Sabrina's e-portfolio

The following useful websites are listed for English learning

Kern, R. (2006). Perspectives on technology in learning and teaching languages. TESOL Quarterly, 40 (1), 183-210.

Goh, C.,& Taib, Y. (2006). Metacognitive instruction in listening for young learners. ELT Journal, 60(3), 222-232

James, H., (2011). 'Small Talk': developing fluency, accuracy, and complexity in speaking. ELT Journal, 66(1), 30-41.

Firkins, A., Forey, G., & Sengupta, S. (2007). Teaching writing to low proficiency EFL students. ELT Journal, 61(4), 341-352.

Rupley, W. H., Blair, T. R. & Nichols, W. D. (2009). "Effective reading instruction for struggling readers: the role of direct/explicit teaching". Reading & Writing Quarterly, 25:125-138.

      The teaching practice provided us a chance to rethink about the teaching materials design and how to achieve the goals and to meet the different needs of learners. The target students of our teaching are seven graders in junior high schools. Because of the tight schedule, we decided to use their textbooks as materials. The aim of the class is to teach students present progressive pattern to make them familiar with it through practices.We followed the procedure of 2W3P-warm up, presentation, practice, production and wrap up. The practices involved worksheets with the sentence pattern and oral production. The purpose of the worksheet is to check students’ comprehension about grammar usage. The activity is served as oral production and students could have more opportunities to communicate with their peers.

1. What is AntConc or AntWordProfiler (or other software) you found on Prof. Anthony’s website?
AntCons is a corpus tool that includes various functions such as word frequency, cluster and lexical bundle analysis and word distribution plot. Moreover, unlike other corpora aimed at researchers or only some specific tasks, AntConc is designed for use in the classroom and it is a freeware application. It also provides a powerful concordancer and is easy for users to familiarize the interface. 

2. How can we use them in our English teaching? 
AntConc involves a concordancer could be applied to language teaching in learning vocabulary, collocations, grammar and writing. We can search for certain keywords or phrases that we want from lots of data and to find how frequent they appear in different contexts. It is very useful and important for teachers and students to get several collocations and patterns to facilitate their knowledge in reading and writing. For advanced learners, they could acquire some practical patterns for academic writing in specified field through searching files by concordancer.

Define these two terms & What are the differences between the two approaches?

1.The distinction between "focus on form" and "focus on formS" was first made by Michael Long (1988, 1991), a professor of second language acquisition at the University of Maryland. Focus on forms means that teachers focus learning on formal linguistic features and isolate from context or communicative activities. On the other hand, focus on form entails a focus on formal elements of language within communicative language teaching environment. 

2.Ellis (2001) also claimed that students view themselves as learners of a language and the language as an object of the study in focus on fromS approach. However, learners view themselves as language users and the language is viewed as a tool for communication in focus on form approach. 

3.Focus on fromS approach provides learners with explicit and isolated grammar instruction to master linguistic items to reach native speakers’ levels. Focus on form provides some types of corrective feedback which is arisen incidentally to remain learners’ attention on meaning in a communicative context. 

Which one do you or will you adhere to?

I will prefer focus on form approach because language is a tool for communication in our daily life. Students should learn how to apply what they have learned into social contexts but not just to memorize grammar rules or vocabulary items in class. Overemphasizing the linguistic aspects may interfere with students’ oral fluency and cause negative effect on their language learning. From this point of view, teachers have to provide more opportunities for students to practice language use in real contexts by giving them corrective feedback when they have difficulties in negotiating meaning.