Topic 1 : Language and Communication

            In this semester, we are studying the subject English for Language Teachers.  For the first topic, I learned about Language and Communication. During the lecture, we had learned about the definition of language, language and culture, functions of language, non-verbal communication, speech and writing and English Language in Malaysia.

            Language is a code that allows us to represent thoughts and ideas by means of sounds. It plays an important role in our daily life. All humans used language for communication. In my point of view, ones need to learn a language in order to improve their basic skills which are reading, writing, speaking, and listening. For example, people from all around the world learn English Language for communication although they have their own language and dialects. As we all are aware of, English is the language used most widely in all over the world. Therefore, these basic skills are needed to allow us to share or represent information with others as intellectual one.

            For our tutorial, we had discussed on how culture and politics affects English Language by considering the factors such as multicultural society, urban and rural setting, politic and historical influence, and educational policies. From the presentation of every group, I can get the different ideas and information shared by different groups which is very useful for us.

Besides doing tutorial task, we also did lots of activities in the class. From the activity that carried out which is writing a sentences using our own language such as Arab, Chinese, Tamil, and Japanese; I can see that people from different races used different symbol to represent their language. All the different languages have their own rules and functions. Without learning the language, for sure we will not be able to understand the language.

Besides, we also prepared a dialogue with language functions for role play. Our group had prepared a dialogue about moving into a new house. From this activity, we can understand better about functions of language from the preparing of our group dialogue. Although our dialogue is not so long, functions used in the dialogue can be easily identified by the others group.

To understand better about the topic non-verbal communication, each group is required to prepare a mime of a situation. Our group chooses to mime a situation of a drunken taxi driver and passengers. Actually our group got the last minutes idea before presenting our mime. Although it is short and simple, the situation of our mime can be easily understood. I also feel proud because our group members were able to done the mime very well.

To conclude, this topic is very important for us as a future English teacher to understand this topic well. From what I had learnt in this topic and the activities that had been carried out, I hope that I can apply all the knowledge to teach my future students and to make the teaching and learning more effective so that the students can gain better understanding in learning language.