Example of lesson Plan

LESSON PLAN

Department                                : English

Study Program                           : English Education

Name of subject                         : Language Testing

Subject Code                             : BM422301  (3 SKS)

Semester                                     : V

Persons in Charge                      : Prof. Dr. Baso Jabu, M.Hum.

                                                    

1.      Objective and Significance of the Subject

a.   Objective:

This course aims at equipping students with theoretical knowledge of the principles and forms of language tests. Besides, it is intended to train and give practical experience to students to construct and evaluate language tests.

b.   Significance:

This course is expected to be useful for providing theoretical and practical knowledge and experience to students to measure and evaluate teaching and learning achievement in a variety of forms, types, and purposes of tests based on language test construction criteria.

2.      Course Description

This course covers language teaching and testing, approaches in language testing (LT), problems in LT, purposes and types of LT, criteria of tests, correspondence of syllabus and tests, subjective and objective tests, test of language elements and skills, test specifications and procedure of test construction, test scoring, score interpretation, test evaluation and direct experience in constructing and evaluating language tests based on types, purposes, and criteria of good language test construction.

3.      The Scheme among the Course Topics

The relation among the course topics can be described in the following figure:

Language teaching & testing

Test scoring & interpretation

Tests of language elements & skills

Test construction

Approaches, & problems in LT

Purposes, types, & Criteria of LT

Syllabus & tests

Subjective vs. objective tests

Test evaluation

 

4.      Specific Instructional Objectives

After attending this course the students are expected to have competence and skills as follows:

-          To identify the relation between language teaching and language testing;

-          To identify the approaches generally used in constructing language tests;

-          To identify the problems that may occur in language testing in practice;

-          To identify types and purposes of language tests;

-          To identify the good language test criteria;

-          To evaluate the relation between learning objectives and tests;

-          To differentiate objective and subjective tests;

-          To construct language tests in the forms of discrete point and integrated skills;

-          To construct tests of language components;

-          To construct tests of language skills;

-          To identify and construct English language test specifications (blueprint);

-          To identify the procedure of language test construction;

-          To interpret test scores;

-          To evaluate English language tests; and

-          To construct English language test

5.      Teaching Learning Strategy

a.       In the first meeting, the course is given in the form of lecturing and discussing on the plan for this course during the semester, topics, assignment, etc.

b.      In the next meetings, presentation based on a certain topic followed by discussion and assignment

c.       Individual/group presentation is done for one or two students/groups successively or concurrently followed by discussion.

d.      The teaching aids used are printed materials, such as tests of SMP and SMA, and visual media, such as multimedia computer, LCD Projector and internet facilities.

e.       Evaluation is given as mid-semester test and final semester test or assignment on constructing tests based on test specifications, try-out, analysis, and reporting.

6.      References

a.      Main References:

1)      Jabu, Baso. 2008. English Language Testing. Makassar: Badan Penerbit UNM.

2)      Alderson, J. Charles., Caroline Clapham, and Dianne Wall. 1995. Language Test Construction and Evaluation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3)      Heaton J. B. 1975. Writing English Language Tests. London: Longman.

4)      Henning, Grant. 1987. A Guide to Language Testing: Development, Evaluation, Research. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.

b.      Supporting References  (Recommended):

1)      Bachman, L.F. & A.S. Palmer. 1996. Language Testing in Practice. Oxford: OUP.

2)      Bachman, L.F. 1990. Fundamental Consideration in Language Testing. Oxford: OUP.

3)      Bailey, Kathleen M. 1998. Learning about Language Assessment: Dilemmas, Decisions, and Directions. Pacific Grove: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.

4)      Carroll, Brendan J. 1980. Testing Communicative Performance. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

5)      Carroll, Brendan J. and Patrick J. Hall. 1985. Make Your Own Language Test. Oxford: Pergamon Institute of English.

6)      Davies, Alan. 1982. “Criteria for Evaluating Tests of English as a Foreign Language” in Heaton, B. (Ed.) Language Testing. 1982:11-16.

7)      Cohen, Andrew D. 1994. Assessing Language Ability in the Classroom. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers

8)      Harrison, A. 1983. A Language Testing Handbook. London: Macmillan Publishers.

9)      Hughes, Arthur. 1989. Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: CUP.

Phonological development in Children

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The first year of an infant’s life, before the child actually utters the first words, is known as the pre-linguistic stage. In the first few months of the pre-linguistic stage the child is already experimenting with the sounds of language.

Infants can discriminate between very similar speech sounds at only one month of age. Eventually, with the exposure to the child’s own native language the infant will lose the ability to discriminate between certain speech sounds and instead starts to focus on those contrasts that are relevant to the native language.

Following the pre-linguistic crying stage of the newborn, infants move from cooing sounds to vocal play and later on to the babbling stage. The latter stage of the pre-linguistic period display the first signs of patterned speech and is usually regarded as the onset to pure speech.

Both babbling and first words tend to begin with stops and end with vowels or unvoiced stops, glides are more frequent than liquids and front consonants are used rather than back consonants.

The sounds classes that are absent from babble are the same classes that are absent from the child’s early words. These include the fricatives, the affricates, and the liquids. In effect, these classes are acquired relatively late in the infant’s speech repertoire.

Apparently, babbling is a linguistic universal and a growing literature provides evidence that although children tend to use those speech sounds they hear produce by adults, children acquiring different languages are apt to use the same group of sounds.

Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units – eventually meaningful units – in order to acquire words and sentences. So, if an infant hears the sound sequence “thisisacup,” it has to learn to segment this stream into the distinct units “this”, “is”, “a”, and “cup.” Once the child is able to extract the sequence “cup” from the speech stream it has to assign a meaning to this word. Furthermore, the child has to be able to distinguish the sequence “cup” from “cub” in order to learn that these are two distinct words with different meanings. Finally, the child has to learn to produce these words. The acquisition of native language phonology begins in the womb and isn’t completely adult-like until the teenage years. Perceptual abilities (such as being able to segment “thisisacup” into four individual word units) usually precede production and thus aid the development of speech production.

CHAPTER II

EXPLANATION

A.  Pre-linguistic Development (birth-1year)

Children don’t utter their first words until they are about 1 year old, but already at birth they show some utterances in their native language from utterances in languages with different prosodic features.

1 month

Infants as young as 1 month perceive some speech sounds as speech categories (they display categorical perception of speech). For example, the sounds /b/ and /p/ differ in the amount of breathiness that follows the opening of the lips. Using a computer generated continuum in breathiness between /b/ and /p/, Eimas et al. (1971) showed that English-learning infants paid more attention to differences near the boundary between /b/ and /p/ than to equal-sized differences within the /b/-category or within the /p/-category. Their measure, monitoring infant sucking-rate, became a major experimental method for studying infant speech perception.

Fig.1. Sucking rate for 20 ms VOT change across category boundary (left), 20 ms VOT change within category (middle), without VOT changes (right). After Eimas et al.(1971).

Infants up to 10–12 months can distinguish not only native sounds but also nonnative contrasts. Older children and adults lose the ability to discriminate some nonnative contrasts.^[4] Thus, it seems that exposure to one’s native language causes the perceptual system to be restructured. The restructuring reflects the system of contrasts in the native language.

4 months

At four months infants still prefer infant-directed speech to adult-directed speech. Whereas 1-month-olds only exhibit this preference if the full speech signal is played to them, 4-month-old infants prefer infant-directed speech even when just the pitch contours are played. This shows that between 1 and 4 months of age, infants improve in tracking the supra segmental info in the speech directed at them. By 4 months, finally, infants have learned which features they have to pay attention to at the supra segmental level.

5 months

Babies prefer to hear their own name to similar sounding words. This indicates that they have associated the meaning “me” with their name.

6 months

With increasing exposure to the ambient language, infants learn not to pay attention to sound distinctions that are not meaningful in their native language, e.g., two acoustically different versions of the vowel /i/ that simply differ because of inter-speaker variability. By 6 months of age infants have learned to treat acoustically different sounds that are representations of the same sound category, such as an /i/ spoken by a male versus a female speaker, as members of the same phonological category /i/.

   Statistical learning

Infants are able to extract meaningful distinctions in the language they are exposed to from statistical properties of that language. For example, if English-learning infants are exposed to a pre-voiced /d/ to voiceless unaspirated /t/ continuum (similar to the /d/ - /t/ distinction in Spanish) with the majority of the tokens occurring near the endpoints of the continuum, i.e., showing extreme pre-voicing versus long voice onset times (bimodal distribution) they are better at discriminating these sounds than infants who are exposed primarily to tokens from the center of the continuum (unimodal distribution).

These results show that at the age of 6 months infants are sensitive to how often certain sounds occur in the language they are exposed to and they can learn which cues are important to pay attention to from these differences in frequency of occurrence. In natural language exposure this means typical sounds in a language (such as pre-voiced /d/ in Spanish) occur often and infants can learn them from mere exposure to them in the speech they hear. All of this occurs before infants are aware of the meaning of any of the words they are exposed to, and therefore the phenomenon of statistical learning has been used to argue for the fact that infants can learn sound contrasts without meaning being attached to them.

At 6 months, infants are also able to make use of prosodic features of the ambient language to break the speech stream they are exposed to into meaningful units, e.g., they are better able to distinguish sounds that occur in stressed vs. unstressed syllables.^[9] This means that at 6 months infants have some knowledge of the stress patterns in the speech they are exposed and they have learned that these patterns are meaningful.

7 months

At 7.5 months English-learning infants have been shown to be able to segment words from speech that show a strong-weak (i.e., trochaic)stress pattern, which is the most common stress pattern in the English language, but they were not able to segment out words that follow a weak-strong pattern. In the sequence ‘guitar is’ these infants thus heard ‘taris’ as the word-unit because it follows a strong-weak pattern. The process that allows infants to use prosodic cues in speech input to learn about language structure has been termed “prosodic bootstrapping”.

8 months

While children generally don’t understand the meaning of most single words yet, they understand the meaning of certain phrases they hear a lot, such as “Stop it,” or “Come here.”

9 months

Infants can distinguish native from nonnative language input from phonetic and phonotactic patterns alone, i.e., without the help of prosodic cues. They seem to have learned their native language’s phonotactics, i.e., which combinations of sounds are possible in the language.

10-12 months

Infants now can no longer discriminate most nonnative sound contrasts that fall within the same sound category in their native language.^[14]Their perceptual system has been tuned to the contrasts relevant in their native language. As for word comprehension, Fenson et al. (1994) tested 10-11-month-old children’s comprehension vocabulary size and found a range from 11 words to 154 words. At this age, children normally have not yet begun to speak and thus have no production vocabulary. So clearly, comprehension vocabulary develops before production vocabulary.

B.  Production

 

Stages of pre-speech vocal development

Even though children do not produce their first words until they are approximately 12 months old, the ability to produce speech sounds starts to develop at a much younger age. Stark (1980) distinguishes five stages of early speech development:

 

0-6 weeks: Reflexive vocalizations

These earliest vocalizations include crying and vegetative sounds such as breathing, sucking or sneezing. For these vegetative sounds, infants’ vocal cords vibrate and air passes through their vocal apparatus, thus familiarizing infants with processes involved in later speech production.

 

6-16 weeks: Cooing and laughter

Infants produce cooing sounds when they are content. Cooing is often triggered by social interaction with caregivers and resembles the production of vowels.

16-30 weeks: Vocal play

Infants produce a variety of vowel- and consonant-like sounds that they combine into increasingly longer sequences. The production of vowel sounds (already in the first 2 months) precedes the production of consonants, with the first back consonants (e.g., [g], [k]) being produced around 2–3 months, and front consonants (e.g., [m], [n], [p]) starting to appear around 6 months of age. As for pitch contours in early infant utterances, infants between 3 and 9 months of age produce primarily flat, falling and rising-falling contours. Rising pitch contours would require the infants to raise sub-glottal pressure during the vocalization or to increase vocal fold length or tension at the end of the vocalization, or both. At 3 to 9 months infants don’t seem to be able to control these movements yet.

 

6-10 months: Reduplicated babbling (or canonical babbling)

Reduplicated babbling contains consonant-vowel (CV) syllables that are repeated in reduplicated series of the same consonant and vowel (e.g., [bababa]). At this stage, infants’ productions resemble speech much more closely in timing and vocal behaviors than at earlier stages. Starting around 6 months babies also show an influence of the ambient language in their babbling, i.e., babies’ babbling sounds different depending on which languages they hear. For example, French learning 9-10 month-olds have been found to produce a bigger proportion of pre-voiced stops (which exist in French but not English) in their babbling than English learning infants of the same age. This phenomenon of babbling being influenced by the language being acquired has been called babbling drift.

 

10-14 months: Non-reduplicated babbling (or variegated babbling)

Infants now combine different vowels and consonants into syllable strings. At this stage, infants also produce various stress and intonation patterns. During this transitional period from babbling to the first word children also produce “proto words”, i.e., invented words that are used consistently to express specific meanings, but that are not real words in the children’s target language. Around 12–14 months of age children produce their first word. Infants close to one year of age are able to produce rising pitch contours in addition to flat, falling, and rising-falling pitch contours.

CHAPTER III

CONCLUSSION

Children don’t utter their first words until they are about 1 year old, but already at birth they show some utterances in their native language from utterances in languages with different prosodic features.

1 month

Infants as young as 1 month perceive some speech sounds as speech categories (they display categorical perception of speech). For example, the sounds /b/ and /p/ differ in the amount of breathiness that follows the opening of the lips.

4 months

At four months infants still prefer infant-directed speech to adult-directed speech.

5 months

Babies prefer to hear their own name to similar sounding words. This indicates that they have associated the meaning “me” with their name.