modeln
(in language teaching) someone or something which is used as a standard or
goal for the learner, e.g. the pronunciation of an educated native speaker.
see also modelling
modelling^1 n
providing a model (e.g. a sentence, a question) as an example for someone
learning a language.
In second languageand foreign languagelearning, some teaching
methods emphasize the need for teachers to provide accurate models for
learners to imitate, for example the audio-lingual method. In first lan-
guage learning, parents sometimes provide correct sentences for children to
repeat, and this may be referred to as modelling. The effect of modelling
on children’s language development has been compared with that of
expansionand prompting.
In expansion the parent repeats part of what the child has said, but expands
it. The expansion usually contains grammatical words which the child did
not use. This is thought to be one of the ways children develop their know-
ledge of the rules of a language. For example:
Child: Doggy sleeping.
Parent: Yes, the doggy is sleeping.
Prompting refers to stating a sentence in a different way. For example:
Parent: What do you want?
Child: (no answer)
Parent: You want what?
By presenting the question in two different forms the parent may assist
the child in understanding the structure of questions and other language
items.
mode(s) of a distribution can be pictured graphically as the “peaks” in the
distribution. A normal distributionhas only one peak. The following
shows a bimodal distribution:
see also mean, medianmodel