How 4 activities in L2 are achieved?

Receptive activities

   1. Reading

Ø    Level of L1 reading ability is a very strong predictor of how successful students will be in learning to read L2. This is true even when the L1 is represented in a different symbolic writing system

Ø     Learners whose L1 is written in a different writing system  from their L2 need to be able to recognize symbols in the target language as an early step 

   Table Writing system of the world

Ø   What learners need to encounter at an early stage

-     Directionality (whether that L2 is written from left to right, right to left or top to bottom)

-     Blank spaces between words

-     Punctuation

Ø    Developing fluency in reading requires acquiring sufficient knowledge of the new language elements especially vocabulary, basic grammar and discourse structure.

Example

  Unlike English, Thai writing system doesn’t have a clear spacing rule. So if English native speakers want to learn Thai literacy, they have to understand this. And for Thai people who wants to learn English literacy, they also have to understand spacing and punctuation rules.

     2. Listening

Ø    First step in making sense what people say is recognizing patterns in recurring sequences of sounds and attaching meaning to them.

Ø     Begin the process of segmenting the stream of speech into meaningful units: sound that form words, words that form phrases, and phrases that form sentences.

Ø     Require the active engagement of learners

Ø     Ear tuning or familiarization : listening to the same record repeatedly until learners can automatically recognize them.

Productive activities

Written or spoken language requires prior knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, phonology, syntax, and discourse structure to access words and combine them into phrases, clauses, and longer units of text.

   3. Writing

Ø    Writing ordinary presumes ability to read.

(The knowledge of language that can be accessed for production is only a subset of what may be used for interpretation of language that is used by others; i.e. receptive competence always exceeds productive competence)

Ø    Ability to use a new writing system.

Ø    Require extensive practice to develop automaticity.

     Ex. Some learners begin with low-level task of copying words and phrases that they remember by sight.

Ø    Learners need to reach the threshold level of L2 structural knowledge.

   4. Speaking

Ø    The language knowledge involved in bottom-up processes for speech production includes: appropriate vocabulary, features of pronunciation, grammatical pattern that convey intended meaning and understanding of discourse structure.

Ø    The top-down processes involved in speech production require content knowledge about a topic, cultural knowledge, knowledge of microsocial context such as speaker role and relationship to addressee, and appropriateness conditions (e.g. what must be said or what should be left unsaid)

Ø     Automaticity in processing

Ø     Processing online or in real time (different from writing that learners have time to revise)

Ø    Speech Acts: Utterances which fulfill attitude functions, i.e., apologize, request, deny, compliment, etc.

        Ex.   Give me your notes -- Order

               Please let me make a copy of your notes -- Request

Ø    Other aspects of speaking competence

·        Conversational structure

·        Contextualization cues

·        Communication strategies