CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

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ELT & ESP

A Contemporary Approach to EFL Writing

Radmila Bodric, University of Novi Sad

The purpose of teaching writing is to make writing a conscious process and through looping it on a regular basis (through different types of essays, reviewing and check-listing the procedure as often as possible) to make it a subconscious one. By means of inventive teaching techniques it can be rendered interesting and, above all, effective. Students are provided with exercises dealing with features of written discourse and are led step by step through the process of discovering, developing and presenting their ideas. Students generally face the problem of what to say about the subject so the main emphasis is on discovering ideas and learning to use heuristics (brainstorming, clustering, the pentad, cubing, critical analysis of argumentation, triple viewing, etc.). A successful sequence to follow in producing acceptable writing incorporates three stages of writing: the controlled stage, aimed at the production of accurate language in context, the guided stage, aimed at organizing the given material, and the creative writing stage, which reinforces the production of content and language. Accordingly, various techniques and tasks covering all forms of rhetorical tradition are at work.

Assessment of Young Learners' Foreign Language in Slovenian Primary Schools

Mihaela Brumen , University of Maribor, Branka Cagran, University of Maribor, and Shelagh Rixon , University of Warwick

Assessment should regularly and systematically be integrated into the process of learning and teaching. That is, it should reflect the kinds of activity that regularly occur in class and with which pupils are familiar. It should have a strong diagnostic function that will provide useful information to teachers and learners in enabling them to take stock of where they are and if necessary to adapt their particular strategies.

The research reported in this article will focus on an investigation of Slovenian foreign language teachers' experiences and attitudes towards the assessment of primary learners of a foreign language. By a survey questionnaire we will present the issue why assessment is actually done on the elementary level, to whom the results are reported, how they are reported and what action is generated by the whole process.

Contrastive Exercises for Teaching Collocations

Živa Ceh, University of Primorska

Students of English as a foreign language very often find it difficult to write or speak in the foreign language. One of the problems they have is how to put words together. When speaking a foreign language we tend to use word combinations that are translational equivalents of the words in word combinations in our mother tongue. The analysis of students' mistakes shows that many mistakes are made because students are not familiar with collocations in a foreign language. Most common mistakes of my students have been used for a series of exercises I have produced. I start with the text containing wrong collocations and ask the students to correct them. Afterwards we write the English collocations again and point out the differences between Slovene and English collocations. In this way students become aware of the differences and hopefully remember the correct collocations.

The Portfolio – a More Responsible Student – a Less Stressed-out Teacher

Soca Fidler, University of Ljubljana

With Slovenia joining the EU, the comparability of knowledge across Europe is essential. The portfolio, a personal document of students' achievements and progress, which helps students compare their levels of language competence and skills with those described in the Common European Framework of Reference, is a valuable instrument meant for boosting students' self-confidence, developing responsibility for their own learning and assisting the teacher, as students set their own goals within the set curriculum or even beyond it.

Some examples of possible integration of the descriptors of the European levels of language competence and skills into the English curriculum in secondary education will be presented. Proposals will be made for incorporating portfolio writing assignments into the Matura Exam format in order to replace the written part of the current Matura Exam. Examples of integrating self-assessment of university students' individual work into their overall grade will also be given. The portfolio, which is based on students' self-reflection, is viewed as an excellent tool for building the student's autonomy in the learning process, thus helping all the involved parties to meet the needs of our lifelong learning society.

Intercultural Study Activities for Novice Translators

Michelle Gadpaille, University of Maribor

Intercultural studies can be broadly defined (anything and everything to do with all English-speaking cultures) or narrowly defined (specific differences in custom between home and target culture). Neither end of the spectrum is entirely satisfactory, and the problem remains of how to alert translation students to the mass of available cultural material, provide basic data about key points of difficulty, and ultimately find some fair way of assessing student competence in the area.

Based on the assumption that, in this field, work with genuine materials provides advantages over textbook study, I designed activities centered on English language newspaper articles, cartoons, songs, poems, movies and advertisements. I will present a selection of the activities used over the past two years in the Translation Programme at the Pedagogical Faculty of the University of Maribor, together with lesson plans, activity sheets, assessment methods and outcomes. These activities would work in any EFL classroom at the appropriate level, but are particularly targeted towards the skills of observation, imitation, accuracy and creativity that young translators need.

Promoting Learner Independence through the Use of Portfolios

Kirsten Hempkin and Barbara Majcenovic Kline , University of Maribor

Students of English at the Faculty of Education in Maribor often seem reluctant to spend time outside the classroom developing their language skills. In order to encourage our students to take some responsibility for their own learning, we introduced a portfolio and learner diary, with a variety of long-term tasks, to complement existing language development classes.

In this paper, we will present a number of factors relating to the portfolios: the portfolio itself with examples of student work; a description of our aims and expectations and how they were met; students' feedback and reflection on the portfolio; a comparison of the work of translation and pedagogical students.

Pronunciation Teaching 2004: What Can Be Learned from the LFC Controversy?

Allan James, University of Klagenfurt

The present paper will consider some implications emerging from the Lingua Franca Core debate of the past couple of years for the theory and practice of pronunciation teaching at tertiary level. Points to be addressed will include the status of pronunciation, the specification of goals/standards/norms in pronunciation teaching and learning, the role of pronunciation in intelligibility/comprehension, the different ‘meanings' of pronunciation and the teaching/learning ‘realities' of traditional phonetic descriptions. Suggestions will be made as to how a consideration of these issues in the context of recent and ongoing international discussion and in the light of current socio-linguistic and socio-cultural realities can inform future approaches to pronunciation teaching.

Learning to Read in English as a Foreign Language, How and When?

Klementina Jurancic Petek, University of Maribor

This paper wishes to give a brief overview of reading strategies, especially those required in reading in English and in Slovene. It will (to a certain degree) compare the reading skills of Slovene first graders (of elementary school) in reading in Slovene and the skills of Slovene fifth graders in reading in English so that the results may give at least some insight into which strategy to use for which language and when. Such a comparison can only give limited results regarding interference of the Slovene reading strategies in the acquisition of reading skills in English by Slovene learners (due to the age difference of the respondents, prior reading knowledge, etc.). It should, however, be interesting to compare them with those obtained as English is gradually being taught earlier in elementary school. The article starts with examining some theoretical issues regarding reading strategies (especially for Slovene and English) and ends with a case study involving Slovene students and comments.

An Analysis of Language Learning Strategies Used by Students of Traffic Technology

Violeta Jurkovic, University of Ljubljana

Language learning strategies have a vital role in the language acquisition process also within the realm of ESP at the tertiary level of education. My contribution first defines the concept of language learning strategies. It continues with the presentation of an instrument for the analysis of the existing language learning strategies used by the learners, Rebecca Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning. The central part focuses on a comparative analysis of language learning strategies used by 1 st year students of traffic technology at the Faculty of Maritime Studies and Transport, aiming to assess the students' existing awareness of the process of language acquisition, the learning strategies which they use, and the expectations with which they learn the language. Objectives of language teachers should include helping students to raise their awareness of language learning strategies and providing them with contexts for their development. Therefore, the concluding part contains sample ESP teaching materials that could enhance the development of the related learning strategies.

he Native Speaker Discredited

Damir Kalogjera, University of Zagreb

The native speaker's competence as a model for teaching English “had recently had some bad press” even in certain academic circles since “Euro-English”, “International English” “Global English” etc. have become outstanding topics on the agenda of English language teaching overseas.

These “winds of change” are often presented as a liberating ideology setting us, foreign teachers, free from the pressure of the “owners of the English language”. Gone are the days when it was considered normal that Robert Graves should object to Vladimir Nabokov's inventiveness by taking liberties with a language that was not his own. Still, would not a trace of academic doubt be appropriate in the case of a possible wholesale acceptance of these new and, apparently, widely welcome attitudes? Could we be in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water when the symbolic signalling of the varieties of British or other native Englishes at the phonological/phonetic, pragmatic and stylistic levels are to be interpreted, the task on which sociolinguistics, pragmalinguistcs, stylistics and cultural studies have thrived and where native speakers attitudes have been a most important support. Is there in view a(nother) major rift between the academic studies of English and the teaching of English to the international public?

Deep Structure of English Writing Skills in Slovene University Students

Milena Kovacevic, Nova Gorica Polytechnic

The article discusses an extensive sample of written English empirical data produced by Slovene university students aged 20-21. The empirical data include essays, reports and thematic discussions. The analysis of the empirical sample shows that the students use some typical interlanguage expressions and syntactic combinations. The deep structure of the interlanguage reveals an underlying influence, or transfer, of the mother tongue structures, i.e. Slovene.

Aspects of Shaping Literacy

Katja Plemenitaš, University of Maribor

The paper is about teaching writing to learners of English as a foreign language. It presents some general assumptions about what constitutes the difficulty of the written text and how learners should be prepared to handle such difficulty. The paper focuses on the problem of linguistic features such as grammatical ambiguity and nominalization that learners have to face when dealing with certain text types. It also offers suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of English through raising the awareness of the discourse function of such linguistic features.

‘Teacher English': Teacher's Target Language Use as Cornerstone of Successful Language Teaching

Urška Sešek, University of Ljubljana

In most of today's courses in English as a foreign language, the learners and teacher share the same mother tongue, but English is the language used to carry out all activities as far as the learner level allows. This means that the teacher's level of target language mastery plays a significant role in the quality of language teaching and the resulting learning. The paper will give a brief overview of the functions of teacher talk as a source of input and model language use, as well as a tool for managing classroom processes. Based on that, an argument will be made for ‘teacher English' as a case of English for specific purposes.

Project-based Approaches to Teaching Business English

Veronica Smith, University of Klagenfurt

The classroom environment does not typically allow learners of Business English to develop the language-in-action skills they will need to call on in their professional lives. A solution to this problem is a project-based approach which permits the integration of language skills in a thematic context. Rather than focussing on fully-fledged projects, in which the content matter takes on a life of its own at the expense of developing language proficiency, the Project-based Approach generates series of language-based tasks around the project theme. Project themes are current local development projects, for which students can either call on their existing knowledge or easily read up about. In this way, there is little need to research the topic and the learners can concentrate on the language of the project. This is ultimately a task-based and autonomous approach to learning Business English and will be demonstrated with examples from recent courses at the University of Klagenfurt.

Essay Titles – Getting the Best out of Students?

Cvetka Sokolov, University of Ljubljana

Essay titles are important (de)motivating factors having an immense influence on the quality of students' writing. The presentation will focus on two questionnaires aimed at students of English, and at lecturers teaching, among other things, writing skills at the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Both groups of respondents were asked to consider a list of essay titles taken from various authentic sources, deciding whether, to what extent and under what circumstances they found them suitable.

In addition, the respondents were asked to paraphrase each title in their own words to convey their interpretation and understanding of a particular title. The students were also encouraged to list some of their favourite essay titles which they had been or would like to be assigned in future.

The results and conclusions arrived at by means of the questionnaires will be presented and compared to my prior assumptions, stemming primarily from my teaching experience. The topic will also be discussed briefly in the light of what experts on essay writing say about essay titles.

Teaching American Environmental Literature in Slovenia

Rick Van Noy, Radford University

During the spring of 2003, I had to opportunity to visit and teach in Slovenia as a visiting Fulbright lecturer. I was assigned two courses in American literature, one on the nineteenth century and one on the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century course I taught as a straightforward survey, wishing to expose international students to some of the main currents in American literary studies. For the twentieth-century course, I changed the approach and organization. An effective strategy for teaching American environmental literature to an international audience uses a bioregional approach, rather than a chronological or thematic one, which enables students to understand the geographic as well as literary/cultural diversity of the U.S. Slovenian students were receptive to the course theme and approach, though they commented on some cultural differences about nature. Generally, they thought that nature and culture are more integrated in the lives of Slovenians, though this alone did not explain the lack of their own environmental literature tradition. The students found a powerful antiwar message in the online writings of the same authors in the course text. They found that environmental literature accomplishes two goals simultaneously: it both calls their attention to the calamities and potential horrors on the one hand, but also to the beauty, balance and peaceful coexistence that nature inspires on the other.