Unit 1 language and language teaching 1. What makes a good language teacher? ● Ethic devotion
● Professional qualities
● Personal styles
2. Views on language learning and learning in general:
● Process-oriented theories: concerned with how the mind organizes new
information such as habit formation, induction, making inference, hypothesis testing and generalization.
● Condition-oriented theories: emphasize the nature of the human and physical
context in which the language learning take place, such as the number of the students and the kind of input learners receive, and the atmosphere.
3. How can one become a language teacher?
It involves more factors and longer learning time, and may never be finished.
Stage 1: all English teachers are supposed to have a sound command of English. Stage 2: learning, practice and reflection.
● Learning:
? Learning from others’ experience (empirical knowledge gained
through reading and observation)
? Learning the received knowledge (language learning theories,
educational psychology, language teaching methodology, etc.)
● Practice
? Pre-service practice (pseudo practice)
? Real classroom practice
● Reflection: take on reflection seriously and keep reflection
Goal: (do not have an end) one can never become a perfect teacher. There is always
room for improvement.
language development other's experience
received knowledge
own experience Practice Reflectio Professional competence Stage 1 Stage 2 Goal
Unit 2 communicative principles and task-based language teaching
1.What is communicative competence
●Linguistic competence
Knowledge of language itself
●Pragmatic competence
The choice of the vocabulary and structure depends on the setting, the relative
status of the speakers and their relationship.
●Discourse competence
The ability to understand or to express a topic logically and coherently by
effectively employing or comprehending the cohesive marks, such as first,
second.
●Strategic competence
Searching for other means of expression, such as using a similar phrase ……
●Fluency
the ability to link units of speech together with facility and without strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation)
CLT: communicative language teaching
2.Principles of communicative language teaching
●Communication principle
Activities that involve real communication promote learning.
●Task principle
Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning.
●Meaningfulness principle
Language that is meaningful to the learner support the learning process.
3.Main features of communicative activities
●Communicative purpose
There must be some information gap that students seek to bridge
●Communicative desire
A real need to communicate
●Content not form
They must have some massage they want to communicate
●Variety of language
●No teacher intervention
●No material control
TBLT: task- based language teaching
4.Four components of a task
● A purpose
Make sure students have a reason for undertaking the task
● A context