Chapter 3

Just thought I would pop in with some of the Chp. 3 material. I would suggest that we book our rooms early for April. That is netting season too and all the rooms will be limited again. Or maybe the netting is in March. Anyway, someone should check it out.
I liked the Hypothesis and Corrollaries. This made sense, that we practice language in a range of contexts. This is a must, students should be encouraged to express their own meaning as early as possible after productive skills have been introduced. This would be a must too, for the new babies. The sooner they hear it, the language, drum sons, music, etc, they learn it fast. That's why we need the babies from the beginning at birth in language nests. Even it is helpful to hear music and language when they are still in the womb. So Grandmas please talk to the little babies as soon as you can.
I can't express enough, the urgency for active communicative interaction for students. Practice makes perfect. This will lead to more proficiency and at a more rapid pace for new learners of our language.
We need to use authentic language in our instructions.
I sat in a class a couple of weeks ago, that played with command tasks (functions). This seemed to help the students remember better. There was also body language, questioning looks, asking for miina wa ikidoon, Please say it again. We had fun using this type of system.
This is good advice: Instruction should be responsive to the effective as well as the cognitive needs of students, and their different personalities, preferences, and learning styles should be taken into account. Also, that should take into consideration, their receptiveness, attitude about learning and a good heart for wanting to learn the language. At least that is what I expected of my students. This also included their traditions, culture, beliefs and a good self acceptance of who they were. It is fun teaching and loving the students for efforts. I am so proud of them and I compliment them and praise them for trying and completing tasks and assignments. We have fun in class and that also sets a postive atmosphere to learn the language.
I read a little on the defintions section. This is to include all of us in teaching and learning the language. These included the works of Edward Anthony (1963)who described the hierachiccal levels of conceptualizations. 1. approach, which was defined by a set of theoritical principles; 2. method, which as a procedural plan for presenting and teaching the language; and 3. technique, which involved strategies for implementing the methodological plan. I put this into my head by the letters AMT, a sure way to keep it in my brain and prioritize the levels of conceptualization. smile.
There was an interesting not: "therefore, it is not what activities are used so much as how they are used that distinguishes methods from one another". As a teacher, we adopt certain activities and apply our methodology to fit our plan. Sounds good to me.. It always helps to add your own thoughts, methods and beliefs to our own way of teaching too. Kinda of our own play on words or something in our own way that makes it easier for the students to learn.
Rivers (1991) further clarifies the major characterisitcs of the audiolingual method by listing Mouton's (1961) "five slogans" of the method.
1. Language is speech, not writing.
2. A language is a set of habits/
3. Teach the language and not about the language.
4. A language is what native speakers say, not what someone thinks they ought to say.
5. Languages are different. (Rivers 1981, pp.41-43).

In the discussion on drills, I use this type of teaching too. We sit in a circle and go around and each person repeats the word. Repetition drills, in which no change was made. Students simply repeat after the teacher' model. My mentor instructor does this type of teaching too. We did not or tried not to do the transformation drills. We stuck to the repetition, adn didn't try the transformation drill until we were in Level 3 or Level 4 of language. We worked mainly with memorizing material, word lists, animals, birds, plants etc. repeating word lists, manupulating the words in order for us to communicate together. We were more into memorizing words and soem sentences. We also did some work with TPR expecially when we did the task principle: Activities that involve the completion of real-world tasks promoted our lerning. The meaningfulness principle: Learners must be engaged in meaningful and authentic language use for learning to take place (Richards and Rodgers 1986, p.72). It is important that we use our own language, our own dialect, be from our own community, or area, be authentic in order for us to learn the language. In our classes we use the double vowel system. We also have insturctors from Mille Lacs, they have a dialet of their own too. We sometimes adjust our own learning to accept and adopt some of their dialect words. We also used classroom activities, games, etc to ehance our learning and made it more fun for learning. (There was an interesting not in the text: Adult learning can be modeled after the way children learn their native language. (TPR, pg. 118) This chapter was fun to read and it affrimed many of the ways I have learned regarding teaching and methods. Interesting and I gaimed more knowledge on teaching and different methods. Phyllis