PDF superior THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN ECUADOR

end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s the Community Approach created the Natural Method. The interaction between the teacher and the students is part of the class, there is more reflexion and the development of the English skills (Reading, Listening, Writing and Reading) appeared as a goal in the learning process. Twenty years ago, a curriculum reform in the English teaching process began with the CRADLE project. The methodology used followed a functional-communicative approach through which the students developed linguistic competences, therefore there was a significant learning where the students knew about the Ecuadorian culture with aspects of socializing. In spite of the course book, material and resources, teacher training in the methodology used in the book, the English deficiency continues being part of Ecuadorian students. There are some factors explained by Silvano Muñoz, who was the coordinator in Los Rios province of the CRADLE project. One of the factors was that teacher did not have the open mind to change the old way of English instruction because it was much more comfortable to keep the discipline with a lot of exercises in class of translation of readings from the OWTE, the textbook used in this course, instead of applying new strategies which required more energy, classroom management and use of English in class. It is important to say that in that moment many of the English teachers in service did not have any pedagogical formation. Thus, many of the strategies in the book were not well done, although the project gave some training about the use of this methodology even the young teachers preferred avoiding the communicative strategies.

At last, the implications related to how feedback is dealt to the students will also be a matter of discussion of this work. Assisting every students’ requirement may turn to be impossible in big classes. Feedback is important for both, students and teacher; however, it has to be planned in a way that saves time and unnecessary work. This study puts forth that a little more than half of the students, 51.60%, show disagreement with the fact that they cannot benefit from a good feedback, though the difference with the ones who feel that the class lacks this benefit, is not big. The reason for this little margin between the ones who agree and the ones who disagree is simple to explain, the teacher can only answer so many questions due to the lack of time common in large classes, so the students who have questions with no answers, feel as if they were left aside, growing a negative feeling towards the teacher’s way to work out the students’ doubts. Truscott (1999) and Krashen (1994) have discussed the effect of feedback in students. It must be given out the appropriate way to avoid the students’ self-limitation in their participation because of possible public embarrassment, but it cannot be left on the side.

All of the interviewed students reported that they learn through the use of diverse activities which allow them to get a better learning with respect to the lessons. However, it was found during the survey that in some classes the space is not enough and it may be difficult for teachers to group students for the different activities. According to Baker and Westrup (2003), large classes pair work and group work needs careful planning to keep all the students involved in the lesson an allow them to work with each other. Pair and group work gives all students lots of practice time. Larger groups can be more difficult to organize, so teacher can start with pair work. When students and teacher can organize and work in pair quickly and easy, teacher can go on to try a larger group work activity. These considerations are very important in larger classes because it will help teacher to organize group in a better way.

This research “The influence of large classes in the English language teaching- learning process in Ecuadorian high schools” is aimed to determine whether or not large classes affect the English language teaching-learning process in Ecuadorian high schools. Three research questions were proposed to carry out the investigation; and, a questionnaire was structured and applied to two hundred nine students from three public educational institutions and one private high school in the city of Quito who were selected at random. They were attending to eight year of basic to third year of secondary and their ages oscillated between 12 and 18 years old.

30 The seating arrangement is decisive in the process of learning because it helps students to move easily in the classroom. In this study for 44,02%, who answered “agree”, the seating arrangement is satisfactory because it is characterized by good arrangement of the chairs in Italian high schools. Also, 29,10% “totally agree” show that the seating arrangement facilitates the tasks carried out in class. Meanwhile, for 10,44%, whose answers are “partially agree” do not consider seating arrangement a great problem because their answers are somewhat satisfactory and 16,41% express that the seating arrangement does not facilitate tasks that are carried out in class because their answers are unsatisfactory. The importance of seating arrangement was studied by Svinicki, Rice, Chism, and Bickford (2002), who state that it is the position how students are sat in the classroom and it has two alternatives: to facilitate the learning process or make it more difficult. They mention that the seating arrangement can be different from one culture to another. For researchers above mentioned, the “café style” is an optimal example of seating arrangement because students are placed in a comfortable position around the desks.

Aduwa-Ogiegbaen & Iyamu (2006) based their study on three questions (a) Do secondary school teachers use instructional resources frequently in teaching English language? (b) Do the English Language teachers use appropriate methods in teaching English Language frequently? (c) Do secondary school students in Nigeria learn English language in an environment conducive to learning? The main instruments used for this study were a questionnaire and observation schedules. The researchers designed the questionnaire by generating a list of items, which solicited students' responses on teaching strategies, instructional resources/media used by the teachers and the teaching-learning environment. The specifications for each of the two data collection instruments used in the study were as follows: (a) Questionnaire: This instrument had four sections dealing with demographic. (b) Observation: Research assistants were trained to observe each classroom and some classroom proceedings during administration of the questionnaire noting the features or characteristics of the learning environment. Based on their results they claimed that the public secondary schools in Nigeria were far behind time in offering multiple pathways to the teaching and learning English as a second language. Public secondary schools in Nigeria should be provided with adequate and a variety of instructional media, technologies such as audio and video recordings, language laboratories and computers. These instructional media can be more effective teaching tools for English Language lessons as they offer an authentic learning experience when interwoven with existing curriculum.

Les politiques nationales pour le bilinguisme anglais-espagnol requièrent la disponibilité en Colombie d’un nombre majeur d’enseignants d’anglais langue étrangère ayant une meilleure formation. Cet article analyse de manière critique l’utilisation de deux modèles internationaux de développement professionnel jouant le rôle de certiications alternatives et additionnelles pour les enseignants d’anglais. Au travers de la révision de la littérature, l’auteur avance l’argument que la promotion actuelle du In-Service Certiicate in English Language Teaching (ICELT) et du Teaching Knowledge Test (TKT) peut représenter quelques formes de standardisation, d’exclusion, d’inégalité et de marchetisation dans le développement professionnel de l’anglais langue étrangère. Ces conclusions suggèrent la nécessité de voix plus critiques de la part des formateurs d’enseignants, de meilleures stratégies de communication parmi les acteurs éducatifs, ainsi que de la construction d’une conception plus pluraliste du développement professionnel des enseignants d’anglais langue étrangère dans laquelle la connaissance locale soit estimée.

It would appear that over the last few years there is a positive swing back to using literature in a language context, or at least literary texts are being used hand in hand with other[r]

Nowadays many people demand a teaching of English whose main objective is communicative competence. In the 1950´s Noam Chomsky defined communicative competence as abilities and dispositions to understanding and acting. Later on, in 1970, Dell Hymes widened the concept by saying that communicative competence involves linguistics, sociolinguistics, discursive and strategic aspects. This concept has to do with verbal and pragmatic aspects of language, but it does not take into consideration the process of meaning production. In 1980, Canale and Swain retook the aspects Dell Hymes dealt with and they considered communicative competence as a complex of competences that interact in daily communication. Communicative competence facilitates communication among people worldwide. The process of cooperation and friendship among countries, as well as the process of globalization, are growing rapidly and, because of that, to have a good command of at least one international language becomes a basic competence in the training of a professional. Hence the importance of developing reading comprehension skills as one of the basic components of communicative competence.

Other authors have summarized a number of reports on dictionary use investigations and commented on them. Wiegand (1998) listed eighty six user studies. Hulstijn and Atkins (1998) reported over seventy studies from a pedagogical perspective. Tono (1998) categorised nearly one hundred and seventy papers and in a later work (2001) summarized more than forty studies. Dolezal and McCreary (1999) extended their annotated bibliography to more than five hundred publications on the topic. Cowie (1999: 178) used the organization proposed by Hartmann (1987), adding two more points of focus, to provide “an even-handed critical perspective on the field”, evaluating the findings of the studies. Nesi (2000) commented on more than twenty studies criticising several aspects of some investigations. Hartman (2001) briefly reports on publications organized around six perspectives on dictionary use: pedagogical lexicography, dictionary awareness, user sociology, reference needs, reference skills, and user training. Bogaards (2003) summarized surveys and experimental research on uses and users of dictionaries. Welker (2010) provided a useful summary of empirical studies on dictionary use, including those related to the teaching of dictionary use. Finally, Lew (2011) explains recent development in the dictionary use studies. We can conclude that the majority of the empirical user studies available today have been done in the last three decades or so.

Thalher, M. (2005), researched to determine what effects (instructional, psychological or social) large classes have on students by investigating and analysing EFL students toward large classes. The findings of this study indicate that large classes affect students educational practices and performance. Large classes are considered a double-edged sword. Students believed that in large classes there is a sense of competition and a friendly relationship among students, but on the other hand, there was a lack of concentration and attention because they felt neglected. It is important to point out that the instructional effects have the highest mean over the social and the psychological effect on EFL students, teachers should take into consideration social and psychological effects since these affects are interrelated.

This paper is a general illustrated description of the contents and structure of the History of the English Language (HEL) Online Course designed by the author for the students enrolled in Historia de la Lengua Inglesa at the University of Jaén (an obligatory year-long course in English Philology curricula in Spain). The purpose of the HEL Online Course is to offer students a very extensive range of both theory and practice-related materials, as well as other useful resources, such as a blog-page and a Google-powered search page. Also, the website of the HEL Online Course is complemented by materials available on the university’s virtual o e-learning platform. The website was launched at the beginning of the academic year 2007-2008 and is currently being used by 2008-2009 students.

Thus, a number of scholars working in the field of teaching English as a Foreign Language have used corpus data to look critically at existing language teaching materials Kennedy 1992, M[r]

On the other hand, Ferlazzo & Sypnieski (2012) insist that students from different levels of proficiency can be an advantage for working in class. The authors believe that students of a low level of English will feel obligated to catch up to the others of higher levels which can result in quicker learning. The authors mentioned above, say that when working in activities, teachers can make groups of students from high and low levels to encourage interaction. Besides these students can support each other in different skills, for example, one could be better at reading and another at writing in English. Consequently, teachers can work effectively with students from different levels of proficiency.

The importance of teaching- learning English as foreign language in Ecuador has been widely recognized in the last years due to its everyday use in all fields. Having an advanced level of English has become into a tool, which allows facing the accelerated advance of globalization and the galloping development of technology. The unlimited access to the countless educational resources published in this language, as well as, to the information available in internet, updated every day; furthermore, a great deal of scholarships offered abroad directed toward students who master English language are the strongest reasons for students to achieve a B1.2 (CEFR) level at the end of third year of high school.

This research investigates if studying historical content through an innovative approach may show better results than traditional methods in terms of learning history. In this case study, the researcher tried to convey the differences in learning about the Industrial Revolution using a traditionally text- book-based methodology versus a Content and Language Integrated Learning (hereafter CLIL) approach that included drama and music. The tar- get students assessed are two Y4 ESO groups of Spanish students in a public bilingual setting who learnt the topic through English language during the first term of the course. The students were assessed using a true/false test to determine the effect ofpre and post implementation tests. All data was collected and analysed following a quantitative methodology. The researcher’s null hypothesis was that there would not be difference between the two methodologies. The results of the study reject the null hypothesis and suggest that, for some topics, teaching history using drama and music could be even more effective than a textbook-based meth- odology. This study is part of a further research already in progress in this field for a reliable statisti- cal analysis.

According to previous analysis of available documents (Curriculum C and Curriculum D) of the English Language with a Second Foreign Language (French) course at this institution, the author of this paper has reached to the conclusion that despite the great progress, the English Language Teaching (education) at UCLV places more emphasis on teaching competence in what Hall (1976) calls macroskills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), and microskills (vocabulary and grammar), without much emphasis on the development of intercultural skills. The proposal of language teaching with an intercultural dimension helps learners to acquire the linguistic competence needed to communicate in macro and micro skills, to formulate what they want to say and write in correct and appropriate ways. But it also develops their intercultural competence, for example their ability to ensure a shared understanding by people of different social identities, and their ability to interact with people as complex human beings with multiple identities and their own individuality.

a. One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. It was happy in a new sense of freedom from control, happy in the opportunity of exploration and adventure; for this child's spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest--victories in battles whose critical moments were centuries, whose victors' camps were cities of hewn stone. From the cradle of its race it had conquered its way through two continents and passing a great sea had penetrated a third, there to be born to war and dominion as a heritage.

In the English Language course with a second foreign language: French at the Universidad Central «Marta Abreu» de Las Villas, there are some limitations in the basic and complementary bibliography of the subject English Language II. The purpose of this research was to propose a Digital Library to systematize the bibliography to satisfy the students’ needs. The study was carried out from a qualitative methodology. The needs analysis allowed the selection and organization of the bibliography for the proposal. For the design of the Digital Library for English Language II (DLELII) the Greenstone Digital Library Software was used. Specialists from the area of English Language and Scientific and Technological Information evaluated the proposal and agreed that it meets requirements such as bibliographic completeness, updating, variety of sources, easy accessibility which resulted in a valid proposal for the improvement of the teaching and learning process of the subject.

The data for the questionnaire was collected according to feedback from the students at An-Najah. The researcher asked the students an open – ended question about the effect of large classes on them. After gathering the data, the answers were classified into three major areas: instructional, psychological and social which were considered as the study instrument by the researcher in the form of a questionnaire. The researcher distributed the questionnaire to the sample study students (230 students). The questionnaire included two versions (Arabic and English). The subjects responded to the questionnaire in Arabic on a 5-point Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 2= disagree; 3=undecided; 4=agree; 5=strongly agree).The questionnaire contained 46 items and was divided into the following sections:1-Items (1-19) showed the instructional effects of large classes on non- English major EFL students. 2-Items (20-32) showed the psychological effects of large classes on non- English major EFL students. 3-Items (33-46) showed the social effects of large classes on non-English major EFL students.