Communicating in the Classroom
When a student has to fill in a chart with the information that a classmate has, this type of activity is known as:
(A) negotiation of meaning
(B) information-gap
(C) blank completion
(D) none of the above.
(B) information-gap
A 'task' necessarily involves:
(A) gaps
(B) steps
(C) talking
(D) tears
(B) steps
Obtaining the greatest amount of information about a learner's language in the shortest amount of time is referred to as:
(A) efficiency
(B) economy
(C) evaluation
(D) equality
(B) economy
Paradigms can serve what function?
(A) cognitive
(B) analytic
(C) affective
(D) acquisitional
(E) none of the above
(C) affective
TRUE or FALSE? Information gap activities involve the exchange of previously unknown information.
TRUE
What are the two most common purposes of communication?
Psycho-social and informational-cognitive
Give an example of a communicative goal and a linguistic goal.
Communicative - What can you do in real life?
Linguistic - target structure
What is the washback effect?
Tests should pattern activities done in class.
What is structured output?
Producing language (target structure) in a special type of form-focused activity that is communicative in nature.
What is communicative burden?
The responsibility of a test taker to initiate, respond, manage, and negotiate an oral event.
It is common to hear, "I studied four years of English in high school but I can't speak a word." Explain why this might be the case.
How were they taught? By paradigms and forced memorization?
What is the authors' view on homework?
That it should be an extension of the class, not something necessarily different or unenjoyable.
According to the rubrics presented in the chapter, what 3 competencies do they take into account?
Grammatical, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic.
Give an example of monitoring when it refers to a process in output production.
Editing one's speech when one realizes something is wrong.
Describe the "instructor as architect" scenario.
Instructor provides students with "blueprint", students become builders or coworkers that put it together.
What are the four competences that make up communicative competence?
Grammatical, discourse (coherence and cohesion), sociolinguistic (appropriateness), strategic (creative language).
Explain the analogy of the gazebo that the authors use in this chapter.
Gazebo = lesson goal. It's tangible, you know you have finished when you have completed the gazebo.
Name and describe THREE of the FOUR criteria for designing a good test.
Economy, relevance, acceptability, comparability.
Access is linked to two important components. What are they?
Accuracy (correctness) and fluency (ease and speed).
How are communicative drills better than meaningful and mechanical ones? What is their downfall?
They are better in that the learner controls the response and the information is unknown to the listener. Even though they seem like real communication, they fall short of providing learners with opportunities that allow them to work on expressing, interpreting, and negotiating meaning with another person.
Explain the significance of Sauvignon's 1998 comparative study on communicative competence.
The communication group scored significantly higher on the test of communicative competence (as well as reading, listening, and oral skills) than the ALM and ALM+culture groups. = ONE LEARNS TO COMMUNICATE BY COMMUNICATING.
Give an original example of a lesson-final task and its corresponding subgoals.
Answers will vary. All subgoals lead up to the lesson-final task, that is a combination of them.
Explain the difference between the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview and the Israeli National Oral Proficiency Test.
ACTFL OPI: Conversation-like, warm-up, level check, probes.
INOPT: four formats (interview, role play, reporting task, discussion)
What is the difference between access and production strategies?
Access: retrieval of correct forms
Production strategies: the ability to string forms and structures together in appropriate ways
Access does not follow automatically from acquisition.
The authors state: "Topicalized or contextualized grammar is not equivalent to a communicative or proficiency orientation." Explain what they mean by this.
True communicative- and proficiency-oriented instruction cannot be grammar centered. In many cases, a communicative goal cannot be reduced to one single target structure.