Attention ... attention ... attentive ...
While it might be premature to talk about a backlash against so-called ‘ed tech’, there does seem to be a growing awareness as to its limitations, even its risks, especially with regard to its impact on attention. This is not to deny the enormous benefits that accrue from the use of technological aids outside the classroom – indeed, the capacity of video games, for example, to focus attention, often over a considerable period of time, is well documented, and it’s not impossible to imagine learners (of the right disposition) making exponential gains solely through gaming (assuming the games themselves have been designed to incorporate second language learning opportunities).
Nevertheless, in terms of the quality of classroom life, the proliferation of digital gadgetry may be having negative consequences on learning, specifically in the way that multiple information channels conspire to divert, diffuse, disperse or otherwise interfere with, focal attention. We’ve known this ever since the first mobile phone rang in one of our classes. Hence, the claims that are made for educational technologies have to be weighed against their possible side effects, one of which is the danger of learners going ‘off task’. Moreover, even if they are in the minority, students who go off task are potentially disruptive and are likely to affect the overall dynamic of the classroom adversely, subverting the collaborative and consensual classroom ecology on which effective learning depends.
Nowadays the presence of technology may be less obtrusive, but it is no less distracting. As long ago (relatively speaking) as 1998, Linda Stone, formerly of Apple, coined the term ‘continuous partial attention’ (CPA) to characterize the kind of restless digital flitting that results from the need to stay constantly informed and in touch. Translated to a classroom context, CPA would hardly seem conducive to learning.
Why not? Because – as the psychologist above said – everything that you remember and forget depends on attention. The more dispersed the attention, the less likelihood of remembering, while the more heightened the attention, the better the remembering, and hence the better the learning. This is as true for language learning as for any other kind of learning. As psycholinguists Nick Ellis and Peter Robinson (2008: 3) put it: ‘What is attended is learned, and so attention controls the acquisition of language itself.’ Likewise, Dick Schmidt (2001: 16) argues that only through the exercise of attention is input converted to intake: ‘Unattended stimuli persist in immediate short-term memory for only a few seconds at best, and attention is the necessary and sufficient condition for long-term memory storage to occur.’ The rest is noise.
Indeed, from a cognitivist perspective, teaching might well be defined as the ‘management of attention for pedagogical purposes’. Managing attention means both drawing attention to the subject at hand, and drawing attention away from whatever might be a distraction. In the case of the latter, this might mean eliminating competing stimuli by shutting down peripheral channels. In other words, by unplugging the classroom.
Whether or not you’re prepared to go that far, here are some tips for maximizing learners’ attention:
1. make sure all heads are up before transitioning to a new stage or activity
2. ensure your own attention is well distributed, and embraces all students equally, including those on the fringes
3. use ‘theatrical’ techniques (e.g. eye contact, gesture, changes in voice pitch and voice quality) to highlight key lesson content
4. make the learning objectives explicit
5. draw connections across stages, and from one lesson to another
6. use examples from the learners’ own lives, using their names (Juana always takes the bus to school)
7. use the board sparingly and judiciously – too much boardwork obscures the key lesson content
8. drill key items in the lesson – not because this promotes accuracy, or forms good habits, but because it serves to make important lesson content more salient
9. eliminate distractions: ensure books are closed and technological aids are switched off during teacher-focused presentation stages, or when learners are supposed to be interacting face-to-face in pairs/groups
10. negotiate the use of aids and technology, such as dictionaries, laptops, etc., so that learners must ask permission to use them, or use them only at designated stages
11. reduce interference from stimulus overload, e.g. unnecessary visual effects in PowerPoints, background ‘muzak’ during silent reading, etc.
12. encourage (younger) learners to show understanding by nodding affirmatively during teacher-fronted presentation/explanation stages. (This idea comes from the ‘SLANT’ technique developed in a group of US charter schools – children have to Sit up, Listen, Ask Questions, Nod, and Track the speaker with their eyes.)
Notice that I’ve not said anything about maintaining a high activity turnover, nor about activities having to be fun. This is because an emphasis on activity for activity’s sake may be counterproductive, in that it serves to divert attention onto the activity itself, and not onto the language that mediates the activity.
Finally, it’s worth restating the point that educational technology, in itself, is not ‘evil’. As I said, technology has increased the potential of extra-curricular learning exponentially. All the more reason, perhaps, to negotiate a classroom environment that is relatively spartan – an uncluttered forum for language-mediated social interaction. There’s not a lot of point, after all, in having learners do in the classroom the kind of things they can do as well, if not better, outside it – like watching YouTube, or chatting online, or sharing a wiki, or googling for images, or tweeting, and so on. If anything, technology has liberated the classroom, restoring to it its original function as a communal space for guided, collaborative – and attentive – learning.
Questions for discussion
1. In your experience, is it becoming harder to capture and maintain students’ attention?
2. Is ‘continuous partial attention’ just another way of saying ‘multi-tasking’ – and is it necessarily bad?
3. Do you think that ‘banishing the gear’ is the answer – or should you try to incorporate it into the classroom ‘ecology’?
4. Can you learn a language while you are doing something else, e.g. playing computer games?
5. What is to be gained from thinking of the classroom as ‘an uncluttered forum for language-mediated social interaction’?
6. What other tips do you have for maximizing attention?
7. ‘If learners choose to go off task, that’s their loss.’ Do you agree?
8. How do you balance the need for learners to be attentive and the need for learning to be fun?
References
Crowther, H. (2010) ‘One hundred fears of solitude’, Granta, 111.
Ellis, N.C. and Robinson, P. (2008) ‘An introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Language Instruction’, in Ellis, N.C. and Robinson, P. (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Abingdon: Routledge.
Powers, W. (2010) Hamlet’s BlackBerry, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
Schmidt, R. (2001) ‘Attention’, in Robinson, P. (ed.) Cognition and Second Language Instruction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strayer, D. (2010) The New York Times, 15 August 2010.
Young, J.R. (2010) ‘College 2.0: Teachers without technology strike back’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, at http://chronicle.com/article/College-20-Teachers-Without/123891/
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/a-is-for-attention/
19 Do rules help you learn a language?
I was a on a bus and I overheard three Spanish-speaking schoolgirls discussing their English homework, coursebooks open on their laps. The conversation went something like this:
A: ¿El ‘present simple’, qué es el ‘present simple’? (The present simple – what’s the present simple?
)
B: Es para las cosas que siempre vas a hacer. (It’s for the things that you’re always going to do.)
A: Pues, el ‘present continuous’ – ¿de qué se trata? (Well, the present continuous – what’s that all about?)
C: Es para las cosas que tu haces una sola vez. Por ejemplo, ‘Yesterday I going shopping.’ (It’s for the things you do only once. For example, ‘Yesterday I going shopping.’)
B: Y ¿’will’? (And ‘will’?)
A: Es para hablar del futuro, como ‘yo voy a ayudar a mis amigos.’ (It’s to talk about the future, as in [in Spanish] ‘I’m going to help my friends.’)
These girls were in their mid-teens, I guessed, and had probably been doing three or four years of English already – three or four years learning, and attempting to apply (but with such conspicuous lack of success) some of the most basic rules of English grammar. Which led me to wonder, what earthly good had these rules done them? And, more radically, what earthly good are rules at all?
I’m not, of course, disputing the fact that language consists of certain patterns and regularities. I’m simply sceptical of the value of teaching these regularities in the form of explicit rules. Especially when the rules have so little obvious utility. As Chris Brumfit (2001: 29) wrote, ‘It is common to believe that teaching the descriptive rules is to teach the means of generating the behaviour itself.’ Clearly, this was not happening to the girls on the bus.
And it’s not just schoolgirls who find grammar rules hard to get their heads around. Some of the best minds in the business are ‘grammatically challenged’. Take, for instance, the eminent linguist Dick Schmidt, who recorded this classroom experience when learning Portuguese in Brazil (Schmidt and Frota 1986: 258):
The class started off with a discussion of the imperfect vs perfect, with C [the teacher] eliciting rules from the class. She ended up with more than a dozen rules on the board — which I am never going to remember when I need them. I’m just going to think of it as background and foreground and hope that I can get a feel for the rest of it.
Which he did – by heading out into the street and trying it on with the locals. The fact that some learners, at least, dispense with rules entirely should give us pause. After all, if we take the view that, as Nick Ellis (2007: 23) puts it, ‘language is not a collection of rules and target forms to be acquired, but rather a by-product of communicative processes’, then surely communication is the name of the game.
But what about accuracy? The argument that without knowledge of rules accuracy will be compromised doesn’t hold much water either. As J. Hulstijn (1995: 383) remarks, ‘It is perfectly well possible to focus learners’ attention on grammatical correctness without explicitly teaching grammar.’ That is, after all, the function of feedback and correction.
And yet part of me can’t entirely dismiss the value of rules – or of some rules, at least – if for no other reason than for their mnemonic value, like the mantra-like spelling rules we learn as children and still invoke as adults: ‘i before e, except after c’. In support of this view, cognitive scientists have studied the role that such memorized rules play in ‘self-scaffolding’ learned routines, the frequent practice of which ‘enables the agent to develop genuine expertise and to dispense with the rehearsal of the helpful mantra’ (Clark 2011: 48).
Moreover, taking a sociocultural perspective, might not grammar rules serve as a kind of symbolic tool, providing learners with the means to regulate their own performance – a form of ‘private speech’, as it were? Isn’t Schmidt’s ‘rule of thumb’ (‘I’m just going to think of it as background and foreground …’) an artefact that mediates his use – and ultimately his acquisition – of Portuguese in the world?
Indeed, Lantolf and Thorne (2006: 291), acknowledging the importance that Vygotsky himself credited ‘to well-articulated explicit knowledge as the object of instruction and learning’, describe a number of studies of second language learners for whom self-verbalization of quite sophisticated grammatical concepts seemed to assist in their subsequent internalization.
If this is the case, it may be that my three schoolgirl companions on the bus, immersed in the process of jointly constructing knowledge out of explicit rules of grammar, were on the right track, even if still a long way from their desired destination.
Questions for discussion
1. Has the conscious learning of rules helped you learn an additional language?
2. Are rules of form (e.g. ‘Add -er to an adjective to make a comparative’) easier and/or more useful than rules of use (e.g. ‘Use the present perfect to talk about situations that happened in the past but which have present relevance’)?
3. Is the problem not so much with rules, but with rules that are inaccurate or opaque, or that involve unfamiliar terminology?
4. Are rules the problem, or is the problem one of rules in the absence of opportunities – or incentives – to apply them?
5. Is the ability to learn and apply rules age-related? If so, from what age do rules start becoming useful?
6. Are rules that learners have worked out themselves better than rules that they have been given? Why?
7. Should we teach ‘rules of thumb’, even if we know that they are incomplete or even inaccurate?
8. Is the problem with the word ‘rule’ itself and its associations with order, obedience, regulations, and so on?
References
Brumfit, C. (2001) Individual Freedom in Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. (2011) Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, N. (2007) ‘Dynamic systems and SLA: The wood and the trees’, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 1.
Hulstijn, J. (1995) ‘Not all grammar rules are equal: Giving grammar instruction its proper place in foreign language teaching’, in Schmidt, R. (ed.) Attention and Awareness in Foreign Language Learning, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Lantolf, J. and Thorne, S. (2006) Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schmidt R. and Frota, S. (1986) ‘Developing basic conversational ability in a second language: A case study of an adult learner’, in Day, R. (ed.) Talking to learn: Conversation in a second language, Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/r-is-for-rules/
20 How do you teach reactively?
Compare and contrast these two approaches:
Teacher 1: ‘Today is Tuesday so we’re going to do the present perfect continuous.’
Teacher 2: ‘Tell me something I don’t know, and I’ll help you to say it better.’
OK. I’m exaggerating, but these two approaches capture, respectively, the difference between ‘pre-emptive teaching’ and ‘reactive teaching’. In the former, the teacher assumes that there is something that the learners don’t know, and the teaching intervention is designed to fill the gap. In the latter, the teacher assumes that there is something that the learners need to say, and the teaching intervention is designed to enable them to do it. It is consistent with the view that, as Dave Willis (1990: 128) puts it, ‘The creation of meaning is the first stage of learning. Refining the language used is a later stage.’
A marvellous account of reactive teaching applied to the teaching of writing is At the Point of Need: Teaching Basic and ESL Writers, by Marie Wilson Nelson (1991). This book deserves to be a classic, not least because it’s about more than simply the teaching of writing. It makes a convincing case for a pedagogy that, rather than trying to second-guess and thereby pre-empt the learners’ learning trajectory, is entirely responsive to it: that is, a pedagogy which is wholly driven by the learners’ needs, as and when they emerge. As Nancy Martin writes, in the Foreword (ibid.: ix):
The concept of teaching only at the students’ perceived points of need, and as they
arise, presents a different view of learning from that of planned and sequenced series of lessons. The former view depends on recognition of the power of the person’s intention as the operating dynamic in writing – and in learning.
The book describes a five-year experiment at a college in the US, where writing workshops were offered to small groups of mixed native-speaker and non-native-speaker undergraduates, each with a tutor, and where there was no formal writing – or grammar, or vocabulary – instruction. Instead, the students (all of whom had scored below a cut-off point on a test of standard written English) were – in the words of the program publicity – invited to:
1. Choose topics that interest you and your group
2. Freewrite without worrying about correctness on the first draft
3. Revise your freewrites. Your group will help you [...]
4. Learn to copy-edit your writing for publication.
Instead of pre-teaching or modelling the skills of writing, ‘this writing program was set up on a dynamic of retrospective planning’ (ibid.: viii) whereby ‘the tutors found that the most acceptable and effective teaching was to give the help the students asked for when they asked for it – that is, as the students perceived the need’ (ibid.: ix).
The program was based on the principle that ‘less is more’ (ibid.: 189), and that effective writing instruction involves simply:
motivating students to want to practise and improve
giving students control of decisions about their work
Big Questions in ELT Page 9