TEFL Chapter 6 Summary
1 Planning is a thinking skill
Planning increases the number of your options – and in doing so, increases
your chances of a successful lesson. Although training courses tend to ask
you to prepare detailed written plans, it’s important to realise that
planning is essentially a thinking skill.
As a general rule: Prepare thoroughly. But in class, teach the
learners, not the plan.
What this means is that you should be prepared to respond to the learners
and adapt what you have planned as you go, even to extent of throwing
the plan away if appropriate.
There are number of general areas to think about:
- Atmosphere - The tasks and teaching procedures
- The learners - The challenge
- The aims - Materials
- The teaching point - Classroom management
For examples look at pp. 123/124
The two key questions when planning are often considered to be:
- What is my procedure? (i.e. What sequence of tasks and activities will I
use?)
- What are the aims of the lesson?
Planning becomes a lot easier if you have a clear idea as to how you think
that people learn.
2 How do people learn languages?
1. Ignorance: the learner doesn’t know anything about the item.
2. Exposure: the learner hears or reads examples of the item (maybe a
number of times), but doesn’t particularly notice it.
3. Noticing: the learners begins to realise that there is a feature he/she
doesn’t fully understand.
4. Understanding: the learners starts to look more closely at the item and
tries to work out the formation rules and the meaning, possibly with the help
of reference information, explanations or other help.
5. Practice: the learner tries to use the item in his/her own speech or
writing (maybe hesitantly, probably with many errors).
6. Active use: the learner integrates the item fully into his/her own
language and uses it (without thinking) relatively easily with minor errors.
1
, A student’s progress when learning a new item:
Look at pp. 126 figure 6.1 The process of learning.
Exposure
Exposure to language may come :
- Restricted: from a text that is recognisably simplified or perhaps
including an unnaturally high number of examples of a specific target
item.
- Authentic: from a text that is realistic – or reasonably like a normal
natural text.
Authentic exposure
This is exposure to language when it is being used fairly naturally.
For examples; reading magazines, listening to small talk and recordings,
living in a place where the language is used, etc.
Restricted exposure
Exposure to texts specifically designed to be accessible to learners – and
probably to draw attention to specific language points.
The text will often:
- be specially designed for learners, providing clear examples of target
language items being used in context;
- be simplified through use of graded language;
- have unusually high quantities of specific target language items.
Learners may:
- listen to you say sentences that exemplify the language point you are
aiming to work on;
- read or listen to course book texts designed to present features of certain
language items;
- read examples of particular features of language in grammar book.
Stephen Krashen made a distinction between:
- acquisition : language that we pick up subconsciously when we are
engaged in communicating and understanding messages.
- learning : language we consciously study and learn about.
In order to acquire language, we need to be exposed to comprehensible
input, i.e. real messages communicated to us that are comprehensible
but just a little above our current level. This suggests an important role in
the classroom for exposure that is restricted (graded) in order for it to be
at an appropriate level, i.e. not too simple, but just above the level of the
learner.
2
1 Planning is a thinking skill
Planning increases the number of your options – and in doing so, increases
your chances of a successful lesson. Although training courses tend to ask
you to prepare detailed written plans, it’s important to realise that
planning is essentially a thinking skill.
As a general rule: Prepare thoroughly. But in class, teach the
learners, not the plan.
What this means is that you should be prepared to respond to the learners
and adapt what you have planned as you go, even to extent of throwing
the plan away if appropriate.
There are number of general areas to think about:
- Atmosphere - The tasks and teaching procedures
- The learners - The challenge
- The aims - Materials
- The teaching point - Classroom management
For examples look at pp. 123/124
The two key questions when planning are often considered to be:
- What is my procedure? (i.e. What sequence of tasks and activities will I
use?)
- What are the aims of the lesson?
Planning becomes a lot easier if you have a clear idea as to how you think
that people learn.
2 How do people learn languages?
1. Ignorance: the learner doesn’t know anything about the item.
2. Exposure: the learner hears or reads examples of the item (maybe a
number of times), but doesn’t particularly notice it.
3. Noticing: the learners begins to realise that there is a feature he/she
doesn’t fully understand.
4. Understanding: the learners starts to look more closely at the item and
tries to work out the formation rules and the meaning, possibly with the help
of reference information, explanations or other help.
5. Practice: the learner tries to use the item in his/her own speech or
writing (maybe hesitantly, probably with many errors).
6. Active use: the learner integrates the item fully into his/her own
language and uses it (without thinking) relatively easily with minor errors.
1
, A student’s progress when learning a new item:
Look at pp. 126 figure 6.1 The process of learning.
Exposure
Exposure to language may come :
- Restricted: from a text that is recognisably simplified or perhaps
including an unnaturally high number of examples of a specific target
item.
- Authentic: from a text that is realistic – or reasonably like a normal
natural text.
Authentic exposure
This is exposure to language when it is being used fairly naturally.
For examples; reading magazines, listening to small talk and recordings,
living in a place where the language is used, etc.
Restricted exposure
Exposure to texts specifically designed to be accessible to learners – and
probably to draw attention to specific language points.
The text will often:
- be specially designed for learners, providing clear examples of target
language items being used in context;
- be simplified through use of graded language;
- have unusually high quantities of specific target language items.
Learners may:
- listen to you say sentences that exemplify the language point you are
aiming to work on;
- read or listen to course book texts designed to present features of certain
language items;
- read examples of particular features of language in grammar book.
Stephen Krashen made a distinction between:
- acquisition : language that we pick up subconsciously when we are
engaged in communicating and understanding messages.
- learning : language we consciously study and learn about.
In order to acquire language, we need to be exposed to comprehensible
input, i.e. real messages communicated to us that are comprehensible
but just a little above our current level. This suggests an important role in
the classroom for exposure that is restricted (graded) in order for it to be
at an appropriate level, i.e. not too simple, but just above the level of the
learner.
2
