Investigating the Effect of Teaching Culture through Movies on Efl Learners' Wtc (Willingness to Communicate)

1.IntroductionDescriptive accounts of the development of children with Down's syndrome (DS) usually draw attention to their speech and language development with delay. Despite a wide range of individual differences, most children are late in saying their first words, their vocabulary grows more slowly than in normal children and although they use the same range of two-word phrases as all children, they have difficulty in mastering the many rules for talking in grammatically correct sentences (Rondal 1988, Miller 1988). This leads to the speech of many teenagers and adults with DS being limited to short telegraphic utterances (keywords without the function words, for example "went shopping Dad" rather than "I went shopping last night with my Dad"). They also tend to have difficulty in pronouncing words clearly (Bray & Woolnough 1988). The combined effect of talking in telegraphic utterances and poor pronunciations often makes young people with DS difficult to be understood, especially if they are trying to talk to strangers out in the community rather than to those familiar with them at home or in school (Buckley & Sacks 1987). There is a specific pattern of cognitive and behavioral features that are observed among children with DS that differs from that seen in normally developing children and children with other causes of intellectual disability. Children with DS are usually good communicators, meaning that they can get their message across and interact well with other people. However, clear speech is more difficult and therefore, speech can be a challenge. We can talk to the child about everything we do; we can talk about what we are going to do and what we did yesterday or last week. We can talk about many things that are outside the child's range of actual experience, such as what the postman does at the sorting office or the doctor at the hospital, what astronauts do or why the wind blows. Many psychologists have emphasized the importance of language for teaching concepts and ideas, the tools for thinking, to children (Vygotsky 1986, Bruner 1983). Any child with a delay in learning to communicate in a language is going to be seriously disadvantaged in being able to gain knowledge about the world. Children with Down's syndrome are expected to show cognitive delay, to be slower in developing their awareness and understanding of the world and to think reason and remember. This cognitive delay may be in part the consequence of the language learning difficulties. Any serious language delay will inevitably result in increasing cognitive delay, as language is such a powerful tool for gaining knowledge and for understanding, thinking, reasoning and remembering. Conversely the more we can do to overcome the children's language learning and speech difficulties then the better equipped they will be to learn and improve their cognitive abilities2. Backgrounds of Down SyndromeIn 1866 British physician, John Langdon Down, for whom the syndrome is now named, first described DS, as "Mongolism." The term DS did not become the accepted term until the early 1970s. More was learned about the condition in 1959 when French Pediatrician/ Geneticist Professor Jerome Jejune discovered that individuals with DS have an extra chromosome -just one year before NADS (National Association for Down Syndrome) was founded. Shortly thereafter, chromosome studies were developed to confirm the diagnosis of DS. The National Association for Down syndrome (NADS) is the oldest organization in the United States serving children and adults with DS and their families. It was first started in Chicago in 1960 by Kay McGee shortly after her daughter Tricia was born with DS. In those days, the standard operating procedure in hospitals was for doctors to advise parents to institutionalize their newborn infants with DS. Parents who did not go after this advice took their babies home without help or services. Kay and Marty McGee chose to neglect the advice of their pediatrician and they took Tricia home. …