Principles Of Teaching Language

[Miina Hunker]

TESOLInternational Association has defined a core set of principles for the exemplary teaching of English learners. The 6 Principles are universal guidelines drawn from decades of research in language pedagogy and language acquisition theory. They are targets for teaching excellence and should undergird any program of English language instruction.

The 6 Principles were developed by a team of language experts. Grounded in research and with contributions and support from educators around the world, the TESOL Board of Directors, and TESOL Staff, these principles are the result of 2+ years of exploration, inquiry, conversation, and collaboration.

The 6 Principles Writing Team:

The 6 Principles are for all educators who interact with English language learners. They are applicable across different educational contexts, such as classrooms with children or adults, dual language learners, emerging bilinguals, and multilingual students.

This website uses cookies. A cookie is a small piece of code that gives your computer a unique identity, but it does not contain any information that allows us to identify you personally. For more information on how TESOL International Association uses cookies, please read our privacy policy. Most browsers automatically accept cookies, but if you prefer, you can opt out by changing your browser settings.

TESOL has defined a core set of principles for the exemplary teaching of English learners. The 6 Principles are universal guidelines drawn from decades of research in language pedagogy and language acquisition theory. They are targets for teaching excellence and should undergird any program of English language instruction. TESOL Press has published a series of The 6 Principles books and Quick Guides that can serve as a companion to our TESOL ME modules.

This double 6-hour module will deepen your knowledge of the research foundations that underlie The 6 Principles for Exemplary Teaching of English Learners and strengthen your understanding of the ways The 6 Principles reflect and reinforce one another.

Teachers create a classroom culture that will ensure that students feel comfortable in the class. They make decisions regarding the physical environment, the materials, and the social integration of students to promote language learning.

Teachers continually assess as they teach--observing and reflecting on learners' responses to determine whether the student are reaching the learning objectives. If students struggle or are not challenged enough, teachers consider the possible reasons and adjust their lessons.

Language learners learn at different rates, so teachers regularly monitor and assess their language development in order to advance their learning efficiently. Teachers also gather data to measure student language growth.

Teachers collaborate with others in the profession to provide the best support for their learners with respect to programming, instruction, and advocacy. They also continue their own professional learning.

The creation of a Production is a long and careful process since Procedural Knowledge, once created, is difficult to alter. Furthermore, unlike declarative units, Productions control behaviour, thus the system must be circumspect in creating them. Once a Production has been created and proved to be successful, it has to be automatised in order for the behaviour that it controls to happen at naturalistic rates. According to Anderson (1985), this process goes through three stages: (1) a Cognitive Stage, in which the brain learns a description of a skill; (2) an Associative Stage, in which it works out a method for executing the skill; (3) an Autonomous Stage, in which the execution of the skill becomes more and more rapid and automatic.

In the Cognitive Stage, confronted with a new task requiring a skill that has not yet been proceduralised, the brain retrieves from LTM all the declarative representations associated with that skill, using the interpretive strategies of Problem-solving and Analogy to guide behaviour. This procedure is very time-consuming, as all the stages of a process have to be specified in great detail and in serial order in WSTM. Although each stage is a Production, the operation of Productions in interpretation is very slow and burdensome as it is under conscious control and involves retrieving declarative knowledge from LTM. Furthermore, since this declarative knowledge has to be kept in WSTM, the risk of cognitive overload leading to error may arise.

The process of Proceduralisation eliminates clauses in the condition of a Production that require information to be retrieved from LTM memory and held in WSTM. As a result, proceduralised knowledge becomes available much more quickly than non-proceduralised knowledge. For example, the Production P2 above would become

The final stage consists of the process of Tuning, made up of the three sub-processes of Generalisation, Discrimination and Strengthening. Generalisation is the process by which Production rules become broader in their range of applicability thereby allowing the speaker to generate and comprehend utterances never before encountered. Where two existing Productions partially overlap, it may be possible to combine them to create a greater level of generality by deleting a condition that was different in the two original Productions. Anderson (1982) produces the following example of generalization from language acquisition, in which P6 and P7 become P8

Discrimination is the process by which the range of application of a Production is restricted to the appropriate circumstances (Anderson, 1983). These processes would account for the way language learners over-generalise rules but then learn over time to discriminate between, for example, regular and irregular verbs. This process would require that we have examples of both correct and incorrect applications of the Production in our LTM.

Before engaging in my discussion of L2-acquisition and L2-writing, I shall introduce the reader to the following concepts, central to any Cognitive theory of human learning and information processing:

LTM, on the other hand, has unlimited capacity and can hold information over long periods of time. Information in LTM is normally in an inactive state. However, when we retrieve data from LTM the information associated with such data becomes activated and can be regarded as part of WSTM.

In the retrieval process, activation spreads through LTM from active nodes of the network to other parts of memory through an associative chain: when one concept is activated other related concepts become active. Thus, the amount of active information resulting can be much greater than the one currently held in WSTM. Since source nodes have only a fixed capacity for emitting activation (Anderson, 1980), and this capacity is divided amongst all the paths emanating from a given node, the more paths that exist, the less activation will be transmitted to any one path and the slower will be the rate of activation (fan effect). Thus, additional information about a concept interferes with memory for a particular piece of information thereby slowing the speed with which that fact can be retrieved. In the extreme case in which the to-be-retrieved information is too weak to be activated (owing, for instance, to minimal exposure to that information) in the presence of interference from other associations, the result will be failure to recall (Anderson, 2000).

3a8082e126