The post which follows is an article which appeared in the IATEFL Business English Special Interest Group Newsletter in 2015
Author: Marisa Constantinides
I train TEFL teachers at CELT in Athens Greece and online - our main courses are Cambridge CELTA and Delta. I interact with educators from all over the world through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and through blogging
N is for New Information
N is for New Information
Screenshot of front pages of papers
Definition
New information is information that is assumed by the speaker not
Discussion
New information typically
- is placed late in the sentence, and
- has a high amount of stress placed on the words representing it.
Examples (English)
In the following exchange, the stressed words are new information:
A: Do you know where my SHOES are?
B: I put them in the CLOSET.
Source
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsNewInformation.htm
As you can see, the new information becomes OLD information in the second utterance and the NEW information in the response provides additional facts or responds to the new information in the previous utterance.
New information and pronunciation
This high stress placement on the new information is usually called nuclear or tonic stress and marks information which is new or contrasted with information presented in a previous utterance or, simply, adds to or builds on that information.
Lack of such stress placement makes utterances difficult to follow a speaker (whether native or non native) and is a typical problem is foreign learner (and teacher) talk.
In terms of a hypothetical acquisition order of phonological features along the cline between unintelligible and with native like phonological competencies, stress placement seems to be a late acquisition item along with segmentation and catenation.
The English Press – from http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2012/09/leveson-inquiry-press-freedom-2/
Thinking Task
Here is the transcript from a clip from the “Yes, Prime Minister” TV series
It’s a series of aphorisms, which the PM delivers about British newspapers. Read through them and try to predict which parts of each utterance will be delivered with low stress (given information at that particular stage in the discourse) and which particular words will receive high/tonic/nunclear stress (New Information)
Prime Minister:
“The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country,
the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country.
the Times is read by people who actually do run the country.
the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.
The Financial Times is read by people who own the country,
the Morning Star is ready by people who think the country ought to be run by another country,
and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.”
Second speaker:
“Well, Prime Minister, and what about the people who read the Sun?”
Secretary(?):
“The Sun readers don’t care who runs the country as long as she’s got big t***.”
Now Scroll down please to listen to how these lines were actually delivered – listen from 1:04
Teaching the feature
I usually do this as a whole lesson on newspapers, part of which has to do with genre and features of different newspaper styles.
If you would like to use this in a lesson you might like to consider this procedure:
Lesson Outline
- Lead in with a brief chat about newspapers in the students’ native language. How many are there and what kind are they; what/who do they represent. What paper do they read, if at all.
- Give them a handout with the aphorisms above but with the names of papers blanked out – depending on the local culture you might wish to omit the last one with the asterisked bits.
- Ss read and decide which of their local papers fit the descriptions – they can insert the names and practice reading them aloud
- Ask them to decide which word(s) in each sentence receive(s) the highest, most prominent stress
- Ask them to practice reading the sentences aloud in pairs or groups
- Then give them names of English newspapers and they can decide where they fit in
- Get them to listen to the video and fill in the names first then listen and mark the stress – check if they were right
- Last, ask them to read out their views of their own local papers and assign correct stress.
If you like, they can then add or change some of the aphorisms as they please.
This can be followed by more focused work on the lexical, grammatical and textual features of these papers.
Books on Discourse Analysis
Brown, G., & Yule, G., 1983, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge University Press
Johnstone, B., 2003, Discourse Analysis, Blackwell
McCarthy, M. 1991, Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, Cambridge University Press
Partridge, B., 2006, Discourse Analysis – an Introduction, Continuum International
Thornbury, S., 2005, Beyond the Sentence, Macmillan Education
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C is for Coherence
Is she coherent?
Watch this much discussed video of a young beauty pageant contestant answering a question posed by the judges.
Thinking Tasks
1. Is Miss South Carolina coherent or not?
2. Read this text and say if it is coherent. Try to answer the following questions:
- Where was published?
- Who authored it?
- What was the author’s purpose for writing it?
These children can be said to have two three or more mother tongues neither language is foreign to that child even if one language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the childs birth country. On average in Europe at the start of foreign language teaching learners have lessons for three to four hours a week. The Welsh language is also compulsory up to the age of 16 although a formal qualification is optional..In some countries learners have lessons taken entirely in a foreign language for example more than half of European countries with a minority regional language community use partial immersion to teach both the minority and the state language..In 1995 the s White Paper on Education and Training emphasized the importance of schoolchildren learning at least two foreign languages before upper secondary education.
Scroll down to the end of the post view the answer.
Definitions:
Review the following definitions and choose the best one (or the one you understand best):
1/ Coherence (linguistics)
Coherence in linguistics is what makes a text semantically meaningful.It is especially dealt with in text linguistics. Coherence is achieved through syntactical features such as the use of deictic, anaphoric and cataphoric elements or a logical tense structure, as well as presuppositions and implications connected to general world knowledge. The purely linguistic elements that make a text coherent are subsumed under the term cohesion.
Robert De Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler define coherence as a “continuity of senses” and “the mutual access and relevance within a configuration of concepts and relations” . Thereby a textual world is created that does not have to comply to the real world. But within this textual world the arguments also have to be connected logically so that the reader/hearer can produce coherence.
– from Wikipedia reproduced here
2/ Here is another definition from the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics
coherence
Coherence is the quality of meaning unity and purpose perceived in discourse. It is not a property of the linguistic forms in the text and their denotations (though these will contribute to it), but of these cover forms and meanings interpreted by a receiver through knowledge and reasoning. As such, coherence is not an absolute quality of a text, but always relative to a particular receiver and context. A description of coherence is usually concerned with the links inferred between sentences or
utterances. It is often contrasted with COHESION, which is the linguistic realization of such links (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).
3/ A definition from the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics
coherence n coherent adj
the relationships which link the meanings of UTTERANCES in a DISCOURSE or of the sentences in a text. These links may be based on the speakers’ shared knowledge. For example:
A:Could you give me a lift home?
B: Sorry, I’m visiting my sister.
There is no grammatical or lexical link between A’s question and B’s reply (see COHESION) but the exchange has coherence because both A and B know that B’s sister lives in the opposite direction to A’s home. In written texts coherence refers to the way a text makes sense to the readers through the organization of its content, and the relevance and clarity of its concepts and ideas. Generally a PARAGRAPH has coherence if it is a series of sentences that develop a main idea (i.e. with a TOPIC SENTENCE and supporting sentences which relate to it).
Ideas for Teaching Coherence
As definition 3 points out coherence in conversational exchanges includes less explicit links but written texts do although coherence refers more to the way ideas are related to one another
Cohesion is generally easier to teach as it involves lexical and grammatical links but coherence tends to be more difficult and it would probably involve quite a lot of recognition and analysis work on the information structuring of the genre you are training your learners to produce.
Activities which might encourage recognition and awareness raising – a few ideas:
- ordering paragraphs into texts or sentences into paragraphs
- inserting sentences from a list of relevant/irrelevant ones into a completed or incomplete text
- completing a text where first – last sentence or first – last paragraph are given
- discussing how ideas in texts are connected to each other – e..g. comparison & contrast ; cause & effect
- appreciating how well written pieces are put together and analysing how the writer has achieved this effect.
Here is a good post from OnestopEnglish on just this topic with a great paragraph at the end by Scott Thornbury.
Find a great collection of lesson plans here on a variety of aspects of coherent transitions in writing; although intended for K-12 students, ELT teachers can find a great number of ideas which can be easily adapted to the ELT classroom.
Please share your own ideas or links in a comment; if you have written a relevant blog post or found a great link, I hope you will!
Answers to thinking tasks
1. Not! (with all sympathy for this young contestant who blanked out in front of the cameras..There are follow-up videos where she explains all, in case you might want to use this in a lesson)
2. The text above was taken from a spam message on my blog – in response to a post about large school chains – franchises in Greece and elsewhere. It is not coherent because:
- It is an irrelevant response to the topic of the blog post. Grice’s maxim of Relevance is flouted.
- There is no internal coherence in the paragraph; although the sentences are connected by topic, it is not obvious how the ideas in the sentences are connected to one another .
- The text, is a random collection of sentences, probably copied from various education sites and blogs that have to do with foreign language teaching – a stray and random collection. This is what blog spammers do: to get their sites listed, they put together paragraphs from various pages on the web and post, in the hope bloggers will not notice.
Interestingly, the mind of the reader who reads this text, attempts to find/discover some coherence in this text, simply because it has the shape and layout of a paragraph; hence we expect it to be coherent.
IATEFL 2015 | Marisa Constantinides: Evernote for teacher observation and teacher development | Workshop summary
A great summary of a presentation I did at IATEFL in 2015 – using new tools for teacher observation which also lead to self-observation and reflection.
Here are my original presentation slides on Slidebean – I am afraid that on the day of my second presentation at IATEFL (I did this one twice, once for the LT SIG and once for the main conference), slibean betrayed me and was completely down – so Olya’s summary is without my slides but with the tool itself
https://app.slidebean.com/embed/rtCrPpeNEc
Read on
Abstract: A tutor, colleague or supervisor with a notepad taking field notes during a lesson is a common sight on teacher development courses. In this talk, I want to show how the use of Evernote can make teacher observations more effective and create an impact that can last longer, leading teachers in training to further reflection and development. Twitter: @marisa_c; slides will are available on Marisa Constatinides’s slidebean. Video is the most reliable way to capture a lesson. There’s technology allowing to easily videotape the class, e.g. Swivel – the teacher is wearing a device, which allows the camera to follow them. But that’s very expensive. What are some cheap alternatives? A lot of observers take detailed notes of everything that happens, what the students and teachers are doing and saying – essentially, becoming a ‘human video’. Typical notes could have three parts: what happened / what you did well / what you…
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G is for Genre
Definition
Genre (
/ˈʒɑːnrə/ or /ˈdʒɑːnrə/; from French, genre French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ʁ], “kind” or “sort”, from Latin: genus (stem gener-), Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.
from Wikipedia; also follow this Wikipedia link for a list of literary genres
Thinking Task
Watch this video of Peter Sellers and think about the features of the genre he is delivering.
How exactly has he achieved his intended effect?
Comments
Peter Sellers delivers the words of the famous Beatles song “A Hard Day’s Night” in the same manner that a Shakesperean actor would deliver the monologue from Richard III – he is not only dressed and surrounded by the props which we associate with William Shakespeare’s Richard III but his spoken style of delivery imitates the spoken features of this particular theatrical genre.
The effect is hilarious.
Is he insinuating that the manner of delivery may sometimes assign some kind of aura to the words that they might otherwise not have?
I don’t know. But what he (or his director) has created is a wonderful starter for discussions on the notion of genre.
Peter Sellers is flouting Grice’s conversational maxim of manner in the deliberate way that artists do in order to generate thought or to create a comical effect.
Imagine if the Beatles set Richard II’s monologue into music similar to a Hard Day’s night. Would we take the words as seriously then, I wonder.
Some Books on Discourse Analysis
- Brown, G., & Yule, G., 1983, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge University Press
- Cook, G, 1989, Discourse, Oxford University Press (several pages can be read on Google Books)
- Johnstone, B., 2003, Discourse Analysis, Blackwell
- McCarthy, M. 1991, Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, Cambridge University Press
- Partridge, B., 2006, Discourse Analysis – an Introduction, Continuum International
- Thornbury, S., 2005, Beyond the Sentence, Macmillan Education
Upcoming webinars for educators | September – December 2016
For our Delta readers, a list of upcoming webinars, courtesy of Twitter friend Adi Rajan @adi_rajan
Have you attended any interesting webinars lately? I’ve been missing all the good stuff and turning up for the crap ones because let’s face it, it’s not all insights and epiphanies. Here are some webinars to keep you (hopefully) engaged till the end of the year. An * marks webinars that require registration.
Language
- A practical introduction to Language Assessment for teachers | Vivien Berry & Susan Sheehan | IATEFL TEAsig| Sep 21, 1700 BST
- Reading Skills for the Selfie Generation | Thomas Healy | Oxford | Sep 21 or 22, 1500 or 1900 BST*
- Speaking with Impact | Adrian Underhill | Macmillan | Oct 13, 0900 or 1400 GMT*
- Exploring the world through English | Ceri Jones | Cambridge Univ. Press | Oct 18, 1500 GMT*
- Linking your classroom to the wider world | Patrick Johnson | Oxford | Oct 19 or 20, 1000 or 1530 BST*
- Bringing…
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From Manager to Leader
by Bita Rezaei
Ask anyone and they will tell you there is a difference between being a manager and a leader but where the difference lies doesn’t seem to get beyond the quote “managers drive, leaders lead.” History is filled with wisdom and case studies on the qualities of good leaders and effective leadership. Over the past few years there have been so many books, articles and blog posts published around the “how to’s” of becoming a good leader, but as tempting as it may seem to call yourself one, it is not that easy.
It is said that management is career whereas leadership is a choice – a calling. Leaders get their power and authority not from their positions but from the trust people put in them. While at times you can tell a manager from miles away by a fair judgment of the dress code, way of speaking and mannerism, being a leader calls for another set of characteristics. To me, it’s about having that intangible charismatic component that some people have and some just don’t.
Teacher, hoping to be a manager?
Teacher, hoping to be a Manager? Or are you already a manager and learnt how to run your institution on the job? Like many of us, you probably thought there wasn’t much to running a school.
But running a school is a very special kind of management and requires special skills. No wonder teachers often do not show a preference for managers who have no background in education and no experience of classroom teaching.
Whichever direction you are coming from, an organised course on ELT Management, especially one which is part of the Cambridge Diploma and so clearly connected with a background in teaching and understanding of sound pedagogical principles may well turn your career around and give you the opportunity to develop it in a different way.
Enter the Cambridge Delta ELT Management Course
ELT Management Module 3 Course
Delivered entirely online – you can log in and complete tasks whenever you have free time
Join this 8-week online course to learn all about what it takes to be a manager in a Language Teaching Operation.
Cambridge Assessment offers this opportunity to Delta candidates who wish to move from being a teacher to being a manager. More and more institutions are becoming aware of this qualification and are showing a preference for teachers who also have management potential.
The course is assessed via an extended assignment on one of the following specialisms listed below:
- Academic Management
- Human Resources Management (HRM)
- Customer Service
- Marketing
In order to participate you must be eligible to be a Delta candidate (more here).
In addition you must
– be able to do academic research
– be able to write academic English
– have access to a language teaching operation (LTO) e.g. a language school or institution
– have access to data/information which will be useful to their project.
In order to apply, please download the application form from this link and send to info@celt.edu.gr
Tuition is 700 euros inclusive of Cambridge assessment fees.
Payment details will be sent to candidates upon acceptance to the course.
Watch an interview with a recent successful candidate
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
The course is asynchronous and you are not required to attend at a specific time.
Candidates who aim to obtain the Cambridge Certificate are required to write a 4,500 word assignment on one of the four areas mentioned earlier.
Submission of assignments is either in early June or early December.
