables learners to communicate meaningfully through
○ collaborative work.
○ It allows them to take part in their learning process
○ It gives a self-elaborated final product.
Steps::
1. choose the topic.
2. set up the final outcome.
3. structure the project.
4. prepare students (investigation, give language they will use)
5. gather information.
6. prepare students for the language demands of step 7
7. compile and analyse information.
8. prepare students for the language demand of step 9
9. present the final product
10. evaluate the project.
4. Task Based Approach: definition. Principles.
TBLT is an approach that focuses on authentic language and asks students to do meaningful tasks using the
target language.
there are 7 principles:
● Scaffolding: lessons and materials should provide supporting frameworks within which the learning
takes place. At the beginning of the learning process, learners should not be expected to produce
language that has not been introduced either explicitly or implicitly.
● Task dependency: within a lesson, one task should grow out of, and build upon, the ones that have
gone before.
● Recycling: recycling language maximizes opportunities for learning and activates the organic learning
principle.
● Active learning: learners learn best by actively using the language they are learning.
● Integration: learners should be taught in ways that make clear the relationships between linguistic
forms, communicative function and semantic meaning.
● Reproduction to creation: learners should be encouraged to move from reproductive to creative
language use.
● Reflection: learners should be given opportunities to reflect on what they have learnt and how well
they are doing.
5. What is a task?
It is a work plan which involves comprehending, manipulating, producing and interacting in the target
language. The primary attention is on making use of their own linguistic resources, although the design of the
task predisposes them to choose particular forms (meaning and form are highly interrelated. The task should
resemble the language of the real world. Form enables students to convey or express meaning.
6. Role of teacher in TBL.
The teacher is mostly a leader and organizer of tasks and class management in order to lead the whole class
towards the objectives of tasks. In broad terms, the teacher organizes discussions, manages groups and pairs,
facilitates performance and acquisition, motivates learners by appropriate feedback and highlighting their
achievements, advises learners on language and finally acts as a language teacher. Other roles include select
and sequence tasks, prepare learners for tasks and arise consciousness-raising.
According to the stage in the task cycle::
● pre-task: facilitator (when sequencing tasks and preparing students for the task)
● task phase: monitor
● planning phase: adviser

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● report: chairperson.
● language focus: consciousness-raising.
7. Define text-based tasks:
A text is a continuous piece of spoken or written language. A text-based task requires learners to process the
text for meaning in order to achieve the goals of the task.
8. Define text and task authenticity
Task authenticity: there should be systematic links between the world of the classroom and the world beyond
the classroom. The closer the link between the pedagogical task and the experiential world, the greater the
TASK AUTHENTICITY.
Text authenticity: in addition to task authenticity, text authenticity is an important feature of TBLT. TEXT
AUTHENTICITY is the use of spoken and written material that has been produced for purposes of
communication, not for purposes of language teaching. The issue here is not whether authentic materials
should be used but which combination of authentic, simulated, and specially written materials will provide
learners with optimal learning opportunities. Specially written texts are simplified for beginning learners, and
patterns are made explicit. While such tests are necessary, they don’t prepare learners for the challenge of
coping with the language they will encounter in the real world outside the classroom. Scaffolded in-class
opportunities to process authentic written texts will assist learners to develop strategies for comprehending
such texts in the world outside the classroom.
9. Decide if the following are true or false. Support your choice in both cases:
a. Units of work teach new content. True. The language learning objective is to develop students’
ability and knowledge to do something in the foreign language.
b. In TBL the language shapes the task development. False. The tasks generate the language to be
used, not vice versa.
c. The main focus of TBL is language acquisition. False. The main focus is on performing the tasks
to achieve communication and language is an instrument to carry them out.
d. The focus of TBL is on the linguistic value of language. False. The main focus is on the tasks
to be done and language is seen as the instrument necessary to carry them out.
e. Final tasks are only related to tangible products. False. The final tasks are communication
tasks which will serve as indicators of the development of communicative competence at their highest
point of communicativeness.
f. Objectives can be planned at the beginning and some are determined on the run. True. At
the beginning of the process only the final task objectives can be determined, the others can be added
later.
10. How is coherence and integration achieved in the framework?
Units within the framework are goal-oriented, so all the tasks are designed towards a final goal which creates
different requirements. Tasks are interrelated and integrated in a way that students and teachers perceive it as
a coherent and logical unit of work.
The unit is built up by different tasks making “scaffolding” as a supporter for students during the process. In
this framework students manipulate different levels of formal and instrumental knowledge while interacting
with materials, classmates and teachers.
Integration can be achieved as knowledge is constructed globally. Through an interrelated and coherent
sequence of tasks which act as a scaffolding allowing students to do things in English.
Well-designed enabling tasks and communication tasks will develop schemas of formal and instrumental
knowledge in a balanced, global and interrelated way.
11. Which considerations should teachers have when applying this framework with a textbook?
When the units are based on a textbook, teachers will not need to analyse in detail the linguistic requirements
of the unit. Some materials in the textbook might have to be left out or altered. Some other materials might
need to be supplemented. Moreover, the sequence in the textbook might be altered.
12. What are the 2 dimensions of knowledge discussed in the framework?
The first dimension is that students learn the procedures that allow them to do certain things in English. The
second dimension is the specific linguistic content which was essential to carry these things out. That is to say,
they develop their communicative competence.
According to Littlewood, the first dimension is the continuum from focus on forms to focus on meaning. The
second is the degree of learner-involvement that a task elicits.
13. What are schemas? How can they reflect TBL? 4

A schema is a structure made up of data, which represents a block of knowledge, stored in our memory.
Schemas can refer to objects, ideas, events, etc. They can represent formal and instrumental knowledge.
They can be reflected in TBL as we can analyse the tasks performed in the classroom in terms of blocks of
knowledge to be mastered, activated, recycled or newly constructed.
14. How are enabling and communication tasks different? How are they combined in the
framework in every lesson?
A communication task is a piece of classroom work which involves learners in: the comprehension,
production and oral interaction in the foreign language. The focus is on meaning rather than on form. It is
similar to activities done in everyday life.
An enabling task act support for communication task which purpose is to provide students with the necessary
linguistic tools to carry out a communication task.
The balance and combination of both types within a unit is crucial for the construction of the communicative
competence, that is also the fusion of formal knowledge (linguistic factors, thematic knowledge, attitudes,
values, etc.) and instrumental knowledge (procedural knowledge involved in spoken language). Both
enabling tasks and communication tasks belong to a continuum.
15. Post method macrostrategies.
1. Maximize learning opportunities: teaching as a process of creating and utilizing learning opportunities.
Teacher role is a balance between manager of teaching acts and mediators of learning acts.
2. Minimize perceptual mismatches: It involves the recognition of potential mismatches between intentions
and interpretations of the learner and the teacher.
3. Facilitate negotiated interaction: It refers to meaningful learner-learner, learner-teacher classroom
interaction in which learners are encouraged to initiate topic and talk.
4. Promote learner autonomy: It involves helping learners how to learn, give them the tool to self-direct and
self-monitor their own learning.
5. Foster language awareness: It refers to any attempt to draw learners´ attention to the formal and functional
properties of their second language in order to increase the degree of explicitness required to promote second
language learning.
6. Activate intuitive heuristics: It highlights the importance of providing rich textual data so learners can
internalize underlying grammar rules and usage for communicative use.
7. Contextualize linguistic inputs: It highlights how language usage and use are shaped by linguistics, extra
linguistic, situational and extra situational contexts.
8. Integrate language skills: It refers to the need to holistically integrate language skills traditionally separated
and sequenced as listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
9. Ensure social relevance: It refers to the need for teachers to be sensitive to the societal, political and
economic, and educational environment in which second language learning and teaching take place.
10. Raise cultural consciousness: It emphasizes the need to treat learners as cultural informants so they are
encouraged to engage in a process of classroom participation that puts a premium on their power/ knowledge.
16. Cooperative and collaborative learning. Examples.
Cooperative Learning: it is a group of students working together to accomplish shared goals. Cooperative
learning requires pupils to work together in small groups to support each other to improve their own learning
and those of others. To work effectively, certain key elements need to be in place.
5 elements:
● Positive interdependence: pupils need to feel that they need each other in order to succeed.
● Individual accountability: each member of the group is responsible for their own contribution, otherwise
the success of the group will be in danger.
● Group processing: pupils should be able to analyse how well their groups are functioning and using the
necessary skills.
● Small group and interpersonal skills: teachers need to teach the appropriate communication, leadership,
trust-building, decision making and conflict management skills to students and provide the motivation to
use these skills in order for groups to function effectively.
● Face to face interaction.
Examples:
● Stand up, hand up, pair up: Students stand up, put their hand up and quickly find a partner with whom
to share or discuss. This structure is perfect for class building, processing and reviewing information,
energizing the class, forming random pairs or teams, lesson starts or wraps.
● Show not tell (pupils have to use drawings and diagrams to explain an answer)
Collaborative learning: it is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something
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together. It is a group of students working together to solve a problem, complete a task or create a product. It
is based on the idea that learning is a naturally social act in which the participants talk among themselves. It is
through collaboration that learning occurs.
Characteristics:
● Attempt to learn something or solve a problem together.
● Participants need to have acquired social skills needed.
● More student centred (they negotiate roles, search for information)
● Focuses on the process of working together (achieve more than they would do alone)
Examples:
● Solving problems across teams:
○ Bring together various teams and present them with a problem to solve.
○ This might be how to develop a new feature for a product, what changes should be actioned
on an existing software, or instituting a new training program.
○ Outline what results you would like to see in broad terms, then let the teams work.
○ At the end, the teams will present what they have developed, justify their choices, and outline
their plans to accomplish the task.
● Developing new products:
○ When it comes to developing new products, collaborative learning can be a massive asset.
○ Teams can work together to identify relevant niches, brainstorm solutions, and create product
concepts.
○ After presenting their products, a question and answer session can help develop the idea
further, as they defend their ideas, respond to criticism, and sharpen their pitch.
17. Analyse briefly the following task based teaching sequence. Consider the following: student’s
and teacher’s role, language use, varieties and types of tasks, characteristics of tasks, goals
and outcomes, skills practice, the task cycle, view of language and the role of L1:
Observations TBL principles
The teacher tells the class that they are going to play teacher: active
with their memory. Student: passive.
Stage: pre-task.
Objective: recall previous knowledge.
The teacher begins by showing the class a picture of teacher: active
a tray with some objects on it (keys, an apple, a Student: passive
ruler, a glass of water, and some more). Teachers Stage: pre-task.
should check beforehand that learners have the Objective: teacher tries to activate/elicit previously
necessary vocabulary. learnt items.
The picture is removed and learners as individuals teacher: active/monitors.
make a list of all things they can remember. Student: active
Stage: task.
Objective: students have to be able to use the
language to communicate.
type of task: rehearsal task. open task.
skills: speaking.
Learners move into pairs to see how many items teacher: active/monitors.
they can remember between them. Student: passive.
Stage: planning.
Objective: Students have to be able to make group

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work and to use the language they know.
Type of task: communication task.
Skills: speaking.
The teacher moves about the room listening to the Teacher: passive/monitors.
groups, the teacher reminds the class to speak in the Student: active.
target language. Stage: planning.
Objective: students have to use the language and
vocabulary they know.
Type of task: communication task.
informal assessment.
Skills: speaking
Role of L1: it is allowed but students are
encouraged to use the target language.
The teacher works with the class as a whole to build Teacher: active
up a list to see if, between them, they can remember Student: active
all the things in the picture. Stage: report
Objective: students have to be able to recognize and
remember the target language.
type of task: communicative activity
Skills: speaking.
Role of L1: is restricted.
The teacher writes up some sentences on the board Teacher: active
(e.g. There are keys between the book and the Student: active
apple). Stage: analysis
Learners are asked to say whether these sentences Objective: students have to analyse the language
are true or false. and to recognize the vocabulary.
type of task: language awareness.
Skills: speaking and reading.
Role of Language: L2 is required.
The sentences are rubbed off the board and learners Teacher: monitors
are asked to work in pairs again to write sentences of Student: active
their own about the picture-3 true sentences and 3 Stage: language practice
false. Objective: to practice the structure presented.
type of task: open ended. communication task.
skills: speaking, reading, writing.
Role of L1: is not allowed. l2 is restricted.
The picture is removed once more. Learners read out Teacher: monitors
their sentences and the other students are asked to Student: active
say from memory if each sentence is true or false. Stage: language practice
Objective: to practice the structure presented.
type of task: rehearsal task.
skills: speaking, reading, writing.
Role of L1:not allowed.
The teacher gives feedback after each sentence and Teacher: active
corrects the sentences which are false. Student: active
Stage: analysis
Objective: to assess students’ productions.
type of task: assessment.
skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing.
Students are given another picture and some Teacher: monitors
sentences to complete. E.g. there are… on the… Student: active
Stage: grammar exercise
Objective: to practice the structure presented.
type of task: grammar exercise
skills: reading, writing.
18. Explain how communicative competence is developed in TBLT. Explain it according to Nunan 7
(Task combination) or Estaire and Zanon (different types of knowledge and tasks).
In TBLT framework, form-focused work is presented in the form of enabling skill, so called because they are
designed to develop skills and knowledge that will ultimately facilitate the process of authentic
communication. In the framework, enabling skills are of two kinds: language exercises and communicative
activities. Tasks done in an English classroom are classwork having the ultimate purpose of developing
students’ communicative competence in English, that is, the development of students’ ability to communicate
in English. Tasks, therefore, have a pedagogic purpose. (Nunan)
According to Estaire and Zanon, Communicative Competence is the result of the fusion of formal and
instrumental knowledge. These two dimensions of knowing a language are constructed in a global,
interrelated way. Thus, constructing communicative competence can be seen as the result of carrying out
tasks.
19. According to Nunan, which should be the role of form, meaning and language use in the TBLT
classroom?
The focus is on meaning rather than on grammatical form, this does not mean that form is not important.
According to Nunan, the deployment (disposition) of grammatical knowledge to express meaning, highlights
the fact that meaning and form are highly interrelated, and that grammar exists to enable the language user to
express different communicative meanings. Students are free to choose whatever language forms they wish to
convey what they mean in order to fulfil, as well as they can, the task goals.
Language is the vehicle for attaining task goals but the emphasis is on meaning and communication.
There is a progression, a continuum from clearly defined exercises (enabling tasks) to defined tasks
(communicative tasks), passing through middle categories which possess features of both to go from the focus
on form to the focus on meaning.
20. Explain the difference among Task Based Approach (TBA), Content Based Instruction (CBI)
and Project Based Teaching (PBT)
The main difference between the 3 approaches is based on the focus. While TBA focuses on language use in
communicative real life situations, CBI integrates language and academic content, and PBT combines
language and knowledge to solve a problem from real life or to make an end product.
In CBI, all or part of the instructional content of a class is adapted from other subjects in the school
curriculum, such as science. By integrating language and academic content, learners receive instruction that is
both interesting and relevant; the subject content provides a rich context for the learning of language.
In PBT, projects are super-tasks that incorporate a number of self-contained but interrelated subsidiary tasks.
21. Types of tasks according to Nunan (communication activity, language exercise, pedagogic task,
etc.)
Target task or real world: it is a communicative act where students put language to do things in the world
outside the classroom, what people do in everyday life.
Pedagogical task: it is a piece of classroom work which involves in comprehending, manipulating, producing
or interacting in the language while their attention is focused on meaning rather than on forms.
Rehearsal Task: it is to rehearse something learners are going to need to do outside the classroom. It is not
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identical to the real process because students get feedback from the teacher and the conditions are not the
same as in real life.
Activation Task: it is a piece of classroom work that encourages students to activate a range of language
functions and structures including making suggestions, agreeing, disagreeing, talking about quantity, how
much/ how many, wh- questions, etc. Students start to create their own ways of expression, recombining
familiar words, structures.
Enabling tasks: they are designed to develop skills and knowledge that will ultimately facilitate the process
of authentic communication. Act as support for communicative tasks. Their purpose is to provide students
with necessary linguistic tools to carry out the activity. The main focus is on linguistic aspects (grammar,
vocabulary, pronunciation) rather than on meaning.
Language exercises: it is a piece of classroom work focusing learners on, and involving learners in
manipulating some aspect of the linguistic system.
Communicative activities: it is a piece of classroom work involving a focus on a particular linguistic feature
but also involving the genuine exchange of meaning.
22. Explain the differences and purpose of rehearsal tasks and activation tasks. How do they
promote acquisition and creative language use?
The main difference is that with rehearsal tasks students do what they need to know to be able to do it outside
the classroom while with activation tasks students activate their previous knowledge with situations which are
not likely to happen but it will help students to solve problems.
23. Read the following characteristics and decide if they refer to Pedagogic Tasks (PT), Language
exercises (LE) or Both (B):
a. Focus on accuracy. LE
b. Focus on achieving meaning. PT
c. Have a clear working procedure. B
d. Resembles everyday life or are an approximation to it. PT
e. Some are based on controlled practice. LE
f. Their outcome is purely communicative in nature. PT
g. They focus on linguistic aspects of language (grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc.)
LE
h. They have a concrete language learning purpose. B
24. Is form necessary in TBLT?
The place of a focus on form in TBLT is controversial. Some theorists adopt a strong interpretation, arguing
that communicative interaction in the language is necessary and sufficient for language acquisition, and that
focus on form is unnecessary. Krashen is one of the main proponents of this strong approach. He argues that
there are two processes operating in language development, subconscious acquisition and conscious learning,
and that form-focused instruction is aimed at conscious learning which does not feed into subconscious
acquisition.
Proponents of a strong interpretation of TBLT believe very firmly that learners should be able to use whatever
linguistic means they can muster, and that an approach that imposes linguistic constraints cannot be called
task-based.
25. How do tasks and functions relate to each other?
Tasks and functions are closely related. Any task will be underpinned by at least one function. Tasks can be
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thought of as functions + context. They allowed functions (and grammar) to be activated in a particular
communicative context.
26. What are the benefits of a task based syllabus?
In a task based syllabus, grammatical and functional functions will reappear numerous times in a diverse
range of contexts. This would appear to be healthy for SLA because it allows learners to restructure and
develop an elaborated understanding of the item in question.
27. According to Nunan, TBLT “allows the learner to grow into the language”. Explain this idea.
Task-based learning benefits students because it is more student-centred, allows for more meaningful
communication, and often provides for practical extra-linguistic skill building. As the tasks are likely to be
familiar to the students (e.g.: visiting the doctor), students are more likely to be engaged, which may further
motivate them in their language learning, so they grow into language.
28. Critical aspects of the post method pedagogy.
There are four aspects in the post method pedagogy.
1. Context: the context of language learning, including the use of pragmatics, cultural and social
awareness, is an important aspect to be considered. Kumaravadivelu revives the notion that language
is directly linked to society, and serves as a tool to suit speakers’ own needs. The emphasis on
context, including ethnic, social, and economic, corroborates with the underlying belief that one single
method can no longer be applied to every classroom.
2. Identity: negotiating identities in the classroom is a necessary strategy, especially among learners
from cultural diverse backgrounds. When learners’ cultures, languages, and experiences are affirmed,
they are likely to be more engaged in learning a language that is still foreign to them.
3. Affective and cognitive variables: teachers should implement metacognitie, cognitive, and socio-
affective strategies to guide students through their language learning journey. Having students reflect
on their own learning process, or learning about how they learn a language best, can be facilitative.
4. Critical Practice: it includes the 3 previous aspects. It offers learners an opportunity to engage in a
dialogue with other learners and teachers, encouraging a reflective and critical questioning of the
pedagogical material in relation to their own life, biases, social, and historical contexts. Critical
practice in ELT elevates learners from being passive learners to being active participants in
constructing knowledge in the classroom.
29. Complete the following definition of TBL:
In Task Based Learning the basic and initial point of organization is the __task_____. Class
work is organized as a sequence of them, and they generate the __language_____ to be used,
not vice versa. So in TBL, what teachers ask students is that they carry out a series of tasks,
for which they will to learn and ___manipulate______ some specific items of language. The
main focus is on the tasks to be done and the language is seen as the __medium_____
necessary to carry them out. TBL thus highlights the __instrumental________value of
language.
30. Stages within a task cycle.
Pre-task
The teachers introduce the topic and gives the students clear instructions on what they will have to do at the
task stage and might help the students to recall some language that may be useful for the task. the pre-task
stage can also often include playing a recording of people doing the task. This gives the students a clear model
of what will be expected of them. The students can take notes and spend time preparing for the task.
In a lower-level class, it will likely include an introduction or review of key vocabulary or grammatical
concepts the students will need to accomplish the assigned task. in a higher-level class, where the grammar
and vocabulary have already been introduced, the students might be asked to brainstorm as to what language
and linguistic features they would expect to need in order to complete the task successfully.
Task
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The students complete a task in pair or in groups using the language resources that they have. The instructor is
generally reduced to the role of observer, stepping in only when the students seem to be going too far astray
from the assignment at hand.
Planning
Students prepare a short oral or written report to tell the class what happened during the task. Then they
practise what they are going to say in their groups. Meanwhile the teacher is available for the students to ask
for advice to clear up any language questions they may have.
Report
Students then report back to the class orally or read the written report. The teacher chooses the order of when
students will present their reports and may give the students some quick feedback on the content. At this stage
the teacher may also play a recording of others doing the same task for the students to compare.
Analysis
The teacher then highlights relevant parts from the text of the recording for the students to analyse. They may
ask students to notice interesting features within this text. The teacher can also highlight the language that
students used during the report phase for analysis.
Practice
Finally, the teacher selects language areas to practice based upon the needs of the students and what emerged
from the task and report phases. The students then do practice activities to increase their confidence and make
a note of useful language.
31. Is the following right or wrong? Support your answer in any case: “Units within the task based
framework begin with a succession of enabling tasks or language exercises and communicative
activities leading to one pedagogic task at the end.”
The statement is false because a unit of work is a series of classes each of it having a structure: pre-task, task
cycle, and language focus, and each class is connected with each other through the same theme and from the
simpler to the more difficult pieces of work to be able to do a final task, which is the highest point of
communicativeness at the end of the unit of work. Each phase in the task cycle has its succession of enabling
tasks, communicative activities and language exercises which leads to a final pedagogic task.
32. Explain the Post-Method pedagogy
Kumaravadivelu views postmethod pedagogy as a three dimensional system with 3 pedagogic parameters:
particularity, practicality, and possibility. It allows us to go beyond, and overcome the limitations of method-
based pedagogy.
● The Parameter of Particularity: it requires any language pedagogy to be sensitive to a particular group
of teachers teaching a particular group of learners pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular
institutional context embedded in a particular sociocultural milieu. From a pedagogic point of view, it
works for and through particularity at the same time.
● The Parameter of Practicality: It involves the relationship between theory and practice. It
recognizes that no theory of practice can be fully useful unless it is generated through
practice. Theory of practice involves a continual reflection and action so it promotes that the
teacher needs to create their own theory based on experience.
● The parameter of possibility: It involves the socio political reality and the individual identity. It seeks
to talk the sociopolitical consciousness that participants bring with them to the classroom so that it can
help to develop a continual identity formation and social transformation.
33. Language-centred, Learner-centred and learning centred methods. (Post-Method Pedagogy)
Methods function as the primary vehicle for the development of basic knowledge and skills in the
prospective teacher.
We can classify them:
Language- centred Methods:
• Focus on linguistic forms.
• They seek to provide opportunities for learners to practice preselected, presequenced
linguistic structures through form focused exercises in class.
• Language learning is linear, additive process.
• Teacher´s task is to introduce grammatical items from simple to complex and help learners
to practice until he/she internalizes them,
Learner-centred Methods:
• They are focus on language use and learner´s needs.
• They seek to provide opportunities for learners to practice preselected, pre sequenced
grammatical structures as well as communicative functions through meaning focus activities.

11
• They involve the use of meaning language in context.
Learning-centred Methods:
• They are focused on learning processes. These methods seek to provide opportunities for
learners to participate in open. Ended meaningful interaction through communicative activities or
problem. solving tasks in class.
• Language development involves a nonlinear process.
• Language is best learned when learner´s attention is focused on understanding, saying and
doing something with it.
34. Why is it said that we are in a “post method era”?
The 2000’s introduced the post-method era: a shift from using methods in the purest sense to recognizing that
the nature of language learning is complex and non-linear. Teachers do not follow one specific approach to
language teaching.
35. Comparison and differences of project work or project based learning. Benefits.
Project Work: A project is like a “super task” which integrates language and meaningful content. The final
product comes from the realization of the final task. Students learn content knowledge, linguistic knowledge
and functional language. Projects, therefore, help provide a topic and situation to consolidate language and
provide further practice of specific tenses and/or lexis. Eg.A class magazine
Project Based Learning: PBL requires critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and various forms of
communication. To answer a Driving Question and create high-quality work, students need to do much more
than remember information. They need to use higher-order thinking skills and learn to work as a team.
36. Reflect on the benefits (linguistic and non-linguistic) of incorporating Collaborative Work in
the Foreign Language Classroom.
It involves groups of students working together to solve a problem, complete a task or create a product. It is
based on the idea that learning is a naturally social act in which the participants talk among themselves. It is
through collaboration that learning occurs. It is more students’ centred because they need to negotiate roles,
search for information, etc. it focuses on the process of working together. It means, that in that way, they
achieve more than they achieve alone.
37. Summarize the main aspects of TBLT:
a. Definition of task: it is a work plan which involves comprehending, manipulating, producing and
interacting in the target language.
b. Characteristics of task:
i. Meaning is primary.
ii. Learners aren’t given other people’s meanings to simply repeat.
iii. There is some sort of relationship to comparable real-world activities.
iv. Task completion has some priority.
v. the assessment of the task is in terms of outcome.
vi.
vii.
viii.
c. Principles behind TBLT:
i. Scaffolding.
ii. Task dependency.
iii. Recycling.
iv. Active/experiential learning.
v. Integration.
vi. Reproduction to creation.
vii. Reflection.
viii.
d. Pedagogic vs. real life tasks: a pedagogical task is a piece of classroom work which involves in
comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the language while their attention is focused
on meaning rather than on forms. A real task is a task that native speakers of a language would do in
everyday life. When learners do an authentic task they are doing something that
puts real communicative demands on them. ... Authentic tasks are easy to identify as they are what we
12
do with our own language all the time
e. Focus vs. unfocused tasks: a focus task stimulates communicative language use (for example, to
describe a picture difference using a specific grammar point). An unfocused task isn´t designed with a
particular grammatical form in mind and learners are free to use whatever linguistic resources they
have to complete the task, for example, a role play.
Role of form in TBLT: . Some theorists adopt a strong interpretation, arguing that communicative
interaction in the language is necessary and sufficient for language acquisition, and that focus on form is
unnecessary. Krashen is one of the main proponents of this strong approach. He argues that there are two
processes operating in language development, subconscious acquisition and conscious learning, and that form-
focused instruction is aimed at conscious learning which does not feed into subconscious acquisition.
Proponents of a strong interpretation of TBLT believe very firmly that learners should be able to use whatever
linguistic means they can muster, and that an approach that imposes linguistic constraints cannot be called
task-based.
f. Benefits of using TBLT:
i. Applicable and suitable for students of all ages and backgrounds.
ii. More varied exposure to language
iii. Students are free to use whatever vocabulary and grammar they know.
iv. Students pay attention to the relationship between form and meaning.
v. It allows meaningful communication.
vi. Encourages students to be more ambitious in the language they use.
g. Disadvantages of TBLT:
i. Requires a high level of creativity and initiative on the part of the task.
ii. There is a risk for learners to achieve fluency at the expense of accuracy.
iii. Requires resources beyond coursebooks and related materials usually found in language
classrooms.
iv.
MODULE 2: ASSESSMENT
1. Characterise formal assessment. Why are tests relevant in the language classroom?
Characteristics:
Formal assessments are the systematic, data-based tests that measure what and how well the students have
learned. Formal assessments determine the students’ proficiency or mastery of the content. The type of test
we use will depend on the situation, the need and the purpose of testing.
The main purpose of formal assessment is to measure the amount of knowledge that students have retained
from what they have been previously taught, in order to study and identify problem areas before a course
ends. Another purpose is to compare a student’s performance with that of other students.
Formal assessment is systematic, planned.
Tests are relevant because they will measure students’ ability in a more objective way than more subjective
forms of assessment such as informal observation and self-assessment. This is not to say that formal testing is
objective. Tests are relevant because they help us to find out how a student is progressing during a course of
study and to identify problem areas before a course ends. They also are useful to compare students’
performances between them, and between the results of previous tests to know how much have students learnt
during the year.
2. Formal assessment: characteristics of a good test.
A good test is one which mixes integrative and discrete test formats. We could employ some integrative tasks,
especially for productive skills like writing and speaking as they enable us to test students in real
communication. And for the receptive skills and for testing language, we could use some discrete items.
A good test has the following characteristics:
 Practicality: it has to be easy to be conducted, to score and to interpret.
 Reliability: a reliable test is consistent and dependable. The test should give similar results even
though different testers administrate it, or the same person takes the test 2 or more times.
 Validity: the test must measure what it has been designed to measure.
 Objectivity: a test is objective when it makes for the elimination of the scorer’s personal opinion bias
judgement so all equally competent users get the same results.
 Relevant.
3. What is feedback? How can ELT teachers provide feedback? Why is it so important for 13
the learning process? Explain the 6 aspects of feedback presented by Rebecca Anijovich
and relate them to ELT.
According to Rebeca Anijovich, feedback is the information which gives learners the information about how
well they are going, to help them to improve specific points. Feedback is that information that has some
impact and which generates some change on a system. This is information that circulates, from one point to
another, and as stimuli produces effects on the elements that make up the circle and can modify the results of
a system and even the system itself. Feedback is part of formative evaluation as it helps teachers identify
concepts that students are trying to understand and skills they are trying to acquire.
How can ELT teachers provide feedback?
 Make it worth their while.
 Build activities focusing on feedback into class time.
 Be seen to monitor whether students are reading and acting on feedback.
 Involve students in actively doing something with feedback.
 Give audio feedback, with marks at the end.
 Give feedback without, or before, marks.
 Insert dialogue with students as part of the feedback process.
 Make sure your feedback is worth reading.
 Make sure your feedback is high profile.
Feedback is important because:
 It contributes to the learning process as students realize their successes, mistakes, strengths and
weaknesses.
 It makes students to get involved and reflect on their proposals and thus build their own strategies to
do a task.
 It can make students to feel motivated, it can improve a student's confidence, self-awareness and
enthusiasm for learning.
Aspects of feedback:
 Impact of feedback: they have an impact on self-esteem. To emphasize how much students have
achieved only, can lead that the students do not feel to improve. Thus, it is better that feedback should
be related to the task, in how the student solved it and how the student self-regulates his/her own
learning.
 Another aspect to have in mind is how feedback is given and in which quantity. A positive feedback
will have a positive impact while a negative feedback will have a negative impact.
 The impact that feedback has on the student may not be instantaneous. Feedback has to be about the
future; thus, students can be asked to hand in their work again with the indications solved.
 Which decisions does the student make in relation with the feedback he got? For feedback to be
effective, it should be clear, language and body language should be adequate. The physical and
emotional context should be appropriate so the message has its correct impact.
 Group or individual feedback: group feedback is useful if each member was engaged in the task. This,
should be after the task was solved and it should include information about the product they did and
how the group work all together.
 How does the teacher give feedback? Feedback depends on the students’ responses, the classroom
atmosphere, and the bonds between teacher and students. Teacher uses different codes to give
feedback, for example, marking and checking, writing comments on one side.
 The manner the teacher gives feedback is important. Tone and mood are very important. The what
and how are the allies or enemies of feedback.
4. Characteristics of feedback according to Rebeca Anijovich.
 Specific: The comments must be specific and related to a specific, measurable performance objective,
which should also include clear expectations for students and their performance.
 Timely: Recipients should receive feedback as close to the event (exam, work, project) as possible.
Immediate feedback will give better results than delayed feedback.
 Adequate: Feedback should be presented in a positive way, tactfully and not in a threatening manner.
 Focus on behaviour, not personality: You should always provide information that is based on the
behaviour, not the personality or characteristics of the person, unless absolutely necessary.
 Proactive: Do not delay or avoid providing timely feedback. It is always better to identify problems and
provide information before they become insoluble or have a great impact on the student.
 Give it using descriptive language: Describing how a person's behaviour affects their behaviour will help 14
facilitate understanding. In addition, it will focus the discussion on behaviour instead of personal
characteristics.
 Do not use judgmental language: Avoiding judgmental language will lessen the possibility of the person
being defensive. It will also increase the probability that the information will be received as objective and
based on observable facts or behaviours.
 Based on accurate and credible information: The answer must be based on accurate information. You
should never use rumours as examples.
 Recurring: Feedback must be periodic.
 Embedded in culture: Promote an environment of continuous feedback and professional development.
 Focused: Feedback should be channelled to situations of key results.
 Offer guidance: The information given to the student should be used to confirm or correct their
performance. A simple: "good work" is not enough, it must be specific and guide the person in the desired
direction.
 Linked to an action plan: When providing feedback, those responsible must also give specific guidance to
the student, who must know exactly how to increase their performance and the steps they must take to
reach the proposed goal.
 An appropriate amount: Too many comments overwhelm and confuse students, as well as too little
feedback is not enough to cause change.
 From multiple sources: In order to internalize the observations and cause change, recipients must receive
information from multiple sources, such as other teachers, management team, guidance team, among
others.
 From the data: Quantitative performance measures, such as approved evaluations, days of absence, work
submitted, projects completed, are essential for the feedback process. These data should be presented in a
meaningful way.
 Adapted to the recipient: the students’ characteristics, the level of performance and style of cognitive
processing should influence the type of feedback they receive.
 Easy to understand: The feedback should be easy to understand and the recipient should repeat the
information discussed again.
 Collaboration: Allowing the student to contribute to the feedback process, and offering solutions, will
help them accept the observations more easily.
5. Is feedback relevant for students?
 It gives a central role to the student during the evaluation process.
 Students assume their responsibility about their own learning and identify their strengths and weaknesses.
 It is necessary to establish clear objectives for the process and results of learning.
 It improves the cognitive processes.
 It gives feedback to relevant places.
6. What is the difference between formal and informal assessment?
One difference between formal and informal assessment is that the last one occurs incidentally, while formal
assessment is planned. While formal assessment is systematic and tries to measure what and how well
students have learnt, informal assessment tries to collect information about students’ performance in normal
classroom conditions.
7. Alternative assessment. Authentic assessment and performance based assessment.
Alternative assessment, authentic assessment, and performance-based assessment are sometimes used to mean
variants of performance assessments that require students to generate rather than choosing a response.
Alternative assessment is a blanket term that covers any number of alternatives to standardized test
(interviews, portfolios, journals)
Authentic assessment is an alternative assessment. For an assessment to be authentic, the context, purpose,
audience and constraints of the test should connect in some way to real world situations and problems. It
integrates the assessment of traditional academic context with the knowledge and skills important to lifelong
learning using a variety of techniques, including real world situations.
Performance-based Assessment is an alternative assessment, it requires students to construct a response,
create a product, or demonstrate application of knowledge in authentic context. Performance-based
assessment requires the development of new assessment tools and scoring rubrics.
Types of alternative assessment:
 Performance-based assessments (projects, exhibitions, role playing, experiments, and demonstrations)
 Open-ended questions 15
 Writing samples
 Interviews
 Journals and learning logs
 Story of text retelling
 Cloze tests
 Portfolios
 Self and peer assessments
 Teacher observation
 Checklists
8. What is an assessment task programme? What is the purpose of designing an assessment
task programme? Why is it more beneficial for teachers and learners? Describe all the
instruments and/or types of assessment that can be used to provide an integral an
effective evaluation and highlight their relevance within the programme. What do EFL
teachers assess in the language class? When and how do they do it? Develop your answers
as accurately as possible resorting to the theoretical background analysed in class.
An assessment task programme is a systematic way of assessing students formally, informally and through
self-assessment because they complement each other and teachers can obtain an overall idea of the students’
progress. Tests are organized to be done gradually. Feedback should also be included as it makes students to
get involved and reflect on their success, mistakes, strengths and weaknesses, and makes them to feel
motivated and feel confident. With formal assessment teachers obtain information of the students’ progress.
With informal assessment, teachers obtain information of the students’ progress during normal classroom
conditions. Self-assessment helps teachers to learn about the feelings of the students toward the material,
language, methods, and it helps students to become aware of their progress and their responsibility with their
own learning.
Designing an assessment programme allows students to demonstrate achievement of clearly communicated
learning outcomes. In planning assessment, teachers consider the disabilities that students may have and, if it
is necessary, determine a strategy for extending accommodations for such student.
Teachers, first, need to think about the syllabus objectives and work out a programme, thinking about what
they are going to test and when. Then, teachers decide on they are going to test and suitable test format.
Having done this, teachers write the tests and administer them. Finally, it is time to think about the results and
reach the conclusions about the learners’ results. The teacher should include summative and formative
assessment to get a better image of students’ progress. With formative assessment the teacher learns about
how the process of learning is occurring and can do remedial work if needed. With summative assessment the
teacher identifies how much the students have learnt as it evaluates the product.
The purpose is to provide a much more accurate picture of students’ ability. It is beneficial because
assessment is done gradually. Moreover, it is less stressful for teachers and students. For teachers, because
they do not have a large amount of work in a short period of time; for students, because if one test went
wrong, he/she has another chance to do it better and their performance would be more reliable and accurate.
Additionally, students get the information of their performance during the course so they can do remedial
work. This helps students to achieve objectives set out in the syllabus because they achieve them step by step.
9. All tests are formal assessment but not all formal assessment is related to tests. Explain
this quote resorting to the theoretical background analysed.
All tests are considered formal assessment but not all formal assessment is related to tests because teachers
can evaluate students through specific activities done at home, a dialogue which is created by a group work in
class, questions related to a text, a game in which students have to write sentences according to items of
grammar. Not only the formal written test situated at the end of a unit in a course of study is considered
formal assessment. There are more instruments to evaluate content and they are also part of formal
assessment.
10. How can linguistic factors be assessed informally?
a. Listening: we develop listening skills in the classroom when all students listen to one text at the
same time. We check listening by getting an impression of what they’ve understood, by looking their
answers or by monitoring activities such as pair work or reactions to instructions from you, to recycle
what they have heard orally or in written form.
b. Speaking: we check speaking by observing and monitoring oral performances in class, and during 16
speaking activities while they happen (games, role-plays).
c. Reading: we check reading informally by observing the way students behave during the reading
activity, by checking understanding, when recycling information (for example, writing a response to a
letter they read). Another way is with a jigsaw reading (divide a text and different groups have to tell
the others about their part.
d. Writing: we assess writing informally by choosing the most important pieces of writing that students
do and do not trying to assess every piece of written work. Group writing activities can make marking
more viable and enables to give feedback to more students. For example, when writing a story focus
could be on text organization and lining and not on grammatical accuracy or spelling.
e. Grammar and Vocabulary: this can be done during the practice stage of the lesson. Also, during
free writing or speaking activities, where instead of focusing on communication we can focus on
language. Giving students a wrong sentence so they can identify the mistake can be an enjoyable way
of checking grammar and vocabulary.
11. Explain: how do informal and formal assessment complement each other?
To get the adequate performance of our students we should balance our formal and informal tests because
with formal assessment we know the product, how our students are going with the acquisition of linguistic
factors, and with informal assessment we can know about our students’ performances in classroom conditions.
By comparing results of both types of assessment, we get a more reliable picture of a student’s abilities.
12. What is informal assessment?
It is a way of collecting information about our students’ performance in normal classroom conditions. It can
be done during a period of time like a term or an academic year. It is incidental and unplanned.
13. Which aspects can be assessed informally?
We assess our student’s performance when speaking, writing, reading or listening. We can see which students
are performing well and which students are finding difficulties. We are also aware of students’ attitudes, how
much effort they are making and how much they are participating in class activities.
14. What is “systematic observation”?
Systematic classroom is a quantitative method of measuring classroom behaviours from direct observations
that specifies both the events or behaviours that are to be observed and how they are to be recorded. Firstly,
we need to work out what we are going to assess. Then, we must establish clear criteria for assessing students
and not only rely on impressions. Finally, it’s important to link the informal assessment we do with formal
assessments (tests) and with self-assessment.
15. Which considerations should teachers take into account when assessing informally?
 Decide how much we are going to assess as not everything that happens in the classroom can be assessed.
 Make sure that marking doesn’t take up all our time.
 Decide which area will be more important to assess.
 Deciding what is a pass or a fail needs a balance of four skills, language and non-linguistic factors.
 Decide proportion of informal and formal assessment.
16. What are non-linguistic factors? Why is it relevant to assess them?
Non-linguistic factors are aspects affecting assessment which are not to do with language per se but are more
connected to other factors such as attitude, working within groups and cooperation.
It is relevant to assess them because we need to think about our students’ overall educational development. It is
important for learners to develop in terms of a language and in terms of attitudes towards learning, towards
language, different cultures and other people. We need to consider students’ ability to take responsibility for and
organize their own learning.
 Attitude: attitudes towards learning, the language, other cultures and other people. The most important is
the attitude towards learning, without a positive attitude to learning, learning is not very likely to take
place. One way of assessing our students’ attitude is by writing profiles: is the student: passive/active,
offers opinions, shows interest, cooperates, accepts opinions? Is the student punctual, hands in homework
regularly when asked, attendance is regular?
 Group work: the ability to work with other people in a group is crucial. The student: has difficulty in
groups, is able to work in groups, accepts group organization, accepts the work of others? Project works,
role plays and games provide us with opportunities to observe and assess group work. Cooperation
involves making decisions in groups, sharing out work, helping each other and positively criticising the
work of others.
 Organization of work: this is the ability of students to organize their own work. Assessment could be 17
done: is able to organize work systematically, to plan work, to produce presentable work, conscientious,
self-corrects? This can be done through: their notebook, books.
 Interdependence: this is the ability to work on their own. Students should be encouraged and trained to
work alone using resources available such us: dictionaries, the course book, to refer to previous work as
an aid.
17. What are the benefits/results of assessing students informally?
As informal assessment is one part of an assessment programme, results can be compared periodically to
those obtained from formal and self-assessment. When comparing them, we might assume a fairly reliable
picture of a student’s ability.
Non-linguistic factors can affect the linguistic factors in a positive or negative manner, thus, it is needed to
assess them.
18. What are the reasons behind taking tests?
 To find out about a candidate’s suitability to follow a course of study, although this is not the case in state
education.
 To find out how a student is progressing during a course of study and possibly identify problem areas
before a course ends.
 To compare a student’s performance with that of other students.
 To find out how much a student has learnt during the course or academic year and compare the results
with the beginning of the course.
19. What are the different types of tests? What are they used for?
 Progress tests: it is administered during courses after certain blocks of study (for example number of
units, each term). The aim is to find out information about how well classes as a whole and individual
students have grasped the learning objectives, how well the course content is functioning within the
specified aims and objectives and future course design. When linked with self-assessment, feedback can
help learners to identify their own problems and to set their own goals for the future.
 Summative tests: are administered at the end of courses and their objective is to see if students have
achieved the objectives set out in the syllabus. These tests can be used to decide whether students move
on to a higher level or not, but also to show progress in a secondary school together with informal
assessment. Information from summative tests is lost because it doesn’t feed back into the learning
process as formative assessment does (type of assessment which feeds back into learning and gives the
learner information on his/her progress throughout a course thus helping him/her to be a more efficient
learner).
 Entry/placement tests: this kind of test will indicate at which level a learner will learn most effectively in
a situation where there are different levels. The aim is to produce groups which are homogenous in level.
 Diagnostic test: it is used to find out problem areas. These tests are based on failure: we want to know in
which areas a student or group of students are having problems. We should consider it as a technique
based on eliciting errors rather than correct answers. They are important to design further course activities
and work out remedial activities, and learners can analyse their own problems.
 Proficiency tests: they aim to describe what students are capable of doing in a foreign language and are
usually set by external bodies. They enable students to have some proof of their ability in a language.
They also provide employers with some guarantee of proficiency in a language because these tests are
considered to be reliable and valid.
20. How can tests have a negative washback effect?
If the syllabus pays attention to writing and grammar, formal assessment should reflect this and assessment
should be in the same way. If assessment is communicative, classes are based on grammar, this is a very
negative washback (the influence of tests or examinations on the teaching and learning leading up to the
assessment) effect on students. When planning formal assessment at classroom level it is useful to make a
clear breakdown of what you are going to test and how much weight each area carries. The breakdown should
reflect the overall syllabus balance of the course.
21. How can teachers offer students a positive washback effect?
A test can have a positive influence if it contains authentic real-life examples of the type of tasks which
learners will need to perform in the future. Teachers offer students a positive washback when they are being
tested with the same kind of tasks they did in the classroom, so there is a match between what has been taught
and what is being tested. A test can have a beneficial washback effect if it is practical, reliable and with high
validity.
22. How should teachers decide what to test? 18

An important thing is to decide on weighting between different elements in the course. This will depend on
the kind of class you have and the syllabuses you are following. When planning formal assessment at
classroom level it is useful to make a clear breakdown of what you are going to test and how much weight
each area carries. This breakdown should reflect the overall syllabus balance of the course.
23. What are the benefits and drawbacks of both discrete item tests and open-ended tests?
● Discrete items test format: they are the most suitable when we want our tests to be reliable.
These formats include many items requiring short answers (multiple choice questions). These
test formats are practical, usually being quick and easy to mark. Unfortunately, such formats
have low validity, because doing such a test is not a test of real communication.
● Integrative and open-ended test formats: they involve communication and interaction
(reading a letter and replying to it). They have high validity. Open ended formats are those
where responses are open (written compositions such as stories). They have beneficial
washback effects, as students become aware of the importance of communication.
However, it may be difficult to interpret results. Firstly, if the student has or not problems.
Secondly, they are impractical, taking a long time to mark and administer. Thirdly, they can
be unreliable, as they are more difficult to mark consistently.
24. Which aspects should teachers have into consideration when writing a test?
 Avoid confusion and ambiguity which may make our test unreliable or invalid.
 Check the initial draft.
 Do the test ourselves to see if we can spot any changes that need to be made.
 Ask a colleague to do the test as there may be changes to make that may be obvious to us but not to other
people.
One way of writing a test is to do it with other colleagues. First, we should agree on what to test. Then, each
person can write a part (one listening, the other reading) or work on each together. A collective approach to
writing tests makes this difficult part easier and at the same time it provides an opportunity to compare ideas
and attitudes. It also provides the moment to discuss the criteria to use to assess performance.
 Write the instructions. A clear and concise rubric will give validity to the tests as students will know what
is expected of them. Clarity is essential in rubrics. If the language is unclear, students may not know what
is expected of them and could fail to perform to their full capability in the test.
o Conciseness: the rubric should not be too long as students may concentrate on what and where to
produce their answer rather than on getting the right answer itself. A way to solve this may be to
put the rubrics in the student’s mother tongue.
 When checking the tasks, you need to think about background knowledge. It should be impossible to
answer any question correctly without reading or listening to a test. Students should not be able to use
their knowledge of their world or background knowledge of certain areas to answer questions.
 It is also important to look out for any kind of cultural bias when writing or checking test questions. No
items should depend on specific knowledge or certain cultures or customs. The test should not require the
student to demonstrate knowledge of a particular culture.
 The test should reflect what students have been doing in class. A test at the end of the course should
reflect the whole course as far as possible.
 All items in your test should be relevant in terms of real world language use. The task should correspond
as closely as possible to some use of the language in the real world. The key is to make the task appear to
the students as something which they might actually have to do with the language.
 Time:
o In reading tests, students should not be required to answer items in a limited time which would be
unrealistic for a reader in real life.
o In listening tests, students should not be required to answer too many items in a short period of
time, especially if the listening text gives answers in rapid succession.
o In writing tests, students should not be required to produce x amount of words in an unrealistic
time limit. Time should be given for planning, writing, reading and possible rewriting.
o In speaking tests where there is an interlocutor, unrealistic time pressures on answers and oral
production should be avoided. There should be time for reflection, checking understanding or
asking for repetition.
25. What can teachers do to avoid tension during a test?
 We need to make sure that formal assessment takes place under test conditions (students cannot copy or 19
help each other).
 First, we should organize the place and to separate students as much as possible.
 There also is a minimum of interruptions and outside background noise.
 Time also has to be considered. Students should know how much time they have to do the test.
 It is also important to have the materials prepared in advance, that you have enough copies and that they
are clear. If there are any errors students should be informed before the test begins.
 Check any recorded material before the test; if the recording isn’t of good quality all attempts should be
made to remedy the problem.
 Electrical equipment also needs to be checked beforehand.
 Make sure any audio equipment is adequate in terms of sound quality and acoustics in the room where the
test is to be administered.
 Students will need to be prepared for the test. If they have had short and regular progress tests they will be
much more prepared and less worried. Students should know in advance the time of the test so they arrive
at time, they also need to know if they have to bring any material (pen, pencil, etc.) and dictionary.
 Tell students about the test conditions: that they shouldn’t speak, that they should raise their hand to ask a
question. That they cannot copy answers, and what would happen if they are caught doing so.
26. How should teachers rate tests?
Short and regular assessment tasks spread the test marking load over the whole term is more beneficial and
takes less time to correct and marking would be more accurate and reliable. The size of the class will
determine the kind of test, in smaller classes open compositions and oral interviews can be afforded, while
with larger classes a multiple choice question is preferable.
 Discrete item or objective tests: they are called like that because of the way of marking them. An
objective test could be marked by any person capable of interpreting and applying a marking key which
gives the correct answers which are unique and not negotiable, for example, multiple choice questions.
Objective testing can be considered as marking by counting. They are easily and quickly marked, but are
difficult to write so that they are reliable. Another disadvantage is the case where many variants of a
similar answer would be suitable and correct to an item. For example, the answer to the question “What
does the man want?” can be: “He wants to buy petrol”, “buy petrol”, or “petrol” are all possible, and the
acceptable one will depend on the test designer.
 Subjective tests: are based on somebody’s opinion, a judgement, a decision about candidate performance.
The person who is to make the judgement is expected to be qualified to make the judgement. These tests
can be objectivised by using rating scales which outline a description of what each point on a scale means
(e.g. 10: the ability to…)
Reliability of raters is the problem.
 Inter-rater reliability: how to ensure that different raters apply the scales in the same
way.
 Intra-rater reliability: how to ensure that the same rater will apply the scales in the
same way on different days or at different times of the day.
Objectively marked tests are not better than subjectively marked tests.
It is a good idea to define beforehand the answer key of a test when other teachers are going to mark the test
so there is no doubt of what is a correct or incorrect answer. With open-ended questions you should ensure
that you cover all possible answers. Work out how you are going to distribute marks before administering the
test.
* analytic rating scale: scale for rating performance or progress in which different activities are
divided into constituent parts and a different band is produced for each activity. We assess each
component of the skill. For example, in an analytical assessment of speaking, we evaluate each
component: pronunciation, vocabulary, the message content, etc.
* holistic rating scale: scale in which different activities are included over several bands to produce a
multi-activity scale. We test the skill as a whole, not each part independently of the other. For
example, in a holistic assessment of speaking, we look at the overall oral performance of the student
(fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. are assessed under speaking as a whole)
The advantage of holistic rating for testing is that rater can internalize the descriptions in a short time. This
system is practical and quick to administer. The disadvantage is that students’ problems are that each
component of the skill is not seen.
The advantage of analytic rating for testing is that it is easier to assign a certain level using simplified and
discrete scales. The disadvantage is that it is less practical in terms of time, paper and training.
27. Types of assessment. 20

Assessment involves measuring the performance of our students and the progress that they are making. It
helps us to be able to diagnose the problems they have and to provide them with useful feedback.
 Formal assessment: is systematic and planned. This is a synonymous of “testing”. It refers to what are
often called examinations (PET; CAE, CPE). They are administered to many students to standardized
conditions. It also refers to the tests administered in class by the teacher in order to assess learning.
Formal assessment can be:
o Formative assessment: ongoing. It evaluates the process. The information gathered will lead
to remedial work when necessary. It helps to check areas of improvement. It aims to monitor
students’ learning, for example with quizzes.
o Summative assessment: focus on learning outcomes. It evaluates the product. It identifies
how much has been learnt.
 Informal assessment: is incidental and unplanned. It is the observation of everyday performance. It is
a way of collecting information about our students’ performance in normal classroom conditions.
 Self-assessment: it refers when the students themselves assess their own progress.
 Assessment FOR learning: an approach to teaching and learning that creates feedback which is used
to improve students’ performance. Students become more involved in the learning process and from
this gain confidence in what they are expected to learn and to what standard. To give feedback on
learning and teaching (written/oral feedback to students, staff-students dialogue, early feedback to
staff to improve teaching). FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT. INFORMAL ASSESSMENT.
 Assessment AS learning: to self-regulate and critically evaluate. Students self-review and/or peer
review to make a judgment (critical evaluation) of their work. Students collaborate to develop their
own shared assessment criteria. FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT. SELF-ASSESSMENT.
 Assessment OF learning: to demonstrate achievement. Graded end or mid semester exam, project,
essay. SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT. FORMAL ASSESSMENT.
ALL TESTS /FORMAL ASSESSMENT ARE SUMMATIVE.
ALL KIND OF INFORMAL ASSESSMENT IS FORMATIVE.
28. Significant learning. Examples.
Learning involves any lasting changes that we may observe in our behaviour or that take place in our minds.
Ausubel’s significant learning theory states that we add and adapt the new information to our previous
knowledge. That is, construction of knowledge begins with our observation and recognition of events and
objects through concepts we already have. We learn by constructing a network of concepts and adding to
them. It is a conscious active process in which the subject is the protagonist. Some examples will be: making
concept maps, explaining the lesson to a friend.
29. Difference between tests and alternative assessments. Performance based assessment and
authentic assessment.
While the traditional paper and pencil tests may be effective to assess some of the skills (such as listening)
they are not sufficient to assess the productive skills of speaking and writing. The nature of proficiency
oriented language learning calls for a variety of assessment options reflecting the numerous instructional
strategies used in the classroom.
Authentic assessment is an alternative assessment. For an assessment to be authentic, the context, purpose,
audience and constraints of the test should connect in some way to real world situations and problems.
Performance-based Assessment is an alternative assessment, it requires students to construct a response,
create a product, or demonstrate application of knowledge in authentic context. Performance-based
assessment requires the development of new assessment tools and scoring rubrics.
30. Complete the chart about the different forms of assessment:
INFORMAL FORMAL SELF
ASSESSMENT ASSESSMENT ASSESSMENT
DEFINITION It is a way of It is a way of It is a process that
gathering information collecting information, involves discovering
of students’ generally an strengths,
performance in normal evaluation of a improvements,
classroom conditions. product which has a weaknesses, feelings,
It is related with an mark. It is related with materials and methods
evaluation of the an evaluation of the used in the course. It
process. product. is related to the
students’ and teacher’s
performances.
21
FUNCTION To check To check if students To evaluate students
understanding, to achieve objectives and their performance
evaluate students in in order to improve or
another way, not only change some things or
with written tests continue with the
(how they work in same strategies.
groups)
INSTRUMENTS/ Homework, attitude, Oral presentations, Quizzes, learner
TECHNIQUES/EXAMPLE activities done in role plays, written diaries,
class, speaking tests. questionnaires.
S English in class, group
writing activities,
comprehension
questions,
participation in class.
RESULTS It is useful to see if the It is useful to check It is useful to
course of study is students’ recognize worries,
applied correctly. understanding in order mistakes, problems.
Teacher can see if to go on. Teacher can
specific activities are see how students
good for a specific develop the abilities
group of students or applied to specific
not goals.
PURPOSE(WHAT DOES IT It measures students’ It measures students’ It measures the
MEASURE?) work during classes performance during a activities done in
and the work students test or another formalclass, whether they
do at home. It also assessment technique. were meaningful or
measures skills. It is not. It also measures
useful for remedial previous knowledge
work. students bring with
them at the beginning
of a course as a
diagnoses.
31. Decide if the following statements are True or False. Support your answer in both cases
resorting to the theoretical background analysed:
a. The washback effect of tests is related to the effect or impact that tests can have on
students' motivation. True. Washback effect is the influence of tests on students. Its result impacts
on the students, on teaching practices and on the curriculum. It can have a positive or negative result.
b. Informal assessment is used to measure non-linguistic factors, such as students’
attitudes and commitment with their learning. False. Linguistic factors, such as listening,
speaking, writing, and reading can also be assessed informally in accordance to their specific
characteristics.
c. Tests are part of formal assessment but all formal assessment techniques are tests.
True. We may use different types of techniques to assess formally, for example, through roleplays,
portfolios, oral presentations, discussions.
d. Self-assessment is used to make students reflect upon their behaviour and
commitment and values. False. Self-assessment also measures the activities done in class, whether
they were meaningful or not. It makes students reflect on their previous knowledge, linguistic factors,
teacher’s practices, and are useful as diagnosis.
e. Formal assessment is planned and summative, whereas informal assessment is incidental
and formative. True. Informal assessment is unplanned and incidental and it involves observing
learners as they learn. While formal assessment is systematic and planned.
f. The only difference between formal and informal assessment lies in the instruments 22
used to collect information. False. The difference is if the assessment is systematic and planned
(formal assessment) or incidental and unplanned (informal assessment).
g. Teachers use formal assessment to assess students’ linguistic knowledge of the
language. False. Teachers can also assess linguistic knowledge of the language with informal
assessment.
h. Though there are several techniques teachers can use to evaluate, tests are the most
accurate instrument to assess students´ overall competence of a language. False. Tests
are not the only way to assess students. There are alternative assessment instruments, like portfolios,
roleplays and oral presentations that can demonstrate the students’ competence of a language.
i. Feedback is part of summative assessment. False. Feedback is part of formative assessment as
it assesses the process of students’ learning and it helps to do remedial work.
j. It can be said that formal assessment is purely summative, whereas informal
assessment is completely formative. False. Formal assessment is planned. Teachers can plan
how to access the process as well through planned observation, progress checks, and so on.
32. List the benefits and disadvantages of using written tests for assessing students:
a. Benefits: they are necessary to find out how students are progressing during the course. They also
help to identify problems as they help to compare students’ performance and how much they have
learnt during the course.
b. Drawbacks: they can have a negative influence if they contain artificial tasks not link with real
future needs. Another drawback is that the information is not always accurate. Moreover, motivation
will depend on how teachers use the results of the test.
33. Why is Performance Based Assessment (PBA) the most appropriate and reliable way, in
linguistic terms, to assess language learning and language performance? Provide some
examples of instruments and techniques.
PBA requires students to perform real-life, authentic tasks, usually using the productive skills in combination
of the receptive skills. Some instruments are: writing an essay, problem-solving tasks, role playing, group
discussions. Tasks should be as authentic as possible. The advantage is that students can elicit authentic
communication and that they can reduce the negative washback effects of testing. PBA requires students to
applicate knowledge to create a product (spoken or written). They are process-oriented. It measures students’
abilities to use the language to respond to a daily life situation. It offers a broad spectrum of possibilities to
address different learning styles.
34. Why are tests necessary but not sufficient in the EFL classroom? Describe their benefits
and drawbacks (you may need to resort to the washback effect of tests)
Tests should be a complement to other forms of assessment (self, informal, alternative assessment). Tests are
not the only way to assess students, we can also assess students informally, for example. There are some
factors that can affect students at the moment of testing them (such as anxiety) so it’s important to take into
account other ways of measuring their knowledge such as practical works, oral interaction during class, their
attitude towards learning the language, how they work in groups and individually. Thus, the teacher can have
an overall image of the student’s progress.
35. What are the overall benefits of formal assessment?
It is useful to check students’ understanding in order to go on. Teacher can see how students develop the
abilities applied to specific goals.
36. Why is self-assessment vital in the learning process?
Self-assessment is brought by the hand of the student itself. It can provide us with useful information about
students’ expectations and needs, their problems and worries, how they feel about their own progress, their
reactions to the materials and methods being used, what they think about the course in general. Self-
assessment can be a much more direct and efficient way of getting information than teacher assessment. For
example, asking students what problems they feel they have. Self-assessment is an integral part of learning.
-Questionnaires
-Surveys
-Descriptions (learners’ diaries, counselling sessions)
37. What are the bases for implementing self-assessment?
The results from teacher’s assessment and students’ self-assessment feed back into the content of a course.
23
Remedial work is done when necessary and objectives can be changed as a result of information from
assessment. Self-assessment should be introduced from the first day of class through a simple questionnaire
about how they feel about previous learning experiences with English, or with diagnostic questionnaires.
Second, it is a good time to think about objectives for the coming year. This can also be done unit by unit.
The beginning of a course is also a good time for students to think about their attitudes towards learning and
their study habits. Self-assessment can also give the teacher feedback about performance without having to
correct every single activity done in the classroom.
38. Review the list of techniques for self-assessment.
Profiles, learner diaries, graphs, self-editing, test yourself, questionnaires-multiple choice questions, listing
problems, surveys.
39. Which evaluation instruments and procedures should be used under a Task Based
Approach? (What? How? Who?)
Evaluation is an integral part of the learning process, which should be planned as part of the process itself.
The role of evaluation is to give teachers and students feedback that will determine adjustments and re-
planning of the work in hand to ensure that learning takes pace effectively and efficiently. Thus, evaluation
should take place all through the unit and be a continuous process. Students’ work and progress in
communicative ability and knowledge of the linguistic system need to be assessed both formally and
informally. It shouldn’t be related to formal written tests only. Other aspects that can be evaluated in a unit
and that offer feedback are: classroom procedures, tasks carried out, materials used and produced, abilities
and attitudes developed, achievement of objectives, meeting of course requirements (doing homework,
speaking English in class).
WHAT can be evaluated? Teacher, process (tasks, materials, students’ and teacher’s roles (interaction,
participation), product (students’ performance, achievement of objectives).
WHO evaluates? Teacher, students, others.
HOW? Evaluation instruments (diaries, questionnaires, students’ self-assessment, peer assessment, students’
profiles, teacher’s self-observation and observation of students, tests).
40. How should evaluation take place during a unit of work?
Evaluation is an integral part of the learning process, which should therefore be planned as a part of the
process itself, in advance, before the unit begins to take shape in the classroom.
planning of the work in hand to ensure that learning takes place effectively and efficiently. Evaluation should
be a continuous process, not solely related to the accomplishment of the final task.
Task based units offer teachers an invaluable context for on-going formative (process) evaluation. A large
proportion of task based work within a unit of work gives the opportunity to teachers to monitor students’
work, concentrating on observing what is happening in the classroom.
41. What is the difference between formative and summative evaluation?
In formative evaluation teachers have more freedom of movement to assess students’ work while they are
performing tasks and the information gathered will lead to remedial work when necessary. It measures the
process of learning.
In summative the assessment is on the final task product. It measures what students have learnt in a period of
time.
42. Explain the following resorting to the theoretical background:
a. Assessment and testing are the same thing.
Assessment is a synonymous of testing. Testing as formal assessment is an important way of
assessing learners. Through assessment we measure the performance of students and their progress.
Teachers diagnose students’ problems and give them useful feedback in order to improve. Within
assessment, testing in one of the possible ways of doing this, among informal or self-assessment.
b. Assessment can only come at the end of a unit.
Assessment is a continuous process that is done during the course by observation and monitoring
activities, group work or individual work, attitude, and so on. Only when the students’ problems have
been solved and they got feedback, the process finishes with the assessment of the product with a
formal assessment.
c. A written test can effectively measure learning.
A written test measures learning, but it is not the only way to assess students. There are other types of
tests to measure different aspects, like roleplays, oral presentations.
d. Informal assessment is only appropriate for measuring attitudes towards the learning 24
process.
Informal assessment not only measures the attitudes towards the learning process. With informal
assessment the 4 skills can also be measured.
e. All formal tests are equal.
Not all formal tests are equal as there is not only one way of assessing formally. There are different
types of tests such as progress, placement, diagnostic tests that are used at different stages of the
course, depending on the purpose.
f. There is no way to build a “good test”. Criteria is just up to the teacher.
A good test is reliable, valid and practical. A good test has a positive influence in the student if it
contains authentic, real-life examples of the type of tasks done during the course.
g. The main objective of assessing students is giving them a mark.
The main objective of assessing students is to focus on their achievements. Assessment should consist
on several stages, so to have a better view of the students’ progress.
h. Formal assessment is only related with written tests.
There are several instruments to formally assess students, for example, portfolios, roleplays,
discussions, oral presentations.
43. Write a reflection on the following quote. Resort to the theoretical background to support
your ideas as regards tests and other ways of assessing students: “Using only tests as a
basis for assessment is not enough to measure student’s learning. Assessment under a Task
Based Approach should be more performance-based and interactive”.
Evaluation is an integral part of the learning process, which should be planned as part of the process itself.
planning of the work in hand to ensure that learning takes pace effectively and efficiently. Thus, evaluation
should take place all through the unit and be a continuous process. Students’ work and progress in
communicative ability and knowledge of the linguistic system need to be assessed both formally and
informally. It shouldn’t be related to formal written tests only. Other aspects that can be evaluated in a unit
and that offer feedback are: classroom procedures, tasks carried out, materials used and produced, abilities
and attitudes developed, achievement of objectives, meeting of course requirements (doing homework,
speaking English in class). PBA requires students to perform real-life, authentic tasks, usually using the
productive skills in combination of the receptive skills. Some instruments are: writing an essay, problem-
solving tasks, role playing, group discussions. Tasks should be as authentic as possible. The advantage is that
students can elicit authentic communication and that they can reduce the negative washback effects of testing.
PBA requires students to applicate knowledge to create a product (spoken or written). They are process-
oriented. It measures students’ abilities to use the language to respond to a daily life situation. It offers a broad
spectrum of possibilities to address different learning styles.
44. How should oral and written works be assessed in TBA?
Oral work: there should be important to get the message across, to convey an attitude. The linguistic
aspects (fluency, accuracy) are also important as well as the interactive aspects such as the speed of
interaction.
Written work: 3 criteria should be taken into account: the communicative quality (organization of ideas,
getting the message across, taking the reader into consideration), the linguistic and discourse features
(accuracy in grammar, vocabulary, spelling, linking devices) and the mechanics (punctuation and
paragraphing).
 The FIVE features of assessment: assessment must be done constructively, focusing on achievement rather
on failure. It must obtain some degree of reliability (dependable), i.e. that it is consistent and that has similar
results. Criteria should be clear and students should know the basic outlines of our assessment. It is very
important to assess what we planned to assess and not something else (validity). Assessment should be
practical in terms of physical resources and time consuming (practicality). A final element is accountability.
Teachers should be able to provide learners, parents and institutions with clear indications of how progress or
the lack of it have been concluded.
MODULE 3: TEACHING THE LANGUAGE AND THE SKILLS
1. Explain and develop techniques and methods to teach writing.
 Careful needs analysis to plan curriculum.
 Co-operative and group work that strengthen the community of the class and offer writers authentic
audience.
 Integration of language skills in class activities.

25
 Learning style and strategy training to help students how to learn.
 The use of relevant, authentic materials and tasks.
2. How to teach writing?
● Focus on the process than leads to the product
● help students to understand their own composition process (feedback, face to face, exchange
information)
● help students to find and build strategies for prewriting, drafting and rewriting (listing, mind map,
brainstorming)
● give students time to write and rewrite. Revision is crucial.
● lead students discover what they want to say and write.
● clear objectives: what do you expect them to do. write an argumentative essay using, for example, a
portfolio and research paper.
● clear criteria. what are you going to evaluate?
● promote motivation and interest for example, play a game, debate about something.
● promote reading to acquire vocabulary and structure.
3. Why is it important to integrate skills? How? Models and principles.
There are 4 skills: Listening, speaking, writing and reading.
They are grouped into:
Productive skills: speaking and writing.
Receptive skills: listening and reading.
Why is it useful to integrate skills?
 In real life skills are integrated.
 It allows the practice of language as in the real world.
 Integrated lessons are more interesting for learners. They offer more variety.
 One single topic can be fully explored, and vocabulary can be practiced and recycled.
 The same context or text can be used for another activity, so the teacher does not have to waste time
setting up something.
 The use of one skill leads on naturally to another. For example, in conversations we speak and listen.
Thus, production and reception are two sides of the same coin.
Principles for this integration:
o It makes teaching coherent and ensures that tasks are linked together around a single topic.
o It exposes students to language that is significant for them and it allows them to produce their own
language.
o It uses students’ intelligence and it accepts students planning, reviewing and evaluating their own
work, and that is more motivating than repetition or practice.
Models that integrate the skills:
 Content based instruction (CBI): it integrates the learning of some specific subject-matter content
with the learning of a second language. The second language is simply the medium to convey
informational content of interest and relevance to the learner. CBI allows for a complete integration of
language skills, because, when planning a lesson around a particular topic, it is difficult not to involve
all four skills as students read, discuss and solve problems, write opinions. For example, English for
Specific purposes.
 Theme based instruction (TBI): it provides an alternative to what would be traditional language
classes by structuring a course around themes of topics. It integrates the language skills into the study
of a theme (for example, natural wonders of the world, urban violence). The theme should be
interesting to students and must allow a wide variety of language skills to be practiced, always in the
service of communicating about the theme.
Principles of CBI and TBI are: automaticity, meaningful learning, intrinsic motivation and
communicative competence.
 Experiential learning: it includes activities that engage both left and right processing, that
contextualize language, that integrates skills and points towards authentic, real world purposes. This
approach highlights the fact of giving students concrete experiences through which they “discover”
language principles by trial and error, by processing feedback, building hypotheses about language
and by revising these assumptions in order to become fluent. The teacher gives learners opportunities
to use language while working on problem solving activities.
 The episode hypothesis: it involves reproducing, understanding and recalling structures that are
26
episodically ordered. One of the keys to the success of the method lay in the presentation of language
in an easily followed storyline. Students receive interconnected sentences in an interest-provoking
episode. A familiar setting and ordinary characters stimulate the curiosity of the reader. Universal
stories enable students from many different cultures to understand. Episodes or stories can be
presented in written or spoken form.
 Task based teaching: it involves the importance of organizing a course around communicative tasks
that learners need to engage outside the classroom. It focuses on communication and meaning. The
course objectives are more language-based. TBLT implies several integrated skills in its focus on
language in the real world. The priority is not the forms of language, but the functional purposes for
which language must be used. It focuses on a whole set of real-world tasks. Tasks are defined as
activities that can stand alone as fundamental units and that require comprehending, producing,
manipulating or interacting in authentic language while attention is paid to meaning rather than form.
4. Which should be given greater attention when developing oral communication skills in the EFL
classroom: fluency or accuracy? Justify your choice.
It is now very clear that fluency and accuracy are both important goals to pursue in CLT. While fluency may
in many communicative language courses be an initial goal in language teaching, accuracy is achieved to
some extent by allowing students to focus on the elements of phonology, grammar and discourse in the
spoken output.
Fluency and confidence are important goals in speaking lessons as there is no point knowing a language if you
can’t use it. To help achieve this aim, we want to find ways of enabling students to speak as much as possible.
Activities shouldn’t teach new language, but allow learners to try out language they understand and have
learnt. Some activities to fulfil this aim might be: learners chat with the teacher about their weekend plans,
learners prepare a monologue about their hobbies and then give a 5-minute speech to the whole class.
The communicative approach proposes that tasks should provide the opportunity for learners to use language
in order to communicate meanings without focusing on accuracy. This would encourage fluency and learners
to explore creatively ways of expressing themselves using their knowledge of the language.
5. Why is it said that reading can be seen not only as a process but also as a product?
Reading can be seen as a product when priority is given to the text and parts of it. While it is seen as a process
when the point of departure is the reader and the background knowledge and values which the reader brings to
reading. Reading as practice focuses on the uses of reading.
Reading as practice is linked to their uses in everyday life.
Reading as product focuses on the form and meaning of the written text and its parts.
Reading as a process is linked to the role of the reader and his/her strategies to construct meaning. Here, it is
important the students’ schemata.
6. Why does Brown say that task based teaching is a “well-integrated approach to language
teaching?
TBL is a well-integrated approach to language teaching that asks you to organize your classroom around
those practical tasks that language users engage in “out there” in the real world. These tasks virtually always
imply several skills areas, not just one, and so by pointing toward tasks, we disengage ourselves from thinking
only in terms of separate four skills. Instead, principles of listening, speaking, reading and writing become
appropriately included under the rubric of what it is our learners are going to do with this language.
7. How can the use of a spiral-syllabus enhance grammar learning?
Grammar can be spiralled by "re-cycling" grammatical constructions so as to provide repeated practice in
various contexts. There are different activities that can be adapted to recycle grammar. For example, with
board games, roleplays, writing stories, and so on.
Recycling is practising language that learners have seen previously. The recycled language will be re-
introduced in a different context, or through a different skill. This helps the student extend their range of use
of the new item.
8. How has the switch from “listening for language practice” to “listening for meaning” changed
the role of listening activities in EFL classrooms?
There is a difference between listening for practice to listening for meaning, Nunan provides a compendium of
recipes for exercises for listening classes organized in four parts:
- developing cognitive strategies (listening for the main idea, listening for details or just predicting)
- developing listening with other skills
- listening to authentic material.
- Use of technology.
9. How has an evolution to a more learner-centred course affected the view on the development 27
of written communication?
Academic writing began to be viewed as a communicative social act. English L2 student writers practise
individualised processes to achieve products; courses focus more on classroom community and student
responsibility through peer response activities, student selection of topics and evaluation criteria, and
collaborative project writing. The development of multiple drafts to achieve meaningful communication-as
well as focus on the problem-solving aspects of identifying and practising discourse conventions-also occupy
teachers and students.
10. Techniques to teach speaking.
 Discussions.
 Role Play.
 Simulations.
 Information Gap.
 Brainstorming.
 Storytelling.
 Interviews.
 Story Completion.
11. What is the most beneficial approach to teach receptive skills (reading and listening)? Support
your answer. Explain the process a class should follow.
 Top-down activities refer to the activities where the learners are asked to get a general view
of the passage. This is helped if the reader or listener’s schemata allow them to have
appropriate expectations of what they are going to come across. Examples of top-down
processing activities:
 Using pictures to predict what the topic will be about.
 Providing three or four titles and asking the students to listen to or read the passage to
decide about the most appropriate title for the passage.
 Providing headings and asking the students to match them with the different sections
of the passage.
 Providing different pictures to be matched with the different sections.
 Putting a series of pictures or a sequence of events in the right order.
 Listening to conversations and identifying where they take place and the people
involved.
 Asking the students to infer the type of relationships between the people involved.
 Providing students with a set of information to be studied. They then have to listen to
or read the main passage and decide whether or not the same points are mentioned.
 Bottom-up activities are concerned with things such as individual words, phrases, and
sentences. These activities guide the students to construct a better text meaning. By stringing
(to put things together onto a chain) these detailed elements together students build up a
whole. For example, these activities help the learners to retain information while it is being
processed, identify word and clause boundaries, recognize key transitions, locate referents,
understand grammatical relationships between syntactic elements in an utterance or sentence,
and identify sentence functions. Examples of such activities include:
 What do some underlined words refer to? Or who/what does a pronoun refer to?
 Identify the order of a set of words in the discourse.
 Recognize linking words or sequence speech markers.
 Recognize the parts of speech of a set of words.
 Identify the tense of verbs.
 Identify synonyms or antonyms of a set of words in the text.
The process a class should follow:
The comprehension tasks involved in the receptive skills should normally follow a sequence of
activities from getting a general view of the text (i.e. top-down processing) to studying the more
specific and smaller bits/elements that constitute these texts (i.e. bottom-up processing).
The receptive skills lesson plan starts with preparing the students through warm-up and lead-in 28
activities. Then, the teacher focusses on the strategies (e.g. predicting, inferring meaning from the
context, locating referents, etc.) needed to understand the spoken or the written text. This is followed
by comprehension tasks that aim at, first general, then, detailed comprehension of the content of the
text. The lesson ends with a follow-up activity that summarizes the text, connects it to the leaners’
daily life experiences, or pushes them to react to it.
12. What is the role of schemata?

The reader brings information, knowledge, emotions, experience and culture- that is schemata- to the printed
word.
the reader knows two types of schemata:
Content schemata (that includes what we know about people, the world, culture and the universe)
Formal schemata (that consists of our knowledge about this course structure)
When we activate their knowledge before they read or listen they bring their schemata to the text.
13. Explain the stages that should go in between the stages of setting the writing task and
collecting in that would help scaffold the writing process?
A student can learn to become a better writer by being actively encouraged and helped to follow through a
series of preparatory steps before the final text is produced and by becoming more aware of that preparation
process, so that it can be done more independently.
1) Introduce the topic, get students interested by reading a text, showing pictures,
discussing some key issues.
2) Introduce and summarise the main writing task. Make sure students are clear
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what they have to do, who they are writing for and why.
3) Brainstorm ideas to collect as many ideas as possible.
4) Fast-write to overcome “blank page” terror and get ideas.
5) Select and reject ideas.
6) Sort and order ideas. Plan the structure of the text by arranging ideas.
7) Decide on specific requirements: style, information, layout.
8) Focus on useful models. Help students to study sample(s) of written texts similar to the one they are
writing. Focus on content, message, organization, grammar, phrases, etc.
9) Plan the text. Use notes, sketches to start organizing a possible shape for the text.
10) Get feedback. At various points, you, other students or groups can make helpful comments or suggestions.
This help may be on the content, organization, language, etc.
11) Prepare draft (s). this gives students the chance to get reader reactions and corrections.
12) Edit. Students carefully go through their text checking if it says what they want it to, if it reads clearly and
smoothly, if its language is correct, etc.
13) Prepare final text. Based on feedback, students write a finished text.
14) Readers. Rather than simply mark a text, get other students to respond to it in some more realistic ways.
14. Explain the process learners need to go through to learn effectively a new grammar item.
Which is the most efficient approach to teach grammar? Why?
The MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL/PROCESSABILITY MODEL stated that movement is key element in
understanding the learning sequence. The learner starts with sentences without movement and then they learn
to move the various parts of the sentence around to get the final form. The learners ascend the structural tree
from bottom to top, first learning to deal with words, then phrases, then with simple sentences, and finally
with subordinate clauses in complex sentences.
Learners first need to have EXPOSURE to the language through reading and listening extracts, then they need
to NOTICE specific items when they are being used and UNDERSTAND the form (how the pieces fit
together), meaning and use (the typical situations, conversations, contexts in which it might be used) of an
item, then, they need to TRY USING language themselves in “safe” practice ways and in more demanding
contexts, and finally, they need to REMEMBER the things they have learnt by having opportunities to use it.
There are two main approaches to teaching grammar. These are the deductive and the inductive approach.
 A deductive approach is when the rule is presented and the language is produced based on the rule.
(The teacher gives the rule.). Deductive teaching is a traditional approach in which information about
target language and rules are driven at the beginning of the class and continued with examples. The
principles of this approach are generally used in the classes where the main target is to teach grammar
structures
 An inductive approach is when the rule is inferred through some form of guided discovery. (The
teacher gives the students a means to discover the rule for themselves.) it is a process where learners
discover the grammar rules themselves by examining the examples. In an inductive approach it is also
possible to use a context for grammar rules. That is to say, learners explore the grammar rules in a text
or an audio rather than isolated sentences. Learners are provided with samples which include the
target grammar that they will learn. Then learners work on the examples and try to discover the rules
themselves. When students obtain the grammar rules and they practice the language by creating their
own examples.
A deductive approach often fits into a lesson structure known as PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production). The
teacher presents the target language and then gives students the opportunity to practise it through very
controlled activities. The final stage of the lesson gives the students the opportunity to practise the target
language in freer activities which bring in other language elements.
Presentation: in this stage the teacher presents the new language in a meaningful context by using stories,
realia, flashcards or miming. Presentation or clarification has 3 different categories: teacher explanation
(teacher tells the learner. Short explanations.), guided discovery (teacher helps the learner to tell himself.
Through good questions learners can notice language and think about it, for example, concept/context
questions, questions about the form, analyse errors, hypothesise rules), and self-directed discovery (the learner
tells himself).
Practice: there are numerous activities such as gap fill exercises, substitution drills, sentence transformation,
picture dictations, reordering sentences and matching sentences to pictures. Activities are fairly controlled at
this stage.
Production: activities will depend on the language taught, the level of students. However, some activities
may be information gaps, role plays, find someone who, spot the differences between two pictures, problem
solving. It is important to monitor and make a note of any errors so that you can build in class feedback and
30
error analysis at the end of the lesson.
I believe the most efficient approach to teach grammar is the Task Based Approach because it deals with
grammar teaching through communicative use of the language. Learners work on tasks and face the language
as a whole. With TBLT, the anxiety level of students is really low because there is a stress-free environment
as a classroom, thereby; the first and the most important condition for the success of the students is satisfied.
The lessons are composed of tasks in TBLT. The tasks form the basic principle of teaching style, and the
common estimation is that students do not need to concentrate on how to use the language but to complete the
task. The important thing is conveying the meaning in order to accomplish the task instead of the accurate use
of the language. This makes the students gain confidence about their capability in English while trying to
accomplish the task. Students’ confidence in themselves and an entertaining classroom environment compared
to the traditional methods make the learning process more effective than any other teaching methods.
The advantage of the task-based approach, according to its advocates, is that during the task the learners are
allowed to use whatever language they want, freeing them to focus entirely on the meaning of their message.
This makes it closer to a real-life communicative situation.
15. Explain the role of restricted and authentic input and output in grammar teaching. Provide
examples of practical activities for each and explain the role of inductive teaching within the
process.
Input is the language learners are exposed to, it comes from the teacher, coursebook, and the students
themselves. Output is the language learners produce.
Restricted output: these activities are defined by their focus on limited options for use of language, limited
options for communication and a focus on accuracy. Typical restricted activities are oral drills, written
exercises, elicited dialogues, and grammar practice activities/games. E.g. Students work on oral practice of the
examples of the examples given by the teacher or do a written exercise to practice those items.
Authentic output: the students are given the opportunity to use those items along with other language they
know in communicative activities.
Restricted input: learners read/listen to a text and get a general understanding of it. The teacher uses the text
to give/elicit examples and to explain/elicit information about the item of language.
Authentic input: authentic texts have not been specifically designed for language students, so they will have
neither simplified, controlled language nor lots of specially placed examples of a specific target language
item. An authentic text will be more useful for drawing attention to a range of various language points in
action rather than a single target point.
16. Approaches to teaching writing. Types of writing.
Types of classroom writing performance (from accuracy to fluency)
 Imitative, or writing down, copying (i.e. dictation)
 Intensive, or controlled (grammar exercises)
 Guided writing (restricted, controlled tasks by models)
 Process writing (students write what they want, organize ideas, choose a topic.
 Real/unguided writing (academic, vocational/ technical, personal), free-writing without guidance or
feedback during the process. For example, write real emails, letters, your own newsletter, magazine,
blog, advertise ideas/school events/products, send comments/replies to discussions/reviews, etc. to
websites, apply for things, write questionnaires.
Approaches to teaching writing
 Process approach: attention to the stages that any piece of writing goes through (pre-writing, editing,
redrafting, publishing). It asks students to consider the procedure of putting together a good piece of
work.
 Product approach: we are only interested in the aim of a task and in the end product, in the final
composition students do.
 Process approach
 y text as a resource for
comparison;
 y ideas as starting point, 31
necessitating more than one draft;

 y focus on purpose, theme, text
type …;
 y the reader (audience) is
emphasized;
 y collaborative with other peers;
 y emphasis on creativity.
 Product approach
 y imitate a model text;
 y organization of ideas more
important than ideas themselves;
 y one draft;
 y features highlighted including
controlled practice of those features;
 y individual;
 y emphasis on end product.
comparison;

type …;
emphasized;
 y one draft;
 y individual;
comparison;

type …;
emphasized;
 y one draft;
 y individual;
comparison;

type …;
emphasized;
 y one draft;
 y individual;
process product
Text as a resource for comparison. It imitates a model
Ideas are generated though discussion or Organization of ideas more important than
brainstorming. ideas
More than one draft Only one draft.
Focus on purpose, theme, text type Focus on the product.
The reader is emphasized. Controlled practice.
Collaborative. Individual.
Emphasis on creativity. Emphasis on end product.
 Writing:
o Besides handwriting is a personal issue, badly-formed letters may influence the reader against the
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writer. Thus, there should be practice in the formation of individual letters. Moreover, there should
be some practice of spelling as the sound of a word and the way it is spelt is not always obvious.
o Different types of writing have different punctuation and layout conventions which should be taught.
o In the writing process the teacher has 3 roles: as a motivator, as a resource, and as a feedback
provider.
o Characteristics of written language from the writer’s viewpoint:
 Permanence: writer abdicates the power to emend, clarify and withdraw. The teacher should
help students to revise and refine their work before the final submission so they feel
confident in their work.
 Production time: given the appropriate stretches of time any student can be a good writer by
developing efficient processes for achieving the final product.
 Distance: writers need to be able to predict the audience’s general knowledge, cultural and
literary schemata, specific subject-matter knowledge and how their choice of language will
be interpreted.
 Orthography: it is important to start with the mechanics of English writing for non-literate in
the foreign language.
 Complexity: writers must learn how to remove redundancy, how to combine sentences, how
to make references to other elements in a text, how to create syntactic and lexical variety.
 Vocabulary: written language places a heavier demand on vocabulary use than does
speaking.
 Formality: the conventions of each form of writing must be followed. For ESL students, the
most difficult and complex conventions occur in academic writing where students have to
learn how to describe, explain, compare, contrast, illustrate, defend, criticize, and argue.
o Principles for designing writing techniques:
 Incorporate practices of “good” writers (focus on a main idea, spend time to planning)
 Balance process and product.
 Account for cultural/literacy backgrounds.
 Connect reading and writing.
 Provide as much authentic writing as possible.
 Frame your techniques in terms of prewriting, drafting, and revising stages.
 Strive (to struggle) to offer techniques that are as interactive as possible: brainstorming,
group collaboration, writing techniques.
 Sensitively apply methods of responding to and correcting your students’ writing.
 Clearly instruct students on the rhetorical, formal conventions of writing.
Writing is decontextualized, planned, permanent, static, conservative, formal.
TEACHERS’ ROLES: as a motivator, resource, feedback provider.
 Speaking:
o Approaches to teach speaking:
 Topics and cues: most of the lesson will develop in the form of a topic (globalisation) or of
a cue (a provocative question) to spark conversation.
 Structuring talk: make sure that all learners get a chance to participate, trying to prevent it
getting boring, occasionally adding to the discussion itself in order to keep it interesting.
 Avoiding the talk-talk loop: it is when the teacher says something, and as there is no
response from the students, they add something else. Teachers should try to avoid this, so
students feel confident to speak.
 Open questions: use open questions (wh-questions) rather than closed questions (yes-no
questions). Focus on specific issues about the topic instead of general issues.
 Playing devil’s advocate: one useful intervention is to play this game and deliberately taking
an opposing or contrasting viewpoint in order to encourage conversation.
o When doing a speaking task, learners need to be able to make eye contact with those they are
speaking to; hear clearly what the other person/people are saying; be reasonably close together.
o The aim of a communicative activity in class is to get learners to use the language they are learning
to interact in realistic and meaningful ways, usually involving exchanges of information or opinion.
For example, giving instructions so that someone can use a new machine; picture difference tasks (to
find differences in a picture); group planning tasks (planning a holiday); puzzles and problems (logic
puzzles); board games; role plays, simulations.
o Scaffolding refers to the way a competent language speaker helps a less competent one to
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communicate by both encouraging and providing possible elements of the conversation. The listener
offers support-like scaffolding round a building-to help the speaker create his own spoken structure.
Some techniques are: showing interest and agreeing, nodding, uh-huh, eye contact, concisely asking
for clarification of unclear information by repeating an unclear word, encouragement echo
(repeating the last word with questioning intonation) to encourage the speaker to continue.
o A genre is a variety of speech (or writing) that you would expect to find in a particular place, with
particular people, in a particular context, to achieve a particular result, using a particular channel
(e.g. by phone). A genre is often characterised by specific choices about style, manner, tone,
quantity, volume, directness, choice of words, formality, type of content, etc. For example, chatting
with a friend, telling a joke, giving an academic lecture, negotiating a sale, giving military orders. A
learner of language need to learn not just words, grammar, pronunciation, etc., but also about
appropriate ways of speaking in different situations which may be different to mother tongue.
o Types of classroom speaking performance:
 Imitative: imitation is carried out for focusing on some particular element of language form
in a controlled activity.
 Intensive: it is designed to practice some phonological or grammatical aspect of language.
 Responsive: short replies to teacher or student-initiated questions or comments which do not
extend to dialogues but are meaningful and authentic.
 Transactional (dialogue): is carried out for the purpose of conveying or exchanging specific
information.
 Interpersonal (dialogue): it is carried out for the purpose of maintaining social relationships.
It is more difficult because it involves a casual register, colloquial language, slang, sarcasm,
etc.
 Extensive (monologue): in the form of oral reports, summaries, or short speeches. The
register is more formal and deliberative. These monologues can be planned.
o Principles for developing speaking techniques:
 Use techniques that cover the spectrum of learner needs, from language focus on accuracy to
message-based focus on interaction, meaning, and fluency.
 Provide intrinsically motivating techniques.
 Encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts.
 Provide appropriate feedback and correction.
 Capitalize on the natural link between speaking and listening.
 Give students opportunities to initiate oral communication.
 Encourage the development of speaking strategies.
o What makes speaking difficult?
 Clustering.
 Redundancy.
 Reduced forms.
 Performance variables (hesitations, pauses, corrections)
 Colloquial language.
 Rate of delivery.
 Stress, rhythm, and intonation.
 Interaction.
o There are 2 approaches for teaching conversation: the INDIRECT approach in which learners are
more or less set loose to engage in interaction. the indirect approach implies that one does not
actually teach conversation, but rather that students acquire conversational competence, peripherally,
by engaging in meaningful tasks. The DIRECT approach involves planning a conversation. This
approach explicitly calls students’ attention to conversational rules, conventions, and strategies. In
relation to TBLT, it is clear that the predominant approach to teaching conversation includes the
learner’s inductive involvement in meaningful tasks as well as consciousness-raising elements of
focus on form.
o Characteristics of speech:
 It goes through 4 processes:
 Conceptualisation: it is related to planning the message content. It draws on
background knowledge, knowledge about the topic, the speech situation and on the
knowledge of patterns of discourse. It monitors everything that occurs in the
interaction so speaker can self-correct.
 Formulation: it finds the words and phrases to express the meanings, sequencing 37
them and putting in appropriate grammatical markers. It prepares the sound patterns
of the words to be used.
 Articulation: it involves the motor control of the articulatory organs to produce the
sounds.
 Self-monitoring: language user should be able to identify and self-correct mistakes.
 Speaking is reciprocal-any interlocutors are normally all able to contribute simultaneously to
the discourse, and to respond immediately to each other’s contributions.
 Speaking is physically situated face-to-face interaction.
TEACHERS’ ROLES: prompter, participant, feedback provider.
 Developing productive skills:
Unlike the receptive skills lesson plan, in addition to understanding and interpreting the discourse, a
productive skills lesson aims at helping learners produce appropriate and coherent messages either in spoken
or written forms. what is essentially involved in the productive skills is the ability to convey information,
convince or share ideas and feelings.
The productive skills lesson plan should take into consideration the following points:
o The lesson aims at helping the learners communicate.
o It is unhelpful to provide a topic and ask the learners to speak or write.
o Some preparation is needed before setting the task.
o Generally, we cannot talk or write about something we know nothing about.
o The choice of the topic is important. The learners should be familiar with it.
o Before asking the learners to produce language, we have to equip them with techniques and strategies to
facilitate their efforts to speak or write effectively.
o Communication breakdowns may happen.
o When difficulties arise, learners have to be able to use specific communication strategies.
Teaching a productive skill procedure involves the following steps:
 Providing a model text:
Comprehension and model analysis (e.g. studying the genre’s distinctive features)
 Practice:
Working on the language needed to perform the task
 Task setting:
Understanding the topic/situation (what is the desired outcome)
 Planning:
Structuring the output
 Production:
Preparing for the spoken task.
Going through the process of drafting, revising, and editing
 Feedback:
Self or peer-regulated feedback using a checklist or teacher-regulated.
Coherence and cohesion are closely related concepts:
Coherence is a broad concept and is achieved when one feels that a text is semantically meaningful
and the content follows a logical line of reasoning. The linguistic features that make a text coherent are
classified under the concept of cohesion.
Cohesion is achieved through the links between sentences. These links hold a text together and give it
meaning. There are two types of cohesion: lexical and grammatical.
Grammatical cohesion occurs when the link between sentences is achieved through grammatical features such
as conjunctions, reference, ellipsis, substitution.
Lexical cohesion, however, differs from grammatical cohesion it is concerned with the semantic relations
between the words of the text. That is, the link is achieved through meaning and not through grammatical
features.
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Speakers and writers need some understanding of these 2 ideas:

Style, which refers to level of formality and can affect grammar, lexis, and pronunciation.
Register, which refers to language appropriate for the topic or field.
Speaking is contextualized, unplanned, temporary, dynamic, innovative, informal.
 Listening:
o It is difficult because:
 People speak too fast to follow.
 Can’t tell where words start and stop.
 People pronounce words they just don’t recognise.
 Can’t get a general sense of the message.
 Don’t know what attitudes people are expressing.
 Can’t pick out those parts that are most important for them to understand.
o There are 2 kinds of listening:
 To get a general overview of the main story or message of a conversation.
 To catch specific details such as names, numbers, addresses, etc.
o To make sure that a lesson is genuinely useful for students, we need to consider why someone might
listen to such a text in real life and what kinds of skills or strategies they’d use. Then, we need to
design tasks that either closely reflect what they might need to do in real life or help them improve
skills that will be useful to them in future. Most tasks fall into one of these categories: take part in a
conversation, answer questions, do/choose something in response to what you hear, pass on/take
notes on what you hear, for example, listen and choose the correct picture, until you have learnt the
poem by heart, choose the best answer from 4 options, decide which person is saying which
sentence, follow the route on the map, do an action according to the instructions, label a picture of
an office, take down the phone number, etc.
o Guidelines for listening skills:
 Keep the recording short (up to 2 minutes)
 Play the recording a sufficient number of times.
 Let students discuss their answers together.
 Don’t be led by one strong student.
 Aim to get the students to agree together without your help. Play the recording again to
confirm or refute their ideas until they agree.
 Play by bits the recording until it’s clear.
 Give help if they are stuck, but still with the aim of getting them to work it out rather than
giving them the answers.
 Don’t change the tasks.
 Try to make sure the task is just within their abilities. It should be difficult, but achievable.
o Strategies to pick up the message:
 Gaining an overview of the structure of the whole text, getting the gist (the general
meaning) using previous knowledge (extensive listening) TOP-DOWN
 Other strategies are connected with the small pieces of the text (hearing precise sounds,
39
working out exactly what some individual words are, catching precise details of information
(listening for detail) BOTTOM-UP
o Using background knowledge (schemata), prediction and filling-in gaps are all important listening
skills. Making a good prediction of the content or the shape of a listening text will help us to make
better sense of it when it happens. Things that could help include: having some idea of the topic
being discussed, knowing something about that topic, predicting issues likely to be raised, knowing
some words or phrases that are commonly used in conversations of this type, and so on.
o Top-Down Procedure:
 Discuss the general topic.
 Predict the specific content.
 Predict the structure.
 Gist listening for overview (learners get an overall impression of the content)
 Gist listening for attitudes (learners interpret intonation, paralinguistic features (sighs, etc.)
 More careful listening for complex meanings.
 Listening to pick out specific small language details.
o Types of listening performances:
 Reactive: learners listen to the surface of an utterance for the sole purpose of repeating it.
 Intensive: students single out certain elements of spoken language.
 Responsive: listening is designed to elicit immediate responses.
 Selective: in longer stretches the student scans the material selectively for certain
information.
 Extensive: students listen to lengthy lectures, to a conversation, etc. to invoke other
interactive skills (note-taking, discussion) for full comprehension.
 Interactive: it includes all 5 of the above types as learners actively participate in discussions,
debates, role-plays, conversations.
o Principles for designing listening techniques:
 Make sure the 4 skills do no overlook the importance of listening techniques.
 Use motivating/appealing activities.
 Utilize authentic language and contexts.
 Consider the form of listeners’ responses.
 Encourage the development of listening strategies.
 Include both bottom-up and top-down listening techniques.
o Extensive listening (to listen to extracts outside the classroom for pleasure). Intensive listening (to
listen to extracts in the classroom and do activities and exercises).
o Types of listening:
 Recorded listening (dialogues, monologues from course books)
 Listening tracks (to hear different voices and accents)
 Live listening (the teacher)
 Live listening to different genres (lectures, face-to-face interviews)
o Stages:
 Prediction
 Before listening
 Listening tasks
 Listening again to study language
 Extensive listening.
o Task cycle:
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 Lead-in (pre-listening: introduction of topic, discussion, looking at pictures)
 Pre-task (looking at worksheet, work on vocabulary, prediction)
 Set task (take part in a conversation, answer questions, do/choose something in response,
take notes) TYPES OF TASKS.
 Play recording
 Feedback
 Conclusion (follow-up activities, review of learnt items).
TEACHERS’ ROLES: organizer, machine operator, feedback organizer, prompter.
o Listening is a complex process that allows us to understand spoken language. It is the channel in
which we process language in real time.
 Reading:
o Types of classroom reading performance:
 Oral and silent reading.
 Reading for detail/intensive reading: reading texts closely and carefully with the intention of
gaining an understanding of as much detail as possible.
 Extensive reading: fluent, faster reading, often of longer texts, for pleasure, entertainment
and general understanding, but without careful attention to the details. The more someone
reads, the more they pick up items of vocabulary and grammar from texts, so it is important
to encourage students to read a lot in the target language, both in and outside the classroom.
We can help by providing a library of readers, magazines, newspapers, etc., by allowing
sections of classroom time for students to read, by creating a book club where they can talk
about their favourite books, share them with each other, etc.
 Some extensive reading activities: use a key section of the story as a dictation,
students draw the picture of the scene to then compare and discuss their different
interpretations, keep a character’s diary, review the book for a TV programme,
redesign the cover of the book.
 Skimming: read quickly to get the gist of a passage (to discover key topics, main ideas,
overall theme, basic structure, etc.). For example, a typical task would be a general question
from the teacher, such as Is this story set in a school or a restaurant? The learners would
attempt to find the answer quickly, without reading every word of the passage, by “speed-
reading” through some portions of the text.
 Scanning: move eyes quickly over the text to locate a specific piece of information (name,
number, date, etc.) without reading the whole text. A common scanning activity is searching
for information in a directory, and a typical task answering the question What does Cathy
take with her to the meeting?
Both skimming and scanning are top-down skills.
o Task cycle (TOP-DOWN):
 Pre-text:
 Introduction and lead-in (get learners interested in the topic, discussion of key
themes, make a link between the topic of the text and the students’ own lives and
experiences, focus on important language that will come in the text).
 First task: pre-reading, predict from some extracted information (key words,
headlines, illustration), read questions about the text, students make their own
questions.
 Text:
 Focus on fast reading for gist (skimming), check text against predictions made
beforehand, guess the tittle from choices, put events in the correct order.
 Tasks to focus on fast reading to locate specific information (scanning).
 Tasks to focus on meaning (general points), answer questions, make use of
information in the text to do something (fill out a form, find out which picture is
described) discuss issues, summarize arguments, compare viewpoints.
 Tasks to focus on meaning (points for detail, more intensive comprehensive
understanding).
 Tasks to focus on individual language items, vocabulary or grammar exercises,
work out meaning of words from context, use of dictionaries.
 Post-text:
 Follow up, role play, debate, writing task (write a letter in reply), personalisation 41
(have you ever had an experience like this one?
 Closing, draw the lesson to a conclusion, tie up loose ends, review what has been
studied and what has been learnt.
o Some types of written language: essays, novels, short stories, comics, menus, letters, diaries,
announcements, recipes, poetry, biographies.
o Characteristics of written language: permanent, processing time (each reader read at their own rate),
distance (there is a physical and temporal distance of the written text, the reader has to interpret
language that was written in some other place and time), orthography (in writing we have
graphemes, punctuation, pictures or charts to understand a message), complexity (writing and speech
represent different modes of complexity. Speech language tends to have shorter clauses and more
subordination), vocabulary (written English uses a greater variety of lexical items than spoken
conversational English. Most unknown words can be predicted from their context), formality (it
refers to prescribed forms that certain written messages must adhere to.
o Strategies for reading comprehension:
 Identify the purpose in reading.
 Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding.
 Use efficient reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension.
 Skim the text for main ideas.
 Scan the text for specific information.
 Use semantic mapping or clustering.
 Guess when you aren’t certain.
 Analyse vocabulary.
 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
 Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships.
o Principles for designing interactive reading techniques:
 Don’t overlook the importance of specific instruction in reading skills.
 Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating.
 Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts.
 Encourage the development of reading strategies.
 Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques.
 Follow the SQ3R sequence:
 Survey: skim the text for an overview of main ideas.
 Question: ask questions about what the reader wishes to get out of the text.
 Read: read the text while looking for answers to the previously questions.
 Recite: reprocess the salient points of the text through oral or written language.
 Review: assess the importance of what one has just read and incorporate it into
long-term associations.
 Subdivide techniques into pre-reading, during reading, ad after reading phases.
 Before you read: introducing the topic, skimming, scanning, predicting, and
activating schemata.
 While you read: not all reading is simply extensive. Give students a sense of
purpose for reading rather than just reading because you ordered it.
 After you read: comprehension questions are one form of activity for post-reading.
Also consider vocabulary study, identifying the author’s purpose, discussing the
author’s line of reasoning, examining grammatical structures.
 Build in some evaluative aspect to your techniques: readers responds physically to a
command, summarizes orally what is read, takes notes, provides a different ending, etc.
TEACHERS’ ROLES: during extensive reading, teachers need to promote reading, persuade students of its
benefits. Occasionally, teachers read aloud. Teachers also organize reading programmes, where we indicate
students how many books we expect them to read over a given period. We explain them how they can choose
what to read, we suggest them genres and level. During intensive reading, teachers are organizers, observers,
feedback organizers, prompters.
RECEIVING LANGUAGE (LISTENING AND READING SKILLS)
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o Typical reading/writing genres for children: songs, chants, poems, short stories, menus, picture
books, plays, recipes, graded readers, and so on.
o Difficulties when reading:
 I don’t know enough vocabulary.
 I need a dictionary all the time.
 I understand the individual words but not the whole sentences.
o The word-by-word approach of reading isn’t the way we read in real-life. We need to raise
students’ awareness that it isn’t essential to understand every word and that practising different
reading techniques is useful.
 Pronunciation:
o Teaching pronunciation improve students’ speaking, comprehension and intelligibility.
o The degree to which students acquire “perfect” pronunciation depends on their attitude to how well
they speak and how well they hear.
o There are two main problems when teaching and learning pronunciation. The first is that some
students have great difficulty hearing pronunciation features which then they have to reproduce.
Second, it is difficult to hear the “tunes”, or identify the different patterns of rising or falling tones.
Thus, teachers avoid to teach intonation. However, we could teach students to identify moods
through intonation (when someone is bored, enthusiastic, or surprised for example), and then
students can imitate these moods.
o When to teach pronunciation:
 Whole lessons: work on connected speech concentrating on stress and intonation, then
students work on recognition of intonation patterns, stress in certain key phrases, and then
can rehearse and perform a short play extract which exemplifies some of the issues worked.
Making pronunciation the main focus of a lesson doesn’t mean that every minute of it has to
be spent on pronunciation work. Sometimes students can listen first and work on listening
skills before moving to the pronunciation part of the sequence.
 Discrete slots: short, separate bits of pronunciation work inserted into lesson sequences.
They can work on all the individual phonemes separately or in contrasting pairs. Also, they
can spend a few minutes on a particular aspect of intonation, or on the contrast between 2 or
more sounds. However, pronunciation is not a separate skill and should be integrated into
longer lesson sequences.
 Integrated phases: when listening to a tape, they can draw their attention to pronunciation
features on the tape, or work on sounds that are especially prominent, or imitate intonation
patterns.
 Opportunistic teaching: tackling a problem at the moment when it occurs can be a
successful way of dealing with pronunciation.
o Areas of pronunciation teaching:
 Working with sounds: working with a particular sound is helpful to demonstrate how it is
made and show how it can be spelt as there is no direct correspondence between sound and
spelling. Teaching contrasting sounds helps students to concentrate on detail, to hear the
small difference between the sounds. Some activities can be: playing bingo with the
phonemic chart, saying tongue twisters or rhymes for poetry/limerick lines.
 Working with stress: stress is important in individual words, phrases and sentences. By
shifting it we can change emphasis or meaning. For example, in performing dialogues.
 Working with intonation: we need to draw our students’ attention to the way we use
intonation to convey meaning, to reflect the thematic structure of what we are saying, and to
convey mood. The point is to raise students’ awareness of the power of intonation to
encourage them to vary their own speech. It also trains them to listen more carefully to
understand what messages are being given to them.
 Sounds and spelling: although there are many regularities in English spelling, the fact is that
there is no complete one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes.
o Connected speech and fluency: the sounds of words change when they come into contact with each
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other. This is something students need to pay attention to. Fluency is helped by having students say
phrases and sentences as quickly as possible, starting slowly and then speeding up. Getting students
to perform dialogues and play extracts will also make them aware of speaking customs and help
them to improve their overall fluency.
o There are 2 general approaches to the teaching of pronunciation:
 Intuitive-Imitative Approach: it depends on the learner’s ability to listen to and imitate the
rhythms and sounds of the target language without the intervention of any explicit
information.
 Analytic-Linguistic Approach: it utilizes information and tools such as a phonetic alphabet
to supplement listening, imitation and production. It explicitly informs the learner of and
focuses attention on the sounds and rhythms of the target language.
o Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) holds that the primary purpose of language is
communication. However, students should not aim to sound like native speakers. They should aim to
surpass the threshold level so that their pronunciation will not detract from their ability to
communicate. CLT teachers use these techniques: listen and imitate, phonetic training, minimal-pair
drills, contextualized minimal pairs (to choose the correct word in a sentence from their
pronunciation), visual aids, tongue twisters, reading aloud, recordings of learners’ production.
o When designing a pronunciation curriculum, we should take into account the following factors that
affect pronunciation in learners: native language, age, exposure to the target language, amount
and type of prior pronunciation instruction, innate phonetic ability, identity and language ego, their
attitude towards the target language, and their motivation to achieve intelligible speech patterns in
second language.
o The role of the native language: when deciding on pronunciation priorities, we should take into
account our students’ native language. There are 6 theories about the role of the first language in
second-language phonological acquisition:
 Contrastive analysis: this theory holds that second-language acquisition is filtered through
the learner’s first language, with the native language facilitating acquisition in those cases
where the target structures are similar, and “interfering” with acquisition in cases where the
target structures are dissimilar or non-existent. The theory, however, cannot predict the
difficulty learners would experience with a given item. Interference-or negative transfer) is
valid in second-language pronunciation acquisition in accounting for foreign accents,
intonation and rhythm.
 Error analysis and avoidance: according to Richards there are 3 types of errors:
 Interlingual errors are those errors caused by negative transfer from the learner’s
first language.
 Intralingual errors are those marked from complex features in the structure of the
target language and which seem to be committed by all second-language learners of
the target language regardless of their native language.
 Developmental errors are those that reflect the same problems and strategies that
young children encounter and use in acquiring the target language as their first
language.
The problem with this theory is that it focuses on learners’ problems rather than
learners’ accomplishments. This gives rise to interlanguage analysis. Moreover, critics
argues that error analysis ignores the strategy of avoidance, which occurs when learners
paraphrase-consciously or unconsciously-the use of words or structures they find
difficult.
 Interlanguage analysis/hypothesis: interlanguage refers to the linguistic codes of second-
language learners that reflect unique systems. Interlanguage grammar can function
independently of the speaker’s native language or target language, and that it follows a
system all its own based on first-language structures, second-language input, language
universals, and communication strategies. The term fossilization is a period in language
learning beyond which it is difficult for learners to progress without exceptional effort or
motivation. According to Corder, interlanguage is a dynamic continuum along a second-
language learner where he can move toward a target system. The learner continually
processes input from the target language and refines rules or hypotheses in the direction of
the target or until its fossilization.
 Markedness theory: it proposes that in every linguistic opposition (phonological or

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semantic) there is one member of any pair of opposites that is unmarked (more basic,
neutral, universal, frequent or first acquired) and one that is marked (more specific, less
frequent, more limited, later acquired). When comparing how sounds are made in the target
language and in the native language, difficulty in pronunciation can be predicted.
 Language universals: the linguists who study language universals assume that all languages
share common properties and that their surface differences might actually be quite
unimportant. Given all the sounds the human vocal apparatus possibly produces, the
languages of the world draw on a finite inventory of sounds and share similar combinatory
and hierarchical principles that explain how natural languages are spoken.
 Information processing theory: learners exhibit a distinct tendency to interpret new
information in terms of their existing knowledge structures, commonly referred to as
schemata. Previously stored information can be processed in one of two manners-either via
controlled processing (processing requiring attention and awareness) or via automatic
processing (processing that is not controlled, modified, or inhibited). Learners interpret
sounds in the second language in terms of the set of sounds that they control as part of their
first-language system. There are 3 modes of learning: accretion (learners add new structures
to their existing schemata or knowledge structures), restructuring (learners reorganize
already-existing structures and create new schemata based on the pre-existing patterns) and
the tuning mode (learners further modify the new and/or old schemata, making them more
accurate, general, or specific).
o Difference in terms:
 Intelligibility is the extent to which a listener actually understands an utterance or message.
 Comprehensibility is a listener’s perception of how difficult is to understand the utterance or
message.
 Accentedness is a listener’s perception of how different a speaker’s accent is from that of
the L1 community.
o Some activities to teach pronunciation:
 Same letter same or different sounds: students classify words which all contain the same
letter, which may or may not sound differently.
 Same sound rhymes: students draw lines to connect words which have the same vowel
sound.
 Odd one out: students hear a list of words and they have to say which is the odd one out on
the basis of sounds.
 Tongue twisters.
 Students hear a list of words. They have to write each one in the correct column of a table
which has the correct stress pattern.
 Students hear a sentence said with the stress placed in different words and they have to
match them with the correct response.
 Students hear phrases and they have to put a full stop, an exclamation mark or a question
mark according to the intonation they hear.
 Students listen to two speakers to say if the second speaker is bored, interested or surprised
according to the intonation.
 Grammar:
o Although teachers spend a lot of time on “input” stages, the real learning experience is when
learners try to use the language themselves. In order to give students intensive oral or written
practice points, teachers use activities designed to restrict the language needed and require the use of
the target items. Restricted output activities are defined by their focus on limited options for use of
language, limited options for communication, focus on accuracy. Typical restricted activities are oral
drills, written exercises, elicited dialogues, and grammar practice activities/games.
o Follow-on activities: grammar practice activities and games, split sentences (matching two halves),
grammar quizzes, memory tests, picture dictation, miming an action.
o Total Physical Response (TPR): it is a methodology which has been proved to be successful at low
levels as learners are given restricted exposure to a large number of instructions (walk to the door)
which will be understood by learners by gestures and demonstrations and they will do what they are
asked to.
o Types of grammar practice: from accuracy to fluency:
 Awareness: after learners have been introduced to the structure, they are given opportunities
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to experience it within some kind of discourse, and do a task that focusses their attention on
its form and/or meaning. For example, learners read an extract from a newspaper and are
asked to underline all the examples of the past tense that they can find.
 Controlled drills: learners produce examples of the structure, which are predetermined by
the teacher or textbook. For example, writing statements about John, modelled on the
following example-John drinks tea but doesn’t drink coffee- with the words speak/English-
Italian.
 Meaningful drills: the responses are still controlled, but learners can make a limited choice.
For example, to practice the present simple tense, learners choose someone they know very
well and compose true statements about them according to the model-he/she likes //doesn’t
like ice cream.
 Guided, meaningful practice: learners form sentences of their own according to a set pattern,
but the vocabulary they use is up to them. For example, to practise conditional clauses,
learners are given the prompt “if I had a million dollars…” and suggest “what would you
do?”
 (Structure-based) free sentence composition: learners hold a discussion or write a passage
according to a given task where they have to use a certain number of the structure learnt.
 Free discourse: the learners are not given specific direction to use the structure, but the task
situation is such that instances of it are likely to appear.
o Grammar techniques:
 Charts: charts and graphs are useful devices for practicing patterns, clarifying grammatical
relationships.
 Objects: not only liven up the context but provide a kinaesthetic, hands-on dimension to
your teaching. For example, with some objects (a purse, a necklace, glasses) learners can be
taught of the possessive.
 Maps and drawings: they are practical and simple visual aids. Useful for jigsaw,
information-gap, and other interactive techniques, they can also serve to illustrate certain
grammatical structures.
 Dialogues: they are useful for introducing and practicing grammatical points.
 Written texts: a text might be used to get a certain verb tense or simply to illustrate a
grammatical category.
o Grammar sequencing in textbooks and curricula: grammatical sequencing received a great deal of
attention in the 1950’s and 60’s when curricula and textbooks were organized around grammatical
categories. Some language professionals believed that difficulty could be predicted and therefore,
grammar in a curriculum should be sequenced in a progression of easier to more difficult items.
Nowadays, grammar is seen as one of several organizational aspects of communicative competence.
o Grammars with rules that make distinctions between correct and incorrect forms are defined as
prescriptive grammars. They tell us how we ought to speak and how we ought not to speak.
Students learn to speak real language that people use.
o Grammars that don’t make these distinctions and that aim to describe language as it is actually used
are called descriptive grammars. The rules are like a plan for building well-formed structures, and
they represent speakers’ unconscious knowledge of the language. It describes how native speakers
actually speak. It uses the value-neutral terms “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” to distinguish
between patterns that are well-formed to those that are not. Grammar in this sense consists of rules
of syntax, which specify how words and phrases combine to form sentences, and rules of
morphology, which specify how word forms are constructed.
o Traditional grammar analyses sentences by means of labelling the parts with their names and
giving rules that explain in words how they may be combined.
o Structural grammar describes how the elements of a sentence fit together in an overall structure
built up from smaller and smaller structures.
o Grammatical competence is the knowledge of language that the speaker possesses in the mind. It is
the cognitive state that involves all those aspects of form and meaning and their relation. The
communicative competence is the knowledge of how language is used. Pragmatic competence
reflects all the possible uses of language.
o For applied linguistics, the focus is more on pedagogical grammar, the type of grammar designed
for the needs of second-language students and teachers. Pedagogical grammar is more related to
descriptive grammar than to prescriptive grammar.
o Grammar must include both rules that are invariant and rules that admit variations.
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o Carter and McCarthy believe that the differences between spoken and written grammar are
important for pedagogical grammars since “descriptions that rest on the written mode or on
restricted genres and registers of spoken language are likely to omit many common features of
everyday informal grammar and usage.”
o Grammar does not exist on its own. It is interdependent with lexis and, in many cases, grammatical
regularity and acceptability are conditioned by words.
o The boundary between grammar and lexis becomes blurred with the use of fixed or semi-fixed
expressions that acts as single lexical units used as wholes. As fixed units, they appear to be
intermediary between lexical words and grammatical structures.
o Learning grammar: at first, grammar learning was thought to take place through a process of verbal
“habit formation”. Habits were established through stimulus-response conditioning. Teachers
conducted pattern practice drills of various types (repetition, transformation, question and answer,
etc.). Teachers introduced new vocabulary until the grammatical patterns were firmly established.
With the rise of generative grammar and its view of language as a system of rules, grammar learning
was seen to take place through a process of “rule formation”, which itself was brought about when
students formulated, tested and revised hypotheses about grammatical structures in the target
language. Errors were welcome. With the shift toward a more communicative approach, grammar is
seen as best learnt subconsciously when students were engaged in understanding the meaning of the
language to which they were introduced. Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers tell us
that learners do not learn grammar in a linear fashion. At present, attention is on emergentism, which
states that learners’ interlanguage emerges from repeated encounters with structures and with
opportunities to use them. Thus, grammar is learnt by the frequency of use of the forms in the
language to which the learner is exposed. It is clear that attention to form should not come through
isolated grammar exercises. Learners will be able to complete the exercises when their attention is
focused to a more communicative interaction. In order to incorporate the new forms, learners must
notice what it is they are to learn.
o Teaching grammar: nowadays, teaching grammar is more implicitly than the teacher giving an
explicit rule. One manner of promoting student noticing some point of grammar is to increase the
number of times that students come across the target structure in a particular text. Another manner is
through interaction in which the teacher leads students to awareness what they did not have before
so to produce a collaborative grammar explanation. It is important to point out that the practice must
be meaningful. This is called grammaring and consists of asking students to engage in a
communicative task where it is necessary to use certain structures to complete it. Feedback is seen as
a necessary part of grammar instruction.
 Vocabulary:
o The word vocabulary typically refers to single words and sometimes, to two or three word
combinations. The concept lexis refers to our internal database of words and complete ready-made
fixed or semi-fixed typical combinations of words that we can recall and use quickly without having
to construct new phrases and sentences. Grammar refers to generalizable patterns of the language
and to our ability to construct new phrases and sentences out of word combinations and grammatical
features (verb endings, etc.) to express a precise meaning.
o The STAGES of learning lexis:
 Meeting new lexical items and understanding them and their use (showing or drawing
pictures, miming the actions)
 Practising using them (word wheel (to combine words to form compound words), word
maps)
 Memorising them (vocabulary games, using dictionaries)
 Recalling and using them.
o We all understand many more lexical items than we actually use in everyday situations. Our
receptive lexis is the set of lexical items that we recognize and understand, but tend not to use
ourselves in everyday speech.
o The role of lexis in the classroom:
 Lexis is important and needs to be dealt with systematically in its own right.
 We need to help students to practice, learn, store, recall and use the new lexical items.
 Training in the use of English-English dictionaries provides students with a vital tool for
self-study.
 We need to distinguish between lexis for productive use and for receptive recognition.
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 We need to deal with single-word lexical items and with multiword items.
o Presenting lexis: it is useful to teach the new lexical items which are connected in some way, for
example, words connected with the same location or event (wedding words), or words that have the
same grammar and similar use (adjectives to describe people), or words that can be used to achieve
success in a specific task (to persuade a foreign friend to visit your town).
o The most common technique for lexis:
 Present: first offer some cues, pictures or information about the target items and elicit the
words from students or model them yourself. Check understanding of how they are formed,
what they mean and how they are used.
 Practice: get the students to practise, by repeating items, using them in short dialogues, etc.
o Lexical practice activities and games: discussions, role play requiring the use of the new lexical
items, using the lexical items in written tasks, matching pictures to lexical items, matching parts of
lexical items to other parts (beginnings and endings), matching lexical items to others (collocations,
synonyms, opposites), using prefixes and suffixes to build new lexical items from given words,
classifying into lists, filling in crosswords, memory games, choosing word families odd out.
o A great deal of lexis work in class occurs in relation to reading and listening tasks. This is important
because learners meet the language in realistic contexts and see how the items fit into the meaning
and style of a whole text. The text that immediately surrounds a lexical item is referred to as co-text,
which provides important exposure for learners to samples of language being used.
o Pre-teaching lexis: the teacher may select some activities specifically designed to revise, teach and
practise lexis before moving on to work on the text or recording. This work must help students to
recall items they already know as much as introducing new items. Some common pre-teaching
tasks: match the words with the pictures, check the meaning of words in the dictionary, matching
words with the definitions, label items in a picture with the right names.
 Using short anecdotes for pre-teaching: teachers often use invented short stories that
includes each of the separate items they need to teach. The story should be designed to help
make the meanings of the items clear and memorable and should be similar to the text that
students are going to read or listen. When the story has been prepared, you can: miming or
showing flash cards to illustrate meanings as you go, or translate/explain the meanings,
asking comprehension questions, pretending to forget the words as you tell the story so
students tell them.
o Dealing with lexis during reading or listening work: while students work on the reading or listening
skills, you can deal with an item a student specifically asks about; give brief, to the point
explanations.
o After the first phase of listening or reading work: guessing the meaning of a word from the meaning
of the text around it, finding words in the text that mean, matching words from the text with a list of
synonyms/opposites.
o Remembering lexical items involves putting it into storage, keeping in storage, saving it, using it
(labelling pictures, topic/word webs)
o We can know about a lexical item how it’s spelled, how it’s pronounce, the number of syllables,
phonemes, which syllable is stressed, what part of speech it is, grammatically related forms, the
basic meaning, metaphorical meanings, connotations, collocations, phrases/idioms it appears in,
lexical families, synonyms, homophones, antonyms, suffixes and prefixes.
o What is vocabulary?
 Tokens: when we want to count how long a book is, or how fast someone can speak or read
in words per minute, we count tokens.
 Word types: if we are interested in how much vocabulary a learner has, we count word
types.
 Lemmas: words that belong to the same word family.
o The vocabulary a learner should learn is based on the needs of the learners and the usefulness of the
vocabulary item.
o How should vocabulary be learnt?
 Learning vocabulary from meaning-focused input (listening and reading): this is
incidentally learning. For this learning to occur it is necessary 3 conditions: first, the
unknown vocabulary should make only a very small proportion of the tokens. Second, there
needs to be a very large quantity of input. Third, learning will be increased if the unknown
vocabulary appears in different parts of the course. It is important the use of dictionaries.
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Incidental learning is cumulative, and therefore vocabulary needs to be met a number of
times to allow the learning of each word. The core of the meaning-focused input is a well-
organized, well-monitored, substantial extensive reading programme based mostly on
graded readers.
 Learning vocabulary from meaning-focused output (speaking and writing): to learn
vocabulary through speaking and writing can happen in several ways. First, activities can be
designed to encourage the use of new vocabulary. Second, speaking activities involving
group work can provide opportunities for learners to negotiate the meanings of unknown
words with each other. Third, because the learning of a word is a cumulative process, using
a partly known word in speaking or writing can help strengthen and enrich the knowledge of
a word.
 Direct vocabulary learning is more effective than incidental vocabulary learning. this is so
as noticing and giving attention to language learning makes that learning more effective.
Also, deliberate learning is more focused and goal-directed than incidental learning.
o Strategies for understanding the meaning of new words: Vocabulary can be learnt by guessing from
the context, learning from word cards and using word parts, using a dictionary, linking the word to
cognates (linking between L1 and L2 words).
o Strategies for acquiring words: repetition and rote learning, organizing word in the mind, linking to
existing knowledge.
o Acquiring a word is not just linking a form with its translated meaning. It is acquiring information
about its spoken and written form, they ways it is used in grammatical structures and word
combinations, and diverse aspects of meaning.
o Vocabulary and teaching:
 Teach the complexity of words.
 Fit in the students’ strategies.
 Teach basic-level words first.
 Teach lexical relationships.
 Think about the first presentation of the word.
 Teach some words through components of meaning.
 Remember that it is how the word is practised, not how often, that is important.
 Remember that students transfer L1 meanings as well as the words themselves.
 Put words in their structural context.
o Introducing new language: a popular way to introduce new language is using the procedure called
PPP (presentation, practice, production). We can present new language through stories, dialogues,
texts. In TBL learning happens because of the task, the task comes first and the students learn
language in order to do it. Many students learn and remember new language if they have to do some
work to get it, for example, with puzzles, doing research. Repetition and drilling (when we start
nominating individual students one after the other and we ask them to repeat) can be useful to re-
present vocabulary to revise a sound, word, phrase. This helps them learn how to say the new
language using the correct sounds, stress and intonation and gives them confidence.
o Practicing new language:
 In controlled practice activities students use and think about specific language items. This
can be done through sentence completion or pictures, dictation, matching activities
(questions and answers)
 In communicative speaking activities we want students to use specific language accurately,
rather than trying to use any or all of the language that they can. For example, we can do this
with story chains (students sit in a circle and follow the story), interviewing each other,
quizzes, games, information-gap-activities, describe and draw, finding
similarities/differences.
 The learning process:
o Learning strategies are the mental and communicative procedures learners use in order to learn and
use language. The knowledge of strategies is important because learning will be more effective.
Learners who are taught the strategies underlying their learning are more motivated than those who
are not. There are two types of strategies- direct (memorizing, analysing, reasoning) and indirect
(evaluating one’s learning, cooperating with others). Some other strategies are: classifying,
predicting, inducing, taking notes, concept mapping, inferencing, discriminating, diagramming,
interpersonal cooperating, role-playing, summarizing, skimming, self-evaluating, reflecting, creative

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brainstorming.
o Strategies for communicating and learning: strategies to get out of difficulty when we do not know a
word, phrase: paraphrasing, transferring, avoidance. Substitution, generalization, description,
exemplification, restructuring (achievement strategies).
MODULE 4: MATERIALS ANALYSIS AND ADAPTATION
1. Define the principles for the development of materials for language teaching.
 Make sure that the materials contain plentiful spoken and written text, which provide extensive experience
of language being used to achieve outcomes in a variety of text types and genres in relation to topics,
themes, events, and locations likely to be meaningful to the learners.
 Make sure that the language the learners are exposed to is authentic in the sense that it represents how the
language is typically used.
 Make sure that the language input is contextualized.
 Make sure that the learners are exposed to sufficient samples of language in authentic use to provide
natural recycling of language items and features that might be useful for the learner to acquire.
 Prioritize the potential for engagement by, for example, basing a unit on a text or a task that is likely to
achieve affective and cognitive engagement rather than on a teaching point from the syllabus.
 Make use of activities that make learners think about what they are reading or listening to and respond to
it personally.
 Make use of activities that make the learners think and feel before, during, and after using the target
language for communication.
 Make sure that the texts and tasks are as interesting, relevant, and enjoyable as possible so as to provoke a
positive influence on the learners’ attitudes to the target language and to the process of learning it.
 Set achievable challenges, which help to raise the learners’ self-esteem when success is accomplished.
 Stimulate emotive responses through the use of music, literature, art, and so on, through making use of
controversial and provocative texts, through personalization, and through inviting learners to articulate
their feelings about a text before asking them to analyse it.
 Make use of activities that encourage learners to visualize and/or use inner speech before, during, and
after experiencing a written or spoken text.
 Make use of activities that encourage learners to visualize and/or use inner speech before, during, and
after using the language themselves.
 Make use of activities that help learners to reflect on their mental activity during a task and then to try to
make more use of mental strategies in a similar task.
 Use an experiential approach in which the learners are first of all provided with an experience that
engages them holistically. From this experience, they learn implicitly without focusing conscious
attention on any particular features of the experience. Later, they revisit and reflect on the experience and
pay conscious attention to its features in order to achieve explicit learning.
 Rather than drawing the learners’ attention to a particular feature of a text and then providing explicit
information about its use, it is more powerful to help the learners to make discoveries for themselves.
 Provide many opportunities for the learners to produce language in order to achieve intended outcomes.
 Make sure that these output activities are designed so that the learners are using language rather than just
practicing specific features of it.
 Design output activities so that they help learners to develop their ability to communicate fluently,
accurately, appropriately, and effectively.
 Make sure that the output activities are fully contextualized in that the learners are responding to an
authentic stimulus, that they have specific addresses, and that they have a clear intended outcome in mind.
 Try to ensure that opportunities for feedback are built into output activities and are provided for the
learners afterwards.
 Most of the texts and tasks should be authentic in the sense that they have not been contrived for
language-teaching purposes.
 The materials need to be written in a way that the teacher make use of them as a resource and not have to
follow them as a script. There must be a built-in flexibility to the course that helps teachers and learners to
make decisions about texts, tasks, learning points, approaches, and routes in relation to learner needs and
wants.
 The activities should involve and encourage the use of such high-level skills as imaging, making
connections, predicting, interpreting, evaluating, and applying. This helps students to achieve processing
required for long-term learning.
 Language should not be restricted to the practice of language forms and functions, but should provide
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opportunities to use the target language to achieve intended outcomes in a range of ranges and text types
for a range of objectives.
 The materials should help the teacher to assess the learners and to give constructive feedback in relation to
achievement of intended outcomes.
 The materials should be cross-curricular in that they relate to other subject areas.
 The materials should include some element of content-based teaching so that the learners learn more
about an area of knowledge that is of particular interest or value to them.
 The activities should help learners to develop skills, which can transfer to other subjects of study or to
professional and/or leisure pursuits (creative, analytical evaluative, organizational, coordination, and
leadership skills)
 The materials should provide the teacher with ideas for localizing and personalizing generic activities.
 The materials should help the teacher to suggest ways in which individuals can make their own choices
and work their own level and speed.
2. Evaluating materials. Stages.
 The context of evaluation: Materials evaluation is a procedure that involves measuring the value (or
potential value) of a set of learning materials.
We thus examine criteria in two stages; an external evaluation that offers a brief overview of the materials
from the outside (cover, introduction, table of contents), which is then followed by a closer and more
detailed internal evaluation.
 The External Evaluation (macro evaluation): In this central stage of the model we have included criteria
that will provide a comprehensive, external overview of how the materials have been organized. The aim
is to examine the organization of the materials as stated explicitly by the author/publisher by looking at:
o The “blurb”, or the claims made on the cover of the teacher’s/students’ book. It includes if the
skills are integrated or not, if the topics are engaging. We can recognize approaches and learning
styles. If the book includes clear structured grammar presentations and extensive practice, if the
vocabulary is contextualized. Variety of activities and level.
o The introduction and table of contents.
o The cover: we can recognize the name of the book, the editorial, if it is available or not in our
country, if it includes a vocabulary list, flashcards or digital material. All of these details are
specified in the cover or in the blurb. It depends on the book.
From the blurb and the introduction, we ca expect comments on some/all of the following:
 The intended audience.
 The proficiency level.
 The context in which the materials are to be used.
 How the language has been presented and organized into teachable units/lessons.
 The author’s view on language and methodology and the relationship between the language,
the learning process and the learner.
When evaluating materials, it is useful to keep a note of these claims:
 Are the materials to be used as the main “core” course or to be supplementary to it? This will
help to evaluate their effectiveness in a given context as well as the total cost.
 Is a teacher’s book in print and locally available? It is also worth considering whether it is
sufficiently clear for non-native speaker teachers to use.
 Is a vocabulary list/index included? Having these included in the materials may prove to be
very useful for learners in some contexts, particularly where the learner might be doing a lot
of individualized and/or out-of-class work.
 What visual materials does the book contain (photographs, charts, diagrams) and is it there for
cosmetic value only or is it integrated into the text? Glossy prints in the published materials
seem to make the book appear more attractive. It is worth examining if the visual materials
serve any learning purpose.
 Is this layout and presentation clear or cluttered? Some textbooks are researched and written
well, but are so cluttered with information on every page that teachers/learners find them
practically unusable.
 Is the material too culturally biased or specific?
 Do the materials represent minority groups and/or women in a negative way? Do they present
a balanced picture of a particular country/society? It is possible that the content of some
materials will cause offence to some learners.
 What is the cost of the inclusion of digital materials, (e.g. CD, DVD, interactive games,
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quizzes and downloadable materials from the web)? How essential are they to ensure
language acquisition and development?
 The inclusion of thesis in the teaching materials; would they be useful for your particular
learners?
 The Internal Evaluation (Micro evaluation): We now continue to the next stage of our evaluation
procedure by performing an in-depth investigation into the materials. The essential issue at this stage is to
analyse the extent to which the aforementioned factors in the external evaluation stage match up with the
internal consistency and organization of the materials as stated by the author/publisher. We need to
examine the treatment and presentation In order to perform an effective internal inspection of the
materials, we need to examine at least two units (preferably more) of a book or set of materials to
investigate the following factors:
 The presentation of skills in the materials. We may want to investigate if all the language skills are
covered, in what proportion, and if this proportion is appropriate to the context in which we are
working.
 The grading and sequenced of the materials. This criterion is an important one and merits some
investigation as it is not always clear what the principle is. Some materials are quite “steeply” graded
while others claim to have no grading at all. Are they from simple to complex?
 Where reading/” discourse” skills are involved, is there much in the way of appropriate text beyond a
sentence? As teachers we sometimes find that materials provide too much emphasis on skills
development and not enough opportunity for students to learn to use those skills on extended reading
passages.
 Where listening skills are involved, are recordings “authentic” or artificial? We need to ascertain
whether or not dialogues have been specially written, thereby missing the essential features of
spontaneous speech.
 Do speaking materials incorporate what we know about the nature of real interaction or are artificial
dialogues offered instead?
 The relationship of tests and exercises to learner needs and what is taught by the course material. Are
these included as part of the materials? If so, we need to see if they are appropriate in context.
 Do you feel that the material is suitable for different learning styles?
 Are materials engaging to motivate both students and teachers alike, or would you foresee a
student/teacher mismatch? Some materials may seem attractive for the teacher but would not be very
motivating for the learners.
 The Overall Evaluation: At this stage we hope that we may now make an overall assessment as to the
suitability of the materials by considering the following parameters:
o The usability factor: How the materials could be integrated into a particular syllabus as core or
supplementary.
o The generalizability factor: Perhaps not all the material will be useful for a given individual or group
but some parts might be.
o The adaptability factor: Can parts be added/extracted/used in another context/modified for local
circumstances?
o The flexibility factor: It can be easily integrated into various types of syllabus.
3. Below is a list of errors commonly found in materials. Which of the principles seen in the
theoretical background would you say they do not comply with? Explain briefly. (internal or
external evaluation)
1. We find a lot of reading and listening Internal evaluation: all the skills should be covered
passages, but no grammar explanations or and in proportion. The skills are not integrated. The
layout of the units should be clear.
activities. Teachers have to resort to the
teacher’s guide to understand what to do
with these materials.
2. All the activities are closely guided and Internal evaluation: activities should be guided so
there is no room for learners to plan or carry learners are encouraged to discover by themselves.
out their own learning processes.
3. Some units contain about 20 new Internal evaluation: the skills should be balanced
vocabulary items, but others contain just 2 and all the units should have the same amount of
or 3, and they are not meant for vocabulary. There should be recycling from unit to
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consolidation or revision. unit.
4. Learners are never invited to talk about Internal evaluation: The activities are not engaging
themselves, their families or life experience. for students. Students should be encouraged to
speak or write about their experiences so to be able
to discover language principles.
5. The authors adhere to the lexical External evaluation: the approach stated in the blurb
approach, but whereas some units are clearly does not correspond to the content of the book.
based on the tenets of this approach, others
are heavily grammar oriented and others
seem to be audio-lingual.
6. There are only pair-work activities. Internal evaluation: there should be different types
of activities to engage different types of learners.
7. The authors adhere to the communicative External evaluation: the approach stated in the blurb
approach, but most of the activities are for does not correspond to the content of the book. The
practice of structures should be in context.
mechanical practice of grammar structures.
8. Lead-in activities are sometimes called internal evaluation: all the units have to have the
“introduction”, sometimes “getting started” same structure and layout so they are clear for the
students and the teacher.
and sometimes “openers”, but they always
have the same design and purpose.
9. Grammar rules are never stated. Learners Internal evaluation: besides grammar rules are
are not led to discover them. learnt unconsciously, students should find some
explanation.
10. No unit is connected to the previous or Internal evaluation: the progression of the activities
the following one. It is up to the teacher to of the coursebook should follow Bloom’s
taxonomy. Moreover, there should be a connection
establish this connection. between the units and language, vocabulary, which
should be recycled in each unit.
11. We find a lot of reading and listening Internal evaluation: the presentation of skills is
passages, but students are never allowed to unbalanced. There is too much emphasis on
receptive skills and there is no place for the
use the language. development of productive skills (writing and
speaking)
12. Pictures and/or topics present the target External evaluation: there should be aspects of the
language culture as being superior to others. target language, but this should not be prioritized
over other cultures.
13. The book is made up of 20 units, each External evaluation: units should be organized in a
consisting on 4 sub units. clear way and easy to follow.
14. No unit is connected to the previous or Internal evaluation: units should be graded from the
the following one. As units progress, simpler to the more complex. All units should be
connected between them and should be recycling
students are not faced to a higher level of from the previous one.
difficulty or cognitive engagement.
15. There is too much emphasis on the target External evaluation: there should be aspects of the
language culture (habits, celebrities, target language, but this should not be prioritized
over other cultures.
traditions, geographical features)
4. Mention and explain 2 principles of language acquisition and teaching:
 Principle of Language Acquisition N°1: A prerequisite for language acquisition is that learners are
exposed to a rich, meaningful, and comprehensible input of language in use. In order to acquire the ability
to use the language effectively, the learners need a lot of experience of the language being used in a
variety of different ways for a variety of purposes.
 Principle of Language Acquisition N°2: In order for the learners to maximize their exposure to language
in use, they need to be engaged both effectively and cognitively in the language experience. If the learners
do not think and feel while experiencing the language, they are unlikely to acquire any element of it. If the
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learners do not feel any emotion while exposed to language in use, they are unlikely to acquire anything
from their experience.
 Principle of Language Acquisition N°3: Language learners who achieve positive affect are much more
likely to achieve communicative competence than those who do not. Language learners need to be
positive about the target language, about their learning environment, about their teachers, about their
fellow learners, and about their learning material. They also need to achieve positive self-esteem and to
feel that they are achieving something worthwhile.
 Principle of Language Acquisition N°4: L2 language learners can benefit from using those mental
resources that they typically utilize when acquiring and using their L1. In L1 learning and use, learners
typically employ mental imagining, inner speech, emotional responses, connections with their own lives,
evaluations, predictions, and personal interpellations.
 Principle of Language Acquisition N°5: Language learners can benefit from noticing salient features of
the input. If learners notice from themselves how a particular language item or feature is used, they are
more likely to develop their language awareness.
 Principle of Language Acquisition N°6: Learners need opportunities to use language to try to achieve
communicative purposes. In doing so, they are gaining feedback on they hypotheses they have developed
as a result of generalizing on the language in their intake and on their ability to make use of them
effectively. If they are participating in interaction, they are also being pushed to clarify and elaborate, and
are likely to elicit meaningful and comprehensible input from their interlocutors.
 Principle of Language Teaching N° 1: the content and methodology of the teaching should be consistent
with the objectives of the course and should meet the needs and wants of the learners.
 Principle of Language Teaching N° 2: the teaching should be designed to help learners to achieve
language development and not just language acquisition. Teachers should help students to achieve not
only basic communicative competence, but also to develop the ability to use language fluently, accurately,
appropriately, and effectively in numerous genres and purposes.
 Principle of Language Teaching N° 3: the teaching should be designed so as to provide the learners with
learning opportunities that will help the to develop educationally in the sense that become more mature,
critically astute, creative, constructive, collaborative, capable, and confident as a result of the course.
 Principle of Language Teaching N° 4: the teacher needs to be able to personalize and localize the
materials and to relate them in different ways to the needs, wants and learning-style preferences of
individual learners.
5. Why are materials evaluated?
 The main aim is to measure the potential of what teachers and learners can do with them in the
classroom.
 To identify whether the designs of the materials are suitable for a task-based syllabus.
 To examine the extent to which materials permit students to achieve learning objectives.
 If they fulfil the prescribed course.
 To adapt them to make them better to suit the needs of the students and the needs of teaching.
6. Importance and drawbacks of authentic materials.
Authentic materials refer to the use in teaching of texts, photographs, video selections, and other teaching
resources that were not specially prepared for pedagogical purposes. They contain real-world uses of
language. They have a positive effect on learner motivation because they are intrinsically more interesting
than created materials. They also provide authentic cultural information about the target culture and contain
real language. They support a more creative approach to teaching.
One critic of the use of authentic material is that they often contain difficult language and unneeded
vocabulary items. They often contain vocabulary beyond the learners’ abilities.
7. Development materials: principles authentic materials (Tomlinson)
 Materials should achieve impact.
 Materials should help learners to feel at ease.
 Materials should help learners to develop confidence.
 What is being taught should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful.
 Materials should require and facilitate learner self-investment.
 Learners must be ready to acquire the points being taught.
 Materials should expose the learners to language in authentic use.
 The learners’ attention should be drawn to linguistic features of the input.
 Materials should provide learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve 54
communicative purposes.
 Materials should take into account that the positive effects of instruction are usually delayed.
 Materials should take into account that learners differ in learning styles.
 Materials should take into account that learners differ in affective attitudes.
 Materials should permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction.
8. Which accomplishments should a course book have for passing the 3 steps of materials
evaluation successfully?
Evaluating textbooks: A book may be ideal in one situation but may turn out to be quite unsuitable in a
different situation.
There are two factors involved in the development of commercial textbooks: those representing the interest of
the author, and those representing the interest of the publisher. The author is generally concerned to produce a
text that teachers will find motivating, creative, relevant to the students’ needs. The publisher is motivated by
financial success.
Criteria for textbook evaluation: Cunningsworth proposes four criteria:
1. They should correspond to learners’ needs.
2. They should reflect the uses that learners will make of the language.
3. They should take account of students’ needs as learners and should facilitate their learning process.
4. They should have a clear role as support for learning.
The type of evaluation a textbook receives will also reflect the concerns of the evaluator. The teacher is
primarily interested in whether the book works easily in her class, can be used flexibly, and could be easily
adapted.
 Materials:
o Materials are anything which is used by teachers or learners to facilitate the learning of a language.
Materials should be clearly linked to the curriculum they serve.
o Authentic materials refer to the use in teaching of texts, photographs, video selections, and other
teaching resources that were not specially prepared for pedagogical purposes. They contain real-
world uses of language. They provide authentic cultural information and exposure to real language.
o Created materials refer to textbooks and other specially developed instructional resources. Created
materials can also be motivating for learners because they look like teen magazines and other kind of
real world materials. They are built around a graded syllabus and hence provide a systematic
coverage of teaching items.
 Textbooks: commercial textbooks together with ancillaries (material that supports) such as
workbooks, cassettes, and teacher’s guides are perhaps the common form of teaching
materials in language teaching. They are used in different ways in language programs. For
example, a reading textbook might be the basis for a course on reading skills, providing both
a set of reading text and exercises for skill practice.
 Some advantages of using textbooks are: they provide structure and syllabus for a
program, they help standardize instructions, they maintain quality, provide a variety
of learning resources, are visually appealing.
 Some negative effects are: they may contain inauthentic language, may not reflect
students’ needs, they are expensive.
 Adapting materials:
o Commercial textbooks can seldom be used without some form of adaptation to make them more
suitable for the particular context in which they will be used. This adaptation may take a variety of
forms (principles and procedures):
 Adding or deleting content.
 Reorganizing content.
 Addressing omissions.
 Modifying tasks.
 Extending tasks.
 Simplifying tasks.
o The context of adaptation: while adoption is a term concern with whole course books, adaptation
concerns the parts that make up the whole. Adaptation is a necessary activity for teachers because the
smaller-scale process of changing or adjusting the various parts of a course book is more closely
related to the reality of the dynamic environment of the classroom. To adapt materials is to try to
bring together the individual elements of the classroom under a heading (internal or external) or a
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combination of them, so that they match as closely as possible. The external elements (what we have)
involve the learners’ characteristics, the physical environment, the resources and the class size. The
internal elements (what the materials offer) involve the choice of topics, the skills covered, the
proficiency level and the grading of exercises.
o Reasons for adapting:
 Not enough grammar coverage in general.
 Not enough practice of grammar points of particular difficulty to these learners.
 The communicative focus means that grammar is presented unsystematically.
 Reading passages contain too much unknown vocabulary.
 Comprehension questions are too easy and the answers can be lifted from the text with no real
understanding.
 Listening passages are inauthentic.
 Not enough guidance on pronunciation.
 Subject-matter is inappropriate for the age and level of the students.
 Photographs and other illustrative material are not culturally acceptable.
 The amount of material is too much or too little to cover in the time.
 Dialogues are too formal and do not represent everyday speech.
 Too much or too little variety in the activities.
MODULE 5: TEACHING ENGLISH LANGUAGE TO CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS
1. What are the principles behind inclusive education?
Inclusive practice aims to minimise or remove these barriers and support the success of all students whilst
ensuring that academic standards are not compromised. An inclusive environment for learning anticipates the
varied needs of learners and aims to ensure that all students have equal access to educational opportunities
through inclusive design. There are 5 broad inclusive learning principles, below, which can apply to all areas
of curriculum design and delivery. These principles often overlap and support each other when applied.
o Being Flexible – open to change and versatile
o Being Equitable – ensuring consistency and accessibility for all
o Working Collaboratively – involving students and stakeholders
o Supporting Personalisation – recognising that successful learning and teaching is governed by personal
difference
o Embracing Diversity – creating opportunities to develop awareness of diversity and global issues
2. Definition and principles (accommodation, modification, inclusive practice, mainstreaming,
three dimension). Examples. Basis of inclusive practices.
The concept of inclusive practices implies that students are more alike than different and that all students are
welcomed members of their learning communities. The concept of inclusive practices is founded/based on the
belief that students with disabilities should be fully integrated into their school learning communities, usually in
general education classrooms, and that their instruction should be based on their abilities, not their disabilities.
When teachers refer to students with disabilities, they mean students who are eligible to receive special education
services according to federal and state guidelines. Special education is the specially designed instruction provided
by the school district or other local education agency that meets the unique needs of students identified as
disabled. Special education is a set of services that may include instruction in a general education or special
education classroom, education in the community for students who need to learn life and work skills, and
specialized assistance in areas such as physical education and vocational preparation.
Students with disabilities may also receive:
● Related services: Assistance required to enable students to benefit from special education (speech/language
therapy, transportation, and physical therapy).
● Supplementary aids and services: They must receive support such as preferential setting, access to computer
technology, and instructional adjustments (such as more time to complete tests, simplified assignments) that
enable them to be educated with their peers who do not have disabilities.
● Accommodations: Changes in how the student learns the key curriculum (i.e. fewer maths problems than the
rest maintaining the same content because it takes longer than other students to complete each one). The
curriculum remains the same.
● Modifications: It refers to what the student learns and usually implies that some curriculum is removed
(according to the level of disability). For example, a student with a significant intellectual disability may not learn
all the vocabulary in a science unit, focusing on words that is likely to encounter in day-to-day life.
Mainstreaming: it involves placing students with disabilities in general education settings only when can meet
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traditional academic expectations with minimal assistance or when those expectations are not relevant (for
example, participation only in recess or school assemblies for access to social interactions with peers)
The least restrictive environment (LRE) guarantees a student’s right to be educated in the setting most like for
peers without disabilities in which the students can be successful with appropriate supports provided. For most
students it means a full-time or nearly a full-time participation in a general education classroom.
3. What are the three dimensions that form the basis for mainstream education? What is
mainstreaming?
o Physical integration: Placing students in the same classroom as non-disabled peers should be a strong
priority, and removing them from that setting should be done only when absolutely necessary.
o Social integration: Relationships should be encouraged between students with disabilities and their
classmates and peers as well as adults.
o Instructional integration: Most students should be taught in the same curriculum used for students without
disabilities and helped to succeed by adjusting how teaching and learning are designed and measured. For
some students with significant intellectual disabilities, instructional integration means anchoring
instruction in the standard general curriculum but appropriately adjusting expectations.
Mainstreaming: it involves placing students with disabilities in general education settings only when can
meet traditional academic expectations with minimal assistance or when those expectations are not relevant
(for example, participation only in recess or school assemblies for access to social interactions with peers)
4. List the different disabilities or disorders and their characteristics.
o Learning disabilities (LD): students with LD have dysfunctions in processing information typically
found in language-based activities. They have significant problems in learning how to read, write, and
compute. They may see letters and words differently and may have difficulty in following directions,
organizing assignments, and managing time. Sometimes they appear to be unmotivated or lazy.
o Speech or language impairments (SLI): students with extraordinary difficulty in communicating with
others for reasons other than maturation. They may have trouble with articulation, or the production of
speech sounds. They may omit words or mispronounce common words when they speak. They may
experience difficulty in fluency, such as a significant stuttering problem. Some students have far-
reaching speech or language disorders, in which they have significant problems receiving and
producing language. They may communicate through pictures or sign language.
o Mental retardation (MR): students with MR have significant limitations in intellectual ability and
adaptive behaviours. They learn at a slower pace and may reach a point at which their learning levels
off. The term INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY is becoming more common.
o Emotional disturbance (ED): when a student has significant difficulty in the social-emotional domain-
serious enough to interfere with the student’s learning. Students with this disability may have
difficulty with interpersonal relationships and may respond inappropriately in emotional situations.
They may have extraordinary trouble making and keeping friends and get extremely angry when peers
play jokes on them. Some are depressed, others are aggressive.
o Hearing impairments (HI): when students are hard of hearing, they have a significant hearing loss but
are able to capitalize on residual hearing by using hearing aids and other amplifying systems. Students
who are deaf have little or no residual hearing and therefore do not benefit from traditional devices
that aid hearing. Some students with hearing loss may be assisted through the use of advanced
technology such as a cochlear implant, a small, complex electronic device implanted near the ear that
can provide a sense of sound. Depending on the extent of the disability, students with hearing
impairments may use sign language, speech reading, or other ways to help them communicate.
o Visual impairments (VI): students with disabilities that concern the inability or limited ability to
receive information visually. Students with partial sight can learn successfully using magnification
devices and other adaptive materials. Students who are blind do not use vision as a means of learning
and instead rely primarily on touch and hearing. They may use braille, specialized computers, and
other aids to assist in learning. Students with vision loss need specialized training to help them learn
to move around successfully in their environment.
o Deaf-Blindness: these students have extraordinarily unique learning needs, particularly in the domain
of communication, and because of the highly specialized services they require.
o Orthopaedic impairments (OI): students with OI have physical conditions that seriously impair they
ability to move about or complete motor activities. Students who have cerebral palsy (parálisis
cerebral) are included in this group, as are those with other diseases that affect the skeleton or
muscles. Students with orthopaedic impairments are difficult to describe as a group because their
strengths and needs vary tremendously. For example, some students are unable to move without a
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wheelchair and may need special transportation to get to school and a ramp to enter the school
building. Others may lack the fine motor skills needed to write and may require extra time or adapted
equipment to complete assignments.
o Traumatic brain injury (TBI): students with TBI have a wide range of characteristics and special
needs, including limited strength or alertness, developmental delays, short-term memory problems,
hearing or vision losses that may be temporary or permanent, irritability, and sudden mood swings.
Their characteristics depend on the specific injuries they experienced, and their needs often change
over time. Students who experienced serious head trauma from automobile accidents, falls, and sports
injuries are among those who might be eligible for services as TBI. As it is a medical condition,
diagnosis by a physician is required along with assessment of learning and adaptive behaviour.
o Other health impairments (OHI): some students have a disease or disorder so significant that it affects
their ability to learn in school. Students who have chronic heart conditions necessitating frequent and
prolonged absences from school, or those with sever and chronic asthma, or with diseases such as
acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and sickle cell anemia may be categorized as having
OHI. Some students with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) also receive special
education services in this category.
o Multiple disabilities: the category used when students have 2 or more disabilities. Students in this
group often have an intellectual disability as well as a physical disability. This classification is used
only when the student’s disabilities are so serious and interrelated that none can be identified as a
primary disability (one that affects a student’s educational performance. A secondary disability is an
additional disability that also affects a student’s education but to a lesser degree. For example, a
student identified with a learning disability as a primary disability, could have an emotional disability
as a secondary disability). Students with multiple disabilities often benefit from assistive technology,
that is, simple or complex devices that facilitate their learning.
o Developmental delays (DD): it is an option used for children ages 3 to 9. This category includes
youngsters who have significant delays in physical, cognitive, communication, social-emotional, or
adaptive development. This option has 2 advantages: first, it avoids the use or more stigmatizing
labels for young children, and second, it acknowledges the difficulty of determining the nature of a
specific disability when children are rapidly growing and changing.
5. Characterise Autism and Asperger.
 Autism: sometimes it is referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorder (aSD) because of its many
variations, usually lack of appropriate social responsiveness from a very early age. They generally
avoid physical contact and may not make eye contact. Problems with social interactions persist as
these children grow; they appear unaware of other’s feelings and may not look for interactions with
peers or adults. They may have unusual language patterns, speaking without inflection, repeating what
others say over and over. They need a highly routinized behaviour to feel comfortable such as a
formalized procedure for putting on their clothes or eating their meals. Some students with autism
have above-average intelligence, others have intellectual disabilities. Children with ASD often have
one subject that they are extremely interested in and one skill they excel at. An autistic student has a
good memory, is not concerned about social expectations, outer appearance and hygiene. They don’t
read body language; it is difficult to keep a conversation going.
In the classroom, autistic students require a specific style of teaching and a supportive learning
environment.
Many autistic students are good at memorization, so they may be able to acquire a large vocabulary of
the foreign language, making it easier to understand and replicate formal written and spoken
language. As they appreciate rules and structures, they may enjoy learning the grammar of a second
language.
Some strategies for teachers:
o Stick to a routine.
o Wait until the student is ready and paying attention before providing instructions.
o Offer clear objectives for an activity
o Focus and build strengths.
o Provide instructions in both languages.
o Watch for bullying.
o Use visual support.
 Asperger syndrome: usually, it is considered a type of autism. Individuals with this disorder usually
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experience difficulty in social interactions and communication and have a very narrow range of
interests. However, with appropriate supports and teacher understanding, students with Asperger
syndrome can be highly successful in school. They tend to have strong or even gifted language skills,
and are therefore well-suited to foreign language study. They may dislike or have difficulty working
in groups and maintaining eye contact.
6. Characterise ADHD. Strategies teachers can use to help students with ADHD.
It is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which the brain of the child develops differently. The symptoms
include inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness and can mean that the student:
 Can’t focus or concentrate and doesn’t stay on task.
 Is forgetful and/or disorganised.
 Is easily distracted, finding it difficult to ignore internal and external stimuli.
 Seems to be daydreaming and/or not listening.
 Interrupts others and doesn’t wait their turn.
 Shouts out and talks too much.
 Finds it difficult to organize and plan their time.
 Doesn’t understand rules.
Strategies for teachers:
 Set the child near you.
 Ask the child discreetly how you can help him.
 Give clear and consistent feedback about behaviour that is appropriate or not in the classroom.
 Highlight the positive wherever possible.
 Start your lesson stating the objectives to help them focus.
 Give them guidelines for study as they need help to plan.
 Build routine into your lessons.
 Reduce task length and allow short breaks between activities.
 Give warnings before changing an activity.
 Give clear instructions using short sentences.
 During exams, give them headphones to do a listening task so that they are less distracted. Help them
keep the track of time, prefer oral exams to written exams, divide the exam into shorter sessions, and
use short and simple questions.
7. Characteristics of dyslexic students. Their difficulties when learning a foreign language.
Techniques to teach them a foreign language. Would it be easy for a dyslexic student in our
teaching context to learn English? Read
Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that can cause problems with reading, writing and spelling. It's a specific
learning difficulty, which means it causes problems with certain abilities used for learning, such as reading and
writing. Unlike a learning disability, intelligence isn't affected. Signs of dyslexia usually become apparent when a
child starts school and begins to focus more on learning how to read and write.
A person with dyslexia may (characteristics):
 read and write very slowly
 confuse the order of letters in words
 put letters the wrong way round (such as writing "b" instead of "d")
 have poor or inconsistent spelling
 understand information when told verbally, but have difficulty with information that's written down
 find it hard to carry out a sequence of directions
 struggle with planning and organisation
 But people with dyslexia often have good skills in other areas, such as creative thinking and problem
solving.
Difficulties to teach them a foreign language:
 The level of a child’s difficulties may give an indication of the likely difficulties in foreign language
learning.
 Motivation, attitude, learning style, self-esteem and determination are crucial to learning.
 Because of the phonological difficulties, there are likely to be problems with the phonology of the new
language. Auditory discrimination may be problematic.
 Processing time is a crucial factor. Dyslexic students often take more time to process language
information.
 Slowing the pace at which we expect dyslexic pupils to speak or listen in the foreign language may not be
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natural but it gives them time to process during the initial stages of learning.
 Working memory and short-term memory difficulties can be expected to affect foreign language learning.
It won’t be easy for a dyslexic student to learn a foreign language because at early stages of learning the new
language progress may be quite acceptable. However, as the demands rise, memory may become overloaded,
and if the pupils don’t understand the necessary strategies and techniques to employ, what was initially a
pleasurable experience can become extremely stressful, with the possibility of breakdown in learning,
motivation and self-esteem.
Strategies/techniques:
 Adopting a metacognitive approach: think and understand the way they learn and the language
structure.
 Analogous reading: make use of words which fit into families to minimise the need for new learning,
e.g. bright, sight, might, light.
 Modelling: involve someone in acting as a model while the student follows.
 Training in auditory discrimination: to listen for a sound in a word while observing pictures.
 Memory training: the use of specific techniques.
 Overlearning: on-line learning will become important with material that can be downloaded and then
worked on as often as the pupil wishes and can manage.
 Use of motivating material/games: attractive flashcards, computer.
 Technology: translators, computer games, word processors, mp3 players.
 Learning styles: take into account how a pupil learns best-small group, individually, seating position,
light sensitivity, motivational factors.
 Handwriting is eliminated. Typing in a computer is better because errors are easily seen and text can
be changed. Moreover, spellcheckers can spot errors.
8. Considerations teachers should have when adapting their classes for blind students.
 It may be possible to find course books with Braille editions. There are people who translate the
materials into Braille, but it takes time.
 Do not make anything too text-heavy.
 It is important to develop some time before the class to explain which parts of the material they will
need.
 Give them enough time for take-noting as it takes them longer.
 Learn about the software they use in their computer. They have special software installed which read
the content of websites and emails to them. Unfortunately, this software is not compatible with all
websites and programs.
 It is important to keep the classroom set-up the same from week to week.
 The classroom routine should be maintained even if the student is absent.
 It is essential to use students’ names continually so it is not confusing for the blind student and it is a
way to build connexions with a class.
 Be careful who you partner your students with. It is important to make sure that students partnered
with blind classmates are willing, or in some cases able, to assist them through appropriate light
physical contact.
 Teachers should be careful not to pay more attention to other students and not to underestimate blind
students.
9. How can technology assist students with special needs?
The use of technology in special education helps break the barriers for people with disabilities and provide
them with access to the most relevant educational programs. Properly designed software and hardware allow
students with special needs to get modern education and achieve any required information online.
Technology helps provide students with individual learning events, enables reaching higher flexibility and
differentiation in educational methodologies. With modern technology, teachers can adapt to the possibilities
of a particular student with minimum effort and choose one of the dozens of available learning tactics
designed to meet the needs of individual learners.
Digital technologies are easily accessible and widespread which allows using them for providing students with
new opportunities.
Special technology allows increasing the independence of a particular student freeing him from the constant
need for direct teacher involvement. As a result, a student can choose the speed of learning that is convenient
for him which leads to more personalized learning. When a student doesn’t inhibit the learning process for the
whole group, it allows reducing the anxiety level which plays a significant role in education as well.
Implementation of technologies in special education allows simplifying the communication and improve the
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academic skills of students with disabilities.
There are many ways of how technology can help students with special needs. For example, some kinds of
disabilities don’t allow students to use handwritten text that is an integral part of "traditional" education.
Using technical tools intended for human speech recognition and synthesizing, you can avoid the necessity
to use paper and pen during the lessons. Such technology would be also helpful for students with disorders
that don’t allow to process visual information correctly.
The adaptive computing technology allows using digital devices to bypass challenging tasks. Screen reader
applications such as JAWS along with specially designed Braille keyboards allow visually challenged students
to use the computer.
Augmentative communication systems help students with speech problems to overcome the communication
barrier. Such systems use picture charts, books, and specialized computers providing functions of word-
prediction for more effective communication.
10. Describe the INCLUDE strategy for teaching SEN. Identify its steps.
The INCLUDE strategy is based on 2 key assumptions: first, that students’ performance in school is the result
of an interaction between the students and the instructional environment. This means that what happens in a
classroom can either minimize the impact of students’ special needs or magnify it. The second assumption is
that by carefully analysing students’ learning needs and the specific demands of the classroom environment,
teachers can maximize SEN student’s success.
The INCLUDE strategy for SEN students follow 7 steps:
I. Identify classroom demands: it includes:
a. Physical organization (the walls, posters, floor space)
b. Classroom routines for academic and non-academic activities.
c. Classroom climate or attitudes towards individual differences.
d. Behaviour management (classroom rules and monitoring).
e. The use of time for instructional and non-instructional activities.
f. Classroom grouping.
g. Instructional materials (they affect the academic success of students with educational needs.
Many teachers choose to develop or collect their own materials, but published textbooks are
also available. Other materials used include concrete representational items such as
manipulatives and technological devices, large-print materials.)
h. Instructional methods (the ways in which teachers present content or skills to students and
evaluate whether learning has occurred are the essence of teaching and are crucial for
accommodating students with special needs. Determining the extent to which students have
mastered academic skills or instructional content is an important aspect of instructional
methods. Grades are used to communicate student evaluation).
II. Note student learning strengths and needs: students with disabilities are a very heterogeneous group; a
disability label cannot communicate a student’s complete learning profile. Like their nondisabled
peers, they have their patterns of learning strengths and weaknesses. Focusing on strengths is
essential, as well as helping students to see themselves and overcome their weaknesses. Three areas
describe student learning strengths and needs:
a. Academics (basic skills-reading, math, oral and written language)//cognitive and learning
strategies-memorization, note taking, textbook reading//survival skills-attending school
regularly, being organized, completing tasks)
b. Social-emotional development (involves classroom conduct such as behaviour including
yelling, refusing, fighting; interpersonal skills such as initiating and carrying a conversation,
establishing and maintaining friendships; and personal psychological adjustments which
includes key motivational areas of self-image, frustration tolerance and proactive learning).
c. Physical development (it includes vision and hearing levels, motor skills, and neurological
functioning. Students with vision problems need adapted educational materials; students with
poor fine motor skills may need a computer to do their homework.)
III. Check for potential areas of student success:
a. Checking for activities students can solve successfully.
b. Promote motivation and self-image.
c. Look for strength in both and social-emotional areas.
IV. Look for potential problem areas.
V. Use information to brainstorm ways to differentiate instruction:
a. Accommodation (support provided to help students gain full access to class content and
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instruction. Examples of accommodations include bypassing students’ learning needs by
allowing them to employ compensatory learning strategies, making an adjustment in
classroom teaching materials, using group organization, and teaching students basic or
independent skills.
 BYPASS strategies allow students to gain access to or demonstrate mastery of the school
curriculum in alternatives ways.
 Instructional methods, materials, grouping, and classroom management.
 Provide intensive instruction on basic skills and learning strategies.)
b. Instructional or curricular modifications (they are made when the content expectations are
altered and the performance outcomes expected of students change because their behavioural
and/or intellectual disabilities are so significant that the curricular expectations in general
education are inappropriate.
VI. Differentiate instruction:
a. Select age-appropriate strategies.
b. Select the easiest approach first.
c. Select accommodations and modifications you agree with.
d. Determine whether you are dealing with a “can’t” or a “won’t” problem. A can’t problem is
one in which the student, no matter how highly motivated, is unable to do what is expected. A
won’t problem is one in which the student could what is expected but is not motivated to do
so.
e. Give students choices. Encourage them to be more responsible for their own learning and
allows them to demonstrate their strengths and interests.
f. Select strategies with demonstrated effectiveness.
VII. Evaluate student progress: you can track effectiveness through grades, observations, analysis of
student work, portfolios, performance assessments, monitoring, feedback.
11. How is an inclusive classroom managed?
Classroom management comprises all of the things teachers do to organize students, space, time, and
materials to maximize effective teaching and student learning. It includes:
 Physical organization: the way a classroom is physically organized can affect student learning and
behaviour in a number of areas. Carefully arranged classrooms can decrease noise and disruption,
improve the level and quality of student interactions, and increase the percentage of time that students
spend on academic tasks. The physical organization of a classroom influences learning conditions for
all students, as well as the accessibility of instructional presentations and materials for students with
sensory and physical disabilities. Physical organization includes the appearance of the classroom and
the use of space, including wall areas, lighting, floor space, and storage. Lighting, either from
windows or ceiling lights, can affect students with disabilities; they may be sensitive to and respond
negatively to certain types of light. In relation to the organization of floor, it needs to be predictable, it
means that you should not make major changes without first considering their impact on students with
disabilities and then informing these students so they have time to adapt. Related to floor space is
monitoring. Teachers should be able to see all parts of the classroom at all times to monitor students.
 Routines for classroom business: establishing clear routines in both academic and non-academic areas
is important for two reasons. First, routines that are carefully structured reduce non-academic time
and increase learning time. Second, you can prevent many discipline problems by having predictable
classroom routines. Most students, especially those with special needs, find stability in knowing that
classroom activities will be similar each day. In the absence of this stability, misbehaviour often
follows.
 Classroom climate: it contributes significantly to the number and seriousness of classroom behaviour
problems as well as student achievement. Classroom climate concerns the overall atmosphere in the
classroom-whether it is friendly or unfriendly, pleasant or unpleasant. Climate is influenced by the
attitudes of the teacher and students toward individual differences. You can build the overall quality
of your communication with your students in many small ways. For example, finding the time each
week to speak privately with students to let them know that you appreciate their strengths, that you
care about them as individuals.
 Behaviour management: it refers to the teacher activities that directly promote positive student
behaviour. It includes establishing classroom rules, providing consistent consequences, and
monitoring student behaviour. Rules help create a sense of order and expectation for a classroom, and
they form a significant first step in setting up a learning environment based on preventive classroom
management. Effective classroom rules share 3 key characteristics: they are brief and specific,
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positively worded and clearly understood by students, and accommodate students from different
cultures. Be sure to explain rules carefully to your students so that they are understood. In addition,
teachers need to tie their expectations to a set of consistent consequences. This means demonstrating
that the same consequences apply to everyone and on a consistent basis. Finally, teachers need to
monitor student classroom behaviours frequently. To do this, you always need to have a clear view of
the entire class, regardless of the activity in which you or the class are engaged. When student
behaviour is not carefully monitored, students choose not to follow the rules consistently.
 Use of time: the use of time is one of the most important aspects of classroom organization.
Effectively using instructional time and managing transition time constitute 2 particularly important
tasks.
 Using instructional time: the amount of time that students are meaningfully and successfully
engaged in academic activities in school is referred to as academic learning time. For
example, teach students how to perform organizational tasks efficiently and how to observe a
firm time schedule when carrying them out. Another way is to select activities that have the
greatest teaching potential and that contribute most to students’ achieving the core school
curriculum.
 Managing transition time: it is the time it takes to change from one activity to another.
Teachers often waste academic learning time by not managing transitions carefully. Teach
rules devoted specifically to transitions and that you teach these rules directly to students.
These rules need to be consistently monitored and reinforced. The way teachers organize
materials can also affect the management of transitions. Materials should be organized so that
they are easily accessible. No matter how well organized transitions are, you still need to
adapt them for some students with disabilities. Students with visual and physical disabilities
may have mobility problems that cause them to take more time with transitional activities.
Furthermore, you may need an individualized system of rewards or other consequences to
guide students with ADHD or behaviour disorders through transition times.
12. Why is it said that “addressing difficulties is a question of problem solving” (p. 47)? Reflect on
this idea.
 Each student who experiences difficulties in learning is different.
 Every situation is different.
So, addressing difficulties is a question of problem-solving:
 Find out about the learner.
 Find out about the difficulties he/she experiences.
 Think about the requirements of the particular curriculum area.
 Barriers to learning in the classroom environment and in the particular curriculum area.
 Reflect on what will best address those barriers to help the learner to achieve in the classroom.
13. Strategies and considerations for developing or facilitating the 4 skills.
 Difficulties in the area of language acquisition may involve receptive (limitations in comprehending
what is said) or expressive (difficulty in putting thoughts coherently into words) language
impairments.
o Addressing receptive language difficulties:
 Teachers should not always speak in terms that are immediately understood by
students or their language will never develop.
 Teachers should ensure, whenever possible, that students who have a difficulty in
language should have direct experience of a concept before it is used. Children learn
by doing.
 Teachers should allow students plenty of time before expecting a response.
 Teachers should speak calmly and see their faces while speaking, use visual aids and
cues to the topics being discussed, and check that the student is appropriately placed
to hear and see.
o Expressive language:
 Students who experience difficulty in expressing themselves need frequent
opportunities for exploratory talk in every area of the curriculum in order to put new
information and ideas into their own words and link subject matter to what they
know. Strategies that facilitate oral language development might include:
 Exploratory talk in small groups.
 Oral reports following group discussion. 63

 Dramatization, role-playing, simulation games.
 Interviews.
 It is highly likely that teachers will meet students who experience difficulties in literacy in classes at
some time or another. Having the ability to handle written text with confidence is a key part of coping
with the day-to-day expectations of classroom life. Commonly, difficulties in literacy may include
barriers experienced in reading comprehension, reading accuracy, spelling and/or written expression.
Sometimes students are identified as experiencing specific difficulties in literacy of a dyslexic nature.
o Reading comprehension: first, it is important to be able to judge the level of difficulty of any
text used in class. Teachers can foster students’ reading comprehension by:
 Adding pictures, subheadings and summaries to the text.
 Teaching students to take notes, underline key passages or write summaries.
 Teaching students to think consciously about the text as they read.
 Shortening the amount read before questions are raised.
 Group reading, where students share the reading of a book and meet to discuss topics.
 Teaching students to scan the text before reading in depth.
 Often students need to gain more experience in reading in order to increase word
identification, knowledge of letter/sound combinations and use of contextual
information and inference. Excellent ways in which to develop these skills and the
related writing skills of language structure, organization of though and creative
writing are:
 Following the text with the eyes while listening to the recording.
 “paired reading” or “reading buddies”:
o Reading accuracy and spelling: some students experience a particular difficulty in reading
individual words accurately, associating sounds and alphabetic symbols in words, in ordering
letters correctly or in letter orientation. In order to reduce errors, students may limit
themselves to writing short, simple, minimal sentences or phrases, so that their writing is of
little interest or stimulation to a reader. Teachers will need to show students how to learn to
spell words. One way to strengthen word recognition and spelling is to adopt a multi-sensory
approach to teaching, which emphasizes the spelling of the whole world. Students should be
encouraged to use every sense-auditory, visual, kinaesthetic and tactile- simultaneously in
quick succession to reinforce their learning of new skills.
o Writing: learners who experience problems in expressing themselves in writing may often
benefit from structured support to help them develop skills for different types of writing.
Allowing a student to dictate text onto an audio recorder and then transcribing it for him/her
will help the student to get thoughts and ideas down on paper.
14. Is it possible for children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) to learn English as a foreign
language? Which methodological considerations should teachers have?
It is possible for children with special educational needs learn English as a foreign language. For teachers of
English, the most common difficulties they have to face are oral communication disorders, reading and
writing difficulties.
The English lesson should be very interactive, emphasis must be placed on singing, playing, dancing,
drawing. Movement activities are extremely beneficial for children with SEN as most of them have
difficulties in staying focused or sitting down. The atmosphere should be pleasant as children feel
uncomfortable working under pressure, in stressful situations or in a boring activity. Abstract concepts, rules,
and grammar rules should be avoided as they bring about tension. It is better to avoid correcting mistakes too
often because they can demotivate children. Lexical or grammar chunks should be repeated as much as
needed. A foreign language is learnt by direct exposure to it, therefore, children with SEN should be
familiarized with English by listening and reading activities. Children have different learning styles, even the
healthy ones. For this reason, it is advisable for teachers to be familiar with the SEN child’s learning style.
Kinaesthetic children prefer movement while learning, visual children prefer reading and pictures,
interpersonal learners like group work and classroom discussions, while intrapersonal children prefer working
individually. It is very important that teachers adjust their lesson to the child’s learning style, especially when
working with children with SEN. The typical English lesson for children with SEN should focus on listening,
playing, speaking, miming, singing, dancing, acting, etc. the types of interaction should be individual or group
work. Teachers should constantly encourage their students. The teacher’s dedication and determination are
very important in teaching English with children with SEN.
15. Explain the criteria/strategy you should follow to plan a lesson when you have a SEN student 64
in the English class.
There are certain strategies that an English teacher has to take into account. For instance, the lesson should be
planned according to the following criteria:
o the methodology used in teaching English should be made appropriate for children with SEN
o the teaching material should be catchy and attractive, but also appropriate
o the teacher should plan extra working time with the child
o the curriculum should be adapted for children with SEN (namely, the pressure to cover the entire
curriculum should be excluded and the focus should be on developing a few skills)
o the teacher along with the inclusive education specialist should draw up an individual study plan for
children with SEN.
Teachers should take into account the kind of disability the student has. Also, the teacher should consider the
student’s strengths and needs to develop the appropriate teaching techniques. Classroom arrangement,
routines and climate, the use of time and behaviour management are also important.
16. SEN students may need different adaptation according to their condition (for example, a blind
student will need certain adaptation which, in turn, would be different to an autistic child).
Explain the areas of adaptation SEN students could have and develop them briefly (you can
explain or provide a concrete example)
When having a SEN student, teachers should adapt:
 Classroom arrangement.
 Classroom routines.
 Call all the students by their names.
 The curriculum should be adapted to the SEN student’s strengths.
 The methodology should be adapted to the type of SEN student we have, for example, with blind
students we should base our classes on listening and speaking.
 The learning style should not be based on abstract rules and extensive grammar.
 Accommodations are changes in HOW the student learn key curriculum, for example, instead of
writing a paragraph, the student can write bullet points.
 Modifications refer to WHAT the student learns and implies that some curriculum is removed. For
example, a student with a significant intellectual disability may not learn all the vocabulary in a
science unit, focusing instead on words that he/she is likely to find in day-to-day life.
17. Is it the SEN student, the one who has to struggle to adapt to the class?
English teachers should adapt their lessons to children with SEN, should engage them in classroom activities
and use interactive methods. These methods are beneficial for regular students too, because they are
challenging, favouring communication and interaction.
18. What are the class requirements for students with sensory or physical needs?
The sensory range extends from profound and permanent deafness or visual impairment through to lesser
levels of loss, which may be temporary. Physical impairments may arise from physical, neurological or
metabolic causes that only require appropriate access to educational facilities and equipment; other may lead
to more complex learning and social needs; a few children will have multi-sensory difficulties some with
associated physical difficulties. These young people will require:
√ Flexible teaching arrangements.
√ Appropriate seating acoustic conditioning and lighting.
√ Adaptation to the physical environment of the school.
√ Adaptations to school policies and procedures.
√ Access to alternative or increased forms of communication.
√ Provision of tactile and kinaesthetic materials.
√ Access to different amplification systems.
√ Access to low vision aids.
√ Access in all areas of the curriculum through specialist aids, equipment or furniture.
√ Regular and frequent access to specialist support.
√ Taking time to listen to the pupil.
√ Think carefully about the clarity of their spoken language. Teachers should use natural speech
patterns and not exaggerate lip movements or shout, highlight key terms and key concepts and place
themselves in a position appropriate for students to lip-read or benefit from a hearing aid where the
maximum range is 2 metres. Students may also need the support of visual and written forms of
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language, as well as multi-sensory clues to acquire spoken and written English.
19. How can teachers ensure visual clarity of a text?
√ Simple and clear typeface is used.
√ Type size is 12 point or ideally 14.
√ Text is left aligned.
√ Layout is consistent and logical.
√ Words are not split between lines.
√ No large blocks of capital letters, no italics, no words underlined.
√ Thicker paper. No lamination.
√ Line space between paragraphs.
√ No text over the top of an image or texture.
√ All text is set horizontally.
20. Which considerations should teachers have when teaching students with behaviour or
emotional problems?
√ Include policies and practices that promote non-violence, mutual respect and respect for property.
√ Interesting programmes that are achievable for all. Students who experience success are less likely to
engage in negative behaviour.
√ Praise and positive reinforcement for effort.
√ Stable, predictable environments with familiar routines and consistent limits.
√ Positive environments. Create situations where students will value praise and comments.
√ Teaching that reinforces acceptable behaviour. For example, teach your students to put their hands up
to gain attention and praise them for following instruction and taking turns.
√ Friendly positive direction will encourage cooperation. Give choices as they reduce the likelihood of
outright refusal.
√ Being aware of events that may be stressful for teachers and students.
√ Avoid situations known to lead to extreme behaviour for individual students. Know the circumstances
under which a behaviour is likely to occur an make changes accordingly.
√ Early intervention. Don’t ignore behaviours that are likely to become extreme.
 Instructional methods:
Teachers use a number of instructional methods in class. Each of these methods should be analysed in
relation to student needs and then used and/or adapted as needed.
 Direct instruction: many students learn skills and subject matter more readily when is presented
systematically and explicitly in what is often referred to as direct instruction. It consists of 6 key
elements:
o Review and check the previous day’s work.
o Present new content or skills.
o Provide guided student practice and check for understanding.
o Provide feedback and correction.
o Provide independent student practice.
o Review frequently.
 Indirect methods of instruction: it is based on the belief that children are naturally active learners
and that given the appropriate instructional environment, they actively construct knowledge and
solve problems in developmentally appropriate ways. A common indirect method is called inquiry
learning. In this approach, the teacher is a facilitator who guides learner’s inquiry by helping them
identify questions and problems.
 Scaffolding: it is an approach that supports students as they develop problem-solving skills.
Scaffolds are forms of support provided by the teacher or a student to help other students bridge
the gap between their current abilities and the intended goal.
 Independent student practice: the purpose is to help student refine or strengthen their skills in
various areas. There are two ways in providing practice, one is in learning centres, the other as
homework.
o Students should practice only skills or content they have already learnt.
o Practice is more effective when students have a desire to learn what they are practicing.
o Practice should be individualized, specific and systematic.
o Students should have much practice on a few skills rather than little practice on many
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skills.
o Practice should be organized so that students achieve high levels of success.
o Practice should be organized so that the student and teacher have immediate feedback.
 Evaluation of student performance: the purpose is to determine the extent to which students have
mastered academic skills or instructional content.
 Neuroscience and education:
“Educational neuroscience (also called Mind Brain and Education or Neuroeducation is an
emerging scientific field that brings together researchers in cognitive neuroscience, developmental
cognitive neuroscience, educational psychology, educational technology, education theory and other
related disciplines to explore the interactions between biological processes and education Researchers
in educational neuroscience investigate the neural mechanisms of reading, numerical
cognition, attention and their attendant difficulties including dyslexia (is characterized by trouble
with reading despite normal intelligence. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading
quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and
understanding what one reads), dyscalculia (is a disability resulting in difficulty learning or
comprehending arithmetic such as difficulty in understanding numbers, learning how to manipulate
numbers, performing mathematical calculations and learning facts in mathematics)
and ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized
by inattention, or excessive activity and impulsivity, which are otherwise not appropriate for a
person's age. Some individuals with ADHD also display difficulty regulating emotions or problems
with executive function) as they relate to education. Researchers in this area may link basic findings
in cognitive neuroscience with educational technology to help in curriculum implementation
for mathematics education and reading education. The aim of educational neuroscience is to
generate basic and applied research that will provide a new transdisciplinary account
of learning and teaching, which is capable of informing education. A major goal of educational
neuroscience is to bridge the gap between the two fields through a direct dialogue between researchers
and educators.
Neuroscience can change education in 10 ways:
i. Better understanding of childhood development.
ii. Adapting classes to facilitate learning.
iii. Spacing learning for optimal absorption.
iv. Cognitive tutoring.
v. Targeting rewarding learning styles.
vi. Incorporation of social activities.
vii. Integrating technology in the classroom.
viii. Increasing brain capacity through learning.
ix. Improved approach with autistic students.
x. Overcoming learning difficulties.
MODULE 6: TECHNOLOGY AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING
1. How can technology enhance language learning?
Technology, when it is integrated into the curriculum, revolutionizes the learning process. More and more
studies show that technology integration in the curriculum improves students' learning processes and
outcomes. Teachers who recognize computers as problem-solving tools change the way they teach. They
move from a behavioural approach to a more constructivist approach. Technology and interactive multimedia
are more conducive to project-based learning. Students are engaged in their learning using these powerful
tools, and can become creators and critics instead of just consumers.
Teachers have incorporated various forms of technology to support their teaching, engage students in the
learning process, provide authentic examples of the target culture, and connect their classrooms. Further, some
technology tools enable teachers to differentiate instruction and adapt classroom activities and homework
assignments, thus enhancing the language learning experience.
2. Explain the main differences between Prensky’s typology and White and Le Cornu’s.
White and Le Cornu’s paradigm of Visitors and Residents describes the lived experience and practice of
technological engagement in a more accurate way than Prensky’s Natives and Immigrants as it allows for a
wide variety of practices which span all age groups and does not require individuals to be boxed in one
category or the other. Another difference is that some people may operate entire as Visitors, visiting specific
Web places for specific purposes, while Residents spend all their online time in social interaction, never using
the Internet for information. Thus, in contrast to Prensky’s theory, the distinction has nothing to do with a
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binary opposition related to age
White and Le Cornu’s theory is more appropriate to describe the use of technology because is not based on
age. Visitors use the web as a tool with a specific purpose and Residents see the web as a place to stay; they
use all social networks and are always connected. On the other hand, Prensky based his theory on age,
categorizing people into digital natives and digital immigrants. No change is permitted here as it only depends
on age.
3. Technology- enhanced language learning (TELL) benefits:
 Using TELL provides a lot more flexibility and caters to more learning styles of the language learners
compared to traditional styles of teaching.
 It can be used alongside textbooks for a much more in depth-learning experience.
 It turns the classroom into a student centred environment. Students can:
o Select order in which material is presented to them.
o Control the material presented to them.
o Control the pace of progress.
 It improves motivation and develops better attitudes in students towards learning.
 Learning is not confined to the area within the classroom environment, it is enlarged: students can
learn about language at home and practice language in class.
4. How can technology maximize the learning of a foreign language? Explain how we can develop
the macro and micro skills of a language through technology?
Publishing student work to the World Wide Web is a means of providing an authentic global audience for
classroom productions. When students write or speak for a broader and more international audience, they pay
more attention to polishing their work, think more deeply about the content they produce, and consider
cultural norms more thoughtfully. These benefits serve to strengthen all student’s skills.
Technology can provide extra opportunities to do meaningful language-learning tasks from the comforts of
their own homes. On a receptive level, they can sign on to a podcast for extra listening practice or view an
instructive video on YouTube. However, technology tools work best when students are asked to develop,
create, and share their work online. In this way, they are active learners, negotiating meaning and creating
media for a worldwide audience. For example, students can “meet” virtually with classmates via de web and
work on collaborative projects on a wiki they can also create blog entries, videos or comment on a classmate’s
work. Students who are reluctant to speak in class may feel more secure when they can record, and rerecord to
create an audio of video file.
One aspect to have into account to teach the skills is that digital natives are used to receive information really
fast, they are multi-task, and prefer graphics rather than texts. Moreover, the combination and intensity of the
individual skills has changed. Digital natives have short attention spans, they want interactivities and
immediate response to their actions. Digital natives need a new approach and computer games or videos are
the instruments to achieve this.
There is a solid base of research which establishes a link between the use of technology with English
Language Learners and their motivation and/or improvement in certain skills areas. Students are motivated,
interested, engaged in activities on the web.
5. Digital natives and digital immigrants Prensky.
Digital Natives are all the “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the
internet.
Digital Immigrants are those of us who were not born into the digital world, but have adopted some or most
aspects of the new technology.
6. Teaching English nowadays involves not only teaching linguistic content, but also teaching the
21st century skills. Explain the following skills and how can they be included or developed in the
EFL class:
a. Technology: technology can be included through the use of visual aids. Moreover, digital material is
cheaper for students. Internet presents us with new opportunities for authentic tasks and materials, as
well as access to a wealth of ready-made ELT materials. Internet also offers opportunities for
collaboration and communication between learners who are geographically dispersed. By using a
range of Information and Communication Tools (ICT) tools, learners are exposed to and can practice
the four main language skills.
b. Communication and Collaboration: it is taught through problem solving activities. Through team-
work where each student has a role so they have to listen to each other so to solve a real-world
assignment. For example, to extend their communicative competence, students comment on a friend’s
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photo on his blog.
c. Problem Solving: it is based on tasks that are related to real world situation in order to offer students
meaningful language use. Problem solving gives the language a purpose to be used. Students can
watch videos which present a problem and they have to find the solution. Using web tools can expand
the students’ problem-solving skills as they are required not just to find information but also to judge
its worth and accuracy.
7. Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL).
TELL deals with the impact of technology on teaching and learning a second language. A TELL activity
reflects a theory of teaching, learning. It has goals and objectives like any other language learning activity and
can be integral or peripheral to the lesson. It integrates the skills. TELL uses computer technology and the
internet to enhance the teaching and learning of languages by: using a hand-held electronic dictionary to look
up a word in class, by chatting with a friend using a little English, by reading news website, by creating a
video and posting it on YouTube, participating in an online discussion board, listening songs and reading the
lyrics, doing a computer-based language exercise from the CD that comes with the textbook.
8. Digital visitors and residents. Definition.
Visitors and Residents is a simple way of describing the range of ways individuals can engage with the Web.
It’s a continuum of ‘modes of engagement’ not two distinct categories.
Visitors understand the Web as akin to an untidy garden tool shed. They have defined a goal or task and go
into the shed to select an appropriate tool which they use to attain their goal. Task over, the tool is returned to
the shed. It may not have been perfect for the task, but they are happy to make do so long as some progress is
made. When in Visitor mode, Individuals decide on the task they wish to undertake. For example, discovering
a particular piece of information online, completing the task and then going offline or moving on to another
task. To Visitors, the web is simply one of many tools they can use to achieve certain goals.
Residents, on the other hand, see the Web as a place, perhaps like a park or a building in which there are
clusters of friends and colleagues whom they can approach and with whom they can share information about
their life and work. A proportion of their lives is actually lived out online where the distinction between online
and offline is increasingly blurred. When in Resident mode, the individual is going online to connect to, or to
be with, other people. This mode is about social presence.
 21st Century skills:
 Critical thinking-and-doing (problem-solving, research)
 Creativity
 Collaboration (cooperation, compromise)
 Cross-cultural understanding
 Communication (using media effectively) skills, both for interpersonal and presentation needs.
 Computing/ICT (Information and Communication Tools), knowing how and when to use technology and
choosing the most appropriate tool for the task.
 Career and learning self-reliance (dependencia) (managing change, lifelong learning and career
redefinition).
 Personal and social responsibility.
 Planning, reasoning.
 Visualizing and decision making.
 Leadership
 Internet-based project work:
Internet-based projects are useful in the classroom as they introduce the internet in the language classroom
encouraging cooperative learning and stimulating interaction. They also encourage critical thinking skills
because students have to transform the information they find in order to achieve a given task.
 Internet-based simulations:
They bring real-life contexts in the classroom, helping learners to deal with situations that might appear
during a foreign travel or in encounters with other speakers of English. Internet gives learners authentic
websites that provide stimulating and relevant content.
 Webquests:
They are mini-projects in which the input and material is supplied from the internet. They are different from
previous projects in the fact that they are structured. There are two types: short-term Webquests (it takes only
a couple of classes and involve learners in visiting a selection of sites to find information to use it in class to
achieve a set of learning aims) and long-term Webquests (students have to transform the information they
have acquired to make a new product. It may last a few weeks, or a term). A Webquest does not require much
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detailed technical knowledge it required the following skills:
o Research skills: the ability to search the internet and find resources.
o Analytical skills: the ability to be critical when selecting websites as resources.
o Word processing skills: the ability to use a word processor. To combine text, images and websites
into a finished document.
 Blogs, wikis, and podcasts:
Blogs, wikis, and podcasts are examples of social software that are computer tools which allow people to
connect, communicate and collaborate online. A blog is a webpage with diary/journal entries. A wiki is a
collaborative web space (pages are edited by any user). A podcast is an audio or video file that is broadcast
(emitido) via internet and can be downloaded. In the classroom, learners can connect to learners from other
places and the ideas and content can be generated and created by them.
The most common type of blog is kept by one person who post comments, thoughts, experiences or any other
content. Most of them allow readers to comment creating an online community around a topic. They might
include blogrolls (list of links). Blogs used in education are known as EDUBLOGS and they cover a wide
range of topics. They can be set up by teachers and learners. A TUTORBLOG is set up by the teacher to
provide news, homework, practice to their students. A STUDENT BLOG is set up by individuals where
students are encouraged to comment. A CLASS BLOG is used by an entire class, where learners all post to
the same blog.
The advantages of using blogs in the classroom are that they provide real world tool for learners to practise
written English and they provide contact with learners from other parts of the world. A negative point is that
blogs are available on the internet to everyone. Correction is one of the things to bear in mind because learners
want to be as accurate as possible when posting. Thus, the teacher should give enough time for drafting,
review, peer correction, etc.
Blog posting can be used for evaluation and the criteria for doing so has to be stated clearly in advance.
A wiki is a public website started by one person and subsequent visitors can add to, delete or change as they
wish. It is more dynamic and can have multiple authors. It has no linear structure and pages link back and
forwards.
A wiki is based on the concept of “collaborative writing”, referring to students, they can add new pages to it
and can edit previous ones.
A podcast consists of a “show” which is released either sporadically or at regular interval. It can be on any
topic and can include music or video. They can be authentic (BBC radio) or specially made for language
learners.
A place to look for podcasts is ENGLISHCASTER where learners and teachers can listen to and subscribe
any that interest them. There are two main uses of podcasts in teaching: learners can listen to podcasts made
by others or they can produce their own podcasts.
 Producing electronic materials:
Electronic materials are informational resources, exercises and activities you create and students use on a
computer and also in printed form. Their production may include working with external web pages,
programmes installed on your computer or more complex software. The choice of tool will be determined by
the kind of material you want to produce and the time available to you as well as the resources you have
access to.
By creating electronic materials, you will be able to provide extra practice for students and consolidate
exercises in group. These exercises will be of high motivation for students. Electronic materials can be part of
a more collaborative project. A wide range of digital resources can be shared between group members over a
server or on a platform like virtual learning environment.
Programs to create electronic materials:
 Technology and young learners:
There are young people who are out there confident with technology but who are not savvy (experienced)
users of it. While older people who are proficient users of technology.
Teenagers will often believe everything they read online. As adults, with more developed critical thinking
skills, we can show our students how to assess validity and origin of information on the web. We need to help
younger learners understand the essential issues such as how to stay safe online, to search safely, and what
sort of behaviour is appropriate and not on social networks like Facebook. We need to make them aware of
cyberbullying and grooming. All these are essential digital literacy skills.
 Padlet:
It is an electronic corkboard (tablero de corcho) that allows you to pin up anything onto the screen. Students
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and teachers add comments, documents, videos, pictures and web links onto the board, and everyone who
visits the board can access to this content. It is ideal for discussions and brainstorming. It works really well for
project work. Some of its advantages is that the teacher can monitor the students’ contributions, it has a
password so the teacher can control who views, it can be embedded into blogs, websites and virtual learning
environments.
 The mobile revolution:
In the contemporary digital area, where smartphones and unprecedented internet connectivity have become
widespread, both language exposure and learning potential have undergone a revolution. The widespread
introduction of mobile devices has allowed flexible access to language learning material outside the
classroom. These devices have enabled informal and unconscious exposure to the English language outside of
conversational educational practices. Students read and write in English on social media sites, when sending
emails and messages, or simply navigating around the web.
Mobile-Assisted Language Use (MALU) is defined as “non-native speakers using a variety of mobile devices
in order to access and/or communicate information on an anywhere/anytime basis and for a range or social
and/or academic purposes in an L2”.
 Get ‘appy:
o discovery puzzle maker, wordsearch, smile, kahoot, wordwall, liveworsheets, canva, padlet,
quizlet (to make flashcards), storywheel (storytelling), GetAcross (a game to practice prepositions
and phrasal verbs)
o Pinterest, Google Docs.
 A practice-based exploration of technology enhanced assessment for English Language
Teaching (Stannard):
o Technology is an area that is having a direct impact on language assessment and is offering us
new ways of assessment. We can get our students to record podcasts and audio files. We can
video our students interacting in groups or even working on a monologue or story. We can
develop their written work in blogs and wikis.
o Assessment is a very broad term that can cover formal exams and tests, both external and internal,
which are structured and built into the fabric of the academic year, as well as more informal types
of assessment that teachers undertake as a part of their day -today practice. The initial first move
into the area of Information and Communication Tools (ICT) is crucial. Teachers need to try
different tools and apps in class to achieve the goal of learning in a different way.
o The Learning Cycle:
 First we need to think about our learning objectives and goals.
 The assessments we set up can be very varied in both the skills they focus on, but also the
way they are executed.
 The assessments might be individual, pair, or group-based.
 Takes place during a course, module or unit.
 The focus is more on gathering data about the student’s progress and using this data to
help them improve.
 The evaluation and feedback of the assessments is also important.
o Summative assessment:
 Often take place at the end of a unit, module, or a whole course.
 The focus tends to be on the mark and the idea is to evaluate how well the student has
learnt what has been presented.
 Focus on the product.
o Formative assessment:
 Take place during a course, module, or unit.
 The focus is more on gathering data about the students’ progress and using this data to
help them improve.
 Focus on the process.
o Washback (backwash) effect:
 It is the impact that an assessment will have on the teaching and learning.
 If an assessment correctly reflects the skills a student needs to be a good language learner,
then it is likely that any work the student does in preparation for the assessment will have
a POSITIVE impact on their learning.
o Peer evaluation/self-evaluation:
 They attempt to make students better learners, to get them to think more about their own
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learning, shortfalls and strengths.
o Language portfolio:
 They offer students the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learnt and experienced
with the target language.
 A portfolio is a “systematic and selective collection of a student’s work that has been
assembled to demonstrate a student’s motivation, academic growth and level of
achievement”.
 An e-portfolio is a digital version of a portfolio. They can be word processed documents,
blogs, wikis, mind maps or other specialist tools (for example, Mahara) and can include a
wide range of digital assets such as video or audio recordings, saved chat room
discussions or forum contributions.
 A tool called DIALANG was developed to allow students to self-evaluate. Once the
students have completed their can do lists, they can click on a button and get some
guidance on what to study to improve.
 Self-assessment in a portfolio is a vital element in developing slef-reflection.
 Some tools to evaluate:
 Speaking: Vocaroo, Voice Threat.
 Writing and Speaking: myBrainShark.
 Reading and Writing: Edmodo.
 Listening: Ello English.
 Reading: Breakingnews.
 Blended Learning:
It is a method of teaching that integrates technology and digital media with traditional instructor-led
classroom activities, giving students more flexibility to customize their learning experiences. In general,
blended learning refers to the following:
1. Some learning happens online in a format where the student has control over the path and pace at
which they engage with content
2. Some learning happens in an instructor-led classroom
3. Online and in-person learning is complementary, creating a truly integrated learning environment
Blended learning reduces failure rates, improves learning, and boosts engagement. Blended learning combines
the best aspects of face-to-face teaching and online instruction in ways that enable students to learn at their
own pace. there are two basic factors which you should consider. While some learners prefer a combination of
online settings and traditional classroom, it is important to consider the target segment of catered students. Not
every learner is motivated enough to actively engage in blended learning. For such learners, this particular
learning strategy is not suitable. Secondly, motivation is indeed a critical aspect of blended learning strategy.
Some advantages of Blended Learning are:
 Individualized support for students.
 Students have access to helpful online materials anywhere and at any time.
 It provides more interactive educational experience.
 Parents have access to what their children are doing.
 It gives students more time for learning.
Disadvantages of blended learning:
 The technology can be challenging rather than useful.
 The teacher has more work to do.
 Students may have more work to do.
 Virtual classroom:
The Virtual Classroom is an e-learning concept whose definition and prime objective is to enable the
educators and the students to impart and perceive education online, respectively, principally over the Internet.
Additionally, it allows them both to communicate, interact and, work together with one another remotely from
any location, without actually being physically present face-to-face, via webinars, audio and video
conferences, web presentations, live streaming, text chats. It provides an opportunity of distance education to
the remote students by means of web-based online learning programs as well as the instructors
with innovative teaching tools to teach virtually from anywhere at any time, irrespective of the geographical
area, through online classes and courses.
Advantages of Virtual Classroom
 Personalized learning: Students can learn at their own time and phase
 Long distance learning

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 Enhances collaboration and communication
 Real-time teaching and learning
 Effective and efficient time management
 Gives students and teacher a worldwide exposure
 Accessed to everyone equally from anywhere and at anytime
 Affordable
 Introduces students and educators to education technology
 Comprehensive online tutorials
 Encourages digital and smart classrooms
 Improves Visualization
Disadvantages of Virtual Classroom
 No control over the students or classroom
 No control over the learning atmosphere or environment
 Virtual Classroom requires computers and internet access, which might not be at hand to everyone
 Expensive: Enrolling into online live class or courses can be costly
 Students lack real-time teaching experience
 The risk to the traditional student-teacher collaboration
 Using videos for learning:
Video clips can be a great tool to assist students in gaining deeper understanding of content. It is
important to have a clear purpose for using films, documentaries, or news clips.
Purposes for using video:
 Building background knowledge on a topic: students learn best when they take in information via
multiple modalities –through reading, listening, and viewing visual media. Images and videos
support the learning of new content, concepts, and ideas.
 Enriching a text or text excerpt: students benefit from contextualizing the person, place, or thing
they are learning about. Video clips can assist them in visualizing an event or a person, while
setting the context historically, politically, socially, and emotionally.
 Deepening or solidifying students’ learning: watching a short instructional video created for kids,
for example from YouTube, can be something novel or fresh to reinforce what students have
learnt or are learning.
Tips for using video:
 Be selective.
 Provide a purpose for using it.
 Give students time to reflect by pausing the clip.
 Keep them short.
 Use transcript.
 Gaming in the English classroom:
Games are able to hold the player’s attention for so long because they are engaging. A good game offers
just the right amount of challenge, it allows exploration and choice, it encourages the use of critical
thinking skills, and it allows for failure.
If we embrace games and bring them into the learning process, we can not only excite our learners but we
can encourage them to be creative and to think critically and talk about their experiences in English as
well.
Just because a game is popular, it doesn’t mean everyone in the class has had the chance to play it.
For example, the ones who know the game can explain it to the others, who will practice language asking
questions about it. Then, they can set stories based on the game to compose and share to practice writing
skills, or build and create things in the game to practice vocabulary. They can even create screen capture
videos, showing something and narrated in English.
It is important for students to see that they, too, are experts. They have interests and pursuits that they can
teach other people about. Giving them control of the teaching and learning process in this way is very
empowering. This sense of purpose and personal investment can create powerful learning opportunities,
and we as teachers can guide them to these moments and equip them with the language they need.
In the EFL/ESL learning context, some evidence exists that digital games can be used to help learners
improve their language skills and vocabulary acquisition. Moreover, learners instructed with an
educational massive-multiplayer online game showed greater increases in listening, reading, and writing
skills.
MODULE 7: INTERLANGUAGE AND ERROR ANALYSIS

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1. Define interlanguage and describe its components and characteristics.
Interlanguage (IL) is a linguistic system used by second language learners. Learners create this language when
they attempt to communicate in the target language. Interlanguage is affected by the learner's native language as
they use their native language knowledge to understand and organize the second language or to compensate for
existing competency gaps. A learner’s interlanguage is a unique linguistic system.
Characteristics
 Interlanguage is dynamic and permeable. It serves as a bridge between L1 and L2 when learners lack
knowledge and fine mastery of rules, but over time, learners progress. They refine certain rules and obtain
new ones. Their competence changes and their interlanguage starts to reflect those changes. First they
may say: ''I no swimming,'' which later becomes: ''I don't swimming,'' until it reaches perfection: ''I don't
swim.'' The process of constant extension and revision of rules reflects IL's tendency to change. IL's rules
are not fixed: they're altered, deleted, or added. Thus, the grammar is influenced from the outside through
the input which is also influenced by the inside.
 Interlanguage is systematic. Although different learners have different interlanguage, they all have their
own rules within their variations. They may not align with the actual rules but they are systematic: ''I
received money, I buyed a new car, and I selled it.'' Rules are set in predictable ways. At any particular
point or stage of development, the IL is governed by rules which constitute the learner’s internal grammar.
 Interlanguage is variable. Learner's performance is variable. They may apply the same rule differently in
separate contexts or domains. Accuracy and fluency vary across occasions as learners have alternative
rules for the same function. In a classroom setting, where the learner is focused on producing
grammatically correct sentences, they may say: ''I don't drink coffee.'' In a spontaneous conversation, the
same meaning can be expressed as: ''I no drink coffee.''
 Reduced system, both in form and function. The characteristic of reduced form refers to the less complex
grammatical structures that typically occur in an IL compared to the target language.
Interlanguage is often heavily influenced by L1 and interference from this may make it seem perfectly logical to the
learner, although it is incorrect. It is important for teachers to understand this and also to see interlanguage as a series
of learning steps.
There five agreed-upon factors that are believed to shape how learners create interlanguage (components) :
Overgeneralization: some of the rules of the interlanguage system may be the result of overgeneralization of
specific rules and features of the target language. For instance, learners can say “I goed home! To
overgeneralize English rules of adding –ed at the end of verbs to express the past form.
Strategies of second language learning: some of the rules in the learners’ interlanguage may be the result from
the application of language learning strategies as a tendency on the part of the learners to reduce the target
language to a simpler system.
Language transfer: some of the rules in the interlanguage system may be the result of transfer from the
learner’s first language. The learners use their mother tongue to create their own language system. This is not
an error but the process must be passed by the learners when they learn the L2. For example, “Today was
really tired”.
Transfer of training: some of the components of the interlanguage system may the result from transfer of
specific elements through which the learner is taught the L2.
Strategies of second language communication: interlanguage system rules may be the result of strategies
employed by the learners in their attempt to communicate with native speakers of the target language.
2. What is fossilization?
Fossilization is defined as the process by which linguistic items, rules, or subsystems become permanently
incorporated into the interlanguage (IL) of a language learner, regardless of the learner's age or the amount of
instruction in the target language (TL).
Fossilization is a normal and natural stage for many learners and shouldn’t be viewed as something bad.
According to Vigil and Oller, fossilization is a factor of positive or negative affective and cognitive feedback.
A positive affective response is essential for the learner’s desire to continue attempts to communicate.
Cognitive feedback determines the degree of internalization. Negative or neutral cognitive feedback will
encourage learners to try again, to reformulate along with a positive affective feedback. Fossilization occurs
when a learner receives positive affective feedback and then positive cognitive feedback reinforcing and
incorrect form of language. The internalization of incorrect forms takes place in the same way as it occurs the
internalization of correctness.
Affective feedback: positive: keep talking, I’m listening.
Neutral: I’m not sure I want to maintain this conversation.
Negative: this conversation is over.
Cognitive feedback: positive: I understand your message, it’s clear.

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Neutral: I’m not sure if I correctly understand you or not.
Negative: I don’t understand what you are saying, it’s not clear.
Affirmative feedback + affirmative cognitive feedback=fossilization
Affirmative feedback + negative/neutral cognitive feedback= learner tries again.
3. Types of error correction.
 Explicit correction: it is used to indicate that the student´s production was incorrect, with the teacher
providing the correct form. For example: “When I have 12 years old… -No, not have. You mean, when I
was 12 years old…”
 Recast/ Rephrase: the teacher implicitly reformulates the learner’s wrong utterance or expands the error
or gives the correct structure without openly referring to the learner’s faulty utterance. They are
unobtrusive and do not interfere with the flow of communication. For example: “I lost my road. -oh, yeah,
I see, you lost your way. And then what happened?”
 Clarification request: phrases like “Excuse me‟ or “I don’t understand‟ are used to show
incomprehension on the part of the teacher because the message has not been understood and a repetition
and/ or reformulation is required. Example: “I want practice today, today. – I’m sorry?”
 Metalinguistic clues: without providing the correct form, the teacher poses questions or makes comments
related to the student’s utterance, such as “Do we say it like that?” Example: “I am here since January. –
Well, okay, but remember we talked about the present perfect tense?”
 Elicitation: the teacher directly elicits the correct form from the students. It stimulates the learner to self-
correct. Elicitation questions require more than a Yes/No answer, for example “How do we say this in
English?”
 Repetition: the teacher repeats the student’s error and adjusts the intonation to draw the learner’s
attention to it. For example: “when I have 12 years old… - when I WAS 12 years old…”
Cross-linguistic influence and learner language:
Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is defined as the influence that knowledge of one language has on an
individual’s learning or use of another language. This influence can involve various aspects of language. For
example, a native speaker of Spanish who is learning English, CLI may lead to Spanish-sounding
pronunciation when speaking English (e.g., pronouncing “zoo” like “soo”).
The contrastive analysis hypothesis:
With roots in the behaviouristic and structuralist approaches the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH)
claimed that the principal barrier to second language acquisition is the interference of the first language
system with the second language system.
Behaviourism contributed to the notion that human behaviour is the sum of its smallest parts and components,
and therefore, that language learning could be described as the acquisition of all of those discrete units.
Interference could not be predicted since one could transfer positively all other items in a language. Second
language learning involved the overcoming of the differences between the native and the target languages.
With the HIERARCHY OF DIFFICULTY teachers may make a prediction of the relative difficulty of a given
aspect of the target language. The hierarchy of difficulty was a way to predict the linguistic difficulty that
learners would encounter in a foreign language classroom.
The implication in teaching is that first language effects are considered important-but not exclusive- factors in
accounting for the learner´s acquisition of a second language. In a communicative language classroom,
teachers will attend to the potential effects of the first language, but will implant such attention in meaningful
communication.
Towards cross-linguistic influence:
The attempt to predict difficulty by means of Contrastive Analysis is the strong version of the CAH, a version
that is believed was unrealistic and impracticable.
The weak version of the CAH recognized the significance of interference across languages. As learners are
learning the language, errors appear, and teachers can utilize their knowledge of the target and native
languages to understand sources of error. This weak version remains today under the label CROSS-
LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE (CLI), recognizing the significant role that prior experience plays in any earning
act, and that the influence of the native language as prior experience must not be overlooked.
Markedness and Universal Grammar:
Markedness theory accounted for relative degrees of difficulty by means of principles of universal grammar.
The theory claims that marked items (unmarked item plus one more feature) is more difficult to acquire than
the unmarked one, and the degree of Markedness will correspond to degrees of difficulty. For example, in the
case of the English indefinite articles (a/an), “an” is the more complex or marked form (it has an additional
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sound) and “a” is the unmarked form with the wider distribution.
Universal grammar theory is another perspective to understand the acquisition of language and its difficulty.
It states that many of the rules acquired by children when learning their first language are considered to be
universal to any language. Rules that are shared by all languages comprise Universal Grammar. These rules
are a set of parameters of a language. Different languages set their parameters differently, thereby creating the
characteristic grammar for that language.
By discovering innate linguistic principles that govern what is possible in human languages, we may be able
to understand and describe contrasts between native and target languages and the difficulties encountered.
An alternative to Markedness theory is the COMPETITION MODEL which suggested that when options for
interpreting meaning failed, learners will look for alternatives in their native language to create meaning.
Stages of learner language development:
 The first stage is a stage of random errors, in which the learner is only vaguely aware that there is
some systematic order to a particular class of items.
 The second stage is a stage of emergent errors, in which the learner has begun to distinguish a
system and to internalize certain rules. These rules may not be correct by target language standards,
but they are legitimate in the mind of the learner. The learner is still unable to correct errors when
they are pointed. Avoidance of structures and topics is typical.
 The third stage is a truly systematic error in which the learner is able to manifest more consistency in
producing the second language. While those rules that are stored in the learner’s brain are still no all
well-formed.
 The fourth stage is the stabilization stage, in which the learner has relatively few errors and has
mastered the system to the point that fluency and intended meanings are not problematic. The learner
can correct himself.
Learner language:
Recently, researchers and teachers have understood that second language learning is a process of the creative
construction of a system in which learners are consciously testing hypotheses about the target language from a
number of possible sources of knowledge: knowledge of the native language, limited knowledge of the target
language, about language in general, about the communicative functions of language, about life, human
beings, the universe. The learners, in acting upon their environment, construct what to them is a legitimate
system of language-a structured set of rules.
By the late 1960’s, SLA began to be examined the same way first language acquisition had been studied and
learners were looked as creative beings proceeding through logical, systematic stages of acquisition,
creatively acting upon their linguistic environment as they faced its forms and functions in meaningful
contexts. By a gradual process of trial and error and hypothesis testing, learners slowly succeed in establishing
closer approximations to the system used by native speakers.
there are a number of terms which stresses the legitimacy of learners’ second language systems. One is
interlanguage by Selinker. Corder, used to the term IDIOSYNCRATIC DIALECT to connote the idea that the
learner’s language is unique to a particular individual, that the rules of the learner’s language are peculiar to
the language of that individual alone. These terms share the concept that second language learners are forming
their self-contained linguistic systems.
Lerner language is an approach to analyse interlanguage through the speech and writing of the learner, that is
the production competence.
Identifying and describing errors:
Corder provided a model for identifying erroneous utterances in a second language. According to Corder’s
model, any sentence uttered by the learner and then transcribed can be analysed. He distinguishes between
COVERT and OVERT errors.
Overt errors are those erroneous utterances which are unquestionably ungrammatical at the sentence level.
Covert errors are those utterances grammatically well-formed at the sentence level but incorrect within the
context of interaction. For example, the sentence “I’m fine, thank you” is grammatically correct at the
sentence level, but obviously an error to the response “Who are you?”.
Describing errors according to Lennon: (types)
 The most generalized breakdown is by identifying errors of addition, omission, substitution, and
ordering. For example, in English a “do” auxiliary might be added (does can he sing?)
 Within each category, levels of language can be considered: phonology or orthography, lexicon,
grammar, and discourse.
 Errors can be global or local. Global errors obstruct communication; they prevent the hearer from
76
comprehending some aspect of the message. For example, “well, it’s a great hurry around” is difficult
to interpret in any context. Local errors do not prevent the message from being heard because there is
a minor violation of one segment of a sentence, allowing the hearer/reader to make an accurate guess
about the intended meaning. For example, “a scissors”.
 Domain and extent. Domain is the rank of linguistic unit (from phoneme to discourse) that must be
taken as context in order for the error to become apparent. Extent is the rank of linguistic unit that
would have to be deleted, replaced, supplied, or reordered in order to repair the sentence.
Sources of error:
By trying to identify sources we can take another step toward understanding how the learner’s cognitive and
affective processes relate to the linguistic system and to formulate an integrated understanding of the process
of second language acquisition.
o Interlingual transfer: (across two or more languages). It is more common at the beginning stages of
learning a second language when native language interferes. For example, “the book of Jack” instead
of “Jack’s book”. These errors are attributable to negative interlingual transfer.
o Intralingual transfer: (within one language). It is the generalization within the target language.
Negative intralingual transfer, or overgeneralization are for example, “Does John can sing?” or “He
goed”.
o Context of learning: context refers to the classroom with its teacher and its materials in the case of
school learning or the social situation in the case of untutored second language learning. In a
classroom context the teacher or the textbook can lead the learner to make faulty hypotheses about the
language. Students often make errors because of a misleading explanation from the teacher, faulty
presentation of a structure or word in a textbook, or even because of a pattern that was memorized but
improperly contextualized.
o Communication strategies: learners use production strategies in order to enhance getting their
messages across, but at times these techniques can become s source of error.
Form focused instruction:
Form focused instruction (FFI) is, according to Spada, “any pedagogical effort which is used to draw the
learners’ attention to language from either explicitly or implicitly” and as “ any planned or incidental
instructional activity that is intended to induce language learners to pay attention to linguistic form.”
What makes FFI promising in foreign language teaching is its potential to draw the learner’s attention to
recurring forms during the lesson, hence attending to both form and communicative meaning. The FFI lesson
responds to learners’ needs as communicative tasks and meaningful practice blend (mix) in activities which
draw the learner’s attention to language forms to promote fluency and accuracy alike.
Mistakes and errors:
A mistake refers to a performance error that is either a random guess or a “slip”, in that it is a failure to utilize
a known system correctly. Hesitations, slips of the tongue, random ungrammaticalities occur in second
language speech. When attention is called to them, can be self-corrected. The learner knows the system but
fails to use it.
An error reflects the competence of the learner. It cannot be self-corrected. The learner’s system is incorrect.
Errors are of significance, they do reflect knowledge and only learners of an L2 make them.
Error analysis:
The fact that learners do make errors, and that these errors can be observed, analysed, and classified to reveal
something of the system operating within the learner, led to a flow of study of learners’ error called error
analysis. It is distinguished from Contrastive Analysis by its examination that errors are attributed to all
possible sources, not only from the negative transfer of the native language. Teachers should be careful in not
giving too much emphasis to correcting errors as the ultimate goal of second language learning is
communicative fluency. The absence of error does not necessarily reflect nativelike competence because
learners may be avoiding the structures that pose difficulty for them.
Treatment of errors:
Teachers should train their students to become active participants and correct themselves, so they can be more
confident and less teacher dependant. Teacher’s treatment of errors can be either explicit or implicit
correction. The former case implies a detailed, direct correction, the teacher provides his/her learners with
exact forms or structures of their erroneous productions; the latter implies an indirect correction, the teacher
indicates the presence of errors providing some sort of clues with the intention of peer or self- correction. At
the moment of error correction teachers have to bear in mind not only what type of mistake was made but also
how to provide a gentle correction to avoid discouraging students in their attempts to use the target language.
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The affective impact of error correction depends on the learners‟ proficiency level.
o Teachers should correct errors affecting intelligibility, errors that interfere with the general meaning
and understandability of utterances.
o High frequency and generality errors should be corrected more often than less frequent errors. For
example, the omission of the third person singular “s” is an error of high frequency and generality.
o Teachers should put more emphasis on correcting errors affecting a large percentage of their students.
o Stigmatizing or irritating errors should be paid more attention to. This factor is related to the
sociolinguistic aspect of language learning.
o Errors relevant to a pedagogical focus should receive more attention than other errors. For example, if
the focus of the lesson is the use of the present perfect tense, the correction of errors involving
prepositions should not be emphasized.
Too much negative cognitive feedback often leads learners to shut off their attempts at communication, while
too much positive cognitive feedback serves to reinforce the errors of the learner resulting in the fossilization
of such errors.
Defining error:
o The error analyst’s object of enquire is the foreign language learner’s ignorance of the target
language. This ignorance can be manifest in two ways. First, in silence. Then, they substitute
language.
 Learner’s ignorance of the target language can be expressed in 4 categories:
 Grammaticality: it is the grammar who decides whether an utterance said by the
learner is grammatical as ungrammaticality is context free. Thus, the grammaticality
of a sentence does not appeal to context.
 Acceptability: we refer to the context to decide if a piece of language is acceptable or
not. (Corder’s typology of covert and overt errors will be of this category).
 Correctness: an utterance can be accepted spontaneously, but reflection based on
learnt rules may consider it incorrect.
 Strangeness and infelicity: it describes a number of types of 'linguistically strange'
word combinations.
Errors can be classified according to basic type: omissive, additive, substitutive or related to word order.
They can be classified by how apparent they are: overt errors such as "I angry" are obvious even out of
context, whereas covert errors are evident only in context. Closely related to this is the classification
according to domain, the breadth of context which the analyst must examine, and extent, the breadth of the
utterance which must be changed in order to fix the error. Errors may also be classified according to the level
of language: phonological errors, vocabulary or lexical errors, syntactic errors, and so on. They may be
assessed according to the degree to which they interfere with communication: global errors make an
utterance difficult to understand, while local errors do not.
In second language acquisition, error analysis studies the types and causes of language errors. Errors are
classified according to:
 modality (i.e., level of proficiency in speaking, writing, reading, listening)
 linguistic levels (i.e., pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, style)
 form (e.g., omission, insertion, substitution)
 type (systematic errors/errors in competence vs. occasional errors/errors in performance)
 cause (e.g., interference, interlanguage)
 norm vs. system

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RESUMEN PLAN LIBRES 2019

MODULE 1: CURRENT TRENDS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

● planning phase: adviser

13. What are schemas? How can they reflect TBL? 4

Objective: Students have to be able to make group

grammatical structures as well as communicative functions through meaning focus activities.

22. How should teachers decide what to test? 18

27. Types of assessment. 20

 Integration of language skills in class activities.

12. What is the role of schemata?

 y ideas as starting point, 31

necessitating more than one draft;

 y ideas as starting point, 32

necessitating more than one draft;

 y ideas as starting point, 33

necessitating more than one draft;

 y ideas as starting point, 34

necessitating more than one draft;

Speakers and writers need some understanding of these 2 ideas:

 Markedness theory: it proposes that in every linguistic opposition (phonological or

interpersonal cooperating, role-playing, summarizing, skimming, self-evaluating, reflecting, creative

 Oral reports following group discussion. 63

 Long distance learning

MODULE 7: INTERLANGUAGE AND ERROR ANALYSIS

Cognitive feedback: positive: I understand your message, it’s clear.

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