Integrating Language Teachers’ Discipline Knowledge in a Language Course
INSTRUCTOR PROFILES
Second Profile: Lisa
Teaching Approach
The whole lesson is based on the completion of an exercise on word-order phenomena in English sentence structure: order of pre-nominal adjectives, position of different types of adverbials, emphasis, etc. Like Monica, Lisa clearly states the topic at the beginning of the lesson, which is reinforced by the main heading of the materials used.
T: ok |shall we start with this | it’s x exercise, right? it says | word order <3> word order xxxxx in your mother tongue and how much you xxxxx | right?
The exercise consists of a list of sentences, each of which contains an error related to word order, except for one sentence which is correct. Lisa asks the students to read one sentence each and identify and correct the mistake. After each sentence, Lisa opens an episode in which she either supplies or elicits what she considers to be the necessary systematic knowledge to explain the mistake as well as the correct alternative.
The type of activity and its development are in accordance with the views declared during the interview, in which she expresses her preference for transformation or error correction exercises, always including some systematization of the grammatical knowledge that is necessary for the satisfactory resolution of the exercise. She also mentions her preference for translation exercises, because they are useful for students to show that they are familiar with grammatical structures and to avoid interference errors in productive skills.
