Task 1
1. One of the most important lessons for me was the fact that teachers make a lot of assumptions about what students know or should know. Both transcripts clearly show that the fact that students recognize the words in written texts or can produce them does not mean that they can easily recognize them in a stream of speech. Both transcripts illustrate how students tend to process the language word by word and how they need to be made aware of how to apply their grammar and contextual knowledge to decode and process the message.
2. Another important lesson that I learnt is that quite often language teachers and students seem to be content with superficial processing. It was of course impossible to arrive at this conclusion just based on the transcripts, but I was trying to assess the transcripts and see how similar situations unfold in my own practice. Students seem to be focusing on key words (e.g. hotel, jeans, dress) instead of processing language in chunks and seeing the relationships between ideas. So, in my opinion, helping the students to process even simple messages and going beyond key words is a worthwhile undertaking in a language class.
1. One of the most important lessons for me was the fact that teachers make a lot of assumptions about what students know or should know. Both transcripts clearly show that the fact that students recognize the words in written texts or can produce them does not mean that they can easily recognize them in a stream of speech. Both transcripts illustrate how students tend to process the language word by word and how they need to be made aware of how to apply their grammar and contextual knowledge to decode and process the message.
2. Another important lesson that I learnt is that quite often language teachers and students seem to be content with superficial processing. It was of course impossible to arrive at this conclusion just based on the transcripts, but I was trying to assess the transcripts and see how similar situations unfold in my own practice. Students seem to be focusing on key words (e.g. hotel, jeans, dress) instead of processing language in chunks and seeing the relationships between ideas. So, in my opinion, helping the students to process even simple messages and going beyond key words is a worthwhile undertaking in a language class.
Great points!
ReplyDeleteYES, YES, YES. But textbooks focus on words and so it is not a surprise that teachers do also. But as you say language is not words but phrases, clauses, chunks-words with experiential meaning--visit, trip, meet, etc.- and structural words--at, the, an, was, he,--all of which fit on one piece of A4 paper. We need to teach language, not words or grammar.
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