Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Friday, November 14, 2014
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (SPEECH TOPICS)
1.
Mandatory reporting in healthcare.
Adverse events to be accurately reported.
2.
Food additives and unhealthiness.
3.
Overreaction to cholesterol.
4.
The dangers of asbestos removal.
5.
The glut of paper products.
6.
Meat consumption and health.
7.
The hazards of Ill-fitting shoes.
8.
Legalization of marijuana.
9.
Underground gasoline tanks leaks.
10.
Pension plans going broke.
11.
The dangers of disposable diapers.
12.
TV violence.
13.
Plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons
(cosmetic surgery). Is it rising to a level that exceeds good sense?
14.
Is the Fast-Food Industry
Accountable Legally for Obesity? (The McLawsuit)
15.
Intelligence depends more on the
environment than genetic factors.
16.
Should there be stronger limits on
immigration?
17.
Importance of safety harnesses.
18.
Juvenile sentence is right.
19.
Mandatory drug tests for students.
20.
Traditional books or eBooks?
21.
Organ donation after death should be
encouraged.
22.
Freedom of press gone too far.
23.
Private space travel should not be
encouraged.
24.
Teenage pregnancy affects the future
of both the child and the mother.
25.
Special privileges for working
women.
26.
Health insurance, a must for all
citizens.
27.
Dangers of steroid use.
28.
Financial education is
important in today’s world.
29.
The use of surveillance cameras in
public places, such as parking lots. Good idea or violation of privacy?
30.
The right to search students’
personal property, like lockers and backpacks as part of the war on drugs.
31.
Grocery store shelves filled with
foods made with genetically modified ingredients without GMO labels. GMO labels
are essential to help you make a decision.
32.
Designer children.
33.
Tell people to vote! Individual
votes matter.
34.
Does Internet mean the death of
newspapers?
35.
Reasons for increase in kidnapping
by parents.
36.
How effective is Alcoholics
Anonymous?
37.
Should death penalty be abolished?
38.
The importance of home schooling for
mentally and physically enabled children.
39.
Does home-schooling result in
children missing the social interaction and growth necessary at that age?
40.
Should surrogate motherhood be
allowed?
41.
Make recycling mandatory to help the
environment.
42.
Is nuclear power the answer to the
energy crisis?
43.
Social networks and our young
generation.
44.
Subliminal messages in movies and TV
ads.
45.
Juvenile delinquents should be
sentenced to bootcamp.
46.
Why breakfast is the most important
meal of the day?
47.
The importance of newspapers in our
daily life.
48.
Parents should not spank their
children.
49.
Single parents should not be allowed
to adopt children.
50.
Men and women speak a different
language of love.
51.
The dangers of using a cell phone
while driving.
52.
The importance of blood donation.
53.
How CMC (Computer Mediated
Communication) affects the workplace.
54.
Why we will rely on robots.
55.
Weaving digital information into
physical space. The ability to reach out into the computer and manipulate
digital objects.
56.
Reducing poverty by fixing the
living environment and housing.
57.
The possibility of cars sharing data
with other cars to avoid accidents. Does that encroach on privacy?
58.
Texting undermines vocabulary and
the mental effort that intelligent writing necessitates.
59.
Nonprofits rewarded for how little
they spend – not for what they get done. We should start rewarding charities
for their big goals and accomplishments even if it means bigger expenses.
60.
Will the Internet crash at some
point and do we need a plan B?
61.
Female genital mutiliation should be
stopped.
62.
A school in the cloud for children
to learn from one another.
63.
Mono-tasking more important than
multi-tasking?
64.
Stem cells to aid in the development
of personalized treatments by creating models of human biology/physiology in
the lab.
65.
Mind wandering into the past and
future makes us unhappy. Bringing the mind back to the present moment produces
positive feelings.
66.
Crowd sourcing the world’s goals.
(United Nations goals of reducing poverty and disease)
67.
Should women represent women in
media because they can tell women’s stories better?
68.
There are 20,000 street gangs in the
US. What should be done to stop/control them?
69.
Should elders over the age of 65 be
allowed to drive?
70.
Are the current food preservation
technologies safe?
71.
New research touts the benefits of
video games, but are they safe?
72.
How air purifiers can be harmful and
aggravate health conditions.
73.
The importance of patents on ideas.
74.
The theory of intelligent design as
opposed to evolution and creationism.
75.
How a cult is different from a
religion and why it is dangerous.
76.
Driving over the speed limit.
77.
Living together before marriage.
78.
Tougher enforcement of laws to
protect victims of domestic abuse.
79.
The federal government should impose
a complete ban on all cigarettes and tobacco products.
80.
Tackle the problem of heart attacks
by getting trained in CPR.
81.
Alternatives of fossil fuel, to
avoid the energy crisis.
82.
Nuclear power is better than solar
power.
83.
Don’t abolish casino gambling as
nobody is hurt by it and it helps with tourism.
84.
Online teaching should be given
equal importance as the regular form of teaching.
85.
Does luck play an important part in
success?
86.
Does the paparazzi help or hinder
the purpose of free press.
87.
Should people have a green burial?
88.
Automobile drivers should be
required to take a test every three years.
89.
Americans should be given a
three-day weekend.
90.
Drug addicts should be sent for
treatment in hospitals instead of prisons.
91.
Waiting period should be made
compulsory for buying firearms.
92.
IQ tests are valid measurements of
human intelligence.
93.
There should be a cap on sports
salaries.
94.
Juveniles should be sentenced as
adults.
95.
Protect endangered species by
outlawing hunting.
96.
Teachers can befriend students on
Facebook.
97.
School cafeterias contribute to
obesity in children and they should only offer healthy food options
98.
Outsourcing is good for us.
99.
Bloggers should be treated as
journalists and punished for indiscretions.
100.
Intelligent design or creationism.
About 55% of people in the US believe that God created man and not evolution.
Should this be taught in schools?
DIPHTHONGS
The following flashcards can easily exemplify each of the eight diphthong sound used in English with their IPA symbols.
CLICK HERE
CLICK HERE
Friday, November 7, 2014
ARTICLE: LANGUAGE OR TEACHING?
The Teacher Trainer – Back Articles
Saved from: http://www.tttjournal.co.uk
IN LANGUAGE TEACHING, WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT:
LANGUAGE OR TEACHING?
Penny Urr
Linguistics – including applied linguistics – is said to be the parent academic discipline of TEFL (see, for example, Johnson, 1986, Brown, 1989): it deals not only with the subject-matter of our teaching – pronunciation, grammar, semantics, discourse structure and so on – but also with aspects of language learning and use. Pedagogy, on the other hand, is about the nature of effective classroom teaching (not necessarily EFL): what kinds things children perceive, understand, remember better, and under what circumstances; what the teacher can do to motivate learning; classroom management and control; teacher-student relationships; and so on.
Both the study of language (linguistics) and that of teaching (pedagogy) are obviously essential to the teacher of English as a foreign language. But if both are essential, why should we concern ourselves with the question of which of them is more important?
The answer is, I think that in professional practice there is often an apparent conflict between the two which is not so easily resolved and which forces the teacher – whether she is aware of it or not – to make decisions about which has the priority.
An example. Supposing I am designing a first-year syllabus for ten-year olds learning English as a foreign language. Frequency studies might indicate that words like crocodile, elephant, and butterfly are far less commonly used than words like engine, wheel, seat, (West, 1953). If we design our syllabus according to linguistic considerations, we will naturally prefer to teach the more common words earlier. But crocodile etc. appeal to children both because of their meaning and because they are fun to (try to) say: and a reliable pedagogical principle is that children tend to learn more easily, words that appeal to them. As a teacher, I am interested in my students’ motivation and rapid acquisition of new vocabulary which they can use to say things, as much as in the usefulness of that vocabulary. So I may well prioritize the less common words.
Another example from methodology this time. There is some fairly convincing evidence (described in Dulay, Burt and Krashen, 1982) that shows that children learning a second language in natural ‘immersion’ conditions have a long ‘silent period’ before they start to speak. Applying this in the classroom, one would need to spend the first few weeks, at least, doing all the talking oneself, or not necessarily demanding verbal response from the students. But classroom teaching cannot afford the luxury of ‘immersion’ conditions. We have four lessons a week instead of the learner’s entire interaction time, and we cannot wait for natural processes: we have to speed things up by getting the learners to speak as soon as they can. Also, active performance by the learners allows us to give encouraging feedback, which reinforces learning and raises motivation and self-image – again, pedagogical principles.
In these examples, I have made it fairly clear that I would prioritize the pedagogical argument, and why. Here is a third example, where I would not. Frequency studies again. It has been shown that the present progressive tense is far less frequent than the present simple (Duskanova and Urbanova, 1967; or you can test this out for yourself by taking a random selection of written and spoken texts and counting!). But the present progressive is far more ‘teachable’: its structure does not entail the difficult do/does interrogative and negative forms, and its meaning can be easily demonstrated in the classroom and lends itself to interesting mime – and picture-based practice. The temptation is to teach the present progressive first, and to spent more time on it – a temptation, I think, which should be resisted.
In other words, when deciding what to teach and how to put it across, I have to consider both linguistic and pedagogical arguments, and then decide which has the priority, or how to combine them. In deciding, I need to use all the knowledge I have gained about TEFL through courses, experience, reading, discussion and reflection.
Teachers who have been through TEFL or Applied Linguistics courses as a preparation for their job may often find that they have been taught to rely mainly on linguistics as a basis for teaching. Most of their theoretical courses and reading will have been on linguistic subjects; relatively little on pedagogy or education as such. The section of the course devoted to teaching experience cannot help but relate to pedagogy – but usually on a strictly practical level: classroom techniques and teaching behaviour. So that trainees come out with a lot of theoretical linguistic knowledge, but little idea how to integrate it with practical classroom pedagogy; for example, they may know a lot about the phonology of English, but have no idea about how to teach pronunciation. On the other hand they may have some good teaching ideas, but little awareness of relevant principles of pedagogy or how the linguistics can be best utilized within them. For instance, they may have been taught that group work is desirable; but may have failed to learn to distinguish between situations where group work is pedagogically valid and where it is not; or may have no awareness of the role of group or pair work in the development of communication strategies.
And you see the results in the classroom. Trained EFL teachers may try uneasily at first to apply some of the (applied) linguistics research-based knowledge in the classroom, but most swiftly abandon it, and base their teaching on techniques they learned through practice or observation. Thus a lot of teaching is opportunistic and unprincipled (‘that procedure works so I’ll use it, never mind the theory’). This is unfortunately often reflected in the literature; you get on one hand, articles giving ‘practical tips’ with no reasoned rationale accompanying them, or on the other, descriptions of research-based or purely speculative theory, with only very dubious links with professional action.
So what do I want?
First, I wish training courses would devote more time to discussing the principles of good pedagogy – we need more courses on things like ‘classroom climate and motivation’, ‘lesson design’, ‘activity design’, classroom management’. And it wouldn’t hurt to look seriously at the teaching/learning methods of other subjects: science, history, art.
Secondly, I wish there were more integration of theory with practice. Theoretical coursework has its place in the learning of the principles of both pedagogy and linguistics – but these principles spring from and ultimately express themselves in human action, so this, surely, is how they should be learned. The principles of student-teacher relationships or of classroom discourse for example: these manifest themselves through real-time classroom interaction, and should be learned primarily, I think, by critical reflection and analysis of how trainees interacted with students in their practice teaching, or how their own teachers interacted with them – these reflections, of course, filled out and enriched by insights gained from books or lectures. One obvious implication of this model is that practice teaching becomes an essential part of a methodology course, rather than a separate component; recent classroom events (such as teacher-student exchanges) are discussed (in methodology sessions) and conclusions slotted into an overall conceptual framework of how language teaching/learning ‘works’.
Third, I wish there were more integration of linguistics and pedagogy. A methodology course should teach professional know-how based on both linguistics and pedagogical information. Such a course might be called (as the president of IATEFL, at the time of writing this article, Denis Girard, suggested years ago). The ultimate aim of such a course would be to get trainees to develop a rationale of language teaching, which enables them to make informed and principled choices between the conflicting claims of different theories.
References:
Brown, G. (1989) (interview) ‘Sitting on a rocket’ ELT Journal 43/3, 167-72
Dulay, H., Burt, M. and Krashan, S. (1982) Languate Two, New York: Oxford University Press
Duskanova, L. and Urbanova, V. (1967) ‘A frequency count of English tenses with applications to TEFL’, Prague Studies in Mathematical Linguistics 2
Girard, D. (1972) Linguistics and Language Teaching, London: Longman
Johnson, K. (1986) ‘ESL teacher training: the case for the prosecution’ in Bickley, V. (ed) Future Directions in ELT Education, Asian and Pacific Perspectives, Hong Kong University Education Department
West, M. (ed) (1953) A General Service List of English Words, London: Longman
Saved from: http://www.tttjournal.co.uk
IN LANGUAGE TEACHING, WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT:
LANGUAGE OR TEACHING?
Penny Urr
Linguistics – including applied linguistics – is said to be the parent academic discipline of TEFL (see, for example, Johnson, 1986, Brown, 1989): it deals not only with the subject-matter of our teaching – pronunciation, grammar, semantics, discourse structure and so on – but also with aspects of language learning and use. Pedagogy, on the other hand, is about the nature of effective classroom teaching (not necessarily EFL): what kinds things children perceive, understand, remember better, and under what circumstances; what the teacher can do to motivate learning; classroom management and control; teacher-student relationships; and so on.
Both the study of language (linguistics) and that of teaching (pedagogy) are obviously essential to the teacher of English as a foreign language. But if both are essential, why should we concern ourselves with the question of which of them is more important?
The answer is, I think that in professional practice there is often an apparent conflict between the two which is not so easily resolved and which forces the teacher – whether she is aware of it or not – to make decisions about which has the priority.
An example. Supposing I am designing a first-year syllabus for ten-year olds learning English as a foreign language. Frequency studies might indicate that words like crocodile, elephant, and butterfly are far less commonly used than words like engine, wheel, seat, (West, 1953). If we design our syllabus according to linguistic considerations, we will naturally prefer to teach the more common words earlier. But crocodile etc. appeal to children both because of their meaning and because they are fun to (try to) say: and a reliable pedagogical principle is that children tend to learn more easily, words that appeal to them. As a teacher, I am interested in my students’ motivation and rapid acquisition of new vocabulary which they can use to say things, as much as in the usefulness of that vocabulary. So I may well prioritize the less common words.
Another example from methodology this time. There is some fairly convincing evidence (described in Dulay, Burt and Krashen, 1982) that shows that children learning a second language in natural ‘immersion’ conditions have a long ‘silent period’ before they start to speak. Applying this in the classroom, one would need to spend the first few weeks, at least, doing all the talking oneself, or not necessarily demanding verbal response from the students. But classroom teaching cannot afford the luxury of ‘immersion’ conditions. We have four lessons a week instead of the learner’s entire interaction time, and we cannot wait for natural processes: we have to speed things up by getting the learners to speak as soon as they can. Also, active performance by the learners allows us to give encouraging feedback, which reinforces learning and raises motivation and self-image – again, pedagogical principles.
In these examples, I have made it fairly clear that I would prioritize the pedagogical argument, and why. Here is a third example, where I would not. Frequency studies again. It has been shown that the present progressive tense is far less frequent than the present simple (Duskanova and Urbanova, 1967; or you can test this out for yourself by taking a random selection of written and spoken texts and counting!). But the present progressive is far more ‘teachable’: its structure does not entail the difficult do/does interrogative and negative forms, and its meaning can be easily demonstrated in the classroom and lends itself to interesting mime – and picture-based practice. The temptation is to teach the present progressive first, and to spent more time on it – a temptation, I think, which should be resisted.
In other words, when deciding what to teach and how to put it across, I have to consider both linguistic and pedagogical arguments, and then decide which has the priority, or how to combine them. In deciding, I need to use all the knowledge I have gained about TEFL through courses, experience, reading, discussion and reflection.
Teachers who have been through TEFL or Applied Linguistics courses as a preparation for their job may often find that they have been taught to rely mainly on linguistics as a basis for teaching. Most of their theoretical courses and reading will have been on linguistic subjects; relatively little on pedagogy or education as such. The section of the course devoted to teaching experience cannot help but relate to pedagogy – but usually on a strictly practical level: classroom techniques and teaching behaviour. So that trainees come out with a lot of theoretical linguistic knowledge, but little idea how to integrate it with practical classroom pedagogy; for example, they may know a lot about the phonology of English, but have no idea about how to teach pronunciation. On the other hand they may have some good teaching ideas, but little awareness of relevant principles of pedagogy or how the linguistics can be best utilized within them. For instance, they may have been taught that group work is desirable; but may have failed to learn to distinguish between situations where group work is pedagogically valid and where it is not; or may have no awareness of the role of group or pair work in the development of communication strategies.
And you see the results in the classroom. Trained EFL teachers may try uneasily at first to apply some of the (applied) linguistics research-based knowledge in the classroom, but most swiftly abandon it, and base their teaching on techniques they learned through practice or observation. Thus a lot of teaching is opportunistic and unprincipled (‘that procedure works so I’ll use it, never mind the theory’). This is unfortunately often reflected in the literature; you get on one hand, articles giving ‘practical tips’ with no reasoned rationale accompanying them, or on the other, descriptions of research-based or purely speculative theory, with only very dubious links with professional action.
So what do I want?
First, I wish training courses would devote more time to discussing the principles of good pedagogy – we need more courses on things like ‘classroom climate and motivation’, ‘lesson design’, ‘activity design’, classroom management’. And it wouldn’t hurt to look seriously at the teaching/learning methods of other subjects: science, history, art.
Secondly, I wish there were more integration of theory with practice. Theoretical coursework has its place in the learning of the principles of both pedagogy and linguistics – but these principles spring from and ultimately express themselves in human action, so this, surely, is how they should be learned. The principles of student-teacher relationships or of classroom discourse for example: these manifest themselves through real-time classroom interaction, and should be learned primarily, I think, by critical reflection and analysis of how trainees interacted with students in their practice teaching, or how their own teachers interacted with them – these reflections, of course, filled out and enriched by insights gained from books or lectures. One obvious implication of this model is that practice teaching becomes an essential part of a methodology course, rather than a separate component; recent classroom events (such as teacher-student exchanges) are discussed (in methodology sessions) and conclusions slotted into an overall conceptual framework of how language teaching/learning ‘works’.
Third, I wish there were more integration of linguistics and pedagogy. A methodology course should teach professional know-how based on both linguistics and pedagogical information. Such a course might be called (as the president of IATEFL, at the time of writing this article, Denis Girard, suggested years ago). The ultimate aim of such a course would be to get trainees to develop a rationale of language teaching, which enables them to make informed and principled choices between the conflicting claims of different theories.
References:
Brown, G. (1989) (interview) ‘Sitting on a rocket’ ELT Journal 43/3, 167-72
Dulay, H., Burt, M. and Krashan, S. (1982) Languate Two, New York: Oxford University Press
Duskanova, L. and Urbanova, V. (1967) ‘A frequency count of English tenses with applications to TEFL’, Prague Studies in Mathematical Linguistics 2
Girard, D. (1972) Linguistics and Language Teaching, London: Longman
Johnson, K. (1986) ‘ESL teacher training: the case for the prosecution’ in Bickley, V. (ed) Future Directions in ELT Education, Asian and Pacific Perspectives, Hong Kong University Education Department
West, M. (ed) (1953) A General Service List of English Words, London: Longman
Saturday, October 18, 2014
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