MIDTERM

• Macro skills


  The primary, key, main, and largest skill set relative to a particular context, commonly referred to in the English language
• The four macro skills

  • Reading
  • Listening
  • Writing
  • Speaking
• Order of acquisition of the four skills in first-language acquisition

  Listening first, then speaking, then possibly reading and writing
• Ways the four skills can be classified

  • According to the medium (oral or written)
  • According to the role of the language user (encoder or decoder)
  • Receptive (listening and reading) or productive (speaking and writing)
• Receptive skills


  Listening and reading - learners do not need to produce language to do these, they receive and understand it
• Productive skills


  Speaking and writing - learners doing these need to produce language
• It is common for language learners to have stronger receptive than productive skills, that is they can understand more than they can produce
• Six language macro skills as a result of the proliferation of information technology

  • Productive skills (Speaking, Writing, And Representing)
  • Receptive skills (Listening, Reading, And Viewing)
• Speaking


  • It is a complex process that involves simultaneous attention to content, vocabulary, discourse, information structuring, morphosyntax, sound system, prosody, and pragmalinguistic features
  • Formal oral communication shares similar features with written communication
• Speaking proficiency


  Can be measured through fluency, comprehensibility, and accuracy
• Oral fluency


  The speaker's automaticity of oral production
• Comprehensibility


  The ease and difficulty with which a listener understands L2 accented speech
• Accuracy


  Relates to both grammar and pronunciation
• Listening


  • It is a complex process that involves the understanding of spoken data and involves receptive, interpretative, or constructive cognitive processes
  • Listening and listening comprehension are essentially the same
• Three subprocesses of listening

  • Decoding (attending, perceiving speech, recognizing words, and parsing grammar)
  • Comprehension (activation of schema, representing propositions, and logical inferencing)
  • Interpretation (matching the meaning to previous expectations and evaluating discourse meanings)
• Reciprocal listening


  Dialogues in which the original listener and speaker have alternating roles as source and as receiver of information
• Nonreciprocal listening


  One-way role taking as in the case of listening to monologues, which appears to be more difficult to undertake
• Speech rate


  Listening generally improves as speech rate is reduced to an optimum level, with normal speech rate usually from 100 to 240 words per minute
• Listening pedagogy has shifted from a more linguistically-based approach to a more-schematic-based one which incorporates cultural constructs, discourse clues, pragmatic norms, and topic familiarity
• Current listening pedagogy


  Involves the enhancement of metacognitive and cognitive strategies to facilitate listening comprehension
• Extensive listening approach


  When learners are exposed to ample comprehensible listening input, it will eventually lead to automaticity
• There are concerns on focusing too much on quantity of listening input without any consideration to methods for improving comprehension
• Discovery listening approach


  Allows learners to notice the differences between the original text and the text that they have reconstructed after a listening task, and try to discover the cause of their listening difficulties
• Dictogloss task


  Allows learners to listen to a short passage and reconstruct it afterwards, helping them focus more on form
• Viewing


  Refers to perceiving, examining, interpreting, and construction meaning from visual images, crucial to improving comprehension of print and nonprint materials
• Media literacy


  The ability to access, analyze, and evaluate media and technology information that involves moving images and sound effects
• Visual literacy


  The power of giving meaning to and building up similar messages for visual messages and the ability to construct meaning from images
• Four general types of visual organizers

  • Web-Like Organizers (spider map and semantic map)
  • Hierarchical Organizers (concept map and network tree)
  • Matrix Organizers (compare/contrast matrix)
  • Linear Organizers (Venn diagram, continuum, chain of events, and storyboard)
• Reading


  • It is a complex cognitive process of decoding written symbols, a linguistic, socio-cultural, physical and cognitive activity which involves getting meaning from and putting meaning to the printed text
• Factors influencing reading ability

  L2 language proficiency, L1 reading skills, topic interest and prior knowledge, and linguistic complexity
• Characteristics of reading


  • It is a language skill that can be developed through systematic practice
  • It is a two-way process that involves the communication between the author and the reader
  • It is visual which involves the transmission of message via optic nerves and requires good eyesight
  • It is a productive process that has purpose whether academically, personally, or professionally
  • It is the foundation of good writing
• Three different perspectives on the reading process

  • Bottom-up processing (data-driven, emphasis on textual decoding)
  • Top-down processing (concept-driven, emphasis on schema and reader interpretation)
  • Interactive processing (interaction between lower-level and higher-level processing)
• Types of schema


  • Content schema (knowledge about people, culture, world, and universe)
  • Formal/Textual schema (knowledge about text structure and rhetorical organization)
• Reading strategies


  Deliberate, goal-directed attempts to control and modify the reader's efforts to decode text, understand words, and construct meaning of text
• Reading skills


  Automatic actions that result in decoding and comprehension with speed, efficiency, and fluency and usually occur without awareness of the components or control involved
• Assessment should focus on processes involved in skills and strategies, with strategy assessment being formative and skill assessment being summative
• Writing


  • It is a non-linear, exploratory, and generative process as writers discover ideas and reformulate them
  • There is a bidirectional transfer of writing skills between L1 and L2
• Coherence


  Relates to the pragmatic features and culturally acceptable rhetorical organization, structure, and sequence
• Cohesion


  The linguistic consequence of coherence through the use of cohesive devices making it an overt feature of a text
• Five approaches to teaching writing

  • Product Approach
  • Process Approach
  • Genre Approach
  • Process Genre Approach
  • Post-Process Pedagogy