Secong_Language_Acquisition

Secong Language Acquisition This is a class of 20 university graduates (12 females, 8 males) who major at business and have just come to England for two weeks. They are all about 21years old and have learned English for 2~4 years in China. Most of them are very outgoing and like to communicate with others. According to the language test at the beginning, half of them are at the advanced level, while the other half are at the intermediate level. What they want to achieve is to improve their communicative skills in business trades and apply for jobs in big business companies in England. What I would like to teach them are some most commonly used expressions , such as, vocabularies, phrases and sentences about business affairs. Through the centralized study of these business language, it’s beneficial for them to acquire the basic talking skills of doing business and improve the fluency and accuracy of their speaking in a short time, which may also help them to gain more confidence in the coming interview and the real business situation in the future. What teaching approachs I will adopt for my learners are “Get it right from the beginning”, “Just listen and Read”, “let’s talk”. Initially, “Get it right from beginning” can be one of the effective methods for these learners to acquire these business expressions and remember them. As a matter of fact that Chinese students are always accustomed to the traditional grammatical instruction, as well as the learners in this class are all adults who already have a good metalinguistic knowledge of their own language, it’s very possible that they will prefer this approach. Thus, according to The Grammar Translation Approach and Audiolingual Instruction, the students will be clearly exposed to a specific list which inlude some basic business vocabularies, phrases and sentences, accompanied by Chinese translation in class at first. After my explicit explanation, they will be asked to drill them after me both chorally and individually. Then each of them will be given a card in which written the Chinese meaning of these expressions, what they have to do is to translate them into English in front of the class. However, based on the study “Grammar plus communicative practice” by Sandra Savignon, even though the students in ‘communicative’ group had no more advantages than the ones in normal ‘audiolingual’ groups in linguistic competence, they were enormously superior in the expressive and communicative abilities. It is obviously indicative of the traditional grammar instruction and pure repetition can not give sufficient opportunities for the learners to interact with others in normal conversation by using the new knowledge. Therefore, I still need some extra activities to help the students to consolidate the new expressions and enable them to make use of them properly in communication. My second activitiy for my students is to provide them with a series of listening materials which specifically involve these expressions used in different business dialogues, such as introducing products, negotiating with others, or persuading the consumers to purchase the commodities. Meanwhile, every student will be also given a piece of paper in which drawn some pictures related to the dialogues respectively. After listening, they will be asked to match the pictures with the different dialogues. In the third activity, students will be given several pieces of reading materials which also include these expressions, and they will be asked to do some multi-choices according to the content in these passages. These two activitities are on the basis of “Just listen…and write” approach, which hypothesizes that language acquisition takes place when learners are exposed to comprehensible input through listening and reading. In these two activities, the students are likely to discover the proper usuage of these business expressions and consolidate them through effectively by receiving native-speaker input from tapes and understanding the reading materials set in the real business situation. It also correspond to the idea that the students would really improve if they pay attention to how a language point is used through various focus listening and reading, which has been proved by Bill VanPatten in his “Processing Instruction” research. However, although these kinds of activities can make the students understand the proper use of these business expressions in the right situation, they still haven’t got chances to put their knowledge into practice and really improve their communicative skills in the business trades. As the learners’ main goal is to enhance their communicative skills in business marketing, “Let’s Talk” is the most beneficial and useful way for them to utilize the expressions they have learned to communicate with others. There are threee kinds of activities I would like to do with my students. The first activity is “The Presentation of A New Product”. Every student has to pick one of the cards in my hand, in which drawn different kinds of new products, such as a mobile phone, a television, a dishwasher and so on. After one minute’s preparation, the students will act as sales staffs and give a brief introduction of their products by using the expressions they have learned in front of the class one by one. During the a student’s introduction, other students will act as the consumers and decide whether to buy the produces or not according to the introduction. At last, the one who achieves most of the orders from the consumers will be given the honorary title of “The Best Seller”. The second activity is called” Mock-Selling”. In this activity, students will work in pairs to imitate the real sales situations in shops. However, according to the fact that the students have different language levels in this class, I will get one advanced students to work with one intermediate student in every pair. Based on Michael Long and Patricia Poter’s “Learners talking to learners” research, such arrangement will effectively drive the intermediate students to produce more expressions and develop their communicative abilities, as the conversations with the advanced learners last longer and have more challengings. In pairs, one students will act as the seller, while the other one will take the role of consumer. What they have to do is to use the expressions to carry out a simulative sales process about a specific product. It’s extremely helpful for the students to get involved in real business situation and practise how to communicate with the customers properly. Meanwhile, In light of the research carried by Kim McDonough, through such kinds of Learner-Learner interaction, the students may get some negative feedbacks from their partners and have a more accurate refomulation of their previous utterance, which is absolutely beneficial for them to improve the accuracy of their expressions. The third activity is called “Marketing”. In this activity, the whole class will be devided into two groups, while each of them will involve 5 intermediate students and 5 advanced students. The two groups will represent two companies, which both sell televisions, and the students in the groups will act as the company representatives. I will act as the representative of a huge shopping mall, who has the crucial right to decide which company’s television is of more advantages and will be sold in the shopping mall. Thus, in each group, the students have to corporate to make a clear and wondeful presentation of their products by coming up with different opinions and discussing them together. Each group should elect one person to give the final presentation. The group which has got a more wonderful and specific introduction of its product will achieve the opportunity to sell televisions in the big shopping mall. According to the study “The dynamics of pair work” carried by Naomi Storch, such “collaborative” interaction in which students work together to achieve a final goal can make them successfully engage in the co-construction of the language knowledge and improve their speaking. Meanwhile, this activity can also provide the students with practical business confrontation, which make them really experience the business maketing. Through all kinds of the activities above, the students will effectively acquire the basic business expressions and make use of them in communication correctly and fluently. However, they still need to make a lot of effort to build up more professional expressions for their business career in the future. According to the established researches and general classroom teaching experience, different approaches all have their own advantages and disadvantages, such as, even though “Get it right from the beginning” method and “Just listen and read” approch can make the students achieve a full understanding of the target language point through traditional instruction and reading and listening, they are not sufficient for the student to improve their oral ability proficiently. Meanwhile, “Let’s talk” instruction also has its limitation as it always neglect focusing on form. Thus, the most effective way to teach the students is to absorb the pros of every teaching approach and make combined use of them, that means intergrating attention to both form instructions and communicative practice. Based on my own experience, as a students, we always prefer the teacher give us a explicit explanation of the language point and offer us different kinds of activities to make use of them and consolidate our knowledge. Moreover, we also would like to create the activities for language using ourselves. Such activities will make our class more colourful and interesting, which make us involve in the class and the knowledge on a large scale. The traditional teacher-centred instruction is definitely deficient for our improvement, what we need is to have more opportunities to conduct the study ourselves and make them more creative and interesting. As my goal is to be an English teacher in China in the future, I will pay attention to what students need particularly and design the most suitable teaching approaches for them.