limiting teaching to what students need or want to learn.
Testimony to the success of the program are the many student ‘voices’ scattered throughout the text. One student, Kamal, for example, recalls:
In WTC [the Writing Tutorial Center] I’ve found that even though my writing is not very good, it’s very important to me, and I like to read it over.
Also, when I read it aloud, my friends said, ‘Wow, that’s good!’ So when they do, my tutors said, ‘Let’s publish that in Excerpts’, and I felt, ‘God, I am a writer!’
That feeling makes me come to WTC all the time. I attend five semesters, twice a week. And each time I attend WTC, I learned. That’s why I love it. (ibid.: 85)
Teaching ‘at the point of need’ is, of course, a principle that underpins the whole language learning movement, including ‘reading recovery’ programs. Courtney Cazden (1992: 129), for example, writes about ‘recognizing the need for temporary instructional detours in which the child’s attention is called to particular cues available in speech or print’ (emphasis added). It would also seem analogous to the reactive focus on form promoted by proponents of task-based learning, described by some researchers as ‘leading from behind’ (e.g. Samuda 2001), whereby the teacher intervenes to scaffold the learners’ immediate communicative needs. As Long and Norris (2009: 137) write:
Advantages of focus on form include the fact that attention to linguistic code features occurs just when their meaning and function are most likely to be evident to the learners concerned, at a moment when they have a perceived need for the new item, when they are attending, as a result, and when they are psycholinguistically ready (to begin) to learn the items.
‘Point of need’ teaching also shares characteristics of what are known as ‘just in time’ (JIT) interventions, as when the user of unfamiliar computer software refers to a Help menu or seeks online support. Thus, in noting how video games embed sound pedagogical principles, James Paul Gee (2007: 142) identifies what he calls the Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time Principle, which goes: ‘The learner is given explicit information both on demand and just in time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice.’
This is a principle both of good video games and of good teaching. Gee makes the point that ‘Learners cannot do much with lots of overt information that a teacher has explicitly told them outside the context of immersion in actual practice. At the same time, learners cannot learn without some overt information; they cannot discover everything for themselves’ (ibid.: 120).
Gee gives the example of good classroom science instruction, where ‘An instructor does not lecture for an extended period and then tell the learners to go off and apply what they have learned in a group science activity … Rather, as group members are discovering things through their own activity, the good science instructor comes up, assesses the progress they are making and the fruitfulness of the paths down which they are proceeding in their enquiry, and then gives overt information that is, at that point, usable’ (ibid. 120).
In short, teaching at the point of need.
Questions for discussion
1. Have you learned anything in an ‘at the point of need’ or a ‘just in time’ way?
2. What does task-based learning have in common with a reactive approach?
3. Teaching writing ‘at the point of need’ sounds like ‘process writing’. Why?
4. Why is a reactive approach not simply experiential learning, i.e. learning by doing?
5. Why do most language programs adopt a pre-emptive, rather than a reactive, approach?
6. If ‘the creation of meaning’ is the first stage of learning, what does this suggest about planning lessons – and planning courses?
7. What special skills might be required of the teacher adopting a reactive approach, in contrast to a pre-emptive approach?
8. At the Point of Need describes a writing program. How could this approach be adapted to the teaching of the other three skills?
References
Cazden, C. (1992) Whole Language Plus: Essays on Literacy in the US and NZ, New York: Teachers College Press.
Gee, J.P. (2007) What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Long, M. and Norris, J. (2009) ‘Task-based teaching and assessment’, in van den Branden, K., Bygate, M. and Norris, J. (eds), Task-based Language Teaching: A Reader, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nelson, M.W. (1991) At the Point of Need: Teaching Basic and ESL Writers, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Samuda, V. (2001) ‘Guiding relationships between form and meaning during task performance: the role of the teacher’, in Bygate, M., Skehan, P. and Swain, M. (eds.) Researching Pedagogic Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing, London: Longman.
Willis, D. (1990) The Lexical Syllabus: A New Approach to Language Teaching, London: Collins ELT.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/p-is-for-point-of-need/
21 Is practice good and what is good practice?
A Swiss student who I was teaching online produced the following short text, in response to an invitation to introduce himself:
I like to play piano very much. I enjoy to watch TV. I love really to eat pizza. I don't like to drink tea at all. I like to read newpapers and magazins a lot.
This is how I responded:
Thanks H***. Nice to hear from you, and to get an idea of your interests. What kind of music do you like playing, by the way – classical or modern?
Just note that verbs like like, love usually are followed by the -ing verb. Enjoy is always followed by the -ing verb. So: I like playing the piano (note the use of the here, too); and I enjoy watching TV, etc. Speak to you soon. Scott
The next day I received the following (Task 2: Describe your computer and what you use it for):
My computer is 2 years old. He has a Pentium Processor. The harddisk is unfortunately to small. My children filled the disk always with computer games. So I have not anough free disk space for important software. I really like to work with computer. My wife enjoyes to send Email to her friends. Our computer is in our lumber room, so I can work also early in the morning.
It appears that the student only then received my feedback on his first task, because he immediately re-sent the above work, self-corrected, thus:
Thanks for your Email!
Dear Scott
My computer is 2 years old. It has a Pentium Processor. The harddisk is unfortunately to small. My children filled the disk always with computer games. So I have not enough free disk space for important software. I really like working with the computer. My wife enjoyes sending Emails to her friends. Our computer is in our lumber room, so I can work also early in the morning.
Notice how the student has picked up on the -ing errors, and self-corrected them. This would seem to be an example of what, in sociocultural learning theory (e.g. Lantolf 2000), is called self-regulation. According to this view, learning is initially other-regulated (as in the first feedback I gave the student) and then it becomes increasingly self-regulated. (Note that in the process of regulating the -ing forms the student has noticed other minor errors in the text and corrected these, too.)
Central to the notion of this transfer of control is the idea that aspects of the skill are appropriated. Appropriation has connotations of taking over the ownership of something, of ‘making something one’s own’.
This is a very different process to what is often called controlled practice. What I’m describing might better be termed practised control.
Controlled practice is repetitive practice of language items in conditions where the possibility of making mistakes is minimized. Typically this takes the form of drilling. And typically the item that is drilled is pre-selected by the teacher, irrespective of the learner’s present degree of control over it. Effectively, the teac
her is in control.
Practised control, on the other hand, involves demonstrating progressive control of a skill where the possibility of making mistakes is ever present, but where support is always at hand. Those aspects of the skill that are targeted for appropriation are selected by the learner. Effectively, the learner is in control.
In practised control, control (or self-regulation) is the objective of the practice, whereas in controlled practice, control is simply the condition under which practice takes place.
My interest in the notion of practised control (as opposed to controlled practice) dates back to an article by Keith Johnson called ‘Mistake correction’ (1988). In this article, Johnson extrapolates from his experience of learning to ride a horse. He describes how he found it difficult to know what to focus on if a particular behaviour (e.g. how to sit when trotting) was first modelled for him by the instructor. But when he’d had a trial run himself, he could then watch his instructor with focused attention (‘it’s all about the knees!’) before having another shot at it. Johnson uses this (skill-learning) example to argue for a task-based model of language teaching.
Johnson situates his theory of practice within a cognitive, information-processing view of learning: by practising in ‘real operating conditions’ we learn to pay attention to those aspects of the skill that we need to take control of. But it also fits with the notion of self-regulation that is enshrined in sociocultural learning theory. However, the difference is that in the sociocultural paradigm the instructor’s role is less as a model of skilled performance and more as a co-performer in a process of skill transfer. Not for nothing is this kind of intervention sometimes called ‘assisted performance’.
To use another analogy – that of learning to ride a bicycle – it is like being allowed to pedal freely, but with someone running along right behind, just in case.
A good example of practised control in language learning is the technique that Stevick describes in his book Success with Foreign Languages (1989: 149):
Another of my favourite techniques is to tell something to a speaker of the language and have that person tell the same thing back to me in correct, natural form. I then tell the same thing again, bearing in mind the way in which I have just heard it. This cycle can repeat itself two or three times … An essential feature of this technique is that the text we are swapping back and forth originates with me, so that I control the content and do not have to worry about generating non-verbal images to match what is in someone else’s mind.
Similarly, through drafting and redrafting a text in the context of a supportive feedback loop, my Swiss student is practising control of -ing forms – and a lot else besides.
Questions for discussion
1. What is ‘controlled’ in ‘controlled practice’?
2. Are ‘controlled practice’ and ‘practised control’ mutually exclusive? Are they perhaps different sides of the same coin?
3. What are the limitations of drilling?
4. What is a supportive feedback loop, and what kind of feedback is supportive?
5. Does practice (of whatever kind) imply repetition?
6. What constitutes practice in task-based instruction?
7. If learning is ‘assisted performance’, what implications does this have for the role of the teacher?
8. Apart from those activity types I have described, what other kinds of activities are consistent with the notion of practised control?
References
Lantolf, J. (ed.) (2000) Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, K. (1988) ‘Mistake correction’, ELT Journal, 42, 2.
Stevick, E. (1989) Success with Foreign Languages, Hemel Hempstead: Prentice-Hall.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/p-is-for-practised-control/
Big Questions in ELT Page 10