An Essay of a Weekly Report Presentation on October 27th, 2015

WEEKLY REPORT PRESENTATION

An Essay of a Weekly Report Presentation on October 27^th, 2015

Submitted as the Requirement to Fulfilled an Assignment of

English as Foreign Language Methodology Course

Under the Direction of Prof. Dr. Hj. Nenden Sri Lengkanawati, M. Pd

Written by:

Rezki Firdaus

1407335

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

INDONESIA UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION

2015

This written is a weekly report presentation on Teaching the language system, Teaching grammar, Teaching vocabulary and Teaching Pronunciation material in Harmer’s book in 2007a and Harmer’s book in 2007b. It was written to fulfil the EFL Methodology assessment. In writing this weekly report presentation on October 27^th, 2015, the writer would recall all of the fourth reading report presentation, question – answer, and give some comment as part of it. This weekly report presentation presented by Ria Sukanti Effendi as the first presenter, Diana Nur Fathimah as the second presenter, Valentina Rizki Sutari as the third presenter and Hanifah Oktarina as the last presenter.

1.    Report Summary of the Presentation

a.    First Presenter (Ria Sukanti Effendi); Teaching the language system

Approaches in Language System Teaching. There are two kinds of approaches in language system teaching, as follows: the deductive approach and the inductive approach. The deductive approach element is engage à study à activate. It means that students are given explanation or grammar rules, and then, based on the explanations or rules, they make phrases and sentences using the new language. Inversely proportional with the deductive approach, the inductive approach occur in sequence engage à activate à study. So, in the first element students has the same at beginning but in the next activities students see the example of the language and then try to work out with the rules. For example, by giving the students some audio and listen it carefully then ask them to find the expression from the audio that were heard by them. 

Chomsky (2002) suggests that an inductive approach can make students rediscover their sub-consciousness knowledge of English grammar and bring it to consciousness, since the grammar of a language is acquired through abstracting a set of grammatical rules from language data, rather than through imitation. It means that Chomsky use the role in teaching then ask then students imitate it.

Brown (2007) says that “classroom learning tends to rely more that it should on deductive reasoning. Traditional methods, especially Grammar Translation, have overemphasized the use of deductive reasoning in language teaching. While it may be appropriate at times to articulate a rule and then proceed to its instances, most of the evidence in communicative second language learning points to the superiority of an inductive approach to rules and generalizations. However, both inductively and deductively oriented teaching methods can be effective, depending on the goals and contexts of particular language teaching situation.”

There are several techniques in explaining meaning of certain words to the students. 1) Show, for example, if we want to explain about ‘book’, we can take a book, hold it, point to it, and says it ‘book’. 2) Mime and Gesture, for example, we can use an expression of someone when running and then at the same time we act and use our gesture to show how someone is running. 3) Facial expression, we can use the expression by showing our face expression is it sad, happy, angry, etc. 4) Picture and Diagram, for example, we use a picture of an apple then ask where will this kind fruit can be grow or something else. 5) Time lines, by using any kind of tense, explain it when do use that kind of tense and the time that were used. 6) Meaning of the word, by share them about a word and describe it. 7) List of vocabulary, give a list that related to the teaching material. 8) Translation, the use of translation is by making a clear meaning of the words.

Explaining language construction. There are several ways in explaining language construction. According to Harmer (2007), 1) beating time with arms, give a stressed in a words. 2) Drawing the tune in the air, use the intonation to make sure their understanding (e.g. rising or falling intonation). 3) Writing the explanation, directly list the rule in a board. 4) Individual cards, demonstrate grammatical sequence by using flash cards that can be moved around. 5) Using Cuisenaire rods (small block of wood in different colors and lengths), it can be used to show the differences in every block by compile it become a sentence then every block has different part of speech. Then teacher ask the students this block belong to what kind of part speech. 6) Say it, for example, if we want students to understand the rule about the third person singular of the present simple, we can say: ‘Listen…we sat I play, you play, and so on then ask them to put ‘s’ in every kind of that sentences.

Practice and controlled practice. Practice, we do a repetition practice to internalize their understanding in short term memory to their long term memory, then they know how to put it in a sentences correctly. So, it becomes part of our students’ language store. Controlled practice, practice where students are expected to concentrate on specific language items. There are four stages in controlled practice, as follows: 1) choral repetition or semi-choral, choral repetition used when the teacher gets all the students to repeat a short phrase or sentence at the same time and with the same rhythm, semi-choral used when the teacher divides the class in half so that each half takes part in different episodes or choral repetition. 2) Nominating, used when the teacher chooses who to speak. 3) Murmuring, used when the teacher tells her students to practice saying things ‘under their breath’ so they all try out saying something new very quietly and in their own time. 4) freer practice (for higher levels), used when the students try to use ‘new language in their own sentences or conversation’.

Examples of teaching the language system. They are teaching grammar, teaching pronunciation, teaching vocabulary, and teaching language functions. Teaching grammar, to teach grammar Harmer used the explanation and practice and discovery approach. Explanation and practice here can be used if we want to teach the present simple for habitual actions, we can show elementary students pictures of someone with an interesting occupation (e.g. marathon runner). Then, we ask several questions about the picture until we come to the target language. We give the models of the target language and ask the students to repeat. Discovery approach, it will be different when we teach grammar by using inductive approach. In this case, we give the students a text, and ask them to find some sentences which contain the target language. After that, we ask them to analyze it (in pair or group). The students need to notice variations of language patterns and they also need to notice the pattern of the target language from those variations. Then, students try to make their own sentence using the same grammar patterns. Here, the students are stimulated to look at the language and come to their own conclusions (with the teacher’s help).

Teaching pronunciation, Using different intonation patterns or stress phrases. For example, we ask the students to hear conversation in which a woman asks a man to do something. The clue that the students have is only the man’s intonation and pitch of voice when he responses the woman request. Then, we pause the audio track and the students discuss whether the man response it positively or negatively. The class discuss and analyze the different patterns the man uses. Punctuation exercises. The teacher plays an audio track and the students have to decide whether they should put a full stop, a question mark, or an exclamation at the end of them depending on what they have heard. Then, the students can practice in the three different ways (statement, question, exclamation). Same sentence, different situations. A variation on these activities is to get students to think about how they would say the same sentence in different situations. Stress in phrase. For example, we can show intermediate students a range of phrases. The phrases can be written on individual cards. Each student has one of the cards and they have to find their ‘stress pair’. Songs and chants. Songs and chants are good for rhythm, and for young children.  Minimal pair exercises. It can be used to make the students able to differentiate the similar-sounding phonemes. For example, ship-sheep, heart-hard, sit-seat, bit-beat, etc. Sound and spelling. It deals with the correspondence between sounds and spelling. Tongue twisters. We can design rhymes and tongue twisters which use a particular sound or sounds and have the students repeat them.

Teaching vocabulary. Explain and practice using flashcards. At beginner levels, teacher often uses flashcards to help explaining a certain list of words. The teacher holds a picture, points to it and says the word/vocabulary. Vocabulary trees and diagram. At intermediate levels, we can ask the students to make vocabulary trees, after that they can also develop the vocabulary trees into diagram in which they will put some vocabularies related to the words in the vocabulary trees. Research. It is usually used for higher levels. For example, we ask the students to do research on internet about words which are associated with a certain topic and how the words are used. We only help the students when they get stuck.

Teaching language functions. In teaching the language functions, we can combine several ways, such as explain and practice, pictures, repetition, back-chaining, controlled practice, etc. Explain and practice sequence in which teacher can engage the students by drawing a picture of a boy and girl on the board which indicates that the boy wants the girl to join him watching movie in the cinema. Then, the teacher composes a question ‘would you like to come to the cinema?’. The teacher models ‘would you like to come…?’ and the students repeat the phrase. After that, the teacher joins the two halves of the question together. This way is called back-chaining. It means that the teacher gets students to repeat sentences bit-by-bit, starting from the back, e.g. ‘known…I’d known…if I’d known…come if I’d known…have come if I’d known…I would have come if I’d known’. This is useful for teaching the longer questions and sentences. Next, the teacher models the answer ‘Yes, please. That would be great’ by using appropriate stress and intonation, then the students repeat. After some controlled practice with various questions and answers and the students are able to substitute other words and phrases, the students can practice in pairs.

Categories of mistakes. There are four categories of mistakes. First, Slips. These are mistakes which the students can correct themselves, once the mistake has been appointed out to them. Second, Errors. These are mistakes which they can’t correct themselves (need explanation). Third, Attempts. These are mistakes that students make when they try to say something but do not know yet how to say it. Fourth, Developmental errors. It occurs along with the language learners’ knowledge development. It happens naturally because the learners make (mistaken) sensible assumption about how the language works.

There are three ways is correcting students. 1) Instant and intrusive correction. It can be used in the study session to clarify the misconception of language in the students’ minds, but it is not appropriate in speaking activity because it can disturb and inhibit the student when they are trying to activate their language knowledge. 2) Peers. If the students cannot do correction themselves, we can help them by asking their friends (peers) to correct it, or by explaining the mistakes ourselves. But, we have to make sure that the students will not feel humiliated when we use peers to help out. 3. Echo Correction. It is a technique in which the teacher repeats what a student has just said to indicate that something is wrong by a questioning intonation so that the student realized and do correction herself.

b.   Second Presenter (Diana Nur Fatimah); Teaching grammar

Related to what’s going to present, Fatimah explain the outline of her presentation as follows: what is grammar? should we teach grammar? and How do we teach grammar? (Consciousness-raising techniques, deductive approach, inductive approach).

What is grammar? grammar is the system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence. Grammar is one of three dimensions of language that are interconnected; with the other two are semantics which deals with the literal meaning of words, and pragmatics, which deals with the meaning in context. Based on its function grammar divided into two, they are, such as written-spoken grammar and prescriptive-descriptive grammar. written grammar is the rule of language that is typical for written text. Meanwhile, spoken grammar seems to display language features appropriate to casual conversation.

Prescriptive grammar is the teaching of grammar which is a ‘prescription’ as to what should be said or written. Prescriptive grammar describes everything on language and its workings. Meanwhile, descriptive grammar is that which concerns with the generalizations about what speakers of the language actually do say rather than with what they should do.

Should we teach grammar? there are some arguments that against with that. They are as stated: language is a skill, not knowledge; Knowledge is not commensurate with skill. communication is the ultimate goal; Communicative competence involves knowing how to use the grammar and vocabularies to achieve communicative goals in a socially appropriate way. Krashen’s distinction between learning and acquiring; Learnt knowledge can never become acquired knowledge. Argument in favor: grammar accommodates learners to generate sentences; Grammar is a description of regularities in a language, and knowledge of these regularities accommodates learners with the means to generate a potentially enormous number of original sentences. Thus, help them in communicating. grammar help avoiding fossilization; Learners who receives no instructions seem to be at risk of fossilizing than those who do receive instructions. noticing is prerequisite for acquisition; Noticeable grammatical items are likely to stick more to a learner. Grammar lesson that is taken now can later act as a kind of advance organizer for his later acquisition of a language.

Grammar teaching can mean different thing to different people. It can be teaching grammar separately. It means that, we can teach grammar to a student’s separately based on the condition of the students. Convert grammar teaching, means that teaching to a communicative syllabus and dealing with grammar questions that arise in the course of doing communicative activities. Overt grammar teaching, means teaching to a grammar syllabus and explicitly presenting the rules of grammar using grammar terminology. How do we decide which kind of grammar teaching that we should we apply? We can teach grammar to the students explicitly, by using conscious raising technique.

Variables that determine the importance of grammar. Those variables are age, proficiency level, educational background, language skill, style, needs and goal. Based on the age, children can benefit from grammar teaching if it is done through structured input and incidental, indirect error treatment. Meanwhile, for adult learners, we can explicitly use grammatical pointers to advance their communicative abilities. Proficiency level, Overt grammar teaching is better be avoided in the beginner level learners, regardless of the age. If it still given, there is the possibility that the focus on grammar will impede learners’ chance to acquire the fluency skill. Educational background: Overt grammar teaching is not suitable for learners with no formal education as the complexity of the rules might have been found difficult to grasp. Language skill, the decision to give overt grammar teaching might also depend on what language skill that learners need to develop. For teaching writing, grammar focus will be more effective to be taught compared to other skills. Style, the teaching grammar might be influenced by the register in which learners want to master. Informal context, for example, does not require more grammatical accuracy compared to the formal one. Needs and goals, Overt grammar teaching is more needed when learners strive for their professional goals that need to be accommodated by accurate use of language. Meanwhile, for the survival goal, message clarity is often enough.

Approaches to teaching grammar including consciousness-raising technique, explicit grammar teaching: inductive approach and deductive approach. Consciousness-raising technique is the notion on teaching grammar. Learners are given a considerable amount of exposures on the language, leaving them to notice some linguistic elements, remembering, and having understood them without conscious effort. Consciousness-raising technique activities can involve: Having to underline or note examples of an item in a text, being given examples and having to construct a rule, having to classify examples into categories such as countable/ uncountable or active/ passive, performing rule based error correction, using a rule to construct a sentence, recognizing instances of a rule in operation. Inductive approach in teaching grammar refers to the approach of teaching language in which grammar is practiced but the learners are left to discover or induce rules and generalization on their own. The advantages of inductive approach in teaching grammar were rules learners discover for them will more likely to fit their existing mental structures that those presented to them. Supports learners’ autonomy it menas learners become an actor who is actively involved in learning process rather than being a passive recipient of knowledge. The disadvantages of this approach was need time to done.

A deductive approach starts with the presentation of a rule and is followed by examples in which the rule is applied. The advantages of this approach was gets straight to the point and thus is a time-saving activity and It confirms to many students’ expectation about classroom learning. Deductive approach also entails disadvantages such as explanation is as seldom as memorable as other forms of presentation and It encourages the belief that learning a language is simply a case of knowing the rules.

As the conclusion. An appropriate grammar teaching technique should be (Brown, 2001): embedded in meaningful context; contributive to communicative goals; present the simple grammatical explanation, pay attention to errors but still maintain communicative flow, intrinsically motivating as possible. So, the teaching of grammar is more appropriate if presented inductively.

Related to another research was conducted by Ellis (2006) " traditional approach is unlikely to result in the acquisition of the implicit knowledge needed for communication". Then, Nurdini (2004)’s research “There is a weak positive relationship between language aptitude and English second language learners’ mastery of conditional sentences”. And the last was conducted by Fotos (1994) “grammar consciousness-raising tasks are recommended to integrate formal instruction within a communicative framework”

c.    Third Presenter (Valentina Rizki Sutari); Teaching vocabulary

Almost the same as the second presenter, Sutari give the outline of her presentation as follows: introducing vocabulary, practicing vocabulary, vocabulary games, and using dictionaries.

Introducing vocabulary. Introducing new vocabulary to the students is not an easy task because elicitation is needed in order to engage students’ attention. It is not only for engaging the students’ attention, but also providing them the context how the vocabulary used. Learning new vocabulary requires students to remember about what they see, hear, and write.

For the first example, in the beginning of a class, teachers can start the class by showing or drawing pictures related to the topic being discussed. Steps: elicitation: miming the action verbs; The words need to be modelled carefully and they may drill the words by asking students to mime the action the way the teachers did at first. teachers can ask the students to work in pairs and ask one of them to be a ‘robot’ and one of them to be an ‘Instructor’, and write new instruction; the students can be asked to write new instruction using the new vocabularies that they have learnt. This type of procedure is very effective for teaching beginners level.

For the second example. Elicitation: showing the students pictures; teachers can show the students a picture of the topic that is going to be discussed in the lesson. Dialogue handout with missing information gap; After providing the students with a context, teachers can give the students a dialogue handout with missing information. Then, predicting the answers. playing the audio – checking students’ answer; teachers can play the audio of the dialogue vocabulary is learnt through spoken discourse, and the students can see if their answers are correct or not. Making new dialogue with different situation; After learning the phrases, students can make new dialogue with different situation using the vocabularies they have learnt.

This third example helps students with the vocabulary that they can use when they do not know the words to describe things. Steps: asking students to talk to each other; Teachers can start the class by asking the students to talk to each other to discuss about certain things in which they need to describe things to others. Showing some useful phrases to describe things; teachers can show them some phrases to help the students to describe things that they do not know the words. Compiling lists of things; teachers ask the students to compile lists of things so that they can use these things in subsequent exercise. Filling in the information gap; students now can describe things to each other to fill in an information gaps.

The fourth example. Steps: being reminded of the text students have read; helps the students with word formation. Students are reminded of a sentence form from the text they have read. Being asked to say various prefixes mean; they are asked to say what various prefixes mean. Trying to add prefixes and suffixes in the words; the students are given a kind of construction-kit where they have to try to make new words by adding some prefixes to the words. Writing sentences using the new words; they are asked to write sentences using the new words that they have added some prefixes in the previous activity.

There are three ways of practicing vocabulary. 1) wheel of words; Students can take a look at wheel of words and they have to try to say which words that can be combined with the words they choose from the wheel. They should do this without using dictionary first, and when teachers already go through the answers, students can look up in their dictionaries whether they are right, 2) word maps; teachers write a word on the board—the topic that students are going to discuss, and ask the students to write what they know about that word. Students can make many hands of that word then teachers can make sure that students can say the words correctly before asking them to describe the words they have written, and 3) artificial Information Gap; students are required to describe things to fill in artificial information gap by looking at different pictures. These pictures will help the students to have the information and describe it to their peers. Their peers will get the information and fill in the information gap. This activity is repeated until it is completed.

Vocabulary games. The Advantages of vocabulary games are a welcome break from the usual routine of the language class, motivating and challenging, and effort of learning and language practice in the various skills. By using games in teaching vocabulary, it will help the students to learn better since games can make relax and fun environment for the students. Students will have the chance to use the language in a no stressful way after learning and practicing new vocabulary through games. There are three kind of vocabulary games that mostly can be used by a teachers’. They are Got it, Back to the board, and Snap games. Got it games!; This activity is designed to engage the students with a list vocabulary items. To play the game, teachers should have already prepared card with words on it. Teachers then have to read out the words one by one and students task is to try to snatch the card with the word on it while saying Got it!. Back to the board games; Students can be divided into some groups and the representative of each group should come forward and sit with their back to the board. Teacher will show the other members of the groups the word that they have to describe to their representatives and of course the rest of them cannot say the words or phrases on the board. The representative who can guess the word first gets the point. And Snap games; This game is useful for simple word-meaning recognition. This game can be played in groups or pairs. Each group has two packs of cards. One pack consists of words, another one consists of pictures. Students task is to match the word with the picture. When they finally match it, they have to say Snap! and collect the pair of the cards.

Using dictionaries. There are two kinds of dictionaries: reference and production dictionaries. Reference dictionaries are those that students use the most. It’s the type of dictionary that shows the students the meanings of the word, how it is used, how it’s spelt and pronounced. Reference dictionaries help students explore a particular word in depth. Production dictionaries are used when students wish to express a particular idea and look for the word that expresses it. Students especially look for a general word they already know and a production dictionary will give them words that have similar concept with the known word. Production dictionaries are able to introduce new words to them. Dictionaries activities. There are two kinds of dictionary: monolingual and bilingual. Monolingual can be used regarding to find what part of speech can the word be; how many meanings of the words are given. Bilingual dictionary can be used by the teacher to point out the students’ things that they can find out from it, such as meaning, grammar, pronunciation, stressed and an example sentence. When students use dictionaries; it is advised that they explain to the students when dictionary use is appropriate and acceptable and when it is not. Most researchers recommend dictionary use for reading activities. Meanwhile, in the situation where students should be listening, it is better to leave dictionaries at bay because, may “lose the benefit of hearing English spoken naturally” and the opportunity to practice their listening skills.

Related research was conducted by Derakhsan and Khatir (2015) study focused on the effects of using games on improving vocabulary learning in an English as foreign language or English as second language context. Next related research was conducted by Rouhani and Pourgharib (2013) investigated the effect of games on vocabulary gain of student. Then, Taheri (2014) investigated the effect of using language games on elementary students’ vocabulary retention. And the last related research was conducted by Alshawi (2014) investigated the implementing of games as an effective learning strategy to acquire new vocabulary.

d.    Last Presenter (Hanifah Oktarina); Teaching pronunciation

Almost the same with the previous presenter, the last presenter also give some point related to the coverage of her presentation. They are pronunciation issues’, example of pronunciation teaching and related research report.

Based on what she read from the books and another resources. There are some issues related to pronunciation: perfection vs intelligibility, problems, phonetic symbols: to use or not to use?, when to teach pronunciation, and helping individual students. Perfection VS Intelligibility. pronunciation may be called perfection when their pronunciation is like native speaker’s speech. It depends perfectly on students’ attitude to how they speak and how good they hear. Intelligibility is more crucial than perfection in teaching pronunciation because it suggest that some pronunciation features are more important than others. Teacher may want students to work towards an intelligible pronunciation rather than achieve an L1-speaker perfection. Likewise, if the word is understood by a listener, we say the speech is intelligible. Problems. What students can hear: some students are still quite hard to regenerate the pronunciation features that they hear. It is because the different first languages speakers have problems in utterance of different sounds. To solve this problem, the teachers should show students through demonstration, diagrams and explanation of how to make sounds. What students can say: students who learn a foreign language have the problem in pronouncing physically certain sounds. To clear up this problem, teachers have to be able accurately making visible where sounds are made (where is the tongue is relation to the teeth? What is the shape of the lips when making a certain vowel?). The intonation problem: intonation is the most problematic area of pronunciation. It is so hard for us to distinguish rising and falling tones. So, teachers should make clear this obstacle to students by giving chances to perceive such intonations and moods on an audio track or teachers’ ways to model them. Teachers then ask students to imitate them more.

Phonemic symbols: to use or not to use?. Students can differentiate sounds of English without using phonemic symbols such as sheep and cheap or ship and sheep by uttering them several times. Yet many students still have an evident demerit of sound and spelling correspondence, it will be effective if teachers let students know about phonemic symbols even more than that. It means that students also have to be able producing the different sounds. So, the knowledge of phonemic symbols is useful for them. When to teach pronunciation: whole lessons, integrated phase, discrete slots, opportunistic teaching. Whole lessons; Teachers devote whole lesson sequences to pronunciation, and some schools timetable pronunciation teaching in lesson sequences. Spending a whole class period is difficult to work on one or two sounds, it can make sense to work on connected speech, concentrating on stress and intonation. It does not mean that every minute of that lesson has to be spent on pronunciation work. Sometimes students also listen to a longer recording first before moving to the pronunciation part in a whole lesson. Integrated phase; Teachers have students to notice at pronunciation issues as an essential part of a lesson. For example, when students listen to a recording, teachers ask students to concentrate to pronunciation features on an audio and then teachers inquire them to imitate intonation patterns or to work on prominent sounds. Discrete slots; Some teachers insert short, separate bits of pronunciation work into lesson sequence. Over a period of weeks, they work on all the individual phonemes. At other times they spend a few minute on a particular aspect of intonation or on contrast between two or more sounds. Opportunistic teaching; This teaching is out of plan. When teachers teach vocabulary to students, for instance, they might stop what they are doing and focus on some pronunciation issues that have coming up during that course.

Helping individual students. To identify students’ difficulties in pronunciation teachers can help students by drilling with minimal pairs or working on variable stress in sentences together. Because pronunciation is an extremely personal problem. Then teacher encourages students to bring their difficult word to the lesson so that teacher can help them. This is appropriate because students may be more aware of their pronunciation problems. The last one is correcting students to make sure that we offer help in a constructive and useful way. This involves us showing which parts of the mouth they need to use.

Examples of pronunciation teaching. Students are involved to pronounce a certain sound. Teachers provide contrasting two sounds that are perfectly similar and inquire students to focus on specific aspects of pronunciation. For example, they give like words sheep and cheap with sounds /ʃ/ and /tʃ/, students listen to these words first then practice them. If students cannot do it well, teachers can show the diagram of the mouth to aid them where the sounds are made. The differences in pronouncing between sounds /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ are the position of plato-alveolar, then voiceless, next lips round and the position of teeth was close. The word with sounds /ʃ/ hold long, then the air flows and fricative. But in pronouncing /tʃ/ 1 strong stressed, doesn’t made the air flows through the mouth and affricative.

There is some research that conducted in pronunciation, first was by Zhang and Yin (2009) who found that there is interference of Chinese to English with the sounds {/æ/ with /e/ in words “bad” and “bed”} and {/ŋ/ with /n/ in “thing” and “thin”}, Age, Attitude and Prior pronunciation instruction. Next, was conducted by Riswanto and Haryanto (2012) who found that by using drilling technique can improve students’ pronunciation achievement. Then, Lin (2014) who found that Vietnamese speakers of English hardly in pronouncing /t/ and /d/ in the words 'coat', it will be 'code', Japanese speakers of English hardly in pronouncing e.g bath [basu] and gum [gamu], Arabic speakers of English hardly in pronouncing floor [iflor], snow [isno], and fred [ifred], Spanish speakers of English hardly in pronouncing /v/will be/b/, e.g  "vain" will be "bain", and Chinese speakers of English hardly in pronouncing sounds /θ/ and /ð/ will be /s/ and /z/, e.g teeth [tees], this [zis] and /v/ will be /w/, e.g private [priwate].

2.    Question and answer

a.    What kind of vocabulary game that useful for a higher achiever?

(Valentina answered) Related to Harmer (2007) that intermediate level is by using a back to the board game. The intermediate level of students has the same level as a higher achiever based on what Harmer has been stated. By using back to the board game make the higher achiever more challenging to do that game.

Prof. Nenden answer: games for higher achiever not explicitly teaching vocabulary because the students in a class was heterogeneous not homogeneous students. So, we can teach vocabulary explicitly to the higher achiever.

b.    How important to teach the stressed word for young learner?

Do not teach explicitly the stressed word for young learner. So, avoided to teach it to young learner. Let them learn by themselves even though they do not know what is it mean. Stressed is important to know by the young learner. So, from the morning age they already learn the correct one how to stressed the word correctly.

Prof. Nenden answer: Be prescriptive teacher. Prescriptive means to teach accurate. So, teach the students accurately. Used native speaker voice to make it clear. Imitate from the native movie for a young learner. So, it is important to teach them the stressed word. Young learner will talk as much as they want even though without knowing the meaning.

c.    How should we teach grammar to young learner, is it explicitly or implicitly?

Related to the young learner, explicitly teaching grammar should be avoided. It is better to teach grammar implicitly to them.

Prof. Nenden answer: Implicitly. Teach the grammar implicitly.

d.    What kind of situation that inductive and deductive can be used?

Inductive can be used to teach young learner. It means that to teach them should be implicitly. For deductive, mostly used by the higher achiever students or an advance student. Because they have more experience in learning a language.

Prof. Nenden answer: for example, when we are going to teach grammar we have to use deductively. But it will be different when we are going to teach writing. Because, another skill also included in teaching listening so we have to teach them inductively.

3.    Comment

Nowadays, teaching grammar by using inductive approach becomes a trend. Even though, there are still many teachers who use deductive approach in teaching grammar, in which, I think it is due to some reasons. The reasons can be related to teaching and learning goals, personal preferences, capability, particular situation, etc.  It is an issue around many researchers who try to prove which approach is more effective. This issue develops along with the trend of the use of communicate language teaching which indirectly seems pro-inductive approach. In my assertion, this trend of CLT use and its relation to the inductive approach is good to spread around young learners’ teachers. It is not only in teaching grammar, but also in teaching vocabulary, pronunciation, and language functions. An inductive approach is more appropriate because it keeps the natural language acquisition where rules are absorbed subconsciously with a little or no conscious focus and it builds more internal motivation by allowing the students discover the rules themselves rather than being told. Nevertheless, for adults, it is still needed occasional explanation. Furthermore, for certain purposes, such as teaching TOEFL, IELTS, and the other proficiency test, deductive approach might be appropriate since the learners need to pass the target fast therefore they have to learn it by the very simple, easy, and fast way, and the deductive approach is the one which can provide it.

Nowadays, for communication purposes, it seems that we want to bring back the natural way of acquiring language. It seems that the emphasis of how to use the language might become stronger than how to “study” the language. The assumption of teaching the language system among teachers has changed day by day along with the realization of ideal teaching approach in language. Translating the word to explain meaning and vocabulary seems easy. Writing down a set of grammar rule seems easy. Teaching pronunciation by playing audio track and asking the students to follow it to pronounce the words seems easy. However, the result of the instant ways will not stay longer without any enrichment and reinforcement. For making a natural, meaningful, and powerful process and result of teaching and learning, we should make greater effort, in this case, teaching the language systems, such as grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and language functions, needs combination of many ways and techniques.  We cannot only depend on one way. The examples of teaching language systems in this chapter report are only some of many ways; even teachers can create and develop their own ways which are suitable with their students, situation, and condition.

The discussion on how to teach grammar in classroom turns out to be resulted from various considerations, especially of the field of second language acquisition. However, regardless of various cons and pros, it cannot be denied that focusing-on-form helps students to achieve their English mastery faster. Additionally, based on the discussion, it can be seen that teaching grammar is available with many choices of activities, ranging from consciousness-raising techniques to the activities which apply overt-grammar teaching. Thus, the debate on whether or not grammar should be taught explicitly can be solved by these various activities that are put in continuum.

To decide the extent to which the explicit explanation on grammar rules are viewed necessary. teachers, we need to take this opportunity and also be wise in integrating grammar with other skills taught in the course. Both deductive and inductive approaches have the same weight of advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, I still choose deductive approach because it seems more suitable with the culture in Indonesia, where teachers are seen as the knowledge transmitter instead of a prompter. Deductive approach is also more preferable because it gets straight to the point, hence, allows us to make use of learning time effectively to learn and practice other language skills.

Since vocabulary is important and a hard work to do, attempt is required to understand, produce and manipulate the target words. There are a number of activities that teachers can apply in the classroom. starting from the traditional one such as filling an information gap, drilling, and describing things to the more sophisticated activities such as games. Of course in doing those traditional activities, teachers also can put some interactive games. By implementing interactive activities in the classroom, students might be more enthusiastic and motivated in learning new words as well as producing the words.

In teaching vocabulary, it is important to be noted that teachers give the lessons in not only single words, but also larger “chunks” such as collocations, phrases, or expressions, even whole sentences, as well as strategic vocabulary. Teachers also can use dictionaries in the classroom when teaching vocabulary since they are essentials in not only looking up words definition but also learning information such as grammar, stress, pronunciation, and etc.

Based on explanation above, pronunciation is one of the most difficult areas for learners, as well as for teachers. However, pronunciation is the important one in teaching English because there are some features of pronunciation that can influence the meaning of speech if we are wrong in pronouncing words or phrases. So that teachers should teach pronunciation to the students. The techniques that can be used are intonation-listening for pitch changes, stress-contrasting nouns, and meaningful minimal pairs.