“Text use may seem a dull topic after all the exciting matters that other guest writers have dealt with recently. However, language learning is, after all, learning language, not just doing fun things with it. And texts – by which I mean the relatively short spoken and written passages that come in textbooks and other teaching materials – can, if they are used properly, play an important part in the learning process. So here goes.
Three kinds of input
Let’s start by looking at the overall structure of language learning. It is useful to identify three kinds of useful input: extensive, intensive and analysed. Children learning their mother tongues receive massive extensive input from the cloud of language that surrounds them, some of it roughly attuned to their level of development, much of it not. They also receive substantial intensive input – small samples of language such as nursery rhymes, stories, songs, the daily mealtime and bedtime scripts, and so on, which are repeated, assimilated, memorised, probably unconsciously analysed, and/or used as templates for future production. And children receive analysed input: explicit information about language. Although they are not generally told very much about grammar and pronunciation, they constantly demand explanations of vocabulary: ‘What’s a …?’; ‘What’s that?’; ‘What does … mean?’”
Read the complete article at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think
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