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Showing posts from September, 2021

Should language teaching programmes include information about cultural matters ?

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As Michael Gove said “Learning a foreign language and the culture that goes with it , is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and Imaginative sympathy and cultural Outlook of children” with that being said   , learning a new language has to be accompanied   a broad background about that culture . leaning about the new culture will allow you to compare it with your culture thus with your mother tongue . this would make language learning much easier . one of the most common reasons why some one would learn a certain language is the admiration and affection to that culture for example , my friend   really admires and loves Persian people that why he learnt that language and quickly . Japanese is a difficult langue because we are not familiar with its grammar and characters but thousands of people from various nationalities learn Japanese and Korean due to their rich culture and amazing cities .   Learning the target language culture would make it easier to un

Noam Chomsky's distinction between 'competence' and 'performance' and the influence this has had on foreign language teaching.

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  According to Chomsky competence is the persons knowledge of the rules of his language that he uses to comprehend and establish unlimited number of well formed and correct sentences as well as discover the grammatical errors and ambiguation ,it can be seen as a prefectionist form of the language . There are several types of competence such as (Communicative Competence, Grammatical Competence, Sociolinguistic Competence, Discourse Competence, Strategic Competence, Pragmatic Competence, Literary Competence) each one of them deals with different aspect of the language .   On the other hand , performance is a set of particular utterance that produce by the native speakers   When we analyzing the two terms we can see the unclear and vague difference between them and this can be showing like in how the intonation and the discourse is not clearly shown in which one of them is counted , performance also contains unabstracted features such as hesitation and unfinished structures . Its beli

 In what ways are foreign-language teachers who lack appropriate and practical training in phonetics and phonology disadvantaged?

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  Phonology is :   (a) The study of word-to-word relations in sentences; that is, how sound patterns are affected by the combination of words (b) The investigation of intonation patterns. ( Jack C. Richards and Richard Schmidt,1985:435 )   Lacking appropriate and practical training in phonetics and phonology means the teacher is unable to explain sounds to student which means he can’t make them read properly . Reading is the cornerstone for any learner , students can’t move forward without reading correctly , they cant gain new words . reading correctly results in better spelling even though there are a lot of irregular words due to the variety of the English roots however most of the follow certain rules so student can spell words more easily if they were able to read correctly .   Teachers with weak phonological background usually face a lot of hardship with beginner students because this is something I used to face before getting deep into phonology . Beginner stud