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Curriculum Proposal for Learners of
Spoken English Communication.
Focus
: Speech communication.Target group
: First and second year college and university level learners of English as a foreign language.
Originally submitted as part of an assignment for the course
LING 911: Language Curriculum Development,
Master of Applied Linguistics,
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
July 1997.
Mark A. Bell
E-mail:
m487396@Rocketmail.comContents:
The learners and the learning situation.
Differences between spoken and written English, and creating a realistic communicative need.
Learning activity factors and putting learning activities together into units of class-work.
Things to teach and the grammatical and functional relationships between them.
Selection from a Database of Learning Activities
Learning activities classified by Activity Factors.
Functional Areas and Activity Factors combined into a lesson.
Functional areas combined into a year of class-work based on cyclical review and refinement.
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Situation
This curriculum proposal arises out of my experience teaching college-age learners of English as a foreign language in South Korea. Many of these ideas were developed while teaching first-year students majoring in Tourism English Interpretation in 1994 and 1995, and students from a variety of general majors in 1996. It is aimed at first-year college and university learners of spoken English, although it could be adapted for young learners in general. It is aimed at students who major in English or a closely related subject, and hopefully have some interest in learning to speak English. Many of the principles that I will outline could be of use in teaching the great many students who do not major in English, but are now required to pass English conversation courses in their first year, provided they have some interest in learning. It is not aimed at those very few learners in Korea who are studying English for immediate professional purposes.
Learners
All students in Korea receive training in English grammar and vocabulary from middle-school (Junior-High) onwards. This training is profoundly non-communicative. There is a heavy emphasis on intensive rote-memorization of vocabulary and unanalyzed phrases, and on passive, multiple choice, taped, listening examinations. Since it is currently illegal for high school students to study at private language schools (and most would not have time anyway), unless they have had the opportunity to travel overseas, their chances of having studied with a native speaker of English before coming to university, or of having been exposed to communicative learning activities and testing methods, are virtually nil.
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ContentsBecause these learners do not have pressing situational needs for their new language, each learning activity should provide them with an immediate need for the language they are going to learn or practice. This need must extend beyond just practicing linguistic form for the sake of practicing or because they are told (Paul 1994). As in real life, language activities should have an extra-linguistic motivation. Also, it is an important feature of spoken language that it is "embedded in the action" (Gerot & Wignell 1995:159). It is the action which should form a matrix for the language, and not the other way around. Often the best way of doing this is through personalization, or through adding an element of puzzle or game to the activity. For example, instead of simply practicing a "personal questions/ first-meeting" dialogue, students can be encouraged to substitute real personal information and to ask their partner real questions. Later, their partner might pretend to take on the role of a famous person, and they might use the language from the dialogue to guess their new identity.
Learners should use all available resources:
If learners need a piece of language, for example to get interesting information from their partner, to solve a puzzle, or to play a game, they will get it from the nearest available source. They should be encouraged to use all available resources: other learners, the class text, their notes, the teacher, hints and tips written on the board. It does not matter where they get the information that they need, only that they need the information that they get. For example, if learners challenge a partner to remember the last seven things they do before they leave their house every day, they will be motivated by curiosity and the novelty of talking about something they never thought about before. With any luck, they will search for the language they need to answer the question and to clarify their partner's answers. If learners are not motivated to try the activity in English at all, then it is best to choose another activity (c.f.: Paul 1994). If learners will not try any activity in English, then this curriculum is not appropriate for the group in question.
The learner's basic tool for getting and clarifying information and instructions, for engaging in dialogue, for engaging in learning activities, and for solving learning problems, is the question. Questioning is not just a grammatical skill, it is a social function. Learners must not only have the grammatical control necessary to ask questions, they must feel comfortable and positive about doing so. There are many ways to reinforce this. I recently experimented with supplementing the usual list of "classroom language" taught at the beginning of term, by writing simple questions like "Hey Mark! What is this?" or "What does this mean?" on the board while learners engaged in activities. I was delighted to find these simple phrases unleashed a flood of questions both to me, and between learners.
For learners to feel comfortable about using questions to learn, then they must have permission to not know. Learners coming from an authoritarian high school system are accustomed to answering questions rather than asking them, and to punishment not only when they answer incorrectly, but when they do not have a ready answer. A prohibition against ignorance results in a prohibition against questioning, since to ask for information or instruction is to reveal that one does not know. It is vitally important to relax this prohibition as soon as possible. Teaching learners that it is O.K. to not know "the answer" and to feel positive about asking questions to find out is the first step in teaching them to guess, to deduce, to search for patterns, and to clarify, as they seek to meet their communicative needs. A variety, of cooperative puzzle, deductive questioning, and guessing games are very effective.
Syntactic elements of the clause:
To form a question, learners have to be able to identify (not necessarily in explicit terms) and manipulate the basic elements of the clause. It is often taken for granted that learners automatically parse sentences into subjects, auxiliaries, verbs, objects, and prepositional phrases. One of the reasons that Korean learners often have such difficulty constructing questions and answers is that they are used to learning English as a series of unanalyzed lexical phrases, and the syntax of English is greatly different from that of Korean. Consequently, they have difficulty identifying syntactic elements and knowing how to manipulate them. Learners not only need to practice yes/no and wh- questions, questions with modals and questions without, questions with prepositional phrases and questions without, and questions which require do-support and questions that do not, they need to contrast them and learn the grammatical principles that make them work.
Ideational elements of the clause:
Learners should learn to put Participants together with Processes together with Circumstances as soon as possible. Learning unanalyzed phrases that cannot be manipulated has its place when certain language needs to be learned quickly (for example, "classroom language" at the beginning of term), but as argued above, learners soon need to be able to tell verbal Processes from Participants or they will not be able to manipulate them. Teaching Circumstances halfway through the course makes no sense. Learners need to know where and how to add circumstantial information without getting confused, and they need this skill as soon as it is possible to introduce it without overwhelming them.
Learners should be encouraged to put simple clauses together to form complex meanings as soon as possible. Korean learners are used to treating language as isolated phrases. They are also far more used to processing language in its written registers than in its spoken. Consequently, they think of expressing themselves in terms of single, information-packed clauses rather than strings of connected clauses. This tendency not to think beyond producing a single clause is highly constraining. Learners feel that because they do not have the resources to express their complex meanings in a single perfect utterance, they cannot speak at all. Learning to produce a string of simple clauses joined with "and", "or", "but", and "because" is a quick and easy way to extend their communicative range and release them from the confines of "thinking inside the clause." This is also an important feature of spoken language (see below).
Gerot and Wignell (1995: 158-61) refer to a continuum that exists between spoken and written language. Features of spoken language include grammatical intricacy (e.g.: relationships between clauses), deictics, present, present continuous, and past simple tenses, individual Participants, language embedded in or constructing the action. These features should be incorporated into the curriculum framework, teacher’s syllabi, and learning activity design where ever possible. I have already discussed the importance of clause combination. Other features are pronominalization including contractions, and the use of intonation and contrastive stress within sentences for communicative effect. (See also Halliday 1989, 1994)
Focus on the immediate, concrete, and personal:
Where ever possible, learning activities should make use of materials that are either in the learner’s immediate environment (clothes, personal objects, classroom objects, other learners, pictures and photographs), and/or materials that are personal to the learner (friends, family, interests, preferences, life-style). There are several reasons for this. Immediacy is a characteristic of spoken language. It encourages the use of deictics ("What’s THAT?!", "It’s next to the…", "What’s she like?") which is a feature of spoken language. It takes the pressure off the learner to imagine abstract images and contexts. Finally, it encourages the learner to use whatever learning resources are at hand in the environment. Note that I am not arguing that learners should not read and write in the classroom, only that the learning activities that they engage in should incorporate the features of spoken language.
Cyclical review, expansion, and refinement of skills:
No skill should be taught in isolation (e.g.: in a single textbook chapter), and then taken for granted from then on. All skills should be introduced, expanded, reviewed and refined over a sequence of lessons. This applies to grammatical skills, vocabulary, learning task, and learning strategy skills. The ability to form and ask questions, for example, is a skill which learners need on their first day in class, and which they need to be extending and refining on their last day in class.
Preview, review, and needs analysis:
Because sequences of activities may have several themes running through them (grammatical, topical, learning task and strategy), because learners may not have the security of simply following a textbook, and because they are generally unfamiliar with communicative methodology, it is vitally important that they preview and review their lessons to clarify learning objectives. It is not fair to expect learners to isolate important skills and features from lessons which may have multiple interlocking learning-objectives, and unfamiliar activity-types. Learners need to do regular exercises to help them clarify their own learning objectives and needs, the objectives of the curriculum, how the current sequence of activities fits in with those objectives, and their plans for review and class preparation.
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ContentsRole of major functional areas:
The
Major Functional Areas Table is a list of "things to teach" and some of the grammatical and functional relationships between them. The major functional areas have been chosen based on the principles outlined in the section Basic Principles. This is a list of areas, rather than a program to be followed in strict chronological order like the chapters of a textbook. They have been roughly sequenced on the basis of grammatical and functional complexity. The first areas use a single tense, emphasize a relatively small set of verbal Processes, and deal with the most directly immediate and personal subject matter. The later areas use a wide variety of verbal Processes, multiple tenses, and more complex forms of clause combination. The Sample Year Plan shows how the Major Functional Areas could be sequenced into a school-year following the principle of cyclical review, expansion and refinement of skills.Once again, the
Major Functional Areas Table is a list of major areas, not a chronological program. Teachers will probably want to combine areas in their class plans. For example, in a single class students might work with personality as an attribute of people, do an advanced describing exercise with objects, and then a simple shopping-dialogue as a preview to the shopping area they will do in the second term. As stated in the section on basic principles, this combining of areas and activity types necessitates preview and review to help students isolate the learning-objectives of the lesson.The
Major Functional Areas Table helps choose what areas to teach and test over the length of the course. The Basic Principles are a list of what to emphasize when teaching. Almost every lesson and class activity is an opportunity to incorporate the basic principles of the curriculum. For an example, see the Sample Lesson Plan.Role of Learning-Task factors:
Once
Major Functional Areas have been chosen, learning activities can be chosen, adapted to class needs, and sequenced into lessons and groups of lessons. Each lesson or unit of work may have several different themes running through it. It may, for example, have several grammatical, topical, functional, learning task, and learning strategy themes and objectives. These themes may run over the course of several lessons. One group of themes may combine in one learning activity in one lesson, and then combine with other themes in another activity.The points at which learning activities intersect can be isolated into factors or characteristics of the learning task. Based on a database of more than 150 beginning level learning activities, I have isolated the following factors: Major functional area, task-type, learning strategy, tense/aspect, grammatical features, and grouping. Please see the
Short Selection of Learning Activities for examples. This table presents a selection of activities from the main database which deal with the functional areas of ‘Actions in progress’ and ‘clothing/appearance’. A printout of the full database of learning activities is available on request.Having these learning activity factors articulated allows the teacher to do three important things.
Firstly, units of work can be constructed and sequenced around functional, grammatical, task and learning strategy themes. For example, if
Major Functional Area is used as a theme, then activities can be chosen from a list like that given in the Short Selection of Learning Activities. If learning task or learning strategy are used as themes, then learning activities can be chosen from appropriate groups. See the following tables."Finding difference" (Learning strategy) activities, and associated Task-types and Functional Areas.
LEARNING STRATEGY |
TASK |
FUNCTIONAL AREA |
ACTIVITY NAME |
finding differences |
find dif.- pictures |
location |
picture difference |
finding differences |
listen - difference |
past narrative |
picture story mistakes |
finding differences |
memory game |
location |
what's different? |
finding differences |
role-play-group |
past tenses |
alibi game |
finding differences/mistakes |
listen - difference |
location |
picture mistakes |
Listening Activities and associated Strategies and Functional Areas.
TASK |
LEARNING STRATEGY |
FUNCTIONAL AREA |
ACTIVITY NAME |
listen - difference |
finding differences |
past narrative |
picture story mistakes |
listen - difference |
finding differences/mistakes |
location |
picture mistakes |
listen - draw |
clarifying, cooperating |
location |
describe your room. |
listen - draw |
describing, cooperating |
describing |
listen and draw - teams |
listen - draw |
following directions |
instructions |
Tina's Pig |
listen - draw |
personalizing, describing |
location |
listen/draw your room |
listen - interpret |
interpreting |
actions in progress |
what are they doing? tape |
listen - location |
clarifying, cooperating |
location - street |
zoo plan |
listen - location |
clarifying, cooperating |
location - street |
mall plan |
listen - sequence |
sequencing |
actions in progress? |
arranging pictures |
Secondly, once possible activities have been chosen along certain themes, points of overlap can be found between them in terms of activity factors. Each characteristic of the learning activity becomes a point at which it can intersect with other learning activities in the unit, with the themes running through sequences of work, and with long term curriculum goals. See the
Sample Lesson Plan for and example. Note how a variety of learning strategies, activity-types, and groupings are brought together to teach the functional and grammatical themes of the lesson.Thirdly, once learning activities have been selected, activity factors can be adjusted to modify the activity in line with students’ needs and interests.
ContentsReferences
Feez, Susan and Helen Joyce. 1997. Systemic Functional Grammar meets competency-based training in NSW AMES. In Interchange 27
Gerot, L. and P. Wignell. 1994. Making sense of Functional Grammar: An Introductory Workbook. Cammeray, N.S.W.: Gerd Stabler: Antipodian Educational Enterprises
Halliday, M.A.K. (1989). Spoken and Written Language. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1994). Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd Edition. London: Edward Arnold.
Neiderhauser, Janet. 1996. South Korea's Globalization: What it means for native English speakers. In TESOL Journal.
Nunan, David. 1988. Syllabus design. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paul, David. 1994. Communicate 1: Teacher’s Guide. Oxford: Heinemann.
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