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Towards integrating television materials into english teaching and learning at the national university of Rwanda: an exploratory case study of the second year english course

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par Pravda Mfurankunda
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town - Masters in Education 2005
  

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2.5. Television and language skills

The importance of television in the classroom context has to a certain extent been handled in Section 2.4.3. Here I want to emphasise the role of television in assisting learners to activate their knowledge in English in general and to develop their language skills in particular. This section especially explores some aspects of language skills that are directly concerned with the language the learner-viewer draws from the television. The debate is done in line with the second subsidiary research question (i.e. How can television materials be used in the English class?)

The language skills that are my concern in this study are listening skills in the first place and speaking skills in the second. The NUR English programmes contain courses that aim at developing these skills. The problem that this mini thesis addresses is that television materials are not exploited in these language classes to reinforce the input learners gain from tape recordings they normally deal with. From students' views though, former EPLM students were sometimes exposed to TV materials in their classes. Why can't this be done in the Faculty of Arts where English students need more TV to develop their language skills? The answer to this question is tackled in subsequent chapters, particularly in Chapter 4 which analyses the data.

Developing language skills is a broad topic in the field of language teaching and learning. This mini thesis deals only with aspects of the class setting where a number of language skills can be enhanced. Such aspects could be, for example, classroom activities or tasks that should be designed around given television material (i.e. news, documentary). The latter constitutes the core unit of planning the instruction. Hence, specific language skills like listening skills might be developed. Other points that need to be tackled here are processes that are central to listening comprehension (i.e. top-down and bottom-up processes) and Brown and Yule's model (1983) of interactional and transactional functions of language.

Research on the role of television in language learning has been carried out by several scholars. Work by Sherrington (1973) paid attention to television and language skills. Others like Schroenn (1987) and Choat and Griffin (1989), elaborated on using television in the primary schools. All three of them acknowledge the importance of developing EFL learners' language skills through television.

Concerning television's contribution to language teaching in general, Sherrington (1973:25) argues that the medium enables us to structure for the viewer the contexts within which language behaviour occurs. In this case, television touches upon the listening skill in that the viewer's comprehension depends on the degree of integration of sound and vision. Besides, experience of television can be an effective means of integrating the skills we plan to develop, such integration is vital if we are to find time and place to fit television viewing experiences into English teaching and learning. Schroenn (1987:13) stressed that we have to ensure that we do not lose sight of the language skills to be developed, and that we do not neglect our central concern with promoting our pupils' language competence. Choat and Griffin (1989: 15) support the view held by Schroenn in the sense that children need to be encouraged to look and listen carefully to television and talk about what they have seen. The writers advise teachers to guide their pupils wisely into treating television appropriately in order to achieve success.

Debate over which language skill to promote using television ranges from an emphasis on speaking skills on the one hand to reading skills on the other. According to Choat and Griffin, it appeared that stress was put on reading skills (1989:26). It is obvious that the medium of television fits with receptive skills (i.e. listening in particular). Thus, as Sherrington explains, watching any television programme itself involves a receptive ability on the part of the viewer, to understand what he sees and hears (1973:66). Choat and Griiffin on the other hand, report on other peoples' assertions on the development of reading skills using television. They believe that television exercises and develops reading skills such as shape recognition, initial letter sounds, word combinations and difficult spelling combinations (1989:26)

The following section focuses on learning principles and approaches to listening and speaking that promote English comprehension and support interactional and transactional functions of the language. These are issues that are related to the language the viewer (i.e. NUR second year English students) comes across on television and is supposed to take hold of for various purposes, including academic purposes. In the section below, I deal first of all with speaking skills.

2.5.1. Speaking skills.

To begin with, it is necessary to be aware of what a skill is and how speaking can be referred to as one. According to Bygate (1991:3) it is obvious that in order to be able to speak a foreign language there is a set of requirements that one has to fulfil, such as knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Knowledge is not an end in itself in the teaching and learning process. There is also a skill and the distinction between the two is crucial. Knowledge in this case can be for instance making decisions on how to produce language and adapt it to circumstances involved. On its part, a skill may have to do among other things with imitating and practising what you know.

In this respect, Bygate gives a brief background on two common and basic skills that have attracted scholarly attention for years and that are closely linked with oral skills and /or speaking skills: motor-perceptive skills and interactional skills. The first has been associated with the audio-lingual approach to language teaching, the kind of skills that involve perceiving, recalling, and articulating in the correct order sounds and structures of the language. (1991:5) The second type of skill is referred to as controlling one's own language production and having to make one's own choices (Wilkins cited in Bygate,p.6). Bygate (1991:6) has the following to say about interactional skills:

Interaction skills involve making decisions about communication, such as what to say, how to say it, and whether to develop it, in accordance with ones' intentions, while maintaining the desired relations with others ...

The scholar suggests two kinds of skill when one has to communicate meaning as part of the overall objective of the interaction. Firstly, people organise what they have to communicate and secondly they develop skills in solving problems which arise from spoken exchanges (1991:22).

With regard to speaking, Florez (1999:1) defines it as an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing and receiving and processing information. Exploring the scope of the skill, she recommends what should be the learners' requirements as far as speaking is concerned. She says that speaking requires that learners not only know how to produce specific points of language such as grammar, pronunciation, or vocabulary (linguistic competence), but also that they understand when, why, and in what ways to produce language (sociolinguistic competence) (1999:1) (see Section 2.3.4 on Communicative approach to language teaching).

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