OPTATIVA II - TKT PREPARATION

Reading is a receptive skill in which we don’t produce any language at all. The main objective of reading is to perceive the meaning of written text and analyze it for different purposes. Jons (2016) said that if you want to be a successful reader, you have to determine, decide, and deduce. One of the things I have learned from this unit is that discourse is connected by three important parts: grammar , vocabulary , and our knowledge of the world. A well-written text for reading must have two important features: a good usage of the grammatical structures ( cohesion ), and a good connection between ideas ( coherent ). In order to have better results while reading, we can use the different subskills that reading has. If you need to get the general idea from the text, you can apply the reading for gist or skimming subskill. If you need to find specific information such as dates or names, you can apply scanning in order to find the information that you are intereste...

A function is a reason why humans communicate. It does not matter if we communicate with a friend, a relative, a teacher, or anyone in the world; we do it for a reason. Like other living creatures human beings interconnect with each other (Finnegan, 2004). I learned that the language we use in order to express a function is called an exponent. These are a few examples of a function and its exponents: Function: making a suggestion Exponent: “We can go to the park tomorrow” Function: Asking for clarification Exponent: “Sorry, could you repeat that please?” The different exponents demonstrate different levels of formality according to the function they are fulfilling. Formal language is commonly used in situations where people are getting to know each other for the first time. In contrast, informal language is used when people already know each other and has developed a certain level of trust between them. They usually use colloquial functions and don’t pay attention to...

Phonology deals with the analysis of the sound patterns of the different languages of the world (Jensen, 1993). When we talk about phonology we usually find these terms:   phonemes , word stress , sentence stress and intonation . A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can alter the meaning of a word in a language. For example, if the sound / s / is added to the noun car, it is known that we are no referring to just one car anymore and therefore, it can be inferred that adding the sound / s / to noun changes its number from singular to plural. Phonemes are usually represented using symbols () and are divided into the following categories: vowels , diphthongs , and consonants (according to the flow of air produced while making the sound). Following with the contents of the unit, I learned about the energy that each syllable has in a word is called stress. The way in which we pronounce each part of a sentence is called sentence stress, this can change the meaning ...

The study of lexis is related to that individual, or sometimes groups of words (units of vocabulary) that have a specific meaning within a language. It should be kept in mind that all words have different kinds of meaning. The term lexis was mostly used by linguists in the past, but nowadays it is used by many people and can be found in common sources such as textbooks. First, we have the “ denotative meaning ”. As it can be seen in unit 2, this refers to the description of the idea behind the vocabulary item. For example, a car is a mean of transportation in which you can travel or move around the city. Then we have the figurative meaning (which comes from the previous one but in a different form), and the meaning from context (the different situations in which we use a word). There are words that can get its meaning from its form (by adding prefixes or suffixes , and compound words ), words that occur together ( idioms and collocations ), and words that we usually learn as on...

According to Broccias (2014), “grammar concerns itself with both the shape of words and how words (and phrases) can be combined together.” In Unit 1 of the TKT course book, I discovered that grammar obtains meaning through the combination and change of words, parts of words, or even groups of words. Many people cannot stand grammar, but they use it unconsciously at the moment of speaking. In my personal opinion, the most important part of this unit is the study of grammatical forms . They are related to the way in which words appear when we produce the language. Grammatical forms can be found in words that contain prefixes and suffixes, grammatical structures or parts of speech .   Parts of speech are divided into nine parts: nouns , verbs , adjectives , adverbs , determiners , prepositions , pronouns , conjunctions and exclamations . Grammar should not be taught explicitly, it should be taught in a way in which we can keep our students on their toes (Schmidt, 2017)...