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LANGUAGE TEACHING
by
Muzaffer KATAR
CONTENTS
Pages
INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................
THEORETICAL ASSESSMENT ON LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE TEACHING.....
THE PRESENT STATE OF GRAMMAR TEACHING.....................................................
CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS............................................................................................
Contrast..........................................................................................................................
Contrastive Analysis........................................................................................................
A Sample Contrastive Analysis and an Account of the Emerged Result...........................
CONCLUSION...............................................................................................................
REFERENCES.................................................................................................................
APPENDIX
Contrastive Analysis of English and Turkish Consonants and Vowels
Living in a community, human beings need a tool to communicate with each other, and to carry on human and social affairs. They, therefore, arbitrarily named the things and occurances around making use of vocal sounds for the purpose of communication. After that they showed the vocal sounds and sets of vocal sounds in written signals.
Peoples living apart used different sets of vocal sounds to attribute to the same thing. Therefore different languages have appeared. But it never means in no ways languages have identical characteristics, since all languages are human and coming from the human logic and tongue.
In the early twentieth century, the great Swiss Scientist, Ferdinand De Saussure opened the way to scientific study of language namely LINGUISTICS- Linguists advancingly made many very important studies in the field. Making references with the other sciences, the nature of language, language acquisition; learning and teaching have been studied and the linguistics has come quite a very good level. But when the subject is language, we know that our way to go is very long and will never finish.
In general characteristics, language is relatively personel, national and human. Individuals use it, a nation has its own language and languages belong to human beings.
By now, linguists studied only philosophical features which exits in the nature and function of language. As I see it there are also metaphysical aspects of languages to study scientifically even if it is difficult to understand.
While the world is getting smaller and more people from different cultures meet each other very often on human affairs, they need to have a shared language to communicate. So, because of the power and superiority of the USA, at first in technology and ecomonics, and the former United Kingdom, English Language is taught all over the world today.
Scientists of linguistics all over the world are trying to discover the secrets of the language and the ways to teach it the best.
After this short talk about language, it will be good to talk about theoretical assessment on language and language teaching.
Most people thinks that language is something made up of words, sentences, structures and paragraphs only. Language is not an existence only made up of words and sentences there are also many other categories out of shapes and structures. Every utterance or set of utterances has a notion, a function, a meaning. So we must not only study the measurable categories like sounds or words of a language, but also unmeasurable categories of a language, like notion, function, message, feeling.
Measurable categories of a language like vocal sounds and sentece patterns are only the body or dress of communication. But what is the spirit in the body? How close are we to an insight of the spirit hidden in the body?
A stretch of language may have one shape but more functions and messages due to the context it is used in. Simply, when we say “Ayþe güzel kýzdýr.” güzel is an adjective. In “Ayþe güzel yürür”, güzel is an adverb, and when we say “güzelim”, “güzel” has a different function and spirit in the same body. “Güzel” is a noun in this sense.
There is a Greek Aphorism on language.
“Language is not a production, but a function.
ergon energeia
(Greek) (Greek)
Therefore we don’t have to take language as a finished production, but also a living and dynamic function. So teachers are not only to try to understand and teach the shapes and patterns but also psychology and spirit flowing with the patterns.
Language teaching is not something so easy as it always seems to be. Most of the native speakers can’t even use their own language. When it is the case in the native language, I think you can understand the difficulties in foreign language teaching and learning. Even though you are able to teach the concrete character of the language you must work a lot to teach the abstract and functional character of the foreign language. There are skills to be taught, known as speaking, writing,reading and listening as well.
I think that in a lot of different scientific studies in many study areas in linguistics, and in the complexity of every-day changing and abundance of methods, approaches, designs, procedures and techniques you get confused and sometimes don’t know how to act. Then it becomes the teachers’ work to form the best method which will make them ablo to teach the most appropriate way.
The profession foreign language teaching is, may be, one of most difficult professions in the world. Teaching grammar differs from any other teaching very significantly. Despite inner or outer difficulties, foreign lanuage teachers are trying to do their best.
The source of problems may sometimes be the teacher himself or his or her background, or classroom techniques or school organization. Every teacher tries no to be dogmatic, but systematic, as the linguistics shows to teach aspects of language the best like speaking, writing, listening and reading.
Modern psychology and modern linguistics have burst into full vigor since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Psychologists searched the laws of learning and it was thought that language learning is also subject to the related laws in psychology.
Today, many theories and methods favored at the turn of the century are still in use in various parts of the world. Few theories and methods practiced in the past has disappeared completely. A general approach towards methods is taking the useful facets and leaving the useless ones of them.
Teachers try to enable students to remember some dialogue utterances through role-playing and other forms of dramatization, but never through brute memorization. And every teacher has a methodical approach; which collects the facets the teacher is able to make use of.
Here are the methods in short of twentieth century:
1- The Gouin Method: Sequential actions are accompanied by utterances that describe the action being performed-first by the teacher and then by individual learner.
2- The Direct Method: Chunks of language are taught in Target Language
3- Basic English: Language is simplified to include only sixteen verbs and eight hundred content words.
4- The Grammar Translation Method: This has been with us for centuries.
5- The Reading Method: The defenders of this method recommended that the reading skill would be emphasized, and that only the grammatical structures found in the reading selections would be presented, primarily to ensure recognition.
6- Structuralizm, Behaviorism and the AudioLingual Method: They emphasized the formal properties of language (the oral and written forms of nouns, verbs, etc.)
7- Transformational Theory and Cognitivism. This is the old, well-known inductive approach in which learners are given examples of language in a context or a situation and then are helped to discover the rules of generalizations that underlie the structure or communicative expression embodied in them.
8- Communication Theory, Sociolinguistics and Humanistic Psychology: In this method there is adaptation and transfering the newly learned material to social situations.
9- The Functional-National Approach: their original purpose was to prepare material for adult “guest workers”.
So all teachers try to pass these theories to practice, even though it is quite difficult work.
And here are some other related subjects to language teaching.
1- Theory and practice
2- Phonetics and phonology
3- Grammar
4- Sociolinguistics
5- Psychology
6- Semantics
7- Textlinguistics
8- Contrastive Analysis
9- Discourse
10- Pragmatics.
Language teaching is relatively concerned with all these branches.
Having made a theoretical assesment and talked about the present state of grammar teaching in short, I am going to talk about a very important technique in understanding and teaching language: CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
Contrast
First, It will be good to give te definition of the language
“ Language in an arbitrarily sutructured set of arbitrarily chosen vocal sounds used by the members of a culture for the purpose of communication.”
This definition can be advanced in this way.
“..... communication, existence of which in all aspect is subject to CONTRAST”.
I mean “ the language exists due to the contrast in its nature and elements.”
I even mean, “CONTRAST is the nature of the language.”
There is contrast between the smallest language segments, namely vocal sounds.
There is contrast between words.
There is contrast between sentences.
There is contrast between languages.
In linguistics, the term, CONTRAST is used for a difference between units. Some say it serves to distinguish MEANINGS in a language, some say it serves for paradigmatic differences. To me, Contrastive Study can be applied in many areas in linguistics, if the spirit of the study accords with the spirit of the word, CONTRAST.
The principle of contrast is considered fundamental to linguistic analysis. It can be illustrated with reference to the notions of phoneme, distinctive feature, morpheme. An example in phonology is the contrast between ½p½ and ½b½; in grammar, inflectional endings, or the various possibilities of word order.
The phrase CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS also identifies a general approach to the investigation of language, particularly when carried on in certain areas of APPLIED LINGUISTICS, such as foreign-language teaching and translation. In the contrastive analysis of two languages, the points of structural difference are identified, and these are ,then, studied as areas of potential difficulty in foreign language teaching. It is never to be forgotten that CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS are SYNCHRONIC; that is to say, we study the language items used in the same period. We don’t study the items of a language in different periods under the heading of CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS.
Contrastive Analysis hypothesis is rooted in behaviorism and structuralism. It claims that the principal barrier to second language system, and that a scientific, structural analysis of the two languages in question would yield a taxonomy of linguistic contrasts between them which in turn would enable the linguist to predict the difficulties a learner would encounter. Thinking behavioristicly we can say that human behaviour is the sum of its smallest parts and compenents, and therefore language learning could be described as the acquisition of all of these discrete units. In short, second language learning basically involved the overcoming of the differences between the two linguistic systems: the native & foreign languages. When we understand the grammar and vocabulary we can transfer them to both languages .
Robert Lado (1957) says that “in the comparison between native and foreign language lies the key to ease or difficulty in foreign languages learning.” Those elements that are similar to (the learner’s) native language will be simple for him and those elements that are different will be difficult. Again, Banathy, Trager and Waddle (1966) claimed that “The change that has to take place in the language behaviour of a foreign language student can be equated with the differences between the structure of the student’s native language and culture and that of the target language and culture (Brown, 1987:153-154).
We should never forget that, Contrast, being the fundemental of language, is a fundemental of language teaching and learning.
Randal Whitman (1970) noted that contrastive analysis involved four different procedures.
1. Description: The linguist or teacher, using the tools of formal grammar, explicitly describes the two languages in question.
2. Selection: A selection is made of certain forms -linguistic items, rules, structures- for contrast, since it is virtually impossible to contrast every possible facet of two languages. Whitman admits that the selection process “reflects the conscious and unconscious assumptions of the investigator”, which in turn affect exactly what forms are selected.
3. Contrast: The mapping of one linguistic system onto the other, and a specification of the relationship of one system to the other which, like selection, “rests on the validity of one’s reference points.”
4. Prediction: You formulate a prediction of error or if difficulty on the basis of the first three procedures-that prediction can be arrived at through the formulation of a hierarchy of difficulty or through more subjective applications of psyschological and linguistic theory.
Stockwell, Powen, Martin (1965); Stockwell and his associates; and Clifford Prator (1967) made studies on hierarchy of difficulty and categorized their studies.
Prator’s reinterpretation, and Stockwell and his associates’ original hierarchy of difficulty, are based on principles of human learning. The first, or “zero”, degree of difficulty reprensents complete one-to one correspondence and transfer while the fifth degree of difficulty is the height of interference. Prator and Stockwell both claimed that their hierarchy could be applied to virtually any two languages and would thus yield some form of objectivity to the prediction stage of contrastive analysis procedures.
Using the hierarchy of difficulty and the procedures for contrastive analysis described by Whitman, one can make simple predictions about difficulties learners will encounter. Let us look, for example, at the learning of English consonants by a native speaker of Turkish.
By “mapping” one language onto the other, you can engage in the process of contrasting the systems-the third of Whitman’s procedures. The following six statements will suffice for a superficial contrast:
1. English /t/, /d/, and /n/ are alveolar; the corresponding consonants in Turkish are dental.
2. English has interdental fricatives /th/ and /dh/; Turkish does not.
3. English has a velar nasal /ng/; Turkish does not.
4. English has a velar glide /w/; Turkish does not.
5. Turkish has palatal /K/, /G/ and /L/ which do not occur in English.
6. From a phonetic viewpoint, English /r/ and Turkish /r/ are of very different natures. (Brown, 1987:157)
Next, the “prediction” procedure can be accomplished by subjecting the above contarstive description to a hierarchy of difficulty
0. Of no difficulty will be all those consonants that do not appear in the six contrastive statements above. We will assume such consonants bear one-to-one correspondence.
1. No apparent instance of coalescence, unless items in Level 2 below might be so analyzed.
2. Palatal stops /K/ and /G/ and palatal /L/ are absent in English.
3. English alveolar consonants /t/, /d/,and /n/ will have to be reshaped by the Turkish speaker from Turkish dental counterparts.
4. English consonants /th/, /dh/, /ng/ and /w/ are new to the Turkish speaker. Also American English /r/ is phonetically virtually new.
5. No apparent instance of a split (Brown, 1987:159).
Even if you can discover the psychological basis under the discourse of a man of a society, you can make psychological or socio-psychological contrastive analysis and comments on them.
Practice of contrastive analysis hypothesis within any one language and within more languages would certainly help us not only understand their language and teach, but also help us perceive an insight of philosophical cultural and other human characteristics and lives of the involved people.
By Contrastive analysis we get aware of certain characteristic difficulties in translating grammatical structures.
By making contrastive study on the structures of two languages we get the knowledge of grammatical transposition, that is, we meet a given part of speech in the source text by some other part of speech in the target language.
Examples
Je wiens chercher un couteau Þ I’ve come for a knife.
(What is conveyed in the source text by a verb is conveyed in the target language by a preposition.
Je persiste à croire qu’ils ont raison. Þ I still think you’re right.
(What is conveyed in the source text by a verbal phrase is conveyed in the target language by an adverb)
I have a brother. Þ Benim bir kardeþim var
(What is conveyed in the ST by a verbal phrase is conveyed in the TT by a possessive adj + adjective and in a very different structure.
We use contrastive analysis while teaching such structural elements.
It is contrastive analysis which help us see the identical features in languages as well as the differences:
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