ELTWeekly Vol. 4 Issue#6 | February 6, 2012 | ISSN 0975-3036 Webinar: Dealing with challenging learners Video: From Communicative Competence to Teaching Speaking Webinar: Spoken grammar/lexical approach Video: Reading Strategies…
The present paper focuses on the impact of Area on the undergraduate learners’ attitudes towards the English language as regards to the situation of ELT in India. SLA research has consistently pointed out that attitudes towards the target language play an important role in learning it. The research on the role of attitudes in English language teaching naturally interests the investigator as a college teacher of English in an Arts college. The researcher has examined the undergraduate learners’ attitudes towards the English language. This paper focuses on the undergraduate learners of English in Arts colleges affiliated to the Gujarat University (Ahmedabad) but located in urban and rural areas. It has been observed that students do want to learn and improve their knowledge of English but somehow they shy away from the language. On their part, the college teachers of English have consistently displayed a lack of understanding of the students’ needs, problems, and interests.
The study was aimed at providing more insights on the application of the corpus-based approach. The objectives of the study were to compare its learning effects with the conventional teaching method's effects on collocations of synonyms. The study was conducted with two groups of L2 learners. One group was randomly assigned to be the experimental group studying with the corpus-based approach whereas the other represented the comparison group studying with the conventional teaching method. The learners from both groups were matched in pairs according to their language proficiency and collocation knowledge on the pretest. During the study, the experimental group was trained through paper-based and hands-on activities to deal with the concordance information in the corpus whereas the comparison group was taught collocations of synonyms through conventional activities such as explicit teaching. The instruments for collecting data included the pretest, posttest, prewriting and postwriting.