Effects of two teaching methods of connected speech in a Polish EFL classroom

The results demonstrate that in general, NF proved more effective than NNF. With regard to individual processes of connected speech, NF was more effective in production, whereas no such effect was found for perception

A Comparative Study on Japanese and Indonesian Elementary School

Pendidikan dasar secara umum terbagi dalam dua lembaga pendidikan yakni sekolah dasar dan sekolah menengah pertama. Proses pendidikan yang berlangsung di sekolah dasar merupakan landasan yang sangat penting untuk proses pendidikan di lembaga selanjutnya. Tujuan yang sangat penting dari proses pendidikan di sekolah dasar adalah pengembangan otot, emosi, sosialisasi, pengenalan lingkungan,dan aspek kebahasaan. Kemudian, mulai kelas empat di sekolah dasar ,para siswa mendalami ilmu pengtahuan secara intensif. Sekolah dsar di Jepang menekankan pada pendidikan mental sehingga anak bisa lebih ulet, tabah, toleran, dan optimis dalam hidup bermasyarakat. Pendidikan moral, olah raga, ketrampilan, dan pendidikan kesejahteraan keluarga sangat penting dalampengembangan kepribadian siswa. Pelajaran matematika dan ilmu pengetahuan banyak diajarkan dengan pendekatan kontekstual di sekolah dasar di Indonesia dan Jepang. Kedua Negara juga mulai memberikan pelajaran Bahasa Inggris kepada siswa sekolah dasar untuk mengenalkan secara dini bahasa dab kebudayan bangsa lain serta mempersiapkan mereka dalam persaingan global. Melakukan studi banding terhadap kondisi pendidikan Negara lain membuat kita memperoleh informasi yang benar terhadap pencapaian kita dan Negara lain di bidang pendidikan serta membuat langkah-langkah perbaikan berdasarkan data yang terpercaya bukan kabar burung yang tidak jelas

Listening skills instruction: practical tips for processing aural input

Two listening challenges faced by English L2 learners are (1) successfully identifying words in continuous speech and (2) understanding a speaker’s intended meaning. Listening is a skill L2 learners report wanting to improve, yet teaching practices often fail to advance learner knowledge and control of listening processes. Instructors can benefit from empirically-supported recommendations to help learners parse continuous speech, and discern speaker intent. This Teaching Tip shares two 3-part strategies to facilitate processing utterance content and interpreting message meaning. The practical tips presented here are consistent with a return in the larger TESOL field to a true communicative approach, relying on authentic materials and real communicative contexts rather than mere mimicry of connected speech features or particular intonation contours.Published versio

Putting Prosody First – Some Practical Solutions to a Perennial Problem: The Innovalangues Project

This paper presents some of the difficulties of teaching languages, in particular English, in the context of LSP/LAP2 programmes in French universities. The main focus of this paper will be the importance of prosody, especially in English, as an area where these difficulties may be addressed. We will outline the various solutions that are currently being put into place as part of the Innovalangues project, a six-year international language teaching and research project headed by Université Stendhal (Grenoble 3), France. The project has substantial funding from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and its mission is to develop innovative tools and measures to help LSP/LAP learners reach B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The languages concerned are English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and possibly French as a foreign language. Initially the project will be focusing on the needs of Grenoble’s students, but the objective is to make the tools and resources developed freely available to the wider community. Oral production and reception are at the heart of Innovalangues. We believe, along with many other researchers, that prosody is key to comprehension and to intelligibility (Kjellin 1999a, Kjellin 1999b, Munro and Derwing 2011, Saito 2012), particularly given the important differences between English and French prosody (Delattre 1965; Hirst and Di Cristo 1998; Frost 2011). In this paper, we will present the particular difficulties inherent in teaching English (and other foreign languages) in the context of ESP/EAP3 in French universities and some of the solutions that we are implementing through this project (Picavet et al., 2012; Picavet et al 2013; Picavet and Frost 2014). These include an e-learning platform for which various tools are being developed, teacher training seminars focusing on prosody and the collection of data for research

Teaching Japanese as A Foreign Language with A Cultural Context

This portfolio is a compilation of the author\u27s work during her studies in the Master of Second Language Teaching program at Utah State University. It also includes the author\u27s reflections on her language teaching experience as a graduate instructor. This portfolio is organized into three primary sections. The first section includes the author’s teaching perspectives which include professional environment, teaching philosophy statement, and professional development through teaching observations. The second section consists of two research papers, one on refusal strategies in Japanese, the other on the use of CALL for the development of oral proficiency. The third section contains an annotated bibliography that focuses on corrective feedback

The role of intercultural communicative competence in the development of World Englishes and Lingua Francas

There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither).Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resides partly in language, the development of intercultural communicative competence (Byram 1997) should play a pivotal role in foreign language education both to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity, facilitating and enhancing intercultural communication in the process. A range of skills considered central to intercultural communicative competence will be presented and illustrated showing how language students can learn to take control over the development not only of language, but of their own identities

Teaching suprasegmentals through strategy use and technology

textIn an increasingly global world, there is a growing demand for pronunciation instruction. A focus on intelligibility as the goal in pronunciation instruction has risen to the forefront of the literature. Suprasegmentals are a practical goal for instruction since they have been shown to have a greater impact on overall intelligibility, but many language curricula do not allocate time or resources to pronunciation instruction at all, making it difficult for teachers to incorporate much needed suprasegmental learning in language classrooms. This Report suggests a practical way to incorporate suprasegmental learning in a mixed language background classroom: a project that incorporates a Web 2.0 tool, VoiceThread, and Covert Rehearsal Model strategy use.Foreign Language Educatio

Developing listening comprehension competence in Japanese English as a Foreign Language Learners

The purpose of this project is to investigate a model for developing listening comprehension competence on the part of Japanese learners of english as a foreign language, with a view toward promoting practical and communicative english competence

The Influence of Attention to Language Form on the Production of Weak Forms by Polish Learners of English

The paper discusses a study whose aim was to examine the impact of attention to language form and task type on the realisation of English function words by Polish learners of English. An additional goal was to investigate whether style-induced pronunciation shifts may depend on the degree of foreign accent. A large part of the paper concentrates on the issue of defining ‘weakness’ in English weak forms and considers priorities in English pronunciation teaching as far as the realisation of function words is concerned. The participants in the study were 12 advanced Polish learners of English, who were divided into two groups: 6 who were judged to speak with a slight degree of foreign accent and 6 who were judged to speak with a high degree of foreign accent. The subjects’ pronunciation was analysed in three situations in which we assume their attention was increasingly paid to speech form (spontaneous speech, prepared speech, reading). The results of the study suggest that increased attention to language form caused the participants to realise more function words as unstressed, although the effect was small. It was also found that one of the characteristics of English weak forms, the lack of stress, was realised correctly by the participants in the majority of cases. Finally, the results of the study imply that, in the case under investigation, the effect of attention to language form is weakly or not at all related to the degree of foreign accent