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This collection is available free of charge to TESOL France members.

The Journal, Volume 7, 2000

Selected articles from the TESOL France Colloquium: "Words, Words, Words.. Le poids des mots", November 1999

Table of Contents

Vocabulary Acquisition for a Lifetime: How do children do it?
Susan H. Foster-Cohen

Le lexique comme système : contrastes anglais-français
Michel Paillard

Les principes de base de la formation des mots
Jean Tournier

Lexical Varieties : Speech Acts, Institutionalized Expressions and Teaching Functional Language
Preston Perlus

Words: What are They, Which to Teach and How to Teach Them?
Felicity O'Dell

The Business Vocabox: Activities for Developing and Activating Vocabulary in the Business English Classroom
Johanna Stirling

Exploiting the Exposé: A User's Guide
Cheryl Lee Caesar

Stories in Language Teaching
Andrew Wright

Introduction

by Sally Bosworth Gérôme, Editor

One does not usually think of fashion when one thinks of language teaching but unfortunately the pressure to follow the latest style in clothing is not very different from the pressure an EFL teacher feels in the classroom. At some periods the teacher is pushed into focusing on grammar and structure, at other points the pressure is to teach communicative techniques. Until recently, vocabulary learning has been out of style. Vocabulary lists to be learned by heart were (fortunately) a thing of the past and no one had come up with very many interesting ways to go beyond them

By drawing attention to "words", the 1999 TESOL France Colloquium went beyond the unfashionable vocabulary learning class to look at the problem from a variety of levels. Some of the conference centered on the more practical aspects proposing ways to teach the acquisition of new words in the classroom, but many workshops and speeches approached the subject through a discussion of research in the fields of word formation, language acquisition in general, and the importance of institutionalized utterances.

What better way to begin a journal on "Words, words, words... 'le poids des mots" than with Susan Foster Cohen's article on how we learn our first words. Luckily children are not the only successful word learners. This article explains that adults too are successful in developing both their mother tongue and their second language vocabulary and that they face many of the same problems children do.

Where do these words come from? How do words become part of a language? Michel Paillard's explanation of how words are formed in both French and English is original and interesting. Learning about this process is one way to approach learning the vocabulary of a foreign language.

Jean Tournier studies word formation from a slightly different angle. His diagram on how a word goes from the fuzzy area of the potential lexis to become an officially recognized part of the lexicon is helpful for visualizing the process.

Fortunately, one of the present fashions of EFL course books is to include extensive exercises on what are often called "word partnerships". Research has shown that these multi-unit items are not only fundamental in initial vocabulary acquisition but also are somehow organized and stored in our memories for later retrieval. Preston Perluss describes the use of these institutionalized expressions in speech acts.

For both those who have been interested in lexical learning for a long time and those who are beginners in the field, Dennis Davy provides the link between the articles on lexical research and the more pedagogical articles on how to teach vocabulary. Starting from many of the aspects discussed in the previous articles, Dennis Davy gives both teachers and students food for thought concerning vocabulary.

Felicity O'Dell looks at what is special about teaching and learning vocabulary in comparison with teaching and learning grammar. How can we help our learners to retain the words they need? Having gained a passive understanding of words, how can students then transfer that lexis from their passive to their active vocabularies? What can we as teachers do to facilitate that process in our learners?

A TESOL Journal would not be complete without some really practical activities that can be used directly in the classroom. Johanna Stirling provides just that with ideas on how vocabulary that has already been presented in the normal course of the business classroom can be reactivated. The activities proposed are not at all limited to business English but could be used in any context.

Cheryl Lee Caesar has enriched her oral presentation classes by finding ways to help her students to learn all the wealth of vocabulary that they encounter during each presentation. By making this type of class more communicative, she helps students to benefit more from the varied input.

It is fitting that this journal arrive at its conclusion in the same way that the colloquium came to a close. Andrew Wright believes that our bodies are made of the food we have eaten and our minds of the stories we have heard. His article convincingly argues that stories provide language teachers with the opportunity to contribute to the development of their students. Stories not only offer raw material to improve vocabulary but as Andrew Wright says, "We are who we are through stories."

This journal is particularly diversified with authors from many different countries and origins. They each offer a fresh perspective on the vast subject of vocabulary acquisition. New technologies have provided vast data bases of "words", radically changed research in the field. The EFL teacher now has a unprecedented opportunity to more efficiently help his or her students.

The Journal, Volume 6, 1999

Evaluation and Assessment: Selected articles following the TESOL France Colloquium Focus on Evaluation, November 1998

Contents

Developing a culture of evaluation
Dermot F Murphy

L'Evaluation dans l'enseignement de l'anglais en France Enseignement secondaire
Marie-France Chen - Géré

Evaluation and In-company language training
Peter Strutt

L'évaluation de l'oral au lycée
Gilles Fériel

L'évaluation formative interactive par la subordination de l'enseignement à l'apprentissage
Maurice Laurent

"I didn't learn my lesson, Sir" The Case for Learner Centred Error Analysis
Richard Duda

Faire de l'évaluation un outil de négociation. Compte-rendu d'une expérience d'évaluation formatrice
Joëlle Aden

Training Students for Exam Success
Peter May

How to Take the Pain out of Marking and Exams
Lynne Rushton

Introduction

TESOL France has always tried to bring together the two worlds of l'Education Nationale (the public school sector) and Form Co (the adult education sector). We all have a common goal: those of us who work with adults in companies are carrying on from where public school teachers left off. Those of us who are working with public school children are trying to prepare our charges for the adult world. The theme of evaluation is a perfect meeting place because we all face the same problems. Teachers from l'Education Nationale, struggling with huge classes and the mass education system, have the same criteria for a good evaluation system as do teachers from the adult education sector who might be working with smaller classes but are struggling to find fast and cost-effective ways to make their students become competent English language users.

Dermot Murphy introduces the broad subject of evaluation by showing how it leaves no one and no institution indifferent. He explains how it has the potential to be useful to individuals and institutions but how it may be perceived as being negative or harmful. The way evaluation is conceived, introduced and managed must be thought through carefully.

Marie-France Chen-Géré's description of secondary school testing echoes some of the principles laid down in Dermot Murphy's article. The Education Nationale system has developed a pioneer program that includes entry-level tests for all those going into secondary schools. This institution, which has to deal with mass education, manages to carry out continuous assessment throughout secondary studies.

Leaving the setting of an academic learning environment to situate the problem of evaluation in an industrial context, Peter Strutt discusses the importance of establishing clear testing procedures for in-company language training. Through effective testing the company can evaluate needs, set target language performance, assess progress throughout the course and determine the degree of attainment at the end of the program. Peter Strutt, by insisting that a good test should be valid and reliable proposes clear guidelines while taking into consideration the "washback" effect.

Returning to the totally different environment of public secondary school teaching, Gilles Feriel establishes similar criteria for both progress testing (formative) and achievement testing (summative). The key words of reliability and validity are central to the new evaluation system being set up throughout France. In this new system, the clear criteria agreed on by both teachers and students include the notoriously difficult area of assessment of oral production. Instead of only focusing on form, it also takes into account communicative competence.

From still another perspective, Maurice Laurent proposes a permanent interactive assessment system. Inspired by the work of Caleb Gattegno, the originator of the Silent Way, this system gives assessment a central position in the course. By continually evaluating student needs and progression, the teacher constantly modifies classroom activities. However, in order for this system to work, the evaluation procedure must take into consideration emotional, perceptive and mental faculties of the students as well as the necessary processes involved in the learning procedure. If the activities are well adapted, students will develop personal learning strategies by analysing their own errors.

The learner-centered error analysis proposed by Richard Duda is of a more targeted nature for language learning. He identifies three sources of defective discourse: interlingual or interlanguage errors, developmental errors and intralingual errors. By explicitly pointing out these types of errors, teachers help learners to become more aware of what they know or think they know about language and language learning. They can learn to accept their mistakes as part of their learning process, using them to progress.

By giving a mark, a teacher is quantifying a learning process that can only be judged in qualitative terms. Instead of helping students to become better language learners, the marking system can lead to a negative personal image and a negative feeling for the English language in general. Joëlle Aden tells about an experience in a secondary school where through enormous personal investment, students completely transform their negative perception into a positive representation. When a teacher fosters the desire to learn a foreign language, students gain a deeper self-awareness.

The theme of evaluation would not be complete without some practical activities that could be used directly in the classroom. Peter May's exercises take into consideration learner motivation and the importance of learners taking charge of their learning process by analyzing the examinations themselves.

By attacking the difficult task of writing from another perspective, Lynne Rushton enables even the weakest students to have the satisfaction of producing a coherent document. When a piece of text is approached from the reader's point of view, the emphasis switches from grammatical accuracy to successful communication. In this way the learner can focus on things like layout, functional language, and organization of information, which are much easier to understand and reproduce than perfect spellings and tenses. Then, once a successful text is produced, students have the motivation and framework to improve their grammatical accuracy. This article includes many practical tips on how to implement these ideas in the classroom.

Reading and re-reading these articles will be extremely helpful for all teachers. When we are in the midst of working through an evaluation procedure, we can easily lose sight of long term objectives and higher level criteria. The similar views of authors from such different worlds as industrial in-company training and Education Nationale show how important it is to take into consideration both the learner as an individual and the language skills we are trying to assess.

The Journal, Volume 5, 1998

Taming Technology: Selected articles following the TESOL France Colloquium, November 1997

Contents

The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on the Language Classroom
Bernard Moro

Les Nouvelles Technologies et l'enseignement des langues vivantes
Marie-Hélène Valentin

Technology's Impact on the Learners' Identity in the Target Language
Peter Isackson

L'innovation, pourquoi, et dans quel but?
Jean-Paul Narcy

Changing Language, Changing Technology
Michael Rundell

Concordances, Collocations and Lexical-based Language Analysis: Implications for Computer-aided Pedagogy
Preston Perluss

Integrating New Technology in the Classroom
Roy Sprenger

Technology in Teacher Education Julian Edge

De la vidéo au multimédia et à Internet: un exemple en classe de 3ème
Christiane Caillot

Introduction

By Sally Bosworth Gérôme, Editor

The "Taming Technology" Colloquium was held in November 1997 but the issues discussed remain just as topical. Although the number is growing, today relatively few teachers in France have the opportunity to integrate multimedia and the Internet into their daily teaching activities. At the same time, both the Education ministry and the media have led the public to believe that information technology has already radically changed the way languages are being taught in schools. Even if the changes are not as widespread as the media would have us believe, they do exist and are growing in importance.

This volume of the TESOL France Journal is both for teachers who are just starting out on the adventure of using these new technologies and for those who have already begun and are well aware of the need to reflect on how to use them more effectively.

In Chapter 1, Bernard Moro introduces the subject with an article on the changing role of the language teacher and on the opportunities the Internet provides for bringing the real world into the classroom. In the next chapter, Marie-Hélène Valentin discusses how this unlimited access to information can become a building block for knowledge.

In Chapter 3, Peter Isackson suggests that the interactivity of the most recent multimedia systems might ultimately help learners to allow their identities to evolve in the target language. This would be an important improvement on most pedagogy, which has traditionally concentrated on short-term performance goals and left the question of learner identity in the background. Then Jean-Paul Narcy goes on to situate innovation in the language classroom in its social, institutional and cultural context. The specificity of teaching English in France to French people is not to be ignored.

Both language and the way we look at language are changing through the use of these new technologies. Keeping up with these changes could be a challenge, but in Chapter 5 Michael Rundell shows how automatic language analysis systems are giving us a better and a more up-to-date picture of the language that is actually being used. The fundamental role played by "collocation" is becoming more and more evident as computers furnish statistical analysis of real language. Preston Perluss suggests how foreign language teaching will improve through the contextual study of words.

The following chapters deal with more direct applications by discussing the use of new technologies in teaching experiences. Chapter 7 addresses the problem of the fears of language teachers by tracing the history of technological developments in language teaching and by going over some basic concepts. Technological progress leads to questions from both an educational perspective (These are our aims, how can technology help?) and a technological perspective (These are our machines, what can we use them for?). These are the points raised by Julian Edge in his discussion on his distance learning classes. The concluding article by Christiane Caillot brings us directly into the classroom with a concrete example of the use of new technologies with young adolescents.

Technological advances have already changed the way we look at language teaching, and they will continue to do so. I hope that these articles will help the reader on his or her quest for a better understanding of this revolution.
Evaluation and Assessment

The Journal, Volume 4, 1997

On Video
Edited by Richard Cooper

You can read this article: Video and the Internet by Linda Thalman

The Journal, Volume 3, Number 1, 1996

Grammar and Discourse
Edited by Thomas Miller

The Journal, Volume 2, Number 2, 1995

Functional Approaches to Written Text: Classroom applications Guest Editor: Tom Miller, USIS, Paris

Contents

Section I What Research Tells Us

  • Discourse Analysis and Reading Instruction, William Grabe

Section II Reading Into Writing

  • Contrastive Rhetoric, Robert Kaplan
    Text Analysis and Pedagogical Summaries: Revisiting Johns and Davies, Ann Johns and Danette Paz
  • Rhetorical Models of Understandng, Claire Kramsch
  • From Information Transfer to Data Commentary, John Swales and Christine Feak

Section III Social Approaches

  • Critical Discourse Analaysis, Thomas Hucklin
  • Words and Pictures in a Bilogy Textbook, Greg Myers
  • I Think That Perhaps You Should: a Study of Hedges in Written Scientific Discourse, Françoise Salager-Meyer
  • The Voices of the Discourse or the Problem of Who Says What in News Reports, Ana Maria Harvey

Section IV Genre Approaches

  • Applied Genre Analaysis and ESP, Vijay K. Bhatia
  • Genre Models for the Teaching of Academic Writing to Second Language Speakers: Advantages and Disadvantages, Tony Dudley-Evans
  • Concordancing and Practical Grammar, Tony Jappy

The Journal, Volume 2, Number 1, 1995

Appropriate Methodology: From Classroom Methods to Classroom Processes
Guest Editor: Roger Budd, British Council France

Contents

Foreword / Avant propos
Roger Budd

Contextual Factors in Determining Appropriate Language Methodolgies
David Nunan

Une approche post-communicative de l'enseignement de l'anglais dans le système français
Anne-Marie Kuperberg

ELT Courses for Primary Schools fear New Boston Tea Party: The Communicative Approach for Young Learners in French Schools Revisited
James Brossard

Taking Responsibility for Appropriate Methods
Julian Edge

Starting from Where They're At: Towards an Appropriate Methodology in Training
Rod Bolitho and Tony Wright

Appropriate Methodology: The Classroom Context and the Institutional Context
Jill Cadorath and Simon Harris

What is "Too Difficult" for Young Learners of English to Understand?
Shelagh Rixon

Storytelling and Storybooks: A broader version of the Communicative Approach
Gail Ellis

Communicative Language Teaching in the 1990's: A Consumer's Perspective
David Atkinson

Appropriate Methodology in Large Classes
Hywel Coleman

BANA v. TESEP: Where does ESP fit in?
Tony Dudley Evans

Language Education in Schools and the Role of British EFL
John Clegg

A Post-communicative Era?: Method versus Social Context
Adrian Holliday

The Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 1994

The Best of TESOL France News Guest Editor: Eric Freedman

Contents

A Decade of Doing Things with Words
Eric Freedman

Section I Principles and practices

The Language Learner as Language User
H.G. Widdowson

Classroom Language Learning: Who's in Charge?
Dick Allwright

Who's Who is Self-access
Philip Riley

Frank Frankel Talks to TESOL
Steve Flinders

Fundamentals of Second Language Acquisition Theory and Its Application to Beginning and Intermediate Language Teaching
on Stephen Krashen (by Ian Lamb)

Inventing New Rules
Mario Rinvolucri

Section II Linguistics, Neurolinguistics and Methodology

Contrastive Analysis and the Language Learner: A Matter of Direction
Julian Parish

Right Hemisphere Participation in Language Learning: a Human Perspective
Anne Pechou

What to do with Language Learners Who are Seen and not Heard
Henry Daniels and David Wood

Section III Languages and Cultures

International English: An American Perspective
John Turek

English: Whose Language?
Ann Malamah-Thomas

Memories, Mataphors, Maxim and Myths
Roger Bowers

Language, Sexism and Schools
Jennifer Coates

Section IV Paroles d'enfant/discours d'adulte

Playful Activities to Teach English to Very Young Children
Elaine Delage

Un journal d'apprentissage pour préparer à l'enseignement
Bernadette Grandcolas

Dictionaries and Teacher Development
Seth Lindstromberg

What Happens When Students Negotiate?
Eric Freedman

Section V Evaluations

Testing: Introduction and Review
David Horner

Communicative Language Testing
Peter Skehan

Peer Observation and Feedback in Teacher Training and Teacher Development
Hester Harris Poumellec, Betsy Parish, Jacqueline Garçon