The second language teaching Research Proposal Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

The second language teaching - Research Proposal Example In this light, this paper discusses the design, use and aims of a set of integrated skills materials that have been designed to teach and reinforce the future tense to a group of six students, aged 16-17, who are preparing the Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English (CAE) examination for speakers of other languages (ESOL). The skills covered will range from listening to speaking, and from reading to writing in a ninety-minute session. The learning environment is a small English language institute for non-native speakers (NNS) of English with a modern language laboratory, equipped with a teacher's terminal and twelve individual student terminals. Each student terminal consists of a desk and an internet-enabled computer. The desk is wooden, on the face of which are call buttons to the teacher's terminal, adequate writing space and a mouse, as well as a glass screen giving visibility to the monitor beneath. To one side of the desk is the central processing unit (CPU), providing access to features such as a headset, CD and diskette-drives for individual practice. The teacher's terminal has the same features with additional buttons for her to monitor and assign tasks. In addition, the lab has a whiteboard, flip charts, large television, DVD-player and slide projector, and is next door to the document centre, which has subscriptions to many English language publications. These resources facilitate the employment of a v ariety of integrated materials in facilitating maximum and optimal language acquisition and practice (Levy, 1997). The laboratory offers the learners to opportunity to be immersed in English through a maximum of methods, and accounts in part for their relative ease with the language at their level. Hinkel and Fotos (2002) in their book, New Perspectives in Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms, trace the change in attitudes to and perspectives about effective grammar pedagogy, showing how teachers have moved from textbook delivery and memorization of grammatical rules and structure, through audio-lingual, then functional, then cognitive, then to communicative language teaching (Allwright, 1979, 1990), particularly in L2 contexts (Hinkel and Fotos, 2002, pp. 2-4). The latter approach and its offshoot humanistic approach, developed to correct the problem of learners who "knew grammar rules but could not use the target language communicatively, and others [who] urgently needed immediate survival competency in English" (Hinkel and Fotos, 2002, p. 4). These approaches saw formal language teaching being superceded by "natural" acquisition through real communication, by means of exposure to a variety of language uses, namely listening, reading, speaking and writing.