Getting to Know How it Works

Dear readers,

      In my new blog's installment, I will dedicate it to various key concepts we as English teachers must have in mind forever. It is a pleasure to share everything I am learning at ULACIT, so I will try to be as concise as possible.

     In a video that we were asked to watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-LkN-Pm_zA) on Language Awareness, I learned that the actual fact of building language awareness in our classes is an outstanding way of raising the bar at second language acquisition. For further analysis, I would like to include the Language Awareness definiton by The University of Alberta, Canada:

"Language awareness is part of WHAT the teacher chooses to teach. As language teachers know, there is much more to a language than simply knowing vocabulary and grammar and reproducing them in either written or oral form. Becoming aware of the nuances and meanings of a language is part of language learning. By increasing students’ language awareness, the students are better able to understand, appreciate and use the language. In this section we will look at what the phrase ‘language awareness’ means, what role it plays in the second language classroom, and ways teachers can increase their students’ language awareness."

Taken from http://www.educ.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/best%20of%20bilash/languageawareness.html

     As a result,we as teachers must comprehend that language is nothing without a context that grounds and explains how it works. Thus, students will be able to become more independent and would be able to solve real life problems that language (for our purposes, literature) present on a daily basis. 

  

 www.wiziq.com 

      To complement the video, we were asked to read Lazar and Parkinson so that we could enhance our vision on teaching literature. To be brief, I will list what I consider the highlights of both authors' texts:

1. Reading comprehension is a function of cultural background knowledge.
2. Chomsky's Grammatical Competence (quoted) explains that all speakers of any language possess an internalized grammar which allows to produce and understand utterances confrom the grammatical rules of the language they are speaking.
3.  We as learners (readers) are interested in metaphorical or symbolic meanings.
4.  Teaching literature is important because it is motivating, it is authentic material, it helps students to understand other cultures,it develops interpretative abilities, it expands language awareness, and others.
5.  Literature may provide meaningful and memorable contexts for processing and interpreting a new language.
6. Parkinson makes a comparison between old-fashioned ways of teaching literature and some "new-age" activities we can implement in class.  
7. Reading for pleasure should be encouraged in our students so that this does not become a torture for them. 
8. Contextualizing literature is key in understanding the how,why,what,when,and who. 
9. Exhorting students to be critical is important if we want them to have opinions on what is being read. 
10. There are plenty of "fun" games we can implement in literature so we bring to life the artworks read in class. 

lordsofliteraturekss.wordpress.com