Language Culture Connection When learning a language, it is extremely important to deeply explore the culture that encompasses the language. The customs, way of thinking and values in a particular culture are crucial in understanding a second/foreign language. The language instructors should also make good use of this knowledge in order to achieve maximum benefits (Collier &Thomas1992).
Native Language Effect In order to be efficient in their language acquisition, language learners should highly rely on their native language knowledge while determining the interconnectedness within the language features. As a matter of fact, the minds of children are trained in such a way that they can classify the phonemes in their native language.
This may however vary with the English phonemes and pose hindering effects. (Antunez 2001). Thus, it is of great importance that a second language learner identifies and understands the principles used in his/her native language.
Inter-language In order to gain competence in a foreign language, learners should learn to appreciate feedback not only from other sources but also from themselves (Clay1993).
Communication Competence. Efficiency in communication is the ultimate goal of every language learner. For this reason, it is important for a language learner to learn all the aspects of language which involve strategic, pragmatic, psychomotor and organizational components of a language. This may entail the understanding of the structures of a language as well as the context of language for fluency as well as accuracy within the language (Moat1999).
1.2 The Main Components of Language Teaching Phonemic awareness A phoneme refers to the minimum unit of a spoken language. It refers to the sounds of a language. A combination of Phonemes forms syllables while many syllables form words.
The English language has got 41 phonemes. For instance, the word shirt has three phonemes (sh-ir-t).
In general, an individual’s ability to recognize and maneuver these phonemes in the spoken word is referred to as phonemic awareness. It can also be used to refer to the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to form words (Cummins1989).
When teaching ELLs in phonemic awareness, one should consider various things. For instance, some phonemes are absent in an English learner’s local language which may make it a bit complex to articulate and make a distinction of the phonemes through hearing.
This may also pose challenges to the learner while placing a given phoneme in the right context. While teaching the English language, it is crucial that the instructor links instructions to meanings, making the sounds and words obtain the required familiarity. For this reason, the English language learners should be equipped with the English vocabularies required for them to understand phonemes.
The instructors of ELLs should therefore incorporate the meanings and pronunciations of vocabularies with phonemic awareness. To be effective in creating phonemic awareness in the English language, instructors should also learn and comprehend the linguistic features of the learner’s first language. He/she should take account of the phonemes that are found in the learner’s first language as well as those that are absent (Cummins1989).
Research indicates that, significant language activities are crucial in capturing the learner’s interest in language learning. They enhance the learner’s response during this process. Such activities may include word walls as well as constant speech games which focus on exact letters and phonemes (Clay1993).
In addition, language instructors should always consider the use of poetry and songs while teaching phonemic awareness. This is because the use of poems and songs creates rhythm and repetition making it easy to memorize some aspects of language and thus enhances remembrance (Antunez 2001).This notwithstanding, the learners should always be involved in coming up with relevant rhymes that exist in their native language (Escamilla1987).
Phonics Phonics is a term used to refer to the teaching of the relationship that exists between alphabetic letters and phonemes. While teaching the English language, the instructors put into consideration the fact that the sounds of a language corresponds to the graphemes in the language.
Here, graphemes refer to the alphabetic letters as well as spellings that correspond to sounds in written lingo. The English language learners should make use of the relationship between graphemes and sounds to identify recognizable words and to make sense of new words.
The teaching of phonics focuses on the instruction of a reading style that uses the knowledge on the correspondence of letters and sounds to achieve effective reading and spelling of words. The main objective of this teaching method is to make the learners appreciate the fact that there is a logical and conventional association between written letters and phonemes.
When teaching phonics to the English language learners, one should put several things into consideration. For instance, learners who do not know how to write in their language may have difficulties in comprehending some phonic ideas, hence the need to teach the purposes of print. In some cases, an instructor may encounter learners whose system of reading and writing in the native language may not correspond with the English language.
For example, a student ‘s first language system of reading and writing may be in such a way that, the alphabetic letters in written language match with varying sounds to those in the English language. This can be explained by the Chinese logographic writing approach where a single written character corresponds to a unit that has meaning/morpheme. On the other hand, the Spanish language contains some similar letters to those of the English language, which correspond in the same way to those in the English language.
These letters include; c, d, l, m, p and q. As a result, many Spanish learners who are learning the English language in America require minimum instruction in phonics with regards to these consonant letters. On the contrary, while most vowels in Spanish are similar to those in the English language, they are named in a different way and correspond to completely different phonemes. For this reason, the Spanish students learning the English language encounter some challenges when dealing with the vowel sounds (Antunez 2001).
