Phonology
 

Complementary Distribution
Allophonic variation where the allophone used is conditioned by its position within the word (initial medial or terminal)  The /t/ is different in time, bit and little.

Assimilation
Two words ending in consonants – in regressive assimilation the second one changes the first, so ‘light blue’ becomes /laip blu:/

Elision
Total loss of one or more sounds; tomatoes, potatoes, canary’ George the Sixth’s throne,  waste (uh) money.

Linkage/Liason
Intrusive sound to link two sound groups, especially with ‘r’ – four eggs; media event; Australia all out; not to mention Avenue des Azalees.

BC about the net – The Eastment report.

SLA

Learning Portuguese case study is by Schmidt and Frota and is in ‘Talking to Learn: Conversation in SLA’ ed R Day 1986.  It may challenge Krashen's monitor model by suggesting that Learning may preceed acquisition; here it is learning that leads the student to notice language in the real world.

Sinclair opposes Chomsky about chunking.

Five points of Krashen’s monitor model:-
Acquisition-learning.
Natural Order.
Monitor.
Input.   Finely tuned v roughly tuned input.  Untuned input is just exposure to L2 - lots of noise.  Finely tuned input is graded and does not allow for acquisition ie i + 1.  Roughly tuned moves beyond this.
Affective filter. Forget they are learning… the hair colour lesson

The thing looking at playground interactions of mexican immegrant children in the US is the Wong Fillmore study.

Ellis adds:-

1. The principal aim of language teaching is to supply comprehensible input in order to facilitate ‘acquisition’.
2. Teaching should be seen as a preparation for ‘acquisition’ in the wider world.
3. The teacher must ensure that learners do not feel anxious or are put on the defensive.
4. Grammar teaching should be restricted to simple forms and its goal is to enable the learner to monitor.
5. Errors should not be corrected when the goal is ‘acquisition’ but should be corrected when the goal is ‘learning’.

Long’s main theory, as discussed by Ellis, is the Interaction Hypothesis.  This states that learning occurs most effectively where the learner is able to negotiate meaning.

Ellis’ statement, based on Long, that ‘negotiation leading to native-speaker assistance in sorting out misunderstandings is more beneficial to learning than simplified input'
but
'I know of no L2 acquisition study that has succeeded in demonstrating that interlanguage changes are brought about by interactional modifications'…

grammar/translation bad!

audiolingualism - 50s & 60s in US; speak & listen before read & write; corpus based on contrastive analysis; aka mim-mem method.  A behavoirist approach (Skinner)

behavoirism learning is a response to a stimulus

cognitive code approach language learning involves active mental processes, not just the formation of habits. Ellis & Chomsky (Rivers)

structuralist language is a set of patterns... (Bloomfield)

communicative approach - purpose and meaning - Functional/notional, and may imply a retreat from teaching grammar.  Nunan, Littlewood 81, Halliday Richards & Rogers 86

To do this necessitates developing a holistic, inclusive and comprehensive approach to language teaching and learning which could be described as… communicative. (Me)

noticing and consciousness-raising....

Skehan mentions a number of standard aptitude tests in addition to MLAT.  These include the DLAB, the York Language Analysis Test and AFLAAT.
Skehan goes on to suggest that two approaches can be taken based on the results of MLAT or other tests:-

* Training is designed to reinforce students’ strengths;
* Training is designed to overcome students’ weaknesses.

Skehan says:-

“It is striking now, more than two decades after the MLAT and LAB appeared, how little impact these batteries currently have, either practically or theoretically…”

Naiman - hypothesis is that Good Language Learners (GLLs in the literature) are mainly good at learning languages because they are ingenious in the development of learning strategies

O’Malley’s research, in particular metacognitive strategies

attribution theory - GLLs take responsibility/ownership for good results, dossy students blame it on external factors

Some strategies:-

self-evaluation
advance preparation
self-management
self-monitoring
cognitive strategies are practical and specific activities while a metacognitive approach involves mental preparation for learning and putting oneself into the fame of mind from which cognitive activities will flow.

Dornyei; Gardner & Lambert

Cook discusses:-

instrumental motivation - passing an exam or getting a posh job
integrative motivation - learners who aspire to become part of an L2 speaking community

Intrinsically motivated students enjoy the process of learning for its own sake

According to the resultative hypothesis learners need to experience real success to move forward.

the Carrot & Stick hypothesis The suggestion that a primary motivation for learners should be that they are rewarded for good performance hypothesis smacks rather crudely of behaviourism.

nAch – Need achievement theory opportunities for students to recognise their achievements in learning
 

PPP - Presentation, Practice, Production. An easy to follow structure for teachers; opportunity for learners to hear and repeat; logical progression through lesson; move from accuracy to fluency; effective at lower levels.
but
Not as effective at higher levels; assumes that learning is linear; prescriptive & inflexible; difficult to analysis what actually happens in the classroom; 'productive' activities can often be done in L1; overuse of target form leads to stilted and unnatural language; habit formation exercises discourage learners from 'thinking'. Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach English 1978.

TTT - Teach, test, teach.

ARC – Authentic Use, Restricted Use, Clarification and Focus. Building blocks used in any order to describe what happens in the classroom.

ESA - Engage, Study, Activate - a Harmer take on the same idea; descriptive and can be used in any order.

NLP -
Neuro - to do with the brain
Linguistic - to do with language
Programming - to do with human behavoir.

We learn according to our prefered learning style, which can be

Visual
Auditory
Kinesthenic
Olifactory
Gustatory

ie VAKOG

MIT - Multiple Intelligence Theories.

The 7 intelligences:-
1    Verbal/linguistic
2    Musical
3    Logical/mathematical
4    Spatial/visual
5    Bodily/kinaesthetic
6    Interpersonal (relating to others)
7    Intrapersonal (introspection)

Willis list five types of task:-
Listing - brainstorming, fact-finding
Ordering and sorting - sequencing, ranking. categorising, classifying
Comparing - matching, finding similarities, finding differences
Problem solving - analyising real and hypothetical situations; reasoning; decision making
Sharing personal experiences - narrating/dexcribing, expolring and explaining attitudes, opinions, reactions.
 

Substitution putting one word in place of another word or a clasue to avoid repetition or sounding like a dork:-
Bill got in the car and he drove away rather than Bill got in the car and Bill drove away.  Zero substituiton is possible, as in Bill got in the car and 0 drove away.
This can all get a lot more complicated according to L&S, as in Do/Can/Could you speak French? Yes I do/can/could and She said the car had been stolen.  This was news to me.

Referencing???

McCarthy

Lexical set/class a related group of words with a shared relationship or type – brother, sister, mother, father; truck, bus, car.  Don’t forget prototypicality and fuzzy boundaries – motorbike moves from the core of the second group…?  Probably involves a taxonomy of hyponymy

Lexical field a general area of shared meaning

collocational relationships and issues of register

The Birmingham School of Discourse Analysis – Sinclair and Coulthard 1975  labels such as acc for accept (shows teacher has understood ie ‘good, yes, fine'; bd for ‘bid’ etc.)

The Silent way – Gattegno

zero conditional “A structure taught for no very good reason at a low level. if you want to say conversation-stopping things like, If you heat water to 100°, it boils." (IhTE Site ta Rob)

Allophone – sound variation which does not effect meaning, as in various ts – time, little, got and clear and dark l at the start and end of little.

Aspiration a puff of air which follows certain sounds, esp plosives.  Where initial ‘p’ preceeds a vowel it is aspirated; following /s/ it is not.  In phonetic transcription aspiration is marked thus:-  [????] (It's a little superscript h)

Velarization in the production of /?/ and /?/ the back of the tongue comes into contact with the velar or soft palate.  (dorso, dorsal – back of the tongue…)

Prosodic features characteristics of speech which effect a whole sequence of speech; includes loudness, pitch, syllable duration and stress, and intonation.

Glottis.  The hole between the vocal chords.  So a glottal stop is where air is stoped at the vocal chords.

Tone unit a sequence of syllables within an utterance on which intonation is seen to act:- ||and then nearer to the front | on the left | there's a bit of forest | coming down to the waterside || and then a bit of a bay|| (Roach)

A tone unit is structured as follows:-

A packet of biscuits (Parker and Graham)

Pre-head unstressed syllables preceeding the head  A
Head first stressed syllable packet of
Tonic syllable (Roach) aka Nucleus (Parker and Graham) syllable containing or starting the intonation for the tone unit. bis
Tail syllables following the nucleus.  Intonation movement may continue through the tail; a rising tone will continue upwards. -cuits

Contrastive stress 'tea or 'coffee? (But this came up in the oral...)

Five intonation tones in mono syllabic utterances:-

Fall \yes neutral, finalising and completing exchange.
Rise /yes requests further information and invites respondant to continue exchange.
Fall-rise \/yes expresses respondants reservations about agreeing
Rise-fall ^yes an emphatic expression of agreement, approval, disapproval or surprise.
Level _yes  expressing something which is routine, uninteresting or boring.

Vowels:-
She bit wet cats;
Sue pulls worms apart;
forgot

Dipthongs:-
Dear, Care, Tour.
Say, hi, boy.
Go, now.

Rewrite rules and tree diagrams?

Socio:-

Types of bilingulism:-
Elitist bilingualism it's posh to talk another language; possibly result of a colonial situation?  Or Tolstoy characters speaking French.
Folk bilingualism you have to be multi-lingual in multi-lingual societies, possibly uisng different languages in different situations.
Co-ordinate and compound bilingualism.  Drivel.  Either two words for the same thing in a person's two languages refer to different mental constructs (Co-ordinate) or they are the same concepts with different labels (compound).  So what?
Subordinative bilingualism L2 words relate directly to L1 words, not to the platonic mental  concept itself.
Asymmetrical bilingualism.   In L2 not  all skills may be present.
Receptive bilingualism losing some of one's language ability.... (Like Greek Julie)
Infant bilingualism  a child learns two languages from birth - possibly from each parent...
Child bilingualism L2 learnt as a child, eg at school.
Sequential and Simultaneous bilingualism  Child bilingualism is an example of Sequential Bilingualism – different languages are learnt and used at different stages in life.  Infant bilingualism is simultaneous – both languages are learnt at the same time.
Adolescent and adult bilingualism  forms of Sequential Bilingualism where languages are learnt at later stages in life.  Language learning becomes progressively less efficient as people age and both these forms of bilingualism are seen as resulting in a non-native speaker status.

Effect of class:-  Peter Trudgill draws a parallel between geographical and social factors in language diffusion.  As a language changes new modes of speech spread from person to person according to their geographical proximity.  A physical barrier, such as a river, may prevent such diffusion from occurring, while people who live far from each other will speak differently from those who are close neighbours.  In the same way, social barriers and distance effect the spread of speech habits between people of different classes.  In Britain not only is there a complex class system but the system is hierarchical – Trudgill uses the term social stratification.  This stratification means that there may be antagonism between different class groups, which in turn results in further resistance to language change.  Trudgill examines the caste-based division of language in a part of Southern Indian, where social division is more significant than regionally based differences....  Trudgill discusses studies in Norwich and Detroit which used the final level of a consultant’s education as being one of the indicators of his or her social class....

Labov’s studies of indigenous and in-comer groups on Martha’s Vineyard on this issue.  Labov differentiates overt prestige, where the desire is to identify with higher social groups, from covert prestige, which is the reverse (not to mention Labov on rhotic /r/ in NYC Department stores.)

Trudgill quotes research in the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa as tending to show that women’s speech more closely approaches the standard form of given languages, as well as discussing various examples of gender-based language differentiation from traditional and tribal societies.  Trudgill notes that such a phenomenon is extremely widespread, and goes on to say:-

‘gender differentiation of this type is the single most consistent finding to emerge from sociolinguistic work around the world in the past thirty years.’

the example of Yugoslavia, quoted by both Peter Trudgill  and Bernard Spolsky , in which Serbo-Croat, once thought of by its speakers as a single Yugoslavian language with varietal dialects, is now seen as the three languages of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian in the three mutually antagonistic countries.

Hebrew...

H-variety and L-variety refer to the two forms present in cultures where diglossia is a feature of language use.  The example generally quoted is that of German-speaking Switzerland.  Here, the H-variety is hochdeutsch, the language form used for formal purposes, in government, the media, education and religion.  The spoken form of the language – the L-variety - is Schwyzertüütsch.  This is based on a variety of Swiss-German dialects and approaches mutual incomprehensibility between its speakers and metropolitan German speakers of hochdeutsch.  Other examples are provided by the use of classical and vernacular Arabic, and the social changes in use of the Demotico and Katharevousa forms of Greek.

A restricted code is one in which language uses a smaller variety of modes of expression than with an elaborated code.  That this should be a feature of pidgin languages is reasonably self-evident.  Problems arise in the differentiation of elaborated and restricted code amongst speakers of the same language.  The Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics  has this to say:-

‘It has been claimed that while middle-class children have access to both codes, working-class children have access only to the restricted code.’

This idea is based on Bernstein.

And also code-switching - mae'n hanli va hadiwy Nigel Starmers Smith.... (speaker changes language mid discourse of even mid sentence.)

How do pidgin languages differ from creoles? bêche-de-mer.

Phatic communion - first advanced by the anthropologist Malinowski.  Phatic communion can be used to mark social distance between people – in formal or business situations this can sometimes be a conscious choice on behalf of one or more of the actors.  This process has been called negative politeness strategy.

Mad EU International English with no 3rd person -s woman - Jennifer Jenkins

The Future of English - David Graddol

Criteria from Professor Anne Raimes’ ‘Techniques in Teaching Writing’:-

How will writing facilitate better L2-learning?
How is a topic selected and exploited?
How can the subject matter be made more meaningful?
Who will be the audience for learners’ written product?
What kind of classroom interaction is called for?
What time-scale should be involved?
What should be done about errors?

My added points:-
What is the student’s level of literacy in his or her own language?
Does their language employ a non-Latin script?  If so, how familiar are they with the western alphabet?

peer marking and Correction Symbols

Approachs to writing

Controlled to free approach, Paragraph-Pattern Approach.
Free-writing approach.
Grammar-Syntax-Organisation Approach.
Communicative Approach.
Process Approach.

Syllabus Design

Breen in Nunan suggests that syllabi ‘express … assumptions about language’ – curricula may establish these assumptions.

Nunan quotes Stern as saying that curriculum is the WHAT and syllabus the WHO and HOW.

Some of the parameters which define Learning Purpose include:-

Specificity.  How easily defined are the learners’ needs to assimilate the target language?
Time.  This relates both to the time available before new language is to be used, and the time available for the totality of learning.
Objective data.  This is factual information on students.
Subjective data takes into account the student’s own ideas and opinions on learning.

Munby  goes on to define nine specific parameters:-

Participant.  Objective data about the learner.
Purposive Domain.  What is the purpose for which new language is required?
Setting.  Where and how will new language be used?
Interaction.  Who will the learner be using new language to communicate with?
Instrumentality.  Is the language to be written or spoken? Receptive or productive?
Dialect.  US English, Manchester English, Australian English or the sort of International (but actually non-standard) English my business student would have been likely to encounter in Saudi Arabia?
Target level.  How much can be realistically achieved, or is necessary to achieve, in the time available?
Communicative event.  Which specific language skills need to be mastered?
Communicative key.  What extra-linguistic communicative abilities will the student need to master?

Nunan  seems to be suggesting that where course content is informed by close analysis of learners’ specific needs, what is taught are ipso facto ESP courses...

Parameters which define Learning Goals could be categorised as follows:-

Affective Goals.  These goals are connected with the social aims of students.  My refugee students are primarily motivated by affective goals in their wish to become part of an English-speaking community.

Learning Goals.  Learning goals can be both the ability to carry out specific tasks, such as essay writing, or assessed objectives such as passing public examinations.

Communicative Goals.  These are goals where what is aimed at is the ability to perform communication in a specific environment.  The example of my student who intended to do business in Saudi Arabia provides an example of a student’s communicative goals.

Cognitive goals.  These goals aim at improving the students’  abilities as language learners.  As such their ultimate aim may be to foster autonomy in language acquisition.

further informed by two points suggested by Nunan:-

What are ‘our beliefs about the nature of language and learning?’
What is our curriculum philosophy?

Batstone, in the set book on grammar, makes the point that the smallest knowable linguistic/grammatical element is the language use in a particular utterance at a particular moment in time.

Jo McDonough, ESP in Perspective

an exclusively product-based or an exclusively process-based approach to syllabus design is unsound...  Both schools of thought seem to be based on an over-exaggeration of the others position, as ... Widdowson  makes clear.

The National  Adult ESOL Core Curriculum

In support of the process-based approach, Nunan quotes Prabhu.  However, Prabhu is revealed to have an agenda which is not process-orientation for its own sake.  Instead he is concerned with meaning – creating conditions for coping with meaning in the classroom .

a content-based syllabus,  ... is criticised by Widdowson  as being a dress-rehearsal process.  His feeling is that students will be unable to universalise language learnt in a particular context.  (tosser).

Nunan goes on to discuss how different writers have approached process-based design, pointing out that while Candlin selects tasks according to pedagogically-based criteria, Long prefers the use of needs-analysis.

Nunan says “there are certain components which are consistently linked together by syllabus designers and coursebook writers.”

learning difficulty (and hence learning order) is not the same thing as grammatical difficulty as it is understood by linguists.

Bangalore Procedural syllabus (Prabhu - also written about by Brumfit),
Krashen and Terrell’s Natural Approach
Mohan’s example of a Content-base syllabus
IE an ESP syllabus!  Like English for business!  Well why didn't he say so?

Learner Autonomy - Leni Dam

Widdowson on Education v Training

formative testing informs the progress of teaching and feeds back into the course
summative testing comes at the end of a course and checks how well the learner has done and how effective the course was.

washback...

Types of test:-

Apptitude
Diagnostic
Placement
Progress
Proficiency
Achievement/Atainment

Reliabilty consistency across the test
Validity degree to which a test measure what it is supposed to measure

communicative testing? (authenticity)
computer adaptive tests
Pan-european standardisation (ALTE)
European Language Portfolio

Testing Spoken English - Nic Underhill
Language Testing - Tim McNamara

Nunan's’ favoured Cambridge English Course

The thing where learners say what they want to say to the teacher in L1 who then translates it to facilitate communication round the group is actually Community Language Learning as advocated by Curran.

Suggestopaedia, on the other hand, uses comfy cushions, music, relaxation techniques and visualisation to make learning more effective and comfortable.  Developed by Lozanov while he could keep awake.

Vocabulary
Lexical words (aka content words) v function words
lexical verbs v auxiliary verbs

Hyponymy – ‘when you have knives, forks and spoons to eat with, they’re called “cutlery”' - cutley is the superordinate, knves, forks etc are hyponyms.

to hate.  Antonymy – ‘the opposite of “to love”’.

appalling.  Synonym -  very bad

Relexicalisation

Lexical Density = Lexical words as % of Word Count
Type-token ratio = types as % of tokens

morphemic affixes such as plural -s and adjective-forming –ness
free and bound morphemes...

possibilities such as ‘house’ or ‘hotel’ would need a determiner .

clines...  always -----------------> never

Derivational suffixes condition the part of speech - +ment makes verb inot a noun
Inflexional suffixes are a restricted, grammar based set set which change how words behave - +ed, +'s +s (plural or third person) +er, +ist.

the bare infinitive....
 

... mass noun and uncount noun as synonyms.  However, COBUILD uses the term mass noun to refer to a situation where number is attached to an uncountable item.  It gives the example:-

‘…in a restaurant you can ask for … ‘three coffees, because the person you are talking to will know that you mean ‘three cups of coffee’.

I tend to use the term multi-word noun where COBUILD uses the more accepted compound noun.

some and any, and their compounds somebody, anywhere, etc, together with the related forms such as nowhere and everybody, I have not used the term indefinite pronoun...

COBUILD uses the term Interrogative Pronouns where I would use the terms wh- question words or information question words.

COBUILD also uses the term possessive determiner where I would previously have used possessive adjective.  I may adopt this terminology in future, partly because I have always been confused as to why my, our, your, his, her, its and their are described as possessive adjectives and mine, ours, yours, his, hers and theirs as possessive pronouns
 
 

partitive	a piece of paper	a cup of tea
-ing adjective	increasing labour	exciting activities
emphasizing adjective	pure bliss	acute agony
classifying adjective	sexual politics	world news
-ing noun	at the beginning	swimming is good for you
collective noun	school staff on strike	police and thieves
uncount noun	when did you have German measles?	milk or sugar?
quantifier	some of my best friends	all of the people, all of the time
generic use of determiner	a dog is a man’s best friend	a joke’s a joke
reflexive pronoun	history repeats itself	sisters are doing it for themselves

would used instead of will in report structures.  COBUILD 4.114
“I’ll phone her tomorrow” becomes
He said he would phone her the following day.
would referring to regular events in the past – 4.115
Every morning he would have breakfast at a small café…
would referring to the future in narrative 4.116
They would reach the castle some time.
He decided he would see her tomorrow.
would expressing likelihood - assumption 4.124, certainty 4.125
A picnic wouldn’t be any fun without you.
I won’t enjoy the picnic if you don’t come.
I would enjoy the picnic more if you came.
If we went for a picnic, where would you fancy going?
possibility in the past – 4.141
Denial would have been useless.
used in instructions, asking for help – 4.163
Would you close the window please?
expressing a wish about the past – 4.211
I would have liked to have visited the mosque in Casablanca.

the delexical verb have (a cup of tea/bath) - take in AmE

teaching point that regret is generally followed by an –ing form.  The task here is to compare this example with the infinitive form “I regret to tell you your application has failed”....

Batstone...  Students are ... given space ... to discover and notice grammar –

Contrastive Analysis Hypotheses you can learn about problems students will have learning L2 by looking at the difference between L1 & L2 (well of course you can, stoopid).   The example (with conditionals) suggests that the Contrastive Analysis Hypotheses does not provide a full basis for planning learning.  According to the hypothesis, since both languages construct conditionals in a similar way the parallel errors should not occur.
 
 

This page © Viv Midlane 2002.  A Cause for Concern production.