Activating Intuitive Heuristics Amy Burhop Erika Doster Jessica Geroux Melissa Lucas

What is hueristics? “A method of teaching allowing the students to learn by discovering things by themselves and learning from their own experiences rather than by telling them things”

Confusion in the Classroom The teacher’s preoccupation with grammatical description may have even been an obstacle to grammar learning.

Deductive Teaching and Intuitive Heuristics The teacher presents learner with a set of grammatical rules, offers explicit explanations of those rules, and then provides opportunities to practice. It encourages very little teacher-learner interaction and almost no learner-learner interaction that is necessary to create an environment conducive to self-discovery.

Inductive Teaching and Intuitive Heuristics Inductive Heuristics is based on the premise that the essence of grammar teaching lies in helping learners discover what the grammatical rules are. They avoid explicit description and explanation, and minimize technical terms.

The Main Point Learning through self-discovery rather than learning from a teacher explanation will favorably affect grammar learning in particular and language learning in general. Learners will be able to comprehend and retain better if they themselves discover the grammatical rules.

Input Enhancement and Intuitive Heuristics Consciousness-Raising – deliberate attempt to draw the learner’s explicit attention to features of a target language. Is a mean to attainment of grammatical competence Explicit focus on grammar is necessary but not sufficient Acknowledges the learner’s active role in grammar construction Concerned with syntax and its relation to semantics, discourse and pragmatics. Input enhancement Correctly shifts the attention from an internal process related to what happens in the mind to an external operation related to input and interaction.

Cont.. Noticing the gap – ability to notice the gap between what they know and what they need to know makes progress in learning a language. Students needs to recognize there is something to learn Teachers can create the conditions necessary for raising learners’ consciousness about aspects of linguistic properties.

Putting Input Enhancement into Action Grammar Tasks: It does not really matter whether the discovery tasks are inductive or deductive so long as these tasks are designed to offer a range of data options and learner operations that can be performed on them. Aimed at raising the learners’ consciousness about grammatical properties of the L2 thereby facilitating the process of noticing the gap and activating their intuitive heuristic. Pedagogical Tasks: Draw the learners’ attention to it if and only if it is absolutely necessary to carry out the communicative activities and negotiation of meaning in class. Meaning of an utterance must be evident to learners before their attention is drawn to the grammatical features.

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Discussion Groups: Please look at your number on the card and report to the following group. 2’s and Black Jacks : Amy 10’s and Red Jacks: Erika 7’s and Aces: Melissa When you hear the music please stand up and dance 