Formas en que el profesor puede preparar a los estudiantes para una variedad de contextos sociales

INTRODUCTION.

His course has been designed for students with no previous knowledge of English. The Beginners Course will take the learner to a level where he/she can begin the Basic Course of La Mansión del Inglés.

Social interaction activities add a further dimension to the functional activities discussed in the previous chapter: that of a more clearly defined social context. This means that learners must pay greater attention to the social as well as the functional meanings. That language conveys. It also means that the activities approximate more closely to the kind of communication situation encountered outside the classroom, where language is not only a functional instrument, but also a form of social behavior. In many cases, this further dimension can be added to activities which were discussed in the previous chapter.

For example, let us take the communication task in which two friends have to find the shortest route between two points in a town (4.4). This was presented as a purely functional activity, in which learners could solve the problem with any language they had available. It is also possible, however, to task learners to simulate the social roles involved in the interaction. They must then attempt to communicate in ways that are not only functionally effective, but also conform to the social conventions governing how friends would express themselves in that situation.

With this extra dimension, the activity then becomes (under the definitions used in this book) a ´social interaction activity´, in which:

• The learner is expected to let social as well as functional considerations affect his choice of language.

• accordingly, the language he produces will be evaluated in terms of its social acceptability as well as its functional effectiveness. In activities which bear a clear resemblance to recognizable social situations, learners will often not need to be prompted, but will attempt automatically to conform to an appropriate social role in the way they speak. This is not surprising, since they know form their mother tongue that all speech has social as well as functional implications, and they must aim ultimately for social acceptability as well as functional effectiveness. .

It is important to remember (as 1 pointed out in chapter 3) that the distinction between functional communication and social interaction activities is not a strict division but a question of differing emphasis: the precise degree of importance that learners give to social factors during an activity is determined by each individual learner for himself. Likewise, ´social acceptability´ is not a fixed characteristic but a variable quality depending on what yardstick is being used.

For the beginner, it may simple mean achieving a satisfactory level of grammatical accuracy while performing

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