Page 235 - Beyond Methods

Contextualizing linguistic input 223
9.2.2 First, think about how you can help your learners relate the text and the context; more specifically, explore the linguistic, extralinguistic, situational, and extrasituational factors that help them with the process of meaning-making. What kind of questions do you need to raise and address in order to help you design a series of tasks?
9.2.3 How can you set the stage for your task? How best to start them thinking about all the possible contexts in which some of the utter- ances taken from the text such as “We need more babies,” or “Let’s Get on the Love Wagon,” will be considered appropriate?
9.2.4 What might be the social and cultural contexts in which it will be considered appropriate for the prime minister of a country to say what he said?
9.2.5 How can you help your learners make the connection between the title of the story, the prime minister’s statement, the setting up of a Working Committee on Marriage and Procreation, and the social con- text described in the last paragraph?
9.2.6 How can you help them focus on the features of cohesion and coherence in this text?
9.2.7 Once you design your microstrategy, try to implement it in the classroom. Monitor how well the students respond and how well it helps you achieve your instructional goals.
9.2.8 Finally, see whether the feedback you get from class perform- ance indicates any need for revising the content as well as the imple- mentation of your microstrategy.
In Closing
This chapter on contextualized discourse and its significance in the development of communicative competence can be summed up in the words of Evelyn Hatch (1992, p. 318): “Communicative compe- tence is the ability to manipulate the system, selecting forms that not only make for coherent text but also meet goals and fit the rit- ual constraints of communication. That is, communicative compe- tence is the ability to create coherent text that is appropriate for a given situation within a social setting.” What helps the L2 learner and user is the realization that an appropriate and coherent text— whether spoken or written—can be created only if the realities that make up linguistic, extralinguistic, situational, and extrasituational contexts are taken into serious consideration.