Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your
contribution is not tax-deductible.)
PayPal Acct: 
Feedback: 
Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):
| [ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, [2] ] |
| Subject: Question 3 | |
|
Author: Mariana |
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 10:40:59 08/20/10 Fri The text “From principles to practice: Teachers’ uptake of principles from instructed language learning to plan a focus on language form in content lessons” is a paper that focuses in knowledge about second language and “examines the ways in which teachers draw on their knowledge of second language acquisition to distil principles that provide a link between a language and content needs analysis and the subsequent design of a unit of work.” The author demonstrates her worry about students that are learning English through immersion in the mainstream curriculum. According to her there are many native speaker students whose learning difficulties are linguistic in origin and require a language-oriented pedagogy in all curriculum areas. She stands out the natives` necessity of a language-oriented pedagogy in all curriculum areas. Reading all her work we can say that Susan Gray develops a work with a validity character. She uses not only her words, but she tries to justify with other authors words or with words of people who has a credit position in society, and she also searches and quotes other theories that could dialogue with the one she works with. To justify her central arguments, she quotes authors like Ellis, Fisher, Westerman, Pica, among others. For example, about Pica - while justifying her work- he “observed when considering data from a wide range of content-based classrooms where the target language was English that students’ language production was ‘fluent, but linguistically inaccurate` (p. 343); attention in the class was directed to meaning rather than form.” And explain that her paper “uses and extends the view of form proposed by Ellis et al. (2002) which incorporates phonological, graphological, lexical, and grammatical form to include discoursal aspects of language. This focus beyond the level of the sentence to text structure is critical for the language demands of academic writing.” Here, once again, when she says: “proposed by Ellis et al (2002)” she is looking for theoretical justifications. Another important point is that she not only substanciates the principles of the research, but she also defines specific terms as in “Sardo Brown (1993, p. 63) defines teacher planning as ‘the instructional decisions made prior to the execution of plans during teaching`.” Defending her afirmation that many secondary students, not just new learners of English, need informed language focused planning and that each of the secondary learning areas has its own language she demonstrates that there are other author who said that, so she puts it in parenthesis (Bullock Committee, 1975; Vollmer, 2006) and continue explaining that educational systems are challenged to develop language-oriented pedagogy that benefits native speaker as well as non native speaker students. It is relevant too that the author still points out that the research area is relevant “there is renewed interest in earlier work in language across the curriculum issues which guided teachers to focus on the reading and writing demands in their subject areas (for example, Davies and Greene, 1984; Lunzer and Gardner, 1979; Morris and Stewart-Dore, 1984 and the Council of Europe’s current project on Languages of Education). Another point is used to give validity to her work, it is mentioning the New Zealand national curriculum - it “argues that each teacher needs to provide specific guidance with the specialist vocabulary, the reading demands, and appropriate ways of conveying knowledge in each subject area (Ministry of Education, 2007).” The author also searches for the words of the Ministry of Education that English language learners will ‘‘need explicit and extensive teaching of English vocabulary, word forms, sentence and text structures, and language uses” (Ministry of Education, p. 16). And in its conclusion was shown the principles chosen to assist teachers in their instructional decision and the way teachers have put principles into practice – using a descriptive account. This validates her research showing teachers experiences in their own teaching as well as those of their students. And she justify “The descriptive account also enabled a critical examination of the theoretical input in one TESOL teacher education programmee teachers in the study used principles as a pivot between the needs analysis and subsequent planning and as the criteria for selecting and sequencing the learning activities.” So, the author always underlies her words through theoretical ones, doing this she transmits the idea of being a good researcher and get readers`confidence [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
|
Forum timezone: GMT-8 VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB: Before posting please read our privacy policy. VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems. Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved. |