appraisal theory n
a developing area within discourse analysis and conversation analysis and
associated with Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. Appraisal theory
is concerned with the way speakers convey attitudinal meaning during
conversation. It deals with the way speakers communicate such attitudes as
certainty, emotional response, social evaluation, and intensity. Appraisal
is mainly realized lexically, although it can also be realized by whole
clauses.
appreciative comprehension n
see reading
apprenticeship of observation n
the understanding of teaching that student teachers bring with them to a
teacher training course based on the thousands of hours they have spent
observing and experiencing different forms of teaching as school children.
A focus of teacher education programmes is therefore to explore ideas and
beliefs about teaching and learning that pre-service teachers bring with
them, and the extent to which these ideas affect their willingness or ability
to acquire new understandings of teaching.
approach n
in language teaching, the theory, philosophy and principles underlying a
particular set of teaching practices.
Language teaching is sometimes discussed in terms of three related aspects:
approach, method, and technique.
Different theories about the nature of language and how languages are learned
(the approach) imply different ways of teaching language (the method), and
different methods make use of different kinds of classroom activity (the
technique).
Examples of different approaches are the aural–oral approach (see audio-
lingual method), the cognitive code approach, the communicative
approach, etc. Examples of different methods which are based on a par-
ticular approach are the audiolingual method, the direct method, etc.
Examples of techniques used in particular methods are drills,dialogues,
role-plays, sentence completion, etc.
appropriateness nappropriate adj
the extent to which a use of language matches the linguistic and sociolin-
guistic expectations and practices of native speakers of the language. When
producing an utterance, a speaker needs to know that it is grammatical, and
also that it is suitable (appropriate) for the particular situation.
For example:
appraisal theory