Resume of Macrostrategies for Language Teaching

Resume of Macrostrategies for  Language Teaching

Chapter 1 : Conceptualizing Teaching Acts

This chapter has been concerned mainly with the general nature of teaching as a professional activity. Whether teachers characterize their activity as a job or as work, career, occupation, or vocation they play an unmistakable and unparalleled role in the success of any educational enterprise.

Whether they see themselves as passive technicians, reflective practitioners, transformative intellectuals, or as a combination, they are all the time involved in a critical mind engagement. Their success and the satisfaction they derive from it depends to a large extent on the quality of their mind engagement One way of enhancing the quality of their mind engagement is to recognize the symbiotic relationship between theory, research, and practice, and between professional, personal, and experiential knowledge.

Chapter  2 : Understanding Post Method  Pedagogy

There are at least three broad, overlapping strands of thought that emerge from what we have discussed so far. First, the traditional concept of method with its generic set of theoretical principles and classroom techniques offers only a limited and limiting perspective on language learning and teaching. Second, learning and teaching needs, wants, and situations are unpredictably numerous. Therefore current models of teacher education programs can hardly prepare teachers to tackle all these unpredictable needs, wants, and situations. Third, the primary task of in-service and pre-service teacher education programs is to create conditions for present and prospective teachers to acquire the necessary knowledge, skill, authority, and autonomy to construct their own personal pedagogic knowledge. Thus, there is an imperative need to move away from a method-based pedagogy to a post method pedagogy.

One possible way of conceptualizing and constructing a post method pedagogy is to be sensitive to the parameters of particularity, practicality, and possibility, which can be incorporated in the macro strategic framework. The framework, then, seeks to transform classroom practitioners into strategic thinkers, strategic teachers, and strategic explorers who channel their time and effort in order to:

       • reflect on the specific needs, wants, situations, and processes of learning and teaching

       • stretch their knowledge, skill, and attitude to stay informed and involved

       • design and use appropriate micro strategies to maximize learning potential in the classroom

       • monitor and evaluate their ability to react to myriad situations in meaningful ways.

Chapter 3 : Maximizing Learning Opportunities

There are no satisfactory answers to those questions .However, what seems to be clear is that both teachers and learners teachers more than learners have a responsibility to create and utilize learning opportunities in class. What is also clear is that, more than anything else, the classroom is the prime site where the success or failure of any attempt to generate learning opportunities will be determined. The authentic classroom interactional episodes used and analyze in this chapter are very short, and together constitute no more than a few minutes of talk between the participants in classroom.

 Chapter 4: Minimizing Perceptual Mismatches

The importance of minimizing perceptual mismatches in the language classroom. It also shows how challenging it is to identify and analyze them. Only a concerted and cooperative effort on the part of the teacher and the learner will bring out the gap between teacher intentions and learner interpretations. An understanding of the similarities and differences in the way the participants perceive classroom aims and events can only lead to an effective pedagogic intervention.

Chapter 5 :Facilitating Negotiated Interaction

Facilitating negotiated interaction focused on how teachers and learners manage classroom discourse, and how such management influences the very nature and scope of input, interaction, output, and, ultimately,L2 development. An underlying thread that runs through this chapter is the joint responsibility vested with both teachers and learners. Without the willing and active cooperation of all the participants, it would be almost impossible to create a conducive atmosphere in the classroom needed to promote negotiated interaction that involves textual, interpersonal, and ideational aspects of language use.

Chapter  6 : Promoting Learner Autonomy

It is clear that any serious promotion of learner autonomy involves the willing cooperation of teachers as well as learners .They are required to jointly determine the degree of autonomy that would be appropriate for their specific learning and teaching context, and the right path to reach their goals. This might call for a fundamental attitudinal change on their part. In practical terms, what this means is that teachers have to determine the degree of control they are willing and able to yield to their students in terms of curricular aims and objectives, selection of tasks and materials, and assessment of learning outcomes. Conversely, this also means that learners have to decide, with some guidance from their teachers if necessary, the degree of responsibility they are willing and able to take in those areas of  learning and teaching.

Chapter 7 : Fostering Language Awareness

Language awareness is essential for the realization of an individual’s full potential

and, through that, for the realization of a nation’s democratic ideals. Fostering general and critical language awareness is one way of connecting the curricular agenda of a teaching program with the learning purpose of an individual learner, and both with contemporary

 sociopolitical order. While language awareness activities are commonly associated with the development of advanced skills in critical thinking, reading, and writing, they are useful for grammar learning and teaching as well.

Chapter 8 :Activating Intuitive Heuristics

.           Based on the discussion in this chapter, it is fairly reasonable to conclude that

-          Activating the intuitive heuristics that every learner naturally possesses is a worthy goal to Pursue.

-          There are several options available to those L2 teachers who wish to pursue that worthy goal.

It is clear that linguistic input that is carefully structured, accompanied by classroom interaction that is suitably managed, can provide a rich amount of sample data necessary for L2 learners to search for and understand the pattern underlying L2

grammatical systems.

Chapter 9 :Contextualizing Linguistic Input

Contextualizing linguistic input Teaching language as discourse, therefore, demands contextualization of linguistic input. It must, however, be recognized that contextualization of linguistic input that begins with a focus on discourse challenges the traditional way of language teaching. For teaching can no longer depend on a contextualized set of linguistic items preselected and frequency  by syllabus designers and textbook writers.

Chapter 10: Integrating Language Skills

Integrate language skills, we will be assisting learners to engage in classroom activities that involve a meaningful and simultaneous engagement with language in use. As Oxford (2000, p. 18) puts it eloquently, for the instructional loom to produce a large strong, beautiful, colorful tapestry, the strands consisting of the four primary skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing must be closely interwoven.

Chapter 11 : Ensuring Social Relevant

         The general discussion, sample micro strategies, and exploratory projects in this chapter all highlight the view that language planning and pedagogy are closely linked to power and politics. Teachers and teacher educators, therefore, have to seriously consider several social, political, historical, and economic conditions that shape the lives of their learners and their linguistic and cultural identity .More specifically, any language learning and teaching enterprise, if it aims to be socially relevant, must critically consider, among other things, the process of standardization, the role of the home language and the use of appropriate teaching materials.

Chapter 12: Raising Cultural  Consciousness

Raising cultural consciousness diversity of world views L2 learners bring with them to the class. One possible alternative is to create critical cultural consciousness among our learners .Creating critical cultural consciousness in the L2 classroom offers immense possibilities for teachers as well as learners to explore the nuances of cultural and sub cultural practices in a meaningful way. It involves constant and continual self-reflection guided by one’s own value system sediment from one’s own cultural heritage.

This critical self-reflection eventually leads to meaningful cultural growth, which has to be constructed consciously and systematically through a meaningful negotiation of differences between the culture individuals inherited by birth and the culture they learned through

experience. The inherited culture should be allowed to interact freely with the learned culture so that there is mutual enrichment. The key to this enrichment is the lived experiences of individuals, along with their capacity to develop critical cultural consciousness. In the fast-emerging world of economic, cultural, and communicational globalization, creating critical cultural consciousness in the L2 classroom is not an option but an obligation.

Chapter 13 : Monitoring Teaching Acts

The M & M scheme for classroom observation presented in this chapter offers new possibilities of, and procedures for, self observing ,self-analyzing, and self-evaluating teaching acts. It is only by systematically analyzing classroom input and interaction, interpreting their analysis, evaluating their teaching effectiveness, and putting all this developing experiential knowledge together that teachers can make sense of what happens in their classroom. The M & M scheme provides the necessary knowledge and skill for teachers to explore their classroom processes and practices.