DIDACTICS
II
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Newsletter 7 7th October 2001
Universidad Tecnológica
Nacional
Instituto Nacional
Superior del Profesorado Técnico
Cátedra de Didáctica
Especial del Primer y Segundo Ciclo de la EGB –Segundo Año
Profesores : Omar
Villarreal & Andrea Coviella,
Marina Kirac, Marisa Caccia and Claudia Alvarez
Instituto Superior de
Formación Docente Nro 41 - Adrogué
Profesor: Omar Villarreal
____________________________________________________________
"The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life: the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure"
Grayson Kirk
Dear All,
Last time we started with a “Happy Spring!”
This, our last long weekend in the year, it´s Welcome Winter!!, no doubt.
Here we are with some Tasks from “Converting Conflicts in Pre-Scholl” (a book I simply love) that Marisa prepared for us all and some material that Analía has also prepared to orient your reading.
Plus two bonus sections one on the teaching
of pronunciation and another on “AFRAID
OF SPEAKING?” These two discussions were published in the List : TESL-L@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
I hope you enjoy this issue of our newsletter.
A big hug to you all
Omar
Villarreal
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Questions for Reflection prepared by Prof. Marisa Caccia
Converting Conflicts In Pre School
Chapter 7: Bang, Bang, You´re Dead!
1. Define Dramatic Play.
2. Why is it so important?
3. What´s superhero play?
4. Why is this kind of play therapeutic?
5. Why shouldn´t superhero play be banned?
6. What happens when it gets out of control?
7. How can teachers help children to control superhero play? Discuss each point.
8. In "The Case of Unyielding Monster" how would you have handled the conflict conversion with a child like
Charles who resisted being "converted"? What would you do then for a positive feelings activity?
Chapter 8: Don´t Call Me Stupid!
1. Why is verbal agression unaccepted behaviour?
2. What aspects of name-calling should Teachers consider? Discuss each point.
3. What preventive activities can Teachers plan for the following kinds of name-calling conflicts?
3a Teasing; in fun
3b Power; attention getting
3c Anger; frustration
4. Why should Teachers be positive word models?
5. What´s the difference between "responsive language" and "restrictive language"?
6. In "The Case of the Loose-Tongued Teacher", how else could Barbara have handled the situation?
How would you have handled it?
Chapter 9: It´s Not My Fault!
1. How many people are involved in blaming conflicts?
2. How do they interact?
3. Discuss MORAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE YOUNG CHILD. Include Piaget´s and Damon´s work.
4. What does peer-oriented morality focuse on?
5. Mention Damon´s ealy positive-justice levels.
6. What´s the function of the early moral emotions: empathy, shame, and guilt?
7. Define empathy. Provide examples.
8. Define shame. Provide examples.
9. Define guilt.
10. What´s the role of the preschool teacher in children´s development of empathy, shame, and guilt?
11. How can you use colour, sound, and movement to help children recognize the emotions of happiness and
sadness? Give examples for each.
12. How can picture-book stories about blaming conflicts be useful?
13. Explain how conflict conversion works.
14. Define Other-Esteem.
15. What does talking mean?
16. How can it be solved?
17. What are the most important conflict-conversion questions and statements teachers should take into account?
Chapter 10: It Works!
1. Discuss: To find a solution for conflicts - especially one that would assit preschool teachers to help children find their own solutions would be wonderful, but - and there is always a "but".
2. Mention the objections to using conflict conversion.
3. Discuss each objection. State your opinion.
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Questions for Reflection prepared by Prof. Analía Figliola
Chapter 1
1- What does paradigm mean according to Kuhn?
2- Can you think of positive and negative aspects of having a dominant or shared paradigm in a certain community?
3- When does paradigm shift start? What is this so?
4- Have there been paradigm debate and paradigm shift in our field - teaching? Can you mention some examples?
5- Explain some possible ways out of the dominant paradigm dilemma.
A Framework for
Task-Based Learning
Chapters 6,7,8 and 9,
Why do children need more speech exposure?
1- What kind of material can enhance this?
2- Mention some positive aspects of task recordings.
3- What are open and close tasks? Exemplify.
4- If you want to make your own task recording, what important points would you take into account?
5- How could interviews help students improve oral performance?
6- What stages are generally suggested to record and use interviews?
7- What are language analysis activities?
8- What are the three starting points for these activities? What would be the focus in each case?
9- List some language practice activities and concentrate on the ones you believe are most meaningful and useful?
10-What is given most priority in the early stages of language learning: lexis or grammar? Why?
11- What important considerations should teachers bear in mind when dealing with elementary groups?
12-Design an outline of a lesson plan (covering all phases of the framework) for beginners.
13-Which kind of tasks could work best with young learners? Why?
14-"What are the different components of the PPP model? Mention some shortcomings.
15-How does it differ from TBL?
16-How can you help make the transition from PPP to TBL?
Appendices,
1- Examine the six types of task analysed in appendix A and decide whether they
- are simple or complex
- have more or less ambitious outcomes
- appropriate for all groups
- combine well and what could be the best way to combine them
- have processes which might require student previous preparation
2- Look at the TBL framework. It has divisions and sub-divisions. Explain and illustrate each of them.
3- Look at the five samples of task-based lesson outlines and consider the following:
- timing
- aims clear? achievable?
- difficulty
- challenge
- involvement and motivation related to sts' background, age and possible interests
- teacher intervention
- use of materials
3- Look at Appendix D and think of possible positive aspects and pitfalls.
Some suggestions/considerations
Are these sheets too difficult or demanding?
How should students be trained to respond to them? Or should they be prepared at all?
Will students find them meaningful?
Should they be shared by all sts, student-teacher?
Should they be corrected? How?
4- Look at Appendix E. What do you think could be the best way/s to deal with the vocabulary shown in the box. Go back to unit 7 and examine the activities suggested there.
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TEACHING PRONUNCIATION ??
I have a class of advanced intermediate
students of all different language
backgrounds. I only have several class periods to devote to
pronunciation.
What would be just a couple of aspects of pronunciation that would be good to
work on as I can't work on everything? (Even though the students clearly need
work on many vowels, consonants, and stress, etc. ) I want the students to
experience success so I want to provide some lessons that will be fairly easy
and worthwhile to everyone in the class. For example I don't want to
work
on r/l as only a couple of students have problems with that. So what
aspects
of pronunciation are more "universal" problems. A colleague
recommended the
text called English Pronunciation for International Students by Dale and
Poms. It seems very clear and at just the right level for the
students. I'm
just not sure what areas to cover. Any suggestions?
LaurelDonatel
LaurelDonatel@aol.com
USA
Laurel Donatello asks,
>What would be just a couple of aspects of pronunciation that would be good
to
>work on as I can't work on everything?
I went to a workshop given by Sue Miller, the new guru of pronunciation
teaching (author of Targeting Pronunciation, which I highly
recommend). According to her, the highest priority items - in the sense
that they most negatively affect intelligibility - are word stress, focus
words, thought groups, linking, finishing words (grammatical endings),
speech rhythm (which includes the three levels of stress), intonation,
troublesome consonant sounds, and clear vowels.
Now, that is much more than the couple of items Laurel asks for. I would
say that the most critical aspect of English pronunciation is the relation
between stressed and unstressed words--focus words, thought groups, and
speech rhythm in Miller's terms. You should also spend some time on basic
intonation patterns--statements, yes/no questions, and wh-questions at the
very least. If time is very short I would choose only one or two vowel
and
consonant problems to work on. The /th/ sound is a universal problem but
it's easy to fix; if you start with that, your students will have an
immediate sense of accomplishment.
By the way, a fun way to practice the voiceless /th/, once you've shown
students the mouth and tongue position (use a mirror if necessary), is to
have them line up according to their birthdays. Have all the students
come
into the center of the room and instruct them to form a line with January
at one end and December at the other. They circulate and ask one another,
"When is your birthday?" The answer almost always includes a
/th/ sound
(unless they were born on the 1st, 2nd, 21st, or 22nd day of the month).
/s/ and /ed/ endings are important and easy to teach, but in my experience
there's little transfer of these sounds until students are really ready to
acquire the endings. In other words, the problem is grammar, not
pronunciation.
I hope this is useful.
Lida Baker
UCLA Extension, Los Angeles
lbaker@ucla.edu
Laura Donatello asks for suggestions for
helping her students improve
their pronunciation in a limited amount of time.
Laura:
Two of the sounds that I think are quite important are the "a" sounds
in "hat" and "taste" (a dipthong). Mispronunciation of
these specific
sounds often leads to misunderstanding, and they are sounds that
frequently are not present in the students' own languages.
I would also work on linking as a way for students to learn to
pronounce final consonants. When I teach linking, I try to get the
students to think of the last consonant of a word as being the first
sound of the next word. Since many students may tend to drop final
consonants, the process of linking can radically increase
comprehensibility. Good board work to illustrate linking is very
important as well.
Good luck!
--Lorna Joy Swain
College of Alameda, Alameda, CA, USA and
American Language Program, California State University Hayward
lornajoy@jps.net
In thinking about pronunciation factors for
students from a wide range of
backgrounds, you need to consider stress/intonation, elided sounds (the
'wanna' 'couja' 'dija' phenomena and other changes in different phonetic
environments), and discrete phonemes (the groups of sounds English
speakers consider 'one' sound). Here are some things that I find useful:
(1) English /r/ is not a typical sound in most languages. Many students
may not need the l/r contrast, but most don't pronounce /r/ correctly.
(2) Diphthongs. The most typical vowel configuration in languages
is 5
'pure' vowels. Students need to be aware of how many English sounds
represented by one letter are really two sounds.
(3) Word stress in English causes the length of time given to the vowel
to increase. In many (especially Asian) languages, all vowels are given
equal time.
(4) Unreleased consonants: For example, in "I've got my
book.", the /t/
in 'got' is not pronounced. Instead, it is unreleased, a glottal stop
type of
sound. What happens is that students, in listening to NSs, often hear
NO sound, so they begin to say 'gah' instead of an unreleased /t/. This
phenomenon exists for many consonants (mostly "stops") at the ends
of words.
(5) Elided sounds. Although many people grow up being told that
pronunciations like 'wanna' for 'want to' are "lazy," we all talk
that way.
For students who come from a language that has an exclusively CV
(consonant-vowel) syllable structure, pronouncing consonants at the
ends of syllables is very difficult. With elisions, many of English's CVC
structures convert to CV structures. The end consonants convert to
beginning consonants for the next syllable. Students becoming
*surprisingly* more understandable under the circumstances. (Students
may need to be warned about including an "extra" 'to', since they
don't
always recognize/remember that the 'to' is the 'a' in 'wanna' or similar
elisions.)
(6) Stress and intonation patterns. This really goes with elided
sounds.
Trying to pronounce each word in its citation ("dictionary") form
leads to
difficulty in placing correct sentence stress.
Karen Stanley
Central Piedmont Community College
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
<kstanley@charlotte.infi.net>
<karen_stanley@cpcc.cc.nc.us>
Laurel Donatello wrote:
> I only have several class periods to devote to pronunciation.
> What would be just a couple of aspects of pronunciation that
> would be good to work on?
I've always thought that pronunciation is something which is better
taught in a 4-5 minute slot every lesson, rather than in a
'pronunciation lesson'. If you limit it to such short slots, it is
perfectly possible to have one every lesson and to cover a different
thing each time. You might spend 5 minutes checking the intonation of
yes/no and Wh questions, or getting students to mark sentence stress, or
practising consonant clusters, or doing a jazz chant or whatever. As
Laurel says, you proably can't spend too long on any one thing because
not all the students may have that problem. Students that have a special
problem you may have to give individual suggestions to as to how they
can work on their pronunciation on their own.
John Harbord
Language Teaching Centre
Central European University, Hungary
<harbordj@ceu.hu>
Laurel Donatel asks about a couple points
about pronunciation that can be
stressed.
For my writing classes, I have students read some of the paragraphs or text
examples as a way of allowing them to practice their pronunciation. I put
three things for them to keep in mind as they read, and I explain and model
each one. These three points, by the way, I believe are more helpful for
Asian speakers than for speakers of Romance languages or Middle-Eastern
languages like Arabic.
(1) SPEAK SLOWLY. If you read too fast, you will automatically reproduce
your old patterns and you can't try to sound like a native speaker.
(2) CONNECT THE WORDS. I give examples (and sometimes when they read I do
this as well) to show how we speark in phrases rather than single word
units (Asian speakers are especially guilty of reading and pronuuncing each
word separately and in the case of Korean and Chinese speakers in
particular, adding an "uh" at the end of a word of a hard consonant
like
"d". I'll put an example like "Mares eat oats and does eat
oats." And
show how it would be pronounced by a native speaker, "Marezeedoat sando
zeedoats" You can make up your own to show how we generally connect
the
last sound of each word in the phrasal unit with the first sound of the
following word.
(3) INTONATION: JUMP UP STEP DOWN. I show how within each phrasal unit we
generally use go up in tone for one of the syllables, then step down to the
end of the unit. (Here I model how to let the voice slide up to a higher
tone, not just using stress, and I do it slowly). Peter Jennings on ABC
News is a particularly good model for them to listen to I believe to show
how to use intonation rather than stress.
I read sometimes and tell them to try to imitate me under their breath if
they like or to just follow along. For the Advanced I classes and lower,
I
make an effort to read slowly and use the 3 points that I put on the board.
I emphasize the three points throughout the 8-week session and in a few
cases can actually see some progress. That is, some of the students do
actually begin to sound a little more like a native speaker at the end.
Hope this helps.
Steve Carter
Wichita State University
USA
stephen.carter@wichita.edu
Laurel Donatel asks:
> . I only have several class periods to devote to pronunciation.
> What would be just a couple of aspects of pronunciation that would be good
> to
> work on as I can't work on everything?
>
> I attended a workshop by one of the best known pronunciation gurus,
> Dr.Paulette Dale when she was a featured speaker at TEXTESOL a couple of
> years ago. (She is the author of the book that you are using-
English
> Pronunciation for International Students.) [She gave out her email
at the
> workshop and encouraged anyone to email her personally with any questions:
> it is PDale@mdcc.edu]
Based on many of her suggestions, I found that work
> on final consonant sounds is one of the most important areas to work on
> when you have very little time and must be selective about what you choose
> to teach. It really gives students "the most bang for their
buck."
> Intelligibility increases dramatically when they start releasing or
> enunciating those final consonant sounds (even if many other
pronunciation
> errors still clearly target them as non native speakers.) Dr. Dale
> advocates that the goal of her "accent reduction" classes is to
reduce
> pronunciation errors that interfere with effective communication - not
> necessarily to accomplish the largely unrealistic goal of having everyone
> sound like native speakers of American English. Final consonant
awareness
> and production really goes a long way to helping students be better
> understood. There is a wonderful chapter in English Pronunciation
for
> International Students on Final Consonant Production. Also, as
the voiced
> and voiceless "th" sound does not exist in most languages other
than
> English, most non native speakers have difficulty with these sounds
and it
> is therefore a sound that is of immediate interest to most pronunciation
> students. Long and short "i" (bit/beat) is also a
contrast that doesn't
> exist in languages other than English and most non native speakers seem to
> appreciate work here too. While Dr. Dale,
too, advocates work on
> stress, rhythm, and intonation - these features are not as concrete.
> Students are unlikely to improve to any significant degree in these areas
> in conversational speech after just one or two short lessons, while
I have
> seen wonderful improvement after just a couple of lessons with regard to
> final consonant sounds, "th" and long and short
"i".
>
> Lenny Borgenstein
> Lborgen48@aol.com
>
About teaching pronunciation
to Spanish speakers: to work with the
problem of long and short sounds of "it" and "eat" I
have used given all
students rubber bands to stretch out with the longer sounds. I use small
hand mirrors for teeth lip placement awareness (b/v) especially. A
difficult problem seems to be the tongue thrust that so many Latin American
Spanish speakers have with d. To work with this I use a "clenched
jaw
technique" which over exaggerates the fact that the sound can be made
without the tongue coming out of the mouth. Try clenching your teeth
together and making the /d/ sound.
Maria Spelleri
Literacy council of Sarasota, FL USA
mariasp@peoplepc.com
Teaching pronunciation is a very difficult
task teachers have to =
accomplish here in Trujillo-Venezuela. Our students have developed a =
terrible habit trying to approximate English to Spanish, in other words, =
when they read a text or listen to a person they write English words the =
way they understand their sounds.
The situation described above have complicated our pronunciation =
teaching process due to the fact that we are fighting against a code =
which does not exist. They have created their own language. If you have =
a similar experience share comments and ideas. The best for all
Mireya Parilli
Trujillo-Venezuela
mireyapa@cantv.net
University of Los Andes
Evi asks about teaching pronunciation to
Spanish speakers and about various
little tricks for teaching pronunciation including using tissues, etc.
My advice is "run" don't walk and get a copy of the books
English
Pronunciation for Spanish Speakers: Vowels and English
Pronunciation for
Spanish Speakers: Consonants (Pearson Education - formerly Prentice Hall
Regents) ISBN: 0132813041
All of the exercises and activities are geared to Spanish speakers. There
is
even a section written in Spanish for students to read to reinforce the
various concepts and explanations explained in English throughout the text.
Spanish speaking students find this material extremely helpful. The
authors
also privide a variety of suggestions and hints. For example, on
page 24 of
the Consonants book (the Chapter on [t] - they say , "Practice saying [t]
by
loosely holding a tissue in front of your mouth. If you aspirate [t]
correctly and say it with a puff of air, your tissue will flutter........"
Hope this helps.
LaurelDonatel@aol.com
USA
Justin Mellersh asks about literature
related to the use of the
phonemic script (IPA) to teach pronunciation and/or listening
and/or speaking.
I did an ERIC search at
http://ericir.syr.edu/Eric/adv_search.shtml
using the keywords - IPA (or) Phonetic Alphabets (or)
Phonemic Alphabets
and came up with a number of results, some for teaching
other languages using phonetic/phonemic alphabets, some
for teaching children or disabled adult NSs, and some for
teaching ESL.
It required too many lines to list all the sources that appeared
relevant. Below is a sample:
ERIC_NO: ED058787
TITLE: An Experimental Study of the Teaching of French
Pronunciation Using an "Ad Hoc" Phonemic Alphabet.
AUTHOR: Herold, William R.
PUBLICATION_DATE: 1972
ABSTRACT: The primary purpose of this experiment is to
determine the effect of reading development based on phonemic
transcription and traditional orthography on the pronunciation of
French as a second language. Sixteen level 1 French classes in
Western New York State schools participated in the experiment in
which the control and experimental classes completed six weeks
of study of an introductory French text in which the first three units
were transcribed for the experimental group along the lines of the
International Phonetic Alphabet. Changes were made, as
necessary, in order to create additional symbols resembling the
traditional grapheme as closely as possible. Pronunciation tests
were administered following the initial period, and statistical results
are discussed. Concluding remarks confirm the belief that the effect
of the written form of a language depends on the degree of
correspondence which exists between the conventional orthography
and the phonology of that language. (RL)
Karen Stanley
Central Piedmont Community College
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
<kstanley@charlotte.infi.net>
<karen_stanley@cpcc.cc.nc.us>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------AFRAID
OF SPEAKING ?
Dear Teslers:
How can students overcome the fright of speaking up in English? My students
seem to be "scared" of talking, they are barely audible when
speaking, and
they seem to never find words to say what they want.
When they have to practice a conversation, they usually do it using the text
for the first time, afterwards I get them to close their books and I try
to
encourage them to remember the conversation rather than to memorize it, I
have also tried to give them a very simple topic (my school days, my
hobbies, my summer vacations) for them to talk about, and try losing that
"stage panic" when speaking English.
Could you give me some suggestions?
Thanks
Lorena del-Aguila
ICPNA
Lima - Peru
sashatidel@hotmail.com
How can students overcome the fright of
speaking up in English?
In my Speech 1 class, I use a response-centered approach.
1. Building a healthy self-concept
Each student responds with one or few simple sentences to the question:
What
are your best qualities?
2. Discovering what needs to be developed
Each student responds with one or few simple sentences to the question:
What
are some of the things that you don't like in you?
3. Developing self-confidence
a. Survey: Anxiety
Students interview other people (students, teachers, administrators, personnel,
etc.) outside the classroom to discover what they feel before a huge
crowd.
Then, they realize that only one out of ten feels confident in delivering
a
speech and even teachers experience anxiety.
b. Diagnostic Oral Activity
Before the first delivery, a student is affirmed by the audience. That
is,
every member of the audience says one or few simple sentences about the
speaker's best qualities.
4. Improving Oral Skills
Students engage in individual, pair, and group work.
The aforementioned activities do not
guarantee instant results, but they
destroy barriers, create a non-threatening environment, and help students
relax
and act spontaneously. There is nothing more productive and
creative than a
learner's mind free of worries and anxieties. So I do not discuss
stage
fright. I make them realize it exists. Then, I make them so busy that
they find
no time to think about it. They just worry about what to say or how
to get
their classmates' attention. Sometimes, each student wants to be
the first to
talk.
With even the simplest tasks, a student gets a sense of success and a feeling
that s/he is in control. It is not how complicated the task is, but
what a
student derives from the task that matters.
Fatima Nacaytuna
Manila, Philippines
fnacaytuna@edsamail.com
www.edsamail.com
In response to Lorena del Aguila4s request
for suggestions for ways to get students talking, I agree that pair/group work
is the place to start.
In my conversation classes here in Spain many students almost inevitably clam
up when I try any type of class discussion and only a few end up doing all the
talking but I may ask the same question and tell them to discuss it in pairs
and immediately the class erupts in non-stop chatter- with everyone
participating and (nearly) all in English! Apart from working with dialogues
there are many task-based activities you can use such as information gap
exercises,
anecdote telling, find someone who..., etc.
Paul Seligson´s Helping Students to Speak (I believe it´s Richmond
Publishing) is a good source for info on getting the most out of pair/group
work and includes photocopiable material for a number of different activities
which require intensive speaking. Most of these are for low to intermediate
levels. For higher levels there is a book I like called Conversation
Lessons by Ron Martmnez (LTP). It is geared towards helping students
learn and internalize idiomatic "chunks" of language needed for
natural conversationand provides a good variety of practice exercises which can
be used for pair/group work. My two euros. What have other TESL´ers
found useful?
Jerry Kammer
Madrid, Spain
kammer@eresmas.net
Hi,
Lorena asks:
>How can students overcome the fright of speaking up in English?
Why don't you first have them speak English in pairs in their desks all at
the same time, first? Thus only a partner and sometimes the teacher (when
going around) can hear them speaking, which I'm sure will reduce the fright.
You should also be careful about correcting mistakes. Not all have to be
corrected.
These two, I believe, give the student a chance for self confidence, and
that, later on, will help to reduce stage fright.
I wish you all a very good academic year.
Sevgi Demir Kaya
ASFA - Istanbul
sevgidemirkaya@hotmail.com
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REMINDER
Dates for Parciales and Make-ups
In all cases 50 Multiple Choice Questions.
INSPT - UTN
Second Parcial ( Both for the Morning and Afternoon Shift)
Friday 16th November 9:00 hours
Publication of results and signing of “Libretas Universitarias”:
Friday 16th November 12:00 hours
Make-up Second Parcial ( Both
for the Morning and Afternoon Shift)
Wednesday 21st November 13:30 hours
Make –up of either or both 1st and 2nd
Parcial
( Both for the Morning and Afternoon Shift)
Friday 23rd
November 9:00 hours
Publication of results and signing of “Libretas Universitarias”:
Friday 23rd
November 12:00 hours.
ISFD Nro 41
Second Parcial
Wednesday 14th November 19:00 hours
Make-ups
During “Período de Compensación” according to the regulations
of Provincia de Buenos Aires