Volume 6, Number 2, December 2009
Klaus Brandl
Implementational Demands in Task-Based Teaching: The Teachers’ Perspective (pp. 117–125)
This case study investigated how five novice teachers of French went about implementing tasks. In particular, the investigation aimed at finding out about implementational demands that imposed challenges for the teachers and how they coped with these challenges. The study also looked at the complementary relationship between implementational demands and task design factors and how these impact teacher behavior and the learner’s engagement. The data collection took place over the period of one academic year and involved observational data and information elicited from interviews. The results revealed a range of challenges that teachers face when implementing tasks. Some of these issues had to do with the learning and implementing of task routines, others with understanding task designs and managing task conditions. Student engagement and frequent task breakdowns were most often found with tasks that required the processing of larger amount of linguistic content during group work, and when the teacher played the primary role as the facilitator of
learning. The article concludes with some suggestions on how to offset the implementational demands in curriculum design and teacher training.
This research aims to create two corpora, one for college General English (GE) textbooks used in Taiwan, and the other for English-medium textbooks for business core courses, to form a basis of comparison. The operational measures for analysis involved vocabulary size, vocabulary levels (distribution among the British National Corpus 1st–14th 1,000 high-frequency word families) and text coverage. Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List containing 570 word families (AWL 570) was chosen as one of the base word lists. The two corpora were lexically compared using Nation and Heatley’s (2002) RANGE software. The results show that approximately 49 to 415 interdisciplinary academic words can be learned from a GE reading textbook as opposed to 421–537 academic words from a business textbook. The business textbooks used a smaller vocabulary than the GE textbooks (the former converging at the 4,000–5,000 word levels versus the latter spreading among the 3,000–13,000 word levels). Beyond the top 2,000-word level and the AWL 570, a GE textbook can supply students with 190 to 1,327 new word families. It is hoped that the indices examined in this study will help English teachers to take into account the continuity of curriculum design while preparing General English and Business English teaching materials.
Anna Uhl Chamot & Bruna Genovese
Using Student Choice in Foreign Language Teaching to Make Connections to Other Disciplines (pp. 150–160)
Five standards have been established by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages to guide instruction in U.S. schools: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities (“the 5 Cs”). Perhaps the most difficult of these standards to implement is Connections: Standard 3.1 - Students reinforce and further their knowledge of other disciplines through the foreign language. This article describes the implementation of this standard in a high school Spanish class through the use of print and non-print media, student choice, differentiated instruction, and videotaped student presentations. Students completed a questionnaire to identify their preferred school subjects and interests. Then, the teacher grouped students with similar interests and challenged them to devise a project that would increase their knowledge of the topic from the perspective of Spanish-speaking cultures and through the use of Spanish to acquire new information. Students gathered information from Spanish and Latin American websites and from local Spanish language print and non-print media. Presentations included videos, simulated interviews with well-known political, entertainment, and sports figures from the Spanish-speaking world, simulations, PowerPoint presentations, music, and book and live theater reviews. Established rubrics were used to evaluate students’ projects. Students reported increased motivation to continue studying Spanish.
Chi Cheung Ruby Yang
Theme-based Teaching in an English Course for Primary ESL Students in Hong Kong (pp. 161–176)
This study was conducted to investigate learners’ perceptions and the impact of a theme-based teaching approach on children’s level of interest in an English course for primary English as a second language (ESL) students in a non-school setting in Hong Kong. A total of 88 participants (consisting 76 Grade 4 and 5 children, and 12 course tutors) were involved. To ascertain if the children became more interested in learning English after the course, their perceptions of theme-based teaching, and their opinions of the themes chosen for the English course, data were collected from both the children (through pre- and post-course questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews) and the course tutors (through questionnaires for the tutors). The major finding is that theme-based teaching in this study could not make learners more interested in learning English, unless teachers were able to use interesting activities and suitable materials in their lessons. The themes of the course should suit the proficiency level, wants and needs of the learners and be relevant to their daily lives. Before the course begins, a placement test should be administered to ascertain the current language level of the learners. There should be post-course evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the course.
Shanthi Nadarajan
The Effect of Instruction and Context on L2 Learners’ Vocabulary Development (pp. 177–189)
This paper investigates the effect of instructional options and classroom context on second language learners’ vocabulary development over a semester. Involving 129 subjects, the study looked at three groups of learners (L1 only, L1 and L2, and L2 only) from six academic writing classrooms. Three classes were taught a specific set of words in context (implicit) while three classes were taught a specific set of words directly (explicit). The results indicated that: (a) vocabulary gains for both implicit and explicit instructional groups were not different; (b) L2 learners in the L1 and L2 combination group learnt differently from the other subgroups; and c) direct teaching of vocabulary does not necessarily increase all L2 learners’ vocabulary growth. While the L2 learners in the implicit instructional group demonstrated a slight gain in vocabulary size, these learners had started off from a higher vocabulary level. Similarly, the L2 learners involved in direct instructional settings who had begun from a lower vocabulary level, were able to increase their word knowledge, suggesting that direct vocabulary instruction, when carried out systematically, might have a role in language instruction. The study has implications for teaching and learning of vocabulary for L2 learners in L1 and L2 settings.
Ming-Yueh Shen & Wei-Shi Wu
Technical University EFL Learners’ Reading Proficiency and Their Lexical Inference Performance (pp. 189–200)
This study investigated whether technical university EFL learners’ reading proficiency affected their lexical inference performance and their responses to the contextual instruction. A total of 145 Taiwanese first-year technical university students participated in this study. The instruments in this study involved a GEPT test, a lexical inference task, and a vocabulary strategy questionnaire. Pearson Product Moment Correlations, simple Regression, and pair-wise t-test analysis were conducted to analyze the data collected from the GEPT test, the lexical inference task, and the vocabulary strategy questionnaire. The results indicated that there was significant correlation between EFL learners’ reading proficiency and their lexical inference performance and their strategies. However, while instruction of contextual inference had a positive effect on the more proficient learners’ lexical inference ability, a significant impact on their strategy use was not found. Discussions were presented, followed by a variety of pedagogical applications for EFL learners as well as suggestions for further study.
Georgia Andreou & Ioannis Galantomos
The Native Speaker Ideal in Foreign Language Teaching (pp. 200–208)
It is customary in the field of second language acquisition to approach learners as potential approximations to native speakers and measure their achievements against those of monolinguals although the learners constitute a different group of people, with different needs, different mental abilities and different mastery of the two languages. It is also argued that defining native speakers is a complex and debatable task and therefore the objectives of foreign language pedagogy should be re-defined and adjusted to the specialized roles and situations the learners usually take part in. Setting goals other than getting as close to monolingual native speakers as possible will shed light on the actual nature of a learner and the characteristics he or she has. The goal of this article is to examine the place of the native speaker ideal in foreign language instruction and to discuss the implications for teaching that the arguments have raised above.
Chamnong Kaewpet
A Framework for Investigating Learner Needs: Needs Analysis Extended to Curriculum Development (pp. 209–220)
This paper presents a framework for investigating the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) needs of Thai engineering students who will study ESP in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) environment. The theoretical research originates from an aspiration to update and improve an ESP course. The review of literature
indicates that learner needs will have to be addressed if the course is to be successful. The literature suggests important principles for investigating learner needs, specifying that attempts should be made to meet those needs in actual teaching and learning situations, which further involve attention to curriculum development. The framework described in this paper is created for the investigation of learner needs which is integrated into the curriculum, and implemented and evaluated while the course is underway to establish if learner needs have been met. By thoroughly examining the framework established in the literature, it can prove useful for other ESP, EFL and English language teaching (ELT) contexts.