There is a fascinating correspondence at the moment on linguanet-
forum on the question: what transferable skills are we teaching when
we teach language? This message mentions some interesting German
research.
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Andrew Jameson
Chair, Russian Committee, ALL
Languages and Professional Development
1 Brook Street, Lancaster LA1 1SL UK
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> From: Graham Davies <[log in to unmask]>
> To: LinguaNET-Forum <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Lnet: thinking skills and MFL
> Date: 20 April 1999 17:29
>
> Dear Colleagues
>
> Cheryl's email on thinking skills and MFL really is raising some
> interesting points. When I qualified as a language teacher in the mid-1960s
> I was not at all happy with the orthodox methodology of the time. Learners
> were encouraged to behave like parrots, making the right noises but with
> little understanding of what they were saying and how it was structured.
> Grammar was a dirty word. Once I got into the classroom in my first
> teaching job I developed my own approach. I felt it was a good idea always
> to start from what the pupils knew about their mother tongue and to build
> on this. So, for example, when introducing German separable verbs I pointed
> out that English had something pretty similar, e.g. "I get up" = "ich stehe
> auf", but whereas we say "I get up at eight" Germans say "ich stehe um acht
> auf", so the difference only lies in the word order. This was understood
> even by the least able of pupils.
>
> Whenever possible I made links with English, pointing out that our two
> tongues came from a common source. This led to discussions about the
> arrival of the Saxons, who gave us the roots of our language, and the later
> Norman invasion which brought in a flood of French words. Raising awareness
> about language and the history of languages became as important as teaching
> the language itself. We were talking about cause and effect.
>
> Regarding the point made by Philip Hood about strategies adopted by pupils
> in completing Fun with Texts exercises, there is an interesting article
> that reports on the main strategies adopted by a sample group of German MT
> pupils who were observed (mainly working in pairs) while completing
> total-cloze exercises in English. The pupils were encouraged to talk about
> their reasons for choosing particular words. The strategies adopted were
> (in order of frequency):
>
> · Frequenzstrategien (looking for high-frequency words: "the", "a", "is",
> "in", etc)
> · Formale Strategien (using punctuation clues and counting the blanks
> representing missing letters)
> · Semantische Strategien (looking for semantically linked words)
> · Gedächtnisstrategien (remembering the original text - if it had been
> looked at before)
> · Grammatische Strategien (applying knowledge of grammatical rules, e.g.
> single subject = single verb form ending in "s")
> · Weltwissenstrategien (general knowledge about the world, e.g. a text
> about superstition might contain something about black cats)
> · Textuelle Strategien (looking for words appropriate to the type of text:
> formal text, dialogue etc)
> · Ratestrategien (guessing - the least used strategy!)
>
> Source: Trippen G., Legenhausen L. and Wolff D. (1988) "Lernerstrategien
> und Lernprozesse bei der Bearbeitung von CALL-Software", in Kühlwein W. and
> Spillner B. (eds.) Sprache und Individuum, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag.
>
> The point worth emphasising is that kids do *think* about language. Even
> the weakest pupils were observed to use some kind of strategy. A later
> research study showed that by raising the kids' awareness about language
> and demonstrating to them which strategies worked best, both their ability
> to complete the exercises and their ability to use the language improved.
>
> ATB
> Graham Davies
>
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