Basic Categories of Methodology

The methodology of TEFL seems to embody such basic categories on which there is general agreement among those who have studied the subject: methods, principles, techniques, aims and means of instruction.

There is no unanimity regarding the term method either. In G. Rogova’s et al. view “method is a technological operation, structural and functional component of the teacher’s and learner’s activity, realized in techniques and principles of instruction. A method is a model of instruction based on definite theoretical provisions, principle, techniques and aims of instruction.

A method is also a specific set of teaching techniques and materials generally backed by stated principles.

A method determines what and how much is taught (selection), the order in which it is taught (gradation), and how the meaning and form are conveyed (presentation). Since presentation, drill and repetition may also be the concern of the teacher, the analysis of the teaching/leaning process must first determine how much is done by the method and how much by the teacher.

Aim is a direction or guidance to establish a course or procedure to be followed. The teacher should formulate long-term goals, interim aims and short-term objectives. What changes he can bring about in his pupils at the end of the week, month, year, course, and each particular lesson. Hence, aims are planned results for pupils in learning a FL. The aims are stipulated by the syllabus and other official directives. They are: practical, instructional, educational and developing (formative).

Practical aims cover habits and skills which pupils acquire in using a foreign language. A habit is an automatic response to specific situations, acquired normally as a result of repetition and learning.

A skill i s a combination of useful habits serving a definite purpose and requiring application of certain knowledge.

Instructional aims develop the pupils’ mental capacities and intelligence in the process of FLL (foreign language learning).

Educational aims help the pupils extend their knowledge of the world in which they live.

Formative or developing aims help develop in learners sensual perception, motor, kinaesthetic, emotional and motivating spheres.

Principles are basic underlying theoretical provisions which determine the choice of methods, techniques and other means of instruction.

Technique in the methodology of TEFL is the manner of presentation, demonstration, consolidation and repetition.

Means is somethingg by the use or help of which a desired goal is attained or made more likely.

11. Managing pair and group work

Both pair work and group work have a place in ESL classes.

Using a variety of seating arrangements and groupings of students is important as it allows learners to practice different types of things.Working with others gives students the opportunity to interact with a variety of people and learn from one another. It also encourages cooperation which will help students get along in class and could reduce the number of student outbursts too.

The Perfect Balance Between Pair Work And Group Work

Appropriate Activities & Benefits
Pair work is great for practicing model dialogues, playing games such as battleship, conducting vocabulary checks, and completing worksheets. Working in pairs gives individual students a lot of speaking time. If working together, students will often have more confidence than when completing exercises individually. If students are competing with their partners, they will be more motivated. Students can work in groups or form teams for role plays, races, games such as board games or card games, and discussions. Groups give students the opportunity to create more complex dialogues, explore relationships between characters, pool knowledge together, and have a more social learning environment. Additionally there is a better chance for self correction or peer correction and for a discussion on a wider range of thoughts and opinions with larger group sizes. On the other hand, individual speaking time is limited when working in groups. You can increase the amount of speaking time students have by decreasing the size of groups to three or four people. If you are in a large class and want all the groups to present material at the end of the lesson, larger groups may be necessary but limit group size to about six.

Monitoring

Pair work is harder to monitor than group work because there are going to be many more pairs of students than groups of students. Be sure that everyone has a very clear understanding of the material before beginning any activity. The best way to monitor students working in pairs or groups is to walk around the classroom during the activitycorrecting students who make mistakes and answering questions. You can gauge the effectiveness of the activity by doing comprehension tests afterwards. If students are having difficulty with material after completing an activity, it is likely that they practiced incorrect structures during the exercise. This is unfortunate and highlights why it is so important to ensure that students understand material by completing practice exercises as a class before asking them to work in pairs or groups. If you find that students have practiced incorrect material, you have to review the key points of the target structure again and be sure to explain everything more thoroughly before using the same activity with another class.

Pairing/Grouping Students

If students sit in the same seats for the entire year, they are likely to be paired with the same person throughout the course. For pairs that work well together, this is a good thing but usually not everyone benefits from having the same partner for a long period of time. Try to change the assigned seating regularly so that everyone can maximize the amount they learn in class and have an opportunity to work with different people. Creating different groups of students is easy especially if seating arrangements change throughout the year. If your class size is under thirty, you may be able to group students by row or column for activities. You can also tell students sitting near each other to form groups or have students count off for example from one to five and then ask students who said the same number to form a group. In order to better facilitate this method of forming groups, direct students who said each number to different areas of the room. Keep in mind that if students count off from one to five, there will be only five groups so you need to determine which number will divide your students into appropriately sized groups.

Besides pair work and group work, students can also complete activities individually and as a class.

Mixing up the structure of your activities will keep classes interesting but be sure not to waste a lot of time rearranging the classroom. If you make groups for an activity at the beginning of class, it may be best to stick with that arrangement for the duration of the lesson.

12. Vocabulary in language teaching and learning Dealing with new vocabulary

Methods of FLT is a pedagogical science which studies the regularities of teaching pupils a foreign language in accordance with the data of basic and contiguous sciences with the regard for the peculiarities of aims and conditions of teaching.

The main practical aim of T.Voc in a secondary school is to form the pupils’ Voc. habits as a basic component of all the language activities.

Vocabulary work is inseparably connected with all the other aspects of the target language:

a) With pronunciation: lexical meaning are expressed with the help of phonic means of a language: -short and long vowels (fill-feel, knit-neat):

- open and close vowels (beg-bag)

- voiceless and voiced consonants (lad-let)

b) With morphology:

c) With syntax,

d) With spelling: fair tale – fare tail;

e) With stylistics: father, pa, daddy, pop, oldman.

By vocabulary habits we mean the ability:

- To transfer of a word from distant memory to immediate memory;

- To check the correctness of selection of a particular word in the given situation;

- To instantly evaluate combinability of the word chosen with other vocabulary items;

- To quickly choose the proper paradigmatic form of the word suitable for a particular structure

By methodological typology of the language material we mean distribution of lexical units into groups in accordance with the degree of their complexity for assimilation.

Different approaches to recognition of lexical (vocabulary) complexity:

- taking into account qualitative characteristics of words, that is formal, functional and semantic peculiarities of a particular word and complexity of its assimilation under the condition of contact between two languages.

- taking into account quantitative characteristics of words which imply wide use of words as well as their length which is measured in the number of letters or syllables.

The basic principles of selection of the active minimum Voc.:

- semantic approach;

- combinative approach;

- stylistic approach;

- frequency approach;

- word-building value;

- words of polysemantic value;

- excluding synonyms;

- excluding international words.

NB! The active minimum Voc. is selected on the basis of topics and communicative situations, analysis of phonogram, dialogues, written speech.

The criteria of selection of the passive minimum Voc.:

- derivability;

- polysemantic character;

- frequency and wide use;

- topical associations;

- semantic and word-building value.

The main stages of formation of the vocabulary habits.

Stage I - presentation of a new Voc. Aim – to introduce a new word and disclose (convey) of the meaning of each word.

Ways and techniques to convey the meaning of a word

DIRECT

- dictionaries

- synonyms

- antonyms

- morphological analysis (word building)

- context

- definitions

- examples

- interpretation

- matching (synonyms, opposites)

- familiar or famous (international) words

VISUAL

- demonstration of school paraphernalia (realia)

- illustration material

- models

- demonstration of movements, mime, body language

- pictograms, pictures, schemes

How to work at a new word? - There are 2 ways: at an isolated word, in a context.

How to work at an isolated word:

- when you deal with proper names, geographical names;

- sometimes you can give some words to develop the language guessing abilities (the first word is given in a context, the rest – in isolation: a runner – in a context; a jumper – will be easily guessed);

- when teaching the pupils to work with a dictionary.

Work at a new word in a context is more widely used: in a phrase, in a situation, in a story, in question-answer form, in a talk, in a story with elements of a talk. It leads to better assimilation of new words.

Stage II – drilling. Aim: to create/form the stereotypes of usage of a new word.

Stage III – situational (communicative practice). Aim – improvement of the vocabulary habits and developing of the pupils’ skills of using the vocabulary independently.

13. Feedback and correction in fluency work

At various stages of language learning students make mistakes. But almost every student is afraid of making them. So it’s very important to conquer this fear. How can we do it? You can use your sense of humour and explain like this: “Please make lots and lots of mistakes in my lessons – new mistakes, mind you, not the same old ones over and over. I like mistakes because we can all learn from them and because if you don’t make any I won’t have a job.

Learning English is like learning to ride a bike – you fall off a lot, but you get the hang of it in the end. You will make a lot of mistakes but you will be able to communicate effectively in the end. Very few people become successful international cyclists and the chances are that even though you can ride a bike, you are not a professional cyclist. Very few students reach mother-tongue level but many students learn to communicate very well in English in spite of this. You will probably never have error-free English so accept that you will always make some mistakes – just try to learn from them and learn to live with your linguistic imperfections”.

Mistakes are of different kinds – some are only slips of the tongue, something which the student knows and will usually get right. Some are the result of under-learning, others are the result of over-learning. Some mistakes are the result of students’ completely misunderstanding. So, it’s very important to differentiate between a mistake and an error.
An error occurs because the learner doesn’t know the correct form and so he can’t produce it at this stage of learning.
A mistake is a slip of the tongue; the learner knows the correct form but may have forgotten it or he’s in a hurry. He can probably correct it himself. It is usually caused by lack of attention, fatigue, carelessness.

The question which occurs here is to correct or not to correct. Correction helps students to clarify their understanding of the meaning and construction of language. It is a vital part of the teacher’s role and the teacher should be gentle, tactful and sensitive in correction. What is appropriate for one student maybe quite wrong for another one. When a student makes a mistake, it is usually counter-productive to say “No!”/ “That’s wrong!”/ ”Are you serious?”/ “How long did you say you’ve been studying English?” etc. It’s often kinder to say “Not bad”/ “Nearly”/ “Good try”/ “That’s an interesting mistake”. Some say that a teacher shouldn’t laugh at students’ mistakes. But they are often very funny so why shouldn’t he? It breaks the “mistakes taboo’ and makes linguistic risks and disasters an acceptable part of the classroom culture. Your students catch on very quickly and you can have a good giggle together when someone messes up.

Teachers often worry about when to correct – immediately, after a few minutes, at the end of the activity or in the next lesson or at least never? The distinction between accuracy and fluency aims is important here. If the objective is accuracy, then immediate correction is more likely to be useful. If the activity is aimed at fluency, then immediate correction is less appropriate and any correction will probably come after the activity has finished.

We need to balance fluency work, without correction, with accuracy work, where we use correction positively.

Another question that worries teachers is – how to correct? The first thing to remember is that the best form of correction is self-correction. It’s very important to give a chance for self-correction when you think that a mistake is what we call a slip. It’s better to show the student that a mistake has been made and give him/her a little time to recognize it and correct. The ability to correct themselves when they make a mistake is an important one for students to develop. Encourage it and give them time to correct themselves – don’t jump in immediately to correct them. Most students (and indeed some teachers) seem to think that it is the teacher’s job to correct students’ mistakes but this is not necessarily so. Yes, teachers can correct their students endlessly but how will that help the students when they go out into the big wide world – who will be there to correct them then? Peer correction is very useful as both learners are involved in listening to and thinking about the language, it helps them cooperate and make them less dependent on the teacher. The whole class may be involved in correction. But if we think that a mistake needs to be corrected, if neither the student who made the mistake, nor anybody else in the class can correct it, then the teacher has to help. But this doesn’t mean that the teacher has to give the correct form straight away.

The more the students are involved in correction, the more they have to think about the language used in the classroom.

Oral corrections are usually provided directly by the teacher; but they may also be elicited from the learner who made the mistake or by another member of the class. Correction may or may not include a clarification of why it was made, and may or may not require reproduction of the acceptable form by the learner. Correction techniques may vary in the classroom. Here is the list of correction techniques that can be used in the lesson:

- Tell learners about a mistake.
- Facial expression: surprise, frown, raised eyebrows, interest.
- Gesture combined with facial expression (worried look or hand outstretched to’hold’ the sentence).
- Finger correction.
- Repeat sentence up to error. (They looked for a …)
- Echo sentence with changed intonation or stress. (You go to a disco yesterday?)
- Ask a question. (Was this last week?)
- Ask a one-word question. (Tense? Past?)
- Draw a time line on the board.
- Draw spaces or boxes on the board to show the number of words in a sentence.
- Write the problem sentence on the board for discussion.
- Exploit the humour in the error. (Student: The doctor gave her a recipe.
Teacher: So she made a nice cake, didn’t she?
Student: Not the right word? Ah, he gave her a
prescription.)
- The chain. A student A makes an error, the teacher elicits a correction from a student B. If he also fails to get it right then he gets another student C – to help her. If the student gives the correct answer he gives it back to B, then B gives to A and only A gives the correct answer to the teacher.

Many of the things about the correction of spoken language are also true for the correction of written language as it means helping people to become more accurate. Teachers are expected to respond to their students’ work and provide appropriate feedback.
Correction is more effective if you devise a simple code which you can write in the margin to draw the students’ attention:

Sp – for a spelling mistake,
Gr – for grammar,
WW – for a wrong word,
WO – for wrong word order,
\!/ - for a missing word

The code helps to highlight important mistakes. When students get their work back they should be asked to see if they can identify the mistakes themselves, with the help of the code.

In conclusion, I’d like to give some tips on error correction.
1. Let your students make mistakes. They need to. We all learn best through making mistakes.
2. Give your students time to realise they’ve made a mistake and try to correct it themselves. If they can’t, maybe someone else can help them. If nobody can help, then you can step in and give the correct form or make a note of it for later.
3. As far as possible, correct mistakes anonymously. Do this by making notes of students’ mistakes as you monitor. Then put the mistakes on the board and give the students themselves the opportunity to correct them, in pairs or small groups. If no one knows the right answer, give it to them, but only as a last resort. Anonymous error correction is a kind way to deal with mistakes. It isn’t important who made the mistake originally – the point is, can the students all correct it?
For example:
Original error: ”I have been to Paris last year”.
On the board: “We have been to London last week”.

To conclude, I want to say that making mistakes is a part of learning and correction is a part of teaching. They go together in the work of teachers. But you should always remember: we can learn without teachers, but we cannot teach without learners.

[1] Jim Scrivener, Learning Teaching, Macmillan Books for Teachers, 2007,p. 284