Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.It tells about a daydream journey of a curious girl named Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by strange and weird creatures. The tale is so interesting, as it gave the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children.

This novel is built of 12 chapters of different interesting events that contains many themes that we might benefit from in our daily lives.In addition to the songs and poems that added an artistic touch to the wok.

Adding that the novel has been transformed into many movies and animations, due to it's popularity and likability. 

I advice everyone to read the novel to discover how the nonsense events that are happening with Alice reflects the real word in one way or another. 

Reading !!!

Reading is a receptive written skill, because reading as comprehension is for understanding and what we read is not our ideas, which is as Goodman called a ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’, it’s a kind of interaction between the text and the reader, whose mind tries to get meanings from what he/she already has (linguistic knowledge/ background…) while reading to initiate a kind of dialogue with it.

This kind of conversation that leads the reader to make sense of a text can be categorized into two categories: the reader may be interested in contrasting a personal interpretation of a text, or he may be more interested in trying to get at the author’s original intentions.

Notably, the term ‘interaction’ refers to the interplay among various kinds of knowledge that a reader uses in reading a text, as they help the reader to decode the language of the text, but fluent readers reach automacity in their reading, and do not consciously control this process. And recent literature on reading, we have the term top-down processing to bring what we already know while reading carefully to understand the meaning of the text, and the term bottom-up processing in which we decode the letters, words, and other features in the text in order to build new knowledge and bring it to our heads. Therefore, our mission as teachers is to activate students’ prior knowledge, then let them read and relate it to the six types of reading knowledge to know their availability in the students, and be aware if they are happening together in their brains. reading as comprehension is for understanding.

Learning Language..

Learning a second language is different than any other subject, because our minds need to think and match what we are getting, with concrete things around it to get the right knowledge, and our brains will work in processing the input data to have more output for the language.

Krashen believed that we can give the child the input of a language, and leave him to be ready to use it by himself, while Dornyei disagreed in the Explicit versus Implicit knowledge debate and said that students need a push to use the language.

Dornyei argued that implicit (indirect) learning through natural acquisition is not enough to gain the correct knowledge of a language, and a student needs to get the language explicitly through direct formal education too.

Under this debate Swan says that language teaching doesn’t mean only teaching language, but also exposing the learner to the opportunity to use the language fluently and appropriately, since using the language is our target from learning it.

For Schmidt, ‘’noticing’’ is the process that transmits ‘’input’’ language to ‘’intake’’ through learning from the teacher and acquiring by the learner practicing, it is the process that makes from quantity of gained knowledge an infinite knowledge to be used.

Course books or authentic materials ?!

For many teachers, what and how to teach is based on the course book and its syllabus that most of the time is chosen by the institution they work for, which is beneficial for the novice teachers to make them confident through using carefully prepared books that provide a balanced chronological presentation of information which is accompanied most of the time with variety of resources that would save the teacher’s time and energy in thinking, searching and preparing , those teachers sometimes use alternatives to the text book ,that they consider it trusted and prepared in a satisfactory language control, but to follow the allocated syllabus and procedures.

But relying on text books may stifle the teacher’s creativity through books that are structured in a specific way to impose a learning style that may not suit all students. Adding that text books are often bland, to avoid any possible offence and to be acceptable in many different contexts, where these contexts may not be in the best interests and needs of the students.

On the other hand, using authentic materials in teaching provides the teacher with more opportunities to choose and create from all the components of language that can be dealt with and suit all learning styles. Moreover, well-chosen and prepared authentic materials generate more students’ involvement and motivate learners to communicate through real topics that prepare them for real world communication.

However, teaching through authentic materials needs time and effort from the teacher to make it coherent, balanced, and organized with the curriculum standards, as well as suitable for the students’ age, ability, learning style, and social mentality. Because some authentic materials may contain a language that we don’t want to teach, or even they may contain some language errors, without forgetting that the majority of them are copyrighted and we should take that into consideration if we want to use them.

As a teacher, I believe that the balance that results from the students’ interests and needs is always the key beyond the correct choice between books and authentic materials, where the teacher should know when the text book is enough and serves the needs of her lesson objectives and when getting trusted, well-tested authentic materials give better results in achieving her goal.

This balance can occur also through interacting both in the same lesson, as the teacher can explain the text in the book and provide activities based on authentic materials, or giving an authentic material as an introduction for the lesson.

Teachers would master the correct choice better after building a rich repertoire of experiences that allows her to match what is best for every class, lesson, and students, to enrich the learners learning experience in a real authentic but professional accurate manner.

Significantly, knowing what to choose is not always easy, since it’s mostly dependent on the learners themselves, where the learners also are affected by many factors that lead to totally different individuals in the same teaching process.

Teaching Unplugged !!!

As a result of the communicative language teaching revolution, teaching unplugged philosophy existed .This philosophy, asThornbury suggested, asks us to return to a materials and technology-free classrooms in which dialogues can take place. And this is what Thornbury called teaching ‘Dogme’, which means going back to the roots of teaching methods and include interactive talks between students, and students with their teacher, by working on the learners’ language and using benefits from his errors rather than following a prescribed syllabus or pre-packed materials such as course books.

But from my perspective, teaching totally unplugged, and returning to a material and technology free class rooms won’t be effective in our century where using technology can help and make ideas clearer at some points, and we might use it as a kind of changing from time to time.

However, focusing on technology and leaving the main goal after using it in helping to deliver the knowledge will absolutely kill the interaction and communication in our classrooms; that’s why it should be used as tool when it’s beneficial to the objectives of the lesson; where balance in knowing when to use what; is always needed.

Communicative classrooms

If our goal is the communicative language ability, then practicing communitive tasks is the path to reach this goal, and in this domain ‘Brumfit’ listed a set of criteria for achieving communication’s fluency, as that the focus in those activities should be on the meaning and not the form because using the language is the tool that will lead for communication, and the used language should be relevant to the students’ needs to give them the chance to produce ideas, information, and opinions.

Brumfit also argued that students should not be reliant on the teacher or the material of the language, but they should have a space for negotiations, predictions (opinion gap), and the use of the four learning skills, as the teacher’s role, should be minimal to save the communication from being blocked.

Prabhu, on his turn gave a useful typology of activities that are based on how to create a gap of information or opinion to open a normal discourse, like the information gap activity which involves the transfer of information from one person to another; it is a give and take instruction to build a full image of the topic.

Also, there is the reasoning gap activity and the opinion gap activity, where the first involves deriving new information from the data that we already have through analyzing and discussing, while the second identifies and articulates a personal preference, feeling, or attitude in a response to a given situation through discussions and debates.

On the other hand, Skehan pointed that time pressure plays a great emphasis to force students to communicate without paying much attention to the completeness of the language form because they need to finish the task quickly. Therefore, they may use the lexical phrases to express ideas instead of building sentences from isolated vocabulary and worrying about the correct structure of the sentence.

Having said all above, leads us to a dangerous fact of developing the ‘undesirable fluency’ by using incorrect forms in communications, which students may use in other tasks.Thus, we need to help students to become more accurate too, by giving them the chance to prepare the content of what they are going to say and focus on the correct expression, or giving them the opportunity to record the communicative task and focus on the form in it after finishing it, or even the teacher can rewrites students text by following the ideas closely but improving the language to the students, to compare her work to there’s and use a cycle of preparatory with follow-up tasks as in the PPP theory to create a balance between accuracy and fluency activities.

Language in early ages

Language is an essential component in our everyday life and we use it for many purposes, and the main purpose is for communication to express ideas, thoughts, opinions, and ask for our needs.

Teaching language starts from the very early ages even though we are unconscious that we are teaching it in many of our talks and behaviors.

But we need to be more aware of better ways in which children become effective speakers, listeners, readers, and writers, because of the essential role of language of teaching language as a system of symbols by which we categorize, organize, and clarify our thinking that enables children to acquire the oral language and use it effectively in a variety of settings as well.

Children’s communicative competencies involve receptive language that refers to the child’s comprehension of words, and expressive language that develops during social interactions.

When children are acquiring language, they are developing five aspects of language knowledge that refers to a specific domain of language knowledge,(Phonetic knowledge, Semantic knowledge,Syntactic knowledge, Morphemic knowledge, and Pragmatic knowledge),but do not isolation from each other.

Furthermore, these five aspects of language can be categorized into three levels: linguistic that represents the usage level of the language, metalinguistic level when children become more aware of the five aspects of language knowledge and can consciously manipulate and reflect on features of language, and metalinguistic verbalization is the most conscious and complex level of language knowledge and occurs when children begin to verbalize their metalinguistic knowledge.