Background to language learning and teaching
What the syllabus tests
Candidates need secure metalanguage. Grammar: parts of speech, phrase and sentence structure, and the distinction between form (how it looks and sounds), meaning and use. Lexis: word meaning, collocation, chunks and formulaic language, register, connotation, word formation. Phonology: phonemes and minimal pairs, syllables, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, and connected-speech features such as linking, elision and assimilation. Functions and notions: functions are the purposes language serves (apologising, requesting, inviting); notions are general concepts (time, quantity, space); exponents are the actual phrases that realise a function, so Could you possibly open the window? is an exponent of requesting, not a notion.
Learning and the learner
Know the main accounts of second-language learning: behaviourist (habit formation, repetition, L1 interference), nativist/innatist (an innate capacity and a built-in syllabus) and interactionist (learning through negotiated interaction). Distinguish acquisition from learning, and know interlanguage, fossilisation, the silent period and the affective filter. Learners differ in age, aptitude, motivation (integrative/instrumental, intrinsic/extrinsic), learning styles, strategies and autonomy.
Traps
- Error vs mistake: an error is systematic and comes from the learner's developing system; a mistake is a slip the learner can self-correct given time and attention.
- Function, notion and exponent are routinely swapped in distractors.
- Deductive vs inductive: rule given first versus pattern worked out from examples.
- Stress is prominence within or between words; intonation is the pitch contour of an utterance.
- Learner behaviour is easily mislabelled: a silent learner is not automatically unmotivated or 'not ready'.
Rule of thumb
To classify an activity, ask where the rule comes from. If the exercise states the rule and asks learners to apply it, it is deductive. If learners meet examples first and complete a guided-discovery task, it is inductive.