Current TESL issues (Teaching English as a Second Language) in an interactive fashion enriched with distinctive keywords and tags and comment forms to discuss the issues
Error Analysis Error Analysis (EA) The history of error analysis dates back from the late 1960s. Corder spelt out the theoretical rationale and empirical procedures for carrying out an error analysis. Corder (1967) noted that errors provided the researcher with evidence of who language was learnt, and also that they served as devices by which…
Postmethod Pedagogy Postmethod pedagogy allows us to go beyond and overcome the limitations of method-based pedagogy. Within such a broad-based definition, Kumaravadivelu (2003) visualizes postmethod pedagogy as a 3-dimentional system consisting of pedagogic parameters of: Particularity: The parameter of particularity requires that any language pedagogy must be sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching…
Attention Attention is viewed as a mainly conscious process involving working memory (Ellis, 2008). Suchert (2004) defines attention as “A process in which biological mechanisms interact when goal-directed behaviours and stimulus-driven responses converge in action (p. 144). Schmidt (1990, 1993, 1994) has argued that attention is essential to learning; that is, there is no learning…
Genie and Critical Period Hypothesis Genie Born in 1957, Genie experienced extreme deprivation beginning at about twenty months of age when she was confined to a dark room in the back of a house, harnessed to a potty seat by day and strapped in a sleeping bag in a caged crib at night, until she…
Individual Differences Individual Differences Learners clearly differ enormously in their preferred approach to L2 learning, but it is impossible to say which learning style works best (Ellis, 2008). One of the major problems is that the concept of ‘learning style’ is ill-defined, apparently overlapping with other individual differences of both an affective and a cognitive…
Infants’ Language Learning | TESL Issues Infants’ Language Learning | TESL Issues All normal children appear to contain within themselves the ability to create a language in spite of wide variations in experience. External auditory simulation is available to the fetus, although attenuated (Armitage, Baldwin & Vince, 1980, p. 1173). Mother’s voice is a prominent…
Input Processing Theory Input Processing Theory VanPatten’s (1996) Input Processing Theory is based on the standard information processing viewpoint. Namely, working memory is limited in capacity (at least in terms of each modality), making it difficult for learners to attend concurrently to different stimuli in the input. He identified ‘detection’ as the key attentional process,…
Evidence-Centered Design Evidence-centered Design was developed by Mislevy. It is important that we see the tasks or items that we design for tests as part of a larger picture, and one approach to doing this in a systematic way is ECD, a methodology for test design and construction developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS) (Mislevy, 2003).…
Speech Acts Speech acts are carried out over various turns and their exact shape takes into account interlocutor reactions. In other words, conversation is co-constructed by both interlocutors, which is something that can never be simulated with DCTs. Speech acts are certainly the most researched area of pragmatics, and they are arguably the most social,…
Competence Competence corresponds to the I-language (Internal Language). Competency is the speaker/hearer’s knowledge of his language. It’s an abstract version of knowledge. Competency is independent of situation. It represent what the speaker knows in the abstract. The different types of competence are: grammatical competency, linguistic competency, communicative competency, pragmatic competency, Communicative Competency: Discourse Competency: The…