Group items tagged

purposefulness: speakers are motivated by a communicative goal (such as getting information, making a request, giving instructions) and not simply by the need to display the correct use of language for its own sake; reciprocity: to achieve this purpose, speakers need to interact, and there is as much need to listen as to speak; negotiation: following from the above, they may need to check and repair the communication in order to be understood by each other; synchronicity: the exchange – especially if it is spoken – usually takes place in real time; unpredictability: neither the process, nor the outcome, nor the language used in the exchange, is entirely predictable; heterogeneity: participants can use any communicative means at their disposal; in other words, they are not restricted to the use of a pre-specified grammar item.

hen did you last ‘describe and draw’ something, for instance?  And the argument that classroom interaction should model authentic language use overlooks the fact that classrooms, by their nature, have their own discourse norms and practices which may be quite different from “real-life”.  Finally, isn’t there a danger that – if the concern for formal accuracy is ‘parked’ indefinitely – the learner’s overall proficiency might be at risk? (See the post on P for Push, for more on this theme.)

But this presupposes that  the communication matters: that it is both contingent – i.e. it connects to the real-world in some way – and engaging: that it engages the learners’ needs, interests, concerns and desires. In short, the learner needs to have some personal investment in the communication

The way it is structured does not seem to stimulate the wish of learners to say something, nor does it tap what they might have to say. … Learners do not find room to speak as themselves, to use language in communicative encounters, to create text, to stimulate responses from fellow learners, or to find solutions to relevant problems (pp 8-9).

More recently, as seen through the lens of complex systems theory, all language use – whether the language of a social group or the language of an individual – is subject to constant variation. “A language is not a fixed system. It varies in usage over speakers, places, and time” (Ellis, 2009, p. 139).  Shakespeare’s language was probably no more nor less variable than that of an English speaker today. As Diane Larsen-Freeman (2010, p. 53)  puts it: “From a Complexity Theory perspective, flux is an integral part of any system.

So, in order to capture the defining qualities of big-C Communication, I would add the following to my list: contingency: the speakers’ utterances are connected, both to one another, and to the context (physical, social, cultural, etc)  in which they are uttered; investment: the speakers have a personal commitment to the communication and are invested in making it work

f language is in a constant state of flux, and if there is no such thing as ‘deviation from the norm’ – that is to say, if there is no error, as traditionally conceived – where does that leave us,  as course designers, language teachers, and language testers? Put another way, how do we align the inherent variability of the learner’s emergent system with the inherent variability of the way that the language is being used by its speakers? If language is like “the inconstant moon/that monthly changes in her circled orb”, how do we get the measure of it?

“We need to take into account learners’ histories, orientations and intentions, thoughts and feelings. We need to consider the tasks that learners perform and to consider each performance anew — stable and predictable in part, but at the same time, variable, flexible, and dynamically adapted to fit the changing situation. Learners actively transform their linguistic world; they do not just conform to it”.

“it is easier to build prefabricated bits, with comparatively little grammatical processing, than from single words with much more processing”. Lewis, M. (1997): Implementing the Lexical Approach. Heinle.

Instead, they would count as ‘exemplar learning’, i.e. the learning of items, either individual words, multi-word phrases, or prototypical examples of ‘constructions’ – which might subsequently be analysed into their components. Cognitive accounts argue that both rule-learning and item-learning are implicated in language learning – with some competition between the two systems.

Emergentist accounts, on the other hand, argue that most, if not all, language learning is exemplar-based: “The knowledge underlying fluent language is not grammar in the sense of abstract rules or structure but a huge collection of memories of previous experienced utterances” (N. Ellis, 2002, p. 166).

Brumfit (2001) puts it: “We may learn the tokens of language formally, but we learn the system by using it through reading or writing, or conversing” (p. 12).

but guiding them through examples and questions gets you to that “ah-ha!” moment. Using extracts from business emails and asking the learners to work out the relationship between the sender and receiver by looking at the complexity of language used is another example of th

’ve observed many teachers struggle to discover the best way to teach. They beg for the answers. However, I don’t believe there are right or wrong answers to their questions.

Very briefly, I wonder if the issue of how knowledge is arrived at – e.g. whether inductively or deductively – is of less importance than what you actually do with that knowledge. If it remains inert, then it’s of little use. In other words, (and I think I argued this in a comment on P is for PPP) language development is optimised through language use

One great example is using descriptions of situations which the learners have to categorise to help them understand the difference between “He told me he would meet the client today” vs. “He told me he will meet the client today”. I

Good learners are ‘language detectives’. As Joan Rubin wrote, as long ago as 1981: “The good language learner is constantly looking for patterns in the language. He [sic] attends to the form in a particular way, constantly analyzing, categorizing and synthesizing. He is constantly trying to find schemes for classifying information” (Rubin, J. 1981. What the ‘good language learner’ can teach us. TESOL Quarterly, 9).

t seems to be used in our field to connote the kind of scaffolding that is able to anticipate the learner’s inductive thought processes, and pre-empt false hypothesising.

“Another name for a scaffolding-teaching process is instructional conversation… or prolepsis. I like the concept of proleptic teaching because I now have a name for what I had done as a teacher for many years. I used to think that my teaching approach was inductive. I used a discovery process — some might call it a constructivist approach — to encourage students to come to their own understanding of a particular linguistic point.

Prolepsis requires teacher and students to achieve a degree of intersubjectivity, which makes it possible for the teacher to guide the student and for the student to be guided through the process of completing a task. In other words, both teacher and student try to come to an understanding of how each of them views the task and its solution, with the goal of helping the student reshape and extend his or her use of language.” (Teaching Language: from grammar to grammaring, 2003, p.95).

in his book The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning (2004) Leo van Lier defines prolepsis as occurring when “we assume (pretend) that learners already have the abilities we and they wish to develop. Together with this assumption we create invitational structures and spaces for learners to step into and grow into” (p.162

students looked at a number of T/F questions I had written. Rather than basing these Q’s on vocab’ as so often happens, I tried to make each one relate to the verb forms. For example, the text read: ‘When the bank realised its mistake, Bill had already spent £85,000′. So the T/F Q was: ‘Bill spent £85,000 after the bank noticed the mistake’ – false of course. Students discussed Q’s together then during feedback, I asked why it was ‘true’ or ‘false’ in each case. As we went through each Q, the students got the hang of it more and more.

Your approach, based on learners’ comprehension of sentences, is very much consistent with the way that VanPatten’s ‘Input processing’ theory is applied – sometimes known as ‘processing instruction’, and mediated by what Rod Ellis calls ‘structured input activities’:

Structured-input activities are comprehension-based grammar activities that go beyond simply presenting learners with enriched input containing the target structure (the stimulus) by means of some instruction that forces them to process it (the response). …

anPatten (1996) defines this as ‘a type of grammar instruction whose purpose is to affect the ways in which learners attend to input data. It is input-based rather than output-based.’ (p. 2)

As Ellis (2008) points out, “Explicit instruction can take the form of an inductive treatment, where learners are required to induce rules from examples given to them, or an explicit treatment, where learners are given a rule which they then practise using” (p. 882). In other words both an inductive and deductive approach can lead to explicit knowledg

I think implicit and explicit make all the difference

discovery learning in which students are presented with input and work on it for the sake of meaning, interpretation, communication, and only then are led to focus explicitly on its form, by which time part of it will have been processed implicitly

ocusing on form, students are led to notice patterns and draw conclusions, which must be later confirmed by the teacher (or the grammar chart in the book!).

As Nick Ellis (2006) reminds us “Not only are many grammatical meaning-form relationships low in salience, but they can also be redundant in the understanding of the meaning of an utterance. It is often unnecessary to interpret inflections marking grammatical meanings such as tense because they are usually accompanied by adverbs that indicate temporal reference”.

ick Schmidt (2001) argues, therefore, that “since many features of L2 input are likely to be infrequent, non-salient, and communicatively redundant, intentionally focused attention may be a practical (though not theoretical) necessity for successful language learning”.

umphrey’s role would seem to be one that teachers might adopt — drawing learners’ attention to features of their output that are still non-target like, or that threaten their communicative effectiveness – but granting the learner a degree of autonomy in terms of whether and how they deal with the issue