All languages utilise a finite and limited set of sounds to convey meaning. Phonology is the ‘branch of linguistics that deals with the sound systems of a language’ (Cook, 2008, p.67). While adapting Communicative approaches in modern ESL teaching, producing the correct sounds of English takes a priority and especially in my teaching context. The students are 6-12 grade school teachers of Science, Math, ICT, and English in Al Ain region, in the United Arab Emirates. They are called in this government-sponsored programme in order to develop their English levels to cope with the changes in curricula they teach as they are now more English focused and based. The students are assessed by official IELTS (International English Language Testing System) results. All teachers are males, aged between 30-60, and have got Arabic as their native language (a small number have French as their second language – teachers from Tunisia.)
When it comes to sound systems, we can find many differences between English and Arabic. English ‘has 22 vowels and diphthongs to 24 consonants, Arabic has only eight vowels (three short, three long, and two diphthongs) to 32 consonants’ (Swan and Smith, 2001, p.196).
In tables 1 and 2, the shaded phonemes have equivalent or near equivalents in Arabic, and according to Swan and Smith, there should not be any difficulty in producing or perceiving these sounds:
The differences between Arabic and English reflect in the students’ pronunciation as they have difficulties and struggle in producing rather a good number of consonants and vowels. The most significant struggle in my classes is with the vowels (the short vowels /ə/ and /e/) and the consonants (/T/ and / ð/).
Many factors contribute to the problematic pronunciation of the above mentioned sounds. The predominant factor is the absence of the target-sound from learners’ first language. In this case, they are schwa / ə / and /e/ in Arabic Language. Thus, learners try to substitute it with a similar sound found in the first language.
As for the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives /T/ and / ð /, there is a tendency, especially in Egyptian students, to substitute the sounds with /s/ and /z/ respectively. Despite the presence of these sounds in Standard Arabic sound system, they do not exist anymore in the Egyptian Arabic accent. Therefore most utterances that include these sounds end up with errors like: this / ð Is/ and think / θ INk/. This is mainly due to Negative Input in which the students have already been exposed to in their schooldays.
STUDENTS, CONTEXT, AND TIME: The research includes the tests results of school teachers who are studying in an ESL training programme in the public (Government) schools in Al Ain region in the UAE. The programme is meant to last for 3 years. The students, the school teachers, are mostly from UAE, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria . The course is part of the professional development and the educational reforms governed by Abu Dhabi Educational council. RESEARCH AND ASSESSMENT: The research consists of the results of 6 listening and reading placement tests being taken by the students (school teachers) over 2 academic years. TRENDS: The students fall into 3 main age groups: A (30-39 years), B (40-49 years), and C (50-59 years). The research concludes that the younger students (group A) and the older students (group C) showed a clear progress in acquiring receptive skills. On the contrary, the middle-aged group (group B) showed rather a decline in the results. REASONS: There are many reasons that can determine the development of such skills, yet the research will explore age-related factors without denying the possible presence of other factors. CONSEQUENCES: This research will shed the light on the importance of the age factor and its role in acquiring the receptive skills, and how it can prove to be of a high importance especially for older adults. It will also underline the challenges and the suggestions for developing listening and reading skills for the middle group in the future.
The article Enhancing ESL Writing via a Literature Based Instruction summarises the experiment undertaken by Chittra Muthusamy, Faizah Mohamad, Siti Norliana Ghazali, and Angelina Subrayan. As the title suggests, the article encloses the literature, the experiment and the findings of incorporating literature based language instruction in ESL writing lessons to trigger, evaluate, and enhance creative writing of the students.
The article starts with an introduction in which the writers gave a holistic view of writing skills in comparison to different aspects of creative writing arguing that literature plays an important role in shifting students’ writing from the dullness of academic writing, to the liveliness of creative one. Then the writers discussed the elements of literature that can engage students, and provide a wide variety of resources for ESL teachers to choose from. The writers cited a number of references to support the claims of literature exposure and its role in enriching students’ academic, intellectual, cultural, and linguistic learning. The article then discussed the principle of creativity, and its relation to education and English language. The writers gave a close look on some types of language creativity ranging from lexical, phonological, graphological, semantic and grammatical creativity, in addition to the use of metaphor. Finally, the writers provided a lengthily details description of the method used in the experiment, a research instrument, the treatment and instructional procedures, data collection and analysis procedures, and finally the findings of the experiment.
The whole article and research can be perceived as a scientific try to answer and solve the complicated issue of how teachable is creative writing. One can notice that the language of the article ranged between pure scientific information-oriented style when talking about the methods and data analysis, and somehow prose-like style when it comes to the rationale behind the experiment. The article is well referenced and well structured in order to reflect the explanatory aspect of the reasons behind such research and study. It provides concise definitions and explanations of literature usage in ESL; and also the difference between writing, creativity, and creative writing. The researchers even went further to explore the relation between creativity and education, and the different types of creativity that ESL learners may reflect. One of the positive points in the article is the scientific explanation and description of the approach and methods used by the researchers in order to test the enhancement of creative writing. The research was conducted on two experimental and control groups; and was built on a quasi-experimental design in which Ibsen’s I-Model of text exploration was applied on the experimental group. The findings and results reflected the overall improvement in creative writing of the experimental group. The researchers gave a full account on the stages of Ibsen’s text exploration and mentioned in details the nature of tasks, the interaction taking place between the readers and the story, in addition to the type of active reading and negotiation of meaning.
Yet, the article raises a number of question marks towards explaining, describing, and validating some key concepts and issues.
First, the researchers gave an exaggerated negative description of the students’ competence and their actual writing skills. They also could not provide a decisive say in whether creativity is considered to be an innate gift, or a tool used in education. The article also fails in describing the appropriate input of the appropriate literary piece that should be used. That not all literary works could be used as a good input for creative writing. Add to this, the well-known, appealing and good literary works usually utilise somehow complicated and complex language structures, vocabulary registry, and writing techniques that can prove challenging for ESL learners and consequently will lead to unfulfilling the aim of creative writing.
Second, the article fails in explaining key arguments the article is based upon. The researcher did not explain the relation between linguistic competence and subject and content details; and between literature and syntax enhancement. The research did not give any pedagogic explanation of how this enhancement is taking place.
Finally, the article could not provide validation for some key points in the study. The article concentrates, especially in the findings, on the overall group achievement in the pre-test post-test comparison. However, the researchers did not pay attention nor highlight the individual differences among ESL learners. ESL learners have different learning preferences, needs, and intelligences. Literature based language instruction may cause disengagement and raise serious effectiveness questions. Their creative writing responses in the post-test might not be but immediate reflection on the experiment where there is no indication of any long-term testing taking place in order to eliminate the temporariness of the results. Moreover, constant exposure to literary works and literature works centred lessons and practices (the entire focus is on creative writing) may raise plagiarism concerns. The writers did not provide any evidence that the creativity measures found in the students’ post-test were authentic and were not mere replicas of the characters, structures, plots, and vocabulary found in the literary work they studied before. In addition, one of the limitations looming around the article is the potentiality of focus-shifting to written forms of output neglecting, in the same time, any other form of output.
