Teaching by Principles. By H. Douglas Brown

Summary

Join Victor Hugo Rojas B. as he delves into 'Teaching by Principles' by H. Douglas Brown, exploring essential principles of language teaching and learning. The session focuses on twelve guiding principles designed to enhance long-term retention and real-world applicability of language learning. Whether it's understanding the importance of language ego, cultural connection, or communicative competence, Rojas emphasizes the personal and context-dependent nature of these principles. He encourages educators to adapt these principles to fit their unique teaching environments while demonstrating how to evaluate teaching techniques against certain principles. The session also prompts reflection through self-study questions aimed at identifying personal and contextual priorities among these principles.

Highlights

• Twelve principles guide effective language teaching and learning. 📚
• Key focus on making learning challenging and relevant for better retention. 💡
• Importance of self-confidence, risk-taking, and language ego. 🛡️
• Cultural connections enhance communicative language teaching. 🌐
• Use principles to evaluate and enhance classroom techniques. 🍎

Key Takeaways

• Explore twelve guiding principles of language teaching and learning. 📘
• Emphasize the significance of meaningful learning for long-term retention. 🎓
• Understand the interplay between language ego, self-confidence, and risk-taking in language learning. 🤔
• Learn about the critical link between language and culture. 🌍
• Reflect on personal and contextual priorities through self-study questions. 🧠

Overview

In his lecture, Victor Hugo Rojas B. introduces the audience to twelve foundational principles of language teaching and learning, as described in 'Teaching by Principles' by H. Douglas Brown. He outlines the importance of each principle, focusing on practical application and its impact on learners' retention and engagement. From automaticity to meaningful learning, he covers principles that contribute to a successful teaching environment.

Rojas highlights how integration of language ego, self-confidence, and risk-taking are crucial for language development. He also discusses the significant role that cultural connections play in enhancing communicative language instruction, urging educators to incorporate these elements into their lessons to bridge cultural differences within language learning.

The session concludes with an insightful discussion on applying these principles in evaluating teaching techniques. Rojas provides examples of familiar classroom activities and offers guidance on how to assess the effectiveness of such techniques through these guiding principles. He encourages educators to reflect on their practice, considering the personal and contextual application of each principle, and ends with thought-provoking self-study questions for further reflection.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Language Learning Principles This chapter serves as an introduction to the fundamental principles of language learning and teaching. The instructor refers to a series of slides outlining these principles, which are covered in greater detail in Chapter 4 of the book 'Teaching by Principles.' The chapter likely provides an overview of key concepts and methodologies for teaching languages effectively.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Overview of Twelve Principles The chapter titled 'Overview of Twelve Principles' intends to explore the essential principles of second language acquisition. While only four or five of these principles will be deeply analyzed in this lecture, the chapter provides an overview of all twelve, emphasizing their significance. Automaticity is particularly highlighted as a key principle, which will be elaborated further in the subsequent lecture section.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Detailed Explanation of Meaningful Learning Meaningful learning is a straightforward concept that emphasizes ensuring that educational material is relevant, interesting, and challenging for learners. This approach aims to enhance long-term retention and improve the applicability of learned material to real-world situations beyond the classroom.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Anticipation of Reward and Intrinsic Motivation The chapter titled 'Anticipation of Reward and Intrinsic Motivation' highlights meaningful learning as a crucial principle. The lecture, part of a series, briefly alludes to anticipation of reward and intrinsic motivation as significant concepts to be discussed later in the series. Specific details on these topics are not covered in this particular chapter.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Strategic Investment and Other Important Principles The chapter, titled 'Strategic Investment and Other Important Principles', introduces a spectrum of twelve principles, with a specific focus on strategic investment labeled as number five. The lecturer indicates that this will be a central point of discussion, particularly in part four of the lecture series.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Language Ego, Self-confidence and Risk-taking The chapter discusses principles six, seven, and eight, highlighting their importance in the context of language learning. The speaker expresses a strong opinion about these principles but regrets not having enough time to delve deeper into the topic within the current presentation. The focus appears to be on the significant impact of ego, self-confidence, and risk-taking in the process of learning a language.
• 06:00 - 07:30: Language and Culture Connection This chapter emphasizes the significant role of ego and self-confidence in learning a new language. It highlights the necessity of risk-taking in language acquisition and discusses how these factors contribute to effective face-to-face communication. The chapter delves into the psychological aspects of language learning, encouraging learners to embrace mistakes as part of the process.
• 07:30 - 09:00: Native Language Effect and Communicative Competence This chapter delves into the concept of language ego and its role in language learning and communicative competence. The lecturer emphasizes the importance of understanding the intrinsic link between language and culture, suggesting that maintaining cultural connections is an essential aspect of effective communicative language teaching.
• 09:00 - 11:30: Using Principles in Teaching Techniques The chapter discusses the connection between language and culture, emphasizing that all cultures, whether American, British, Thai, Japanese, or Chinese, relate in some manner to the English language. This underscores the importance of understanding the culture-language linkage in teaching.
• 11:30 - 13:00: Self-study Questions The chapter titled 'Self-study Questions' discusses the impact of one's native language on learning a new language. It emphasizes the importance of considering the native language effect in language teaching. It also mentions that this concept is part of a broader framework, which will be further explored in part two, and is related to communicative competence, specifically principle number 12, which has been briefly described as a summary of several related principles.

Teaching by Principles. By H. Douglas Brown Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I'm going to give you a series of slides now that will underscore what I like to call principles of language learning and teaching and which are explained in detail in chapter 4 of this book teaching by principles that I've been referring to so as I change this slide I'm going to very quickly run through some of these principles
• 00:30 - 01:00 because my intent here with this lecture is to actually highlight four or five of the principles in some detail but this particular page will give you an idea of the twelve different principles that I feel are extremely important in learning a second language now automaticity I'm going to explain in this part two of my lecture and so I
• 01:00 - 01:30 won't say anything more about that meaningful learning is a very simple principle that says let's make sure that in all of our lessons all of our designs that the material is relevant the material is interesting the material is challenging to learners so that they can have better long-term retention and better applicability to the real live world that's outside of their classroom
• 01:30 - 02:00 meaningful learning a tremendously important principle the next as I move up here on this slide the the next two I will be talking about as part three of my lecture in in this tape and I won't say anything more about anticipation of reward and intrinsic motivation right now but I will go on to the next group of
• 02:00 - 02:30 principles here just to show you the spectrum of possibilities in all these twelve principles the next one that I would highlight strategic investment number five I'm going to try to zoom in on that a little bit I'm also going to talk about that's part four of this particular lecture show I
• 02:30 - 03:00 will I will leave that particular item uncommented on right now but parts six seven and eight as I slide this paper up a little bit part six seven and eight or principle six seven and eight our cluster of principles that I feel are extremely important and if I had more time in this tape I would I would give you lots and lots of thoughts about language
• 03:00 - 03:30 ego the extent of which are our egos are involved in the process of getting this language out of our mouths and into our ears and communicating face to face about self-confidence the importance other extreme importance of self-confidence in learning a second language and the absolute importance of risk-taking and I will be talking a little bit about risk-taking and self-confidence and
• 03:30 - 04:00 language ego in the process of talking to you at the end of this of this lecture in strategies based instruction other principles that follow here as I slide this paper up are the language culture connection I think no one can deny that language and culture are intertwined and it's an important element in communicative language teaching to keep some form of a cultural connection in mind whether it's the
• 04:00 - 04:30 culture of the USA or the UK or whether it's the culture of Thailand or Japan or China indigenous cultures all all cultures can apply in some way to the English language and so the language culture connection is an important one my last three principles as I change slides again here are the first the native language effect we
• 04:30 - 05:00 all know about the native language effect we're all quite familiar with the fact that our native language interferes with a new language that we're trying to learn and it's certainly something to be accounted for in our teaching the inner language principle I will also deal with in part two and communicative competence principle number 12 I've already talked about a little bit because it's kind of the summation of many of these principles
• 05:00 - 05:30 reminding us that in all of our efforts in language teaching we should strive toward communication or a real-live unrehearsed language so those are our 12 principles and again as I said they're in chapter 4 of the book that I referred you to at the beginning teaching by principles and you might want to take a look at that chapter for a little more detail I would
• 05:30 - 06:00 say one way to think about these principles because there are 12 of them we could get overwhelmed one way to think about it would be what are the most important principles for you and that's going to be a personal choice and a choice that's dependent on your context your experience your students and their purposes in learning the second language because I think all
• 06:00 - 06:30 twelve can apply but you may wish in your teaching to evaluate yourself or evaluate your teaching on the basis of a few of them and maybe pick the most important and in parts two three and four of my lecture here I'm going to pick up on several of these principles and try to illustrate them for you to show that you can indeed use them for designing for teaching for evaluating
• 06:30 - 07:00 your students let me however just close off this part with one example of using the principal's and I'm going to change my slide again here as I pull that off and put on this particular list and I'm only going to give you really part of this list because it doesn't it doesn't matter I have a whole long list of techniques
• 07:00 - 07:30 here and so you're wondering well how do I use these principles to evaluate or inform techniques that I'm going to use in the classroom well I've listed here very familiar activities and techniques that you use in the classroom coral drilled jigsaw interview role plays reading aloud fill in a closed passage scan a reading passage for details explain grammar gift reading comprehensions
• 07:30 - 08:00 reading comprehension questions and if you were to take these and a dozen or several dozen other principles you might be able to take a look at the performance of one of these techniques and evaluate the success of that technique according to certain principles and so if I were to take that same list and superimpose a list of a
• 08:00 - 08:30 set of principles and my lines didn't line up here so my technology is still in need of improvement but I think you'll get the idea you can take a look at sake oral drill and and make a decision to evaluate the success of something or to determine the the use of something in your classroom in accordance with a number of principles well I've just chosen three here so does coral drill
• 08:30 - 09:00 promote language ego and in a way it does because people can repeat things without feeling that they're on the spot and being singled out does it promote autonomy and in some ways a little bit but probably not very much an autonomy because it's just kind of repeating but it could contribute a little bit to autonomy does it promote automaticity and we'll be talking about that and the answer is probably very much so does a
• 09:00 - 09:30 jigsaw task where you're doing say a group a set of group work with a map or whatever does that promote language ego maybe in the form of helping people to feel competent in the language does it promote autonomy perhaps so in learning language that applies outside of the classroom so that when they're beyond the walls of the classroom they can use language does it promote automaticity maybe and maybe not depending on the situation now one could go down through
• 09:30 - 10:00 technique after technique after technique and string any number of principles along the side here to evaluate the success of the technique either before you plan it or after you have used it in the classroom so that's one example of a way to use principles to evaluate your performance as a teacher as I close off this part I want
• 10:00 - 10:30 to I want to call your attention to and I'm going to move this slide here I want to call your attention to some questions that I would hope you would be able to address as self-study questions in in the process of thinking about language learning and teaching thinking about the principles that I have just talked about thinking about
• 10:30 - 11:00 approaches and so for part one I've got three questions here for your contemplation on your own number one can you think of principles to add to the list of 12 and believe me I've already put autonomy on that previous slide that's not listed here and I think that's a good principle there are a number of possible principles that one would be able to add to this list and possibly subtract something as a teacher
• 11:00 - 11:30 number two which three principles do you think are the most important for your context and question three how have certain principles affected your own language learning and you might want to do a little journal and go back to your own language learning and think well you know how did intrinsic motivation drive me or extrinsic how is meaningful learning important how did I chief automaticity so think about those two questions as
• 11:30 - 12:00 self-study self-contemplation possibilities