[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

Implications for teaching
Three core issues need to be addressed in planning speaking activities for an English class. The first is to determine what kinds of speaking skills the class will focus on. Is it all three of the genres described in the preceding posts, or will some receive greater attention than others?

Informal needs analysis is the starting point here. Procedures for determining needs include observation of learners carrying out different kinds of communicative tasks, questionnaires, interviews, and diagnostic testing (e.g., Tsang and Wong 2002). The second issue is to identify teaching strategies to “teach” (i.e., provide opportunities for learners to acquire) each kind of talk.

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

In a previous post I explained some of the reasons why we should focus on bottom-up strategies for listening and reading. In this post, I’d like to show how this might work in practice for the skill of listening.

Even learners who have a good range of grammar and vocabulary can struggle with understanding natural speech. And the same is true even for listeners who have a reasonable grasp of the topic and good prediction skills (usually associated with top-down strategies). There could be a number of reasons for this, but one essential reason is that they have difficulty in decoding the “signal” which is coming at them. By “decoding”, I mean perceiving the sounds of English and linking them mentally to words and phrases that they have in their store of language. (Even so-called native speakers struggle with this – for example, the recent case of a man who thought the phrase “as opposed to” was “as a pose to” until he was nearly 20.)

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

English grammar has been closely bound up with that of Latin since the 16^th century, when English first began to be taught in schools. Given that grammatical instruction prior to this had focused on Latin, it’s not surprising that teachers based their grammars of English on that of Latin. The title of John Hewes’ work of 1624 neatly encapsulates its desire to make English grammar conform to that of Latin: A Perfect Survey of The English Tongve, Taken According to the Vse and Analogie of the Latine. Since English is not derived from Latin, and has a very different grammatical structure, this is not a helpful model.

Despite this, eighteenth century grammarians persisted in imposing the Latinate structure on English, as shown in this treatment of the English noun declension by Wells Egelsham in A Short Sketch of English Grammar (1780):

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