UNIT 6 WRITING

UNIT 6 WRITING

Writing is a productive skill as speaking is. If you have written a shopping list, a postcard, a birthday card, some emials, yopur diary,or maybe a story.All these are examples of text types. Writing skills are an important part of communication.  Good writing skills allow you to communicate your message with clarity and ease to a far larger audience than through face-to-face or telephone conversations. You might be called upon to write a report, plan or strategy at work; write a grant application or press release within a volunteering role; or you may fancy communicating your ideas online via a blog.  And, of course, a well written resume with no spelling or grammatical mistakes is essential if you want a new job.

Find more at: http://www.skillsyouneed.com/writing-skills.html#ixzz3YrkKgg1e

UNIT 5 READING

UNIT 5 READING

Talking about Reading skill, we can say that it is a receptive skill, like listening.Reading involves making sense of written text. It often contains a series of sentences, as in a letter or even in a postcard.We need to use our knowledge of the world to see the sense connection between these two sentences(coherence). The grammatical links between the sentences(cohesion) also help us see the connection between them.Language instructors are often frustrated by the fact that students do not automatically transfer the strategies they use when reading in their native language to reading in a language they are learning. Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at the beginning and going word by word, stopping to look up every unknown vocabulary item, until they reach the end. When they do this, students are relying exclusively on their linguistic knowledge, a bottom-up strategy. One of the most important functions of the language instructor, then, is to help students move past this idea and use top-down strategies as they do in their native language.

Bibliography:
http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/stratread.htm
 

UNIT 4 FUNCTIONS

UNIT 4 FUNCTIONS

In unit 4  we could see that the reason why we communicate is a function, for example: apologizing greeting, inviting, advising, agreeing , refusing. Functions are a way of describing how we use language, so the language we use to express functions is called an exponent. An exponent can express different functions at the same time. There are some levels of formality that we express by these exponents, for example: formal language or, informal language, so when people choose the level of formality, it is called appropiacy. Of course we sometimes use inappropriate language and we create some effect. As we can see a focus on functions in the classroom can lead to an emphasis on communication and learning language in chunks, so combining functions and grammar helps to give grammar meaning and context.

Here we have some links to clarify the explanation about functions:

UNIT 3 PHONOLOGY

UNIT 3 PHONOLOGY

In the unit number 3 we saw about Phonology which is the study of the sound features used in a language to communicate meaning. So a phoneme is the smallest unit of a sound, for example, S in books, so this sound is a phoneme. The differentiation between sounds  helps distinguish between words. These sounds are represented by phonemic symbols. Each phonemic symbol represents one phoneme. Dictionaries always give phonemic transitions of words to show their pronunciation. When there is the symbol ‘ it means the stress can be showed like: /stju:dant/. The stress in English is an important part because it influences how sentences and groups of words are formed. There are other features of connected speeches are linking and intonation linking refers to join words together at the word boundaries, while Intonation is the way a speaker changes the level of their voice to show meaning, so through it we can show emotions and attitudes emphasize or make less important the things that we say.

Bibliography:

UNIT 2 LEXIS

UNIT 2 LEXIS
 

Lexis refear to individual words o set of words. There is a menaing that descirbe tha thing or idaes behind vocabulary item There is also the meaning that a vocabulary item has in the context in which it is used. The meaning of some vocabulary items can also come form their form e,g from prefixes, suffixes or compounds. In addition there are words such as collocations thaty often occur together (e.g. heavy rain, arrive at, depend on), or idioms that are a kind of fixed expressions as they can not be changed but the meaning is different from the original combination e.g. to be under the weather, to have green fingers. Talking about chunks, they refer to language that occurs in semi fixed units and usually we learn as one piece like: I'd like to, my name's. Words can also have different relationships with another. For example: synonyms or antonyms that may be part of the same lexical set or the same family. Also False friends, homophones, homonyms. Here I post a video that will help us to understand better about "lexis".

 Here is a web page with more information about lexis:

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/series_landing.jsf?seriesCode=CLTL&seriesTitle=Cambridge+Language+Teaching+Library&sort=series_number

UNIT 1 GRAMMAR

UNIT 1 GRAMMAR 

Talking about grammar, it means how we combine, organise and change parts of words, words and groups of words to make meaning. Grammar is a topic that include a lot of forms , uses, and functions. Grammaticals forms are made up and presented in speech or writing, for example: nouns im English is "base word " . Talking aboput parts of speech, we can see prefixes and suffixes, prefixes is a group of letters added at the begining of a base word, and suffixesis a gropu of letters added at the end of a base word. Following wit parts of speech we have nine parts such as: noun , verbs, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions and exclamations. now we are goping to see tha grammar and its use, grammatical structures are used to cnvey or communicate meaning. Grammar rules describe the way the language works, but ñanguages changes over the time , so grammar booksdo not always change as quiclky as the language.