Methodology in Language Learning: Between The Lines

 

Students whose heritage is other than that of the country in which they are living are often interested in learning about their relatives and ancestors. While one can learn much from the study of culture alone, acquiring high-level language proficiency can help tremendously in understanding one’s heritage. These skills open doors to the literature and the people of the parent nation. They also provide a conduit to a culture that, if you are a heritage learner, belongs to you and has shaped who you are today whether you are aware of it or not. Studying the language provides insights not only into the foreign culture but into your own kin culture, as well. The history of your relatives and the culture from which they emanated becomes more alive, understandable, and rich when you can access it, using the foreign language.

 

Anyone who studies a language has invested much time and effort into acquiring knowledge and proficiency. This is even more the case for those who begin studying foreign languages when they are young children. One reason to continue studying a foreign language is to protect this investment. It is far too easy to forget a foreign language and re-learning does not always come as easily as re-learning some other subjects. The second question that you can ask is: what is foreign languagestudy? Some experts consider that language learning consists of acquiring four skills:

- reading, 

- writing, listening, 

and speaking – and four sets of enabling knowledge – grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and cultural understanding. The former are the means for developing communicative competence, or the ability to use the language for communication with native speakers in authentic situations. The latter are the building blocks that you will need in order to acquire any one of the four language skills. Some learning strategies will work for all seven of these objectives. Others will be pertinent to only specific skills or enabling knowledge. So, let us look at each of the skills from the point of view of what it is, what the sets of enabling knowledge are, and what kinds of strategies can be best used to become proficient at that skill.

 

Reading is termed a receptive skill; the other receptive skill is listening. (You might have heard reading and listening referred to as “passive” skills. That is a misnomer. There is nothing passive at all about learning to read and listen well: both require active processing skills.) What “receptive” means is that the reader receives input from a writer. Rarely does the reader have the opportunity to question the author about what he or she really had in mind when writing a text. However, in reading, a reader can, at least, read the text multiple times in order to make sense of it. Reading consists essentially of decoding and interpretive skills. Decoding at a simple level is a matter of matching symbols (letters, characters) to sounds and/or words. At a very high level, decoding is a matter of interpreting social consciousness from words. In order to read any kind of text, readers must decipher symbols. English speakers generally have an easier time decoding Latinate alphabets (even though some letters may look a little different) than non-roman alphabets, such as Arabic, Georgian, Cyrillic, or Chinese. There are about three dozen different writing systems in the world, including alphabets, syllabaries (a set of graphic symbols, each of which represents a syllable in the language), and other kinds of writing systems. Some writing systems encode from left to right, others from right to left, and yet others from top to bottom. Each new script can pose a challenge to a brain already habituated in one or another type. Decoding takes many forms. One decodes letters into meaningful sounds. One decodes foreign-language words into the things and actions they describe. One decodes full sentences and texts into interrelated units of meaning. How difficult message decoding is depends on how saturated the message is with sociocultural schemata, how sophisticated the writing of the author is, how much the author implies rather than states directly, and how differently text organization differs from one’s native language text structure.

 

To be able to read well, you will need to know a lot of words, and you will need to know the grammar rules. That is the minimum enabling knowledge. You will also need to know the scripts of the language (i.e. formulaic exchanges, such as the way people interact in a telephone call or what goes on and gets said at a grocery store – while oral in nature, they are reflected in texts written in an informal style about everyday life), the way native texts are organized (something linguists call discourse competence), and how texts differ according to genre-specific ways of writing. For example, newspaper articles are written very differently from science fiction, and so on. The list below contains a few tips for becoming good at reading. Following the list is an explanation of how to put these tips into action.

 

·      Read a lot.

·      Learn about text organization.

·      Learn writing conventions.

·      Explore genre differences.

·      Develop knowledge about the target culture (and the world, in general).

 

 

To become a proficient reader, you will need to spend a lot of time reading. One of the most important findings about acquiring good reading proficiency is that time on task is very important. In short, the more you read, the better you will read. In extensive reading, however, you will probably make the most progress if you carefully choose the level of text you are reading. If the text is too simple, you may learn some new factual information and gain some reading speed, but you will not increase your knowledge of vocabulary and structure and, therefore, will make limited progress in gaining proficiency in reading. Likewise, if you choose a text that is too far above your level, you will also impede your progress in gaining proficiency because you will be spending too much time trying to figure out what the text means. The best text is the one that is just a little beyond your comfort range. Then you will be able to use the text effectively to take the next step in proficiency development.

 

 

You can improve your reading significantly by learning all you can about how various kinds of written materials in your foreign language are organized. Are they organized similarly to American English, where one starts with a topic paragraph and topic sentence that gets developed by adding details? Or are they organized like texts in Persian, in which a topic is repeated several times in circular fashion, with each iteration adding new information? Or is the text organization unique in some other way? As new language learners, we often approach a foreign text with the same expectations we have for texts in our own language, and it can be very confusing for us when there are significant differences in the ways in which thought is encoded between languages.

 

 

©

·      University of Oxford - post gradual studies 2009 'English Language Teaching'

·      Maastricht University – ‘Methodological courses for Teachers of English’- 2012

·      Tilburg University – ‘Methodological courses for Teachers of English’ – 2014

  Author: W.R. Łaskawiec ©

 

Bibliography: 

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2)  Gore, Lesley, Listening to Maggie, Longman, 1979.

3)  McClintock, John and Stern, Borje, Let's listen, Heinemann Educational Books, 1974.

4)  Maley, Alan and Moulding, Sandra, Learning to listen, CambridgeUniversity Press, 198 I.

5)  Scott, Wendy, Are you listening?, Oxford University Press, 1980.

6)  Stokes, Jacqueline StClair, Elementary task listening, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1984.

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16)         Brown, Gillian, Listening to spoken English, Longman, 1977.

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18)         Brown, Gillian and Yule, George, Teaching the spoken language, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

19)         Byrne, Donn, 'Listening comprehension', Teaching oral English, Longman, 1976.

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21)         Curfs, Emile, 'Listening deserves better', Modern English Teacher 9:3, 1982.

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23)         Communication in the classroom, Longman, 1981. Geddes, Marion and White, Ron, 'The use of semi-scripted simulated authentic speech and listening comprehension', Audio-visual Language journal, 1978.

24)         Littlewood, William, Communicative language teaching, Cambridge University Press, 198 I.

25)         Maley, Alan, 'The teaching of listening comprehension skills', Modern English Teacher, 1978.

26)         Porter, Don and Roberts, Jon, 'Authentic listening activities', English Language Teaching]ournal, 1981.

27)         Richards, Jack C., 'Listening comprehension', TESOL Quarterly, 1983

28)         Rivers, Wilga, 'Hearing and comprehending', Teaching foreign language skills (revised edn.), University of Chicago Press, 1980. Widdowson, Henry, Teaching language as communication, Oxford University Press, 1978. The teaching of listening comprehension, British Council, E.L. T. Documents Special, 1981