Today

1
Today

• Find out your own beliefs about language learning
  and teaching
• Start Chapter 1
• What is it to know a language?
• Standards used to determine language proficiency

2
Instructors role in Developing Good Language
Learners (Reiss, 1983)

• Inform students honestly of the amount of work
  involved and the benefits
• Create a comfortable classroom climate in which
  students feel comfortable and involved
• Help students develop a cognitive style that is
  conductive to language learning
• Personalize language instruction whenever
  possible in order to motivate students
• Ask students to monitor each other to make them
  an active part of the language teaching
• Present all material in a meaningful manner

3
The good language teacher (Mollica and Nuessel,
1997)

• Out-of-class Roles
• Researcher
• Planner
• Manager
• Advocate
• Organizer
• Evaluator
• Communicator

• In-class Roles
• Teacher
• Motivator
• Evaluator
• Facilitator
• Innovator
• Communicator
• Disciplinarian

4
The Good Language Learner (Stern, 1975 Rubin,
1975)

• Has a personal learning style or uses positive
  learning strategies
• Has an active approach to language learning
• Has a strong drive to communicate and learn from
  communication. He is willing to do many things to
  get his message across
• Practices
• Attends to meaning
• Attends to form and monitors her own speech and
  that of others

5
The Learners Role (Cook, 1991)

• Find a learning style that suits you
• Involve yourself in the language learning process
• Develop an awareness of language both as system
  and communication
• Pay consistent attention to expanding your
  language
• Take into account the demands that L2 learning
  poses

6
Proficiency a common goal

• Not a theory of language acquisition
• Not a method of language teaching
• Not a curricular outline or syllabus
• Not a concern with grammar accuracy

7
Proficiency?

• Expertise
• Competence
• Ability
• Polished Performance
• High-level Skill
• Well-developed Knowledge

8
On Knowing a Language

• Being proficient
• For the medical doctor
• For the businessman
• For the tourist
• For the linguist

9
Proficiency for the linguist

• Phonetics knowledge of sounds in terms of
  production and perception
• Phonologyknowledge of the sound system
• Syntax knowledge of the organization of words
  into larger structures, particularly sentences
• Semantics knowledge of the meanings of words and
  sentences
• Pragmatics knowledge of language use

10
Competence vs. Performance (Chomsky, 1965)

• Competence what a person knows
• we have the ability to distinguish between
  grammatical and ungrammatical expressions, as
  well as recognize ambiguity. We are capable of
  judging sentences we have never heard before!
• Performance what a person can actually produce
• we tend not to produce what is in our
  competence because of memory limitations,
  distractions, errors, false starts, etc.

11
Problems with the competence vs. performance
distinction

• Limited to grammatical compentence
• Does not include notions of
• Appropriateness in the use of language, i.e.
  context
• sociocultural significance

12
Communicative competence

• Concept coined by Hymes in the 60s who expressed
  the need to have a sociolinguistic and
  contextual competence as well as grammatical
  competence
• 70s Campbell and Wales grammatical vs.
  communicative competence

13
Communicative vs. grammatical competence
Criticisms

• Distinction forces the following assumptions
• Grammatical and communicative competence need to
  be developed separately
• Grammatical competence is not an essential
  component of communicative competence
• Communicative competence may be defined as the
  ability to function in a truly communicative
  setting-that is, in a dynamic exchange in which
  linguistic competence must adapt itself to the
  total informational input, both linguistic and
  paralinguistic, of one or more interlocutors
  (Sauvignon 1972, p.8)

14
Communicative Competence A framework (Canale
and Swain, 1980)

• grammatical competence mastery of the linguistic
  code
• sociolinguistic competence ability to use
  language appropriately in different contexts and
  shift registers
• discourse competence ability to be cohesive and
  coherent
• strategic competence use of verbal and
  non-verbal strategies to compensate for the gaps
  in knowledge

15
Summary

• Competence vs. Performance
• Communicative vs. Grammatical competence
• Communicative Competence

16
Assessing ProficiencyThe past

• Need for a national standard
• 50s Common Yardstick by Educational Testing
  Service (ETS)
• 70s Common Yardstick by Interagency Language
  Roundtable (ILR)
• 80s American Council on the Teaching of Foreign
  Languages (ACTFL)

17
Assessing ProficiencyThe present

• ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines
• Global tasks/functions from naming objects to
  developing an argument
• Context/content from memorized utterances in a
  familiar context, to supporting your point of
  view in a political discussion
• Accuracy fluency, grammar, pronunciation,
  vocabulary, pragmatic competence and
  sociolinguistic competence
• Text type from words in isolation to extended
  discourse

18
Defining the content of instructionStandards
for foreign language learning

• Content standards, upon which performance
  standards are assessed, lie at the heart of
  education reforms (Phillips, 1999 p1)
• The five Cs (1996)
• Communication Communicate in languages other
  than English
• Cultures Gain knowledge and understanding of
  other cultures
• Connections Connect with other disciplines and
  acquire information
• Comparisons Developing insight into the nature
  of language and culture
• Communities Participate in multilingual
  communities at home and around the world