* CHAPTER 20

FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION

Instructor: Dr. Tahriri

Student: Omid Sanaei

Sandra McKay’s (1985) classification:1. ChartsCharts and graphs are useful devices for practicing

pattern and grammatical relationships.

* Grammar Techniques

Another grammatical system that we can represent it to charts is the verb system.

2. ObjectsObjects are helpful for teaching purposes such as

possession, students in communication with each others and making conversation.

3. Maps and drawingsMaps and drawings are practical and simple in a

classroom. They are useful for jigsaw, information-gap and other

interactive techniques. They can serve to illustrate grammatical structures.

Maps can stimulate learners’ use ofPrepositional phrases (up the street, on the left and

etc…)Question forms (where, is this and etc…) Imperatives ( go, walk and etc…)Appropriate discourse for getting someone’s attention,

asking for directions, receiving and clarifying given information and terminating conversations.

4. DialoguesDialogues are an old-age technique introducing

and practicing grammatical points.

5. Other written textsAt a simple level, sometimes a text might be used to

get at a certain verb tense or illustrate a grammatical category.

Difficulty could be predicted and grammar in a curriculum should be sequenced progression of easier to more difficult items.

It is so hard to verify such hierarchies of difficulty over grammatical sequencing, so situational and notional-functional curricula came into existence.

We have seen grammar as a one of several organizational aspects of communicative competence which should be considered in programming curriculum.

* Grammar Sequencing in Textbook and Curricula

Grammatical categories are one of several considerations in curricular sequencing.

A curriculum manifests a logical sequence of basic grammatical structures, and such a sequence maybe more usefulness than of clearly identified degrees of linguistic difficulty.

Beyond those basic structures, a few permutations will make little difference in the success of students, as long as language being learned in the context of a communicative curriculum.

* There are some main points that we should take them into consideration :

In vocabulary teaching, lexical items are basic to all of the four skills.

Vocabulary is not a “ skill ” as we normally use the term.

The skill comes in the efficient storage (competence) and adept retrieval (performance) of those units.

One of the casualties of the early approaches to CLT was a loss of a concereted focus on the lexical forms of language.

Furthermore, as teacher perceived their role as a facilitators, they became more reluctant to take the directive steps to turn students’ focus to lexical forms.

* Current Issues in Vocabulary Teaching

We saw revival of systematic attention to vocabulary learning across a number of proficiency levels and contexts.

Ranging from explicit focus such as lexical approach, to more indirect approaches.

Indirect approaches focuses in communicative tasks and attention to lexical form that is more central to the development of language curricula.

* Toward The End of The Twentieth Century:

Incidental learning (Read, 2004):

Offered the seductive prospect that, provided the learners had access to sufficient comprehensible input.

vocabulary acquisition would largely take care of itself.

* One of The Main Topics In Vocabulary TeachingLearners are better served in the long run

with:1 )Incidental exposure to lexical items (that is, as a

product of communicative

activities)

Intentional, explicit on vocabulary

Intentional vocabulary (Hulstijn, 2001):

Focus accounts for significant gains in acquisition

It may be therefore necessary to re-visit unfashionable

Regular rehearsal of words procedures such as : Rote learning Training in automatic word recognition

Rapid growth of corpus linguistics.

The volumes of raw data that are now available in corpora that encompass spoken and written language.

We have ready access to collocations (words that tend to appear in the company of other words).

Concordancing enables learners (and textbook writers) to see words in context (McCarthy, 2004).

* Further Development in Vocabulary Teaching

1. Allocate specific class time to vocabulary learning

As a teacher, in classroom interaction and communication we should some attention to words.

Words are basic building blocks of language.

Communication can take place when people simply string words together without applying any grammatical rules at all.

* Principles for Teaching Vocabulary

2. Help students to learn vocabulary in context

The best internalization of vocabulary comes from encounter with words within the context.

Isolating words and focusing on dictionary definition, learners can benefit from attending to vocabulary within a communicative framework in which items appear.

3. Play down the role of bilingual dictionaries

To help students to resist the temptation to overuse their bilingual dictionaries.

Electronic are useless for students and rarely help students to internalize the word for later recall and use.

English-English dictionaries are useful for better understanding of definitions, metaphors, idioms, and contrasts.

4. Encourage students to develop strategies for determining the meaning of words

Teachers can encourage students guessing vocabulary in context.

A Program for Teaching Vocabulary Development skills

1. Goalsa) To improve the reading vocabulary skills of ESL students.

2. Word Buildinga) Suffixesb) Prefixes

c) roots

3. Definition

CluesDraw a line under the

words:The Panther

(a large black animal

related to a cat)

4. Inference

CluesInformation:The forsythia was covered

with the golden flowers

that bloom early in the

spring

5. Engage in “unplanned” vocabulary teaching

Sometimes, most of the attention you give to vocabulary will be unplanned.

Those moments when a student asks about a word has appeared that you feel deserve some attention.

Sometimes, they are simply brief little pointers. For example: clumsy

*Thank You for Your

Attention