SHARE
An Electronic
Magazine by Omar Villarreal and Marina Kirac ©
Year
5
Number 127 May
15th 2004
6250 SHARERS are reading
this issue of SHARE this
week
__________________________________________________________
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a
single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never
decreases by being SHARED
__________________________________________________________
Dear
SHARERS,
Eleven years ago
this year a group of young, talented and energetic students of English from
Universidad Nacional de Cuyo had the courage and the determination to make their
collective dream come true. They shared much more than classes and teachers in
the campus outside the city of Mendoza. They shared a passion for the theatre,
for music and for the arts in general, and for everything creative. They thought
that they could offer a new meeting scenario for those teachers who also
believed in innovation and change as the driving force in the process of
teaching and learning English.
Rubén
Scattareggi, the undisputable leader of that incredible group of students
recruited local talent and talked to Oriel Villagarcía in Buenos Aires (at that
time Oriel had a managerial position with Longman Group Argentina). Oriel, in
turn, talked to a group of friends
and associates into contributing to the meeting and so we all headed to Mendoza
to spend two unforgettable days of shared classroom experiences and warm
comradeship. The First National Congress of Teachers and Students of English
had been born and it certainly was a huge success.
The First
Congress plenarists and workshop leaders were: Prof. Marcela Ramos and Prof.
Patricia Palacios from Universidad
Nacional de San Juan (Rubén´s recruits), and Prof.Fernando Armesto, Ms. Susan
Hillyard, Prof. Cristina Grondona White, Mr Denis Dunn and Prof Omar Villarreal from various
institutions in Buenos Aires (Oriel´s recruits).
The Congress went
on growing strong and healthy with a number of ups and downs into the bargain,
as it so often happens with all “living” organisms:
1993.-
Mendoza
Universidad
Nacional de Cuyo – President: Rubén Scattareggi
1994.-
Mendoza
Universidad
Nacional de Cuyo – President: Rubén Scattareggi
1995.- San
Juan
Universidad
Nacional de San Juan – President: Marcela Ramos.
1996.-
Córdoba
Universidad
Empresarial Siglo XXI – President: Julio César Jiménez.
1997.-
Salta
Instituto
Provincial de Lenguas Vivas – President: Irma Larrinaga
1998.- Santa
Fé
Asociación
de Profesores de Inglés de Santa Fé - President: Eduardo
Quintana
1999.- It was not
held.
2000.-
Necochea
Asoc.
Necochea de Cultura Inglesa and Instituto“San Pablo” – President: Omar
Villarreal
2001.-
Mendoza
Universidad
Nacional de Cuyo – President: Rubén Scattareggi
2002.- It was not
held.
2003.- Buenos
Aires
UTN,
UMSA, CAECE, Consudec, UBA,UCALP,UNCuyo,: President: Omar
Villarreal
2004.- Bahía
Blanca
Asociación
de Profesores de Inglés de Bahía Blanca - President: Marcela
Alvarado.
2005.-
Rosario (Asociación de Profesores de Inglés de Rosario)
2006.-
Buenos Aires (Universidad CAECE).
Today,
everything is ready to offer a new high quality Congress with top-notch speakers
and an exciting social programme. We are sure the old familiar magic of these
meetings will be at work again.
We
hope to see you in Bahía Blanca in July. We are sure you will have a great time
together.
Love
Omar and Marina
PS: If you want
to have more information about the Tenth National Congress of Teachers and
Students of English, double click on this link:
______________________________________________________________________
In
SHARE 127
1.-
Strategies-based Language Strategies: A Brief Analysis.
2.- How Babies acquire Languages
between ages 0 and 3.
3.-
Haunted by a preposition.
4.- What do we mean when we
talk about Educating for Peace?
5.-
Manos por Hermanos: A Message from Bethina Viale.
6.-
Iniciación en la Enseñanza de Español a Extranjeros.
7.-
Jornadas Torre de Papel de Capacitación Profesional.
8.-
Visualize to Learn.
9.- “Much
Ado about…” and Forthcoming Bs.As. Players Tours.
10.- Anglia
Update.
11.- News from “On the Road” Theatre
Company.
12.- APIBA SIGS
13.- International Brain and
Education Congress.
14.- Distance Learning for Teachers
and Translators.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.- STRATEGIES-BASED
LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION: A BRIEF
ANALYSIS
Our dear friend and SHARER Kenton
Sutherland, Senior English Language Fellow United States Department of State at
Universidad Arturo
Prat, Iquique, Chile, has sent us this article he has written on one of his
areas of research. Kenton will be one of the keynote speakers at the Tenth
National Congress of Teachers and Students of English to be held in Bahía Blanca
next July. Kenton will address the plenary on 10th of July.
Strategies-based
language instruction: A brief
analysis
Abstract:
This article reviews
current literature and attitudes towards
strategy training and concludes that students who have increased
opportunities for strategic investment in their language training will be more
successful. Such strategy-based
instruction raises awareness of
student learning preferences,
teachers them to identify, practice, evaluate, and transfer strategies to
new learning situations, and promotes learner autonomy, enabling students to
continue their learning after they leave the language classroom. Seven models of strategy instruction are
provided along with a list of what
“good learners” do and what teachers can do to improve student
strategies. . Rebecca
Oxford´s comprehensive taxonomy, Strategic Inventory
for Language Learning (SILL), is
also included.
How do we explain the fact that certain
students seem to have a special ability to learn a foreign language and advance
very rapidly while others struggle and advance very slowly? In the past, we have sometimes tried to
explain this phenomenon with statements such as, “She has a good ear” or “He is
just no good at languages.”
These kinds of explanations are no longer satisfactory. What seems to be happening in the so-called ¨student with a good
ear” may, in fact, be her ability to focus on language events using conscious or
unconscious strategies and storing them for future use. The so-called ”student who is no good at
languages” may simply not possess
any of these systematic strategies
to help him learn more effectively.
Let´s take a brief
look at what some typical students
do to help them learn English:
Juan Carlos attends the English
Conversation Club meetings at his university every week so that he will have a
chance to interact with native speakers of English.
María Eugenia puts stickers on objects all
over her apartment with words in English written on them.
Herminia uses a yellow highlighter to mark
important points in her textbook and her notebook. She uses a pink highlighter for
new vocabulary.
Marcos likes to learn the words to
popular hip-hop songs and sing them
along with the recordings.
Daniela regularly reads international
magazines and newspapers in English at the library of the Chilean-North American
Cultural Institute. She also tries
to read popular books such as the Harry Potter series. She reads fast, does not look up unknown
words in her dictionary, but tries to guess their meanings.
José Luis loves to watch English language programs
and movies on cable television and tries to guess the meaning of expressions
that he is not familar with.
Victoria is a little shy, but she likes
to make notes in the margins of her textbook and outline grammatical
points. She keeps an organized
notebook of vocabulary by different categories: house words, outdoor words,
transportation words, professions, recreation and entertainment, etc.
Timoteo spends hours every week in
internet chat rooms, trying to understand and communicate in English with other
young people around the world.
He has made some E-mail friends this way, and he writes to them as often
as he can. He uses a lot of
emoticons :-) and internet abbreviations (IMHO) when he writes
Isabel writes English words on one side of
a card and the Spanish equivalent on the other side. She studies them on the bus and when she
has to wait in line, usually going from English to Spanish, but sometimes she
will try to remember the English words by looking at the Spanish
word.r
These are only a few
of the myriad ways that people go about learning a language. Every one of the above activities is, in
tact, a personal strategy for learning.
Oxford (2002) defines a
language learning strategy as ”specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques
that students (often
unintentionally) use to improve
their progress in developing L2 skills.”
She states that these strategies not only facilitate the internalization,
storage, retrieval, or use of the new language but are, in fact, necessary
self-directed involvement for developing communicative ability.
For a long time,
language teachers have concerned themselves mainly with teaching methods and
textbooks, considering teaching to be a “delivery system” Recently, in light of research on
successful and unsuccessful learners, language teachers are starting to consider
the importance of the learner in the process. According to Brown (2001), the “methods”
that the learner employs to internalize and perform in the language are as
important as the teacher´s methods.
He refers to this as the Principle of Strategic
Investment¨:
Successful mastery of
the second language will be due to
a large extent
to a learner´s own
personal “investment” of time, effort, and attention to
the
second language in the
form of an individualized battery of strategies for
comprehending and
producing the language. (Brown, 2001)
What
exactly is it that “good learners” do to contribute to their success in
learning
a foreign language? Trying
precisely to answer that question in the 1970s, early research in strategy-based
instruction (SBI) had its roots in studies of successful learners, One of the
early seminal studies was based on generalizations drawn over some years of
research by Rubin and Thomson (1982)
According to them, good language learners
find
their own way, taking charge of their learning
.
organize
information about language.
are
creative, developing a “feel” for the language by experimenting with its grammar
and words.
make
their own opportunities for practice in using the language inside and outside
the classroom.
learn to
live with uncertainty by not getting flustered and by continuing to talk or
listen without understanding every word.
use
mnemonics and other memory strategies to recall what has been
learned.
make
errors work for them and not against them.
use
linguistic knowledge, including knowledge of their first language, in learning a
second language.
use
contextual cues to help them in comprehension.
learn to
make intelligent guesses.
learn
chunks of language as wholes and formalized routines to help them perform “beyond
competence.”
learn
certain tricks that help to keep conversations going.
learn
certain production strategies to fill in their own
competence.
learn
different styles of speech and writing and learn to vary their language
according to the formality of the situation.
If good learners use these strategies (although not necessarily all of them)
is it possible that slower learners
could also learn to use them?
According to a number of sources, the answer is a definite “yes.” Cohen
(2003) claims that “the most efficient way to heighten learner awareness is to
provide strategy training – explicit instruction in how to apply language
learning strategies – as parts of the foreign language curriculum.” Brown (2001) believes that learners need
to apply a whole battery of strategies for language learning. Although he states that some of these strategies
are subconsciously applied, Brown argues that successful learners often have
achieved their goals through conscious, systematic application of a battery of
strategies, which suggests that they can be learned by all
students
Cohen (2003) lists a
number of goals of strategy training.
He claims that strategy training aims to provide learners with the tools
to do the following:
Self-diagnose their strengths and weaknesses in
language learning.
Become
aware of what helps them to learn the target language most
efficiently.
Develop a
broad range of problem-solving.
Experiment with familiar and unfamiliar
learning strategies.
Make
decisions about how to approach a language task.
Monitor
and self-evaluate their performance.
Transfer
successful strategies for new learning contexts.
To date, no best method
appears has been empirically researched for strategy training although
Cohen describes several that have
been proposed: (Pearson and Dole, 1987; Oxford et al., 1990; Chamot and
O’Malley, 1994), with the same goals in mind: (1) to raise student awareness of the
purpose and rationale of strategy use;
(2) to give students opportunities to practice the strategies they are
being taught; and (3) to help them use the strategies in new learning
contexts.
As a result of the
current interest in strategy development, various instructional models now exist
for language strategy training.
Cohen describes seven
different models:
General Study Skills Courses. These courses are sometimes intended
for students with academic difficulties but successful students can also
benefit. Many general academic
skills can be transferred to
language learning, i.e. using flash cards, overcoming anxiety, and learning good note-taking
skills.
Awareness Training: Lectures and Discussions. Separate lectures and discussions which provides students with a general
introduction to strategy applications and the ways they can be used to
accomplish various language tasks.
Strategy Workshops. A more intensive approach to
increasing learner awareness of strategies. They often combine lectures, hands-on
practice, and discussions about the effectiveness of strategy use and are
sometimes a required part of a foreign language program. They may help students with specific
language skills or present ideas for learning certain aspect of a language.
Peer Tutoring. “Tandem” or peer tutoring programs
began in Europe in the 1970s and are now flourishing in many universities across
the United States. Students of
different language backgrounds pair up for mutual tutoring sessions. They must spend equal amounts of time
with each language and alternate roles as teacher and learner. They often exchange suggestions about
the strategies they use. Another
approach is to encourage students studying the same language to meet together in
study groups. Less proficient
students can benefit from the language skills of more proficient students, who
can also provide strategy insights, sometimes better than a teacher
can.
Strategies in Language Textbooks. Textbook publishers are beginning to
embed strategy training in language texts although students may not be aware of
it. A few textbooks provide
explanations and benefits of the strategy involved. The advantage here is clear: students learn strategies while involved
with contextualized learning. They
also will not need separate extracurricular strategy training courses. Students are directly reinforced in the
classroom to use strategies to the extent that they will be able to continue to
apply them later on their
own.
Videotaped Mini-Courses. Rubin (1996) developed a video
program aimed at raising students´ awareness of learning strategies and the
learning process in general, to show students how to transfer strategies to new
tasks and to help them take charge of their own progress while studying a
language. Materials are structured
to expose students to various strategies for use in many
different
contexts.
Strategies-Based Instruction. SBI is a learner-centered approach to
teaching that extends classroom strategy training to include both implicit and
explicit integration of strategies
into the course content. Students
apply strategies and share their preferred strategies with other students. They increase their strategy use in the
tasks they are asked to perform.
According to Oxford in
a more recent work (2002), studies
have indicated that L2 strategy training is frequently successful, but she states that this has not been
consistently confirmed (see, for example O´Malley and Chamot, 1990). Some strategy training, according to
Oxford, has been effective in various skill areas but not in others, even within
the same study. Oxford believes
that problems in the research methodology might have obscured some potentially
important findings, e.g. too short
a strategy training period, disproportionate ease or difficulty of the training
task, lack of integration into the course work and perceived irrelevance of the
training, and inadequate pretraining
assessment of learners´ initial strategy use and
needs.
Oxford goes on to
indicate that the most effective strategy training is
explicit:
Learners are
told overtly that a particular behavior or strategy is likely to be
helpful, and
they are taught how to use it and how to transfer it to
new
situations. Blind training, in which students are
led to use certain strategies
without
realizing it, is less successful, particularly in the transfer of
strategies to
new tasks. Successful training
succeeds best when it is woven
into regular
class activities on a normal basis, according to most
research.
Another important
observation that Oxford makes is that language learning style determines
strategy choice. When allowed to
learn in their favorite way, students often use strategies that directly reflect
their preferred learning. For
example, students with an analytical learning style prefer strategies such as contrastive
analysis, rule learning, and dissecting words and phrases. Students with a global style use
strategies that help them find the big picture, such as guessing, scanning, and predicting, and
which assist them in conversing without knowing all the words, such as
paraphrasing and gesturing.
Visually oriented students
use strategies such as listing, word grouping, and so on. Students with an auditory preference
like to work with tapes and practice aloud. Students who are tolerant of ambiguity
use quite different strategies from students who are intolerant of ambiguity. Indeed, statistical links between
students´ L2 learning strategies and their underlying learning styles have been
shown by Ehrman and Oxford (1990) and Ely
(1989).
In spite of the
prominence of learning style on strategy choices, research has also shown that
students can stretch beyond their learning style to use a variety of valuable L2
strategies that are initially uncomfortable ( Scarcella and Oxford, 1992). Strategy training is particularly
useful in helping student use these new strategies which are beyond their normal
stylistic boundaries.
Let us return now to one of
Cohen´s seven models for teaching language learning strategies, specifically the
seventh model: Strategy-Based
Instruction or SBI. Brown (2001)
gives us a slightly different viewpoint on SBI. He asks us to consider how our language classroom techniques
can encourage, build, and sustain effective language learning strategies in our
students. He goes on to state that
in an era of communicative, interactive, learner-centered teaching, SBI simply
cannot be overlooked. In effect,
Brown, chastizes teachers who are so consumed with “delivery” of language to
students that they neglect to spend any effort to prepare learners to “receive”
the language. “And students, mostly
unaware of the tricks of successful language learning, simply do whatever the
teacher tells them to do, having no means to question the wisdom thereof. In an effort to fill class hours with
fascinating material, teachers might overlook their mission of enabling learners
to eventually become independent
of the classroom -- that is, to
become autonomous learners.” (Brown, 2001, p. 208)
In a language course
that contains a strong SBI component,
students experience the advantages of systematically applying the
strategies to the learning and use of the language they are studying (Cohen,
2003). They also have the
opportunity to share their preferred strategies with classmates and to increase
their strategy performance in daily class work. Teachers can also individualize strategy
training when learning styles are known and reinforce strategies with the
regular course work. Here are some
things Cohen lists as things that teachers do in a typical SBI
classroom:
Describe,
model, and give examples of potentially useful
strategies.
Elicit
additional examples from students, based on students´ own learning
experiences.
Lead
small-group and whole-class discussions about
strategies.
Encourage
students to experiment with a broad range of strategies.
Integrate
strategies into everyday class materials, explicitly and implicitly embedding
them into language tasks to provide for contextualized strategy
practice.
Cohen goes on to state
that “teachers may conduct SBI instruction by starting with established course
materials, then determining which strategies to insert and where; starting with
a set of strategies they wish to focus on and design activities around them; or
inserting strategies spontaneously into the lessons whenever it seems
appropriate (e.g., to help students overcome problems with difficlt material or
to speed up the lesson).” .
What specifically are
these things called strategies that
we are supposed to teach in order to create autonomous language learners
of our students? In an important
work in this field, Rebecca Oxford (1990) provided us with the most
comprehensive taxonomy of learning strategies currently available. (Brown,
2001) These strategies are divided
into what have come to be know as direct or cognitive strategies, which learners
apply directly to the language itself, and indirect or metacognitive strategies,
in which learners manage or control their own learning process.
Direct (cognitive) strategies include and
number of different ways of
remembering more
effectively,
using all
your cognitive processes
compensating for missing
knowledge.
Indirect
(metacognitive) strategies include different ways of
organizing and evaluating your learning,
managing
your emotions,
learning
with others.
In the same
work, Oxford provided a Strategic Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) which
provides fifty statements which learners are to answer on a five-point scale (1.
Never true of me, 2. Usually true
of me, 3. somewhat true of me, 4.
usually true of me, 5. always or
almost always true of me). The
statements which the students answer 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 are grouped into Oxford´s
six areas above and attempt to determine how often a student uses specific
strategies, if at all. Here is the
entire list of statements from SILL , from the Version for Speakers of Other
Languages Learning English:
Part
A
1. I
think of relationships between what I already know and new things I learn
in English.
2. I use
new English words in a sentence so I can remember them.
3. I
connect the sound of a new English words and an image or picture of the word to
help me remember the word.
4. I
remember a new English word my making a mental picture of a situation in which
the word might be used.
5. I use
rhymes to remember new English words.
6. I use
flashcards to remember new English words.
7. I
physically act out new English words.
8. I
review English lessons often.
9. I
remember new English words or phrases by remembering their location on the page,
on the board, or on a street sign.
Part
B
10. I say or write new English words several
times.
11. I try
to talk like native English speakers.
12. I
practice the sounds of English.
13. I use
the English words I know in different ways.
14. I
start conversations in English.
15. I
watch English language TV shows spoken in English or go to movies spoken in
English.
16. I
read for pleasure in English.
17. I
write notes, messages, letters, or reports in English.
18. I
first skim an English passage,read over the passage quickly, then go back and
read
carefully.
19. I
look for words in my own language that are similar to new words in English.
20. I try
to find patterns in English.
21. I
find the meaning of an English word by dividing it into parts that I understand.
22. I try
not to translate word-for-word.
23. I
make summaries of information that I hear or read in
English.
Part
C
24. To understand unfamiliar words, I make
guesses.
25. When
I can´t think of a word during a
conversation, I use gestures.
26. I
make up new words if I do not know the right ones in
English.
27. I
read English without looking up every new word.
28. I try
to guess what the other person will say next in English.
29. If I
can´t think of an English word, I use a word or phrase that means the
same
thing.
Part
D
30. I try to find as many ways as I can to
use my English.
31. I
notice my English mistakes and use
that information to help me do better.
32. I pay
attention when someone is speaking English.
33. I try
to find out how to be a better learner of English.
34. I
plan my schedule so I will have enough time to study
English.
35. I
look for people I can talk to in English.
36. I
look for opportunities to read as much as possible in
English.
37. I
have clear goals for improving my Engljsh skills.
38. I
think about my progress in learning English.
Part
E
39. I try to relax whenever I feel afraid
of using English.
40. I
encourage myself to speak English even when I am afraid of making
mistakes.
41. I give myself a reward or treat
when I do well in
English.
42- I
notice if I am tense or nervous when I am studying or using
English.
43. I
write down my feelings in a language learning diary.
44. I
talk to someone else about how I feel when I am learning
English.
Part
F
45. If I
do not understand something in English, I ask the other person to slow
down or say it
again.
46. I ask
English speakers to correct me when I talk.
47. I
practice English with other students.
48. I ask
for help from English speakers.
49. I ask
questions in English.
50. I try
to learn about the culture of English speakers.
Oxford does not claim
that this is a comprehensive list of English learning strategies, but it is
certainly quite an impressive assortment that has stood the test of time and is
quite useful for teachers as well as for students who take the test. According to Brown (2001), “the
SILL has now been used with learners in a number of different countries
including the US, and has proven to be exceptionally enlightening to learners as
they are exposed, perhaps for the first time, to so many different strategic
options.” Its only drawback is that
scoring and interpretation are a bit tricky and care must be taken to follow the
scoring directions exactly.
According to Brown,
such strategies can be taught, and because of their specificity, they are
actually easier to learn than more general learning styles. Brown claims that
many strategies are related to, and actually become, the outward manifestation
of style. For example, a
risk-taking style would result in seeking practice opportunities, making
conversation even when it isn´t ”necessary,” trying out language language you´re
not sure of, asking for correction, making guesses about what someone said, etc. Brown provides an interesting list for
strategy building in the classroom¨:
Building Strategic Techniques (Brown,
2001)
To lower inhibitions: play guessing games and communication
games; do role-plays and skits; sing songs; use plenty of group work; laugh with
your students; have them share their fears in small
groups.
To encourage risk-taking: praise students for making sincere efforts to
try out language; use fluency exercises where errors are not corrected at that
time; give outside-of-class assignments to speak or write or otherwise try out
the language.
To build students´self-confidence: tell students explicitly (verbally and
nonverbally) that you do indeed believe in them; have them make lists of their
strengths, of what they know or have accomplished so far in the
course.
To help them to develop intrinsic
motivation: remind them about the rewards for
learning English; describe (or have students look up) jobs that require English; play down the
final examination in favor or helping students to see rewards for themselves
beyond the final exam.
To promote cooperative
learning: direct students to share their
knowledge; play down competition among students; get your class to think of
themselves as a team; do a considerable amount of small-group
work.
To encourage them to use right-brain
processing: use movies and tapes in class; have them
read passages rapidly; do rapid “free writes”; do oral fluency exercises where
the object is to get students to talk (or write) a lot without being
corrected.
To promote ambiguity tolerance: encourage students to ask you, and each
other, questions when they don´t understand something; keep your theoretical
explanations very simple and brief; deal with just a few rules at a time;
occasionally resort to translation into Spanish to clarify a word or
meaning.
To help them use their
intuition: praise students for good guesses; do not
always give explanations of errors—let a correction suffice; correct only
selected errors, preferably just those that interfere with
meaning.
To get students to make their mistakes work FOR
them: tape-record students´ oral production
and get them to identify errors; let students catch and correct each other´s
errors; do not always give them the correct form; encourage students to make
lists of their common errors and to work on them on their
own.
To get students to set their own
goals: explicitly encourage or direct students
to go beyond the classroom goals; have them make lists of what they will
accomplish on their own in a particular week ; get students to make specific
time commitments at home to study the language; give “extra credit”
work.
Brown stresses that we
should seize every opportunity to teach our students how to learn every time an
appropriate opportunity occurs in class.
By doing so, we increase our students´ opportunities for strategic
investment in their learning process.
The SBI Model, which introduces strategy training as part of the regular
course work, seems offers an excellent working model for language strategy
training. In the final analysis,
whichever model we choose, according to Cohen (2003), should accomplish the
following: (a) introduce the
strategies to the students and raise awareness of their learning preferences;
(b) teach them to identify, practice, evaluate, and transfer strategies to new
learning situations, and (c) promote learner autonomy to enable students to
continue their learning after they leave the language classroom.
Bibliography
Brown,
D. Teaching by Principles: An interactive Approach to Language
Pedagogy, Second Edition. White Plains, NY: Pearson
Education
Chamot,
A. and O´Malley, J.The CALLA
Handbook: Implementing the
Cognitive
Academic Language Learning approach. Reading,MA:
Addison-Wesley.
Cohen,
A.Strategy Training for Second Language Learners.ERIC Digest EDO-03-02. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics
Ehrman, M. and Oxford,R. 1990. Adult
Language Learning Styles and Strategies
in an Intensive Training Setting. Modern Language Journal, 74, 311-327
Ely, C.
Tolerance of
Ambiguity and Use of Second
Language Learning Strategies. Foreign Language Annals, 22, 437-445 .
Oxford,
R. Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know. New York: Newbury/Harper
Collins
Oxford,
R., Crookall, D., Cohen, A., Lavine, R., Nyikos, M., & Sutter,
W.
Strategy
training for Language Learners: Six
Situational Case Studies and a Training Model. Foreign Language Annals, 22(3),
197-216
Pearson,
P.and Dole,J. 1987.Explicit Comprehension Instruction: A Review of
Research
and a New Conceptualization of Learning.
Elementary School Journal, 88,
151-65.
Rubin, J.
and Thompson,I. 1994. How to Be a More
Successful Language Learner.
Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle. Second Edition: 1994.
Rubin, J. Using Multimedia for Learner
Strategy Instruction. In OXFORD, R.L. (Ed.), Language Learning Strategies around the
World: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
(pp. 151-56). Honolulu; University of Hawaii, Second Language
Teaching & Curriculum Center.
Scarcella, R. and Oxford,R. 1992.The Tapestry of Language Learning: the
Individual in the Communicative Classroom.Boston, MA: Heinle &
Heinle.
© 2004
by Kenton Sutherland.
All rights reserved
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2.- HOW BABIES ACQUIRE LANGUAGES BETWEEN AGES 0 AND 3
Our
dear SHARER Juana Lopez Barrera from Lima has sent this article by the
celebrated specialist in Early Teaching of English Helen Doron. Juana also sends
a warm regards to all the SHARERS in our country.
Child Neurolinguistic Development from 0 - 3
Introduction
A child's
brain begins as a chaotic pool of unconnected neurons waiting to be stimulated,
directed and wired in some logical pattern. This complex wiring creates an
excessive number of connections, causing the brain to rapidly overdevelop
between the ages of two and 10. Although trillions and trillions of neurons are
connected during this burst of discovery, more than half of the excessive
connections will eventually be eliminated. The trick, according to Dr. Chugani,
is to keep desired connections alive and permanent to allow for efficient
processing of a variety of functions.
During
the first decade of life, the cerebral cortex undergoes a dramatic curve in
energy consumption. Metabolic rates in the brain rapidly increase beginning at
birth and begin to reach adult values around age two. At age three, a child’s
metabolic brain energy far exceeds adult levels, and by age four, a "plateau" is
reached which lasts until about age nine. This plateau is the result of
hyperconnectivity, where cortical neurons have formed excessive connections,
which are later either preserved or selectively eliminated depending upon
exposures and stimuli. Around age 10, plasticity of the brain begins a gradual
decline until 16 or 18, at which point, the levels of glucose utilization have
reached adult values.
Because
the regions of the brain develop systematically, there are critical windows of
opportunity for learning. Different regions become more malleable during
particular phases. "Our brains are particularly open to certain stimulations at
certain times," said Dr. Chugani. "Once that time is up, you can never recapture
that unique ability."
So if
your little girl wants to play a musical instrument, she shouldn’t wait until
age 20 when the cortex is already developed. She should begin at age five when
her cortex is being wired specifically for such skills. The connections then
become part ofthe brain’s formation. Dr. Chugani explains it this way. If a
child has done something many times before, it becomes easier, not just
physically but biologically, too. The pathway in the brain becomes very clearly
drawn or wired over time. So if a child learns a second language or plays a
musical instrument very early, the connections for that task are very clear and
unobstructed. If the child has never encountered a situation before, the
brain has to try several different pathways, and may be re-routed several times
before making the appropriate connection.
Dr.
Chugani also stresses the importance of repeated and reinforced learning.
Research suggests that crash courses in a second language are much less
effective than continuous learning over four or five years. It doesn’t do
much good to enroll a child in a French class for one semester, because the
brain benefits from repeated exposures, not intense isolated hits. This same
reasoning explains how children become wired for positive or negative behaviors.
They
learn what is reinforced throughout their childhood.
Why do
all members of some families seem to continually explode or overreact to simple
situations? A child’s automatic response mechanisms are learned through
collected past experiences over a lasting period, so if you are raised in a
hostile environment with parents who often yell or exhibit violent behaviors,
you will probably become "hard-wired" for hostility. The brain doesn’t screen
out negative behaviors. This is just one reason Dr. Chugani is opposed to
television violence. "It becomes a passively learned behavior," he said. "You
learn what you see--and again the brain doesn’t differentiate between good and
bad." All exposures are registered and stored until they become reinforced or
contradicted by others.
Levels of
Language
|
Prosody
|
intonation and rhythm |
|
Phonetics
|
pure
sounds |
|
Phonology
|
sounds
arranged into units of meaning |
|
Morphology |
word
grammar |
|
Syntax
|
sentence
structure |
|
Semantics
|
meaning
|
|
0 - 10
months
The path
leading to language begins even before birth, when a developing fetus is bathed
in the muffled sound of its mother's voice in the womb. Newborn babies prefer
their mothers' voices over those of their fathers or other women, and
researchers recently have found that when very young babies hear a recording of
their mothers' native language, they will suck more vigorously on a pacifier
than when they hear a recording of another tongue.
At first,
infants respond only to the prosody--the cadence, rhythm, and pitch--of their
mothers' speech, not the words. But soon enough they home in on the actual
sounds that are typical of their parents' language. Every language uses a
different assortment of sounds, called phonemes, which combine to make
syllables. (In English, for example, the consonant sound "b" and the vowel sound
"a" are both phonemes, which combine for the syllable ba, as in
banana.) To an adult, simply perceiving, much less pronouncing, the
phonemes of a foreign language can seem impossible. In English, the p of
pat is "aspirated," or produced with a puff of air; the p of spot
or tap is unaspirated. In English, the two p's are considered the same;
therefore it is hard for English speakers to recognize that in many other
languages the two p's are two different phonemes. Japanese speakers have trouble
distinguishing between the "l" and "r" sounds of English, since in Japanese they
don't count as separate sounds.
Polyglot
tots. Infants can perceive the entire range of phonemes, according to Janet
Werker and Richard Tees, psychologists at the University of British Columbia in
Canada. Werker and Tees found that the brains of 4-month-old babies respond to
every phoneme uttered in languages as diverse as Hindi and Nthlakampx, a
Northwest American Indian language containing numerous consonant combinations
that can sound to a nonnative speaker like a drop of water hitting an empty
bucket.
Kuhl,
Williams, Lacerda, Stevens and Lindblum in 1992 (Science) found that by 6 months
of age, babies recognized the phonemes of their mothertongue as distinct from
those of other languages.
By the
time babies are 10 months to a year old, however, they have begun to focus on
the distinctions among phonemesof their native language and to ignore the
differences among foreign sounds. Children don't lose the ability to distinguish
the sounds of a foreign language; they simply don't pay attention to them. This
allows them to learn more quickly the syllables and words of their native
tongue.
An
infant's next step is learning to fish out individual words from the nonstop
stream of soundthat makes up ordinary speech. Finding the boundaries between
words is a daunting task, because people don't pause . . . between . . . words .
. . when . . . they speak. Yet children begin to note word boundaries by the
time they are 8 months old, even though they have no concept of what most words
mean. Last year, Jusczyk and his colleagues reported results of an experiment in
which they let 8-month-old babies listen at home to recorded stories filled with
unusual words, like hornbill and python. Two weeks later, the
researchers tested the babies with two lists of words, one composed of words
they had already heard in the stories, the other of new unusual words that
weren't in the stories. The infants listened, on average, to the familiar list
for a second longer than to the list of novel words.
The
cadence of language is a baby's first clue to word boundaries. In most English
words, the first syllable is accented. This is especially noticeable in words
known in poetry as trochees--two-syllable words stressed on the first
syllable--which parents repeat to young children (BA-by, DOG-gie, MOM-my). At 6
months, American babies pay equal amounts of attention to words with different
stress patterns, like gi-RAFFE or TI-ger. By 9 months, however, they have heard
enough of the typical first-syllable-stress pattern of English to prefer
listening to trochees, a predilection that will show up later, when they start
uttering their first words and mispronouncing giraffe as raff and banana
as nana. At 30 months, children can easily repeat the phrase "TOM-my
KISS-ed the MON-key," because it preserves the typical English pattern, but they
will leave out the the when asked to repeat "Tommy patted the monkey."
Researchers are now testing whether French babies prefer words with a
second-syllable stress--words like be-RET or ma-MAN.
Decoding
patterns. Most adults could not imagine making speedy progress toward memorizing
words in a foreign language just by listening to somebody talk on the telephone.
That is basically what 8-month-old babies can do, according to a provocative
study published in 1996 by the University of Rochester's Newport and her
colleagues, Jenny Saffran and Richard Aslin. They reported that babies can
remember words by listening for patterns of syllables that occur together with
statistical regularity.
The
researchers created a miniature artificial language, which consisted of a
handful of three-syllable nonsense words constructed from 11 different
syllables. The babies heard a computer-generated voice repeating these words in
random order in a monotone for two minutes. What they heard went something like
"bidakupadotigolabubidaku." Bidaku, in this case, is a word. With no
cadence or pauses, the only way the babies could learn individual words was by
remembering how often certain syllables were uttered together. When the
researchers tested the babies a few minutes later, they found that the infants
recognized pairs of syllables that had occurred together consistently on the
recording, such as bida. They did not recognize a pair like kupa,
which was a rarer combination that crossed the boundaries of two words. In the
past, psychologists never imagined that young infants had the mental capacity to
make these sorts of inferences. "We were pretty surprised we could get this
result with babies, and with only brief exposure," says Newport. "Real language,
of course, is much more complicated, but the exposure is vast."
Innate Language Capacity of
Newborns
Learning
words is one thing; learning the abstract rules of grammar is another. When Noam
Chomsky first voiced his idea that language is hard-wired in the brain, he
didn't have the benefit of the current revolution in cognitive science, which
has begun to pry open the human mind with sophisticated psychological
experiments and new computer models. Until recently, linguists could only parse
languages and marvel at how quickly children master their abstract rules, which
give every human being who can speak (or sign) the power to express an infinite
number of ideas from a finite number of words.
Universal
Grammar:There also are a finite number of ways that languages construct
sentences. As Chomsky once put it, from a Martian's-eye view, everybody on Earth
speaks a single tongue that has thousands of mutually unintelligible dialects.
For instance, all people make sentences from noun phrases, like "The quick brown
fox," and verb phrases, like "jumped over the fence." And virtually all of the
world's 6,000 or so languages allow phrases to be moved around in a sentence to
form questions, relative clauses, and passive constructions.
Statistical wizards. Chomsky posited that
children were born knowing these and a handful of other basic laws of language
and that they learn their parents' native tongue with the help of a "language
acquisition device," preprogrammed circuits in the brain. Findings like
Newport's are suggesting to some researchers that perhaps children can use
statistical regularities to extract not only individual words from what they
hear but also the rules for cobbling words together into sentences.
Computational linguists have designed computer
models called artificial neural networks that are very simplified versions of
the brain and that can "learn" some aspects of language. Artificial neural
networks mimic the way that nerve cells, or neurons, inside a brain are hooked
up. The result is a device that shares some basic properties with the brain and
that can accomplish some linguistic feats that real children perform.
But
neural networks have yet to come close to the computation power of a toddler.
Ninety percent of the sentences uttered by the average 3-year-old are
grammatically correct.
10 - 13 months: First
Words
Characteristics:
one or two syllables.
Consonant clusters (e.g. st) and diphthongs (e.g. you) are
rare.
Most consonants are in front of mouth, e.g. p, b, d, t, m, n.
Most common vowels: are those in "stop" and "eet".
Reduplication common e.g. baba for "bottle"
Meanings
of first words
(Nelson, 1973)
|
51%
|
general
nominals |
e.g. ball,
doggie, snow |
|
14%
|
specific
nominals |
e.g.
mommy, pet names |
|
13%
|
actionwords
|
e.g. give,
byebye, up |
|
9% |
modifiers
|
e.g. red,
dirty, outside, mine …. |
|
8% |
personal social
words |
e.g. no,
yes, please |
|
4% |
function words
|
e.g. what,
for …. |
These are
the number of terms in each category, not necessarily the frequency of use.
Selective: food, clothing, animal, toy and vehicle names.
Change is
important: objects that move and change themselves. The rest is “part of the
furniture” e.g. not common TV, table, window, tree but common clock,
blanket, key, car etc..
Overextension
Overextension most common between 13 – 30
months.
Words or sentences?
Children
use first words in several ways.
Seldom simply as a name e.g. sees ball and
says ball. This happens, but rarer.
More typical is child who sees his
father’s slippers and says daddy. i.e. comment on object or event in the
environment.
Child says airplane when he sees
plane in sky and byebye when it’s gone, i.e. the importance of a
transition point / change in child’s environment.
Location,e.g. when an object is moved,
child says down.
Description or commanding herself, i.e.
child blows nose and says nose.
Negatives: not just using word no, but
more complex forms of negation too.
|
Holophrastic
speech = words that are sentences. |
Back to
neurolinguistics: Children may be noticing grammatical morphemes when they are
as young as 10 months and have just begun making connections between words and
their definitions. Gerken recently found that infants' brain waves change when
they are listening to stories in which grammatical morphemes are replaced with
other words, suggesting they begin picking up grammar even before they know what
sentences mean.
Such
linguistic leaps come as a baby's brain is humming with activity. Within the
first few months of life, a baby's neurons will forge 1,000 trillion
connections, an increase of 20-fold from birth. Neurobiologists once assumed
that the wiring in a baby's brain was set at birth. After that, the brain, like
legs and noses, just grew bigger. That view has been demolished, says Anne
Fernald, a psycholinguist at Stanford University, "now that we can eavesdrop on
the brain." Images made using the brain-scanning technique positron emission
tomography have revealed, for instance, that when a baby is 8 or 9 months old,
the part of the brain that stores and indexes many kinds of memory becomes fully
functional. This is precisely when babies appear to be able to attach meaning to
words.
Other
leaps in a child's linguistic prowess also coincide with remarkable changes in
the brain.For instance, an adult listener can recognize eleph as
elephant within about 400 milliseconds, an ability called "fast mapping"
that demands that the brain process speech sounds with phenomenal speed. "To
understand strings of words, you have to identify individual words rapidly,"
says Fernald. She and her colleagues have found that around 15 months of age, a
child needs more than a second to recognize even a familiar word, like
baby. At 18 months, the child can get the picture slightly before the
word is ending. At 24 months, she knows the word in a mere 600 milliseconds, as
soon as the syllable bay has been uttered.
Fast
mapping takes off at the same moment as a dramatic reorganization of the child's
brain, in which language-related operations, particularly grammar, shift from
both sides of the brain into the left hemisphere. Most adult brains are lopsided
when it comes to language, processing grammar almost entirely in the left
temporal lobe, just over the left ear. Infants and toddlers, however, treat
language in both hemispheres, according to Debra Mills, at the University of
California--San Diego, and Helen Neville, at the University of Oregon. Mills and
Neville stuck electrodes to toddlers' heads to find that processing of words
that serve special grammatical functions, such as prepositions, conjunctions,
and articles, begins to shift into the left side around the end of the third
year.
From then
on, the two hemispheres assume different job descriptions. The right temporal
lobe continues to perform spatial tasks, such as following the trajectory of a
baseball and predicting where it will land. It also pays attention to the
emotional information contained in the cadence and pitch of speech. Both
hemispheres know the meanings of many words, but the left temporal lobe holds
the key to grammar.
Sign
Language
This
division is maintained even when the language is signed, not spoken. Ursula
Bellugi and Edward Klima, a wife and husband team at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., recently demonstrated this fact by
studying deaf people who were lifelong signers of American Sign Language and who
also had suffered a stroke in specific areas of the brain. The researchers
found, predictably, that signers with damage to the right hemisphere had great
difficulty with tasks involving spatial perception, such as copying a drawing of
a geometric pattern. What was surprising was that right hemisphere damage did
not hinder their fluency in ASL, which relies on movements of the hands and body
in space. It was signers with damage to the left hemisphere who found they could
no longer express themselves in ASL or understand it. Some had trouble producing
the specific facial expressions that convey grammatical information in ASL. It
is not just speech that's being processed in the left hemisphere, says MIT's
Pinker, "or movements of the mouth, but abstract language."
Birth
of a language
Linguists
have never had the chance to study a spoken language as it is being constructed,
but they have been given the opportunity to observe a new sign language in the
making in Nicaragua. When the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, they
established schools where deaf people came together for the first time. Many of
the pupils had never met another deaf person, and their only means of
communication at first was the expressive but largely unstructured pantomime
each had invented at home with their hearing families. Soon the pupils began to
pool their makeshift gestures into a system that is similar to spoken pidgin,
the form of communication that springs up in places where people speaking
mutually unintelligible tongues come together. The next generation of deaf
Nicaraguan children, says Judy Kegl, a psycholinguist at Rutgers University, in
Newark, N.J., has done it one better, transforming the pidgin sign into a
full-blown language complete with regular grammar. The birth of Nicaraguan sign,
many linguists believe, mirrors the evolution of all languages. Without
conscious effort, deaf Nicaraguan children have created a sign that is now fluid
and compact, and which contains standardized rules that allow them to express
abstract ideas without circumlocutions. It can indicate past and future, denote
whether an action was performed once or repeatedly, and show who did what to
whom, allowing its users to joke, recite poetry, and tell their life stories.
18 - 20 months - putting words
together
Two basic
observations
Child language is simpler than adult
language in a regular way. Typically nouns, verbs and adjectives are present
whereas articles, conjunctions, prepositions and endings are normally missing.
Early child language is genuinely creative
– not only are many child utterances not identical to adult utterances the child
may have heard, but they are not even simplifications. A child who watches a
door being closed and says allgone outside has constructed a novel
utterance.
Telegraphic speech: emphasizes the first of the
observations above, e.g. I see the truck becomes I see truck.
18-month
olds recognize complicated grammar
Inside a
small, dark booth, 18-month-old Karly Horn sits on her mother Terry's lap.
Karly's brown curls bounce each time she turns her head to listen to a woman's
recorded voice coming from one side of the booth or the other. "At the bakery,
workers will be baking bread," says the voice. Karly turns to her left and
listens, her face intent. "On Tuesday morning, the people have going to work,"
says the voice. Karly turns her head away even before the statement is finished.
The lights come on as graduate student Ruth Tincoff opens the door to the booth.
She gives the child's curls a pat and says, "Nice work."
Karly and
her mother are taking part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, run by psycholinguist Peter Jusczyk, who has spent 25 years probing
the linguistic skills of children who have not yet begun to talk. Like most
toddlers her age, Karly can utter a few dozen words at most and can string
together the occasional two-word sentence, like "More juice" and "Up, Mommy."
Yet as Jusczyk and his colleagues have found, she can already recognize that a
sentence like "the people have going to work" is ungrammatical. By 18 months of
age, most toddlers have somehow learned the rule requiring that any verb ending
in -ing must be preceded by the verb to be. "If you had asked me
10 years ago if kids this young could do this," says Jusczyk, "I would have said
that's crazy."
Linguists
these days are reconsidering a lot of ideas they once considered crazy.
Recent
findings like Jusczyk's are reshaping the prevailing model of how children
acquire language.The dominant theory, put forth by Noam Chomsky, has been that
children cannot possibly learn the full rules and structure of languages
strictly by imitating what they hear. Instead, nature gives children a head
start, wiring them from birth with the ability to acquire their parents' native
tongue by fitting what they hear into a pre-existing template for the basic
structure shared by all languages. (Similarly, kittens are thought to be
hard-wired to learn how to hunt.) “Language”, writes Massachusetts Institute of
Technology linguist Steven Pinker, "is a distinct piece of the biological makeup
of our brains."
Chomsky,
a prominent linguist at MIT, hypothesized in the 1950s that children are endowed
from birth with "universal grammar," the fundamental rules that are common to
all languages, and the ability to apply these rules to the raw material of the
speech they hear--without awareness of their underlying logic.
Yet for
all of grammar's seeming illogic, toddlers' brains may be able to spot clues in
the sentences they hear that help them learn grammatical rules, just as they use
statistical regularities to find word boundaries. One such clue is the little
bits of language called grammatical morphemes, which among other things tell a
listener whether a word is being used as noun or as a verb. The, for
instance, signals that a noun will soon follow, while the suffix ion also
identifies a word as a noun, as in vibration. Psycholinguist LouAnn Gerken of
the University of Arizona recently reported that toddlers know what grammatical
morphemes signify before they actually use them. She tested this by asking
2-year-olds a series of questions in which the grammatical morphemes were
replaced with other words. When asked to "Find the dog for me," for example, 85
percent of children in her study could point to the right animal in a picture.
But when the question was "Find was dog for me," they pointed to the dog
55 percent of the time. "Find gub dog for me," and it dropped to 40
percent.
It is
striking how little difficulty the child has with any of the general mechanisms
of language: the notion of a sentence, rules for combining various classes of
words, the expression of a wide variety of meanings, the concept of inflections,
and more. All are present from a very early age. Particular rules, meanings and
inflections may, however, require time for mastery.
The early
appearance of many semantic relationships, together with the striking
differences between many child utterances and the adult speech around the child,
strongly suggests that the child is attempting above all to express his own
ideas, emotions, and actions through whatever system she ahs so far constructed,
The
acquisition of grammatical morphemes of English is in a regular sequence
determined mainly by grammatical complexity and by semantic complexity.
Overregularization
|
Stage 1
|
Came, did,
broke are leant. Not surprising as irregular
forms are 4 times as common in adult speech to children as regular ones.
|
|
Stage
2 |
Regular past
tense morpheme - ed is learnt and suddenly appears in all verbs,
regular and irregular alike, e.g. comed, doed, breaked.
|
|
Stage
3 |
Child returns
to correct irregular forms together with regular forms. |
This
shows that the child is essentially a pattern learner. Once a pattern is
acquired, it will be applied as broadly as possible.
Other
types of error show how the child filters rules through his own emerging
grammatical system: e.g.
Going to put some sugars (count nouns v.
mass nouns)
I didn’t spilled it
Does the kitten stands up?
The
search for patterns on the part of the child can even override her desire to
match the patterns of the language around her.
Vocabulary
A recent
study indicates that the size of toddlers' vocabularies depends in large measure
on how much their mothers talk to them. At 20 months, according to a study by
Janellen Huttenlocher of the University of Chicago, the children of talkative
mothers had 131 more words in their vocabularies than children whose mothers
were more taciturn. By age 2, the gap had widened to 295 words.
In other
words, children need input and they need it early, says Newport. Parking a
toddler in front of the television won't improve vocabulary, probably because
kids need real human interaction to attach meaning to words.
3 years
old
You
may feel confident that you can outsmart your three-year old, but when it comes
to brainpower, he’s probably got you beat. The metabolic energy consumed by a
child’s brain is 225 percent that of an adult. Does that mean your child is far
more intelligent? Probably not--but it does indicate that he’s thinking and
processing information at a much greater rate. And at this tender young age, he
holds an incredible strength--his immense capacity for
learning.
Neurolinguistics today
The
debate over how much of language is already vested in a child at birth is far
from settled, but new linguistic research already is transforming traditional
views of how the human brain works and how language evolved. "This debate has
completely changed the way we view the brain," says Elissa Newport, a
psycholinguist at the University of Rochester in New York. Far from being an
orderly, computerlike machine that methodically calculates step by step, the
brain is now seen as working more like a beehive, its swarm of interconnected
neurons sending signals back and forth at lightning speed. An infant's brain, it
turns out, is capable of taking in enormous amounts of information and finding
the regular patterns contained within it.
Geneticists and linguists recently have begun
to challenge the common-sense assumption that intelligence and language are
inextricably linked, through research on a rare genetic disorder called Williams
syndrome, which can seriously impair cognition while leaving language nearly
intact. Increasingly sophisticated technologies such as magnetic resonance
imaging are allowing researchers to watch the brain in action, revealing that
language literally sculpts and reorganizes the connections within it as a child
grows.
Hearing
more than one language in infancy makes it easier for a child to hear the
distinctions between phonemes of more than one language later on says Newport.
Newport and other linguists have discovered in recent years that the window of
opportunity for acquiring language begins to close around age 6, and the gap
narrows with each additional candle on the birthday cake. Children who do not
learn a language by puberty will never be fluent in any tongue. That means that
profoundly deaf children should be exposed to sign language as early as
possible, says Newport. If their parents are hearing, they should learn to sign.
And schools might rethink the practice of waiting to teach foreign languages
until kids are nearly grown and the window on native command of a second
language is almost shut.
Linguists
don't yet know how much of grammar children are able to absorb simply by
listening. And they have only begun to parse the genes or accidents of brain
wiring that might give rise, as Pinker puts it, to the poet or the raconteur.
What is certain is that language is one of the great wonders of the natural
world, and linguists are still being astonished by its complexity and its power
to shape the brain. Human beings, says Kegl, "show an incredible enthusiasm for
discourse."
Maybe
what is most innate about language is the passion to communicate.
©
2000-2001 by Helen Doron Early English. All
rights reserved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.- HAUNTED BY A
PREPOSITION
Our dear SHARER Norma Benesdra has sent us
this, as she calls it, “poetic contribution to a tricky problem” which she wrote last
October.
Haunted by a preposition
(Poetic contribution to a tricky problem)
Last Sunday I was
in Tigre.
I slept in
the sun
On a
ramp
By the
grass
Near the
river Luján
Among the
birds
Flying
above,
And the ants
working below
Moving to
and fro
Between their
ant-hill
And a leaning
tree.
Away
from the city bugs,
Off the
drudge of work,
the ring of
cell-phones and the web,
I woke sweetly
To the
sound of kisses.
The friends were
around me.
Out
of
mercy
For my
sweat and toil
Over
prepositions
And particles
galore,
They had let me
doze
Into
Morpheus’ arms
Till the time
arrived
To come back
to work
on our
teacher’s notes,
to unfold the
scrolls
Of the PDF
files
For a
wanted prize
And a load
of fun.
© 2003 by
Norma
Benesdra. All rights reserved.
----------------------------------------------------------
4.- WHAT
DO WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT EDUCATING FOR PEACE
Our
dear SHARER and friend Susan Hillyard, who has recently chaired the Forum on
Education for Peace in Del Viso, has sent us this article that she wrote on this
crucial aspect of the sachool curriculum.
Susan
will be giving a plenary on “Reflective Teaching and Learning” at the
Tenth National Congress
of Teachers and Students of English in Bahía Blanca next July. Susan will
address the plenary on 9th of July.
Educating for Peace
Susan Hillyard B.Ed
(Hons.)
Headmistress English Secondary
Sector,
Wellspring School , Del
Viso
Educating for peace is an essential
component of the curriculum but it does not mean we should do one-off campaigns
where everyone gets excited for a month and then forgets the idea. It does not
mean we should teach for peace, explicitly, only to find the students are unable to transfer
their understanding to other situations. Rather it means that every moment in
our teaching lives whether as parents, older siblings, grannies or uncles,
teachers, professors or psychologists, social workers, cleaners or bus drivers,
we should hold dear a number of tenets.
There are hundreds of peace
movements in the world today, but a most respected one, the United Nations, laid
down six "peace keys" in 1997 when
it drafted the
" Manifesto 2000" in which it
asked,
" What if the new millennium were a new
beginning , an opportunity to turn, all together, the culture of war and violence into a culture of peace
and non-violence?" . This means that we should begin to change from within and
raise our own consciousness of what we mean by the word PEACE so that we all
model, in whatever actions we perform, the development of a culture of
peace.
Peace is not simply the antithesis of
war. It is a highly complex concept and one we should define for our own
context. We should reflect on ways to not only talk about the problems we face
today but to act positively to change the way we are educating for future
generations. We would do well to accept that real change can only come through a
fundamental and deeply profound change in the way we, as adults, educate the
young.
Without delay, we should share our
ideas and understandings in an atmosphere of intellectual debate where we pledge
ourselves to underpin all our teachings with the tenets of a culture of
peace.
In 1962 a new initiative was opened
with the UWC Wales, the first of
the now ten United World Colleges which have as their mission
statement:
Through international education,
experience and community service, United World Colleges enables young people to
become responsible citizens, politically and environmentally aware, and
committed to the ideals of peace and justice, understanding and cooperation, and
the implementation of these ideals through action and personal example. -UWC
Mission Statement
In 1997 the United Nations drafted
the " Manifesto 2000" in which it asked
" What if the new millennium were a new
beginning , an opportunity to turn, all together, the culture of war and
violence into a culture of peace and non-violence?" In order to grasp this moment, in order
to start anew a number of tenets
were developed which could be used by us all to underpin all our actions every
day.
Respecting the rights and dignity
of each human being
Rejecting violence, obtaining
justice by convincing and understanding
Developing attitudes and skills for
living together in harmony, putting an end to exclusion and oppression
Giving everyone a chance to learn
and share through the free flow of information
Making sure that progress and
development are good for everyone and for the environment
Appreciating that people are
different and that everyone has something to contribute to the community
Ensuring an equal place for women
and men in building society
Participation by everyone in making
decisions
Some of us were lucky enough to grow up in the 60s when "Peace
and Love" was the accepted catch
phrase and we thought we were living the dream of universal peace. Perhaps some
of us were in our own way happy enjoying a new freedom that other generations
had never enjoyed and we didn't go too deeply into the philosophy of it all. We
were happy to enjoy the music, the underground poetry and prose and the picnics
at the park. At least in my
experience we thought everybody else in the world was doing the same. Until a
real teacher suggested with some coercion that we should take out a subscription
to a magazine called the "Courier" This changed :my life, opened my eyes and
helped me to understand diversity.
The spark for this forum came from the crisis we are suffering in
Argentina and from the feeling many of us have that the social fabric as we knew
it in our adolescent days is breaking down. Teachers flock to conferences all
over the country as they know they need to change and transform the education
system but they can't seem to find the ready solutions they seek. The crime rate
is up, drug abuse is becoming more common especially drinking and smoking, theft
is on the rise, there are more kidnappings and murders, family ties seem to be
breaking down and our students are
living more and more in two broken homes. We feel as educators that we are
constantly trying to instil values in teenagers which do not exist in the world
of their realities and there is a big gap between teaching and learning that we
cannot manage to bridge.
I go all over the country offering
workshops on all sorts of topics but the cry is always the same..........".they
have no discipline, they couldn't care less, they aren't motivated, they're very
violent, they feel no shame, they're so rude, they won't take on any
responsibility, they can't keep a promise, they show no respect or even
self-respect " and so on in an endless string of criticism from the teacher directed at
the student as though the student lived in a bubble. My answer is always the
same: WE have to change, WE have to set the climate, WE have to realize life is
not the same as it used to be, WE have to find ways to create the climate, to
educate, to teach cooperation and harmony, to model what we expect and to have
high expectations of the educated
man.
Criticising, ranting and
raving and moaning won't solve the problem. It never did. So we have to find
constructive ways to understanding the education process and approach the
situation in subtle ways and from many angles. The idea of joining together in
an atmosphere of enquiry seems like a fair way to start the ball rolling and to
see if there is any way that caring, educated, creative adults can put their
heads together to seek
solutions.
© 2004 by Susan Hillyard. All rights
reserved.
------------------------------------------------------------
5.- MANOS POR HERMANOS: A
MESSAGE FROM BETHINA VIALE.
Our dear SHARER and friend Bethina
Viale writes to us from Rosario:
Hola queridos
SHARERS:
Antes que nada, muchas
gracias a Omar y Marina por permitirme hacer este pedido en Share. Además,
explico que escribo en castellano porque, como dice mi amiga Graciela Castelli,
"las cosas del corazón se explican mejor en nuestro propio idioma". Y este
mensaje va dirigido a nuestros corazones.
Manos por Hermanos es
una Asociación Civil sin Fines de lucro que está trabajando con gente de escasos
recursos. Necesitan gente con conocimientos de inglés (especialmente
traductores) para traducir su boletín mensual y su página web. El objetivo es
poder acceder a la gente de habla inglesa para solicitar donaciones; así se
mantine la Asociación, con donaciones.
Como somos muchos los
que formamos esta comunidad de Share, tal vez podamos ayudar a Manos por
Hermanos y "darles una mano" en esta tarea.
Desde ya muchísimas
gracias.
Lots of love,
Bethina
------------------------------------------------------------
6.- INICIACIÓN
EN LA ENSEÑANZA DE ESPAÑOL A EXTRANJEROS
Our
dear SHARER María
José Gassó from Alpha centro de comunicación y cultura
wants to invite all SHARERS to this course on
Spanish for Foreigners:
CAI-ELE
Curso Alpha de Iniciación a la Enseñanza de ELE
Está
destinado a todos aquellos hablantes nativos de español que quieran incursionar
en la enseñanza del español para extranjeros. Coordinado por la Lic. María José
Bravo
Duración:
8 clases de 2 1/2 horas (20 horas en total, durante un
mes)
Días:
Lunes 7, martes 8 y jueves 10, Lunes 14, martes 15 y jueves 17, Martes 22 y
jueves 24 de junio.
Horario:
18:30 a 21 hs
Lugar:
Sarmiento 1419, Departamento "A" (1er piso), Sarmiento y
Uruguay
Cierre
de inscripción: viernes 4 de junio
Inscripción:
al e-mail informes@centroalpha.com.ar
o llámenos al tel:
4373-0767
------------------------------------------------------------------------
7-
JORNADAS
TORRE DE PAPEL DE CAPACITACIÓN PROFESIONAL
Our dear
SHARERS from Torre de Papel announce this Professional Development Course which
our e-magazine is proud to sponsor:
JORNADAS DE CAPACITACIÓN PROFESIONAL
Sábado 12
y domingo 13 de junio de 2004
Hotel El Conquistador –
Salón América, 10 º Piso
Suipacha
948 - Buenos Aires, Argentina
Sábado 12 de junio por la mañana
Taller de Redacción
Jurídica
dirigido a
traductores, intérpretes, abogados, escribanos y estudiantes de carreras afines
interesados en mejor la redacción en español.
Toda la bibliografía reciente acerca del
lenguaje jurídico coincide en que sus características principales deben ser la
claridad, la sencillez y la concisión. sin embargo, para un abogado, lo más
común es decir ‘satisfacción del canon locativo’, en lugar de ‘pago del
alquiler’. La propuesta de este taller se orienta a simplificar el lenguaje
jurídico, con la convicción de que entender los escritos jurídicos es un derecho
de todo ciudadano. la claridad del lenguaje ayuda a la transparencia de los
actos.
Programa:
* El lenguaje jurídico. Características. Clases de escritos * Cómo simplificar
el estilo. Lenguaje claro en español * Organización de los textos * Párrafos y
oraciones * Puntuación * La oración: el actor, la acción y el objeto. Extensión
* Los incisos * Voz activa y voz pasiva * Economía de palabras * Empleo de
sustantivos y adjetivos * La nominalización * El empleo del gerundio * Los
conectores * Locuciones prepositivas y adverbiales * El
léxico.
Cada uno de los
puntos del programa se explicará de manera práctica, por medio de ejercicios.
los textos en que se basan los ejercicios fueron redactados por
abogados.
Docentes a
cargo:
Pedro
Mairal cursó la carrera
de Letras en la Universidad del Salvador, donde fue profesor adjunto de
Literatura inglesa. En 1998, el jurado integrado por Adolfo Bioy Casares,
Augusto Roa Bastos y Guillermo Cabrera Infante le otorgó el Premio Clarín de
Novela por Una noche con Sabrina Love. Ha publicado Hoy temprano
(cuentos, 2001) y dos libros de poesía: Tigre como los pájaros (1996)
y Consumidor final (2003). Desde 1997, diseña y dicta cursos de redacción
para abogados.
Mariana
Bozetti es profesora en
Letras, egresada de la Universidad Católica Argentina. En la Universidad
Torcuato Di Tella dicta Teoría y práctica de la escritura y Comprensión de
textos y escritura. Como investigadora de la Academia Argentina de Letras,
colabora con la revisión de la Gramática de la RAE. Desde 1998, diseña y dicta
cursos de redacción para abogados.
Sábado 12 de junio por la tarde
Plain English Writing Workshop
Dirigido a
traductores, intérpretes, abogados, escribanos y estudiantes de carreras afines
interesados en mejor la redacción en inglés.
English
today is the international language of business. Leading law firms must
therefore be able to communicate effectively in English. But how? Most of the
communication with clients is written so it is vital for the lawyers to be able
to write in English effectively, as for lawyers accuracy is paramount. Many
lawyers have learnt to write in so-called ‘Legal English’ and write long winded
sentences full of legalisms and unnecessary words. However, in law firms around
the English speaking world today there is an increasing tendency to move away
from legalese. This tendency is called Plain English. Plain English is a way of writing based on the
principle that any educated lay person should be able to read a legal document
and understand it.
The
Workshop covers the following points: * Comparison of long ‘legalese’ with Plain
English * Bring subject to front of the sentence, avoid
glue words and use the active voice * Avoid excessive use of legalisms and cut out
compound constructions * Avoid nominalisation * Use personal pronouns to appeal
to reader * Prefer the present tense. Only use ‘shall’ for obligation, never
future action * Avoid negatives *
Do not put phrases within sentences * False friends for Spanish speakers in
legal writing in ESL * Punctuation (even a comma can change the meaning) *
Prefer simple word of Anglo-Saxon origin rather than Latin word * Phrasal verbs
and informal and formal writing * Make writing reader centered. Layout and
tabulation * Avoid sexist language * Drafting guidelines, words that are
ambiguous for lawyers.
Workshop Leader:
Joanna Richardson
was born in Oxford,
England and went to school there. In 1985
she obtained a B.A. Hons. in Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Literature
from King’s College London. From
1992 – 2001 she worked in Argentina as a teacher of EFL and as a translator into
English. From 2001 to present she has been teaching Plain English to
Lawyers at Marval, O’Farrel & Mairal. At the moment she is designing a
course to teach writing skills to the communications team of Tenaris. In April
2004 she gave a paper with the following title at a symposium on Bilingual
Education: Bilingualism in the
workplace: a case study. Teaching
lawyers to write in Plain English.
Domingo
13 de junio
Taller
"El
mercado internacional al alcance de todos. Sitios web y listas de traducción"
Dirigido a
traductores, intérpretes, profesores de idiomas, estudiantes de las carreras de
traducción, interpretación y profesorado de idiomas; y profesionales de carreras
afines con conocimientos de idiomas que deseen expandir su campo laboral al
mercado internacional.
Si bien el
traductor argentino posee una formación académica excelente en lo que a la
carrera de traducción se refiere, es también cierto que muy pocos operan en la
escena internacional con conocimiento y soltura. Tenemos que saber qué hay fuera de nuestras
fronteras, cómo se trabaja en el exterior y bajo qué condiciones y aprovechar la
globalización con ética para vivir y trabajar con dignidad. Este
Taller se propone analizar las posibilidades que ofrece el mercado internacional
hoy en día: listas de traducción, bases de datos y portales para traductores.
Introducción
general:
por
qué del tema. Situación del traductor en la
Argentina
Capacitación profesional y buen precio. Desconocimiento del mercado
extranjero
Formas de pago. Ordenes de trabajo – Contratos – Directrices.
El Potencial que
representa el mercado internacional. Listas de
correo:
definición: lista
de correo. Reglas básicas de etiqueta. Tipos de listas para traductores e
intérpretes. Profesionales: listado. Prácticas de pago:
listado.
Bases de datos:
definición: base de
datos. Tipos de bases de dados. Comerciales (de un
producto): listado. Privadas: listado.
Portales de
Traducción: definición:
portal de traducción. Servicios: Ofertas de trabajo
(abiertas/cerradas/directas). Foros de discusión. Bancos de
glosarios.Terminología. Ofertas de software y otros. Calificación de agencias. Correo-e / Sitio web para perfil.
Categorías pagas y no pagas (pros & cons). Aquarius.
Translators’ Café. Proz.com. Trally. Otros: detalles generales y listados. Cuadro
comparativo / Resumen y opiniones de usuarios.
A fin de
proporcionar ejemplos prácticos, en este Taller se trabajará con conexión a
Internet a través de una pantalla, un cañón y una computadora
portátil.
Docentes
a cargo:
Aurora
Matilde Humarán es
Traductora Pública
en idioma Inglés egresada de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en 1982.
Estudió Marketing en
la Universidad Argentina de la Empresa y Publicidad en la Universidad de
Ciencias Empresariales y Sociales. Tiene un posgrado en interpretación otorgado
por la UBA y numerosos cursos de capacitación en sus más de 20 años de
experiencia. Es investigadora de los recursos de Internet aplicados a la
traducción. Hasta noviembre de
2003 se desempeñó como traductora interna del hoy Banco Meridian. Fue miembro del equipo de críticos
literarios de la editorial Emecé. Miembro activo en
distintas listas de discusión y portales de traducción.
Colaboradora de la
revista "La Linterna del Traductor". En la actualidad es traductora autónoma
especializada en textos jurídicos, financieros, publicitarios y literarios.
Es Traductora
Senior del equipo de redacción de SMI, división United Business Media plc. Aurora es socia de Aleph
Translations.
José
Luis Villanueva Senchuk
es
Intérprete
de Conferencia y Traductor. Tiene una
amplísima experiencia en interpretación (más de dos mil horas en cabina),
obtenida en eventos en: Argentina, España, Ecuador, Estados Unidos, Colombia,
India, Bélgica, Reino Unido, Malta, Alemania, entre otros. José Luis tiene un
MBA por el INCAE. Estudió además medicina en la Universidad Católica de
Guayaquil y Administración de Empresas en Salem State Collage, Massachusetts,
Estados Unidos. En
la actualidad cursa la Maestría, en Traducción en la Universidad de Belgrano.
Es investigador
de recursos de Internet aplicados a la traducción (glosarios, diccionarios,
corpuses, etc.). Miembro
activo en distintas listas de discusión y portales de traducción. Es
colaborador de la revista "La Linterna del Traductor". En la actualidad
trabaja en forma independiente como intérprete y traductor especializado en las
siguientes esferas temáticas: medicina, seguridad, cuestiones gubernamentales y
estudios sociales. Es
Traductor Senior del equipo de redacción de SMI, división United Business Media
plc. Es, además, miembro y colaborador en comisiones de la Asociación Española
de Traductores e Intérpretes. José Luis es socio de Aleph Translations.
Informes
e Inscripción
Teléfono:
00-54-11- 47752198
|
Taller “Redacción jurídica en
español” |
$
30 |
|
Taller “Redacción jurídica en
inglés”
|
$
30
|
|
Talleres “Redacción jurídica en español y en
inglés” |
$
60 |
|
Taller "El mercado
internacional al alcance de todos. Sitios web y listas de traducción"
|
$
60
|
|
Tres
Talleres |
$
100 |
Agencia
de Viajes
Planeta Tierra
Tel./Fax:
00-54-11-4325-2232
Importante
Vacantes
limitados. Se entregarán certificados de asistencia.
Los
aranceles incluyen el coffee break de media mañana, el servicio de cafetería de
la tarde y el material didáctico.
El pago
deberá realizarse antes del evento para garantizar la
vacante.
Si una
vez inscripto, usted no puede asistir a este evento, la cancelación deberá ser
comunicada por escrito con al menos cinco días de anticipación al inicio del
evento. En este caso podrá percibir el reintegro del valor pagado, menos un 15%
en concepto de gastos administrativos. De lo contrario, perderá el derecho de
reintegro alguno, pero podrá designar a otra persona para que asista en su
lugar. Las sustituciones deberán ser notificadas por escrito.
------------------------------------------------------------
8.- VISUALIZE
TO LEARN
Our
dear SHARER Marta L. Vigo has sent us this invitation:
English Video
Studio is pleased to announce that Oriel Villagarcía will be teaching his course
"Visualize to Learn " in San Nicolas on June 11th from 7:00 to 9:00
p.m.
Venue: Biblioteca de
la Casa del Acuerdo,calle De la Nacion 137
Fees: $15.- for students and $20 for
teachers.
Enrolment is open
up to June 7th. You can enroll personally at English Video Studio,
Mitre 142, San Nicolás or by phone to: 03461-426918 or e-mail to evs@intercom.com.ar
Oriel is
a graduate “Magna Cum Laude” as a Teacher of English from Universidad Nacional
de Tucumán, holds a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics from the University of
Lancaster (U.K.). and persued post-graduate studies at the University of Texas
(USA) He is probably one of the best known teacher trainers of our
country.
------------------------------------------------------------
9.- “MUCH ADO
ABOUT…” AND FORTHCOMING THE BS AS
PLAYERS TOURS
Our dear SHARER Natalia
Dalinkevicius from The Bs.As. Players writes to us with their latest news:
Evening
Play Season "Much
Ado About... Beatrice and Benedick"
A 75-minute
comedy for advanced students based on Shakespeare's play "Much Ado About
Nothing" in a free version of Celia Zubiri.
Directed
by: Bettina Menegazzo
Assistant: Fernando
Armesto
Music by: Marcelo
Andino
Cast: Fernando
Armesto, Ignacio Borderes, Ezequiel Campa, Nicolás Moldavsky, Paula Mercenaro,
Patricia Gómez, Josefina Torino and Nicolás Strucelj.
Opening Night:
Friday, May 21st 7:00
p.m.
Teatro
Santamaría - Montevideo 842 – Ciudad de Buenos Aires.
Ticket price:
$10 - For groups of 10 people or more: $8
Performances on
Friday at 7:00 p.m.
May 21,
28
June 4, 11, 18,
25
July 2, 16, 23,
30
August
6, 13, 20, 27
Forthcoming Tours of Greater Buenos
Aires
Martinez (Teatro
De la Capilla - Ladislao Martinez 539)
June
Tuesday
8th
10hs.
Hercules
14.30hs.
Hercules
Thursday
24th
10hs. Master
Cat
14.30hs.
Master Cat
September
Tuesady
14th
10hs.
Master
Cat
14.30hs.
Hercules
Lomas de Zamora
(Teatro
Coliseo - España 55)
July
Thursday
1st
14hs.
Master
Cat
16hs.
Hercules
18hs.
Pretenders
20hs.
Pygmalion
Haedo (Colegio
Ward - Hector Coucheiro 59)
August
Friday 20th
14hs.
Master
Cat
16hs.
Hercules
18hs.
Pretenders
20hs.
Pygmalion
Ticket
Price: $6 (Master Cat, Hercules, Pretenders) $7
(Pygmalion)
Reservations:
4812-5307 / 4814-5455
------------------------------------------------------------------------
10.-
ANGLIA UPDATE
Our
dear SHARER Mónica Blanco from Anglia Exams has sent us this update of Christian
Kunz´s presentations:
Anglia
Examination Syndicate announces the following professional development seminars
for English language teachers, translators and advanced language students:
1 -
Capital Federal
Saturday 5th
June
Anglia
Examination Syndicate and English & Fun announce
the following ELT
seminar:
“Making the most
of an autumn day with ELT professionals”
Addressing our students’
needs, wants and lacks through the implementation
and practice of
differential learning- Keeping
Constructivism on the front burner.
A shift from monotony to
dynamism - soaking up the latest trends in English street
speak
Venue: Colegio de La
Salle – Riobamba 650 – Capital
Fee:
Anglia members: $20.00 / Non-Anglia members: $25.00
2 -
Parana - Entre Ríos
Friday
21st may- 02.00 – 08.00 p.m. /
Saturday 22nd may – 10.00 a.m. – 06.30 p.m.
The English
Department at UADER and Anglia proudly
present:
“Segundas Jornadas
de Estudio y Reflexión sobre el
Idioma Ingles”
“Aids for
Professional Development” by
local speakers
“Latest
Trends in English Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Grammar.” by Christian
Kunz
3 -
Corral de Bustos – Córdoba
Saturday
29th May - 10.00 a.m. – 02.15 p.m.
Instituto Babel,
Masters Idiomas and Anglia Examination Syndicate
have the pleasure to announce the following Seminar :
“Latest
Trends in English Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Grammar.”
“Received
Pronunciation or Estuary English??
Recent Issues Concerning British/American Slang and Colloquial
English”.
4 –
Olivos
Wednesday, 2nd June – 06.00 – 08.00
p.m.
Colegio Nuestra
Señora de la Paz and Anglia Examination Syndicate
have the pleasure to announce:
“Soaking up the latest trends in English
street speak”
Understanding real English can certainly be a
challenge but definitely fun too!
“
a boxful of smart
classroom ideas to exploit the full potential of English street speak with your
students”
Fee:
$15.00
5 -
Puerto Deseado - Santa Cruz
Monday, 7th June – 06.00 –
07.45
Language
School and
Anglia Examination
Syndicate have the pleasure to announce the following Workshop:
“Soaking up the latest trends
in English street speak”
Escuela Técnica Nro 3-
“Oscar Smith” Puerto Deseado –
Santa Cruz
6 -
Comodoro Rivadavia - Chubut
Tuesday,
8th June – 05.00 – 08.15
Language
School and
Anglia Examination
Syndicate have the pleasure to announce
“Latest
Trends in English Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Grammar.”
7 -
Neuquén
Saturday
12th June - 10.00 a.m. – 06.30
p.m.
ELT
Today and
Anglia Examination
Syndicate proudly present:
“Making the most
of an autumn day with ELT professionals”
Addressing our students’
needs, wants and lacks through the implementation
and practice of
differential learning- Keeping
Constructivism on the front burner.
A shift from monotony to
dynamism - Soaking up the latest trends in English street
speak
Information and registration: Liliana Maiolo :
lmaiolo@infovia.com.ar Paraguay 369,Cipolletti Tel.(0299)
477-0941
For all
events
post-seminar 45–minute presentations (free of
charge)
Anglia
Examination Syndicate
International English Language Exams for the
New Millennium.
International Diploma in TESOL via distance
learning
For All Events :
Core Presentations by Christian
Kunz RSA
Cert./ Dip. ELTA.
Christian Kunz has been a
practising ESL/EFL teacher in Argentina, Australia and the UK now for over 13
years. Although he and his wife are currently living and working in England,
Christian still runs ELT Professional Development Programmes for teachers in
Argentina, and is the senior Director of Studies at Kensington Schools of
English in Buenos Aires. Christian has been involved with the Anglia Examination
Syndicate Testing Services since 1996 and was appointed Academic Representative
in South America for this EFL examining body in 1997. Christian now divides his
time between Chichester College, England, where he is an EFL Lecturer, and
freelance consultancy and language testing through the Kensington Schools of
English Exams and Assessment Department
--------------------------------------------------------------
11- NEWS FROM “ON THE
ROAD” THEATRE COMPANY.
Our dear SHARER Ximena Faralla ,
Director of On the Road Theatre Company
invites all SHARERS to enjoy:
SHAKESPEARE UPCLOSE
The possibility
of enjoying two of William Shakespeare´s most famous plays with a variety
of settings in time.
Macbeth
Set in Shakespearean times, a
45 minute version of one of his most famous tragedies. Intense, real
and precise, this production of Macbeth deals with the main character´s
ambition, particularly enhancing the witches´ influence over his fate.
Breaking the traditional rule for tragedies holding murders offstage,
the reality of this show brings audiences closer to Macbeth´s
tormented ambition and Lady Macbeth´s insanity.
Romeo and
Juliet
Set in the
present, our half hour production of this unique, star-crossed love
story aims at the adolescents in the audience identifying with the ones in the
play, bridging over to them through the carefully designed music and songs.
Adapted and
Directed by Ximena Faralla
Music &
Songs by Julián Vidal
Cast
Paul Jeannot -
Nicolás Pueta - Matías Roberto - Veronica Taylor - Ines Vrlijack
Saturday,
May 29th - 9 pm at "The Playhouse" - Moreno 80 , San Isidro.
Tickets $9.-
ALADDIN
A PRINCE INVISIBLE TO
THE EYE
Join us in
our 60 minute adaptation of the adventurous fairy tale for all Primary
School!
Written & directed by Ximena Faralla
Music & songs by Julián Vidal
Cast: Nicolás Pueta - Veronica Taylor - Matías Roberto
- Inés Vrlijack - Gonzalo Córdoba
Three
Dates:
Friday, May
21st
Wednesday,
June 23rd
Wednesday,
July 14th
At
2:00 p.m.
At
UPB Theatre - Ciudad de la Paz 1972 – Belgrano.
Tickets
$5.-
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12- APIBA SIGS
Our dear
SHARERS Alejandra Jorge & Valeria Artigue, APIBA SIGs Liaison
Officers,
|
NAME
OF SIG |
DATE
– TIME
NEXT
SIG event |
VENUE
NEXT
SIG event |
MORE
INFORMATION
Follow
the link!! |
|
Applied
Linguistics |
Saturday
May 22nd
10.00 -
12.00 |
Liceo
Cultural Británico
Av.
Corrientes 5305 |
|
|
Computers |
Forum + Face-to-face
meeting Saturday August 28th
2.00
pm - 5.00
pm |
Instituto Polimodal “Arzobispo Jorge
Matulaitis" Brasil 835 -
Avellaneda. |
|
|
Critical
Theory & Literature (La Plata) |
Saturday
May 15th
9.30 -
12.30
(2
sessions of 1hour 15’, with a 30’
break) |
Centro
Cultural “Islas Malvinas “
Calle 50 entre 19 y 20 – La
Plata |
|
|
Language |
Saturday
May 15th 11.15 - 12.00 |
Cultural
Inglesa de Buenos Aires
(CIBA). Viamonte 1745. |
|
|
Literature
& Cultural Studies |
Saturday
May 29th
10.30 - 12.30
|
AB School of English
Av.
Montes De Oca 340 |
|
|
Phonology |
Saturday
May 15th
9.30
– 11.00 |
Cultural
Inglesa de Buenos Aires (CIBA). Viamonte
1745. |
|
|
Second
Language Teaching (Bernal) |
Saturday
May 22nd 10.00 - 12.00 |
EGB
18 (ISFD No. 24, Dr Bernardo Houssay),
Avellaneda 177, Bernal, Prov. of B.A |
|
|
Second
Language Teaching (Lomas de Zamora) |
Saturday
May 15th –
10.00
- 12.00 |
ISP
"Presbitero A. Saenz",
Calle Saenz 740, Lomas de Zamora, Prov. of
B.A |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------
13-
INTERNATIONAL BRAIN AND EDUCATION CONGRESS
Our dear SHARER
Maria Almeida has sent us this information about the forthcoming First Congress
International Brain and Education Congress to be held at the Regent´s Hotel in
Buenos Aires on July 2nd and 3rd.
The main plenary
sessions and workshops include:
Memory
Tools: Helping Students Exploit Their Brain Power
Prof.
Ana
M. Leiguarda
Universidad
Nacional de Córdoba
Studies
on problem solving and working memory for education
Prof.
Bacigalupe Maria de los Angeles
Universidad
Nacional de La Plata
The Role
of Cognitive Mediation in the Acquisition and Learning of EFL
Lic.
Omar Villarreal
Universidad
Tecnológica Nacional
Universidad
Católica de La Plata.
Acting
and the Brain
Alfred
Hopkins B.A.
Instituto de
Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas
Brain
Compatible Learning: it´s all in your head
Ms.
Lucrecia Prat Gay
Rio de la
Plata School
An
affective tool for asssessing, evaluating and improving
students'performance
Prof.
Silvina Massa de Muñiz
Godspell
College, Boulogne.
Leading
with the brain in mind
Magdalena
Ortiz de Ries Centeno
Colegio
Rio de la Plata.
'ADD/ADHD
Let's see the positive side of the illness'
Lic.
Maria Almeida
'How
to help your students understand and remember
information'
Prof.
Zulema Vadillo
Prof.
Mariana Derfler,
IACA, Holistic English
Institute
If
you would like to attend this unique event, enroll today! vacancies are limited
Contact us by fax to (5411) 4771-8797/ or mail to: Precis Congreso- Lerma 464
C1414AZJ Buenos Aires preciscongreso@movi.com.ar
Maria
Almeida
--------------------------------------------------------------------
14- DISTANCE LEARNING FOR
TEACHERS AND TRANSLATORS
Our
dear SHARER Lic. Cecilia Piriz has sent us last-minute
information
All our
courses are delivered via the Internet through the Net-Learning system at www.net-learning.com.ar . Visit our campus ! They are aimed at teachers and
translators who want to improve their professional practice. Face-to-face attendance is not
required. These courses are “attended” from any computer, any where, any
time. They are delivered
on-line. See the courses content
and methodology fully described in our web site. Our coming courses are:
Course:
Introduction to Contracts and Agreements
Tutor: Trad. Matilde
Fabrello
Duration:
6 weeks – Starting date: 18 May
Fee:
AR$140 – US$90
Course:
Action Research
Tutor:
Prof. Liliana Luna, M Ed.
Duration:
4 weeks – Starting date: 20 May
Fee:
AR$120 – US$85
Course:
Prepositions.
How to learn them and how to teach them?
Tutor: Prof. Aldo
Blanco
Duration: 6 weeks – Starting
date: 26
May
Fee:
AR$160 – US$85
--------------------------------------------------------------------
We would like to finish this issue of
SHARE with a very short quotation by Sandra Carey
"Never mistake knowledge for
wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a
life."
- Sandara Carey
HAVE A
WONDERFUL WEEK!
Omar and Marina.
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SHARE
is distributed free of charge. All announcements in this electronic magazine are
also absolutely free of charge. We do not endorse any of the services announced
or the views expressed by the contributors. For more information about the
characteristics and readership of SHARE visit: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/ShareMagazine
VISIT
OUR WEBSITE : http://www.ShareEducation.com.ar
There you can read all past issues of SHARE in the section SHARE ARCHIVES.
------------------------------------------------------------------------