Drills, however, are less commonly used in language teaching today and
have been replaced by more communicative teaching strategies.meaningful learningn
(in cognitive psychology) learning in which learned items become part
of a person’s mental system of concepts and thought processes. The psy-
chologist Ausubel contrasted meaningful learning with rote learning
and other types of learning in which learned items are not integrated into
existing mental structures.
meaning unitsn
segments or chunks of spoken discourse which serve listeners as signals of
organization and are characterized by pitch change on the most important
syllable. These are also referred to as sense groups, tone units, or intonation
groups.
mean length of utterancen
also MLU
(in language acquisitionresearch) a measure of the linguistic com-
plexity of children’s utterances, especially during the early stages of first
language learning. It is measured by counting the average length of the
utterances a child produces, using the morphemerather than the word as
the unit of measurement. As a simple countable measure of grammatical
development the MLU has been found to be a more reliable basis for
comparing children’s language development than the age of the children.
MLU is generally not considered to be a good index of development in
second language learning.
meanscoren
another term for mean
means– ends modeln
an approach to curriculum developmentor to teaching in which a dis-
tinction is made between ends (e.g. objectives and content) and means (i.e.
the process of instruction) and which generally employs a cycle of planning
activities involving:
a identification of learners’ need
b specification of goals
c formulation of objectives
d selection of content
e organization of content
meaningful learning