Category: PDFs

PDF #166 – Betty Schrampfer Azar – Basic English Grammar, Second Edition

Basic English Grammar remains a developmental skills text for students of English as a second or foreign language. Serving as both a reference and a workbook, it induces students to the form, meaning, and usage of basic structures in English. It provides ample opportunities for practice through extensive and varied exercises leading to communicative activities. Although it focuses on grammar, it promotes the development of all language skills.

PDF #165 – Simon Borg – Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do

This paper reviews a selection of research from the field of foreign and second language teaching into what is referred to here as teacher cognition – what teachers think, know, and believe and the relationships of these mental constructs to what teachers do in the language teaching classroom.

After reading “Learning an L2 in a troubled world” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #164 – The generative grammar of the immune system

Grammar is a science that is more than 2000 years old, whereas immunology has become a respectable part of biology only during the past hundred years. Though both sciences still face exasperating problems, this lecture attempts to establish an analogy between linguistics and immunology, between the descriptions of language and of the immune system. Let me first recall some of the essential elements of the immune system, with which I shall be concerned.

PDF #163 – Phonology in Generative Grammar

A generative grammar is formally a collection of statements, rules or
axioms which describe, define or generate all well-formed utterances in a language and only those. The theory of generative grammars consists of a set of abstract conditions which determine the form of the statements admitted in such grammars and which govern the choice among alternative descriptions of a given body of data.

This is the most comprehensive and current introduction to phonological theory and analysis. Presupposing only minimal background in linguistics, the book introduces the basic concepts and principles of phonological analysis and then systematically develops the major innovations in the generative model since Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Patterns of English (1968).

Careful study of the text will enable the student to read the current scholarly literature with critical understanding and some perspective. Some unique features of the book include a set of exercises reinforcing the basic concepts and principles, illustrations from a variety of languages based on published and unpublished materials, a survey of all the major lines of research in phonological theory, and an extensive bibliography. Phonology in Generative Grammar is supported by an instructor’s manual.

After reading “Phonology in Generative Grammar” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #162 – Gustavo Rubino Ernesto – Teaching HEL in ESL Classroom 

The main point of this paper is to present a stimulating approach of HEL to ESL students. One major issue in an English as a Second Language (ESL) course that a teacher confront its students with the diversity of English around the globe. Many students already know that English is spoken in many countries but how it came to happen, and its differences are unknown territory to most of them. This paper highlights the most important aspects that should be tackled by students and ESL teachers when facing World Englishes.

In this paper Teaching HEL in ESL Classroom I argue that in order to explain World Englishes teachers need to elucidate the history of the English language and its many changes. Many students lack the knowledge of German and/or Latin to start a HEL course with Old English and because of that many authors suggest that Late Modern English as a more realistic and practical starting point.

Linguistic terms are not very often easy to be taught to those who are not interest in it, but some basic linguistic aspects such as phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax and semantics need to be explained before addressing the History of the English Language (HEL) but with limited coverage. The course should engage students on the ethical stakes involved in the spread of English, both historically and contemporarily. It should also organize HEL at the same time around a textual tradition chronology. Covering the main points in its history, social and cultural influences, pressures from other languages, internal and external history, synchrony and diachrony, content and structure, conscious and unconscious variations, stability and instability, language difference and identity.

You can check my video on this subject on YouTube.

PDF #161 – Angelika Kratzer – Semantics in Generative Grammar 

Semantics in Generative Grammar – In many languages, verbs are inflected. In all languages, verbs bring along at least some inflectional heads, lexical items bearing inflectional meanings: e.g. agreement, voice, aspect, tense, negation, mood, question markers, and evidential. Whether inflectional heads are literally attached to a verb or not is an issue that is of interest for morphology or phonology, but it is not likely to be relevant at all for syntax or semantics. In semantics, we are interested in the compositional aspects of meaning.

The inflectional items we care about, then, are those that make a compositional meaning contribution. In our introductory book, Irene and I only talk about the meanings of bare verbs. We neglect all contributions of inflectional items. In LING 620, you will look at the semantics of at least tense and mood, and possibly also at the semantics of aspect and questions.

The guiding idea about verb denotations we fleshed out in our book is one that we inherited from logic: the meaning of a (bare, inflectionless) intransitive verb like dance determines who the actual dancers are. The denotation of dance, then, is the set of individuals who dance. Adapting this kind of denotation to the demands of Frege’s Conjecture, we construed the denotation of dance as the characteristic function of the set of individuals who dance. But wait. Who are the individuals who dance? Those who are dancing right now? Those who
have just finished dancing? Those who have danced in the past? Those who dance habitually? The professional dancers? Or those who are able to dance? It’s much easier to swallow that the common noun goat might pick out the set of actual goats, or that the adjective plastic might pick out the set of actual things that are plastic.

After reading “Semantics in Generative Grammar” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #160 – Authentic Task- Based Materials: Bringing the Real World Into the Classroom

Task-Based Materials – One of the most challenging tasks constantly facing language teachers is how to capture the interest and to stimulate the imagination of their students so that they will be more motivated to learn.

To this end, the ongoing search for and the development of meaningful teaching materials, which often can be used to supplement the textbook for a course, is a critical planning activity to be done by teachers.

This paper reviews two major aspects of teaching materials, which, as many language researchers believe, may contribute to the overall effectiveness of the learning process because the learner sees the activity as relevant to his or her learning needs.

Are the materials derived from authentic sources, reflecting real- world language? Are the materials task-based, involving the learner in the practical
use of the language? Following this discussion, some examples of a classroom activities in which students can use authentic task- based materials to enhance their language learning are presented.

There currently is a wide array of teaching materials available to EFL/ ESL teachers to accommodate their various needs and their unique teaching situations. Many of these materials are commercially produced. These can include EFL/ ESL texts, audiotapes with accompanying workbooks, videotapes with student worksheets, and various Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) programs. There are materials available for teaching reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, vocabulary-building, survival English, cross-cultural communication, pronunciation, business English, TOEFL preparation, and various other content-based English courses.

After reading “Task-Based Materials” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #159 – Hands On! A Collection of ESL Literacy Activities

Although the primary focus is to provide a thematic based approach to
learning reading and writing, the activities will also serve as catalysts for speaking and listening activities. Hands On! is not a curriculum, but one of many resources that can be used to teach learners how to read and write.

His collection of activities was developed for instructors working with adult ESL learners who have had little or no opportunity to develop reading and writing skills.

The chapters focus on topics usually explored in any adult ESL class, although references are made to areas and names within Nova Scotia. The primary focus of this resource is to provide a thematic-based approach to learning reading and writing. This book is not a curriculum, but one of many resources that can be used to teach learners how to read and write.

Chapters 1–5 are in sequential order for learners at a very basic level. Each of these five chapters builds on the previous chapter. Chapters 6–14 are in no particular order and should be selected according to learners’ level, needs and interests.

After reading “A Collection of ESL Literacy Activities” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #158 – The Evolution of Model-Theoretic Frameworks in Linguistics

Model-Theoretic Frameworks in Linguistics – The varieties of mathematical basis for formalizing linguistic theories are more diverse than is commonly realized.

For example, the later work of Zellig Harris might well suggest a formalization in terms of CATEGORY THEORY, since Harris takes the utterances of a language to constitute a collection (possibly not even enumerable) that is not itself of particular interest, and concentrates on discussing a set of associative, composable mappings defined on it.

And thoroughgoing versions of generative semantics like Pieter Seuren’s seem to call for a formalization in terms of TRANSDUCERS, mapping meanings to phonetic forms and conversely.

However, work in formal syntax over the past fifty years has been entirely dominated by just one kind of mathematics: the string-manipulating combinatorial systems categorized as generative-enumerative syntax (henceforth GES) in Pullum and Scholz (2001).

A GES grammar is a recursive definition of a specific set, ipso facto computably enumerable.2 The definition is given in one of two ways: top-down or bottom-up. The classic top-down style of GES grammar is a program for
a nondeterministic process of construction by successive expansion symbol strings.

It amounts in effect to a program with the property that if it were left running for ever, choosing randomly but always differently among the possibilities allowed for expanding symbols, every possible string in the desired set would ultimately get constructed. Such a device is described as GENERATING the entire set of all structures the machine is capable of constructing.

After reading “Model-Theoretic Frameworks in Linguistics” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #157 – Compelling Conversations: Questions and Quotations on Timeless Topics- An Engaging ESL

I am tired of ESL books that bring too much information in one page. This book is a great one because it helps students with conversations. It brings enough information that does not make the student tired. This is a key aspects to any teacher. 

The art of conversation, once considered the sign of a civilized individual, seems less common today. Yet I treasure the moments of sharing experiences, collecting news, and exchanging ideas. I make a point of knowing my neighbors, allowing casual greetings to become long conversations, and making time to explore in depth the feelings and perceptions of friends and relatives. These natural conversations provide information, encouragement, laughs, and pleasure.
Many people say that they are too busy to have long talks. Other people prefer to watch television, play computer games, or listen to the radio rather than talk to relatives and friends. Sometimes people feel too shy to speak to the people next to them. Many Americans have forgotten how to hold good, deep conversations, or even a friendly chat on the phone. I suspect this lack of real communication lessens their daily joy.

After reading “Compelling Conversations ESL”, you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs. And visit my channel by YouTube.