POEM

Poem

The other side of the World

Q1:

Once the peaceful world!

Where people used to cherish;

And make merry-faces;

To help others laugh;

Where children would play;

With all their friends;

And all the rest watching;

Now, all that has changed;

With a blink of an eye;

The World has become a place;

Of hate and distress;

Where souls are muted;

I can hear a distant voice;

With a cold-blooded sigh;

Calling for help;

Feeling the deep wound inside;

In the world of despair;

Where no one listens;

The voice echoed and echoed;

Without any replies!

Q2:

Most of the students were feeling difficulty in the application of subject-verb agreement. The ESL students did feel difficulty while doing language exercises based on tenses; such as interconversion of past, present, and future tenses. Transforming nouns, adjectives and adverbs was also a difficult task for the ESL students. The grammar-based approach addresses the structure or grammatical elements of language in order to improve language skills. In an ESL class taught through the grammar-based approach, typically, the teacher spends most of the available class time explaining grammar elements; the students are mere listeners (Brown, 2007).

Q3:

ESL students were finding it difficult to pronounce certain words 'strength', 'refund', etc. I used contrastive analysis, comparing the first language and English, to predict areas of difficulty for language learners; this information was then used to design lessons. A strong reliance on spoken language was a consequence of the linguistic principle that oral language is paramount and that written language is simply a byproduct of speech. Behaviorist concepts of habit formation and reinforcement resulted in a heavy emphasis on repetition, mimicry, and memorization of controlled units of language. A typical audiolingual lesson consisted of a dialogue presented to the class by the instructor, using only the L2 (Hawkins, 2004).

Students were often assigned homework in the language lab where they practiced grammatical patterns. Reading and writing were secondary in importance to the development of good speaking skills. Because of its scientific reputation, as well as heavy financial support from governments and publishers, the audiolingual method became extremely influential (Lightbown, 2006).

Q4:

Although the teaching and learning of second languages (L2s) has been a concern of educators for many centuries (e.g., John Amos Comenius wrote about his nouvelle méthode in the 1600s), this overview will be limited to the past 200 years. The oldest method of language teaching is grammar translation (sometimes called the classical method); this stemmed originally from the teaching of Latin in Europe but spread to other contexts (Brown, 2007). This ...