Using Bulgarian Mini-Lessons in an SLA Course to Improve the KAL of American ESL Teachers
METHODOLOGY
Bulgarian mini-lessons
Teacher trainees were first introduced to the Cyrillic alphabet, in order to sensitize them to problems students encounter when learning a foreign alphabet. Since Bulgarian is a phonetic language, it was not difficult for students to start reading Bulgarian words and do simple Grammar exercises soon after they learned the alphabet. In the lesson on reading, words in Bulgarian were grouped according to type of letters – same graphemes as the English ones, different graphemes, and false friends i.e. same graphemes but different sounds. The purpose of this lesson was to demonstrate concepts like positive and negative transfer, learning styles, and learning strategies in SLA. Bulgarian introductions and greetings were also taught to illustrate the role of sociocultural factors in SLA. Bulgarian, like many other European languages has two different forms for the 2nd person pronoun which provide speakers with a choice of formal and informal address forms. Issues in non-verbal communication were discussed after students were taught how to say “Yes” and “No” in Bulgarian. Bulgarian uses gestures opposite to the ones used in English i.e., to say “Yes”, one shakes his head, and to say “No”, one nods. Another lesson on Degrees of Comparison of Bulgarian adjectives demonstrated deductive and inductive reasoning. In addition, the instructor talked about different lexical and grammatical categories any time the students expressed interest in them. For example, when we discussed Prater’s (1967) Hierarchy of difficulty of language structure acquisition, we examined the category of Gender in Bulgarian and English as well as some phonological features of the two languages.
Some of the topics for the course did not lend themselves to this method of teaching and no activities were designed to accompany them. Examples are: the role of age in SLA, models of SLA, and the Natural Order Hypothesis. Some of these topics dealt with purely theoretical concepts, others required a more advanced knowledge of the language in order to be demonstrated through mini-lessons.
