Critical Review of Two Research Articles Dealing with Second Language Teaching - Essay Example

Critical Review of Two Research Articles Name Tutor Date Critical Review of Two Research Articles Introduction Teaching the second language is an art and it involves development of listening, reading, writing as well as speaking of the second language. Therefore, a language teacher is supposed to be adept and proficient in the language and should be able to identify with the students for him or her to appreciate their needs, psychological hindrances as well as their cultural differences. Handling a second language is reasonably challenging since it entails the teacher to research, be a steady learner in addition to being a need analyst. In addition to giving significance to individual students, the teachers are supposed to also subordinate their teaching behavior to the learning requirements of the students (Paliwal, 2006). This paper analyses two research articles. One article discusses the necessity to give a face-lift to the image of the traditional pedagogue within a second language classroom while the second article provides an overview on enhancing the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Summary (article 1) The first article analyses the necessity to give a face-lift to the image of the traditional pedagogue within a second language classroom. Teaching the second language involves sharing of knowledge as well as developing the required fundamental language skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing. It is a positive reception of foreign individuals; this means that the students learning the foreign language are readjusting their attitude towards the world and towards themselves. As a result, teaching the second language should consist of all the learning domains, which include cognitive, psychomotor along with affective (Richa, 2011). To better help the students learn the second language, the teachers should invent activities that help the students in learning. The teachers should be aware of the most modern techniques and teaching language methods since they choose and set up acquisition-promoting drills and activities. The activities are supposed to be both interesting and challenging as well. As second language learners learn simpler phonemes, words and structures first so the activities must also be sequenced from easier to intricate. Additionally, teachers should manage their classes effectively. The teaching room should be modeled into a natural learning room. The time, the venue, the syllabus, the teaching activities and also the students should be managed efficiently to make sure that the complete program reaches its preferred end (Richa, 2011). Teaching the second language also needs the teachers to center the communication process on the learners. This means that the teachers ought to subordinate their teaching process to the students’ learning requirements. Therefore, the teaching requires the instructor to be a catalyst to the communication of the learner and hence the teachers should play some key roles in facilitating communication process. These roles include, the teacher being a prompter; if the learners do not find appropriate vocabulary the instructor can prompt the lexical items or phrases and if the students are hesitant, he/she can use probing questions. The Socratic questioning prompts the students to think for solutions and this boosts their morale and also increases their participation. The instructors can also act as independent participants within group activities as they will facilitate teaching the students using examples (Richa, 2011). When teaching, the teacher should remember that the learners are the knowledge consumers and hence they should offer the students the needed learning materials. The learning needs of the students are different and hence the teacher should cater for individual needs (Richa, 2011). Research Findings (article 1) The findings of the first article are that the attitude of the instructors towards language pedagogy should change. Littlewood, 2006, argues that “good teaching does not guarantee good learning, because it is what the student does that makes him/her learn”. Therefore, as the student learns, the teacher is supposed to motivate the students to ensure the learning activities succeed. In case shyness affects some of the students’ participation, the can be made to work on individual tasks. During group learning, such students can be made the group leaders. The teacher should give strong positive reinforcement for each contribution. In addition, the instructor is supposed to respond to the potential an individual has for developing, must create the desire to learn and ought to make the learner realize that learning the second language is a mind expanding and character invigorating experience. In second language teaching, the overarching vision of the instructor keeps the learner going and hence it is very significant (Richards, 2007). In order to teach the language effectively, the teachers are responsible for organizing the resources. They should arrange and handle a range of study materials which include, test based, task based and also realia. Text based resources include books or audio/video CDs and such. Task based resources include tape recorders, word puzzles, themes and also worksheets while realia resources consist of letters, newspapers, magazines etc. In case such resources are not available, the teachers are supposed to act as a resource because the students are required to consult the teachers if the encounter any linguistic difficulty. Additionally, the teachers should look for support from their institutions and manage personnel and funds (Butzkamm, 2005). When designing learning activities, it is always important to remember that audio-visual activities helps in promoting knowledge retention and group work develops a natural learning set up and also improves skills, for example appropriate turn talking, tolerating diverse opinions, not interrupting etc. Mixed ability groups are important. Communicative arts such as drama, puppets, music can be effectively utilized in language teaching and learners’ creativity should be employed. Constantly, abridged literary classics forms maybe used as a good source of language and they also make language learning more interesting. The teacher should keep discussions open minded putting into consideration the experience of the learners. Finally, it is important to ensure that learners participate in designing of the activities (Richards, 2007). According to Littlewood, 2006, “there is pecking order of needs varying from the physical needs, security needs, emotional needs in addition to the need for self esteem and self actualization”. When preparing the questionnaire to analyze each individual learning need of the students, the instructor should note all these levels. Consequently, the instructor should fully understand the reason behind the individual learner’s interest in learning the second language (Kubota, 2008). The teacher can then prepare the tests and exercise basing on the varying needs of the learners. For example, in case there are particular purposes such as cafeteria opening in an alien country, writing letters to friends in old country, the instructor should be very careful when designing the activities. Basing on the needs of the learners, the instructor may redesign the syllabus or develop a new syllabus that entirely meets the needs of the learners (Mackey, 2005). The instructor should create a congenial warm, teaching-learning atmosphere. Furthermore, discipline should be observed and the learners should be informed about the institution rules before the learning starts (Butzkamm, 2005). Summary (article 2) The second article discusses various ways of enhancing the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. In regard to developing language abilities, the teachers are supposed to teach the students all the abilities of the four skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Basically, all these skills are important when learning the second language and therefore it is not possible to master the language devoid of one of these skills. The most common communication strategy when learning a second language is code switching. This strategy has been seen to prompt fluency development and offer the learners a sense of achievement and therefore enabling the learners to discuss topic of interest in their early learning process (Eric, 2005). Listening is one of language communication ways. Different students have different listening habits. Some learners try to understand individual words or the entire sentence; they will get troubled when learning complex words or sentences while some learners comprehend the material directly. In order to improve the listening skills, the teacher should try to let the learners be in a language atmosphere. Principally, it is not possible to teach speaking separately and it normally intertwined with listening. The conventional method of listening and speaking is aural-oral but currently two-way communication method is widely accepted (Eric, 2005). Reading is an extremely essential way for the student to gain information when learning the second language. It is a fundamental skill for a second language learner and this is why the teacher should offer the students with several reading exercises. However, the readings should be done within limited time. Consequently, the teacher should ask the students to read the provided reading materials accurately and with a certain speed. The teachers should assist or give a hint to the students when reading the new words for the first time. The learners should also be encouraged to read phrase by phrase. The teachers can utilize back-chaining technique when teaching extremely complex words or polysyllabic words. In this case, the teacher pronounces the last syllable and the learner repeats. After this, the teacher goes on working backwards from the end towards the start. Browsing is encouraged when the students are reading. Browsing the material first implies fore-reading and hence the student will be able to grain the information before actual reading (Eric, 2005). Finally, writing is one of the ways of availing variety within classroom procedures. Writing offers the learners a physical evidence of his/her accomplishment and becomes a means in which he/she can assess his/her improvement (Eric, 2005). Findings (article 2) In regard to the second article, the findings are that the teachers are entirely responsible in assisting the students to improve as much as possible in their learning. Therefore the teachers should provide the necessary learning materials to the students and use all effective teaching techniques. The instructors should offer periodical tests to the students to be able to review the success of the teaching methods employed and what more is needed to be accomplished. They teachers can prepare different forms of both subjective and objective tests to evaluate this. After evaluating the students, the teacher should give feedback to the students for them to improve. It is also necessary to let the learners know the success criteria used in specific activities (Butzkamm, 2005). Nevertheless, even though feedback is necessary to avoid fossilizing the errors, spot correction should be avoided until the learning activity is completed and personal correction is supposed to be replaced by either collective collection or peer correction. What’s more, the teacher should emphasize on practicing the learning process and should avoid too much structural correction. The instructors should constantly learn new methods of teaching students through regular vigilance. They should always be alert and active since this gives the best out of the learners through exercises (Richards, 2007). The teacher should let the learners grasp the phonetic symbol since this is the foundation and an excellent intonation and phonetic greatly depends on the foundation. Reading orally after listening to radio or the teacher is a good way during the start. The students should be attentive when it comes to oral reading skills, which include stress, strong structure, weak structure, intonation shortened plosive consonant, affricate consonant, syllable and such. The teacher should provide correct information about oral reading (Gao, 2010). Expand the learner’s knowledge regarding the language. Listening examinations as well as listening practice are vital, but practice is more crucial. It is easy for the teacher to understand the students using listening tests. Obviously, through practicing, the students can greatly improve their listening conception (Zhichang, 2003). All teaching methods have a psychological foundation and aural-oral method is based on behaviorism. Its psychological assumption is that language learning forms a set of new language. This method is appropriate in teaching a second language at the early stages. On the other hand, in two-way method, there is communication connection between the instructor and the learners. The connection is linked with the communicative activities between two individuals. Instructors are able to control the practice entirely or partly and also the practice can be controlled by learners freely. The internal force is as a result of material content and not interests in the phonetic arrangement. In order to make the accurate response, the instructor should ensure that the students are attentive. The two-way communication lengthens the dialogue limitlessly and this is the main advantage of this method. In this case, if the learner wants to give the accurate response, he/she has to think about it hard. The learner cannot forget the sentence easily because he/she thought about it. In this case, the student is bale to speak freely and can express him/herself competently (Wolgan, 2003). Writing is extremely important since it assists the student to be in a position to consolidate and grasp vocabulary as well as structure. It also complements the other three language skills. Since sentences forms the base of any article or writing, students should be encouraged to start their writing with sentences. To begin with, the teacher is supposed to ask the students to express themselves with sentences, and finally write short articles. In translation, the learners should be taught the five fundamental sentence drills and after that they should be allowed to choose some representative sentences within the test as models and finally to write sentences after these models. Exchanging of the sentence pattern is also important and therefore the students should be encouraged to rewrite the sentences, practice sentence expression with the same meaning but using different patterns. Shortening and rewriting of the texts assists the students in understanding the texts and also assists them in writing compositions using the second language competently. It is also important is fostering the learner’s capacity to summarize and use the second language freely (Gao, 2010). Conclusion The teachers should be the role models to the students since the teachers’ values have a great impact on the students. Therefore, the teachers should try as much as possible to be on the top of the field and be always at the leading edge. Moreover, they should try to lower the gap between theory and practice while teaching. Teaching a second language entails teaching students from different cultures, sexes and varying age groups. Therefore, to be an effective pedagogue in such a set up, the instructor should take into consideration specific behavioral features (Theodore, 2004). Moreover, when teaching the four language skills, the instructor should fully utilize his/her teaching skills and used varying teaching methods to stimulate the learners’ interests. Normally, the four language skills cannot be separated and when teaching a second language, it should start with listening and speaking, followed by reading and writing. It is important for the students to work in pairs or in groups and at times the whole class. This provides the learners with an opportunity to take part in learning more actively. Nevertheless, the teacher should always supervise the pairs and groups to ensure that all students participate equally as much as possible. Such activities also offer chances for peer teaching, where weak students can get support from the strong students (Mackey, 2005). References Eric, X. (2005). How to improve the ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing. < . Reviewed on 8th June 2011. Richa, G. (2011). Reshaping the Pedagogue: The Changing Role of a Language Instructor in a Multicultural Classroom. Vol. 1/86. < http://www.eltweekly.com/elt- newsletter/2011/03/86-research-paper-reshaping-the-pedagogue-the-changing-role-of-a- language-instructor-in-a-multicultural-classroom-by-richa-goyal/>. Reviewed on 8th June 2011. Butzkamm, W. (2005). "Code-Switching in a Bilingual History Lesson: The Mother Tongue as a Conversational Lubricant". International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Vol. 1/2. Gao, A. (2010). Strategic Language Learning. Multilingual Matters. Canada: Sage. Kubota, K. (2008). Ideologies of English in Japan. World Englishes. Vol.17/.3. Littlewood, W. (2006). Communicative Language Teaching.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackey, W. (2005). Language Teaching Analysis. Sydney: Sage. Paliwal, A. (2006). Communicative Language Teaching in English. Jaipur: Surabhi Publications. Richards, J. (2007). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theodore, S. (2004). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolgan, M. (2003). Communicating Naturally in a Second Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhichang, X. (2003). Chinese pragmatic norms and “China English”. World Englishes. Vol. 21/4. Read More