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SUMMARY: THE PRACTICE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING , JEREMY HARMER, 5TH^ EDITION
1. The world of English language teaching TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) is not one single profession. There are many different ways to teach English and places where it is taught - from the general English of many school classrooms around the world, to the more specialised worlds of business English or English for academic purposes (EAP). And the language itself is not one ‘thing’ either; constantly evolving and being used in more and more diverse situations. 1. 1 Who speaks English? It is likely that there was a time (in the early Middle Ages) when English was spoken almost exclusively by English people living in what is now England. Even then, however, there will have been outsiders who wanted to learn the language so that they could communicate with native speakers. At that time, English already constituted an amalgam of many different language strands, but the developing language didn't stay where it had started. It migrated through conquest and trade to other countries, such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, the Indian subcontinent, parts of Africa and Asia and many other corners of the globe. And it didn't stop there. It has morphed and spread to other countries and populations, too, until it has become one of the world's main languages of international communication and commerce. Braj Kachru, more than three decades ago, proposed a 'three circles' view of English in the world, where the 'inner circle' comprised countries such as the USA, the UK, Australia, etc. These were countries where English was the national language (and the mother tongue of most of its users). Kachru suggested there were about 320 - 380 million English speakers of this kind (Kachru 1985). In the ‘outer circle' Kachru included 150- 300 million speakers from countries such as India and Singapore, where there was a long history of English use, and where local varieties of the language have developed. Finally, Kachru proposed an ‘expanding circle', where English is a dominant foreign language. This expanding circle included countries as diverse as China, Sweden, Turkey and Argentina. Of course, when we are discussing English 'speakers', we first have to decide what 'speaking English' means. If we were to include everyone who is learning English at beginner levels (as well as those who are competent speakers), we would get a very different figure from the total of people who speak English at upper-intermediate level – the B1 or B2 level (Common European Framework of Reference) or 51 - 67 (Global Scale of English). Moreover, the English that is spoken around the world is not necessarily always the same kind of English, as we shall see – and that has implications for language teaching. 1.1.1 Varieties of English There is more than one version of English, of course. In the south of England, many people speak ‘standard southern English' (SSE), the variety of British English which appears in many coursebooks and exams for learners of English. But if you travel north, you will find English that is clearly not standard southern English; similarly, in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, many people speak other different varieties of the same language. There are, of course, plenty of similarities of grammar, lexis and pronunciation and, in most cases, a mutual intelligibility, but there are also significant differences in terms of language construction and pragmatic use. And in England itself, different regional areas have clearly identifiable language varieties. Variation of a similar kind is found on a far bigger scale in the USA, of course. We might identify General
American (GA) as a kind of US equivalent of standard southern English - one which, like its British counterpart, is also used in teaching and examining all over the world. But anyone who has ever been to North America (or who has watched US and Canadian movies) must be aware of the many and varied regional and ethnically diverse Englishes which are present all over the North American continent. And so, even in native speaker countries, many language varieties coexist. As we have said, teachers, exam boards and materials writers generally opt for one of two 'inner circle' varieties - GA or SSE - but these varieties, too, show differences of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling. In most cases, though, these varieties are remarkably similar and almost always mutually understandable. Outside the inner circle' versions of English, the situation is equally fascinating. First of all, there are recognisable and well-established 'outer circle' varieties such as Indian or Singaporean English. Secondly, where English is becoming a language of inter-country communication in, for example, South East Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.), it is arguable that a recognisable new form of Asian English may be emerging. And finally, we need to be aware of the enormous number of speakers of English who speak it as a second or additional language. The chances are that these people will not be speaking English with 'natives', but instead with second-language English speakers from other countries. This, incidentally, is now the reality in many large urban areas in 'inner circle' countries where a significant number of inhabitants may not have English as a home language and may be speaking to other English speakers who use a variety of different Englishes. English as a lingua franca (ELF): this is another and more widely-used name for what is sometimes called English as an international language (EIL). ELF is English used as 'a means of communication between people who come from different language backgrounds … not a language variety in the traditional sense of the term' (Jenkins 2012: 487). ELF speakers seem to be very ‘accommodating', jointly ensuring that communication is successful in a way that might horrify native-speaker examiners who demand accuracy based on native-speaker norms. When Barbara Seidlhofer studied ELF conversations, she found a number of ‘deviations' from native speaker norms. Typical features of ELF speech included:
- frequent failure to use the third person singular of the present simple (e.g. She look very sad),
- the use of the relative pronouns who and which interchangeably (a book who, a person which),
- adoption of all-purpose questions tags such as isn't it? Or no? (where native speakers typically used more grammatically-based options such as He could have been more careful, couldn't he?),
- the pluralising of nouns which are considered uncountable in some native speaker varieties (furnitures, advices) (Seidlhofer 2004: 220). Elsewhere, Jennifer Jenkins noticed that most ELF speakers do not differentiate between strong and weak forms (of words such as to, which can be pronounced /tu:/ or /tə/) and that they substitute voiced and voiceless /// and /0/ with /t/, /s/ and /d/ (think becomes sink or tink). This may be because /ð/ and /0/ 'do not occur in the majority of the world's languages' (Jenkins 1998: 122). ELF is not so much a variety as a process of accommodation , which, though it may have some recurring features, is in constant flux as its speakers interact with each other. As Andy Sewell suggests, 'adopting an ELF perspective on teaching does not mean that norms and standards are no longer required, but that these are mutable concepts and that learners need to be introduced to language variation when they are ready' (Sewell 2013: 7). 1.2 Who learns English, and which variety do they learn? English is studied at schools, colleges, universities and private language institutes. For children and young adults, this is usually because English is on the curriculum, or because they need to learn it in order to study at an English-medium college or university. On the other hand, where adults make a choice to study English, they may do so for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they want to travel, perhaps they want to use
English as a lingua franca and its predominance in international commerce. However, as with all ESP, there are a number of issues which BE teachers and materials designers have to confront. Where, for example, do the lessons take place, and what stage of their business lives have the students reached? Some BE lessons take place at secondary school, whilst others are designed for university students of business. Some BE study takes place in-company, when teachers go to the offices where their students are working. Lessons here may involve business role-playing so that the students can put what happens in the lesson straight into practice in the workplace. Clearly, the content of BE lessons will depend on whether the students are studying for some future life of business or whether they are currently in work in a business environment. If the latter, we may conduct a detailed needs analysis to find out what happens in the student's office and what that student needs to do. In reality, however, many BE coursebooks look remarkably like general English coursebooks. They have the same kinds of exercises as their general English equivalents, although the vocabulary and contexts reflect business environments. Which is the best approach? As with all ESP, it will depend on who the students are and what they need and want. Having made our decision, we can plot a course on the axes of a language and business quadrant (see Figure 2). 1.2.3 Content-based language teaching (CBLT) and CLIL The aim of language teaching is that the students will learn a language, whereas in content teaching, the content is the most important thing. When content is taught in an L2 (the target language ) the idea is that the language will be learnt as well. It's as if with content as the focus, the language comes along to join the party, and the students will learn it as it occurs. To some extent, this is similar to ESP, except that the term content-based language teaching (CBLT) is usually used to describe the study of academic subjects rather than as a way of talking about language study for a particular professional purpose. CBLT comes in many forms. At its most content-driven , it is likely to include total immersion, where the students do all their studies in the target language. At the other end of the spectrum - language-driven teaching - the focus is on the language, but the course includes specific content, in a more deliberate and organised way than in some general English courses. Entirely English-medium instruction is a form of total immersion, but in bilingual schools some teaching will take place in the students' first language (L1) as well. There are 'halfway houses', too, such as theme-based language teaching, where a major organising principle for a scheme of work is content-based topics and themes. Does CBLT work? Various results suggest a high rate of achievement. For example, the immersion programmes that started in Canada in the 1960s and still go on today (where young English-speaking learners are taught for a large part of the time in French) suggest that 'students achieve success in subject matter learning ... they achieve high levels of comprehension in French and can express themselves both orally and in writing on topics related to academic subjects' (Lightbown 2014: 16). But there are doubts about their levels of grammatical accuracy and their pragmatic competence in French, even after many years of study. CLIL (content and language integrated learning), a European variant of CBLT, mixes the specific language they need to express that content at the same time. In other words, whereas in general English lessons, the syllabus selects the language to be taught and someone then looks for content to exemplify that language, in CLIL lessons, content is selected and then CLIL planners look for the precise language which will enable the students to understand and talk about that content. Thus, the students may have to learn technical
words and structures that would never normally be included in a general English lesson at that level. In this way, the teaching of language is integrated into the teaching of the content and takes place alongside it. That is because some language in CLIL is content-obligatory language : you have to learn it if you want to talk about the content. CLIL experts also identify three other Cs, namely communication (students have to be able to communicate content, and to be able to communicate with each other), cognition (students need to develop their thinking skills) and culture (students need to be able to relate content to the culture in which it is embedded and to be able to understand their own culture through comparison with other behavioural norms). In the area of cognition, CLIL practitioners refer to HOTS (higher order thinking skills) and LOTS (lower order thinking skills). In simple terms, a lower order type of question might be What is this? or How many of these are there? whereas a higher order kind of question might be Why is this like it is?, What causes there to be so many of these?, etc. Higher order skills are a form of critical thinking. One issue that marks CLIL out from some other approaches is the tolerance of the students' L1 in the classroom. In some cases, content teachers can explain concepts in the students' L1 before language teachers teach the same students how to deal with (and talk about) the content in the L2. CLIL enthusiasts claim high levels of success, suggesting that students with average abilities achieve higher levels of skill than they have typically achieved in traditional classes. Others report that teachers' experience of CLIL has been very positive. Just as with CBLT, in general there are varying degrees of CLIL, from entirely CLIL-centred curriculums ('hard' CLIL), to single lessons which are content-centred ('soft' CLIL). So why don't all schools use CLIL or some other form of CBLT? Well, in the first place, and most importantly, CLIL may well demand a very special kind of teacher - someone who is equally at home with content teaching and language teaching (and has the linguistic abilities to match), and this may well imply spending a lot of time and money to train or retrain teachers from both disciplines. An alternative is to get subject teachers who work in the target language to work with language teachers. The language teacher can prepare the students for the content that they will work with, or help them with difficulties they have experienced. However, such coordination demands significant organisation, financial support and, crucially, a willingness to cooperate. Other people have worried that the L2 acts as an extra barrier to the students' content learning, especially where teachers are not totally confident in their own L2 language use. 1.3 Who teaches English? English is taught in countries all over the world, and to students from as young as three or four right through to people in old age. Simple mathematics will tell us that there are simply not enough native- English-speaker teachers (NESTS) to meet that demand. On the contrary, in the vast majority of contexts, English is taught by non-native-English-speaker teachers (NNESTS), people who have the language as a second or additional language. And yet, despite this obvious fact, there is still, for some people, a belief that the 'best' teachers of a language are native speakers. This is the belief that Adrian Holliday calls native- speakerism , and which he describes as 'a pervasive ideology within ELT, characterized by the belief that "native speaker" teachers represent a "Western culture” from which spring the ideals both of the English language and English language teaching methodology' (2006: 385). It is certainly true that in some situations, people still seem to believe that NESTs are the ideal. Some of these people are the native-speaker teachers themselves: for example, white British teachers who rely on their ethnicity to prove their efficacy. But it is not just the teachers. Many students (and parents of students) have the same beliefs, and, as a result, it is still the case, in some situations, that NESTs, sometimes unqualified, can walk into jobs where they are preferred over their NNEST colleagues.
Pedagogic grammar books describe the language as it is, because that is what will help students and teachers most.
2. 1 What we want to say No words have genuinely fixed meanings: the words we use and what they actually mean in the context we use them, are not the same thing at all. There is no one-to-one correspondence, in other words, between form and meaning. 2.1.1 Form and meaning Meanings can vary according to a particular pragmatic purpose. This point is well exemplified by the different ways we have of expressing the future in English. Among the many alternatives on offer, we might say I will arrive at eight o'clock (a simple statement of fact), I'm arriving at eight o'clock (= that's the arrangement I have made), I'm going to arrive at eight o'clock (= that's my plan) or I arrive at eight o'clock (= that's on the itinerary). Each of these constructions indicates futurity, but each means something slightly different, as we have shown. If we take one of the grammatical constructions used to construct a future sentence, the present continuous ( I'm arriving at eight o'clock ), another startling phenomenon becomes apparent. In our example, the statement refers to the future, but if we say Look at John! He's laughing his head off at something , the present continuous (sometimes called progressive) is referring not to the future, but to a temporary transient present reality. A third possible meaning of the present continuous is exemplified by a sentence such as The problem with John is that he's always laughing when he should be serious , which describes a habitual, not a temporary action. And we can even use the present continuous to make a story about the past more dramatic, e.g. So I'm sitting there minding my own business when suddenly this guy comes up to me.... This same-form-different-meanings situation is surprisingly unproblematic for competent language users since the context (situation) and co-text (lexis and grammar which surround the form, such as eight o'clock, Look at John, etc.) usually resolve any ambiguity. The choice of which future form to use from the examples above will depend not only on meaning, but also on what purpose we wish to achieve – even though we may find it difficult to interpret her meaning. 2.1.2 Purpose Many years ago, the philosopher J L Austin identified a series of verbs which he called ‘performatives', that is, verbs which do what those same words mean. Thus, if a speaker says I promise , the word promise itself performs the function of promising. The idea that language performs certain functions is not restricted to the kind of verbs Austin mentioned, however. It's cold in here might, in certain circumstances, perform the function of a request to the other person in the room to close the window. One major result of this interest in purpose was to lead linguists to propose a category of language functions, such as inviting, apologising, offering and suggesting. Thus Would you like to come for a coffee? performs the function of inviting, etc. The study of functions and how they are realised in language has had a profound effect upon the design of language teaching materials, making language purpose a major factor in the choice of syllabus items and teaching techniques. 2.2 Appropriacy and register A feature of language functions is that they do not just have one linguistic realisation. Thus, when we attempt to achieve a communicative purpose (such as getting someone to accept an invitation), we have to choose which of these language forms to use. Which form, given our situation, is the most appropriate? And the same is true, of course, in our choice of language in letters, emails and text messages, where we
select language according to the purpose we wish to achieve and who we are communicating with. Six of the variables which govern our choice are listed below:
- Setting
- Participants
- Gender
- Channel (spoken vs written language)
- Topic
- Tone (formal/informal, polite/impolite) Language is a social construct as much as it is a mental ability. It is important for our students to be just as aware of this in a foreign or second language as they are in their own. 2.3 Language as text and discourse Although, as we shall see, grammar and vocabulary are vital components of language (as are the sounds of English in spoken discourse), we also need to look at language at the level of text and discourse (that is, texts which are longer than phrases or sentences). 2.3.1 Discourse organisation In order for collections of sentences or utterances to succeed effectively, the discourse needs to be organised and conducted effectively. In written English, this calls for both coherence and cohesion. For a text to be coherent, it needs to be in the right order - or at least in an order that makes sense. However coherent a text is, however, it will not work unless it has internal cohesion. The elements in that text must cohere or stick to each other successfully to help us navigate our way around the stretch of discourse. One way of achieving this is through lexical cohesion , and a way of ensuring lexical cohesion is through the repetition of words and phrases. We can also use interrelated words and meanings (or lexical set chains ) to bind a text together. Grammatical cohesion is also achieved by tense agreement; if the writer is constantly changing tense, it will make the text difficult to follow. Writers also use linkers, such as and, also, moreover (to show an point), however, on the other hand, but (to indicate contrast) or first, then, later (to show sequencing in time). These features are also present in spoken language, which shows many examples of ellipsis (where words from a written-grammar version of an utterance are missed out without compromising the meaning of what is being said). The following two lines, for example, were spoken in a British pub: A: Another round? B: Might as well. Another round? is probably an elliptical version of the question Shall we have another round? (a round is an order of drinks for everyone in the group), and Might as well is an elliptical version of the sentence We might as well have another round. For conversational discourse to be successful, the participants have to know how to organise the events in it. They need to know, for example, how and when to take turns, that is, when to interrupt, when to show they want to continue speaking or when they are happy to ‘give the floor' to someone else. In order to do this successfully, they need to be able to use discourse markers effectively. These are the spoken equivalent of the linkers we discussed previously. Thus, phrases such as anyway, moving on and right are ways of beginning a new thread of the discussion (or sometimes of closing one down); D’you know what I mean? OK? and Right? are ways of encouraging a listener's agreement and Yeah But and OK. .. (said with doubtful intonation) are ways of indicating doubt or disagreement. Finally, in order for conversations to proceed successfully, we need to be sure that the participants are playing the game according to the same rules. Thus, for example, if speaker A asks a question, he or she
The grammar of any language has a number of features and complexities. Some of the things that learners of English need to be aware of include:
- Sentences and clauses: when we string ideas together, we use main and subordinate clauses. That last sentence has one of each. Relative clauses are those that attach themselves to main clauses, usually with a relative pronoun such as who, which, that , etc. Conditional clauses are those where the subordinate clause suggests a condition, e.g. If I don't get to talk to you tomorrow (condition), I may as well give up (result). Conditional clauses can express certainty (If it rains, I'll get wet) or degrees of hypotheticality. We can also talk about reason clauses ( He fell asleep because he was tired ), purpose clauses ( He exercised every day in order to lose some weight ) and time clauses ( By the time you read this, the game will be over ), amongst others.
- Verbs: we have already seen in 2.1.1 how the same verb form (the present continuous) can have several different meanings, and how we can express futurity in a number of different ways. But when we talk about the present continuous, we are describing not only the time we are discussing, but also the aspect - continuous - of the verb. Aspect is the way that speakers explain the situation they are talking about. When and how we teach them is a discussion for another time, but the main point is that our students need to be able to deploy tense and aspect successfully. Some verbs, such as love, drive, play and cheer , are referred to as main (or lexical) verbs because they carry meaning on their own, whereas others, such as be, have and do, are called auxiliary verbs because they usually help main verbs in sentences like I didn't see her, I haven't eaten my lunch and She's arriving in five minutes. There is one class of auxiliary verbs (called modal auxiliary verbs ) which are worth noticing. These verbs - can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would and ought to - don't take the third person singulars in the present simple, we don't put to before the infinitive verbs that follow them and they don't have an infinitive form.
- Nouns and noun phrases
- Adverbs and adjectives: Adverbs are words like quickly, happily and angrily which modify verbs. Adverbial phrases perform the function of adverbs in sentences like He arrived at midnight. Adjectives, on the other hand, are words like beautiful, happy and angry, which modify nouns (a beautiful song, a happy moment, an angry exchange). Whereas adjectives tend to be used before nouns (as in the examples above) or on their own as subject complements ( She was sad ), adverbs and adverbial phrases can occur in a number of positions, including the beginning of a sentence or at the end. We don't usually put an adverb between a verb and its object. Frequency adverbs, such as sometimes, often, etc. often go in the middle of sentences before lexical verbs and after auxiliary verbs. Adjectives and adverbs can be modified to make comparative and superlative forms. This quick summary of some issues of grammar is hardly comprehensive, of course. 2.5 Lexis There is more to a word than just its meaning. Lexicographers know these things is that they use huge language corpora for their investigations. This allows them to computer-search a massive collection of books, articles, audio recordings, etc. and see words in lines of text where it is clear what comes before and after the word they are looking at. This will tell them what other words co-occur frequently with their search word. What words mean and how they co-occur are the subjects we will now discuss. 2.5.1 Word meaning
The least problematic issue with vocabulary, it might appear, is meaning. We know that table means a thing with three or four legs which we can write on and eat off and that book is a collection of words between covers. But, of course, the situation is more complicated than this. Both words have many different meanings, quite apart from those already mentioned. We can eat off a table , or we can table a motion at a conference. The point is that the same collection of sounds and letters can have many different meanings. As with multi-meaning grammatical forms, this polysemy is only resolved when we see the word in context. It is understanding the meaning in context that allows us to say which particular meaning of the word is being used in this instance. What a word means is often defined by its relationship to other words. For example, we explain the meaning of full by saying that it is the opposite of empty; we understand that cheap is the opposite of expensive. Such antonyms reinforce the meaning of each word in the pair – though, of course, because a word can be polysemous, it may have more than one antonym. Words can also have synonyms - words that mean exactly or nearly the same as each other. We say that bad and evil are synonymous. Once again, much will depend on the context in which the words appear. Yet in truth, it is very difficult to find real synonyms. Another relationship which defines the meaning of words to each other is that of hyponymy , where words like banana, apple, orange, lemon , etc. are all hyponyms of the superordinate fruit , and they have a co-hyponomous relationship with each other. Fruit itself is a hyponym of other items which are members of the food family. We can express this relationship as shown in Figure 2. Part of a word's meaning, therefore, concerns its relations with other words, not only in terms of antonymy and synonymy, but also in terms of how it fits into the vocabulary hierarchy. One final point should be made about word meaning, namely that what a word means is not necessarily the same as what it suggests - or rather that words have different connotations , often depending on the context they occur in. Thus, the word chubby has a very positive connotation when it is combined with baby , but it suddenly becomes somewhat negative in tone if it is combined with middle-aged English teacher. 2.5.2 Extending word use Words don't just have different meanings, however. They can also be stretched and twisted to fit different contexts and different uses. We say that someone is in a black mood (very cross) or someone is green (naïve), yet we are not actually describing a colour. In such contexts, black and green mean something else. Such metaphorical use of words allows us to move beyond their purely denotational use (where a word only describes a thing, rather than the feelings or ideas it suggests). It helps us extend our range of expression and interpretation, allowing us the opportunity to explain our feelings about things in a way that creates readily available images. Some metaphors become fixed into phrases, which competent speakers recognise at once, even though the meaning of the phrase is not decipherable from any understanding of the individual words. We all know that She kicked the bucket means she died and that He has bitten off more than he can chew means that he has attempted something that is too difficult for him. If someone says I've got him eating out of my hand , we understand the metaphor, but it is not original; it is a common expression, an accepted idiom.
The rising tone now indicates that this is a question, and the fact that eight is the nucleus shows that this is the information in question. Utterances are often made up of more than one tone unit, e.g.: ↘ ↗ You'll arrive at eight o'clock, okay Once again, the rising tone on kay indicates that this is a tag question, asking the listener to confirm the speaker's choice. Intonation is also used to convey attitude. Finally, intonation plays a crucial role in spoken discourse since it signals when speakers have finished the points they wish to make, tells people when they wish to carry on with a turn (i.e. not yield the floor to another speaker) and indicates agreement and disagreement. Thus a falling tone at the end of an utterance indicates that the speaker has finished their point, whereas a rising tone suggests they wish to keep going. In this context, falling tones are sometimes called proclaiming tones and are used when giving new information (or adding to what has been said) whereas fall-rise tones (↘↗) are called referring tones and are used when we refer to information we presume to be shared with our listeners or when we want to check information. 2.6.3 Individual sounds Words and sentences are made up of sounds (or phonemes ) which, on their own, may not carry meaning, but which, in combination, make words and phrases. Standard southern English (SSE) has 47 phonemes. Competent speakers of the language make these sounds by using various parts of the mouth (called articulators ), such as the lips, the tongue, the teeth, the alveolar ridge (the flat little ridge behind the upper teeth), the palate, the velum (the soft tissue at the back of the roof of the mouth, often called the soft palate) and the vocal cords (folds) (see Figure 4).
2.6.4 Sounds and spelling Whereas in some languages there seems to be a close correlation between sounds and spelling, in English this is often not the case. The sound /ʌ /, for example, can be realised in a number of different spellings (e.g. won, young, funny, flood ). Words can change their sound(s), too, and this is not indicated by the way we spell them. Other changes occur when sounds get close or slide into each other in connected speech: sometimes elision takes place where sounds 'disappear' into each other. Sometimes assimilation takes place, where the sound at the end of one word changes to be more like the sound at the beginning of the next. Thus the /d/ at the end of /bæd/ becomes a /g/ when placed next to a word starting with /g/, e.g. /bæg gai/ (bad guy. 2.6.5 Stress British and American English speakers often differ in where they place the stress in words. Thus ballet in British English is stressed on the first syllable ( bal ), whereas in American English, the stress usually falls on the second syllable ( let ). Stress is the term we use to describe the point in a word or phrase where pitch changes, vowels lengthen and volume increases. In a one-syllable word like dance, we know which syllable is stressed since there is only one. In multi-syllable words there is often more than one stressed syllable (e.g. singularity, information, claustrophobia ). In such cases we call the strongest force the primary stress and the weaker force the secondary stress. Words are often not pronounced as one might expect from their spelling. It is worth noticing, too, that when a word changes shape morphologically, the stressed syllable may shift as well. Stress is vitally important in conveying meaning in phrases and sentences. 2.7 Speaking and writing There are many features of speech that are not available in writing, such as intonation and stress. We frequently use ellipsis when we speak; present verb forms outnumber past tense forms by a factor of 2:1; speech has a grammar all of its own; and we use modals such as will, would and can in very speech-specific ways. It is also noticeable that speakers often start sentences and then abandon them. Listeners in conversations are not just passive recipients of other people's words. We use interjections and other words to indicate support, and to show that we are listening. We use echo questions to keep the conversation going or to check that we have understood, and we employ response forms to acknowledge requests and points made. None of these features occur in writing (unless we are providing written transcripts of spontaneous speech). Indeed, a major difference between speaking and writing is that whereas the former is often co- constructed and, as we have seen, messy, 'pure' writing tends to be well-formed and pre-organised. It is precisely because conversational speech occurs in real time that it is unplanned, and this fact accounts for many of the features we have discussed above. When internet chatting takes place in real time, it veers towards co-constructed dialogue and away from any written communication that either woman might have constructed on her own. Of course, there are major differences between the language of informal conversation and the language of a prepared lecture. The latter is likely to be more similar to written language (because it has been planned and put together in a writing-like way). Face-to-face speakers have a number of features to help them indicate attitude, intimacy, etc. These
language they hear and transforms it into an ability to speak it. It's that simple. Or perhaps it isn't quite that simple. For example, if we consider the language exposure that children receive, we find that it is a special kind of language. People don't speak to two- and three-year-olds in the same way that they speak to adults. Instead, they (parents especially) use exaggerated intonation with higher pitch than is customary. This conveys special interest and empathy. They simplify what they say, too, using shorter sentences and fewer subordinate clauses. They choose special vocabulary which the children can understand, rather than more sophisticated lexical items which they would not. And even before children can themselves speak, parents act as if they were taking part in the conversation. So, in a sense, children are being taught rules of discourse, even though neither they nor their parents are conscious of this. Parents - and other adults – do not choose the simplified language or exaggerated intonation consciously, either. It is usually done subconsciously, so if you asked most people exactly how they speak to children, they would not be able to say on what basis they choose words and grammar. Finally, children have a powerful incentive to communicate effectively. Even at the pre-word phase of their development they have an instinct to let people know when they are happy, miserable, hungry or alarmed. The more language they can understand – and especially speak - the better they can function. All of this is bound up with the age of the child and what happens to us as our brains develop and grow. That instinctual ability to absorb language and context and to transform them into an ability to understand and speak 'perfectly' doesn't usually last for ever. However, at around the time of puberty, children start to develop an ability for abstraction, which makes them better learners, but may also make them less able to respond to language on a purely instinctive level. What researchers into second language acquisition (SLA) want to know is whether the processes that help young children acquire their first language (or ‘own' language or 'mother tongue') are the same as those which help people to learn subsequent languages. 3.1 What research offers We cannot 'see' learning and so we try to find metaphorical parallels' to explain what we think is happening. The problem, of course, is that theorists don't necessarily agree, whether their insights come from classroom research or from profound beliefs about what is going on. As a result, ‘Educators who are hoping that language acquisition theories will give them insight into language teaching practice are often frustrated by the lack of agreement among the “experts” (Lightbown and Spada 2013: 121). What should teachers do with the differing accounts of learning success that research offers them? One possibility is just to ignore it completely and go on teaching as before. However, that would be unfair, not only on the students, who might not always respond to ‘as before' teaching, but also on the teachers themselves, who benefit hugely from constant questioning and investigation about what they do. 3.1.1 The mind is a computer When the linguist Noam Chomsky wrote his famous review of Verbal Behavior (a book by B F Skinner which suggested that behaviourist theories could account for language learning), he posed a version of the following question: If all language learning is habit-formed, how can we say things that we never heard (or practiced) before? (Chomsky 1959). An answer to this is that language cannot just be the result of endless language we use is the result of an innate human capacity – a set of linguistic principles common to all human beings. Whatever language we end up speaking, there is some kind of universal grammar (UG) programmed into all of us. All a person's brain needs to get language acquisition going is input. This will then be processed by some kind of language acquisition device' (LAD) – a kind of human computer. Perhaps this mixture of a universal grammar activated by language input could account for child language acquisition. But could it be a model for second language learning, too? In the early 1980s, the American linguist Stephen Krashen seemed to be following this line of thought by
suggesting that input was a sufficient condition for language acquisition to take place. In his input hypothesis (summarised in Krashen 1984), he claimed that language which we acquire subconsciously (especially when it is anxiety free) is language we can easily use in spontaneous conversation because it is instantly available when we need it. Language that is learnt, on the other hand, where ‘learnt' means taught and studied as grammar and vocabulary, is not available for spontaneous use in this way. Indeed, it may be that the only use for learnt language is to help us to monitor (check) our spontaneous communication; but then the more we monitor what we are saying, the less spontaneous we become! In Krashen's view, therefore, acquired language and learnt language are different both in character and effect. Krashen saw the successful acquisition by students of a second language as being bound up with the nature of the language input they received. It had to be comprehensible, even if it was slightly above their productive level. He called this comprehensible input i + 1 (that is, information the students already have plus the next level up), and the students had to be exposed to it in a relaxed setting - when their affective filter was lowered. This input is roughly-tuned (rather as parent-child language is subconsciously moderated, as we saw above) and is in stark contrast to the finely-tuned input of much language instruction, where specific graded language has been chosen for conscious - explicit - learning, or where teachers draw the students' attention to language that they meet. Roughly-tuned input aids acquisition, Krashen argued, whereas finely-tuned input combined with conscious learning does not. 3.1.2 Explicit and implicit knowledge Language learning (because of the language acquisition device in our heads, perhaps) is implicit and does not demand conscious attention (except for the monitor function). However, there is a problem with such implicit language learning, according to Zoltán Dörnyei, because 'while it does such a great job in generating native speaking L1 proficiency in infants, it does not seem to work efficiently when we want to master an L2 at a later stage in our lives' (Dörnyei 2013: 163). In other words, while comprehensible input may lead to some progress, 'students may reach a point from which they fail to see further progress on some features of second language unless they also have access to guided instruction' (Lightbown and Spada 2013: 107). Focus on form versus focus on forms Commentators have made a difference between a more general focus on form and a focus on forms. The former occurs when students direct their conscious attention to some feature of the language, such as a verb tense or the organisation of paragraphs. It can happen at any stage of a learning sequence as the result of intervention by the teacher, or because the students themselves notice a language feature. It will occur naturally when students try to complete communicative tasks (and worry about how to do it - or how they did it) in task-based learning, for example, or it might happen because the teacher gives feedback on a task the students have just been involved in, giving 'guided instruction' to help the students' explicit knowledge of some features of language. It may happen in negotiated interaction when students ask for clarification or confirmation. A focus on forms, on the other hand, occurs when teachers focus on grammar items one by one. Many language syllabuses and coursebooks are structured around a series of language forms, and one of the chief organising principles behind a course may be learning these forms in sequence. Some commentators have argued passionately that focus on form - which grows incidentally out of communicative tasks - is significantly more effective than focusing on language forms just because they are there. There are two opposing views on the practice of teaching forms one by one: either it is important because students need to learn them, or, on the contrary, having course designers and teachers decide on the sequence of learning in the abstract, rather than allowing the learners to address the forms as they are learning may violate some kind of natural order of acquisition. Furthermore, this approach may deny the
discussed so far. Diane Larsen-Freeman worries that drilling (in audiolingual teaching) 'didn't necessarily require students to use language meaningfully' (Larsen-Freeman 2013: 194) and so it was not mindful. For her, instead of straightforward repetition, we should provoke successive 'iterations', where we say the same thing - or a variation of it - to express slightly different meanings. For drilling to be truly effective, then, it has to involve more than mere repetition. Once what is to be drilled has been broken down into its constituent parts, we have to find ways of making it mindful and deliberate. Perhaps we can:
- gradually disappear' parts of lines that are being repeated (as in ‘disappearing dialogues', where the students read a dialogue and we gradually erase words until they are doing it from memory);
- ask our students to write drill lines down (rather than speaking them) to vary the mode.
- use 'fluency circles', where the students have to say the same thing to a number of their colleagues, one after the other;
- use 'shouted dictation', where half the class have to dictate individual sentences to the other half of the class at the same time. The resulting noise means that each student either says or listens to the same thing many times, and for a reason;
- use chain drills, where the students have to build a story using the focus language, e.g. If he stays in bed, he will miss the bus. If he misses the bus, he'll get to work late. If he gets to work late, he'll get the sack. If he gets the sack etc. If we want our students to achieve automaticity (i.e. they can say things automatically, without having to think about how to do it), repetition and practice will help. In the early stages, that may well involve straightforward repetition, often in chorus to give the students initial confidence. But as soon as possible, we need to move to more deliberate and meaningful ways of practising language. Some commentators find value in repetitive games and play, because one of the functions of repetition is, of course, to memorise language items. Rather than using bland content for this, 'memorizing texts with high salience, such as songs, poems, jokes, advertising slogans, can be both enjoyable and relevant, leaving the material available for incorporating in future “real” communication' (Maley 2013: 147). 3.1.4 Language is communication Once upon a time, teachers prioritised grammar and translation, almost to the exclusion of student speaking – though the fifteenth-century scholar Johannes (Jan) Comenius recommended using imitation instead of rules to teach a language. However, even with the arrival of the direct method and audiolingualism, speaking was mostly limited to repeating prescribed language. What was needed instead, it was argued (especially in the second half of the twentieth century), was a way of teaching that allowed the students actually to use language in order to communicate, rather than merely repeating what they were told to. Many years ago, when Dick Allwright and his colleagues were teaching students who were about to study at universities in the UK, he hypothesised that ‘if the language teacher's management activities are directed exclusively at involving the learners in solving communication problems in the target language, then language learning will take care of itself' (Allwright 1979: 170). This was a reflection of the idea that, provided students had exposure to language, and then had the desire and need to use it, they would find the means to do so. As a result, such communication would cause them to 'get' the language. This idea puts the learners firmly centre stage and suggests that genuinely communicative activities are what are mostly needed. In such a scenario, language focus happens as a result of communication (focus on form) rather than being taught from the start ('get it right from the beginning'). Others see a more precise value in communication - especially spoken communication. For Merrill Swain,
'comprehensible output (a clear echo of Krashen's input) 'pushes learners to process language more deeply (with more mental effort) than does input (Swain 1995: 126). The very act of communicating, in other words, is a cognitive learning experience. Some are sure that it is the actual nature of the communication which affects successful learning. The key component, in this view, is cooperative interaction between speakers and, especially, the way they negotiate meaning between themselves. This is the collaborative talk that learners 'engage in when they experience linguistic problems' and which helps them not only to resolve these issues in target-like ways while they are talking, but also to remember the solutions and use them independently in their own language at a later date' (Ellis 2014: 42). Interestingly, this type of negotiation has an echo in the accommodating' behaviour which speakers of English as a lingua franca (those who use English to communicate with other non-native speakers) have been observed to display (see 1.1.1). 3.1.5 Language is grammar; language is vocabulary The order in which things are taught is not necessarily the order in which they are learnt. There is some suggestion that (following on from theories of a universal grammar - see 3.1.1) there is some ‘natural order' of acquisition which ‘does not appear to be determined by formal simplicity and there is evidence that it is independent of the order in which rules are taught in language classes' (Krashen 1985: 1). The grammar syllabus is also focused mostly on what is 'teachable', that is, on items which are easy enough to explain and for which the students are ready. But it tries to teach more ‘difficult' items, too, even though the article system in English is both complex and abstract and notoriously difficult to teach and learn. Thus, learners may be better off learning about articles via exposure in the input. No one has mapped out a generalisable natural order for all learners. Secondly, we can't tell whether - even if we could describe a natural order in detail - things would have to be taught in that order, and what effect such teaching might have on the students' learning of the items in that order. Finally, we cannot say for certain that even if a language item is taught before the students are 'ready for that item, it won't, nevertheless, be available for them when they get to notice it again (see 3.1.2). We have to be aware of how difficult our students are finding things and we have to be ready to help them with language which emerges naturally in lessons. It also suggests that we need to consider the concept of students being ‘ready' for something (which is reflected in Krashen's i+1 position and, from a social-constructivist perspective in discussions of the Zone of Proximal Development). As teachers, we also need to be ready for language that emerges in our lessons, and be able to help our students to notice it and focus on it. Another issue has attracted a considerable amount of attention here, and that is whether grammar and its list of 'high priority' items is what we should be focusing on. Words group together in collocations and lexical phrases (or chunks) and this formulaic language competence is directly linked to automatized, fluent language production. The fluent speaker of a language deploys these chunks automatically. Thus, according to Rod Ellis, 'It may pay to focus on these (and more generally on vocabulary) with beginner learners, delaying the teaching of grammar until later (Ellis 2014: 33). When theorists drew our attention to the work of philosophers such as Austin, it was to remind us that language is used for doing things - that it has a purpose (see 2.1.2). This gave rise, towards the end of the twentieth century, to syllabuses of language functions, which challenged, for a moment, the supremacy of grammar lists. These meaning-focused items prompted students to study and practise dialogues for apologising, suggesting, agreeing, etc. and were included in teaching materials. Although the grammar syllabus still dominates the way that many people think about language learning - despite some of the doubts we have raised here - syllabus designers have become increasingly aware of the need to focus on vocabulary and the way that words cluster and chunk together, and on the purpose of these chunks within an act of communication. 3.1.6 The role of other languages (translation)
