UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DE MINAS GERAIS

Curso de Licenciatura em Letras

Discipline: English Language VII
Professor: Viviane Raposo Pimenta

SYLLABUS

Ø  Communication in formal and informal speech.

Ø  Linguistic, discursive and sociolinguistic competence.
Ø  Consolidation of grammatical structures of English language at an
advanced level.
Ø  Reading of various textual genres.
Ø  Studies of teaching approaches in English language.
Ø  Introduction to academic research.
Main issues of this summary
 What is a method?

•All methods include prescriptions for the teacher and the learners.

•All methods are a pre-packaged set of specifications of how the teacher

should teach and how the learner should learn derived from a particular theory
of language and a theory of language learning.

•For the teacher, methods prescribe what materials and activities should be
used, how they should be used and what the role of the teacher should be.

•For learners, methods prescribe what approach to learning the learner should
take and what roles the learner should adopt in the classroom.
 What is an approach?

•Underlying each method is a theory on the nature of language

and a theory on the nature of language learning both of which
comprise the approach.

•These theories are derived from the areas of linguistics,

sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and are the source of
principles and practices of language teaching.
 What is an approach influenced by?

•Theory of language: How is language viewed?

‒Structural View of Language.
‒Functional View of Language.
_Interactionist View of Language
_Socio-interactionist View of Language
_Discursive View of Language

•Theory of language learning: How do learners learn the language?

–What are the psychological and cognitive processes involved (habit
formation, induction, inferencing, generalization)?
–What are the conditions that need to be met for these learning
processes to be activated?
 Theory of language – focus of teaching (1/2)

If language is seen as a system of structurally related elements

for the coding of meaning:
•What dimension of language is prioritized?
–Grammatical dimension.

•What needs to be taught?

–Phonological units.
–Grammatical units and operations.
–Lexical items.
(students need to know the labels which describe different kinds of
words (parts of speech) and their place in a sentence (grmmatical
function)
 Theory of language – focus of teaching (2/2)

If language is viewed as a vehicle for the expression of functional

meaning. It is based on analysing how people use language. It
categorises language depending upon the context of the
communication, according to what we are using language for. It is
called its function.

•What dimension of language is prioritized?

–semantic and communicative dimension of language.

•What needs to be taught?

–functions, notions of language.
 Components of a method
Syllabus

•Syllabus is the level at which theory is put into practice and at

which choices are made about the content to be taught, the skills
to be developed, the order of the content etc.

•The theory of language adopted will affect the organisation and

selection of language content.

•Different methods have different types of syllabi associated with

them i.e. different ways of selecting and organising content.
 Teaching/Learning Practices (1/2)

•Types of learning tasks and activities to be used in the

classroom.

•Roles of learners in the classroom: the degree of control that

learners have over their learning, roles that learners will assume in
the classroom, learning groupings recommended.

•Roles of teachers: functions that the teacher is to fulfil in the

classroom, the degree to which the teacher influences the learning
process and the kind of interaction between the teacher and the
learners.
 Teaching/Learning Practices (2/2)

•Role of materials: the function of materials in the learning

process and the forms they take. In some methods, materials are
designed to replace the teacher so that learning can take place
independently. In others, materials are teacher proof so that even
poorly trained teachers with imperfect control of the language can
use them.
Assessment

•How students’ language knowledge is to be assessed.

•Error correction policy.
Examples of methods
As a consequence of repeatedly articulated dissatisfaction with the limitations
of the concept of method and the transmission model of teacher education,
the L2 profession is faced with an imperative need to construct a postmethod
pedagogy.
Parameters of a postmethod pedagogy
A postmethod pedagogy must
(a) facilitate the advancement of a context-sensitive language education based
on a true understanding of local linguistic, sociocultural, and political
particularities;

(b)  Rupture the rei. ed role relationship between theorists and practitioners by
enabling teachers to construct their own theory of practice; and

(c) tap the sociopolitical consciousness that participants bring with them in order
to aid their quest for identity formation and social transformation.
The three pedagogic parameters of particularity, practicality, and possibility
as organizing principles for L2 teaching and teacher education.

First and foremost, any postmethod pedagogy has to be a pedagogy of

particularity. That is to say, language pedagogy, to be relevant, must be
sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching a particular group of
learners pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular institutional
context embedded in a particular sociocultural milieu. A pedagogy of
particularity, then, is antithetical to the notion that there can be one set of
pedagogic aims and objectives realizable through one set of pedagogic
principles and procedures. At its core, the idea of pedagogic particularity is
consistent with the hermeneutic perspective of situational understanding
(Elliott, 1993), which claims that a meaningful pedagogy cannot be
constructed without a holistic interpretation of particular situations and that it
cannot be improved without a general improvement of those
particular situations.
All pedagogy, like all politics, is local. To ignore local exigencies is to ignore lived
experiences. Pedagogies that ignore lived experiences will ultimately prove to be
“so disturbing for those affected by them—so threatening to their belief systems—
that hostility is aroused and learning becomes impossible” (Coleman, 1996, p.
11). A case in point is the sense of disillusionment that accompanied the spread of
communicativelanguage teaching. From South Africa, Chick (1996) wonders
whether “our choice of communicative language teaching as a goal was possibly
a sort of naive ethnocentrism prompted by the thought that what is good for
Europe or the USA had to be good for KwaZulu” (p. 22). From Pakistan, Shamim
(1996) reports that her attempt to introduce communicative language teaching
into her classroom met with a great deal of resistance from her learners, making
her “terribly exhausted” and leading her to realize that, by introducing this
methodology, she was actually “creating psychological barriers to learning” (p.
109). From India, Tickoo (1996) points out that even locally initiated pedagogic
innovations have failed because they merely tinkered with the methodological
framework inherited from abroad, without fully taking into account local linguistic,
sociocultural, and political particularities.
An interesting and intriguing aspect of particularity is that it is not a thing out
there to be searched and rescued. Nor is it a chimera that lives in the fantasy
world of fertile imagination, unreal and unrealized.
Particularity, as Becker (1986) succinctly puts it,

is not something we begin with; particularity is something we arrive at, by

repeating. Particularity is something we learn. We don’t distinguish birds until
we learn their names and hear their songs. Up to that point we hear “bird”
around us and then we begin to pick up their particularity along with the
language. Particularity is something we achieve. (p. 29)

From a pedagogic point of view, particularity is at once a goal and a process.

One simultaneously works for and through particularity. It is a progressive
advancement of means and ends. That is to say, it is the critical awareness of
local exigencies that trigger the exploration and achievement of a pedagogy of
particularity.
A pedagogy of practicality does not pertain merely to the everyday practice
of classroom teaching. It pertains to a much larger issue that has a direct
impact on the practice of classroom teaching, namely, the
relationship between theory and practice. General educationists (e.g., Elliott,
1991) have long recognized the harmful effect of the theory/ practice
dichotomy. They af. rm that theory and practice mutually
inform, and together constitute, a dialectical praxis, an af. rmation that has
recently in. uenced L2 teaching and teacher education as well (e.g.,
Freeman, 1998).
One of the ways by which educationists have addressed the theory/ practice
dichotomy is by positing a distinction between professional theories and
personal theories. According to O’Hanlon (1993), professional theories are
those that are generated by experts and are generally transmitted from centers
of higher learning. Personal theories, on the other hand, are those that teachers
develop by interpreting and applying professional theories in practical situations
while they are on the job. Although this distinction sounds eminently sensible, in
reality the expert-generated professional theories are often valued whereas the
teacher-generated personal theories are often ignored. Evidently, in a well-
meaning attempt to cross the borders between theory and practice, yet another
line of demarcation has been drawn, this time between theorists’ theory and
teachers’ theory.
In short, a pedagogy of practicality aims for a teacher-generated theory of
practice. This assertion is premised on a rather simple and straightforward
proposition: No theory of practice can be useful and usable unless it is
generated through practice. A logical corollary is that it is the practicing teacher
who, given adequate tools for exploration, is best suited to produce such a
practical theory. A theory of practice is conceived when, to paraphrase van
Manen (1991), there is a union of action and thought or, more precisely, when
there is action in thought and thought in action. It is the result of what he has
called pedagogical thoughtfulness. In the context of deriving a theory of
practice, pedagogical thoughtfulness simultaneously feeds and is fed by re.
ective capabilities of teachers that enable them to understand and identify
problems, analyze and assess information, consider and evaluate alternatives,
and then choose the best available alternative, which is then subjected to
further critical appraisal. In this sense, a theory of practice is “a on-going, living,
working theory” (Chambers, 1992, p. 13) involving continual re. ection and
action.
The idea of a pedagogy of possibility is derived mainly
from the works
of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. General
educationists such as
Simon (1988) and Giroux (1988), and TESOL
practitioners such as
Auerbach (1995) and Benesch (2001), take the position
that pedagogy,
any pedagogy, is implicated in relations of power and
dominance, and is
implemented to create and sustain social inequalities.
Acknowledging
and highlighting students’ and teachers’ subject
positions—that is, their
class, race, gender, and ethnicity—these authors
encourage students and
teachers to question the status quo that keeps them
subjugated. They
advocate a pedagogy of possibility that empowers
participants and point
cultural and historical backgrounds, appropriated the language and
used it on their own terms according to their own aspirations, needs, and
values. He reports how the Tamil students, through marginal comments
and graphics, actually reframed, reinterpreted, and rewrote the content
of their ESL textbooks, written and produced by Anglo-American
authors. The students’ resistance, Canagarajah concludes, suggests “the
strategic ways by which discourses may be negotiated, intimating the
resilient ability of human subjects to creatively fashion a voice for
themselves from amidst the deafening channels of domination” (p. 197).
Similarly, analyzing L2 classroom data in terms of the ideology and
structures of apartheid South Africa, Chick (1996) found that classroom
talk represented “styles consistent with norms of interaction which
teachers and students constituted as a means of avoiding the oppressive
and demeaning constraints of apartheid educational systems” (p. 37).
Unpublished reports from Palestine (Lamice Abdulla, personal communication,
October 19, 1999) indicate how the teaching of English in the
secondary schools of the West Bank and Gaza during the intifada
movement conditioned and constrained classroom events. Although the
Sri Lankan, South African, and Palestinian cases may be considered by
some as extreme examples of classroom life imitating the sociopolitical
turmoil outside the class, there are numerous instances when race,
gender, class, and other variables directly or indirectly in. uence the
content and character of classroom input and interaction (see Benesch,
2001).