ELT – Page 2 – ELTWeekly

Vol. 4 Issue 6 – Research Paper: ‘A study on the impact of Area on the undergraduate learners’ attitudes towards the English language’ by Hitendra Vyas

The present paper focuses on the impact of Area on the undergraduate learners’ attitudes towards the English language as regards to the situation of ELT in India. SLA research has consistently pointed out that attitudes towards the target language play an important role in learning it. The research on the role of attitudes in English language teaching naturally interests the investigator as a college teacher of English in an Arts college. The researcher has examined the undergraduate learners’ attitudes towards the English language. This paper focuses on the undergraduate learners of English in Arts colleges affiliated to the Gujarat University (Ahmedabad) but located in urban and rural areas. It has been observed that students do want to learn and improve their knowledge of English but somehow they shy away from the language. On their part, the college teachers of English have consistently displayed a lack of understanding of the students’ needs, problems, and interests.

Vol. 4 Issue 6 – Research Paper: ‘Corpus-Based Approach Toward Teaching Collocation of Synonyms’ by Aliakbar Jafarpour, Mahmood Hashemian & Sepideh Alipour

The study was aimed at providing more insights on the application of the corpus-based approach. The objectives of the study were to compare its learning effects with the conventional teaching method’s effects on collocations of synonyms. The study was conducted with two groups of L2 learners. One group was randomly assigned to be the experimental group studying with the corpus-based approach whereas the other represented the comparison group studying with the conventional teaching method. The learners from both groups were matched in pairs according to their language proficiency and collocation knowledge on the pretest. During the study, the experimental group was trained through paper-based and hands-on activities to deal with the concordance information in the corpus whereas the comparison group was taught collocations of synonyms through conventional activities such as explicit teaching. The instruments for collecting data included the pretest, posttest, prewriting and postwriting.

ELTWeekly Vol. 4 Issue 5

Many non-native speakers feel uneasy teaching their students English pronunciation. This workshop is designed to use free software and information from the Internet to help teachers improve their students’ pronunciation. Workshop led by Colin Large, English Language Fellow

Vol. 4 Issue 5. – National Workshop on Teaching Vocabulary and Pronunciation at the Tertiary Level, February 10, Sathyabama University, India

The Department of English conducts workshops with experts in the area of ELT to equip the teachers with changing trends in language teaching methodologies on a regular basis. Although the workshop is meant for teachers in the area of English for Science and Technology, it may be useful to the scholars and also to the students of ELT. Research scholars doing experimental studies may also benefit by learning the techniques in teaching vocabulary and pronunciation.

Vol. 4 Issue 5. – UGC National Seminar in Indore, India: ‘Voicing The Silence: Redefining English Literary Studies’, February 17-18, 2012

This conference means to address all areas of literature written in English including classical to Victorian, Edwardian, Modernist and contemporary Literature in English differently as the locus of impersonality and emotion, of autonomy and commitment, and also analyzing it in the light of ethics and responsibility and would addresse fundamental questions about ethics and literature To work on ethics is quite a challenge since various definitions of the term have been given from Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant to Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Deleuze, Nussbaum, Badiou, Bouveresse or Attridge.