Blank Activities in English Language Teaching - Article Example

 “Pros And Cons of Fill in the blank Activities in English Language Teaching”   This article is basically about the usage of fill in the Blank technique used as a testing tool. The article discusses the pros and cons of this technique in detail. The article further discusses the importance of English grammar. Fill in the Blanks: Fill in the blanks or gap filling activity is a very famous examination technique used by teachers throughout the world. This type of activity is categorized under objective type testing. What happens in fill in the blanks activity is that there is sentence which is not complete i.e. some parts of the sentence is missing and the student has to put the appropriate missing part into the sentence. For example, the Earth is _____ planet from the sun. The student needs to put third (3rd) in the gap. Most of the blanks require a distinct answer. Advantages: The following are some advantages of Fill in the blanks activity, which has made this famous: The teachers can make students read the complete context. This activity makes students increase students reading ability, as they need to go to the material thoroughly. In this way, students get to know about the important and key words used in the context. More the students read, the more they improve their vocabulary. The teachers get to know about the student’s that they take reading seriously or not. The Fill in the blanks activity is also used in psyche testing. The psyche testing is commonly used when recruiting military persons. Fill in the blanks is used in psyche testing in such a way that the sentence is incomplete and the portion of the sentence has to complete by the student. This technique can easily being evaluated by psychiatrists as they can figure out the person personality and aptitude by looking the complete meaning which student has tried to deliver. This psychiatrist can judge that whether the person has a positive or negative thinking. Fill in the blanks technique is friendly for both students and the teachers. The students do not need to answer the questions in paragraphs i.e. lengthy answers are avoided. For teachers it is easy for grading of the exam, as there are mostly absolute answers to be filled in the blanks, so they do not need to read long answers and grade them on relative basis. Disadvantages: However, there are many drawbacks of this technique. Few of them are discuss below: It requires students to cram more rather then to comprehend the context. This technique does not help teachers a lot in finding the conceptual comprehension of the students. This activity is mostly dislike by students who emphasize more on conceptual studies. The blank usually requires distinct answer to be filled gap i.e. Even a person knows what the question is about, but if he/she writes the synonym of the exact words, the blank is considered to be wrong. This technique is no room of error from the student. If the Fill in the blanks is wrong, the student gets a zero directly whereas in subjective type the student can express their reasoning to the questions, own though even may be partially incorrect. They can at least score something than nothing. Conflicts with CLT approach: Communicative Learning Teaching is an approach that is mostly used in learning second or foreign language. This technique helps the students in learning more vocabulary of other languages. However, the Fill in the blank does not fits in CLT. The main reason behind that is the respondent only has to fill the exact word or phase, instead of using synonyms, which can be helpful in learning more words for the same meaning. The students remain confined in answering fill in the blanks. The above mentioned drawbacks have led to the downfall of gap filling activity, and there are other objective type testing techniques, which have taken its place, such as Multiple Choose Questions (MCQs), True-False, Match the columns etc. Implicit/Explicit/Mechanical Learning: Implicit learning is learning of knowledge that is not learned from documents, others experience unless the person does not it try itself or experiences itself. Whereas explicit knowledge can be learned from documents, presented materials, from other peoples experience. Mechanical drill learning is the learning of the knowledge, which is more practical. For instance, most of the topics studied in science courses are considered as practical because only reading the theory of topic does not fully make student understand the concepts. Grammar in Use: “Grammar in Use” is a book written by Robert Murphy. This book has been considered as a leading book for proper usage of grammar of English. This book deals grammar concepts in details and explain their usage to English learners. Book helps in accuracy in writing English as well. However, this book is only helpful for people who want to learn basic concepts of English grammar, but is not much useful for those people who want to explore grammars advance concepts. This book is a must for people whom English is not their mother tongue and wants to learn English as secondary language. This concept is also called English as a Secondary Language (ESL). The grammar used technique is also applicable in other languages as well. The book has discussed of some useful terminologies that are useful in ESL. For example, the book talks about sentence transformations, in which people who are learning ESL are given sentences in which the person has to reword the sentence and the meaning of the sentence does remains the same. The book also emphasize on structural linguistics, which has revived the analysis of verbs and has also improvement of the tense-making system. This approach has modified the historical communication and has merged it with current communicational speech. Structural linguistic is helping in finding the common structures and phrases used in other languages spoken in different parts of the world and helps in better communication among languages. This book uses a neutral view about the gap filling activity. It favor this technique mainly because of the advantages discussed earlier, but discourages because gap filling keeps the learners confine to specific words. The book says that the learner should improve their vocabulary by learning new words. The completion of long sentences, the writer says that parallelism and consistency must be maintained. There are many other books, which have contributed in the development and revival of English language. Bibliography Raymond Murphy. (2005) English Grammar In Use. Cambridge University Press John P Broderick . (1975) Modern English linguistics: A structural and transformational grammar. Crowell Joseph Milosh. (1980) Teaching the History of the English Language in the Secondary Classroom. National Council of Teachers Zellig S Harris. (1955) Methods in structural linguistics, The University of Chicago Rob Batston. (1994) Grammar. Oxford University Press http://cimic.rutgers.edu/~liqin/teach3.html Available from [Accessed 29 October 2007] http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/structling.html [Accessed 29 October 2007] Read More