My Linguistics books part 1

Dear all,

I have these copies of textbooks from during my study in Applied English Linguistics program at Atma Jaya several years back.
I use them now only occasionally. Just in case you know anyone who might need them I'd be happy to lend them (terms & conditions apply).

Here is the list (part 1)
1. English Phonetics & Phonology (Phillip Carr)
2. English Phonetics & Phonology - A Practical Course (Peter Roach)
3. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Kate L. Turabian)
4. Doing Your Research Project (Judith Bell)
5. Assessing Reading (J.Charles Anderson)
6. Constructing Achievement Test (Norman E. Gronlund)
7. Evaluating and Selecting EFL Teaching Materials ( Alan Cunningsworth)
8. teaching Vocabulary (I.S.P. Nation)
9. The Gregg Reference Manual (Sabin O'Neill)
10. Qualitative Assessment of Text Difficulty (Jeanne S. Chall)
11. Communicative Language Teaching (William Littlewood)
12. Vocabulary in Language Teaching (Norbert Schmitt)
13. Statistika dalam Linguistik (Christopher Butler)
14. Textual Patterns - Key Words and corpus analysis in language education (Mike Scott and Christopher Tribble)
15. Teaching Collocation (ed. Michael Lewis)
16. Meaning in Language (Alan Cruse)
17. Teaching by Principles (H. Douglas Brown)
18. Introducing English Semantics (Charles W. Kreidler)
19. Semantics (John I. Saeed)
20. Vocabulary Myths (Keith S. Folse)
21. A General Service List of English Words (Michael West)

Vocabulary or Grammar? (part 2)

What do experts have to say ?

What I wrote here is an excerpt of my theses, so....my apology for the rather academic style :)

In the language teaching practice, what has been done is mostly separating grammar and vocabulary as two different aspects, with more priority given to grammar. It means that learners have to master the grammar system then learn lots of words to be able to talk about anything (Lewis, 2000).

Teachers had also been  encouraged to see grammar as the structure or "the bones of the language, and the vocabulary as the flesh to be added" (Hill, 2000:47).

 Lewis (2000) then stressed on the importance of learning lexis, specifically, lexical chunks, over grammar since learning lexical chunks enables learners to talk about things. It is possible because lexical chunks actually carry syntactic rules.

It is also claimed that native speakers can better understand ungrammatical utterances with accurate vocabulary, than those with accurate grammar and inaccurate vocabulary (Widdowson, as cited in Zimmerman 1997).

"Without grammar little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed" (Wilkins, quoted in Lewis, 1997).

"A lexical mistakes often causes misunderstanding; while grammar mistakes rarely does" (Sinclair, cited in Lewis 1997).

No more words needed :)

Is Drilling Effective?

Drill (v): to fix something in the mind or to habit a pattern by repetitive instruction (www.meriam-webster.com).

Drilling practice may seem like a boring activity. But like it or not, drilling works!
Referring to the way we learn our mother tongue when we were a baby, we did listen to the same forms repeated by our parents, and we copied them.
How do you think we learned the word 'makan', or 'mau', or 'ibu'? Yes, you're right, through repetition practice, similar to drilling.

By referring to this concept we may now have more understanding on the importance of drilling. It is necessary especially for young learners and or beginners.

There are several types of drilling practice (adopted from http://www.usingenglish.com/weblog/archives/000414.html): choral drills, interactive drills, substitution drills, transformation drills and drilling using flash cards.

1. Choral drills
It is the type of drills where a teacher models a word (s) or sentence and students listen and repeat.

2. Interactive drills
It is the type of drills where a teacher ask questions, and the students are expected to answer using the forms taught earlier.  In this drill, the possible answers are also limited, and not too complex. Betty S. Azhar's grammar book has many oral drill practice of this form.

3. Substitution drills
In a substitution drill the teacher gives an example sentence, then asks the students to change one or more words in it (targeting vocabulary enrichment).

4. Transformation drills
Similar to substitution drills, but here the changes are in grammar, not vocabulary.

5. Drilling with flash cards
The technique may be similar to no 4 and 5 above, but mainly targeting vocabulary and using flash cards as the prompt.

Vocabulary or Grammar? (part 1)

Which one is more important? Vocab or Grammar?
Definitely both. But how should we see these two aspects of language for us to better understand their roles in communication?
Let me give this illustration (I read this somewhere; this is not originally mine). Communicating is like delivering a package of boxes. The knowledge allows you to put one box before another. But what you put in these boxes - the message- requires vocabulary knowledge.
What use are the boxes without the content?

Our education system so far, or at least what I experienced in my school years, has been focusing too much on the learning of rules. What should come at the beginning, and what should follow, this subject must be followed by certain verb form, and so on, and so on. 

But as far as I remember, I learned very little on what I must say. What must I say if I want to congratulate someone for his achievement? or if I hurt my leg? or when I need someone's help? or when I am hungry?
Again, How to say it vs What to say (rules vs content), see the difference?

What could be the reason of this?
As an English teacher I have to admit that I like teaching grammar. Like here means REALLY LIKE IT. If I may choose, I prefer teaching grammar than writing, for example.

I believe many of the same profession as mine have the same feelings towards teaching grammar.
Why do teachers like teaching grammar?
Because grammar is easy to teach. They are rules. Black and white most of the time.
There are some grey areas or exception, but mostly black and white.
The rules say this, so do it this way.
And moreover, they are of manageable size and fixed most of the time.
For example, the rules of Simple Present Tense have been the same for the last century, I believe.

But teaching vocabulary.........?
There are so many words to teach. Where should we start? 
There are synonyms, there are idioms.....
and the number of words is increasing. More and more new words are 'invented'.
It is quite overwhelming for teachers, especially for us, local teachers.
How should we explain the difference between 'walk' and 'stroll', or between 'feel' and 'sense'?
Do you share the same opinion? Feel free to write a comment.

More is coming in Part 2.