What is your stance in teaching English pronunciation when English is now considered an international language?

English language has taken pain the up and down from dust to glory since it came into sight in Beowulf, Chaucer Canterbury Tales, and Shakespeare’s works until J. K. Rowling’s. The fluctuations of political, social events; the cataclysm of The Black Death (1346-1353); the changes of ecclesiastic aspects; the assimilation of other cultures from the Roman Occupation (43-410 CE), the Germanic Settlements (from around late 400s), the Viking Invasions (787-1000s), and the Norman Invasions (1000s-1154); the Renaissance Mixing (1400s-1600s), the Empire Imports (100s-present) have significant roles to play in shaping the English language as what we have at the present time. The body of the English language has faithfully reflected the country’s alternation from inferior to superior status. It was initially influenced by the outside world in every aspect of life then its status was recognised to have influenced the world since Britain was ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’ (see Baugh and Cable, 1991; Algeo, 2010).

As English is now considered as an international language (Crystal, 2003) or as a lingua franca (see Jenkin & Leung, 2017), teaching and learning English has never been so omnipresent before. With its diverse features from itself and from the influences it received from many other languages all over the world, teaching and learning English should be seriously considered initially by teachers. One of the issues should be mindful of is pronunciation teaching. The importance of pronunciation teaching can be obviously seen from the significant roles of good pronunciation in students’ communicative competence and performance (Gilakjani, 2012). In his study, Gilakjani (op.cit.) also emphasises that “limited pronunciation skills can decrease learners’ self-confidence, restrict social interactions, and negatively affect estimations of the speaker’s credibility and abilities”.

In order to teach English pronunciation effectively, it is suggested that teachers need to basically have the knowledge of phonetics and phonology (Nunan, 2015). In order words, teachers at least need to equip themselves features of pronunciation. The two main features of pronunciation mentioned in Roach (2000) are segmental features and supra-segmental ones. While the former is at the micro level and deals with phonemes (sounds including consonants and vowels), the latter is at the macro level and deals with linking, intonation, and stress (involving word stress and sentence stress) (Roach, op.cit.). Moreover, factors that impact English pronunciation learning in a particular context should also be taken into consideration. In his research, Gilakjani (op.cit.) has proposed four primary factors that affect students’ English Pronunciation learning as well as pronunciation performance: attitude (see Kara, 2009), motivation (see Gardner, 1985), instruction (Tanner, 2008), and exposure to target language (see Ahmadi, 2011). Tanner (op.cit.) also affirms the correlation of cultural sensitivity and the development of students’ English pronunciation proficiency. Mother tongue, according to Ahmadi (op.cit.), has certain roles to play in the target language’s pronunciation learning. This holds true when it comes to English sounds that do not exist in first language, e.g. Vietnamese learners may find difficult to produce /θ/, /ð/, to name just a few, due to the absence of these sounds in Vietnamese. Those discrepancies could hinder the learners’ pronunciation advancement as well as their pronunciation performance. As a result, students’ communicative ability is also radically affected due to lacking of confidence and difficulties in recognising words spoken by others.

It is due to the fact that teaching pronunciation is well connected to students’ language capability and language use, the integration of pronunciation into the curriculum is virtually indispensable (Gilakjani, op.cit.). The ideas of sound structures should be acknowledged by the teacher (Gilakjani, op.cit.) so that he/she would know well what to do with the students in a certain phase of pronunciation practice. What’s more, teacher’s observation should also be conducted to draw out what sounds would be difficult for learners to produce (Gilakjani, op.cit.). This would become a great help for students to be supported by the instructors in shaping good pronunciation during the time of learning so that intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability would be likely achieved by the learners of English (Burns, 2003). While the first one means sounds produced have to be recognisable by the listeners, the second and the third are respectively indicated that the meaning and the purpose of the utterances should be understood by the listeners.

From my perspective, as an English teacher, I am in agreement with Gilakjani (op.cit.) that teachers should devote time and effort in observation and figure out the specific sounds which would be problematic amongst a group of learners in a particular context. Also, teachers should help learners realise the prosodical features of pronunciation aspects of the target language. Likewise, as stated above, English is influenced from other languages, the pronunciation of those borrowing words may be quite different, e.g. pizza /ˈpiːtsə / is probably one of the words pronounced wrong by most of Vietnamese students or even teachers if they do not pay enough attention to the difference (it could be pronounced /ˈpiːzə / or /ˈpɪzə/) since it was first used in Britain from Italian pizza in around 1935 to mean ‘cake, tart, pie’ of uncertain origin (Cited in Etymology online: www.etymonline.com).

In conclusion, in my personal point of view, teaching English pronunciation is an integral part of English language teaching. Therefore, more quantitative and qualitative research on how to improve students’ pronunciation ability is needed, especially in the specific contexts of Vietnam. Teachers of English should acknowledge the significant roles of pronunciation in improving students’ communicative competency and performance to be well-prepared in terms of knowledge involved and proposing feasible strategies in promoting learners’ pronunciation accomplishment.

REFERENCES

 

[1]         Ahmadi, M. (2011). Why is Pronunciation so difficult to learn? English Language Teaching, 4(3), 74-83.

[2]         Algeo, J. (2010). The Origins and Development of the English Language. Sixth Edition. Boston, MA: WADSWORTH Cengage Learning.

[3]         Baugh, A. C. & Cable, T. (1991). A History of the English Language. Third Edition. Great Britain. Routledge.

[4]         Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language. Second Edition. NY: Cambridge University Press.

[5]         Gardner, R. C. (1985). Social Psychology and Second Language Learning: The Role of Attitudes and Motivation. London: Edward Arnold Publishers.

[6]         Gilakjani, A. P. (2012). A study of Factors Affecting EFL Learners’ English Pronunciation Learning and the Strategies for Instruction. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2(3). 119-128.

[7]         Jenkin, J. & Leung, C. (2017). Assessing English as a Lingua Franca. In E Shohamy et al. (eds.), Language Testing and Assessment, Encyclopaedia of Language and Education. Springer International Publishing.

[8]         Kara, A. (2009). The Effect of a ‘Learning Theories’ Unit on Students’ Attitudes towards Learning. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 34(3), 100-113.

[9]         Nunan, D. (2015). Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages – An Introduction. NY: Routledge.

[10]     Roach, P. (2000). English Phonetics and Phonology. Third Edition. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. UK.

[11]     Tanner, J. D. (2008). Factors Affecting the Acquisition of Pronunciation: Culture, Motivation, and Level of Instruction. All theses and Dissertations, 3242.

Mr. Know-All by William Somerset Maugham

Ph Vivian

August 2017

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences”, said the famous poet Audre Lorde. In terms of mutual recognition and acceptance of dissimilarity, our minds are usually trapped by a deep-rooted prejudice which we ourselves have somehow consciously or unconsciously built up. The situation is plainly encountered in the short story Mr. Know-All by William Somerset Maugham – a British famous writer during the 1930s.  

The story was set on a passenger ship sailing to Yokohama from San Francisco, shortly after the First World War had ended. In this close and limit environment, the narrator had a ‘chance’ to face with what he did not intend to face and to learn a worthwhile lesson of his life. The attitude of prejudice comes into sight right at the beginning of the story: “I was prepared to dislike Max Kelada even before I knew him.” By the end of the war, Britain took over part of Levant and the local people were insulted and looked down by British. “I did not at all like Mr. Kelada” was repeated many times during the story. The narrator did not like King George’s strange subject by describing Mr. Kelada as being short in a sturdy build, clean-shaven and dark skinned, with a fleshy hooked nose. Our storyteller did not like Mr. Kelada’s name, his belongs, his appearance, his manners, his oriental smile, his pride in being a British, the ways he got involved in and did not drop any matters. He even used the word “Levantine” in order to refer to people from Eastern Mediterranean and to denigrate Mr. Kelada. It seems that all the ugly features of gentleman from Alexandria or Beirut were collected at first to deliver the reason of the narrator’s intense hatred over his partner in the cabin, but actually his real sense of purpose was to ironically disclaim all the righteousness of prejudice in terms of the way people judged others through their race and appearance but not their intrinsic value.  

Mr. Kelada, notwithstanding being an expert on distinguishing the cultured pearl with half an eye, notwithstanding being a egocentric man, notwithstanding being challenged by Mr. Ramsay, notwithstanding being sure of the chain’s value, spared no effort to nobly claim that he was mistaken in order to protect a vulnerable woman’s dignity when he suddenly caught sight of her desperate white face. Just like the narrator, the more we readers find him intolerable at the beginning of the story by reason of his loquacity, the more we want to say sorry by virtue of our improper perspective towards this kind-hearted man. The situation happens always. It is ironical that what we see with our very eyes and hear with our very ears is not always the truth. It is ironical that Mr. Kelada who had been named Mr. Know-All, now could not examine the value of a chain, but again ironically he himself was the true Mr. Know-All because he knew well when to show and when not to show his knowledge.

As said by Richelle E. Goodrich, “We live our lives supposing things are as they appear to be when that is almost never the case.” The story Mr. Know-All has left us food for thought over the matter of holding prejudices and judging a book by its cover.

Thinking about Laura’s Compassion in Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party

Ph Vivian

September 2017

In The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield has drawn a social realistic canvas with two contrastive pieces of colours in which Laura’s compassion is the tenuous sole stroke existing in a society of people from different walks of life.

Laura is a young lady from the upper class. She, as any other nobles in the society, leads a luxurious, well-off life. She lives in a big splendid bright house with pearls and flowers where the presence of laughter is regularly and the absence of sorrow is always. However, in the Garden Party, to some extent, Laura is a sensitive girl when she is impressed that one workman stops to smell lavender, when she delights in the busy sounds of the house, she can even feel the little breezes blowing through the doors, and the sunshine alighting here and there. And above all, although living in wealth, she also possesses a sense of compassion. She muses that she would get along well with those simple workmen and wouldn’t let class distinctions get in the way. She is conscious of her class though, she wants to get along with the lower ones.

Laura’s family is boisterously preparing a party in the family garden where all the luxury is exhibited from a meticulous beautiful cup to fashionable dresses and dances which are intrinsically born for the silk-stocking. Then the Godber’s man comes and informs that a young cart driver was killed that morning when his horse reared on the street. The man’s name was Scott and he had lived in a cottage just down the road from the Sheridans in a settlement of commoners. He left a wife and five children. Young sensitive Laura was moved hearing the news. She calls Jose aside and tells her the garden party must be called off. From my perspective, such thinking is as beautiful as a flower blooming on a stone. People could not achieve full happiness when the others’ sorrow still exists in front of their eyes. Down the hill, there is a poor family of commoners suffering from their immense lost – their very husband and father, the backbone of the family. It seems that there is nothing more mournful than death. As far as I am concerned, Laura’s compassion, no matter how weak it is, has a sense of thorough understanding. Love and compassion are necessary. They are not luxury. Without them, humanity cannot survive. A couple of lines in Mahabharata – a Great Epic of Bharata Dynasty – run like this:

-         What is the most wondering thing in the world, Yudhisthira?

-         The most wondering thing in the world is all around us, people can be died and we don’t realize it can happen to us, reply Yuhhisthira.  

Those sentences have reminded us the reason that we come to this life. So what is compassion, we may ask? Compassion is the ability of realizing clearly the nature of sorrow. Compassion is also one’s ability of standing firmly to realize that he/she will not be apart from the sorrow. Laura to some extent shares the feeling of the commoners’ family’s grief. She wants to stop the party and visit the victim’s house. Although young Laura’s compassion is so feeble that she comes there with a velvet streamer on her head, the pride of class consciousness is still running in her blood, and when people are looking at her, she wishes she hadn’t come, she wishes she were anywhere but here with all of those eyes staring at her, this would be an unforgettable milestone in her life. She has grown up witnessing the death man which she has never seen before. “There lay a young man, fast asleep – sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful.” And the Laura speaks to him: “Forgive my hat.”

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

Ph Vivian

August 2017

 “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house…” The scenario of the story begins at the funeral of Miss Emily – the so-called last generation of the Grierson representing the last aristocratic class of the South after their defeat in the Civil War – and ends with a horrible discovery of the townspeople when they went upstairs to her secret dusty room which was unknown for over forty years. The large majority of the story reveals a numerous flashbacks of the townspeople about the period of Miss Emily’s alienated and isolated life shortly after her father’s death.

The time was undergoing a vigorous change and there was also a significant effect on society. After the Civil War (1861-1865), the South was defeated by its counterpart. Although the white nobles’ positions in the South were not remained and they were isolated by the large part of community, their pride of once-powerful period was still held high inside themselves and in the eyes of society: “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town…”. “And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.”

Following the stream of consciousness, the townspeople recalled the time when she had refused to pay taxes and when her father had died. “The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face.” I wonder whether she was such a cold woman that she could not express her sadness over her father’s death or her grief soaked to its peak at which she could not shed tears as she should when she realized that now she had nothing left. She would be fatherless like a little girl. No one would care for her or be by her side. As far as I am concerned, I do believe that she had her own feelings. She might be just as any other normal women on earth by which I mean she also longed to love and to be loved by others. However, life had bitterly encased Emily in a suffocating atmosphere of alienation and isolation which she, albeit with all the power of her will, could not escape. We just can’t help feeling pity for Miss Emily when it comes to “She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angles in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene.” There seems to be an increasing weight of evidence that she was experiencing the utmost heart-rending misery of her life. A large piece of her soul was incomplete and she needed to be filled by someone or by the love from others. While the society was going on the way of modernization, the community continued to step forward, Miss Emily wanted to forget everything and seemed to be struggling to find someone to be friends with. She went out with Homer Barron – a Northerner who, despite being a so-called day labourer, came like a victorious warrior. In the middle of rumour that Miss Emily and Homer Barron were going out together, the town dwellers learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letter H. B. on each piece, a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a night shirt. The townspeople probably thought that they were soon getting married until the time they did not see Homer Barron any more. No one knew exactly why Homer Barron disappeared from the last time seeing the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. From my perspective, I am convinced that just like me, a large number of readers would wonder why she came up with such a horror manner to keep her fiancé forever by killing him with arsenic she bought from the druggist and put his corpse on the bed lying beside her for such a long time of her life. Miss Emily could not make clear distinction between reality and illusion. She lived in the illusion of the past, of her father and her lover. She refused any change during the course of her life time. Time meant nothing to her though she could not escape from it. It is believed that William Faulkner, through the character of Miss Emily, wanted to convey the idea of disintegration of the Old South during the Reconstruction in the early twentieth century.

We readers may not avoid feeling sympathetic for Miss Emily owning to the fact that after all, we all are the products of our life’s setting.

A Rose for Emily!

"The Story of An Hour" by Kate Chopin

Ph Vivian

July 2017

The nineteenth century American literary circle witnessed the emergence of Kate Chopin whose fiction was closely connected with the South. The enthralling image of women in her fiction was contemporarily considered emancipated and passionate. Mrs. Mallard – the protagonist of the brief fiction ‘The story of an hour’ – was one of the typical illustrations of self-assertive female characters in Chopin’s works.

Death hovers over the story from the beginning when Mr. Mallard’s death was informed. Unlike others, Mrs. Mallard immediately understood what had happened and instantaneously started grieving for her husband: “She wept at once with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.” At the time of willingly confining herself in order to achieve the physical and mental states she desired, at the moment of being physically exhausted, the scenery through the room’s window threw into her eyes the open square before her house, the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life, the delicious breath of rain in the air, the wares of a peddler on the street, the singing from countless sparrows. Life went on outside and the world did not stopped. Kate Chopin not only saw and understood all aspects of the female psyche, but she herself was a self-assertive writer of her time. She was interested in writing about women’s awakening of their true nature. “She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will – as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been”. Mrs. Mallard could not be free from the thinking of freedom. A little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips: “free, free, free! Body and soul free”. Now that she can be free and plan her own future life thanks to the new found victorious freedom. “There would be no powerful will bending hers”. We understand that Mrs. Mallard has lived under the shadow of her husband for such a long time that she now desired to live for herself and wished to escape from any private will from a fellow-creature imposed upon her life. The climax of the story was raised to its peak when she suddenly realized that “a kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.” In the name of love, people could take any actions in order to impose their will and viewpoints upon their inferiors who were most of the time women in the society. Even though she knew that her husband loved her, any kind intentions were brutal due to their restriction of her true nature.

The very subtle detail from the story that should be considered was Louise – Mrs. Mallard real name was called for the first time in the seventeenth paragraph. At the moment she thought she could find herself deep inside identity. “Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own”. Mr. Mallard’s return was a lethal fact that resulted in her death. Mrs. Mallard’s fatal heart attack was not owning to her overwhelming joy of her husband’s homecoming as doctor’s claim. It is, however, ironically due to the fact that it was the ending of her new found happiness of independence.

It is true that Kate Chopin herself was a self-assertive writer when expressing her interest in writing about women’s spiritual self-assertion of her time.

Reflection In “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein

Ph Vivian

July 2017

The story built in The giving tree appeared to be simple featuring only two characters: the tree who characterized the mother and the boy who was her child. In spite of its simplicity, the subtle lesson from the story learnt by generation to generation lasts long since the first time it was published fifty-three years ago: The lesson of love and “For it is in giving that we receive” (Francis of Assisi)

Shel Silverstein started the story with a peaceful scene where the tree and the boy happily played and did everything together. How beautiful it was! From my perspective, I do believe that this was one of the most felicitous moments in their lifetime.  

But time went by.

And the boy grew older.

These brief words signal a transition or the beginning of conflicts. The boy was growing up and his demands of things were different over time. The first conflict came when the boy now had his own friends and expanded his social life. He felt the need of money to buy things and have fun. He then wanted a house, a wife and children. He desired to pursue his own dream of a happy family. Afterwards, he wanted a boat to take an adventure to discover the fascinating world. It is obvious that every time he came, the tree was happy and she was even happier to give him all she had. She was amazingly generous and willing to offer her apples, branches and even sacrificed her trunk so that the boy could fulfill his demands and wishes. When I read the story and tried to put myself in the character’s shoes, I was deeply touched and those following words obsessed me all the time:

“And the tree was happy

…but not really”

At first, I thought the tree was happy to help the boy accomplish his dream of sailing away to broaden his horizon, but this time she was not really happy. I even thought that the tree was not really happy due to the fact that she worried one day when the boy came back, would she have anything left to offer him? To be honest, those three echoing words “…but not really” remained in me and provoked much of my thinking. Yes, right! The boy was not the boy and the tree was not really the tree any more. The boy then was a man. His point of view about life was different. The important things in his life were not the same as those before. He wanted to uncover new things and pursue new dreams. As for the tree, she had nothing left except an old stump. Changes are the law of life. It is inevitable owning to the fact that people have rights to follow and achieve their lifelong ambition. However, There may be a majority of readers disagree with Shel Silverstein and argue why the boy just wanted to receive all the time and didn’t even think of the tree’s feelings and why the tree just gave, gave and gave from the beginning till the end of the story. Personally, I do think that the author had his own idea to develop his character demanding and going far enough away from his “home” in order to let the boy realize how much valuable the tree was to him, how kind the tree was to him, how warm the tree’s arms were to him and how tremendous the tree’s love was to him. Eventually, after struggling hard in life, after bitter ups and downs, the only place he thought of and wanted to come back was the tree – his mother’s arms. Simultaneously, the tree as a capacity of a mother wished to gain her satisfaction in terms of motherhood. She was truly happy to spare no effort to support her son without the expectation of receiving anything in return. “It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving”, Mother Teresa once said. The tree’s love was unquestioning. By the same token, we children should acknowledge that we owe our mother a perpetual, never-ending love which is usually taken for granted.

And I am convinced that the biggest message we all have learnt from the story is that: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (Bible – I Corinthian 13:7-8)

TED Talks and Extensive Listening

Ph Vivian

April 2018

In their paper, Renandya and Farrell (2010) have laid special emphasis on extensive listening in English language teaching (ELT). They claim that extensive listening students not only outperform the strategy-based students on the receptive measures, but also outscore the control students on the picture storytelling test. In this sense, extensive listening and the positive effects of employing TED Talks in developing listening skills would be the focus of this reflective discussion.

From the perspective foreign language teaching and learning, TED Talks offers a great source of authentic listening materials (Park and Cha, 2013). At the present time, there are more than 2,700 talks on the tremendous variety of topics available on the official website www.ted.com to be discovered. The talks are continuously updated in order to stress the topicality of the social current affairs so that the site is reasonably able to meet the learners’ interests.

In addition, TED.com provides a distinctive “interactive transcript” (Park and Cha, op.cit. p. 98) which substantially helps English learners watch and see the transcript at the same time. Brown, Waring, and Donkaewbua, (2008) when examining the effectiveness of holistic reading-while-listening approach assert that learners may be aware that a higher level of comprehension is approachable and doable. This greatly encourages them to move forward and pay more attention to invest time and effort in this skill.

As a teacher of English, I have witnessed how my students feel interested in and make enthusiastic response to TED Talks whenever I have some extra time to show them one. From my view, I do believe TED Talks would probably be one of the great sources to be exploited and used in improving students’ listening skills. Also, TED Talks deverses more careful study in specific contexts in uplifting students’ listening proficiency.

REFERENCES

[1]   Brown, R., Waring, R., & Donkaewbua, S. (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2). 136-63.

[2]   Park, S-M. & Cha, K-W. (2013). Pre-service teachers’ perspectives on a blended listening course using TED Talks. Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning, 16(2), 93-116.

[3]   Renandya, W. A. & Farrell, T. S. C. (2010). ‘Teacher, the tape is too fast!’ Extensive listening in ELT. ELT Journal Volume, 65(1). 52-59.

Task design: What happened to the girl?

Ph Vivian

April 2018

*The template of the task description is adapted from Zhang (2012)

Goal

1.     Describe the fraction you see to get the complete picture using IN, ON, UNDER, and BEHIND. It should be noted that to get the whole picture come into sight, the collected descriptions of the fractions should be of the presence of IN, ON, UNDER, and BEHIND. Work with your friends to make sure the whole picture will be presented within the allotted time.

2.      What happened to the girl? (Is it a suicide, an accident or a murder or any other cases?)

Rationale

The goal of this task is to indicate whether it is a suicide, an accident or a murder or any other cases that happened to the girl in the picture. To do so, each student needs to describe a split part of the picture. The pictorial content is quite complex due to different clues which could be the important point to find out the answer. The task, therefore, requires intermediate level language skills.

Describing the split images gets students involved in using (at least) the required prepositions of place IN, ON, UNDER, BEHIND. Students, then, are required to discuss and negotiate their interpretation of what happen to the girl in the picture and draw out the conclusion that it is a suicide, an accident, a murder or any other cases which makes the outcome of this part open-ended.

Description and the Procedure

Students work in dyads synchronously in a chat room. Each student receives either part of the picture (figure 1). First of all, students describe the parts of the picture to each other and try to figure out the correct position of stuffs in the scene. The description of the presented fraction is typed (by students) into a box below it before sending to the community. The collection of the complete picture’s descriptions needs to be of at least four prepositions IN, ON, UNDER, and BEHIND before it comes into sight on the screens. It is noted that additional descriptions without the required prepositions are encouraged to get a more accurate prediction in the second part of the task. 

In the next step, students discuss to find out what truly happened to the girl and submit their decision to the instructor. (Note: Relevant vocabulary related to the parts of picture should be accordingly included in the requirement.)

Type/ information flow Jigsaw task/ two-way	Outcome Part 1: closed Part 2: open	Contextual support/ complexity Visual cues/ medium
Mode synchronous	Groups dyads	Level intermediate
Communicative demand high	Required interaction medium	Discourse functions/ skills prepositions

Production and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14(1). Retrieved from http://cie.asu.edu/.

Figure 1: Adapted from a detective story on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfnKFwdGwZc

Figure 2: Fractions of the picture

The design employs the image of a scene of a crime or an accident or a suicide to provoke thinking as well as intrinsic interests. In my personal education context, the majority of my students are young (aged from 15 to 24) and they are willing to be challenged by solving problems, especially discovering the truth behind detective stories. It is believed that the students would completely engage in the task since Taylor and Parsons (2011) claim that in order to improve students’ engagement, the tasks need to require and instil deep thinking.

As for task type, the first part of the task designed is a pedagogical task when students are required to describe the divided parts of the picture using the given prepositions of place (IN, ON, UNDER, BEHIND). Whereas, the second part of the task is the real world task where students use their personal knowledge and opinion to discuss and make a decision of what truly happened to the girl. Zhang (op.cit.) asserts that decision-making task “require[s] learners to arrive at a particular outcome, which often only can be achieved by engaging in multiple negotiations and turns communicating between students” (p.5). Zhang (op.cit.) also mentions that as proved by Smith (2003) and Keller-Lally (2006), decision-making tasks produce more negotiations compared to jigsaw. Accordingly, to complete the task, students need to communicate together, exchange ideas in order to fill the information gap from each other. Moreover, they need to express their own thinking over what happened to the girl and explain why. As a result, they are expected to focus on meaning rather than form.

Additionally, with respect to the structuring of the task, Zhang (op.cit.) mentions that “the unstructured/optional task allowed for an open-ended outcome, whereas the structured/required task was based on a narrow and controlled design” (p.8). The task is divided into two subtasks and the complexity of the tasks is gradually increasing. This could be because while the first one is considered as a structured design, the second one is the unstructured task by doing which students have more choices and answers based on their personal perspectives. Furthermore, Brown, Anderson, Shilcock and Yule (1984) suggest that static tasks (e.g. description) are considered to be simple than abstract tasks (e.g. opinion giving or problem solving). Zhang also reveals his agreement with Brandl (2008) that although it may take less time for students to work with pre-structured tasks and they also pay attention to the accuracy of the output, “students produced more language in unstructured than in structured tasks in the synchronous mode” (Zhang, op.cit., p.8).

There actually exist other task types that go along the two – synchronously communicative tasks. While the communicative task which goes along the first part is closed, the one goes along the second part is open and obviously the communicative tasks employed in this case are two-way since the information is held by many (or at least four) students. It is suggested by Smith (2003) and Keller-Lally (2006), open-outcome tasks which allow students to propose a mix variety of potential solutions employ more negotiations (cited in Zhang, 2012). Accordingly, the language outputs tend to be more in use compared to those of closed-outcome tasks.

Regarding the task’s characteristics, the task could be challenging to the elementary students. It is due to the fact that the task requires them to have certain knowledge of the target language to describe the images in details by mentioning the positions of all the stuffs presented through which students use the prepositions IN, ON, UNDER, BEHIND. Despite the complexity of the task (which should be considered closely in designing a task serving a specific purpose – see Robinson 2001), it has exploited the pictured-based content which is, in comparison with its counterpart – text-based materials, easier to achieve the outcome (Zhang, 2012).

In general, for the abovementioned justifications, the task is designed to serve as a TELL activity that can challenge students while they are adequately visually supported for the purpose of using ON, IN, UNDER, and BEHIND.

REREFENCES

Brandl, K. (2008). Communicative language teaching in action. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Brown, G., Anderson, A., Shilcock, R., & Yule, G. (1984) Teaching Talk Strategies for
Production and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robinson, P. (2001). Task complexity, Task Difficulty, and Task Production: Exploring Interactions in a Componential Framework. Applied Linguistics 22(1), 27-57.

Taylor, L. & Parsons, J. (2011). Improving Student Engagement. Current Issues in Education,

Zhang, F. (2012). Computer-enhanced and mobile-assisted language learning: Emerging issues and trends. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.