English Teaching from the Modern Perspective - Assignment Example

Summaries of Articles on English Teaching This paper summarizes three articles on the issue of English teachingfrom the modern perspective. This is a point of serious concern because educational system has become showing signs of becoming outdated and focused only on drilling and lecturing rather than development of thinking, analysis and information digesting and perception skills. Summaries of Articles on English Teaching ESL and Classroom Teachers Team Up to Teach Common Core (by Lesli A. Maxwell) The article by Lesli Maxwell reveals the issues of relationships between the English as the second language teachers and the content teachers and the effect of such cooperation in terms of mastering English. The teachers at Meadow Park Middle School practice involvement into a closer cooperation of such kind by means of complete embracing the Common Core Standards in mathematics and English. They have tried to pick up the standards, reduce them to the basic concepts, simplify the language and support their learners both in English and content classes. The reason for necessity of such cooperation is that the new standards of education presuppose harmonic development of an educated person, and this diversity is impossible without inter-subject relationships. In this regard, both a native speaker and a learner of English as a second language have the same objectives – reading and understanding complex texts, finding written and oral arguments, engagement in conversations. It is obvious that the students with low skills in English take much time from their tutors in content subjects, and this is the fact which also proves necessity of cooperation between the two mentioned types of teachers. Practice shows that teachers of English as a second language support the idea of their assistance to the content teachers who may need it when working with the learners of English. This is because English teachers are familiar with the learners’ language capabilities, knowledge level and cultural background, and this information plays a very important role when choosing an appropriate approach to better ways of explanation of the content subjects. The author also concerns herself with the matter of the English teachers’ status in their educational institutions. They are considered the main responsible for formulating language competence of the learners, they must work extra time to equalize the students’ language knowledge level, that is, they have many responsibilities and their scope of work is very large. The dilemma here is that they are rarely awarder for this, for example, the number of principles who are English teachers is very low, and almost all of the leading roles in the schools are occupied by their content colleagues. This creates an image of a misbalance and makes the English teachers think on their role in the education process. The article also represents an approach to the activity of the English teachers as a combination of both language and content teaching. The advice is for the teachers to make the students spend more time working on language and content every day to gain good competence in both language and academic content. The schools of the Internationals network apply a new method of core competence gaining by means of mixing classrooms with the students who have different proficiency in English and different levels of grades. This promotes the students’ team and collective work, and those more experienced help the newcomers and those with a lower level to pull up their knowledge. A ‘push-in’ model is another common-core achievement technique. This is the type of educational activity when the teachers of both English and content are in the classroom at the same time, and this creates the basis for English learning content. The principal’s role is a significant component of success in this regard. The principal promotes interaction and close cooperation of the content and ESL teachers and creates the basis for formulating school culture. The principals, for example, can provide their teachers with the time for their self-trainings where they can develop and share their ideas with each other. (Maxwell, 2013, 4-9). The ESL Logjam: Waiting Times for ESL Classes and the Impact on English Learners (by James T. Tucker) The author of this article investigates into the crisis of the ESL, English as a second language, courses, and the problems are overcrowding, overbooking and long waiting time. One more fact that deteriorates state of affairs in this field is insufficient funding, recognized even by Congress. One of the most distracting factors that avoid many potential students’ enrolling for EFL classes is the problem of waiting lists. Almost sixty per cent of the EFL services providers state that they have waiting lists, and waiting time can last from several weeks to more than three years. The fact that causes this problem is that the demand for EFL services is constantly increasing, whereas the number of skilled and qualified teachers increase is rather slow. The surveys conducted by various organizations confirm the necessity of the services of English teaching: shares of non-native English speakers and non-speakers in the US are rather high, and many adults have the English knowledge level usually referred to as ‘LEP’, or limited English proficiency. The changes in life make these people take up the classes of English mastering, but there are still many barriers and obstacles preventing them from enrolling. These are, for example, lack of time which could potentially be devoted to this activity, insufficient monetary funds, lack of children care and transportation difficulties, as well as the above mentioned long waiting time. Another factor that adversely affects the category of elder students is that they face difficulties with a huge amount of the material taught and too fast pace, which are difficult for them to cope with. The author managed to distinguish a typical adult student of English as a foreign language: this person belongs to the working poor, has to hold, as a rule, two jobs in order to support the family, and the little time available in the evenings, usually few hours, is remaining for English studying. The motivation of such people to learn English is extremely high, and it explains why many ESL services providers have long waiting lists. The motivations and reasons why adult people take up studying activity are improvement of overall English competence, development of the previously acquired skills, meeting the demands of their works or expanding possibilities of better employments. Some also indicate that by studying English they feel themselves more confident among the others. The activity of ESL services providers is specific. These are not the schools or colleges in the sense we usually think they are: for example, many of them offer a free visiting schedule – a student may come whenever he or she wants or has time for studying. Moreover, some may offer Saturday classes, and the total number of studying hours is a point of concern of the student. The level of proficiency most adults prefer to choose is basic. This is because their overall proficiency, as it was mentioned before, is limited, and they need to advance further to be more literate and to complete the most typical tests for the students of such a kind. The author also mentions that there are different types of the ESL services providers. They may be either state-financed, or private and public non-profit institutions. The point of concern here is that if these providers are state-financed, lack of finding usually adversely affects the quality of the education they provide, because this decreases the staff motivation, on the one hand, and makes the principals do something the high cost of the tutors’ labor. The quality of education is the main thing people come to the providers for, and these organizations must maintain the same competitive level of quality in order to both help themselves benefit and provide people with real knowledge rather than introduction to the basic training. (Tucker, 2006, 30-37). What English Teachers Need to Know about Grammar (by William Murdick) The article of William Murdick describes the author’s views on how grammar is taught and how it should be taught. The reason for this, as per the author’s assumption, is that the teachers themselves, especially the beginning ones, have not mastered it perfectly themselves. It is so because today grammar is studied in a rather simple way covering the basic subjects and revealing the basic concepts. This is why the teachers should not only master the grammar course completely, but they also should concern themselves with grammar in a larger sense of this word, going further in their exercising from that which is traditionally taught. Another way of improving teachers’ efficiency is their knowledge about the students’ level of the subject mastering. The author states that most children already know most grammatical rules and constructions and other things subconsciously, and the teacher’s task is to organize them and make the children comprehend them. Children come to school already with basic knowledge in their heads, and the teacher must shape it and bring it to conscious surface so that the children were aware of them and knew the correct names of grammatical concepts, such as gerund, noun, pronoun and others. The article also studies the problem of grammatical errors and their role in English grammar teaching. The examples of grammatical errors given in the students’ books are typical and rather easy, which is a reason of their false assumption that grammar is an easy subject and the errors can be easily corrected. This simplification of the material taught has nothing to do with the knowledge possessing, and the graduates still often make grammatical errors because of this fact. The teachers, therefore, need to know that the errors make an entire complex and it is necessary to classify them in order to manage their occurrence in students’ speech. The author defines such types of grammatical errors: errors of competence and performance, the first ones deriving from lack of ability or knowledge, the second ones because of mistakes of linguistic thinking; the best example is misspelling: ‘the’ instead of ‘the’; metacognitive skill errors arising as a result of lack of metacognitive sensibility or attention, for example, improper agreement of the subject and the verb; errors connected with usage, which may be based on social grounds: some users may consider their own speech patterns and words to be the ultimate ones and use them not only in their usual surrounding (family, home etc.), and the recommendation for the teachers here is to teach controversial forms to raise students’ curiosity in the correct forms; developmental errors, which can be described as lack of language skill development and use of something similar to middle stages of the sentences and constructions. The teacher’s approach to correction of these errors is not just about red-marking them, which can result in student’s using of simpler and even childish model of writing. Regarding the teacher’s overall competence, it is necessary to know more than just grammar, but this suggestion is being argued by some teachers. This is absolutely necessary in terms of teaching good knowledge, and the possible solution the author gives is changing the preparation program of the teachers of college and graduate levels. The author also provides a recommendation of one of the most renowned and respected linguists of today, Noam Chomsky. He suggests that the language study should be used to motivate children explore the human mind and the things related to it. Children should be also supported in their inquiries and scientific investigations, because they already have very much data in their brains. Chomsky also advised that grammar itself did not help to improve the students’ writing and should be taught because it is an important part of the English language study. (Murdick, 1996, 38-45). References Maxwell, L. (2013). ESL and Classroom Teachers Team Up to Teach Common Core. Education Week, 2013, 33, 4-9. Murdick, W. (1996). What English Teachers Need to Know about Grammar. English Journal, November 1996, 38-45. Tucker, J. (2006). The ESL Logjam. Waiting Times for ESL Classes and the Impact on English Learners. Los Angeles: NALEO Educational Fund, 30-37. Read More