Second Language Learning and Language Teaching - Essay Example

LFTMO4 ASSIGNMENT TWO (January Part A: Grammar (Unit 3 Morphemes Morpheme is the smallest unit of grammar. It does not necessarily standalone like a word, words are composed of one or more morphemes. a) Define in your own words the following types of morpheme, providing examples of each: Lexical morpheme A lexical morpheme is the ‘content’ word, meaning that it can be added to any time. ‘Toast’ is a lexical morpheme because it belongs to open category. Examples include boy, food, door, school etc. Functional morpheme A functional or free morpheme is the one that belongs to the closed category. It means that new similar words (functional morphemes like because) cannot be created. This category of morpheme has more to do with the grammar than the content word. Examples include she, the, without etc. Derivational morpheme Derivational morphemes belong to the bound category, meaning they are always grammatical and are always a ‘part of a word’ (Cutting, 2010). When derivational morphemes are added to the stem it turns the element into a different grammatical category. For instance when ‘-ness’ is added at the end of the word ‘good’ it forms a new word ‘goodness’. Inflectional morpheme Contrary to the derivational morpheme, an inflectional morpheme does not change the grammatical structure of the word upon adding it to the stem. However, it does indicate grammatical aspects of its function. Adding the past form to the word ‘jump’ turns it into ‘jumped’ indicating the past form (grammatical aspect) of the word. b) How important is it to teach students of English as an L2 about these categories? Critically discuss what you would and would not teach them and why. Justify your answer with examples from the classroom context. It is critical to teach students about morpheme categories but it is not vital to teach them everything. The purpose is not to cloud their minds with unnecessary details that will hinder their efforts in grasping the core concepts. The nature of English language is transforming everyday around the world. It is not wise to feed the new learners of English language rigid facts that will probably modify in the coming years. Despite the changing nature of English language, there is no denying the importance of the basics. I will teach my students about morphemes, what they are, what their usage is and most importantly make the students practice them to use it. The ultimate goal of teaching English as a second language is not to make the students appear in PhD exams in English language. They primary goal is to make them effective communicators. In the classroom, the majority of focus is on theory. Theoretical learning has its benefits but my class will be much more activity driven. I would teach my students about morphemes through activities and not by just writing it on the white board. They will be given hand-outs that will have a list of different morphemes. Above the list there will be sections with Free Morphemes and Bound Morphemes with subheadings of lexical, derivational, functional and inflectional. The students’ job would be to put each word (or element) in its appropriate category. I will not go beyond teaching them the basics of morphemes. I will definitely elaborate on some of the compilations with morphemes. For instance I will teach them about the problems in describing morphological structure of ‘men’ and ‘went’. Then I will ask them to suggest a similar complication in morphemes. I do not expect them to inspire me at this point. It is there learning process and they are just being informed about morphemes. Teaching students about morphemes is not as important as making them use it. They should be correctly able to convert a verb into its past form. Even if they don’t know which morphed element that is, it is still ok. One doesn’t need to study electromagnetic radiations to operate microwave oven. The objective is to heat the food not to know the structure of magnetic waves. Considering the difficulty students face while learning morphemes, it is better to pay attention to derivational morphemes more than the other. The reason is their usage and importance. They span over more English language grammar and vocabulary than other morphemes. So from an effective point of view it would be more helpful that students are made to practice derivational morphemes more. In terms of excluding the materials from my English language syllabus, I would shrink the parts where the students have to know the names of different morphemes. The major portion associated with morpheme is of word and it spans over; nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Practicing in these niches is much more effective for the students. My course is designed to give the students minimum content that has the maximum benefit. c) Devise and justify an activity that you could give an advanced group of students to teach them about derivational morphemes. The students should be able to understand the morpheme grouping as it indicates a clear developmental stage (Ellis, 1994, p.94). My ideal strategy would be ask my school if they can get a mobile phone and/or computer app developed that probes students to identify derivational morphemes. This strategy will work only after delivering a lecture where I educe them about derivational morphemes over the white board or through multimedia presentation. Students should be able to set the duration and number or test questions in the app. At the end of the test the app should be able to tell their score and specify which areas are weak. This weak area should be archived within the app so that next time when the students logs in, his weak areas are ready to be practiced. The exercises in the app should give students a word and their job would be to add the appropriate derivational morpheme at the end of it. For instance, they should be given the word ‘enjoy’ and they should be able to type or choose the correct morpheme ‘-ment’ at its end. Similarly another exercise can be giving students a list of different morphemes and they should be able to identify correctly which ones are derivational and which ones are inflectional. The question asks to teach advanced level students. There is a good probability that these students will have smart phones. The app will only be able to work online. The students’ score would automatically get fed into my school computer (data archive). Here I can monitor the progress of students. Another activity to teach them would be giving them a test hand-out in class. This test will contain a list of words and the students will be asked to write the appropriate derivational morpheme against each word. Similarly, the test will have a question asking students to pick the derivational morpheme from a list of words. My focus will be to make them practice making the correct morphed forms of words so they can correctly use it for communicating in English. For instance students will need to demonstrate that the difference between ‘finger’ and ‘singer’ is that finger is an indivisible morpheme whereas ‘singer’ is composed of two morphemes ‘sing’ and ‘-er’ (Roach, 2009, p. 54). Part B: Lexis, semantics and pragmatics (Unit 4) 1. Lexical relations a) Explain the following terms briefly in your own words and provide your own examples of each: 1. Synonym The lexemes whose meanings are similar to each other are known as synonyms. Strong and powerful are synonyms. This similarity by no means allows words to be interchangeable. Each and every word has its own meaning. The way the word ‘strong’ is used can never be replaced by the word ‘powerful’. One can say that this wood is strong but calling wood or table powerful would be wrong. However both of these words (synonyms) share the essence of their meanings. 2. Antonym Antonyms work exactly opposite to synonyms; the lexemes whose meanings are opposite to each other are known as antonyms. For instance sweet and bitter are antonyms. They can be both non-gradable and gradable. 3. Hyponym Hyponyms are lexemes that contain a word belonging to a group or whose word contains the meaning of another word. A squirrel is the hyponym of animal. Closely linked to hyponym is superordinate. 4. Superordinate The word on top of the lexeme hierarchy is the superordinate. In the previous example, the word animal is a superordinate as it contains all kinds of animals. Words such as lion, tiger, cow and platypus are hyponyms of the superordinate lexeme animal. b) To what extent are lexical relations (synonyms, hyponyms and superordinates) were part of the syllabus at an institution where you have studied or taught English? Critically discuss how they are presented and what could be improved. If they are not presented at all, do you think they should be? Justify your answer with reference to the literature. Lexical relations (synonyms, hyponyms and superordinates) were never a huge part in the school I studied in. We were taught about all these lexes separately but the relationship was almost never explained to us. No need was felt. We were told that synonyms are the opposite of antonyms with examples. The relation between hyponyms and superordinates was barely taught to us in class. Considering that I haven’t been taught about relations between lexes the way it should be, I can think of a lot that can be improved. I feel compelled to do more to make up for my own lacking. For instance, the students will be given frequent surprise tests once sufficient lecture content has been delivered. The tests will be conducted to examine their linking ability between the stated lexes. Test/activities can be spiced up by asking students to use a pair of synonym or antonym in a sentence. They can also be given true false statement. Their job would to be pick the correct statement about hyponyms and superordinates. As stated earlier the focus is on the use of the English language tools not on their definitions or rigid grammatical rules. Grammar is certainly the basics of English language but as suggested by Vivian Cook in his book Second Language Learning and Language Teaching (2008), teachers are banned from explicitly teaching grammar as it belongs to old style of teaching (p. 5). For teaching and practicing synonyms, one exercise can be giving test hand outs to students. These papers should have sentences that don’t sound pleasant or polite. Students’ task would be to replace the words from the given list of synonyms that would make the sentences more acceptable. Replacing an offending lexical item with an appropriate synonym (that does not have the negative connotation) takes away the unpleasantness (Thomas, 1995). This will not only help them identify the correct lexeme but it will help them form better sentences too. This can be one way to present it. I will not recommend teaching children about the relations between the lexemes in details. If they are forming correct sentences by using appropriate words (synonyms, antonyms etc.) then it is more than enough. I think that frequency or depth in which a English teacher usually goes while establishing the link between lexemes is more than sufficient. Establishing the relation is not imperative. One of the key aspects of learning is having an interest. It is better to keep the students engaged with what is more interesting and effective than complicating simple concepts. George Yule suggests in his book The Study of Language (2010) a method used by Peter Mark Roget, an English doctor. The Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition used the technique of using games for education (Yule, 2010). He used crossword puzzles to teach lexical relations of synonymy and antonymy (Yule, 2010). This helped in creating similar and dissimilar words. Up to this extent of recognizing the similarity or the dissimilarity in two lexemes is crucial. I would recommend that students of TESOL should be taught the basics of these relationships. Today people are not attracted to crossword puzzles as they used to in the twentieth century. I suggest that the improvement in teaching lexical relations would to shunning conventional teaching strategies. This would mean dropping complex details because students will have a hard time in understanding them. Even if they do understand it, they would have spent precious time over it. This time can be used in practicing those aspects of English language that are more rewarding. Role play to teach the use of synonyms, antonyms etc., is an interesting idea. It will not only teach students but it will give them a ‘hands on approach’ towards learning English language. c) Design and justify an activity to teach an intermediate group of students about either homophones or homonyms. Students can be divided into groups. Each group can be given a separate word and they will have to think of as many homophones as possible within a time limit. Say the class gets divided into four groups of five students. The teacher will give each group one word to make homophones of within two minutes. Competition always interests students. This activity is designed for intermediate students; they will feel more comfortable working in groups than to face the pressure of performing on individual basis. The teacher must understand that teaching homophones is a risky business. Once they start getting good at generating homophones they will get confused when putting them in a sentence or using them in writing paragraphs. When the teacher stresses too much on the difference between here and hear, and tells students that these homophones are easily confused, they will get confused (Stirling, 2011, p. 132). For this reason, the homophones activity will be very light and not at all stressful. The purpose would be to give them an idea what homophones are. It can also be a great way in distinguishing between similar sounding words. References Cook, V. J. 2008. Second language learning and language teaching. London : Routledge. Cutting, J. 2010. MA teaching English to speakers of other languages: Linguistics for TESOL. University of Sunderland. Ellis, R. 1994. The study of second language acquisition. Oxford University Press. Roach, P. 2009. English phonetics and phonology. Cambridge University Press. Stirling, J. Teaching spelling to English language learners. Raleigh: Lulu. Thomas, J. A. 1995. Meaning in interaction: An introduction to pragmatics (learning about language). London: Routledge. Yule, G. 2010. The study of language. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.   Read More