Sat, Mar 07, 2009 page4

• Teachers stress rules of thumb

  DEVIATIONS A linguistics professor said at a forum for teaching English as a second language that students needed to learn that native speakers often break the rules

  • By Jenny W. Hsu / STAFF REPORTER
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  Teaching English learners the language’s rules of thumb and the reasoning behind them would better empower students to make informed decisions, a linguistics professor said at a two-day forum that opened in Taipei yesterday, encouraging instructors to teach children English through play.

  University of Michigan English Institute director Diane-Larsen Freeman said that English was both a vehicle and a subject that is constantly changing. In addition to teaching students English through rote memory, teachers should make learning interesting and applicable to their daily lives so as not to make English a boring subject, she said.

  She was speaking at the 2009 International Conference on English Language Teaching and Testing sponsored by the Language Training and Testing Center in Taipei.

  Some students may want rules, Freeman said, because rules provide a sense of security and teachers must honor that.

  But teachers can deal with that phenomenon by teaching students the rules of thumb and that there would be exceptions to the rules because language is not fixed, she said.

  “Anytime we give a rule, we need to make it clear that we are teaching generalizations that may be true 80 percent of the time, but that there are going to be deviations,” she said.

  Whenever possible, she said, teachers should teach the reason behind the rules because as students comprehend why things are the way they are, they will be empowered to make better decisions.

  Larsen-Freeman said that language was constantly evolving and teachers should avoid treating “grammar on one hand and vocabulary on the other” because the two elements are very much intertwined. She said that instructors should be mindful to teach students how to use the language in a conventional manner.

  For example, she said, the sentence “Your helping me is what I want” is grammatically correct, but is less often used by a native speaker. In a setting that requires help from a friend, a native speaker would more likely say, “Will you help me,” which is both grammatically accurate and conventionally used.

  Larsen-Freeman said that children worldwide were generally leaning English at an increasingly younger age. However, the professor said she believed it was not so important to start second-language acquisition so early because it takes away from learning something else. A child of 10 or 11 would be a very good learner, she said.

  Children also learn best through engagement, she said, adding that young learners best acquire a language by playing with it through games, songs and stories.

  Another presenter at the forum, Byron Gong (龔營) of the Soochow University English Department, said in his paper that through researching 914 writing samples of 457 test candidates, he found that topic development was most problematic for Taiwanese students in the writing section of International English Language Testing System (IELTS).

  Most Taiwanese IELTS candidates do not extend their writing sufficiently to reach a satisfactory level and that they often lack confidence and practice in academic writing, he said.

  Other topics that are covered in the two-day forum include using picture books to facilitate classroom-based discussion in a college curriculum, developing synchronous online English writing instruction and the challenge of English language testing in Asia.
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