II What is self-assessment?

Current textbooks often include features which encourage learners to be aware of, and enjoy, their own progress. Self-assessment is a flexible learning tool which helps learners

- monitor their own progress so they can identify their success

- reflect on any difficulties and find ways of overcoming them

- identify their own learning styles and preferred techniques

- set personal goals to increase independence and sense of achievement.

Self-assessment involves learners, makes them feel they have a say in their learning and assessment. That is why it is such a positive method in assessing learners. It is also important for learners to record their progress both their achievement and attitude to their learning experience.

Currently, the Common European Framework is encouraging Profiling. Some teachers are now developing 'can-do' record sheets based on syllabus criteria and arc encouraging learners to select and collect their best work and to keep this in a special folder or 'portfolio' which therefore shows what the learner 'can do’.

Supplement 7

Pronouncing Grammar

Elena A. Shamina St. Petersburg State University

I strongly believe that the division of language material for learning and teaching a foreign language into aspects, such as lexis, phonetics, grammar, etc., is highly artificial, it does help in concentrating learning and teaching efforts on this or that linguistic phenomenon during one particular lesson — and this is its only advantage. For some decades now methodologists have been speaking about skills, such as speaking, writing, listening and reading, with grammar, pronunciation and such like only means of using or developing the communication skills.

If you have no doubts that grammar is inherent in all of them, I claim that pronunciation is, too. Pronunciation is clearly a part of speaking and listening and there is no need to go into it further. Reading and writing also embrace phonetics because letters reflect sounds, and vowels and consonants reflect letters. Punctuation marks require certain intonation contours and such a device as hyphen may be a signal of a certain accentual pattern (cf. 'make 'up, 'make-up).

Pronunciation and grammar are intervened (together with other so-called aspects of a language) in every instance of speaking English, listening to it or reading and writing in it. Moreover, it may be argued that the relations between pronunciation and grammar are closer than those between pronunciation and lexis. At least they are definitely more systematic: both "aspects" have the finite number of units (phonemes and morphemes, tense forms and stress patterns, etc.) and strict rules they fol­low. In old textbooks descriptions of grammar and phonetics used to be coupled together. Indeed, vowels and consonants make up the sound form of all the words, including that of the so-called grammatical or formal words, such as modal and auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc. It means that a mistake in pronunciation may result in a gram­mar mistake. Far be it from me to say that the one is graver than the other, but the conclusion may seem striking, if teachers and students concentrate only on the written forms of English.

For example, pronunciation of certain consonants has crucial importance for making correct verb tense forms and correct singular and plural forms of nouns. Verb suffixes -ed and -(e)s and noun plural suffix -(e)s may be pronounced in three different ways: voiceless consonants (/t/ and /s/), voiced consonants (/d/ and /z/) and with a vowel (/Id/ and /Iz/). It is worth mentioning that some English textbooks do introduce the fact and even offer exercises for practising saying the correct forms. Russian speakers who usually do not differentiate between voiced and voiceless consonants at the end of words in accordance with their native language pronouncing habits, tend to say only voiceless endings, which in certain contexts may lead to a misunderstanding: bets instead of beds or picks instead of pigs, start instead of starred, built instead of build, etc. It has to be emphasized that in all these examples the duration of elements is very important, too. The difference between Present Simple forms build, spend and Past Simple forms built, spent lies mostly in the long sonant in the former and the short sonant in the latter. When teaching phonetics I always make my students practise saying three forms o( the verbs like send - sent - sent, build - built - built or spell - spelled - spelt (which is usually viewed as a grammatical exercise), and I suggest that when teach­ing grammar teachers should make their students pronounce these forms with correct sounds. Or they can make their stu­dents play a guessing game with the teachers enunciating and students recognizing the forms.

Russians also have difficulties in saying forms like watches and teaches, often omitting the vowels in the suffix (watch's, leach's), which may make the forms sound strange or even unrecognizable. For practising the correct pronunciation of such forms I adapted a chart from the book “Pronunciation Games^” by Mark Hancock (Cambridge University Press, 1995). In trying to find out where a path may lead them through the maze, students are supposed to concentrate on the pronunci­ation and say the suffixes in the verb tense forms and noun plural forms correctly. To move about the maze one has to start in St. Petersburg and go to the adjacent cell only if the pronunciation of the suffix in the word in it is the same as in the starting cell.

Vowels, too, may have the function of differentiating between grammatical forms of words. To demonstrate this, let us again look at irregular verb forms and nouns with a change of vowels in singular and plural forms. The plural form of the noun men is different from its singular counterpart man only by the vowel, as well as the Simple Present Tense form of the verb run from its Simple Past tense counterpart ran. Russians have to be painstakingly careful not to mix up the two, as their native language does not use such subtle differences in vowel quality to make different words. Making an understandable phonetic mistake students even at the Intermediate level or higher may end up making a stupid mistake in grammar. To make students aware of the importance of saying such grammatical forms correctly, they may be engaged in looking for a path through the following maze containing ir­regular verb forms using only either Simple Present Tense or Simple Past Tense form forms? Simple Past Tense forms?

read	brought	sang	drove	taught	spend	spread
bring	broke	cost	sold	had	ring	rode
drive	sing	bear	sting	found	fly	stung
dug	find	run	bore	spent	ran	wear
flew	rang	sell	teach	weave	caught	rise
came	have	rose	wore	dig	fought	put
sent	wove	send	come	ride	break	cut

Doing the exercise students are supposed to say the verbs loud and clear and not only to draw a line through the chart (there are some possible paths for both Past and Present verb forms).

_{Supplement 8}

_{Unleashing Writing Creativity in Students}

_{Mario Rinvolucri}

Lathophobic aphasia is a term coined by Earl Stevick, perhaps EFL’s best writer of the past twenty five years, to describe his language paralysis when he first visited Germany and France. At that time Stevick had just graduated from a U.S. university, majoring in German and French. For the first month or so he spent in each country, he dared not open his mouth for fear of making mistakes. He reckoned he was suffering from lathos (mistake) phobic (fear of) aphasia (inability to speak). This behaviour had been ground into his being by a perfectionist set of teachers for whom the best was only just good enough. (Since those days, Stevick has gone on to learn about 14 other languages.)

Stevick is not the only perfectionist around. I feel that sometimes L2 writing is more prone to paralysis, brought on by absurd demands on oneself, than is oral production in the target language. Writing takes longer than talking, and some students use the added time to initiate corrosive inner monologues about the inadequacy of what they are doing. This self-strangulation occurs in LI writing too, of course. I can think of a couple of excellent colleagues who flagellate themselves into deleting and trash-binning fully adequate text. If these folk had the same neurosis in their cooking, they would starve to death! Let me offer you an L2 student example of this perfectionist dis-ease.

Last summer at Pilgrims, Kent, UK, one course participant wrote the lines that follow about herself as a writer:

I am a 29-year-old beginner writer who is going to stay a beginner writer for the rest of her life. I presume that the reason for this is that I never seem to be totally satisfied with my writing. Every time I read what I have written I feel like revising something. Sometimes it is just a comma and sometimes a whole paragraph. I guess I would like to do the same with these lines. I love writing but it's so "painful" reading your own texts over and over again.

Free, creative writing practice

I would like to make a case for free, creative writing practice, during which the teacher circulates in the class, working as a mobile dictionary and grammar book rather than a punitive mistake spotter. The teacher's role is to help the students and enrich their texts, rather than to use "geo-stationary-positioning" (reading over student's shoulders) to eradicate all the mistakes the students will naturally and usefully be making.

Of course, yes, there is a case for 100 percent correction, but not all of the time. That is what Stevick experienced, and it tied his tongue when he went to his target-language countries.

Creative writing exercises

I want to offer some well-tried classroom activities that may bring students to WANT to write in English. I feel that doing some writing work during class time is useful precisely because the teacher can give SUPPORTIVE help when and where it is needed. The very best time to teach a new word is when the student needs it to express herself.

Activity 1: Writing across the classroom

Tell the students you want them to spend 20 minutes writing short letters to each other. When Ahmet has written his short letter to Maria, he takes it over to her. She then writes him a reply.

Once the technique is understood by the students, everybody should be engaged in reading or writing for 90 percent of the twenty minutes. You go round helping, but not reading over their shoulders. This could be the first time the students have ever written anything in English to actually say something to another person. As happens in all good writing exercises, each person has an interlocutor, a reader. It is extremely hard to write convincingly to the sky or to the teacher's red pen.

If you use the technique with 14-year-olds, it is best to get the students to write their names on slips of paper — you collect the slips and shuffle them. Each student then picks a name and writes his or her first letter to that person. This avoids a handsome boy getting 12 letters from the girls in the class and makes sure that marginal students are included.

Activity 2: Tree-leaf correspondence

Bring some small bits of tree branches, roots, bark, etc. to class.

Teach "tree" words such as needle, leaf, sap, taproot, twig, etc.

Ask students to name and draw their favourite tree, each working on a sheet of paper in front of them.

Then ask the students to get up and mill round the room. They are to find a partner who is not sitting right next to them.

In each pair, they decide who will be the tree and who will be the leaf/needle.

Tell them to go back to their respective places and explain that the "Tree" is to write a one-page letter to the "Leaf/Needle" and that the "Leaf/Needle" is to write a letter to the "Tree."

When the writing is done, the trees and the leaves exchange letters. Then they answer the letter received.

End the class with the partners exchanging their second letters and discussing the process.

In both Spring and Autumn, some very touching, lyrical letters get written.

You can use this technique to get the students to practise the vocabulary of many different areas of life with pairs such as the following:

• Oxygen writing to Water

• A Waterfall writing lo its River

• Brakes writing to their Car

• Lungs writing to their Smoker

• The town of Catania writing to its volcano Mount Etna

The potential list is endless.

_{Supplement 9}

_{Climbing Grammar Mountain}

_{Cindy Gunn and Ann McCallum}

AS TEACHERS, WE ASKED OURSELVES OUR IMMEDIATE REACTION TO THE WORD grammar, and we came up with words such as challenging, important, and necessary. Our students, however, when asked the same question on an informal survey, responded with comments such as "suffering/' "boring," and "No, not grammar!" When asked to reflect on how grammar was taught to them, most students replied that teachers used direct teaching, worksheets, or editing exercises to help students improve their grammar proficiency.

We believe in the importance of teaching and learning grammar but have discovered that, although there is a place for direct teaching of rules, students are more responsive to alternate methods of learning English grammar skills. For example, we limit any direct teaching of grammar to pertinent mini lessons that empower students to make personal grammar connections. Games are another way to help students learn, review, and internalize various grammar structures.

Shameem and Tickoo (1999) point out that: "Research shows that new language items can be learned incidentally and effectively when students participate in communication activities." Further, Rinvolucri (2002) outlines four benefits of using a game format to teach grammar: games encourage personal involvement in the learning process; they provide diagnostic data about individual student skill levels; they foster enthusiasm for a subject traditionally viewed as uninteresting; and they typically are structured so that they involve everyone in the class. We feel that by presenting students with a game setting that incorporates strategy, skill, an element of chance, and enjoyment, "suffering" through boring, lengthy grammar lessons need no longer be the case.

In this article we discuss a game we have developed called Climbing Grammar Mountain. As practicing teachers, we understand the power of a game that is easy to prepare, practical for the classroom, and enjoyable as well as educational for students. We encourage educators to use sentences from their own students' work, or ones that relate to a particular grammar point or weakness currently being worked on in class. This game, as presented, is appropriate for university level composition courses, intermediate to advanced English as a second language (ESL) classes, and high school English classes. With some adaptation, younger or lower level students can benefit from this game as well.

Climbing Grammar Mountain: How does it work?

Climbing Grammar Mountain is easy to prepare and can be adapted to the unique needs of different classrooms. Preparation

Draw 4 vertical climbing lines (for a class size of approximately 20 students) on the board or on an overhead transparency. Leave space on the bottom of the transparency to show one sentence at a time. Divide each line into 10 segments to represent vertical feet. As in the example below, mark the segments 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.

	Climbing Grammar Mountain
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0	100	100	100
	90	90	90
	80	80	80
	70	70	70
	60	60	60
	50	50	50
	40	40	40
	30	30	30
	20	20	20
	10	10	10
	0	0	0
	Team 1	Team 2	Team 3	Team 4

Prepare a series of sentences. Some should be correct, and about three quarters should contain one grammatical error per sentence. Choose these sentences from the students' work, or develop sentences to correspond to the particular grammar point or points the class is currently working on. Conversely, the game could be a culminating or review activity and could include one error each from a wide variety of grammatical issues. (See the Appendix for sample sentences you can use as models.) Run off the sentences on a transparency and cut them apart. Place them in a paper bag or envelope ready to draw from during the game. Divide students into 4 teams of 4 or 5 students each. (Organize the number of mountain climbing tracks and teams accordingly.)

Instructions to students

Today you are going to race to the top of Grammar Mountain. In this activity, you are going to compete against other mountaineering groups to get to the highest point on the mountain before our class time is up. In order to climb the mountain, you will need energy and equipment. These things are available in the form of sentences.

When it is your team's turn, you will be given a sentence. You will need to determine if the sentence is grammatically correct or not. If you believe the sentence is correct, you can assign 0, 5, 10, or up to 20 vertical feet to the sentence. If it is indeed correct, you will advance that far up the mountain. If the sentence is incorrect, your team will fall down the mountain the number of feet you assigned to the flawed sentence.

Teams can win 5 bonus feet for correcting a flawed sentence. The team whose turn it is gets the first chance to correct the sentence; then other teams may try to earn the five bonus feet.

Have a great climb, and we'll see you at the top!

For the teacher

Before you start the game, ask the students to get into teams of four or five people depending on how many students are in the class. Have the students choose a name for their team. Start by playing a practice round of the game.

Provide the whole class with a correct sentence that is fairly easy to identify as correct.

Ask each team how many vertical feet (up to a maximum of 20) they are willing to award to it. Show how you would move a player up the mountain by that many vertical feet.

Next, provide a sentence that is incorrect. If students award any vertical distance to it, they must go back down the mountain that many feet. If students recognize the sentence as incorrect and do not wager any vertical feet on it, they can stay where they are. Allow them a chance to correct the sentence for five bonus points.

After the practice round, begin the actual play, using the sentences you prepared. Draw one sentence at a time. Show the first team one sentence and have them make their play. If the sentence is incorrect, give the playing team the first chance to correct the sentence for 5 bonus feet. If that team cannot correct the sentence, open it up to the rest of the class and give the answering team an extra 5 bonus feet. Then, move on to the next team, drawing a new sentence.

The game continues until you have used all the sentences.

How did it go in the classroom?

While developing this game, we asked our students to give us written anonymous feedback. These students were the same students who said that grammar is "boring" and related to "suffering." Most students commented about the aspects of fun and participation, things that were lacking in their previous grammar experiences. For example, one student wrote: "It's a cool way of learning grammar alright. Makes boring grammar fun! Studying grammar in high school was boring." Another student commented, "Yes, it was fun. It's better than just memorizing the rules."

When asked what they learned from the game, some students focused on the grammar target of our lesson, but others commented on the importance of paying attention to detail. For example, one student wrote, "I have to read everything more carefully." And another wrote that he/she learned "how to search for mistakes."

Students also commented that they hoped we would play the game again in class. The overall feedback from the students was positive reinforcement for our belief that students can learn and have fun at the same time. We found that using Climbing Grammar Mountain in our Freshman Composition classes worked well. In addition to the learning opportunity and enthusiasm fostered by the game setting, this activity specifically helped us meet two of the course objectives listed below: l. To improve students' understanding of the fundamentals of effective written communication, especially grammatical usage, sentence construction, paragraphing, and essay development. 2. To help students learn from others through such activities as peer review, team work, and group discussions.

Looking at the first objective, Climbing Grammar Mountain focuses the students' attention on grammatical usage and sentence construction. The game provides a way to address these two areas in such a way that the target structures are being reviewed and reinforced in an interesting, engaging manner. The game also meets the second objective by allowing the students to work and discuss together as a team to judge the validity of the sentences. If you use sentences taken from the students' own written work, the students would also be engaging in a peer review session.

Adaptability to different student populations

The beauty of Climbing Grammar Mountain is in its adaptability. The target grammar points can be from beginner levels through advanced levels. The important thing to remember is to have sentences that the students should be capable of recognizing as correct or incorrect. This is a game to review grammar, not to introduce new structures to the students. The sense of satisfaction for the students comes from the fact that they can work together and climb the mountain. Like real mountain climbing, the students must put in effort, so you do not want the sentences to be too easy for the students.

For younger students, we recommend not drawing the mountain on the board or using an overhead projector but rather creating a gentle, actual slope from one end of the classroom to the other so students can visualize moving "up" the mountain as they play the game. For example, the floor could be the starting point, a pillow several steps away from the starting point could represent 10 feet, a stool another several steps away could be 20 feet, and other classroom furniture or equipment could build up to the top of the mountain, which could be represented by a chair with several books on top. As the game progresses, the students would move to each level and stand beside (not on!) the height they reach on the mountain. The physical movement helps to engage the younger learners by providing tangible reference to the distances referred to in the game.

Conclusion

In the end, a teacher can only encourage a student to partake in a particular learning opportunity and perhaps instill some rationale for the necessity of it. It is ultimately up to the individual to connect with the learning and make it personally relevant. The word grammar, along with perhaps homework and alarm clock, has negative connotations in the minds of many. We hope to overcome some measure of this resistance to learning grammar, a skill most will agree is necessary and important. Through the use of an interactive, student-centered game activity, students may internalize the structures of grammar so critical for effective written and spoken communication. We believe that Climbing Grammar Mountain provides students with one means of accessing grammatical information.

References

Rinvolucri, M. 1984. Grammar games: Cognitive, affective and drama activities for EFL students. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shameem, N, and M. Tickoo, eds. 1999. New ways in using communicative games in language teaching. Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

Cindy Gunn is an Assistant Professor in the department of Language and Literature at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. Ann McCallum, formerly an Instructor of English at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, is a children's book author and currently teaches math in Maryland, U.S.A.

Supplement 10

Writing

Richard A. Murphy

Writing is, in a very real sense, a mirror image of reading. Both are interactive. Readers decode what writers encode. Both draw upon schemata. The reader brings prior knowledge to the comprehension of a text; the writer draws upon similar knowledge in composing a text.

Wilga Rivers makes the distinction between notation, or writing practice, and expressive writing, or composition. Notation ranges from mere copying to the construction of simple sentences describing facts or representing typical, uncomplicated speech. Expressive writing or composition involves the development of ideas either of a practical or a creative nature. Pedagogically, there is considerably more control in the development of notational skills than in more expressive types of writing. The expectation is that the EFL student will progress through several stages of writing practice to the early stages of creative composition. This development from control to creativity continues a line drawn throughout this manual in the chapters on dialogues, oral exercises, and reading comprehension.

The first activities introduced in this chapter are skill building exercises taking the learners from the very beginning to the mid-intermediate proficiency level. Here the focus is on structural detail and accuracy in the use of the written language. Learners are presented with textual segments, clues, and models of typical prose to assist them as they attempt to rearrange words or sentences, complete partially written texts, and imitate or modify entire paragraphs. In skill building exercises the progression is from simple to more complex structures, a so-called bottom up approach. The second part of the chapter, which is meant for intermediate and advanced learners, shifts the focus from the mechanical manipulation of structures to the more creative activities of process writing.

The process approach to writing is based upon a set of principles basically different from those underlying skill building. Where skill building exercises move from simple to complex structures, process writing, which is a top down model, starts with a concept or theme and works down to the grammatical and semantic units. In the process approach each learner completes a writing assignment in a group, exchanging ideas with other members of the group and receiving editorial help at various stages of composition. When conducted properly, process writing is a prime example of cooperative learning.

The process approach, with its stress on group interaction, is a direct offshoot of communicative language learning, just as pattern practice was a product of the audio-lingual method. For many years preoccupation with structural accuracy allowed little room for the development of cognitive strategies in creative writing. Students, left to their own resources, were often at a loss as to how to formulate ideas on a topic or theme. Process writing provides for the formulation of ideas and plans through learner cooperation, Rivers (1981) eliminating much of the isolation, frustration, and uncertainty encountered in writing programs of the past.

Recent studies have attempted to redirect the process approach with its stress on the general mechanics of creative composition to training in writing for specific content areas. The reason for this is a fear that process writing does not prepare students adequately for an academic career. In a content-based approach students develop writing skills within specific academic disciplines so that they will be able to compose essays and reports using the specialized vocabulary and structures peculiar to these disciplines. Usually offered at the university level, such courses are often adjuncts to academic courses, such as economics, history, or physics. Sometimes they are taught by teams composed of an EFL/ESL teacher and an instructor from the specific content area. In many respects, the content-based approach to writing has a lot in common with English for Special Purposes (ESP) courses, which are geared to developing oral and written proficiency in specific occupational fields.

In a similar reaction to process writing, other researchers have suggested that teachers of writing classes concentrate on what is expected in the American academic community. Advocates of what has come to be known as the audience-based approach mean to train students in the type of writing that will be expected of them at a university or college.

Valid as they are, neither content- nor audience-based approaches to writing lie within the scope of this handbook, which is meant to assist instructors in teaching "general English." The range of topics and fields to which students might direct their knowledge of the language is very wide, ranging from critical appraisals of literature at one end of the scale, to issuing written staff orders for the daily management of a hotel at the other. Basic fluency can always be channeled into specific directions at a later date, particularly through the acquisition of specialized vocabulary. The development of fundamental proficiency remains the chief concern of this manual. And to this end effective techniques drawn from skill building and process writing are applied throughout this chapter.