Big Questions in ELT

by Scott Thornbury

  More useful – although perhaps less satisfying from an aesthetic point of view – might be the memorization of specially written dialogues that embed high-frequency lexis, including formulaic language, with a ‘high surrender’ value. Dörnyei (2009: 298–9) refers to a study by Taguchi (2007) in which the researcher

  developed a dialogue-based teaching programme of grammatical chunks ... consisting of an initial video presentation of the target dialogue, followed by choral and pair repetition of the text and rule explanation. Students then underwent structured drilling of the chunks within a communicative context, and finally they memorized and performed short dialogues that included the target sequences. … The results indicated a substantial development, with the range and number of the chunks performed by the students doubling over the training period.

  This approach seems to combine the features of both a communicative approach and (the much maligned) audiolingual one, with its emphasis on memorized dialogues – a case of East meets West perhaps?

  Questions for discussion

  1. Have you ever learned anything by rote? Did it work?

  2. Why does rote learning have a bad name?

  3. Rote learning, memorization and learning by heart: are they all just different names for the same thing?

  4. Is ‘having a good memory’ something you’re born with, or can it be trained?

  5. Is rote learning a cultural artefact? That is to say, does it work in some contexts but not in others?

  6. What techniques have you used in class to develop your learners’ capacity to remember vocabulary?

  7. What criteria might dictate the choice of chunks (i.e. formulaic language) that you could insert in dialogues to be memorized?

  8. To what extent does dialogue memorization seem like a return to audiolingualism?

  References

  Carroll, J.B. (1981) ‘Twenty-five years of research in foreign language aptitude’, in K.C. Diller (ed.) Individual differences and universals in language learning aptitude, Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

  Chua, A. (2011) Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, New York: Penguin.

  Ding, Y. (2007) ‘Text memorization and imitation: The practices of successful Chinese learners of English’, System 35, 2.

  Dörnyei, Z. (2005) The Psychology of the Language Learner: Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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

  Palmer, H.E. (1921) The Principles of Language-Study, London: Harrap & Co.

  Skehan, P. (1998) A Cognitive Approach to Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Taguchi, N. (2007) ‘Chunk learning and the development of spoken discourse in a Japanese as a foreign language classroom’, Language Teaching Research, 11, 4.

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

  http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/m-is-for-memorization/

  14 What makes an activity ‘communicative’?

  The term communicative is applied fairly loosely. Typically it’s used to describe any activity in which learners are interacting with one another. So, a coursebook activity in which learners perform a scripted dialogue, or a minimal-pairs activity which involves pairs of students pronouncing words to one another and identifying the appropriate picture on a worksheet, might both be labelled ‘communicative’. No wonder, therefore, that the term ‘communicative approach’ has become so elastic as to embrace any methodology that foregrounds speaking in pairs or small groups.

  But, strictly speaking, communicative means more than simply interactive. A communicative activity will also be:

  1. purposeful 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.

  2. reciprocal To achieve this purpose, speakers need to interact, and there is as much need to listen as to speak.

  3. negotiated Following from the above, they may need to check and repair the communication in order to be understood by each other.

  4. synchronous The exchange – especially if it is spoken – usually takes place in real time.

  5. unpredictable Neither the process, nor the outcome, nor the language used in the exchange, is entirely predictable.

  6. heterogeneous 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.

  It may, of course, be the case that not all these criteria will apply in equal measure, not least if the exchange involves writing. And many activities that are simply interactive will share at least some of these criteria. But the difference between an interactive activity and a communicative one is the difference between ‘Tell your neighbour about your weekend’ and ‘Talk to your neighbour about your weekend and find three things that you did in common’. The first is not necessarily reciprocal; the second is. (Of course, the second is also more contrived, but it’s arguable that a degree of contrivance is needed in order that tasks meet the communicative criteria.)

  The archetypal communicative activity is the information-gap task where Student A has some information and Student B has some other information, and the task requires that they share this information in order to achieve the designated outcome. Describe and draw, Spot the difference and Find someone who ... are all examples of information-gap activities that meet the criteria outlined above.

  But what is their particular merit over, say, activities – such as rehearsing a scripted dialogue or playing a game like Pelmanism – that are interactive but not strictly communicative? The standard argument (and a key tenet of the communicative approach) is that such activities better reflect the way language is used in the ‘real world’. A corollary to this view (and a core principle of task-based instruction) is that language is best acquired through such lifelike language exchanges. Cognitive theorists might add that the attention to meaning demanded in communicative interaction requires that learners ‘park’ their concern for formal accuracy, and thereby develop strategies – such as ‘chunking’ – that promote fluency.

  None of these arguments is necessarily proven nor conclusive. For a start, there’s a contradiction between, on the one hand, the aim to replicate the features of authentic communication, and, on the other, doing so by means of activities that are often highly contrived (as noted above). When, in real life, did you last ‘describe and draw’ something, for instance?

  On the other hand, 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. According to this view, activities that are not at all communicative – such as drills – may nevertheless have a legitimacy that ‘authenticates’ them in the eyes of the students.

  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? The phenomenon of the second language user who is very communicative but irremediably inaccurate is a familiar one.

  Nevertheless, there does seem to be a good case for arguing that only lifelike language use can tap into the cognitive and affective factors that both motivate and nurture language acquisition. But this presupposes that the communication matters: that it is contingent, i.e. that it connects to the real world in some way, and that it is engaging, i.e. that it engages the learners’ needs, interests, concerns and desires. In short, the learner needs to have some personal investment in the communication. This is what I call big-C communication, as opposed to the kind of small-c communication that is characterized by the six criteria above. The difference between big-C and small-c communication seems to underpin this comment by Legutke and Thomas (1991: 8–9):

  In spite of trendy jargon in textbooks and teachers’ manu
als, very little is actually communicated in the L2 classroom. 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.

  So, in order to capture the defining qualities of big-C communication, I would add the following characteristics to the list above. A communicative activity needs to be:

  7. contingent The speakers’ utterances are connected, both to one another, and to the context (physical, social, cultural, etc.) in which they are uttered.

  8. engaging The speakers have a personal commitment to the communication and are invested in making it work.

  How you achieve these worthy goals is, of course, another matter!

  Questions for discussion

  1. Has the term ‘communicative’ lost so much meaning that it might be time to dispense with it?

  2. Are the arguments in favour of using information-gap activities convincing? Are there any other pros or cons of these types of activities?

  3. In your experience, do learners ‘park’ their concern for formal accuracy when they are doing this type of activity? If not, does it matter?

  4. Is the distinction between small-c communication and big-C communication a valid one? Can you think of an activity that you could label big-C?

  5. How could you ensure an activity is ‘contingent’ – as it is defined above?

  6. An activity might be ‘engaging’ for one learner but not for another. Is there some way of maximizing the potential for engagement?

  7. Would a communicative approach based on these criteria really be any different from the ‘current’ version of the communicative approach? If so, how?

  8. The article focuses on communication as if it were only speaking. But how would these criteria apply to the design of writing tasks?

  Reference

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

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

  http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/c-is-for-communicative/

  15 How do you achieve ‘flow’ in your teaching?

  Özbek, the publisher’s rep, got on to the subject of ‘flow’. He was driving me from the airport into the centre of Istanbul, and it turned out that he was currently researching a Master’s dissertation on motivation. He was attracted by the idea that intrinsic motivation is located in the present moment, and reaches a peak when you are so absorbed in a task that time seems to slow down or even to stop altogether. The poet W.H. Auden describes the effect of this absorption as ‘the-eye-on-the-object look’, when, for example, skilled craftsmen

  wear the same rapt expression,

  forgetting themselves in a function. (from ‘Sext’ in Horae Canonicae)

  This is what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1990) calls ‘flow’. It is the kind of ‘peak experience’ often reported by artists or sportspeople, when there is a perfect match between performance challenge and available skill. The alternatives, such as too much challenge, or too little, are likely to result in either anxiety or boredom.

  According to Csíkszentmihályi (1993: xiv), flow experiences have the following characteristics:

  1. they have concrete goals and manageable rules

  2. they make it possible to adjust opportunities for action to our capacities

  3. they provide clear information about how well we are doing

  4. they screen out distractions and make concentration possible.

  Appearing as it did around the same time as the popularization of task-based learning, the theory of ‘flow’ offered an elegant rubric for the design and management of second language learning tasks. The theory suggested that good tasks should stretch learners, pushing them beyond their immediate ‘comfort zone’, while at the same time providing them with sufficient support so as not to induce anxiety. But since then Csíkszentmihályi’s theory seems to have lost traction, so I was intrigued to hear my Turkish friend (in gridlocked traffic that was the antithesis of flow!) update me on a couple of recent studies that have rehabilitated the notion of flow.

  One of these (Egbert 2003) reports a study in which students rated their experience of various classroom tasks (such as reading aloud, group discussion, etc.). The one task that seemed to have induced the greatest degree of flow, based on self-report data, was one in which the students (all US high-school students of Spanish) interacted freely in a chatroom discussion with Spanish-speaking contemporaries. The researchers concluded that tasks which are most conducive to flow are those in which the participants’ perceptions of challenge, control, and interest are optimal.

  The concept of flow applies not only to learning but also to teaching. Of course, ‘flow’ – in a less figurative sense – is a concept that has often been invoked by educators to capture a desirable quality of classroom management, as when we report that ‘a lesson really flowed’. Flow, in this sense, is a function of having well-rehearsed classroom routines, and it typically distinguishes the teaching of experienced teachers from the rather stop-start nature of novice teaching.

  But flow in the ‘forgetting oneself in the function’ sense is also a well-attested phenomenon. In a study by Christine M. Tardy and Bill Snyder (2004), a group of teachers in Turkey reported experiencing ‘flow’ in their professional lives, noting that ‘flow tended to occur when students were more personally interested and involved’. Moreover, the study found that ‘these teachers often perceived flow to emerge when they felt classroom communication to be authentic and not mechanical’. And ‘flow was seen by the teachers … as something that could not be planned or predicted, but seemed to arise rather spontaneously’.

  Finally, the teachers ‘described flow as occurring at moments in which they perceived learning to occur, for both themselves and their students’. The writers conclude that ‘experiencing flow in their work may help to explain why teachers “stick with it”, despite the often minimal external rewards’.

  Looking back on my own teaching, and recalling ‘eye-on-the-object’ moments, they are often associated with some kind of high-risk strategy that I had embarked upon. Quite often, in fact, they were stand-by lessons when I was substituting for an absent teacher, working from very little information about the class, and with zero opportunities to plan. It was real seat-of-the-pants stuff. I remember once teaching two classes (in adjoining classrooms) simultaneously – timing the groupwork so I could whip next door and do a bit of whole-class stuff, and then out again. I felt like one of those chess grandmasters, playing a hundred games simultaneously in a shopping mall! Pure flow!

  Questions for discussion

  1. Have you experienced ‘flow’ in the classroom – either as a learner or teacher? If so, to what do you attribute it?

  2. How would you know if learners were experiencing ‘flow’? How could you research this?

  3. To what extent is the prosaic sense of ‘flow’ (as in ‘the lesson flowed nicely’) a pre-requisite for the ‘peak experience’ sense?

  4. Is flow really a function of spontaneity? In which case, what does that say about lesson planning?

  5. Is there a danger that ‘teacher flow’ might be achieved at the expense of ‘learner flow’?

  6. ‘Flow’ seems to be associated with ‘stepping outside your comfort zone’: what are the implications for teacher training and development?

  7. Is ‘flow’ a 1990s idea, and has it been superseded by more realistic educational goals, such as competence and communicative effectiveness?

  8. Does flow compensate for the ‘minimal external rewards’ of teaching, such as low pay and long hours?

  References

  Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, NY: Harper Row.

  Csíkszentmihál
yi, M. (1993) The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, NY: Harper Row.

  Egbert, J. (2003) ‘A study of flow theory in the foreign language classroom’, The Modern Language Journal, 87, 4.

  Tardy, C.M. and Snyder, B. (2004) ‘“That’s why I do it”: flow and EFL teachers’ practices’, ELT Journal, 58, 2.

  To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/f-is-for-flow/

  16 How does identity impact on language learning?

  In one of his last pieces for the New York Review of Books, the historian Tony Judt, terminally ill with motor neurone disease and reflecting on his life and work, admitted to a feeling of never having had a narrowly defined sense of identity – whether geographical, political or religious. There was no single social grouping that he strongly identified with. But this was not a source of anxiety. On the contrary: ‘I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another.’

  Having myself lived most of my life ‘on the edge’, one way or another, I share something of Judt’s preference for rootlessness. I’ve lived twice as many years away from my country of birth as I ever lived in it. And, despite having been granted Spanish citizenship, I don’t feel a strong affinity for my elective new ‘home’. On the downside, however, this reluctance to forge an alternative Spanish identity probably accounts, in part at least, for my less than native-like fluency in Spanish.