The article discusses the principle of connecting the way or ways foreign language is taught with the ways they are evaluated or tested. The author says this important connection can be made by providing concrete instructional applications including spoken language, portfolios and rubrics for assessing students’ writing proficiency. Historically speaking language teaching including English as a foreign language, has seen an emphasis on communicative language teaching methods since the early 1970’s when the term communicative competence was introduced. Since that time teachers have attempted to incorporate real world language usage in their classes and in their instructional materials, especially in adolescent and adult language instruction. Besides the author refers to four important points to make appropriate connections during the process of teaching and learning, the first is real use of languages in which student express a desire to communicate in authentic language, meaning they want to hear and use language outside of the language classroom; they want to use what they know for functional purpose: order food, send an e-mail to a friend and others. One of the interesting challenges for many language teachers is that the real world classroom activities are not often included in the textbooks, so teachers have to organize to apply new strategies in order to evaluate students’ knowledge.
Then we can find the purposes for language teaching and language learning, which is a very simple thing because teachers defined this aspect by the application of test and other types of evaluation, it means that always students are going to be evaluated in order to promote them to the next level, sometimes it could be devastated for the students because of the level or difficulty that test can be, but no matter what always teachers have to apply this tests to determine the knowledge. A particular case could be (TOEFL) that inevitability is one of the hardest tests in the world but is a requirement for the students who want to enter on english speaking colleges in USA, Canada, New Zealand and other english speaking countries.
Concluding this article the author expresses his desire to promote new strategies for language teaching and language learning in order to make more comfortable and easier the classes with new students, for example he mentioned role plays, rubrics, interviews, portfolios and other strategies that could be used to make a dynamic class. At the end, teachers must try to link the culture of the native country with the culture of the country with the second language, in this way students will learn to differentiate outstanding issues between both cultures from their own points of view, improving their language through their knowledge about costumes and cultures.
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