I is for Intelligibility

I phoned my Spanish internet provider the other day and tried to explain a problem I was experiencing. Clearly, I was unintelligible because the operator immediately switched me to an English-speaking operator. Even then, I had trouble getting my message across, because I didn’t know how to say ‘tráfico de datos’ in English. Was I again being unintelligible, or simply incomprehensible?

This reminded me that, in a session on my MA TESOL course last summer, during a discussion on the goals of pronunciation teaching, one student mentioned the fact that she’d heard that there was a distinction between intelligibility and comprehensibility, and she asked me to explain the difference.

I volunteered an off-the-cuff explanation (as one does!), suggesting that intelligibility is a function of speakers (and particularly of their pronunciation), while comprehensibility (invoking Krashen) is a function of texts. Or, put another way, output is (to a greater or lesser extent) intelligible, while input is (to a greater or lesser extent) comprehensible.

Even as I said this, I could see there were problems. Communication is by definition reciprocal, so is it possible to gauge either intelligibility or comprehensibility without reference to interlocutors – either listeners or readers? Moreover, whether listening to a speaker or reading a text, your degree of understanding is going to be experienced in a similar way: ‘I understand it a bit, a lot, or not at all.’

Since that awkward day (sorry, Autumn, my bad!), I’ve had a chance to research the difference.  For example, Munro, Derwing  and Morton (2006, p. 112), referencing earlier work by the first two authors, define intelligibility ‘as the extent to which a speaker’s utterance is actually understood’, whereas comprehensibility ‘refers to the listener’s estimation of difficulty in understanding an utterance’. (So I wasn’t entirely wrong, perhaps). They further distinguish both from accentedness, i.e. ‘ the degree to which the pronunciation of an utterance sounds different from an expected production pattern.’ And they add: ‘Although comprehensibility and accentedness are related to intelligibility, they are partially independent dimensions of L2 speech.  An utterance that is rated by a listener as “heavily accented,” for instance, might still be understood perfectly by the same listener.  Furthermore, two utterances that are fully intelligible might entail perceptibly distinct degrees of processing difficulty, such that they are rated differently for comprehensibility.’

On the other hand, and markedly differently, Nelson (2011), referencing papers by Smith (1992) and Smith and Nelson (1985), defines intelligibility as ‘word and/or utterance recognition, involving the sound system’, and comprehensibility as ‘word/utterance meaning, or locutionary force’. To further complicate matters, they introduce the term interpretability, i.e. ‘the meaning behind the word/utterance, or illocutionary force’.

MacKay (2002, p. 52) helpfully (?) unpacks these distinctions with an example:

If a listener recognises that the word salt is an English word rather than a Spanish word, English is then intelligible to him or her. If the listener in addition knows the meaning of the word, it is comprehensible, and if he or she understands that the phrase, ‘Do you have any salt?’, is intended to be a request for salt, then he or she is said to be able to interpret the language.

Put another way, if you’re having trouble understanding someone, it may be a case of not recognizing what they’re saying (likely their fault), or not knowing what they mean (probably your fault), or not knowing what their intention is (could be anyone’s fault). Going back to my exchange on the phone, I can sort of apply these distinctions, but I’m also wondering if accentedness was the reason why I was switched to the English-speaking operator, since the first operator made no attempt even to negotiate some sort of understanding. (Mercifully, in a subsequent conversation with yet another operator, I was actually congratulated on my Spanish – probably because, although heavily accented, I was intelligible. Or do I mean  comprehensible?)

This raises another issue related to intelligibility: that it is highly subjective. As Rajagopolan (2010, p. 467) argues, ‘No matter how one tries to define intelligibility from a neutral standpoint, the question that cries out for an answer is: “intelligible for who?”’ Why was I intelligible to one of my interlocutors but not to another? Was it, indeed, nothing to do with accent at all, but more to do with attitude? After all, it is not accents that are intelligible, it is people.  I never tire of quoting Bamgbose (1998) on the subject: ‘Preoccupation with intelligibility has often taken an abstract form characterized by decontextualised comparison of varieties. The point is often missed that it is people, not language codes, that understand one another” (quoted in Jenkins,  2007, p. 84). Thus, intelligibility may have as much to do with our overall impression of a speaker as it has to do with the intrusiveness of their accent (or lack thereof) – not dissimilar to the notion of ‘comfortable intelligibility’ (Kenworthy 1987) or ‘perceived fluency’ (Lennon 2000, cited in Götz 2013).

Either way, this doesn’t provide a lot of solace to those who have to assess a learner’s pronunciation, as in the kinds of oral tests favoured by many public exams nowadays, using descriptors such as these:

• is easy to understand throughout; L1 accent has minimal effect on intelligibility
• can generally be understood throughout, though mispronunciation of individual words or sounds reduces clarity at times

What are the chances that any two raters will agree?

References

Götz, S. (2013) Fluency in native and nonnative English speech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Jenkins, J.  (2007) English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kenworthy J (1987) Teaching English Pronunciation. Harlow:  Longman.

McKay, S. (2002) Teaching English as an International Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Munro, M.J., Derwing, T.M., & Morton, S.L. (2006) ‘The mutual intelligibility of L2 speech.’ Studies in Second language Acquisition, 28.

Nelson, C. L. (2011). Intelligibility in World Englishes: Theory and Application. New York: Routledge.

Rajagopolan, K. (2010) ‘The soft ideological underbelly of the notion of intelligibility in discussions about “World Englishes”.’ Applied Linguistics, 31/3.

Smith, L. E. (1992). Spread of English and issues of intelligibility. In B. B. Kachru (ed.) The Other Tongue: English across Cultures (Second Edition). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Smith, L. E. and Nelson, C. L. (1985). ‘International intelligibility of English: Directions and resources.’ World Englishes, 4(3).

Illustrations by Quentin Blake from Success with English, by Geoffrey Broughton, Penguin Education, 1968.

S is for Speaking (2)

 

photo by Ahed Izhiman

Following on from last week, here are five more of my favourite speaking activities that I included (or planned to include) in my talks in Palestine. As in the last batch, they require minimal materials, promote a good deal of productive language use, and have elements of task rehearsal and repetition built in.

 

Find someone who… This is a classic and hardly needs describing, but there are some interesting variations. It involves learners walking around (space permitting), asking all the other learners questions with a view to completing a survey or finding someone whose answers most closely match theirs. For example, in order to find out how adventurous the class is, learners (either singly or in small groups) first prepare three or four questions that fit this frame:

Have you ever …?  Would you ever…?

For example, Have you ever been sailing? (And, if the answer is No) Would you ever do it? Have you ever eaten insects? Would you ever eat them?) etc. They then survey the rest of the class, making a note of the number of affirmative answers. This will involve the repeated asking of the question(s), but in a context that requires that learners pay attention, not only to asking the right questions, but also to the answers. It is this requirement, the enforced re-allocation of attentional resources, that – in theory – encourages memorization of the forms. Reporting to the class the results of the milling activity (e.g. Maxim said he would never dive off the high board; Olga said …) is also another way of providing repetitive practice where attention is not only on meaning, but, because of the public nature of the reporting, also on form – i.e. on getting it right. Variants involve choosing items from a grid – e.g. holiday destinations, hotels, and months – and asking questions in order to find someone who is going to the same destination, staying in the same hotel, and in the same month.

Show and tell. Another classic: in successive lessons, learners take turns to make a short (two to five-minute) presentation to the rest of the class, e.g. about an interest they have, a hobby, a favourite object, a book they have read or movie they have seen. It is important than the presentation is spoken – not simply written down and read aloud. This requirement, along with the public nature of the task, encourages preparation and rehearsal. A question-and-answer session at the end ensures spontaneous language use. Ideally, learners should have a chance to repeat the presentation, either immediately or at a later date, in order to incorporate any feedback. An alternative organization is to put the students into small groups to share their ‘news’, while the teacher circulates and assists. One person from each group then reports some of the more interesting findings to the class. This is a great way to begin a lesson, and, if done regularly, trains learners to prepare in advance.

Discussion cards. Students in small groups have a set of statements or questions about a specific topic on cards. These can be prepared by the teacher, but, better still, by the students themselves, whose discussion cards can then be exchanged with another group. One student takes the first card, reads it aloud, and the group then discuss it for as long as they need, before taking the next card, and so on. If a particular statement doesn’t interest them, they can move on to the next one. The object is not necessarily to discuss all the statements: the teacher should decide at what point to end the activity. Groups who have finished early can prepare a summary of the main points that have come up. These summaries can be used to open up the discussion to the whole class.

Describe-and-draw race. The teacher pre-teaches or revises nouns relating to geometrical shapes, such as line, square, circle, triangle, and rectangle, as well as prepositional phrases such as on the left, on the right, above, below, outside, inside, so that learners can describe a simple arrangement of shapes. (Alternatively, they could be easy-to-draw objects, such as fruit, items of clothing or of furniture).

To practise, the teacher describes an arrangement so that the learners can draw it correctly. The learners do the same to each other in pairs, and/or ‘dictate’ a picture to the teacher.

photo by Tamar Hazam

 

Now the game element is introduced. The class is divided into two teams, and the blackboard is divided in two by a line down the middle. Each team has a representative at the board, each with a piece of chalk, or boardmarker. In advance of the game the teacher should have prepared a dozen or so different designs incorporating the geometrical shapes, large enough to be seen by all the class. The teacher ensures that the two team representatives at the board can’t see the designs, and then selects one and shows it to the two teams. Each team attempts to describe the design to its representative at the board, and the first team to do this successfully, so that the design is replicated on the board, is the winner of that round. The teacher then selects another design and the game continues, with new ‘drawers’ at the board.

Paper conversations. Not strictly a speaking activity, but one that simulates the real-time and non-predictable nature of spoken interaction, and therefore is useful preparation for it. Learners have a ‘conversation’ with their classmates, but instead of speaking, they write the conversation onto a shared sheet of paper. While the students are writing, the teacher can monitor their written ‘conversations’ and make corrections or improvements more easily than when students are actually speaking. The conversations can then be read aloud, using the ‘heads up’ procedure described in the previous post.

All these activities, and more, can be found in my book How to Teach Speaking (Pearson 2005).

 

 

 

S is for Speaking (1)

 

Reading aloud becomes speaking

Last week I gave a workshop to two groups of teachers in Ramallah and Gaza City – teachers who are working in fairly tough conditions, with large classes and few resources. I needed to be able to demo some practical hands-on activities that they could use in their classes on Monday morning. Activities, moreover, that would provide plenty of opportunities for speaking. Hence, the title of the talk: My ten favourite speaking activities. There were no PowerPoint slides, so the following will serve as a summary of five of the activities that I workshopped (with more to come), and of the principles that we extrapolated from them. I ought to add that none of these activities I invented myself – they are all in the ‘public domain’ as it were. And have been for a long time. Which is proof of their worth.

1. What animal am I? Or any number of guessing games involving yes/no questions. After the teacher demoes it, individual learners take the hot seat. Great for practicing really useful questions like ‘Do you lay eggs?’ Other variations include the well-known ‘What’s my line?’ (i.e. ‘What’s my job?’ ).
2. Spot the lie. Tell three short anecdotes about yourself, two of which are 100% true and one of which is 100% false. Students have to spot the lie – they can ask questions to try and catch you out. They then do the same in pairs or small groups. Travel stories are good material, or minor mishaps, such as things you lost.
3. Reading aloud (heads up): Reading aloud can be the most turgid classroom activity, as students mouth words without any hint of understanding, and mouth them badly to boot. However as Michael West realized, as long ago as 1955: ‘With a slight modification… Reading Aloud can be made one of the most valuable exercises in the early stages of teaching pupils to speak a foreign language. The pupil should be made to look up when they read aloud. The teacher says, “Don’t read to the book! Read to me. Look up at me.” He makes them read a phrase or short sentence silently then, looking up, say it to someone – to the teacher, or to another pupil, or to the class. In doing this the reader must look up during the speaking of the whole sentence; he must not just look up for a second and then look down again.’ West argues that the effect of this is that the reader must hold the material in the mind in such a way that its meaning is processed, and then recall it meaningfully. Moreover, meaningless reading becomes meaningful speaking because there is an audience: ‘The pupil is speaking to someone – not to the book or the empty air; and the more realistic recall is, the more vivid and effective as the learning.’
4. Carousel: This is less an activity than a way of organizing speaking activities so that there is built-in repetition. It takes its name from the fact that carousels go round, stop, pick up new passengers, and continue the ride. So, one half of the class stand in a circle, e.g. around the walls of the rooms, while the ‘carousel’ consists of the other half of the class, so that individuals in each circle face one another. They then do the speaking task and, at a signal form the teacher, the inner circle moves around one, and the task is repeated, this time with new partners. When the inner circle has ‘revolved’ one complete turn, the two circles change places. An easy task might be for each student to draw their family tree (brothers, sisters, uncles. aunts etc) and attach it to the wall. They stand next to their picture and answer questions about it. Another one is the headlines activity, where students write, and post up, a catchy headline to describe their recent activities, e.g. JOYFUL WEDDING PARTY; FRUSTRATING SHOPPING TRIP, etc.
   

   The carousel in operation

5. Dialogue build: I was taught this technique on my pre-service course, and I couldn’t have survived my first year of teaching without it. Very simply, the teacher uses a picture prompt (e.g. two people on the phone or in a hotel reception) to elicit and drill, line by line, a dialogue of anything between four and a dozen turns. Students practice it, first with the teacher, then with each other, changing partners frequently, and then perform it – perhaps with variations – to the class.

Principles of good speaking tasks that underlie these activities include:

• repetition – e.g. of the same questions in What animal am I? or of the answers, in Carousel, or of both questions and answers, as in Dialogue build.
• interaction – students not only have to speak but they have to listen and respond to one another – as in Spot the lie and Carousel.
• support – activities are supported in a secure framework, e.g. a script or a text, so that the anxiety often associated with spontaneous speaking is reduced, e.g. Reading aloud, Dialogue build.

Reference

West, M. 1955. Learning to read a foreign language and other essays on language-teaching. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Thanks to Ahed Izhiman for the photos.

H is for Holistic

I took delivery of two books last week, both of which make liberal use of the term holistic. One (Samuda and Bygate, 2008) is about task-based learning, and its first chapter is titled ‘Language use, holistic activity and second language learning’. The other (Goh and Burns, 2012) is called Teaching Speaking and has the strap-line: A Holistic Approach.  But now I’m wondering if the term hasn’t become a little overused, to the point of becoming meaningless. What, for example, do the following have in common: holistic approaches, holistic learners, and holistic testing – not to mention whole-language learning, and whole-person learning?

According to Wikipedia, ‘The term holism was coined in 1926 by Jan Smuts, a South African statesman [and, somewhat ironically, an advocate of racial segregation], in his book, Holism and Evolution. Smuts defined holism as “The tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution”‘.

Holism seems to have been co-opted into psychology (particularly Gestalt psychology), and thence into education, where a holistic approach can mean one of two things: either “an approach to language teaching which seeks to focus on language in its entirety rather than breaking it down into separate components” (Richards and Schmidt, 1985:240), or – very differently – an approach that engages the whole learner: intellectually, emotionally, and even physically.  Thus, Legutke and Thomas (1991: 159), for instance, talk about “the holistic and multisensory nature of learning which involves head, heart and hands”.

In this latter sense, holistic learning is virtually synonymous with whole-person learning, and often used to characterize such humanistic learning methods as the Silent Way, Total Physical Response (TPR) and Community Language Learning (CLL) . Thus, according to Richards and Rodgers (1986: 117) “CLL advocates a holistic approach to language learning, since ‘true’ human learning is both cognitive and affective. This is termed whole-person learning. Such learning takes place in a communicative situation where teachers and learners are involved in ‘an interaction… in which both experience a sense of their own wholeness’ (Curran 1972:90)”.

Whole-language learning, on the other hand, is the preferred term (in the US at least) for those approaches that are holistic in the first of the senses I outlined above, i.e. that ‘learning proceeds from whole to part’ (Freeman and Freeman 1998: xvii), and that, by experiencing whole language – e.g. as whole texts or as communicative tasks – you internalize the parts. It’s a ‘deep-end’, experiential approach. Thus, you learn speaking by speaking, reading by reading, and so on. This is why Samuda and Bygate (2008: 7) align task-based learning with holism: ‘One way of engaging language use is through holistic activity. Tasks are one kind of holistic activity’.

Goh and Burns (2012: 4), too, label their approach to speaking instruction as holistic, but only in the sense, it seems, that it “addresses language learners’ cognitive, affective (or emotional), and social needs, as they work towards acquiring good speaking competence”. In terms of a methodology, however, they reject a ‘learn-to-speak-by-speaking’ approach, arguing that “both part-practice activities and whole tasks are necessary to facilitate the automatization of various components of the complex skill of speaking” (op. cit. p. 148), adding that “speaking lessons should include opportunities to focus on grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation at appropriate stages of the learning sequence” (ibid.).

This is consistent with what Cazden calls ‘whole language plus’, where the primary focus is on task performance, but where there is recognition of the need for ‘temporary instructional detours’  in which the learner’s attention is directed to lower level features ‘at the point of need’.  Moreover, such a two-pronged approach is more likely to accommodate the learning style preferences of both analytic and holistic learners, where the latter are defined as learners who “like socially interactive, communicative events in which they can emphasise the main idea and avoid analysis of grammatical minutiae” (Oxford, 2001:361).

More recently, complexity theory and an ecological perspective have deepened our understanding of what ‘whole-ness’ entails.  As Ellis and Larsen-Freeman (2009: 91) put it: ‘Cognition, consciousness, experience, embodiment, brain, self, human interaction, society, culture, and history – in other words, phenomena at different levels of scale and time – are all inextricably intertwined in rich, complex, and dynamic ways in language, its use and its learning’.

Maybe this more elaborated and multi-layered view will serve to conflate the two senses of holistic as applied to approach. Could a focus both on whole-language and on the whole-learner help blur the distinction between learning and using, and between learner and language, forming one complex system, such that (to borrow Yeats’s image) we cannot ‘tell the dancer from the dance’?

I’ll let Leo van Lier (2004: 223-224) have the last word:

An ecological approach sees the learner as a whole person, not a grammar production unit.  It involves having meaningful things to do and say, being taken seriously, being given responsibility, and being encouraged to tackle challenging projects, to think critically, and to take control of one’s own learning.  The teacher provides assistance, but only just enough and just in time (in the form of pedagogical scaffolding), taking the learners’ developing skills and interests as the true driving force of the curriculum.

(Don’t know about you, but it sounds oddly familiar to me!)

References:

Cazden, C. (1992) Whole Language Plus: Essays on Literacy in the US and NZ, New York: Teachers College Press.

Ellis, N., and Larsen-Freeman, D. (2009) ‘Constructing a second language: analyses and computational simulations of the emergence of linguistic constructions from usage’, in Ellis, N., and Larsen-Freeman, D. (eds.) Language as a Complex Adaptive system, Special issue of Language Learning, 59.

Freeman, Y.S. and Freeman, D.E. (1998) ESL/EFL Teaching: Principles for Success, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goh, C, and Burns, A. (2012) Teaching Speaking. A Holistic Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Legutke, M., and Thomas, H. (1991) Process and Experience in the Language Classroom, Harlow: Longman.

Oxford, R. (2001) ‘Language learning styles and strategies’, in Celce-Murcia, M. (ed.) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (3^rd edition), Boston, MA: Heinle Cengage Learning.

Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T.S. (1986) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J., and Schmidt, R. (eds.) (2002) Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (3rd edn.), Harlow: Longman.

Samuda. V. and Bygate, M. (2008) Tasks in Second Language Learning, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

van Lier, L. (2004) The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural perspective, Norwell MA: Kluwer.

 Illustrations from Goldschmidt, T. 1923. English by Intuition and Pictures. Leipzig: Hirt & Sohn.

C is for Conversation

A core tenet of the Dogme philosophy is that classroom learning should be ‘conversation-driven’, and that, out of the language that emerges from this conversation, language learning episodes can be co-constructed.

But what do we mean by ‘conversation’?

In a recent comment on Diarmuid Fogarty’s blog, Luan Hanratty wrote:

Conversation is the word we really need to define. Jack Richards wrote that interactions fall into three basic categories: small talk, transactions and performances. For me, small talk is the most important because it constitutes a difficult social skill that is often least practised among learners. But small talk is too mundane to base a whole class around, hence the need for materials.  Dogme has the danger of becoming like the people who tweet about what they had for lunch. Pleasant but not very inspiring, especially in an learning context. Surely we can do better by giving more time to transactions and performances, i.e. speech acts rather than coffee chats.

This is a fair criticism, especially if we construe conversation as being synonymous with ‘chat’, which by definition is largely interpersonal in terms of its function, and local – even trivial – in terms of its field. If learning opportunities are based solely upon this fairly restricted register, it’s unlikely that most students will find their communicative needs are satisfied – especially if these needs include more formal registers, such as academic or technical writing. (At the same time, it’s worth noting that even written registers are becoming increasingly ‘conversationalized’, especially since the advent of digital media).

So, effectively, a classroom conversation needs to be more than chat. And it also needs to be more than the teacher-led question-answer sequences that characterised Direct Method courses, and which are so easily ridiculed: How many fingers do I have? Do I have a nose on my face? Is this your neck? etc.

Causeries avec mes élèves

Incidentally, one of the prototypical Direct Method courses was called Causeries avec mes élèves [Conversations with my students, 1874)]. Its author, Lambert Sauveur, describes the first lesson: “It is a conversation during two hours in the French language with twenty persons who know nothing of this language. After five minutes only, I am carrying on a dialogue with them, and this dialogue does not cease.”

While this dialogue might, in many ways, not have resembled natually-occuring conversation (the first five lessons of his course dealt with parts of the body), one principle that Sauveur rated highly was coherence, his intention being “to connect scrupulously the questions in such a manner that one may give rise to another”. As Howatt (1984) comments: “This principle probably explains his success in communicating with his students better than anything else. They understood what he was talking about because they were able to predict the course of the conversation” (p. 201).

Conversation is predictable, because one turn follows from the other. At the same time, because it is locally assembled, and takes place in real time, it is unpredictable. This tension between the predictable and the unpredictable makes conversation – real conversation –  an ideal medium for instruction.  As Leo van Lier (1996) argues, “learning takes place when the new is embedded in the familiar, so that risks and security are in balance… Conversational interaction naturally links the known to the new. It creates its own expectancies and its own context, and offers choices to the participants. In a conversation, we must continually make decisions on the basis of what other people mean. We therefore have to listen very carefully… and we also have to take great care in constructing our contributions so that we can be understood” (p. 171).

At the same time, for such conversations to provide a site for learning, there need to be strategic interventions on the part of the teacher – interventions that distinguish normal conversation between peers from what has been called ‘instructional conversation’ (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988):

The task of schooling can be seen as one of creating and supporting instructional conversations… The concept itself contains a paradox: “Instruction” and “conversation” appear contrary, the one implying authority and planning, the other equality and responsiveness. The task of teaching is to resolve this paradox. To most truly teach, one must converse; to truly converse is to teach” (p. 111).

The notion of instructional conversation has been further developed by scholars such as Neil Mercer (1995), who writes of the ‘long conversation’ that constitutes the dialogic curriculum, and Gordon Wells (1999), who calls it ‘dialogic enquiry’.    In fact, dialogue may be a better term than conversation, not least because it echoes Paulo Freire’s insistence on putting dialogue at the heart of pedagogy: “Whoever enters into dialogue does so with someone about something; and that something ought to constitute the new content of our proposed education” (1993, p. 46). In a similar manner, Sylvia Ashton-Warner yielded to – and exploited –  the hubbub in her infant classroom: “I harness the communication, since I can’t control it, and base my method on it” (1963, p. 104).

Individual presentations

So, really, conversation stands for all the talk, the dialogue, the communication (both spoken and written) that is generated by the people in the room, and that is shaped, scaffolded, supported and signposted by the teacher. It could take the form of formal debates, individual presentations, small group tasks, or a plenary discussion. It could be mediated by means of an online chat function, or Twitter, or SMS messages, or pieces of paper that are traded back and forth across the class. In the end it is simply the ‘stuff’ (to use Ashton-Warner’s phrase) out of which learning episodes are moulded. In its most basic, common-or-garden form it is simply conversation – the most natural form of communication we know.

Formal debate

And, as Gordon Wells concedes, “conversation may not be perfect as a means of information exchange… but when engaged in collaboratively, it can be an effective medium for learning and teaching. In any case, since there is no better alternative, we must do the best we can” (1987, p. 218).

References:

Ashton-Warner, S. (1963, 1980). Teacher. London: Virago.

Freire, P. (1993). Education for Critical Consciousness, New York: Continuum.

Howatt, A.P.R. (1984). A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mercer, N. (1995). The guided construction of knowledge: Talk amongst teachers and learners. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Tharp, R.G., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning, and schooling in social context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Lier, L. (1996). Interaction in the language curriculum: Awareness, autonomy and authenticity. Harlow: Longman.

Wells, G. (1987) The Meaning Makers: Children learning language and using language to learn. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a sociocultural practice and theory of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

R is for Reticence

No, there is no entry on Reticence in An A-Z of ELT. Nor shyness. But it is nevertheless a topic that comes up often, especially in discussions about approaches that prioritise learner-generated talk, such as task-based learning or Dogme. “That’s all very well”, some teachers retort, “but my students don’t want to talk”.

As it happens, I dealt with the issue of student ‘shyness’ on the Dogme discussion list, which in turn gave rise to a blog posting on the Delta Publishing website last year:

http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/development/learners-who-are-shy-to-speak

In that posting I made the point that the teacher’s agenda can be a key factor in either encouraging or inhibiting classroom participation:

If [the students] are being asked to talk freely about something that matters to them, only to discover that the teacher’s ulterior purpose is to elicit, test, and correct a pre-selected language item (the future perfect, for example), they of course will be less inclined to play the game.

So, I was naturally drawn to an article in the latest ELT Journal (January 2010) by Xiaoyan Xie, called ‘Why are students quiet? Looking at the Chinese context and beyond’.  I came to the article with some misgivings due to its overt flagging of the ‘Chinese context’.  I expected that the writer (like many before her) would lay the blame for student reticence on the culturally inappropriate, Western-style communicative methodology (as instantiated in current best-selling coursebooks) and its ill-fit with Confucian values of modesty and avoidance of threats to face.  Not at all. Rather than appealing to cultural stereotypes, she uses transcripts of classroom interactions in Chinese contexts to demonstrate how the teachers’ interaction style – including their dogged control of the discourse, their inflexible adherence to the lesson plan, and their failure to engage with learners’ contributions at any level other than in terms of accuracy – contributes to students’ reticence. She concludes:

The findings suggest that the teachers should relax their control and allow the students more freedom to choose their own topics so as to generate more opportunities for them to participate in classroom interaction. Doing so might foster a classroom culture that is more open to students’ desire to explore the language and topics that do not necessarily conform to the rigid bounds of the curriculum and limited personal perspectives of the teachers. (p. 19)

She ends with a question: “So what is the appropriate degree of variability that Chinese teachers, or indeed teachers from other cultures, should allow for in order to expand the patterns of classroom communication?”

Get into groups and discuss!

F is for Fluency

Jeremy Harmer recently asked – on Twitter – for opinions as to why some learners achieve high degrees of fluency, while others do not. I wanted to reply that any answer to that question depends on how you define fluency – and then I would go on to attempt to define it. But the 140-character restriction of Twitter proved too much, so I thought I’d blog it instead.

As I found when I tried to define it in the A-Z, fluency is one of those elusive, fuzzy, even contested, terms that means different things to different people. In lay terms, a “fluent speaker of French” is probably someone whose French is judged as accurate, easy on the ear, and idiomatic. The term, however, was co-opted by methodologists (especially those aligned to the communicative approach) to describe the purpose of classroom activities whose focus is on communicating meaning, rather than on the practice of specific (typically grammatical) forms. Thus, Brumfit (1984) said that “the distinction between accuracy and fluency is essentially a methodological distinction, rather than one in psychology or linguistics”. And added, “fluency…is to be regarded as natural language use, whether or not it results in native-speaker-like language comprehension or production”. The problem with this definition, though, is that it is very difficult to operationalise, especially from the point of view of testing. What exactly is “natural language use”, how do you contrive it in the classroom, and how do you assess it (especially if you are discounting native-speaker-like models as your benchmark)? As a term, fluency becomes difficult to disentangle from related concepts, such as intelligibility, coherence, communicative effectiveness, and so on.   

To counter this fuzziness, various researchers, working in a cognitive tradition, attempted to characterise it in measurable terms. Thus, Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005), following Skehan (1998), define fluency as “the production of language in real time without undue pausing or hesitation.”  That is to say, it is a ‘temporal phenomenon’. Well and good. This is something we can measure.

Confusingly, though, they go on to say that “fluency occurs when learners prioritize meaning over form in order to get a task done”. This to me seems patently false: getting a task done is no guarantee that there is no “undue pausing or hesitation”. On the contrary, the effort involved in performing a task may actually increase the degree of dysfluency. And nor is attention to meaning a pre-condition for pause-free production. Some of our most fluent productions, as proficient speakers, are texts that we have committed to memory (tongue twisters, nursery rhymes, prayers, oaths of allegiance, etc) that we can trot out without ANY attention to meaning.

In fact, it may be that fluency is indeed a function of memory, and that the capacity to produce pause-free speech in real time is contingent on having a memorised bank of formulaic language “chunks” – a view that was first put forward as long ago as 1983 by Pawley and Syder in their seminal paper, ‘Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency’. Well, I used to say that it was P & S who ‘first put forward’ this view. And then I discoverd more recently that the great Harold Palmer, as even longer ago as 1925, identified ‘the fundamental guiding principle for the student of conversation’ as being “Memorize perfectly the largest number of common and useful word-groups!”

If this is in fact the case, as teachers interested in developing fluency, we might need to:

1. clarify the concept of  what a ‘word group’ is;
2. select those word groups that are both common and useful;
3. set a target that represents the largest practicable number;
4. decide what the criteria for perfect memorization might be;
5. devise and teach strategies that promote memorization of word groups;
6. devise activities what provide opportunities for learners to activate what they have memorized, without undue pausing or hesitation, in ways that replicate real language use.

Is this a tall order?