Page 207 - Beyond Methods

Activating intuitive heuristics 195 eral options for teachers to design and implement microstrategies
that are appropriate to the needs and wants of their learners.
Microstrategies for Activating Intuitive Heuristics
The grammar of a language consists of a number of systems such as time and tense, prepositions, articles, interrogatives, etc., and sev- eral subsystems within each. For the purpose of designing micro- strategies for activating the learner’s intuitive heuristics, teachers can select any of the grammatical subsystems suitable to the profi- ciency level of their students. In designing microstrategies, teachers may find it useful to consult a good pedagogic grammar book such as A Communicative Grammar of English (Leech and Svartvik, 1980) or The Grammar Book (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1983). Also useful are learner resource books such as Grammar Practice Activities (Ur, 1988) and teacher resource books such as About Lan- guage (Thornbury, 1997). The activities and tasks given in these grammar-based books can be easily adapted to suit the needs and wants of a specific group of learners. Given below are two illustra- tive microstrategies on different aspects of the English grammati- cal system.
Microstrategy 8.1: Articles of Trouble
8.1.0 The article system in English is one of most troublesome as- pects of English grammar for L2 learners to learn to use satisfactorily. In this microstrategy, I focus on a subset of the article system dealing with basic features of the definite (the) and the indefinite (a, an, and 􏰀 [zero]) articles, and present one way of teaching them. You may wish to modify the suggested steps depending on what your learners already know or do not know. Keep the main objective in mind, i.e., creating conditions for activating learners’ intuitive heuristics (conditions that also promote negotiated interaction and foster language awareness).
8.1.1 Write on the board (or project on the OHP screen) two or three clusters of simple sentences to illustrate singular count nouns with in- definite/definite references. Here’s a sample cluster:
There is a table in this classroom. There is a book on the table.
The book belongs to me.