Conversation Analysis Conversation Analysis Like ‘discourse analysis’, Conversational Analysis provides a tool for conducting micro-analyses of classroom discourse and, in particular, for examining the sequential development of classroom talk. CA derives from a branch of sociology-ethnomethodology. Seedhouse identified five key principles of this method of enquiry: Indexicality, i.e. the use that interactants make of shared…
Communicative Language Testing Communicative Language Testing The advent of communicative language testing saw a growing preference for face-to-face interaction as the context in which the assessment of spoken language skills would occur. In communicative language testing, the target of test inferences is performance of a set of communicative tasks in various contexts of use. The…
Sociocultural Theory in Language Learning Sociocultural theory is based on work by the Russian psychologist, Vygotsky, and represents a fundamentally different way of looking at language and learning. Sociocultural theory is grounded in the ontology of the social individual. A sociocultural approach considers language and, by extension, second language acquisition as contextually situated and is…
IELTS Writing Task 1 | Leisure Time IELTS Writing Task 1 | Leisure Time ?Instructions: The table, graph or bar chart below shows the number of hours of leisure time during a week enjoyed by males and females across various employment status. Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information delineated in the…
Emergentism Emergentism is the name that has recently been given to a general approach to cognition that stresses the interaction between organism and environment and that denies the existence of pre-determined, domain specific faculties or capacities. Emergentism thus offers itself as an alternative to modular, ‘special nativist’ theories of the mind, such as theories of…
Lateralization Lateralization argues that the location of language functions is fixed in one of the brain’s two hemispheres, usually the left one. Cerebral lateralisation or cerebral dominance refers to the differential proficiency of the cerebral hemispheres for the acquisition, performance and control of certain specific neurological functions. Infants as young as four days show a…
Functionalist Theories of SLA Functionalist theories of L2 acquisition share a number of concerns with variability theories. For example, both are concerned not just with how linguistic knowledge is represented in the mind of the learner, but also with how this knowledge is used in discourse. Also, both types assume that syntax cannot be considered…
Test Specifications Test specifications – usually called ‘specs’ – are generative explanatory documents for the creation of test tasks. Specs tell us the nuts and bolts of how to phrase the test items, how to structure the test layout, how to locate the passage, and how to make a host of difficult choices as we…
Reverse Engineering Reverse engineering (RE) is an idea of ancient origin; the name was coined by Davidson and Lynch, but they are the first to admit that all they created was the name. RE is an analytical process of test creation that begins with an actual test question and infers the guiding language that drives…
Classroom Assessment Classroom Assessment According to Brookhart, in classroom assessment, assessment and learning are integrated within the classroom. She sees this in terms of Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the zone of proximal development, or that space between what the individual can accomplish independently and what he/she can do with assistance. Personal knowledge of the learner…