more didactics questions

• Intuitive notions


  Notions of what works rather than on explicit principles of how to best promote learning
• Pragmatic meaning is crucial to language learning
• Engaging learners in activities where they are focused on creating pragmatic meaning is intrinsically motivating
• Focus on form


  • A general orientation to language as form
  • Attending to specific forms (e.g. the -s on a plural noun)
  • Awareness of form-function mapping (correlation between a form and its meaning)
• Focus on form refers to the noticing of specific linguistic items as they occur in the input, not to an awareness and understanding of grammatical rules
• Ways instruction can cater to a focus on form

  1. Grammar lessons designed to teach specific grammatical features

  2. Inductive approach to grammar teaching

  3. Deductive approach to grammar teaching

  4. Structure-based comprehension and production tasks

  5. Consciousness-raising tasks

  6. Methodological options that induce attention to form in the context of performing a task
• Intensive instruction on grammar is time consuming
• Extensive grammar instruction affords the opportunity for large numbers of grammatical structures to be addressed, and many will be attended to repeatedly over time
• Extensive grammar instruction involves a response to the errors that each learner makes, so it is individualized and affords the skilled teacher communicative opportunities
• Extensive grammar instruction occurred relatively frequently in communicative adult ESL lessons through both preemptive and reactive attention to form
• Learners who experienced such momentary form-focused episodes demonstrated subsequent learning of the forms addressed
• Instruction needs to be conceived of in terms of both intensive and extensive approaches to grammar
• Implicit knowledge


  Procedural, held unconsciously, can be verbalized only if made explicit, accessed rapidly and easily, available for use in rapid fluent communication
• Explicit knowledge can exist without the metalanguage to express it
• Learners need the opportunity to participate in communicative activities to develop implicit knowledge
• The extent to which explicit knowledge can be converted into implicit knowledge remains controversial
• Learners follow a natural order and sequence of grammar acquisition as implicit knowledge
• The built-in syllabus is universal, the same irrespective of the learner's age or L1
• Not all researchers accept the universality and inviolability of the built-in syllabus
• Language learning is a slow and laborious process, and the variance in speed of acquisition of children can be accounted for by the amount and quality of input they receive
• Contrary to krasehens belief learning output is also important for language learning
• Curriculum and syllabus are similar because both involve similar planning processes, although at different levels of scale
• The term curriculum is also used to refer to the instructional content of a program
• Planning a course


  Results in a written plan called a syllabus
• Curriculum


  Broader concept than syllabus, applies to the program level, includes planning, enacting and evaluating
• Curriculum


  Can also be used to refer to the instructional content of a course, as in "the curriculum for my course"
• Syllabus


  Has both practical (actual plan for a course)and theoretical meanings (specific way to conceptualize what language is and how language is learned so that materials can be selected or prepared for the classroom)
• The focus on syllabus, rather than on the broader concerns of curriculum, appears to be unique to the field of language teaching
• Syllabus types


  • Grammatical, formal, or structural syllabuses
  • Notional-functional syllabus
  • Task-based syllabus
  • Skills-based approaches
  • Lexical syllabus
  • Genre or text-based syllabus
  • Project-based language learning
  • Content-based instruction and content and language integrated learning
  • Negotiated syllabus
• Grammatical syllabus


  Organized around the grammatical structures of the language, focuses on grammatical patterns as the building blocks of language, usually at the sentence level
• The grammatical syllabus has been criticized because learners learn about the language and its systems, not how to use the language to express themselves, construct knowledge, communicate
• Notional-functional syllabus


  Organized around the communicative purposes, called functions, for which people use language and the notions that are being communicated

  
  

  Requires analyzing learners' needs for using the language
• For the notional-functional syllabus it is important to find out about the learners' needs for using the language - with whom, where, and why
• Task-based syllabus


  Organized around tasks, by doing tasks together, learners use whatever language they have to negotiate the task, and through that negotiation, they acquire the language

  
  

  Tasks range from real-world to pedagogic
• Lexical syllabus


  Based on a mini-corpus of common, pragmatically useful language items and language patterns drawn from spoken and written language corpora, embedded in authentic language texts, learners work inductively to understand the patterns of usage
• Genre or text-based syllabus


  Genres are spoken or written texts, such as recounts, lectures, and critical reviews, structured in particular ways to achieve particular social purposes, texts are selected according to learners' educational and social needs, learners analyze texts to identify particular linguistic moves, specialized vocabulary, and so on to produce or participate in the texts effectively
• Project-based language learning


  Learners engage in individual and cooperative investigative and production-based tasks to complete a project, uses a project or projects as the backbone of the syllabus, the projects result in an end product such as a research report, a performance, or a presentation
• Negotiated syllabus


  Grew out of the task-based syllabus, in the sense that it is through processes of negotiation in interaction with others that one uses and acquires language, contrasts with product-based syllabuses which focus on the knowledge and skills that are the products of learning, decisions about what will be learned are made through negotiation between teacher and learners

  
  

  Shared decision-making process rather than a pre-determined plan
• Enactment view of curriculum

  The curriculum is seen as the educational experiences jointly created by teacher and learners in the classroom
• Implementation view of curriculum


  A curriculum is designed by curriculum specialists and is implemented by the teachers and learners, the processes of planning and implementing are seen as sequential stages, each carried out by different specialists in a hierarchical manner