Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and exercises for Electronics for Competitive examination

Total Physical Response (TPR) by James Asher

Total Physical Response (TPR), developed by James Asher, is a language teaching method built around the coordination of speech and action; it attempts to teach language through physical (motor) activity.

Approach to Language Learning

• Asher does not directly discuss the nature of language.
• Asher’s language learning theories are reminiscent of the views of other behavioral psychologists.

Method Design and Objectives

• The general objectives of TPR are to teach oral proficiency at a beginning level.
• The type of syllabus Asher uses can be inferred from an analysis of the exercise types employed in TPR classes. This analysis reveals the use of a sentence-based syllabus, with grammatical and lexical criteria

1.4. Teaching Units

The entire plan for a group of students contains a series of basic elements that we call teaching units, lesson plans, or Units of Work. It is very difficult to set a guideline or a proposal for the best way to organize a unit of work; however, in that sense, it should be clear that some elements must be specified:

• Topic & Title
• Learning Objectives
• Contents
• Methodology
• Activities
• Assessment

2. Criteria for Sequencing Contents and Objectives

The new legal framework considers CONTENTS divided into four different blocks. This does not imply an order; it may be an organizational criterion.

Content Sequencing Parameters

To sequence contents, it may be useful to choose a content organizer following some parameters:

• The type of text
• The

Linguistic Contributions to Foreign Language Teaching

What is a language? It is both a state (érgon) and an activity (energeia).

Traditional Language Concepts and Saussure

Plato believed that language was a copy of reality, while Aristotle argued for the conventional origin of language. Ferdinand de Saussure built on the belief that language as a form could be analyzed and responded to certain laws. He stated, "Language is a representation, and not a substance."

Functional Linguistic Theory and Structuralism

The functional investigative method involves searching for and isolating minimum units applied to language. Distributionalism is based on the possibility of dividing the spoken chain into regular units through distributional analysis.

Chomsky:

Literature and Discourse Competence

Discourse Competence involves understanding and producing messages beyond the sentence level, including both spoken and written forms. In the primary stage, short narratives, poems, songs, dialogues, and descriptions provide excellent instances of language in context.

Discourse analysis rests on the notion that language is more than a sentence-based phenomenon. Therefore, literature in schools is a valuable resource to improve discourse competence.

Key Concepts in Discourse Analysis

• Context
• Cohesion and Coherence
• Bottom-up and Top-down processing
• Sentence-based vs. Discourse-based approaches

Literature and the CEF: Basic Competencies

The outline below focuses on the pedagogical advantages derived from working with...

The Notion of Communicative Competence

Before underlining the main instructional methods used for the acquisition and learning of a second language, it is necessary to tackle the main concept our legal framework refers to: communicative competence. Let us analyze it first.

Defining Communication and Competence

The idea of communicative competence is the result of a convergence between Chomsky's conceptions and sociolinguistic investigations into communication situations. Dell Hymes (1972) defines it as: "the shared knowledge of grammar rules and their rules of use." Widdowson notes that usage and use are not one and the same.

M. Canale and M. Swain (1980) mention a triple competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic. D. Coste (1978)...