Introduction
Based on the textbooks in Hong Kong, the students in Primary 5 get the first chance to learn conditional sentences. There are four types in all: Type 0 (any situation which is always true), Type 1(something is going to happen in the future), Type 2 (an imaginary situation which stands no chance of happening or even impossible) and Type 3 (a situation which might have happened in the past but which did not really happen) (Loo, 1996). As time goes by, students will get a better understanding about them in junior high school. Thus, it is not the first time that Miss Wong’s students get to know the target structures. However, some students find that it is hard to understand why we use simple past tense in if-clause to refer to an imaginary
…show more content…
To achieve this goal successfully, she introduces them deductively. However, as Larsen-freeman (1986) suggests that the learning of a foreign language should be the same as the learning of native language. We never recite all rules when we use our native language. The rules should be figured out inductively. In our real teaching process, we should introduce grammar rules inductively from interesting examples. Therefore, our students can understand grammar rules by summarizing them from examples by themselves.
The roles of the teacher and students
The roles are very traditional because Miss Wong is the authority in her classroom. Students cannot exert their ability to explore new knowledge actively. They do as Miss Wong says without any creativity. Such teacher-centered class will lead the learners become less motivated and hardly have chances to pursue a better academic grade in English study.
The interactions in the classroom
Most of the interactions occur between Miss Wong and her students, and there is little student-student interaction. In this way, the students will hardly get opportunities to cooperate with one another, and the dominant position of students cannot be noticed at all. As teachers, we should design some attractive activities to make our students study in active
Amy Tan is somewhat a genius. She understands that communication is relative and not solely dependent on predefined syntax. Obviously she does not want to jeopardize her credibility as a professional, thus dew to the somewhat unconventional position of the paper, Amy presents the information as an opinion based on personal experience. Upon completing the introduction of this passage, the reader has concluded the following passage will most likely be the author's opinion on the English language; and is not to be analyzed with the same scrutiny as a research paper.
Lesson planning is an important component of teaching English language because a good teacher must make a lesson plan in order to achieve the objectives of a lesson. This term, I had a chance to observe grade 6 students.The classroom was composed of 31 students. All of them were native speakers of Turkish and their English proficiency level is elementary. In the lesson which I attended, the teacher taught simple present tense. So,the main objective of this lesson was to make the students use the simple present tense. To do this,the teacher made a detailed lesson plan and she divided the lesson into the stages. In this paper, I am going to mention how she taught the simple present tense and whether it was an effective lesson or not.
into the manner in which grammar is generally approached could be made clear by looking
In this paper, a critique is carried out on Miss. Wong’s teaching methods from the perceptive of pros and cons of teaching effectiveness, and then pedagogical implications are drawn from this part. To explore a more effective approach in teaching conditionals, a design of a grammar task will be the core part with a discussion on it.
Grammar is introduced with the use of dialogues which students imitate and repeat. The students induce grammar from the examples and explicit instruction is avoided. Techniques such as dialogue memorization, repetition, backward build-up, chain, substitution, single/ multiple slot substitution drills are mainly used. Students are imitators of the teacher and try to respond to the teacher’s directions as accurately as
The other stages of the two lessons may have some other similarities. When the students are asked to give examples of the language, the teacher should pay close attention to each sentence. Error correction, once again, plays a crucial role but crucially, when errors occur, T2 would only correct by saying the correct version and never referring to the grammar structure, as done by T1.
Mastering the grammar of the foreign language is essential in order for students to understand the written target language
Teachers having wide knowledge and experience as well as deep understanding of grammatical errors can use standardized methods to indicate students’ errors in writing correctly and clearly. Should they underline errors made by English learners, followed by giving more explanations and suggesting how to correct errors, students could know what kind of error they have made exactly to avoid them in the next writing. Besides noting down errors corrected directly, teachers can use error codes to describe the types of errors and give some recommendations to instruct how errors can be corrected. For example, VT is an abbreviation for verb tense or RO is the symbol of run-on sentence and so on. Noteworthy, it is necessary for students to have a certain understanding of the error codes so that they will know what teachers indicate. After that, they could realize what grammatical structures they should revise. In addition, after correcting errors, teachers should write down some compliments or advice to students, which is a considerable activity to create interaction between teachers and students. It can be revealed that teachers’ positive feedbacks like “Good” or specific recommendation such as “Linking words”, “Should write concluding sentence clearly” are truly beneficial to raise students’ motivation for avoidance of errors in their next written work and writing
As Wu (2012) mentioned, there's no agreed-upon method of teaching English conditionals so far. Consequently, the research of new and personal approach is going to be made through this proposal.
In the last century, there has been major shifts in attitudes towards language teaching and learning. Language was previously viewed as a system that can be acquired through focusing on grammar, that view influenced some teaching methods such as Grammar Translation Method, Audiolingual Method and Situational Language Teaching (Nunan 2001). Scholars started to question the validity of such methods, because they have noticed that although students had a good knowledge of the language rules, they were unable to use the language to communicate (Larsen-Freeman 2001). In other words, students should learn linguistics skills as well as communicative skills (Richards and Rodgers 2001). Littlewood (2002:1) commented, "the structural view
The teacher’s approach to teaching grammar differs greatly depending on the age of the learners. The younger the student is, the less they tolerate grammar explanation and exercises. A teacher focuses more on fun activities such as games, songs and movies instead of grammar drills, explanations, and exercises, depending on the students’ age. Moreover, young learners deduce the underlying rules of the language and make them their own much faster than adult learners. Thus, explaining grammar to kids seen of no use. Cook (1994)
We should be interested in the everyday oral use of the language and not to overwhelm the learner with so many structures that they are able to learn within a context. They should have a pleasant learning experience that allows them to interact with others without thinking about what the rules claim. Nevertheless, the fact that prescriptive grammar helps with the preservation of the formal written language is enough to make us think about the importance of teaching some grammar rules in a very formal
There are many variations in the conditional clauses, which can be inserted into many parts in the whole sentence. It can exist at the beginning of the sentence, in the middle of the sentence and at the end of the sentence (Hewing, 2002), which increases the difficulty for students to understand. Also, Chinese do not have conditional sentences, so it might be difficult for learners to understand. In fact, there are some points which can help student have a comprehensive overview to the conditional sentence, as long as students master those learning skills, they would have better understanding of it.
Having said so, syntax is likely to be a source of comprehension difficulties for many EFL students long sentences and difficult syntax can block comprehension even when vocabulary is familiar (Nuttal,1991). Faced with long complex sentences, learners get
The problems related to subject-verb agreement have been examined by many educators and researchers. For example, one can mention the study carried out by Siti Stapa and Mohd Izahar (2010). In particular, these scholars focus on the errors made by Malaysian ESL learners. Their research indicates that these errors occur primarily due to linguistic differences. One should mention that in some languages, there are no forms that can distinguish the singular and plural forms of the verb. For example, one can speak about such a language as Bahasa Malaysia. Thus, these people can use the singular form of the verb, instead of the plural form. For instance, they can utter the following phrase, “Now, people is not looking for appropriate job but a stable one” (Stapa & Izahar, 2010). These mistakes can significantly impair their written and oral communication. Thus, it is important to consider the differences between two languages. Additionally, there are many students who speak non-standard dialects of English such as Ebonics (Baxter, 2007). Such learners perceive themselves as native speakers; nevertheless, they can also violate the rules of subject-verb agreement. Therefore, their academic writing style can be significantly impaired. Such people need to do corrective exercises in order to overcome this difficulty. This is one of the points that can be made.