ENG 345: Week 9

            In Brown chapter 17, he talks about integrating the four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. He talks about why the skills have not been integrated before, which include that it is easier to separate courses and that not everyone is learning English for the same reason. He then gives reasons why it is beneficial to include all four skills of learning a language, such as written and spoken language often bear a relationship to each other; to ignore that relationship is to ignore the richness of language and often one skill will reinforce another by learning to speak we model it off of what we hear. He then shows models of the skills integrated, which are content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, theme-based instruction, and experiential learning. He ends the chapter with an integrated lesson outline that includes all four language-learning skills. The warm-up (5 min.) focuses on listening, the presentation (10 min.) focuses on listening, reading, and speaking, the listening focus (10 min.) focuses on listening as well as reading, writing, and speaking, the grammar focus (15 min.) focuses on listening, reading, writing, and speaking, the focus on types of workers (15 min.) focuses on reading, speaking, listening, and writing, and finally the wind-down (5 min.) focuses on listening and speaking. The four language learning skills should be combined and integrated into the classroom. It helps reinforce the subject areas and they can each help get an overall language learning experience. It helps students be well rounded in their second language as well.

            In Kumar chapter 9, he talks about contextualizing linguistic input and the four main contexts. The first context he talks about is the linguistic context, which is to understand the meaning of grammatical or lexical items. He gives the example of the word table, which has multiple definitions when used in different contexts. He also gives the example of sentence cohesion. He talks about the use of removing redundancies to make it cohesive.  The next context he talks about is the extra-linguistic context, which deals with prosodic signals such as stress and intonation. He gives the example of stressing the word him even after the question asked is a “what” question. The third context is situational. The situational context is about words and utterances having different meanings in different contexts. Kumar gives the example of “I now pronounce you man and wife” as only having meaning if it is in a church and spoken by a priest. If a store clerk says the same sentence, it does not have the same meaning. The last context is extra-situational, which deals with context. He gives the example of a woman from Zambia greeting another woman and telling her that she looks like she has put on weight, in Zambia that is seen as a compliment, whereas in America it is seen as an insult. These contexts make a lot of sense and there are a lot of different meanings that language learners have to pick up on when they are learning a second language.