Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
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Teaching English to Adults
189 is very common that one year’s intensive English, and in some countries two years’ study, is required before a student is in a position to do any justice to the subject matter of an advanced level degree course. The pedagogic solutions for mixed ability classes are varied. It is useful to discover just how great the range is by using a diagnostic test. There will certainly be a large block in the middle of the ability range who can be separated off as a group for some parts of the lesson, or for some lessons, and will form a more homogenous teaching group. If this strategy is adopted, the poor ones and the better ones must receive their due time and attention. Individual work is essential for each person not in the main group, with the emphasis on bringing the weak ones up to standard to join the main group. A planned scheme of work using available textbooks and particularly class tape recorders and the language laboratory is vital in individualised learning of this type. A great deal of time, probably outside class hours, will need to be spent coaching the weak ones. There is one advantage, however, in that the weak ones may well not be proficient in English through lack of practice or opportunity, but they should, through the very fact of being selected for Higher Education, be intelligent and able. With care and attention they should always be capable of catching up with the others. A danger of splitting a heterogeneous group in this way is that the very act of division may intensify rather than alleviate the difficulties. So it is probably better to have the whole class together for the majority of the time, and use techniques which involve each person at his own level. With, say, oral questioning, it is possible to ask the more difficult questions of the able students at a speed that will tax them and the easier questions of the less proficient and at a slower pace. Similarly, there might be a choice of titles for the composition, some more difficult than others, to cater for different levels of proficiency. One effective technique here is group work, where the good students are asked to be group leaders and given the task of helping along and getting the best out of the others. In general terms, the teacher’s task is to provide each student with a learning experience at his own level and a challenge to improve, so Teaching English to Adults 190 that the initially heterogeneous class becomes over time a more homogeneous unit. The problems are quite different where English is not the major subject of study. A student in the English department who usually has integrative motivation, identifies to at least some degree with the subject of his study and wishes to make his own the good things he find in the cultural, literary and aesthetic life of English-speaking countries. On the other hand, many scientists, for example, are interested in English simply as a tool, an instrument to make them better at their job by giving them access to the extensive scientific literature in English and by allowing them to speak to their English- speaking colleagues from around the world. With the growth of English as an international language, there has been a corresponding increase in the teaching of specialised English. Teaching English to non-specialists in tertiary state education is just one branch of English for Special Purposes. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is a growing branch of ESP peculiar to Higher Education. This can of course be radically different from country to country, especially when English is the medium of instruction for a scientific subject, as it is in large parts of Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The local languages do not have widespread acceptance amongst all the students concerned, they do not have the lexis to cope with the technical terminology, and there is very little in print of a specialised nature, hence English is the medium of instruction. The main problem here is to ensure that the level of English is sufficient to deal with the complex subject matter and with the demands of the learning system— listening to lectures, note-taking, reading textbooks, coping with tutorials and seminars, writing reports, essays and exam papers, and ultimately carrying out the research leading to a thesis. And of course all this must be done in English. The teacher’s task here is to foster his student’s study skills. There are several helpful courses available, such as J.B.Heaton’s Studying in English (Longman, 1975). In many other countries in the world, particularly where English is a foreign, rather than a second, language, it is very common for a teacher to be confronted with a group of medical students or engineers who have little existing knowledge of English and demand to be taught how to read Teaching English to Adults 191 their technical books and journals, and nothing else. They have no need to write in English nor even to speak it. Their need is for a course in reading technical English. It is not impossible to provide this by starting with very elementary examples of the written word and by taking the students through a carefully graded sequence of texts with copious commentary in their mother tongue. A better approach is to argue, first, that this is in fact a misguided, short-term view of what is needed. There is always an opportunity to use the skills of writing, speaking and listening, whatever one’s immediate circumstances. Many write reports or articles for publication in international reviews, others must talk to and understand expatriate colleagues and visiting lecturers. With the ease of travel today, many must surely travel outside their own country to international conferences and courses, where English will certainly be widely used. And it is a necessary precondition for many scholarships that the candidate has a good level of English. The second argument is pedagogic. It may well be that the best way to learn to read efficiently in English is to pay Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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