Communication Skills for the Adult ESL Student
A Microcounseling Approach
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10817317 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joan Friedenberg, Joan E Friedenberg, Curtis H Bradley |
| Year | 1981 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 403 |
| Publication date | 1981-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | TESOL Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0039-8322 • E-ISSN: 1545-7249 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3586481 |
| OpenAlex | W1995892090 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
The motivation to develop this article came from the influx of over 150,000 adult immigrants into Florida during the past year. Since that time Florida educators have been seeking the most effective ways to give these new arrivals large doses of ESL instruction, survival skills, and vocational training. Although the functional/notional syllabus seems to address the special needs of adult ESL students, few structured and systematic classroom techniques have been developed to teach it. Microcounseling is one of the most widely used and systematic methods of developing interpersonal communication skills. By modifying this approach to include lexical, syntactic, and cultural components, we too can use this method to teach ESL students to communicate effectively. ESL teachers are certainly aware of their students' need for communicative competence, yet most ESL methods and materials more traditionally emphasize manipulating phonemes, morphemes, and verb phrases. Although it is reasonable to include some discrete-point teaching in any ESL course, it is not reasonable to assume that students will somehow magically integrate these language components into meaningful and appropriate messages without our help. Consider, for a moment, the tens of thousands of recent adult immigrants from Indochina, Cuba, and Haiti to the U.S. These people enter here with little or no proficiency in English, virtually no knowledge of U.S. customs, and, worse, few job skills. Although English is extremely important to adult immigrants, the more basic needs for survival and an immediate job often take precedence. An ESL program for adults should include discrete-point grammar teaching, as well as opportunities for the students to integrate the discrete points into meaningful messages which will aid them in developing interpersonal communication skills. These skills will both enhance their employment prospects and enable them to develop satisfying relationships with Americans
Communication skills · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Medical education · Pedagogy · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Medicine · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.02 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1984 - 1984 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |