Theme: teaching and learning second language using information technology Contents Introduction Main part

Should the native speaker be the target of language teaching?
Most word instructors, and actually most students, recognize that their aim search out enhance as complementary to the native speaker as likely. One question is the question of that native talker. A language enters place many sorts, in accordance with country, domain, class, sexuality, profession and additional determinants; this, therefore, search out succeed the Lang2 abstract entity aim of ‘sound’. Some assortments are a matter of accent, few of social and territorial accent. The student’s aim needs to relate to the duties that they will assume when utilizing the second style. Some British juniors I saw in London were attacking job knowledge in Switzerland; my associates respectively instructed them Swiss German. When they secondhand this on the trained workers, their friend laborers raise it highly pleasing: foreigners proper to talk High German, not Swiss German. I was an L2 consumer of Swiss German as a juvenile and can still comprehend it fairly, determined the customer talking does not see me as a outsider and switch to High German. The problems of which variety to teach is more pressing for a language that is used globally, such as English. England itself contains a variety of class and regional accents, even if vocabulary varies little; the English-speaking countries from Australia to Canada, Scotland to South Africa, each have their own variety, with its own internal range; outside these countries there are well-established varieties of English spoken in countries such as Singapore and India. Which of these native speakers should the students adopt as a role model? The claimed advantages of RP were that, despite its small number of speakers based in a single country, it was comprehensible everywhere and had neutral connotations in terms of class and region. True as this may be, it does sound like the classic last-ditch defense of the powerful status form against the rest. A more realistic native accent nowadays might be Estuary English.
Though much concerning this difference may concern accent, study an American novel quickly shows the various conventions, either in dictionary, orthography or syntax. So far as style education is worried, skilled is no distinct ideal native talker for all scholars to echo; the choice of model has to take all sorts of alternative into report.
However, if L2 consumers are not the same monolinguals, as we have happened contending concurrently with an activity, either in the words they see or in the rest of their minds, it is unfit to base speech education on the native speaker model, because it may, on the individual help, disappoint the scholars the one quickly acknowledge that they will never go along with as native speakers, and on the different restrain them to the endeavors of monolinguals alternatively the copiousness of multilingual use. If we want students to become efficient L2 users, not imitation native speakers, the situations modelled in coursebooks should include examples of successful L2 users on which the students can model themselves. The Japanese syllabus puts forward a goal of ‘Japanese with English Abilities’, not imitation native speaker. Similarly, the Israeli curriculum ‘does not take on the goal of producing near-native speakers of English, but rather speakers of Hebrew, Arabic or other languages, who can function comfortably in English whenever it is appropriate’. Successful L2 use is nearly completely missing from textbooks. In few courses, graduates should equate different ideas. In Move, juniors’ debate, ‘Do fellows or wives occasionally do these tasks in your country?’, connected to cartoons of a cook, a dancer, a paratrooper, thus; in Hotline. students present ‘beneficial verbalizations’ in their own words. Most coursebooks use England as a backcloth, but they infrequently present multilingual English crowd, even though pluralism is constantly noticed, as in the argument of Asian marriages in The Beginners’ Choice. By the end of a vocabulary course, students will never have perceived L2 consumers reprimand native speakers, remove imposed controls on a system to added L2 consumers, main as this may search out their aims. When they have done Changes, a course accompanying the subtitle ‘English International Communication’, the only models of L2 consumers, except that ‘undergraduate’ figures, the graduates will have join are brief first-man biographies of population in Taiwan, Madrid and Paris.
Even the stars in coursebooks are perpetually monolingual alternatively bilingual. The types that are supposedly L2 consumers put into a place two main classifications: travelers and guests, the one without warning request the way, frightfully buy belongings or try to discern unfamiliar travel methods, and undergraduates the one chat to each additional about their lives and interests. Both groups use absolutely able English for their ventures; nothing identifies bureaucracy from the native speakers imitated in the pages except that their names are Birgit, Klaus or Philippe. Neither group are persuasive role models of L2 consumers. New English File features bury alia heroes in the way that the writer J.K. Rowling and the model Naomi Campbell, and gives short existence histories of folk who servant Japan and Rio: it is not hope value mentioning either one bureaucracy use second vocabularies successfully. Nor is it only English. Coursebooks for teaching other languages, such as French Libre Exchange or Italian Ci Siam, present L2 users similarly. L2 users have an unflatteringly powerless status, rather than the extra influence that successful L2 users can wield. The students never see an L2 user in action who knows what they are doing. While the roles of students or of visitors are useful and relevant, they are hardly an adequate reflection of what L2 use can provide. Looking at most EFL and modern language coursebooks, you get the distinct impression that all of them are written by monolinguals who have no idea of the lives lived by L2 users.
English for specific sympathy – English as the word of adventure is some unexpected to an Englishman! Sometimes the reason for codeswitching is that the choice of terminology shows the speaker’s public act. A Kenyan he the one was portion welcome own twin in a shop begun in their Leiria vocabulary and before changed to Swahili for the rest of the discourse, to signal that he was considering her as a common client. Often bilinguals use fillers and tags from individual prose in another, as in the Spanish / English exchange, ‘Well I’m happy to meet you’, ‘Andale pies and do return’.
The common factor underlying these examples is that the speaker assumes that the listener is fluent in the two languages. Otherwise, such sentences would not be a bilingual codeswitching mode of language use but would be either interlanguage communication strategies or attempts at one-upmanship, similar to the use by some English speakers of Latin expressions such as ‘ab initio learners of Spanish. Monolinguals think that the reason is primarily ignorance; you switch when you do not know the word, that is, it is a communication strategy of the type mentioned in; yet this motivation seems rare in the descriptions of codeswitching. Box 10.4 lists few reasons population codeswitch, containing most of those noticed here. When does codeswitching happen in agreements of terminology makeup? According to individual set of estimations, about 84 per insignificant value of switches inside the sentence are private dispute, announce the English/Malaysian ‘Ana free hair in’, place English is changed to only for the part ‘free’. About 10 per insignificant value are phrases, as in the Russian/French ‘Imelda use woman de chambre’. The surplus 6 per insignificant value are switches for whole requirements, as in the German/English ‘Papa, win du public prosecutor Licht amahs, therefore I’ll be so isolated’. But this still does sadden when switches are likely from individual terminology to another; exchanging is very far from haphazard in semantic agreements. The hypothesis of codeswitching grown by Shona Pollack claims that skilled are two main limits on place exchanging can happen: _ The ‘free morpheme constraint’: the speaker may not switch language between a word and its endings unless the word is pronounced as if it were in the language of the ending. Thus, an English/Spanish switch ‘Rutendo’ is impossible because ‘run’ is distinctively English in sound. But ‘filenadol’ is possible because ‘flip’ is potentially a word in Spanish.
The ‘sameness restraint’: the switch can reach a point in the sentence place it does not defile the syntax of either language. So skilled are implausible expected some French/English switches in the way that ‘a bus Americana’ or ‘one American roadster powered by engine’, as they hopeful wrong in both accents. It is likely, nevertheless, to have the French/English switch ‘Jay ached an American car’, cause both English and French share the construction at which point the object understands the verb. The approach to codeswitching that has existed most powerful currently is the matrix language frame model grown by Carol Myers-Scotto. She claims that in codeswitching the matrix expression specifies the frame, and the entrenched expression supports material to enlarge the frame, moderately like dawdling the humankind upon the skeleton. So, in ‘Samara pig stop buying center glia an peaks end birthday present glia then Maria’, the matrix vocabulary is Greek, that supplies the linguistic construction, and the entrenched expression is English, that supplies two noun phrases. The role for the matrix language is to provide the grammatical structures and the ‘system’ morphemes, that is, grammatical morphemes that form the basis of the sentence. The role of the embedded language is to provide content morphemes to fit into the framework already supplied. For example, the Russian/English sentence ‘On duolog Laia-I am dog-of’ shows matrix Russian grammatical morphemes and structure, but an embedded English content word ‘dog’. The later version of this model is known as the 4M model as it divides all morphemes into four types: content morphemes which have thematic roles, typically nouns such as ‘book’ and verbs such as ‘read’; early system morphemes which have some content meaning, such as articles ‘the/a’, up’; late bridge system morphemes which make necessary connections between grammatical parts but contribute no meaning, say ‘the Wife of Bath’, or possessive ‘’s’ ‘John’s friend’; late outsider system morphemes which have connections extending beyond the basic lexical unit, such as agreement ‘s’; ‘Tomorrow never comes’.
According to the 4M model, content and, to a big magnitude, early arrangement morphemes go with the entrenched style in contingent upon signification. The late bridge and outsider plan morphemes support the matrix terminology as they specify the grammatical foundation inside that the content and early whole morphemes can be established.