Teoría del Desarrollo Organizacional (DO)

The two textbooks seem generally similar in term of both aspects of DI that are being covered and in terms of activity types. Concerning the latter, for example, the two textbooks follow the same methodology of:

- sensitizing learners to intonational features.

- getting learners to listen to intonation in a number of tasks, including imitation and discrimination.

- getting learners to put intonation patterns in communicative activities.

Brazil‘s (1994a), Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English (henceforth PALE), and Bradford (1988), Intonation in Context, use an inductive approach in which learners feel the rules before these rules are stated in their institutionalized form (i.e. following an inductive method) before proceeding towards other formats of production, e.g. imitation and drilling, free use of intonation in classroom setting (i.e. a deductive method). Three points are stressed in these textbooks:

- Alerting learners to the role of context in determining intonation choices - Getting learners to follow an inductive-deductive format

- Starting with the features in the order they are stated.

More specifically, Bradford (1988a, p. 2) and Brazil (1994b, pp. 1-10) describe the structure of their materials as consisting of:

- Sensitization: this is the stage of demonstrating one feature of English intonation at a time in order to raise learners‘ awareness of the choices a speaker makes, and this is done through a conversation, followed by some questions that learners need to answer in order to be familiar with the content.

- Explanation: this includes a description of the feature in question and its significance to meaning; and any necessary transcription convention is included here.

- Practice activities: these include activities for intonation recognition/discrimination, and others for producing these features.

- Communication Activities: depending on pair work, these activities provide learners with the chance to put into use the features they have learnt so far; this is a freer situation practice than the practice provided by other tasks in the units.

Such method combination and activity types lie at the heart of any teaching that encourages making use of communicative value and putting it into practice, as the literature tends to stress

In a purely inductive (or consciousness-raising approach, henceforth C-R), learners are exposed to data and are encouraged to implicitly learn these rules, but no explicit instruction or immediate production is sought in class (Rutherford, 1987, p. 153), emphasizing raising learners‘ attention receptively to linguistic forms in an attempt at developing eventual mastery (Ellis, 1993, p. 6). PPP, however, believes in stating the rules explicitly and practicing them in controlled and free production modes.

Although PPP has been criticized as having too much emphasis on production and, thus, distracting ‗attention away from the brain work involved in understanding and restructuring‖ of

the learner‘s inter-language (Thornbury, 1999, p. 105), this should not make PPP invalid altogether. On the other hand, while appreciating C-R for involving learners as truly active participants, one should not lose sight of the fact that in order for C-R alone to be rewarding it should depend on long term exposure to data as production is delayed to a much later stage when learners have ‗absorbed‘ enough understanding of data in order to produce it (Hopkins and Nettle 1994, p159). Furthermore, it is obvious that C-R suits learners who are approaching the language covertly. It also suits learners who can have enough exposure to data, which may not be present in many EFL contexts such as Syria.

To sum up, because PPP learning is more effective for translating knowledge into communication in actual situations, while inductive learning is more effective for the memorization of rules (Woodward 1991, pp. 84-5), there seems to be an agreement that a combination of both could complement the benefits of each other (Hopkins et al, 1994, p. 158).

With particular reference to spoken discourse teaching in general and intonation in particular, McCarthy and Carter (1995) believe that traditional teaching methodology of PPP should be modified to include greater awareness of the nature of spoken and written discourse; they conclude that such an approach has „considerable potential for a more rapid acquisition by

learners of fluent, accurate and naturalistic communicative skills‟ (1995, p. 217). Jones (pp. 182-

3 in Richards and Renandya 2002) also shares Pickering (2001, p.250-1) the view that an inductive approach can increase familiarity with the rules.

Stern (1992, pp. 119- 120) sums up this point with reference to phonology and pronunciation when he adopts a four level methodology, involving the exposure of learners to speech in order to observe and absorb the linguistic forms, followed by exercises and drills such as imitation, and finally comes what he calls ‗practical phonetics‘ by which he means free production in class. For Stern (ibid, p. 121), too, explanation not only is a way of achieving phonological competence, but also adds to the learner‘s knowledge about the foreign language and about speech in general.

Chun (2002, p. 202) summarizes the same idea regarding the teaching of DI by suggesting the following methodology: - sensitization - explanation - imitation - practice activities - Communicative activities.

In other words, the PPP and C-R complement each other: the C-R method has some weaknesses such as being time-consuming, while the PPP method lacks good memorization of rules; therefore, it would make sense to combine them together in order for them to complement each other.

To conclude, all the task types used in the Brazil and Bradford materials are necessary for teaching any course on phonology and pronunciation. However, there is still another task type which is highly recommended in the literature but which is not present in Bradford‘s material. This will be mentioned in the following subsections.