Page 231 - Beyond Methods

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9.2.8 Based on your notes (and on an analysis of the conversation you may have taped), you might decide to treat various aspects of tense and time expressions followed by focused exercises to be done in class later.
9.2.9 And, as before, reflect on the usefulness of this kind of an ac- tivity for your group of learners, and on your readiness to design such microstrategies.
Exploratory Projects
The following exploratory research projects are suggested to help you design your own microstrategies like the ones illustrated above. The first one focuses on linguistic and extralinguistic context and the second on situational and extrasituational context.
Project 9.1: Cloze Encounters
9.1.0 Cloze procedures refer to a method of deleting every fifth, sixth, or nth word from a prose selection and evaluating the response learners make as they supply the words deleted. They require “atten- tion to longer stretches of linguistic context. They often require refer- ences about extralinguistic context” (John Oller, 1979, p. 42). They as- sess whether a person has the basic syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical skills necessary to understand a piece of discourse. One type of cloze is constructed deleting every nth word; other types involve deleting spe- cific grammatical items such as articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc. While cloze procedures are generally used for testing purposes, “they must be sensitive to any of the things that teachers are trying to ac- complish in the way of instructional objectives” (Oller, 1979, p. 362). In addition to teaching and testing reading skills, cloze procedures can be used effectively for teaching and testing discourse grammar as well.
9.1.1 First decide which of the discourse grammar items (e.g., articles, prepositions, pronouns, logical connectors, etc.) will be your focus. For illustrative purposes, say you opt for pronouns. Select a passage suit- able to the proficiency and interest level of your students. Make sure the passage has several instances of different types of pronouns.
9.1.2 Keeping a copy of the original for your reference, delete all the pronouns in that passage and replace them with blanks of equal length. You may also number the blanks for easy reference. Write clear direc- tions telling your students what you expect them to do. Here’s a sample: