A Criticism on Speech Primacy

It is the issue of speech primacy that has been disputed throughout the history of foreign language (FL) teaching so far. Speech primacy refers to a propensity to taking precedence over speaking and listening in FL teaching such as Audio-Lingual Approach. In effect, speech has been given priority in terms of pragmatism of late years. FL teaching in Europe nowadays is inclined to make much of aural practices together with the development of educational media and phonetic notation at the beginning of this century. It is said that the auditory type learners are favored over those of visual type in FL learning. But authenticity of this claim is doubtful. People in the cultural area of Chinese characters in general are predominant in visual perception and use fewer sounds in their ordinary conversation in comparison with those in Europe. It should result in their narrow undestanding of the languages in Europe. Thus, the learners whose first language (L1) has fewer speech sounds than the second language (L2) are likely to have various constraints on the phonological level in the L2. In addition, some differences in linguistic structure between the L1 and the L2 prescribes the cognitive patterns of its users. Viewed in this light it is hard to say that the teaching method established based on speech primacy is effective to the adult learners of Japanese. It is important to plant the basic knowledge-intelligibility in English, with a view to overcoming such constraints of the Japanese learners, i. e. beginners of visual type, through visual aids such as reading and writing. That is to say, FL teaching is likely to be more valid if the teaching corresponds to the learners\u27 imagery type and their L1

THE USEFULNESS OF BILINGUAL SENTENCE ANALYSIS

The procedure, "Bilingual Sentence Analysis, " with Global English (defined later) as a target, is designed to help students internalize English. It involves seven steps, beginning with listening and leading to conversation. This is accomplished in three ways : contrasting L1 with L2,dividing short sentenses into "sense-groups, " and the process of "self-error-correction.

The Network of Lexical Schema in English

The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the teaching of English in Japan by providing the Japanese learners with knowledge useful for overcoming their difficulties in making English sentences. In order to accomplish this purpose we focused on 16 radical verbs and 30 direction words frequently used in the predicate in which a number of variations are required in producing English sentences, and reinterpreted the meanings of those polysemic words in terms of cognitive semantics. The present paper consists of two parts. In Part I, we dealt with 16 radical verbs frequently used among others in English communication. Here, we classified pairs of words which semantically contrasted with each other into eight sections such as (1) Be vs. Have, (2) Make vs. Do, (3) Give vs. Take, (4) Put vs. Get, (5) Come vs. Go, (6) Let vs. Keep, (7) See vs. Seem, (8) Say vs. Send, and made an attempt to reveal the lexical schema of each verb and, in the process, the change and derivatives from the lexical schema to the perihperal meanings. We then dealt with about 30 direction words, namely prepositions and adverbs, in Part II. Here, we classified a pair of words semantically contrasting with each other into eight sections such as (1) Before vs. After (Behind), (2) For vs. Against, (3) From vs. To (Toward), (4) In vs. Out, (5) Into vs. Out of, (6) On vs. Off. (7) Over vs. Under, (8) Up vs. Down, and tried to uncover the lexical schema of each word and, in the process, the change and derivatives from the lexical schema to the peripheral meanings. In addition, we sorted a group of words sharing similar meanings with one another into six sections such as (9) About・Of・On・With, (10) Across・Along・Through, (11) (A) round・About, (12) Among・Between, (13) At・In, (14) By・Before・(Un) till, taking into consideration the revealed differences in the use of those words

The Level of Mastery of Polysemic Words Showing Second Language Learners\u27 English Proficiency

The result of an investigation on the knowledge of polysemic words among 263 subjects of high school and university students in Japan demonstrated that the wider their knowledge of polysemic words is, the higher is their proficiency in English. The meaning of polysemic words is closely interwoven with the way of thought and way of expression based on its socio-cultural background because they are used as daily-words in their linguistic world. Hence, it maybe difficult for those who are outside their linguistic world to use these words because the use of polysemic words requires a higher sense of analytic ability of lexical meaning than the others