Big Questions in ELT

by Scott Thornbury

  The starting age in Spain has been the subject of an extended study, conducted under the leadership of Carmen Muñoz of the University of Barcelona, and written up in an article in an issue of Applied Linguistics (Muñoz 2008), as well as a book (Muñoz 2006). Muñoz points out that a basic flaw in the argument supporting the introduction of English at primary is that proponents of an early start base their case on the evidence of natural L2 acquisition, i.e. where young learners are immersed in a second language, because (typically) they are the children of immigrants. Muñoz argues that to extrapolate from these cases to the classroom situation – where children are getting around two hours or less a week – is fundamentally flawed.

  An inferential leap has been made in the assumption that learning age will have the same effect on learners in an immersion setting as on students of a foreign language, where the latter are exposed to only one speaker of that language (the teacher) in only one setting (the classroom) and for only limited amounts of time … However, recent studies conducted in foreign language settings have clearly illustrated the role of input and exposure in the equation: an early start leads to success but only provided that it is associated with enough significant exposure. (Muñoz 2008: 591, emphasis in the original)

  It’s difficult to see how – even with substantial training in classroom techniques that maximize exposure and use – that any primary system that devotes only an hour or two to English a week is going to make any noticeable difference, especially in classes of 20 or more children. In fact, it may be just a waste of time and valuable resources.

  And studies do indeed show that when learners who start at primary are compared with learners who start in their early teens, the difference in attainment by the time they leave school is negligible.

  On the other hand, advocates of an early start – even if they accept the argument that immersion-like conditions cannot be replicated in schools – still claim that an early start predisposes children to foreign language learning, and thus has positive effects on their long-term motivation. However, the evidence is not conclusive. Motivation was investigated in the Barcelona study and it was found that, although there are positive effects for starting early, they don’t persist – a trend found in studies in Hungary, Canada and the UK as well. Tragant (2006: 239) sums up the evidence: ‘When FL (foreign language) instruction starts early in primary school there seems to be a decline in the learners’ attitudes around the age of ten to eleven; when most students start a foreign language or enter immersion programmes in secondary school, their initial attitudes are positive but their interest soon wanes.’

  This may, of course, have a lot to do with the kind of teaching the children are subject to. If teachers are untrained in foreign language instruction for young learners, it’s unlikely that even the small amount of time available will be used to best effect. This is especially the case if instruction mimics the kind of teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused instruction that characterizes language teaching at secondary and tertiary level. And a transmissive approach is typically the default choice in large classes of (potentially) unruly children.

  In the end, as Dörnyei (2009: 236) points out, ‘comprehensive discussion of the age issue is never purely about age but also concerns a number of other important areas – quite frankly, we would be hard pressed to find a potentially more complex theme in SLA than the issue of age effects’. Among these other ‘important areas’ that Dörnyei alludes to are: the amount and type of exposure; affective factors, including motivation and attitudes; children’s cognitive development; first language support versus multilingualism; socioeconomic inequalities; teaching methodology and teacher education; and the role and purpose of foreign language learning within the broader remit of education in general.

  Questions for discussion

  1. What is the starting age in the public sector in your context? Does it seem to be working?

  2. If the difference in success rates between an immersion setting and classroom instruction is largely due to the amount of exposure that children get, how could this be increased (in the school setting)? For example, is ‘content and language integrated learning’ (CLIL) a feasible option?

  3. How significant is the effect of the starting age on motivation, do you think?

  4. Is there a viable alternative to a ‘teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused’ methodology for large classes of young learners? Or even for small ones?

  5. Does it really matter that young learners don’t learn a lot of the foreign language they are being taught? Isn’t there a broader educational objective at stake?

  6. The move to introduce foreign languages earlier is partly propelled by the belief that there is a critical age for language acquisition – hypothesized to be around the age of puberty – beyond which learning second languages becomes increasingly hard. On the basis of your reading or experience, do you think the Critical Age Hypothesis holds water?

  7. Is English the victim of its own success, causing children to be pushed into learning it at younger and younger ages?

  8. To what extent does early foreign language teaching threaten the child’s mother tongue development? Is this an argument against an early starting age?

  References

  Dörnyei, Z. (2009) The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Eurydice Information Network on Education in Europe (2009) Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe 2009: at http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/about/eurydice/index_en.htm

  Muñoz, C. (ed.) (2006) Age and the Rate of Foreign Language Learning, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

  Muñoz, C. (2008) ‘Symmetries and asymmetries of age effects in naturalistic and instructed L2 learning’, Applied Linguistics, 29, 4.

  Tragant, E. (2006) ‘Language learning motivation and age’, in Muñoz, C. (ed.) Age and the Rate of Foreign Language Learning, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

  To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

  http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/a-is-for-age-of-onset/

  8 What is fluency and how do you teach it?

  Fluency is one of those elusive, fuzzy, highly contested words that means different things to different people. In lay terms, a ‘fluent speaker of French’ is probably someone whose French is judged as correct (albeit accented), intelligible, idiomatic and – if not fast – at least not halting. In other words, it flows.

  Traditionally, methodology writers have tended to follow suit. Thus, Donn Byrne, in Teaching Oral English (1976: 9), defines fluency as ‘the ability to express oneself intelligibly, reasonably accurately and without undue hesitation’. However, the advent of the communicative approach witnessed a radical reframing of the notion of fluency, where fluency, far from incorporating accuracy, was in fact viewed in sharp contrast to it. Thus, the Teacher’s Book for Headway Intermediate (Soars and Soars 1986: iv), in a section headed ‘Accuracy versus fluency’, identifies accuracy work as presentation and controlled practice, while defining fluency work as ‘consist[ing] of the performance of real, or realistic, tasks which require language’. This is consistent with Brumfit’s (1984: 56) view that ‘fluency … is to be regarded as natural language use, whether or not it results in native-speaker-like language comprehension or production.’ And he adds that ‘the distinction between accuracy and fluency is essentially a methodological distinction, rather than one in psychology or linguistics’ (1984: 52).

  The problem with this definition, though, is that it is very difficult to put into practice, 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 reject 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.

  Moreover, the separation – even polarization – of accuracy and fluency may have m
isled us into thinking that they are mutually exclusive, each demanding different kinds of task design and teaching interventions, such as whether to correct errors or not. It is a dichotomy that has generated a great deal of debate on how best to sequence accuracy and fluency activities, and how to achieve the optimum balance between them. But what if accuracy and fluency cannot be so easily unravelled? What if they are interdependent? Where does that leave our methodology?

  To counter this fuzziness, various researchers, working in a cognitive tradition, have attempted to characterize fluency in measurable terms. Thus, Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005: 139) 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, at least, is something we can measure. Accordingly, researchers have identified a number of objective measures of fluency, such as speech rate (e.g. syllables per minute), number and length of pauses, length of runs, and so on, and, while there is still disagreement as to which of these are the most reliable indicators of fluency, we are now much better equipped to test it.

  To test it, but not necessarily to teach it. These objective measures are, after all, only the surface features of fluency, and do not tell us a lot about the cognitive and social processes that underpin it. You can’t teach learners how not to pause, unless you know why they are pausing in the first place.

  So, what do the experts say? Confusingly, Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005: 139) revert to the old communicative argument, claiming that ‘fluency occurs when learners prioritize meaning over form in order to get a task done’. But does getting a task done really correlate with ‘undue pausing or hesitation’? Not necessarily, since the effort involved in performing a task may actually increase the degree of dysfluency. Nor does pause-free production necessarily indicate that meaning is being prioritized. 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.): texts that we can trot out with zero attention to meaning.

  In fact, it may be that fluency is – in the end – simply a function of memory, and that the capacity to produce pause-free speech in real time is contingent on having a memorized bank of formulaic language, or ‘chunks’. As Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992: 32) argued, ‘It is our ability to use lexical phrases … that helps us speak with fluency’ – a view that is a core principle of the Lexical Approach (Lewis 1993) but which in fact long pre-dates it. As far back as 1925, Harold Palmer (1925, 1999: 185) identified ‘the fundamental guiding principle for the student of conversation’ as being ‘memorize perfectly the largest number of common and useful word groups!’

  Palmer’s advice seems particularly prescient, given that he lacked the technological means – such as access to computerized corpora – to test this intuition. Nevertheless, the relationship between memory, formulaic language and fluency has stood the test of time, and although no one is saying that fluency is solely an effect of having access to a mental phrasebook, there is general agreement that, as Segalowitz (2010: 126) puts it, ‘the ability to correctly use formulaic sequences contributes to the native-like naturalness of speech, and to modulating the message-processing load to make communication easier and more efficient. L2 speakers lacking appropriate control of formulaic sequences will not be able to enjoy the efficiency advantages that can accrue from using such sequences, and this can create processing burdens for them that might compromise fluency.’

  In the interests of fluency development, how might we now apply Palmer’s injunction to ‘memorize perfectly the largest number of common and useful word groups’? 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 that provide opportunities for learners to activate what they have memorized, without undue pausing or hesitation, in ways that replicate real language use.

  Questions for discussion

  1. When you use the word ‘fluent’ to describe a second language speaker, what do you understand by this?

  2. How does (grammatical, lexical, phonological) accuracy contribute to fluency? How might it inhibit fluency?

  3. Is there any sense in labelling some classroom activities as accuracy activities, and others as fluency activities? Would form-focused activities and meaning-focused activities make any more sense?

  4. Is it worth continuing the search for the measurable attributes of fluency (such as pause length, etc.)? What practical use might such research have for teachers?

  5. To what extent is ‘fluency in the eye (or ear) of the beholder’? That is to say, isn’t it partly, at least, the overall impression a speaker makes, rather than a purely (psycho-) linguistic phenomenon? In which case, are there any shortcuts to creating this impression?

  6. What do you understand by word group, chunk, lexical phrase or formulaic language? Are the terms synonymous? Can you give examples?

  7. ‘Select the word groups that are both common and useful.’ How would you go about doing this?

  8. ‘Devise activities that provide opportunities for learners to activate what they have memorized …’ Again, what kind of activities might these be?

  References

  Brumfit, C.J. (1984) Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching: The Roles of Fluency and Accuracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Byrne, D. (1976) Teaching Oral English, London: Longman.

  Ellis, R. and Barkhuizen, G. (2005) Analyzing Learner Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward, Hove: Language Teaching Publications.

  Nattinger, J.R. and DeCarrico, J.S. (1992) Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Segalowitz, N. (2010) Cognitive Bases for Second Language Fluency, London: Routledge.

  Palmer, H. (1925, 1999) ‘Conversation: The fundamental guiding principle for the student of conversation’, in Smith, R.C. (1999) The Writings of Harold E. Palmer: An Overview, Tokyo: Hon-no-Tomosha.

  Soars, J. and Soars, L. (1986) Headway Intermediate Teacher’s Book, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

  http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/f-is-for-fluency/

  9 Should we push our learners?

  I used to examine teachers for various in-service training schemes. One of my major frustrations was the lack of any category in the observation checklists that required me, the examiner, to judge the extent to which the observed lesson ‘pushed’ the learners. There were no descriptors of the type ‘Learners were challenged’ or ‘Learners were pushed to the limit of their competence, and then helped to go beyond it.’

  So many of the lessons I saw played safe, and were pitched well within the learners’ present level of competence. This ensured that the lessons went very smoothly, so that you came out having ticked all the right boxes, but at the same time you were left with the residual suspicion that the learners were not really any better off at the end of the lesson than they were at the beginning.

  ‘Being pushed’, arguably, is a precondition for effective learning. In order to progress, learners need to be challenged to go beyond their immediate comfort zone. Otherwise, there is a danger that they will simply mark time as language learners, or even – to use a now fairly discredited term – that they will fossilize.

  The term ‘push’ is borrowed from a comment that Merrill Swain made as long ago as 1985, in proposing what became known as the Output Hypothesis (in contra-distinction to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis). If you remember, Krashen (1985) had argued that comprehensibl
e input alone is a sufficient condition for second language acquisition to occur, with the proviso that the input should be pitched a little above the learner’s present state of competence – what Krashen dubbed input + 1.

  Swain (1985: 249), on the other hand, argued that, while input is necessary, it is insufficient. Instead (or as well), the learner needs to produce language, and not only produce it, but be ‘pushed towards the delivery of a message that is not only conveyed, but that is conveyed precisely, coherently and appropriately’. She adds that ‘being “pushed” in output ... is a concept that is parallel to that of the i + 1 of comprehensible input’.

  One reason for this is that being pushed to produce language puts learners in a better position to notice the ‘gaps’ in their language knowledge, encouraging them to ‘upgrade’ their existing interlanguage system. And, as they are pushed to produce language in real time and thereby forced to automate low-level operations by incorporating them into higher-level routines, it may also contribute to the development of fluency.