Vol 01 No 2 TESL Reporter

              swoon wembs 1

published by

teaching english as a second language

english language institute the church college of hawaii
winter
1968

vol

1 I

no

2

laie

hawaii

terminal behavior and language
by

teaching

dr J donald bowen

UCLA

in modern education one often hears of the concept terminal behavior this is a term supplied from the field of psychology a term which reflects the belief that the measure of any successful educational activity is the degree to which the studeens s beud nt t havior is modified to what extent does he do or can he do things he did not or could not before the lessons were presented the term fits comfortably in second language teaching where we wish to influence the behavior of students by enabling them to communicate effectively in a medium other than their native language the extent to which they can do this can be measured and evaluated as a reflection of the effectiveness of the teachiingpllus achng piu
terminal behavior language teaching by J donald bowen page I NCTE study group examines program
1

whatever aptitude and motivation the student brings to the classroom knowing what terminal behavior we seek should be useful in the design we should select of our teaching and arrange activities that lead di er c y reecttlly to the acquisition of the re
is professor of english at the university of california Ios s lo l ia angeles and a well known author of books and articles on teaching english as a second landr
bowen

guage

coxxtexxts oxi xi

page 2

teaching and testing page 3 by ted plaister by a tongan and samoan faapp contrasted fai aa l eng s wiith eng Ilish do and maake1 h akee makke na t page 5 by alice C pack master teaches vocabulary p age 7 harold alien briefed on BATESL il
W
1

page

7 8

dr charles

fries

honored

quired behavior the trouble is we n do not know explicitly what sequence of activities does lead to the skill of communicating effectively in a new language we observe that all normal human infants in a socially typical environment do learn their mother tongue but we also know that this experience cannot be recreated for a teenager or an adult natural language learning seems to be possible only with the optimum combination of age and circumstance the desired terminal behavior in a second language is communication within a relevant range of experience ideally the same range the student commands in his first language but obviously for a non infant this is a highly developed and complex pattern of behavior involving physiological and neurological coordinations that
continued on page
6

page