Native and Non-Native Teacher Talk in the EFL Classroom (original) (raw)
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TESOL Quarterly, 2013
that time be taken to engage with the first chapter as a means of developing a deeper understanding of the principles that underpin the activities that follow, in order to develop a systematic and reasoned teaching approach. Step-by-step engagement with the principles and strategies proposed in the book has the potential to lead to effective practice in vocabulary instruction in a way that engages and motivates both teacher and learner. The usefulness of the book is not limited to the main body of the text. In the appendices, Dong provides a list of suggested reading and wordlists of commonly occurring subject-specific vocabulary from the fields of English, the sciences, mathematics, and so on. Added to this there is a very helpful summary of the developmental stages of ELL English proficiency, and vocabulary relating these to the kinds of strategies that might be most beneficial at each stage. The inclusion of such features is evidence of the careful thought given to the needs of teachers and learners engaging in vocabulary instruction. The book offers a very complete, sound, and innovative toolkit for those wishing to facilitate subject-specific vocabulary learning in the ELL context, and would seem to be unmatched in its combination of an evidence base, thoroughness, reader-friendliness, and usefulness.
Focusing on the EFL Learners’ Spoken Language: An Analysis of Classroom Discourse
KnE Social Sciences, 2022
This paper discussed the spoken language produced by adult learners who attended a General English Intermediate course at one of the best English course providers in Indonesia. The writers analyzed examples of inaccurate and accurate spoken language produced by the students during an observed lesson and then shed light on possible reasons for the spoken language from linguistic point of views. The results of this study were intended to offer some insights into the nature of inaccurate and accurate spoken language in the learning of English as a foreign language. English teachers are, therefore, expected to focus not only on fluency but also on accuracy in English language teaching. Keywords: accuracy, classroom discourse, fluency, spoken language
On Native Language Use in Tertiary Level English Classes
Prithvi Journal of Research and Innovation
This study focuses on the tertiary level classes to explore the contexts of learners’ native language (NL) in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes. The main objective of the study is to explore the contexts and consequences of the NL use in EFL classes. To achieve this objective, descriptive research design was adopted. The sample population consists of forty teachers teaching English in university classes. The study collected and analyzed the data obtained from open and close ended questions. Most respondents agreed in the use of the NL for substantiating learning experiences, enhancing learner-centered approaches, and bridging gaps between the target and the native languages. The researchers also discovered that the NL use inhibited fluency, and use of the FL; thus hindered developing pragmatic and discourse competence in the learners. Notwithstanding this fact, the NL use created learner-friendly setting, enhanced strong bond between the teachers and the learners, and deve...
458-467 TEACHING ENGLISH IN ESL AND EFL CONTEXTS.pdf
Teaching English language has become a priority for educational bodies around the world, especially in developing countries where the aspiration to go global increases drastically. Whether in a small country like Syria, where English is regarded as a foreign language, or in a sub-continent like India, where English is a second associate language, teaching English in schools is gaining more attention. Tracing insights from their teaching experience and exposure to the educational milieu in both countries, the researchers conducted a comparative approach to examine the major traits of teaching English language in public schools in both countries. Data analysis reveals that the teaching practices are almost the same in the ESL and the EFL contexts, where teacher-cantered classrooms, exam-oriented activities and traditional teaching methods are dominant. The results of this study validate questioning the boundaries established in English Language Teaching literature between teaching English in EFL versus ESL contexts. It is found that such differentiations are not solid as the educational policies in both contexts isolate language teaching and learning in the classroom from language use in the target community.
The traditional assumption in ELT that the objective of learning is essentially to be able to emulate the linguistic behaviour of English native speakers is still alive and well in most contexts of formal instruction. Though lip service is paid to the importance of communication, this is automatically assumed to necessarily involve conformity to the standard code and to the conventions of native speaker usage. But the findings that emerge from research into ELF interactions lead to pedagogic implications that would seem to require some serious rethinking. When (current or former) learners of the language put their learned language to use in ELF contexts, they are generally capable of communicating without conformity. Linguistically 'incompetent' though they may be considered by reference to the norms imposed by teaching and testing, they usually have a strategic capability for making effective communicative use of the linguistic resources at their disposal. This raises questions about the very construct of competence in a language, and the extent to which it relates to the learners' own experience of language use, and what this tells us about the nature of plurilingualism. A related question arises as to the pedagogic effectiveness of raising the learners' conscious awareness of their own experience in their learning of English as an extension of that experience. All of this suggests that the objectives for language learning might be revised to focus attention not so much on 'native-speaker competence' and conventions of usage but on the communicative process itself, on 'languaging', and how English can be used as a communicative resource like the L1. This reconceptualization of how English might be more effectively learnt, brought about by an understanding of how communication is actually achieved through ELF, obviously has implications for language teacher education in that it would require encouraging a change of mindset of teachers and teacher educators, accustomed as they generally are to the conventional view that language learning is essentially a matter of being taught the formal properties of the target language and the conventions of its native-speaker usage. This paper will review some recent empirical insights into ELF use, discuss possible implications for English as a (school) subject, and argue that the unprecedented global spread of English and the challenges this poses to pedagogy drive home the vital importance of a strong (socio)linguistic component in teacher education.
Native speaker TESOL teacher’s talk : examining the unexamined
2008
In this paper we provide a critical analysis of “native–speaker”TESOL teachers’ classroom talk and interview data collected from English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs in an Australianuniversity to move beyond commonsense ideas of how their talkmight resource the language classroom. Using the sociolinguisticconcept of “frame”, we analyse episodes of talk from the classroompractices of two teachers. We examine the complexity of layered meanings produced as the teachers teach and simultaneously provide linguistic instruction on the language that is vicariouslyproduced in their talk or the activity. We propose that unexamined,native speaker teacher talk, although well-intentioned, can also carry risks that might make it problematic for the language learner.The two extracts reveal two potential problems—the nativespeaker’s agility in con/textual shifts, and the native-speaker’s capacity to cumulatively rephrase classroom questions and addunnecessary syntactic complexity that was n...