Free English Language Dissertations - An Analysis Of The Unit Layout Reveals That Speaking Practice Is Stressed
An analysis of the unit layout reveals that speaking practice is stressed through pair work and discussions at every possible opportunity, as well as class feedback, brainstorming, eliciting, role plays etc
Interestingly, the writing skill has been separated and allocated its own section at the back of the course book to be used at the teacher’s discretion. Perhaps this segregation is due to the amount of class time that writing activities (e.g. letters and emails [Unit2], descriptive pieces [Unit6], biographies [Unit10]) can consume, often involving activities that are more appropriate for homework.
All four skills, however, must be practiced and assessed in class and, although writing is often perceived as the most difficult of the four, its development is essential in everyday life. By separating writing, its removal from the classroom is almost being endorsed, a move that would disadvantage visual learners, discourage students with learning difficulties (e.g. dyslexia) and fail to thoroughly train students.
In general, however, the skills are adequately represented (short sentence writing is a regular feature), but, as pointed out by Cunningsworth, in actual language we rarely use one skill in isolation numerous other communicative situations in real life involve integrating two or more of the four skills. Integrating skills is promoted throughout the course, e.g. pair work discussion of grammar activities includes listening, speaking, reading and writing, e.g. asking students to write questions in pairs from a text uses all four skills. Communicative interaction between students will strengthen their cognitive strategies, e.g. how to deal with the problem of real-time responses and unpredictability in normal conversation.
The suitability of the methodology
With the development of communicative language teaching the distinction between syllabus design and methodology becomes difficult to sustain This suggests a broad perspective on curriculum in which concurrent consideration is given to content, methodology and evaluation.
Each unit of the New Headway course follows the same pattern, commencing with a Test Your Grammar section before giving detailed explanations. This lends itself to the Test Teach Test (TTT) methodology, but could easily be tailored for Presentation Practice Production (PPP) lessons.
The sequencing is inductive (and, to some extent, behaviourist) in Unit 9, for example, students are asked to analyse pairs of sentences and differentiate between those that are facts and those that are possibilities; they are then presented with a context/theme based on a reading comprehension of problem pages; after gist and specific information reading and a discussion, students finally focus on the target language in the Grammar Spot.
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