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Why MFL teachers may have to rethink their approach to foreign language reading instruction

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Reading instruction, Uncategorized

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Introduction

In a previous post I already concerned myself with reading instruction; more specifically, I advocated that much reading skills instruction in UK classrooms tends to revolve around comprehension tasks. I also pointed out how such practice is detrimental to the development of reading proficiency, as it does little more than testing students on their ability to find details in a text rarely engaging students in real life tasks. As I advocated in that post, reading instruction should do much more than that: should inspire L2 learners to read independently and equip them with effective reading skills and learning strategies (e.g. using online dictionaries or knowing how to exploit the full learning potential of an online article). Moreover students should be given a degree of choice in terms of the to-be-read-texts.

Thus, foreign language teachers need first and foremost to develop their students’ self-efficacy as readers, i.e. the belief that they can read, they can comprehend L2 texts whilst making reading an enjoyable experience. To believe that s/he can be effective at reading an L2 text a learner will need more than a growth mindset; s/he will have to experience repeated episodes of success in reading tasks and a feeling of progression.

For teachers to enable students to experience such success they need to be able to understand the cognitive processes involved in the L2-learner comprehension of L2 written text. Most importantly, they need to be conversant with some recent research findings which are somewhat counter-intuitive and may force them to reconsider the way they teach not just reading, but all the other three macro-skills too.

Thus, in this post I set out to concisely outline how the human brain processes foreign language written text and explain why UK teachers may have to change their current instructional approach to reading.

Top-down processing accounts of L2 reading

Before the early 70’s the dominant theory of reading comprehension was that the reconstruction of the intended meaning of a text proceeds ‘bottom-up’, i.e. from the decoding of the smallest units (letters) to incrementally larger units, i.e.: words, then clause, then sentences, etc. Reading was seen as a linear process of recognizing one word after the other until the entire meaning of a sentence is grasped. This view of the reading process was discounted by subsequent research.

Seminal work by Goodman (1972) and subsequently Rumelhart (1980) turned reading theory upside-down (literally!). Rumelhart’s model of reading proposed that the human brain processes written text using top-down rather than bottom-up processing. His theory, rooted in cognitive psychology and still widely accepted by many scholars and researchers, posited the existence of cognitive structures called schemata which encapsulate all of our background knowledge with regards to specific life situations or concepts and consist of elaborate frameworks of objects and relations which we use to make sense of the world. For instance, when we think about a ‘haunted house’ we will activate schemata which contain all the experiences we had stored over the years about haunted houses – whether mediated by fiction or in real life. Schemata being also culturally situated, a Chinese learner’s schemata about a haunted house may be different from an Italian or a Maori’s. Schemata are, in this sense, the building blocks of cognition and “reflect the experiences, conceptual understanding, attitudes, values, skills, and strategies …[we] bring to a text situation” (Vacca & Vacca, 1999, p. 15).

To go back to the haunted house example. Imagine one is reading a short story about a haunted house (in their native language). Top down processing theory posits that that learner, in order to comprehend the text will apply his/her knowledge about the topic (content schemata) and of the genre-specific features of short-story texts (discourse schemata). Content and discourse schemata will be activated by cues in the text and applied to reconstruct the intended meaning; so, for instance the sentence ‘she saw a ghost’ will activate a range of expectations about the consequences of seeing a ghost (e.g  ‘she screamed’, ‘she ran’); one of them may match automatically what comes next or may not. Failure to understand, then, may mean that (a) the cue in the text is ineffective or (b) there is no schema in the brain which matches that cue and that text. In this sense, reading is not just a receptive skill, but require construction of meaning and cognition, in that, if we find in the text information we do not have a schema for, that information may result in the creation of a new one.

This model has been applied by L2 theorists and researchers to L2 reading, too: L2 learners would apply their content and formal schemata to makes sense of L2 text. Consistent with this theory, schemata application would not require the reader to recognize every single lexical item and morpheme. This psycholinguistic framework, viewing reading as a game of guessing, sampling, predicting, and verifying top-down hypotheses, emphasizes the role of higher level syntactic and semantic processes and minimizes the role of component and bottom-up processes.The application of schemata entailing that one does not need to decode every single word in the text, you may now understand why on your PGCE you were told that you should teach students to look for key words to enable them to understand texts. And I am sure quite a lot of you still model this strategy with GCSE, IB or A level groups.

However, just as I did, you too will have found that this inferential approach does not work all the time. In the absence of a solid and wide-ranging vocabulary repertoire, this inferential approach often leads students to making wrong assumptions about the intended meaning of L2 text. So, when someone uses the typical UK textbook with simple and predictable texts packed with known word and cognates about very familiar topics like daily routine, free time and hobbies, etc… this approach may work. With more complex and less predictable texts (e.g. authentic texts) however, this is often not the case.

Interactive models of L2 reading

Hence, more recently, the pendulum has swung back again: in recent years, scholars and researchers have re-discovered the importance of bottom-up processing in reading comprehension. New cognitive accounts of the reading process have been proposed which are widely accepted by the academic community: interactive models which recognize the synergy of top-down and bottom-up processing in reconstructing the intended meaning of L2-texts. From this perspective, it is claimed that information processing of text is driven by both bottom up and top-down information’ i.e. the processing of the physical stimuli (bottom-up processing) and the context provided by expectation and previous knowledge (top-down processing) (Carrell et al., 1998).  Prior knowledge with the help of accelerated bottom-up processes influences the perception, speed, and conceptual framework in reading processes. This view proposes multiple, independent, parallel routes simultaneously processing information with a cross-checking mechanism. Active routes are contingent upon the information presented, the individual’s knowledge and the task demands (Grabe, 2004).

In conclusion, whilst we read in the L2 our working memory activates different systems simultaneously to process the different levels of the text in an attempt to comprehend the author’s intended meaning: higher order skills (e.g. content schemata) and lower order skills (e.g. letter and word recognition).

The role of phonological processing and oral fluency in reading proficiency

One specific set of lower order skills has received particular attention in recent years: lower level verbal processing in working memory and, in particular phonological processing. There is a vast body of research evidence indicating that poor readers exhibits deficits in phonological processing and ability in general.

There are a number of reasons as to why efficient phonological processing correlates with high level of reading proficiency. Firstly, as discussed in previous posts (e.g. ‘Words in the minds’) the establishment of a complete and solid phonological representation for a word appears to be the first and the most important requisite for success in early L2 vocabulary acquisition for a young L2 learner (Segalowitz et al, 1991)

Secondly, there is clear evidence that meaning activation in Working Memory is mediated through phonology (e.g. Metsala & Ehri, 1998; Proctor, Carlo, August, and Snow, 2005). This is because when we learn a word, we encode it through its phonological representation (see my description of the role of articulatory loop in ‘Eight important facts about working memory’ for more info on this point); hence, when we identify a word, its phonological representation is automatically and very rapidly activated and precedes the retrieval of its meaning from Long-term memory. In other words, meaning activation is mediated by phonology.

Thirdly, rapid lower level verbal processing means that the brain can free up cognitive space in Working Memory during reading; this means that there is more space available for higher level cognitive processing, from the application of formal schemata (e.g. the analysis of grammar/syntax) to the application of content schemata.

Another important set of evidence points to a strong correlation between oral fluency and reading proficiency (e.g. Geva and Ryan, 1993 and Droop and Verhoeven, 2004). Droop and Verhoeven’s study is particularly interesting as the two groups they compared were equivalent at pre-test in terms of knowledge of vocabulary but not in terms of oral fluency; the group with higher levels of oral fluency were the more proficient readers. Hence better oracy skills correlated with more effective reading skills.

General implications for reading instruction in the foreign language classrooms

Effective reading comprehension being dependent on how effective top-down and bottom-up processing are performed, L2 reading instruction must concern itself with, on the one hand, training students in the skillful application of schemata; on the other, it must provide learners with masses of instruction in (a) topic-specific vocabulary and word-recognition skills; (b) metalinguistic knowledge (the ability to recognize parts of speech, noun/verb/adjective inflections, syntactic order, etc.) ; (c) discourse markers (connectives) and their function as text organizers and, much more than it is usually done, (d) phonological awareness.

It should be pointed out that of the four elements just listed, two, range of vocabulary and phonological awareness are the most widely acknowledged by research as effective enhancers of reading proficiency. Hence I strongly recommend these should take priority in our teaching of reading skills.

Practical implications

The obvious corollary of the above discussion for the foreign language classroom is that a sound approach to reading instruction must include fairly traditionally activities such as:

  • Schemata activation activities – These should include; (1) pre-reading activities activating the background knowledge students have about the topic(s) dealt with in the to-be-read text (e.g. brainstorming student assumptions as to why people smoke before reading an article on the causes of smoking); (2) activities which require students to predict / infer what comes next in a text based on their knowledge of the world, e.g. jigsaw reading or ‘guess what comes next’ tasks (whereby a very short story where only the opening line is visible to start with is displayed on the classroom screen and the students have to infer what the next line is about); (3) before reading a challenging L2 text students may be asked to read similar texts in the L1- an idea originated with Krashen;
  • Vocabulary building activities of the likes found at language-gym.com (work-outs section). These should be carried out routinely prior to engaging students in any reading task and should focus on the words included in the to-be-read texts in order to lessen cognitive load during reading; they should also be carried out after each reading task for consolidation purposes;
  • Metalinguistic tasks engaging students in contextualized structural analysis of the target text (e.g. whereby students are asked to identify to what part-of-speech category words belong to)
  • Extensive practice in the recognition of discourse markers (e.g. gap-fill or translation tasks);
  • Narrow reading tasks – these kill a lot of birds with one stone as narrow reading helps enhancing vocabulary by constantly recycling it from text to text (five or six texts should be used) and by requiring the application of the same schemata set;
  • Metacognitive retrospective tasks – students are asked to reflect on two or three main issues that impeded their understanding of the target text and what they could do to overcome them.

The most important implications for L2 reading instruction, however, refer to oral fluency and phonological skills and their link with reading proficiency. Teachers may have to focus much more than they currently do, in my experience on enhancing phonological awareness. In a previous post on ‘Listening micro-skills enhancers’ (https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/seven-micro-listening-enhancers-you-may-not-be-using-often-enough-in-your-lessons/)  I indicated several examples of very-easy-to-set-up activities that students enjoy, which focus on this hyper-neglected dimension of oracy.

Moreover, the evidence that higher levels of oral fluency correlate with higher levels of reading proficiency even when vocabulary range is equivalent entails that ways must be find to integrate lots of oral practice in the foreign language classroom – a pedagogical recommendation that I have often made in my posts, advocating that a substantial chunk of each lesson should be devoted to learner-to-learner oral interaction tasks (of the communicative sort).

Conclusions

Based on the above discussion teachers may have to rethink the way they teach reading skills. Firstly, their approach to reading skill instruction should focus systematically on both top-down and bottom-up processing skills. The two skills can be taught separately, obviously; they do not have to be explicitly integrated in every single lesson. Oral fluency, vocabulary building and phonological awareness must be focused on much more than it is currently done in foreign language lessons as they are pivotal to the development of reading proficiency.

‘Growth mindset’ – Panacea or double-edge weapon?

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Uncategorized

The principles embedded in Carol Dweck’s Growth mindset theory have played a great role in my life, especially in recent years. They are inspiring, motivating and reassuringly universal. However, they are nothing new. Every single one of Tony Robbins or Eric Thomas’ motivational videos disseminate exactly the same ideas. In the realm of social learning theory, Bandura’s (1994) produced very similar findings and his self-efficacy theory overlaps with Dweck’s work in many ways. Another psychologist, Herman (1980), codified in his resultative hypothesis very similar principles, too. Finally, at the risk of trivializing the present discussion, Rocky Balboa’s famous ‘motivational’ speech to his son, in Sylvester Stallone’s movie, could be seen as a forerunner of many of Dweck’s principles…

So why all the fuss now? Why is ‘Growth mindset’ all the rage in the business and education world at this moment in our history? Why do, these days, so many diagrams displaying Carol Dweck’s commandments pop up in so many Tweets and Facebook posts day in day out? Why is it that nowadays every business and educational establishment prides themselves in adopting a growth mindset? Does it mean they did not before? Why is everyone jumping on the ‘Growth mindset’ bandwagon all of a sudden?

The answer to the question is manifold. The fact that Dweck is a Stanford professor obviously helps, to start with, rendering it more credible than the aphorisms of a motivational guru of the likes of Eric Thomas. Secondly, the label ‘Growth mindset’ is much more intelligible and appealing to the masses than the obscure jargon used by other psychologists (e.g. ‘Self.-efficacy theory”, ‘Resultative hypothesis’). Thirdly, Dweck’s theory is clearly packaged and presented; it is very inspirational and versatile in its application. But, most importantly, it comes at the ‘right time in our history – a time of deep global societal and financial crisis; a time in which every single one of us needs to believe that hard work, grit, positivity and the will to succeed can pull us through the frightening uncertainty and precariousness of today’s world. In this, lies the main reason for the success of Dweck’s theory and its resonance with so many of us.

Of course, there is another, more sinister interpretation of Dweck’s success, which verges on conspiracy theory, but cannot be totally discounted. This interpretation has less to do with the author’s theory than with its opportunistic use by businesses and educational establishments. Whereas Growth mindset has great potential for motivating and inspiring staff, it can also be used to support a more autocratic/ top-down leadership style. For instance, the notion that ‘if one cannot accept negative criticism’ exhibits a fixed mindset is one that I could not agree more; however, what if the criticism is ‘incorrect’, not constructive, biased, badly formulated, in other words, bad criticism. Does it mean that if one does not accept this kind of criticism one exhibits a ‘fixed mindset’? It is easy to see how this can be easily used by a manager to silence any ‘dissonant’ voices amongst their staff.

The same goes for not being open to new challenges – another marker of a fixed mindset. Excellent to ‘silence’ anyone who is against a given innovation in a business or educational establishment. What if there are valid reasons to speculate that a new initiative will not be more effective – despite major time and financial investment by all the stakeholders – than the to-be-replaced existing practice? Should one be silent for fear of being ‘dubbed’ a ‘fixed mindset employee’?

My argument here is basically that, at a crucial time in the lives of many businesses and educational establishments, when transformational change is rampant and cost-effectiveness is a must, Carol Dweck’s theories can be a powerful double-edge weapon by constituting a great source of inspiration, motivation and resilience which pushes people to work beyond their comfort zone whilst – when used unethically – being very effective in silencing criticism or any resistance to change, even when they are legitimized by common sense, objective evidence and/or ethical considerations. Is it why the Growth mindset principles have become so popular?

In conclusion, Dweck’s ‘Growth mindset’ theory provides an excellent reference framework for self-improvement which can have many productive and motivation-enhancing applications in business as well in the foreign language classroom and education at large. It sends a positive and inspirational message which has an intuitive cognitive and affective appeal for anyone. However, one should be concerned when the people who use a ‘minimalistic’ application of Dweck’s theory – like the ones crystallized in the fancy diagrams circulating on Twitter-  ‘learnt’ through two or three CPD sessions, rather than through extensive and ‘deep processing’ of Dweck’s publications, as a means to pre-empt healthy criticism and constructive debate.

Of the ‘curse’ of tense-driven progression in MFL learning

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Assessment, General pedagogy, Grammar teaching, Uncategorized

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For too many years the UK National Curriculum posited the ‘mastery’ of tenses as the main criteria for progression along the MFL proficiency continuum. A learner would be on Level 4 if s/he mastered one tense + opinions, on Level 5 if s/he mastered two, etc. This preposterous approach to the benchmarking of language proficiency has always baffled me and has caused enormous damage to MFL education in the UK for nearly two decades. Not surprisingly I felt relieved when the current British government ‘scrapped’ the National Curriculum Levels. Sadly, this approach to progression is so embedded in much UK teaching curriculum design and practice that it will be very difficult to uproot, especially considering that some Examination boards still place too much emphasis on tenses in their assessment of GCSE examination performance.

But why am I so anti- tense-driven progression? There are two main reasons. First and foremost, the expressive power of a speaker/writer in any language is not a function of how many tenses s/he masters; it is more a function of – in no particular priority order:

  1. How much vocabulary (especially verbs, nouns and adjectives) s/he has acquired;
  2. How flexibly s/he can apply that vocabulary across context;
  3. How intelligible his/her output is;
  4. How effectively s/he can use time- markers (which will clearly signpost the time dimension we are referring to in communication);
  5. How effectively s/he masters the various functions of discourse (agreeing, disagreeing, evaluating, etc.) which will hinge on his/her knowledge of discourse markers (however, moreover, etc.) and subordination;
  6. How effectively s/he masters L2 syntax; etc.

In fact, in several world languages tenses do not really exist. In Bahasa Malaysia, for instance, one of the official languages of the beautiful country I live in, tenses – strictly speaking – do not exist. The past, the present and the future are denoted by time adverbials, e.g. one would say ‘Yesterday I leave my wallet in the hotel room’. Sentences like this one, would convey more meaning than the more accurate ‘I left my wallet in the hotel room’, since it is perfectly intelligible and more useful if one needs to tell the owner of the hotel one stayed in last week, when the wallet was left behind. Yet, according to the former National Curriculum Levels the second sentence would be a marker of higher proficiency…

Placing so much emphasis on the uptake of tenses skews the learning process by channeling teachers and students’ efforts away from other equally or even more important morphemes and aspects of the languages, which somehow end up being neglected and receiving little emphasis in the classroom and textbooks. It also creates misleading beliefs in learners about what they should prioritize in their learning.

This is one of the main problems with tense-driven progression, but not the main one. The most problematic issue refers to the pressure that it puts on teachers and learners to acquire as many tenses as possible in the three KS3 years. This is what, in my view, has greatly damaged British MFL education in the last 20 years, since the UK National Curriculum Levels were implemented. Besides resulting in overemphasizing tense teaching, such pressure has two other very negative outcomes.

Firstly, many teachers end up neglecting the most important dimension of learning – Cognitive Control. This occurs due to the fact that not enough time is devoted to practising each target tense; hence MFL students often learn the rules governing the tenses but cannot use them flexibly, speedily and accurately under communicative and/or time pressure. The pressure to move up one notch, from a lower level to a higher level – often within the same lesson – reduces the opportunities for practice that students ‘badly’ require to consolidate the target material, unduly increasing cognitive overload.

Secondly, often students are explicitly encouraged or choose to memorize model sentences which they embed in their speech or writing pieces in order to achieve a higher grade, learning them ‘ad hoc’ for a scheduled assessment. This would be acceptable if it led to acquisition or if it were supported by a grasp of the tenses ; but this is not always the case.

In conclusion, I advocate that the benchmarking criteria that UK teachers adopt explicitly or implicitly, consciously or subconsciously to assess progression in MFL learning should be based on a more balanced approach to the measurement of proficiency; one which emphasizes discourse functions, range of vocabulary (especially mastery of verbs and adjectives) and pronunciation, much more than it currently – a year since the National Curriculum Levels were abolished –  still does. As I have often reiterated in my posts, teaching should concern itself above all with acquisition of cognitive control rather than with the learning of mere rule knowledge. Progression should be measured more in terms of speed and accuracy of execution under real-life-like communicative pressure, width of vocabulary, functions and structures mastered as well as syntactic complexity. Tenses are important, of course, but they should not take priority over discourse features which are more crucial to effective communication.

Six writing research findings that have impacted my teaching practice

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) L2 writing, Language acquisition principles, Uncategorized, Writing skills

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Every now and then I post concise summaries of research findings from studies I come across in my quest for emprical evidence which supports or negates my intuitions or experiences as a language teacher and learner. As I have mentioned in a previous post (‘ten reasons why you should not trust ground-breaking educational research’), much of the research evidence out there is far from being conclusive and irrefutable, due to flaws in design, data elicitation and analysis procedures which often undermine both their internal and external validity. However, when three or more  reasonaby well-crafted studies (however small) find concurring evidence which challenge commonly held assumptions  and/or resonates with our own ‘hunches’ or experiences about teaching and learning, it is reasonable to assume that ‘there is no smoke without fire’.

The following studies have been picked based on the above logic. They are small and less than perfect in design, but do reflect my professional experience and indicate that the validity some dogmata many teachers hold about language teaching and learning may be questionable.

1. Baudrand-Aertker (1992) – Effects of journal writing on L2-writing proficiency

21 students of French in the third year at a high school in Louisiana were asked to keep a journal over a nine-month period. They were required to write two entries per week at least and were not engaged in any other type of writing tasks for the whole of the duration of the study. The teacher responded to the students’ journal entries focusing only on content – not on form. Using a pre-/post-test design Baudrand-Aertker found that:

  • The students’ written proficiency improved significantly as evidenced by the post-test and their own perception;
  • The students felt that the journals helped them improve their overall mastery of the target language;
  • The students reported positive attitudes towards the activity;
  • The vast majority of the students did not want to be corrected on their grammatical mistakes when engaging in journal writing.

Although this study has important limitations in that there was no control group to compare the independent variable’ effects with, I find the results interesting and I intend to give journal-writing a try myself next year.

  1. Cooper and Morain (1980) – Effects of sentence combining instruction

The researchers investigated the effect of grammar instruction involving sentence combining tasks on the essay writing of 130 third quarter students of French. The subjects were divided into two groups: the experimental group received 60 to 150 minutes instruction per week through sentence combining exercises whilst the control group was taught ‘traditionally’ through workbook exercises. The experimental group outperformed the control group on seven of the nine measures of syntactic complexity adopted. Although the study did not look at the overall quality of the informants’ essays but only at the syntactic complexity, its findings are very interesting and has encouraged me to incorporate sentence combining tasks more regularly in my teaching strategies. Here is an discussion of the merits of sentence combining instruction and how it can be implemented

  1. Florez Estrada (1995) – Effects of interactive writing via computer as compared to traditional journaling

In this small scale study (28 university students of Spanish) Florez-Estrada compared a group of learners exchanging e-mail and chatting online with native-speaking partners with another group of students engaged in interactive paper writing with their teachers. The researcher found that the computer group outperformed the control group on the accuracy of key grammar points such as preterite vs imperfect, ‘ser’ vs ‘estar’, ‘por’ vs ‘para’ and others. The findings of this study were echoed by another study of 40 German students, Itzes (1940), which involved students in chatting via computer amongst themselves in the TL. A notable feature of this study is that the students chose the topics they wanted to chat about. These two studies confirms finding from my own practice; I often use Edmodo or Facebook to create a slow student-initiated chat on given topics in which the whole class is involved, every students sharing their opinions/comments with their peers with the assistance of the dictionaries. I have found this activity very beneficial even with groups of less able learners.

  1. Nummikoski (1991) and Caruso (1994) – Effects of extensive L2-reading on L2-writing proficiency as contrasted with written practice.

Both studies investigated if L2 learners who are engaged in extensive L2-reading (with no writing instruction/practice) write more effectively than L2 learners who are involved in writing tasks but do no reading. The results of both studies show a significant advantage for the writing-only condition. These studies, which are by no means flawless, do challenge the commonly held assumption that we can improve our students’ writing proficiency by engaging them in extensive reading.

  1. Martinez-Lage (1992) – Comparison of focus-on-form with focus-on-form-free writing

The researcher investigated the impact of two writing-task types on the writing output of 23 second-year university Spanish students. The same students were asked to write (a) typical assigned compositions and (b) dialogue journals in which they were told they would not be assessed on grammar accuracy. The surprising finding was that the syntactic complexity across both task types was equivalent but the focus-on-form-free task type (journal writing) was grammatically more accurate. I concur with Martinez-Lage on this one as I have tried this strategy myself with many of my AS groups over the years.

  1. Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1992) – Effect of peer feedback in L2 writing

The researchers studied 30 students in an accelerated first year college French class, who wrote two essays involving three separate drafts. The experimental group was involved in peer feedback (essays were read aloud to each other and oral feedback was given), whilst the other group received written teacher feedback. In terms of performance from the first to the second essay both groups made significant improvements, but in different areas: the peer-feedback group got worse in grammar but did better on content, organization and vocabulary; the teacher feedback group, exactly the opposite. It should be noted that a previous study by Piasecki (1988) which adopted a very similar design but lasted much longer (8 weeks) and involved 112 students of third-year high school students of Spanish, found no significant differences between the two conditions. This confirms my reservations about using peer-feedback as an effective way to correct learner output and as a blanket corrective strategy; in my opinion it may work quite well with certain groups of individuals with highly developed grammar knowledge and critical thinking skills but not with others.

What is the most effective approach to foreign language instruction? – Part 1

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Grammar teaching, Language acquisition principles, Uncategorized

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Introduction – Of metaphors teachers live by and pedagogy ‘evangelists’

Every single one of us lives by metaphors, behavioural templates which we acquire through our interaction with the environment we grow up and live in. The language learning metaphors that are at the heart of our teaching come to a large extent from our experiences as language learners. These images of learning are so strongly embedded in our cognition that according to researchers it takes years of training and teaching practice to replace them with new templates; in certain cases, they are even impervious to  ‘conditioning’, despite the demands of teacher trainers, course administrators or students – I have observed this phenomenon first-hand time and again in most of the schools I have worked at.

Our beliefs about L2 learning play an enormous role in determining what teachers we will become and our response to any new methodology that we are asked to adopt. Some individuals will reject new instructional approaches in the belief that if they are such good linguists and their teachers’ approach worked so well for them, why should it not work for their own students? Some others – like I did, for instance, during and after my PGCE – will integrate elements of their existing belief system with the new methodology (-ies) to create a sort of personalized ‘hybrid’ – a ‘syncretistic’ approach. Others, instead – what I call the ‘radical converts’ – will espouse the new methodology with some kind of fanaticism often becoming zealous evangelists of their new pedagogic ‘dogmata’

It is the third attitude that one must be wary of: the blind allegiance to any approach that claims to have found a universal pedagogical fit for every learner. Any such claim will be unfounded because every learner brings to bear on the learning process a range of genetic and acquired individual variables that play an important role in language aptitude as well as in the cognitive/emotional response to teachers and their methodology. Whilst some guiding principles may be ‘universal’ in that they refer to general mechanisms that regulate human cognition across age, race, gender, G.I. factor and language aptitude, their implementation will ALWAYS be conditioned by contextual variables.

Consequently, I am not going to play the ‘know-all L2-pedagogue’, here, and tell teachers what the best approach is. After all, if your students are happy, motivated and learning lots, you have found the best approach already. You may want to enhance and vary your repertoire of teaching strategies, but after all, if the vast majority of your students are getting where you want them to be in the time and with the resources that you have been allocated by your course administrators, you do not need anyone to tell you how to teach; unless someone throws the spanner in the works, that is, and tells you that you must ‘integrate’ new technology, life-long learning skills, etc. into your healthy and balanced teaching echo-system…

Psychology, however, does give us some clear indication of how humans acquire cognitive skills. So, if one believes, as it is logical to presume, that language acquisition involves the same processes and mechanisms involved in the acquisition of any other cognitive ability, it is possible to identify some core pedagogical principles as crucial to any form of explicit foreign language instruction. Moreover, there is some sound research empirical evidence out there that should inform our teaching; to claim that it is conclusive and irrefutable would be preposterous, but to ignore it because it is not would be irresponsible. After all, what teachers must do with research evidence is to make an informed choice and ask themselves the questions: do these findings resonate with me and my past experiences? Is it worth trying this out? And, after trying it out: did it work? And if it didn’t, you can modify it or reject it altogether and look elsewhere.

Thirteen pedagogic principles rooted Cognitive psychology

The following are the pedagogical principles rooted in Cognitive psychology theory and research that worked for me. I am no evangelist, thus I am not positing them as the Gospel’s truths: these are merely some of the beliefs I formed in more than 2 decades of primary, secondary and tertiary MFL teaching, researching and, most importantly, reflecting on my own practice and listening to my students.

I am not concerning myself explicitly with the most important issue– motivation. It goes without saying that no methodology will ever be effective unless the teacher brings about a high level of his/her learners’ cognitive and emotional arousal and develops their self-efficacy.

Finally, let me reiterate that the principles below are based on the epistemological assumption that language skills are acquired in the same way as any other cognitive human skill.

  1. Practice makes perfect – Every language skill and item, in order to be acquired, is subject to the ‘Power Law of Practice’ (Anderson, 2000). Hence Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Translation/Interpreting, Grammar and any other skills must all be practised extensively. This entails that any instructional approach (e.g. Grammar Translation and PBL) which does not emphasize all four skills in a balanced manner is defective. Instruction can be successful only through extensive practice and recycling of the kind envisaged in the next two points.
  1. Recycling must start from day one – forgetting starts occurring immediately after a given item has passed into Long-term Memory (Anderson and Jordan,1998). As the diagram below clearly shows, after 19 minutes one loses 40 % of what was recalled at time 0; after 9 hours, 56 % and after 6 days, 75 %. Recycling is imperative and must be of the spaced, distributed kind (a bit every so often) not of the massed kind (a lot of it once a week). Moreover, recycling must start on the same day something has been learnt. Instruction must model independent vocabulary learning habits which focus on autonomous recycling; it must also be mindful of human forgetting rate and provide for consolidation accordingly.

ebbinghaus-graph

  1. Effective language learning = high levels of cognitive control – A language item can be said to be acquired only when it can be performed accurately and efficiently (with little hesitation) under real time conditions in unmonitored execution (e.g. spontaneous conversation). This means that acquisition occurs along a conscious to automatic continuum; it starts from a declarative stage where the application of the knowledge about a specific language item is applied slowly under the brain’s conscious control and it ends when the execution of that item is fully automatic and bypasses working memory (Johnson, 1996). Instruction must involve extensive practice which starts with highly structured tasks (i.e. gap-fill or audiolingual drills) which become increasingly less structured with time and aim at developing cognitive control (the ability to perform effectively in real operating conditions).
  1. Production should always come after extensive receptive processing – Humans learn languages by imitating others’ linguistic input. Instruction should engage learners in masses of receptive practice before engaging them in production. Thus, ideally, extensive listening/reading practice (in the way of comprehensible input) should always precede speaking/writing practice. This rules out reading or listening comprehension tasks as valuable receptive practice, as these are tests, not effective sources of modelling; reading/listening for personal enjoyment or enrichment would be more conducive to learning in this regard.
  1. Cognitive overload should be prevented and controlled for – cognitive overload occurs when learners are engaged in tasks that pose challenging demands on their working memory. Teachers ought to prepare their students for a given task by facilitating their cognitive access to each level of challenge posed by that task. Thus, before reading a challenging text, the learners should be taught the key vocabulary and grammar points it contains and effective strategies to tackle it. Moreover, the text could be adapted to incorporate more contextual clues that may facilitate inference of unfamiliar lexis.
  1. Focus on micro-skills as much as you do on the macro- ones – To execute any task in the L2 (e.g. an unplanned role-play) effectively, the brain must acquire effective cognitive control over both the higher meta-components (e.g. generating meaning) and the lower order skills involved (e.g. pronunciation and intonation). By automatizing lower order language skills, the brain frees up space in learner Working Memory thereby facilitating processing efficiency and cognitive control and, consequently, performance – this is like learning to drive a car whereby a driver automatizes the basic skills such as changing gear or accelerating so that s/he can focus on the road. Instruction must identify and systematically address every set of macro- and micro-skills that typical language tasks involve. Following on from (2) such micro-skills must be practised extensively, too.
  1. Learning is enhanced by depth of processing, distinctiveness of input and personal investment – Learning of any language item does not simply involve practice, but also depth of processing. Instruction must engage learners in semantic analysis and association in order to strengthen the memory trace and to increase the range of context-dependent cues at encoding which will enhance the recall of any target item. The distinctiveness of instructional input (how outstanding and memorable it is) is also an important learning enhancing factor. Personal investment, how much the learning taps into an individual’s emotions and personal background increases retention, too. Hence, in choosing topics and learning materials learner opinions and tastes should always be taken into account (e.g. personalized reading-for-enjoyment activities).
  1. Grammar taught explicitly can be acquired – On condition that it is practised extensively, in context, and through masses of communicative practice which starts from controlled tasks and progresses through increasingly challenging unstructured ones. The process is a lengthy one so it may require training students to work on it independently, too. Implications: recycling is imperative and must occur mostly through the cognitive-control enhancement dimension, i.e. less gap-fills and written translation and more oral semi-structured and unstructured tasks. To enhance grammar acquisition the exceptions to the rule governing an ‘X’ structure should be taught before the dominant rule, e.g. irregular before irregular forms (see my article ‘Irregular before regular…’ for the psycholinguistic rationale for this approach).
  1. Corrective feedback is important, especially at the early stages of instruction – However, in order to be effective it must be processed by the brain long and deeply enough for it to be rehearsed in Working Memory and stored permanently in Long-term memory. Hence, any feedback practice on an erroneous executed ‘X’ item must :
  • Be distinctive;
  • Engage learners in deep processing;
  • Recycle the corrective feedback;
  • Be carried out through various means in order to provide more contextual cues for its recall;
  • Not limit itself to treating the symptom (i.e. the error) but also and more importantly the root cause (whether lack of knowledge, processing inefficiency, etc.)
  • Bring about learner intentionality to eradicate the error (i.e. motivate them to address the error in the future in a sustained effort to eliminate it).

(Conti, 2004)

  1. Learning strategies can be taught – On condition that a persuasive rationale for their instruction is provided; that they are modelled and scaffolded effectively and are practised very extensively through a variety of contexts (Cohen, 1998; Macaro, 2007)
  1. Metacognition should be modelled regularly – enhancing learner metacognition is imperative as a learner who knows how to learn and perform best is a learner who is bound to be more successful. Research shows clearly that highly metacognizant individuals are more successful at L2 learning (Macaro, 2007). Ideally, teaching should regularly scaffold holistic and task specific metacognition by prompting students to monitor and evaluate every level of their language learning and performance. The same approach concisely outlined in point 9 applies here.
  1. Individual variables must be assessed at the beginning of instruction – Learner individual factors may inhibit or facilitate learning. Ideally, at the beginning of instruction it may be helpful (but not always viable, I know…) to obtain as much information as to the following students’ characteristics
  • Previous history as language learners;
  • Personality traits;
  • Learning strategies;
  • Learning preferences (NOT learning styles – but rather how one enjoys learning)
  • Language proficiency across all skills;
  • Language aptitude;
  • Personal interests;
  • Processing efficiency (e.g. how well learners process language);

    This is very time consuming and does require quite a lot of resources and expertise.

  1. Sources of divided attention must be controlled for – This is the most obvious learning principle (Eysenk, 1988); that is why I placed it last. In a lot of UK state school classrooms to expect every student to be focused 100 % of the time is unrealistic. However, in settings where behavior management is not an issue, teachers should endeavour to minimize any distraction stemming from any sources which are directly under their control. One of them is the excessive manipulation of digital media (e.g. app smashing) which hijacks learners’ finite attentional resources away from language processing. Digital media can be effective target language learning enhancers, but must be used judiciously to expand not shrink learning.

In conclusion, as already stated above, the above list is by no means exhaustive. It only includes some of the many pedagogic principles which, in my opinion, ought to underlie any instructional approach regardless of the educationl setting and espoused theory. Unfortunately, something important is missing: how should one implement the above principles in curriculum design, lesson planning and across all four macro-skills? Some of the answers can be found in the other articles on this blog. More answers will be provided in the sequel to this article in the very near future, in which I will concern myself with how those principle should inform pedagogy vis-à vis the four macro-skills, grammar, translation and learning strategy instruction.

Irregular before regular – maximizing explicit grammar instruction by inverting traditional instructional sequences

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Grammar teaching, Uncategorized

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In most coursebooks and schemes of work adopted by UK MFL education providers, the exceptions to a given grammar structure are usually taught after the dominant rule governing that structure has been imparted. In the present post I argue that in many cases inverting the teaching sequence may have a more beneficial impact on acquisition. The rationale for this approach is rooted in the way the brain forms and revise the L2 Interlanguage system.

When a learner is taught a grammar rule, the brain creates a cognitive ‘structure’ that s/he will consolidate through much receptive exposure and production. As already discussed in my post on how L2 grammar ‘rules’ are acquired, when a grammar structure is in the process of being automatised, the brain tends to be extremely circumspect in accepting as ‘correct’ – and consequently ‘learnable’ – any use of that structure which does not match the declarative knowledge (or mental rule representation) stored in Long-Term Memory which refers to it. This is particularly true of the final stage in L2 grammar structure acquisition – Andersons’s (2000) Strengthening process. During this stage, the brain needs to be particularly impervious to any alteration to the rule system referring to that structure in order for that system to be stable and avoid encoding ambiguity. For any successful cognitive restructuring of an existing grammar rule to occur two conditions must be met:

  • The grammar rule one wants to restructure must be fully acquired for any exception to it to be incorporated; only then will the brain be more likely to ‘see’ the exception to that rule as a separate subsystem which does not pose any ‘threats’ to the dominant rule system;
  • The exception to the rule must be processed by the brain numerous times in salient and meaningful contexts; this entails that exceptions to a given rule which do not occur frequently in the language processed in classroom or out-of-the-classroom L2-based activities are less likely to be internalized as they will be ‘masked’ so to speak by the dominant rule.

Let us look at an example: teaching the Passé Composé in French. Coursebooks normally begin with the verbs forming this tense with ‘Avoir’ and after a few lessons move on to the ‘Etre’ verbs. Whilst some of the more able and focused learners can cope with this, in my experience many learners cannot. Very often, teachers may believe students have acquired mastery over the two sets of rules based on their learners’ ability to perform successfully at cloze tasks or other mechanical grammar activities. However, in less structured activities (e.g. spontaneous speech) errors in this area will be usually rife.

Issues in acquiring the exception to the dominant Passé Composé rule are exacerbated by the fact that very few of the verbs requiring Etre are high frequency verbs, hence the students do not usually receive great exposure to them when processing classroom or naturalistic French input. This will make restructuring of the ‘have + past participle’ rule more difficult.

In this case, teaching the ‘Etre’ verbs before the ‘Avoir’ ones is a more effective strategy; once acquired the exception (Etre + past participle) through extensive modelling and practice, the learners will find it easier to learn the dominant rule due to the very frequent occurrence of ‘Avoir Verbs’ in classroom or naturalistic target language input.

The same applies to any other grammar structure where the exceptions to the rule do not occur very frequently in the instructional or naturalistic target language input. Think about irregular past participle such as ‘reçu’, ‘vecu’, ‘su’, etc. which are notoriousy less easy for students to acquire than ‘pris’ or ‘fait’, for instance.

In conclusion, L2 teachers, curriculum designers and course-book writers may want to invert the traditional instructional sequence whereby irregular forms are taught after the regular ones. Moreover, before moving from the less dominant ‘X’ rule sub-system to the dominant one, they ought to ensure as much as possible that the former has been internalized through masses of practice; in other words, that the learners master the use of the target grammar structure not simply in terms of knowing the rule but also in terms of cognitive control over its use, under Real Operating Conditions (see my post on ‘Cognitive Control’ if not clear as to what I mean here).

The case for translation in foreign language instruction

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Uncategorized

Introduction

This article was inspired by www.frenchteacher.net Steve Smith’s very informative and insightful post ‘What is the point of translation” (http://tinyurl.com/ooxjxeg) in which he clearly outlines the pros and cons of adopting translation in the MFL classroom. I strongly recommend Steve’s brilliant article – a must-read for MFL teachers. The present post is meant as a way to add a research ‘edge’ to and expand on Steve’s very valid points.

The controversy over translation

Whether translation is a useful  learning tool or not is still very controversial amongst L2 educators (Brown, 2002). Why? Mainly because not much research has been carried out on the extent of its impact on L2 proficiency. Moreover, at least until recently, translation has been out of favour with large part of the teacher community because of the following reasons:

  • It is associated with the Grammar translation approach;
  • It is assumed that L1 use in the classroom hampers L2 acquisition;
  • Translation is seen by many as a mechanical transfer of meaning from one language to another – not a communicative activity;
  • Translation tasks are perceived as boring;
  • Translation is seen as independent of the other four skills;
  • Translation takes up lots of valuable time that could be devoted to more beneficial communicative activities;
  • Translation is believed to be appropriate only for training translators.

However, attitudes towards translation have been gradually shifting recently, especially in the last 10 -15 years. As Duff (1994) points out, translation is a real-life task that happens everywhere around the world in a wide range of contexts. In the MFL classroom, students translate for their classmates L2 items they do not understand on a daily basis. When visiting a foreign country, L2-knowers translate for non L2-knowers signs, notices, announcements, etc. When socializing with foreigners, interpreting is a common occurrence, too. And I would add to this that, when using the internet, our learners draw upon translation more than often in their interaction with social media or other knowledge sources – whether through dictionaries or other digital tools. Finally, Kern (1994) found that most teachers agree that mental translation into one’s L1 is inevitable when reading.

Moreover, research in Good Language Learner Strategies has found that more effective students often “refer back to their native language(s) judiciously [translate into L1] and make effective cross-lingual comparisons at different stages of 293 language learning” (Naiman et al, 1978:14). Increasingly, studies suggest a facilitative role of translation or L1 transfer in students’ language learning (e.g. Omura, 1996; Prince, 1996; Cohen & Brooks-Carson, 2001). In Horwitz’s (1988) study the majority of German (70%) and Spanish (75%) students believed that learning a foreign language is largely a matter of learning to translate from English into their L1. Prince (1996) noted that students often believe that learning through translation, with the new word being linked to its native-language equivalent, is more effective than learning vocabulary in context.

Hsieh (2000) reported that translation benefited his Taiwanese students’ L2 reading strategies, vocabulary acquisition, whilst enhancing their cultural background knowledge: 85% of his informants reported that translating helped them pay attention to the coherence and contextualization of English reading text; 65% thought that they became more aware of multiple meanings of an English word; and 62% felt that translation helped extend vocabulary knowledge and reading skills. On the whole, these students believed that the adoption of translation had a desirable effect on their English reading and vocabulary learning.

Several studies (Zhai, 2008; Cumming, 1989; Uzawa, 1996; Kobayashi & Rinnert,1992; Cohen & Brooks-Carson, 2001) have investigated the effect of composing in L1 and then translating into L2. Zhai (2008) concluded that the lower-level learners benefit most from the translated writing. Similarly, Cumming (1989) reported that inexpert French ESL writers use their first language to generate content, and expert writers, in contrast, use translation not just to generate content but to verify appropriate word choice

Dagiliene (2012) found that “ translation activities are a useful pedagogical tool. When introduced purposefully and imaginatively into language learning programme, translation becomes a suitable language practice method for many students. When integrated into daily classroom activities translation can help students develop and improve reading, speaking, writing skills, grammar and vocabulary. Translation in foreign language classes enhances better understanding of structures of the two languages and also strengthens students’ translation skills. It is an effective, valid tool in the foreign language learning and can be used in the university classroom to improve knowledge in English. Still, translation should not be overused and should be integrated into language teaching at the right time and with the right students”.

My case for translation

Before being a teacher I worked as an interpreter and translator (English to French /Italian and viceversa) for about three years. A lot of the written translations involved highly specialized vocabulary that is not normally learnt in school or in a naturalistic setting. It was very challenging, but I learnt loads and not just in terms of vocabulary and grammar; it definitely improved my accuracy, especially in terms of those ‘horrible’ little function words that every L2 learner struggles with: e.g. prepositions.

L2-to-L1 translation tasks, especially when carried out with the support of a bilingualised dictionary and pitched at the right level of challenge can do marvel in terms of linguistic proficiency enhancement; provided, that is, that they are carried out as part of a well-sequenced inter- and intra-lesson series of tasks which recycles the target vocabulary and structures systematically. The following are, in my view, the most important benefits of translation as an instructional tool:

  • Vocabulary consolidation and expansion – this is demonstrated by a number of studies and is pretty self-evident;
  • Noticing grammar and lexical collocations in context– by this I refer to Schmidt’s (1990) noticing hypothesis, whereby spotting the difference between the L1 and L2 usage of a given grammar structure sparks off the acquisition process of that structure ( i.e. the cross-lingual comparison that Naiman et al, 1978, mentioned above, alluded to). An example from a recent lesson: I wanted my students to notice verb-subject inversion in Spanish, but I wanted them to do so in context and without any input whatsoever from me. As I was working out a teaching strategy which would prompt that process I immediately thought of translation; it would have definitely forced them to ask me and/or themselves the question: where is the subject of this sentence? And indeed, when I did ask them to translate a text which included a few instances of verb-subject inversion the next day, it did spark off many questions along this line.
  • Rigor / Focus on accuracy – In the most common reading tasks staged in MFL classrooms, student can ‘get away’ with just ‘getting’ the main gist of the text or spot the required details through the use of para-textual or contextual cues. However, when asked to translate, they cannot operate impressionistically all of the time. They need to interpret the meaning of each and every word and make sense of each syntactic unit. This focuses the learner on grammar and syntax as well since, even when they use dictionaries, they will often have to analyze the grammar to infer meaning.
  • ‘Resourcing’ strategies enhancement – in my Ph.D study I identified ‘resourcing’ as one of the most powerful language learning strategies in terms of vocabulary, spelling and grammar knowledge acquisition. Translation tasks whether from the L1 to the L2 or viceversa will require students to resort to dictionaries, more advanced target language knowers or online forums (e.g. http://www.wordreference.com).
  • Ease of differentiation – It is easy to cater for different abilities through translation tasks. If the translation involves sentences, one can create subsets of sentences for each ability group in the class; when it involves longer texts (e.g an 80 words e-mail), one can design them in such a way that the language starts easy and becomes increasingly complex.
  • Control on input/output – It is one of the tenets of my approach to foreign language instruction that before involving students in unstructured / unplanned activities one should engage them in fairly extensive controlled practice (from easy to incrementally challenging). Translation is very valuable in the context of this approach as it is one of very few tasks that gives the teacher total control on student output. An example: your students are going to perform an oral task that you have carried out several times before in the past in the same topic areas. You will have practised the relevant lexical items already as discrete items and in the context of reading and listening texts. Now, prior to the task you may want to prepare them for the larger units of meaning they are going to attempt to convey in the oral interaction (i.e. sentences); knowing what kind of sentences they are likely to produce in the performance of the target task – based on past experience – you can ask the class to translate them on mini-boards, on a google-doc (displayed on the classroom screen/interactive whiteboard/Apple tv) or through a card game. That should facilitate the ensuing task.

Important caveats and guidelines for translation tasks implementation

The reader should note the following important caveats which, in my view, should be heeded in the adoption of translation as a learning tool:

  1. Translation tasks are best given as homework, unless they are used as relatively short and snappy starters, plenaries or pre-task warm-ups with more confident learners;
  2. Translation tasks must be logically integrated in the learning flow of a lesson or series of lessons. L2 to L1 translation, can occur at any point in an activities sequence; however, L1 to L2 translation tasks should only be staged after extensive practice in the vocabulary and grammar structures they include have been practised extensively. In the language-gym.com/work-outs modules, for instance, L2 to L1 translation only occurs at end of a sequence of 10-15 vocabulary building/reading activities;
  3. Translation tasks are not for everyone; teachers need to be careful in adopting translation with less able or less motivated earners;
  4. Comprehensible input (from L2 to L1) and achievable output (from L1 to L2) should be the guiding principle in the selection or design of translation tasks. Vigotsky’s zones-of-proximal-development should be borne in mind in designing or selecting translations;
  5. Since translation is perceived by many students as a ‘boring’ task (Dagiliene, 2012), teachers need to ensure that translation tasks are as stimulating and imaginative as possible as well as relevant to what the students are learning, the objective of the lesson and the preceding sequence of activities;
  6. Translations should not be randomly selected using merely relevance to the topic as a guiding principle; they should recycle as much as possible the target vocabulary and grammar;
  7. In L2 to L1 translation, the target sentences / texts should contain as many contextual clues as possible in order to facilitate the inference of unfamiliar language items;
  8. Students should be given access to bilingualised dictionaries (e.g. http://www.wordreference.com);
  9. Unless one is dealing with very advanced students, L1 to L2 translation including challenging and connotative language or complex idioms ought to be avoided; language should preferably be denotative and straightforward to translate;
  10. In order to avoid cognitive overload, sentences including complex subordination should be avoided in L2-to-L1 translation with less advanced learners;
  11. It may be advisable to scaffold L1 to L2 translation for less advanced learners by cueing students to the problematic nature of specific language items. Colour coding, symbols or simply different fonts could be used to this effect. For example: in the sentence “I live in a big city” the adjective big may be written in bold as a reminder that there is something to be aware of in translating it into French (big in French precedes the noun, unlike the majority of French adjectives);
  12. Translation should not be overused as a classroom and even homework task, unless we are dealing with highly motivated and able learners.

In conclusion, translation can be very useful as a learning tool if one bears in mind the above caveats and guidelines. I believe the arguments I have put across in this article make a sufficiently strong case for adopting it in the MFL classroom or as homework fairly regularly – but judiciously, without overusing it. I particularly recommend the adoption of translation to teachers who, like myself, lay a lot of emphasis on unplanned oral interaction, as a way to balance the emphasis on communicative fluency with focus on form and accuracy.

Transcription – a much underused yet powerful micro-listening skills enhancer

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Translation, Uncategorized

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Being a music lover, many years ago (before sites like http://www.metrolyrics.com existed), as a learner of English, French, Spanish and German, I improved my listening skills and vocabulary repertoire by transcribing songs in those languages. Being forced to listen to each song over and over again, the process sharpened my ‘ear’ for the target language sounds whilst forcing me to use dictionaries in search for any word which matched whatever I heard the singer say often using the context to try and guess them. I learnt lots of new words in the process and my pronunciation improved, too, massively.

As a teacher, I have often recycled that learning strategy with my pre-intermediate to upper intermediate students, mostly as homework, but at times in class, too. The objective? Mainly to develop micro-listening skills and spelling, especially word-endings, so problematic for many learners of romance languages; but most importantly, to focus learners on the relationship between the target language phonemic and graphemic systems, which, especially in English and  French, is not always strightforward. As Macaro (2007) rightly notes, Transcription, defined as ‘the converting of authentic recorded text to written form by individuals with the freedom to listen and repeat as often as they wish’  is a much underused activity. He points out three advantages of learning tasks involving transcription.

  1. It practices phonological decoding (which in turns will impact on pronunciation);
  2. It enables the learner to practice analytical skills (by thinking through the separation of the morpho-syntax);
  3. It focuses students on spelling.

I would add a fourth advantage to transcription which relates to the post-task activities. In my experience, when – after completion of the task – the students listen to the same text again whilst reading the original (correct) script, they often experience a few ‘eureka’ moments when they notice the way phonemes relate to their graphemic form. Moreover, quite a few questions about target language phonology will be asked that teachers never usually hear after typical listening comprehension tasks. For instance, the other day, from an L1-Italian student: “Sir, why did he not pronounce the ‘h’ in ‘heir’? I thought you are supposed to pron ‘h’ in English!”. What is remarkable about this question is that I had made that point about the word ‘heir’ several times before in class; yet, the boy only noticed it in the context of this task, due to the greater focus it lays on phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

The following are three transcription tasks I use quite a lot. Teachers should note that for task 1 and 2 it is preferable not to use lengthy texts. Moreover, as I am sure it is evident, teachers should use easy texts to start with and may want to carry out vocabulary building pre-transcription tasks involving the language items found in the target text – especially the more linguistically challenging ones.

  1. Pure transcription of video or audio recording – students simply transcribe the passage they hear, writing down every word. This is more suitable for highly motivated and able groups.
  2. L1-scaffolded transcription – students are provided the L1-translation of the to-be-listened text on the left-hand side of a piece of paper and, whilst listening to it, they write out what they hear in the target language on the right-hand side. The rationale for providing the L1 translation is that it gives the learners some badly needed support when they struggle with more challenging words.
  3. Partial transcription tasks – the students are provided with a gapped transcript of the recording. The gaps involve entire sentences. This type of transcription task is useful in that the sentence preceding each gap helps the students in the decoding of the missing sentence, thereby eliciting the application of inference strategies.

I have been using transcription tasks for a very long time with my more able groups, especially as homework. I use it at KS3, too, with very short texts or sets of 7-8 sentences on a given topic and students find it extremely useful. Giving feedback on them is very simple: scan the transcript from the textbook, show it on the screen and ask the students to self- or peer-correct. The learning benefits cut across several dimension of language acquisition and go well beyond micro-listening skill enhancement. They involve gains in vocabulary, spelling and even grammar and syntax as feedback will inevitably concern itself with ending mistakes.

Combining transcription tasks with narrow listening activities (see my blog on Narrow listening) creates, in my experience, an amazing powerful learning synergy which addresses a wide range of macro- and micro-listening skills components by recycling vocabulary and grammar structures at every possible level of target language processing.

Finally, let us not forget that apart from its value as a teaching and learning strategy, Transcription is a skill that has a number of application in the academic and business world (journalism, social science research, interpreting, etc.).

The ‘student-K’ paradox- How ineffective classroom learning can enhance language proficiency and implications for MFL instruction

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

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Recently, I have been undertaking lots of research into vocabulary acquisition in order to enhance the learning potential of my website (www.language-gym.com) at a time when it is undergoing massive restructuring and expansion. But as always with ‘paper’-based research, I felt something important was missing: the student’s views on how learning occurs; not in its dry, ‘scientific’ representation by scholars and researchers, but as articulated by the learners’ themselves.

Hence, I turned to my students and, as I usually do every term, I carried out a few semi-structured interviews with my most effective and least effective students. As always, the findings were fascinating. Today, one student in particular, ‘K’, yielded the most interesting data ever, as they referred to an apparently paradoxical phenomenon that I had never heard of or read about before; what I will refer to, from now on, in my personal jargon, as the ‘student-K paradox’. But who is ‘Student K’? And what is this ‘student-K paradox?’

‘K’ is the dream language student every effective language teacher would love to teach and every less effective teacher would fear to have in their classes: the hyper-talented, driven, inquisitive and risk-taking student who, however meaty your lesson content is, however ambitious your learning intentions are, will always ask you for more – more words, more grammar, more resources, more challenge.

Despite never showing real interest for French or Spanish before the age of 11 – two years ago – and coasting through 2 years of French at Primary, K. has managed to attain at 13 a level of proficiency in both languages that I had never witnessed before in any individual of her age. Her spoken and written output is not only rich, varied, complex and accurate but seems to be produced effortlessly. Whilst interacting with her in spontaneous speech, one never detects any anxiety. What is particularly striking about her, is her vocabulary repertoire, which transcends by far the boundaries of an excellent GCSE student – and she is only Year 9!

But how did she get there? This is the most interesting bit; the answer is: because she felt that in year 5 and 6 she was not learning much in class. She felt that her teacher’s approach just wasn’t working for her. She gave too many worksheets, teaching too much grammar causing an information and cognitive overload not supported by effective recycling that K just could not handle. In addition, she felt the approach was overly prescriptive and ‘narrow’ in terms of learning scope; she felt she was not progressing and grew increasingly worried about it.

So, K decided to address the issue by taking on French grammar on her own, at home. She started googling the grammar points she felt her teacher did not teach her properly; study independently; taking notes; doing online activities; reading and translating independently, etc. until she ‘nailed’ the verbs and tenses she had not managed to learn in class. In other words, the anxiety she felt in class for not being able to learn from her teacher’s input paradoxically enhanced her learning as she self-initiated activities which widened her lexical repertoire and improved her knowledge of the target grammar. She would then try out the lexical and grammar items learnt through this process in class so as to obtain teacher feedback (vocabulary and grammar activation). It would be interesting to know whether K would have learnt more than she did autonomously had the teacher taught her more effectively. Probably not…

Another crucial acquisition factor she mentioned was the new teacher she had in Year 7 who allegedly inspired her to go beyond the vocabulary set by the book and the schemes of work. She found the lessons with the new teacher more fun – although in the interview she could not articulate why. The teacher would encourage her to be creative and risk-taking with the language and gave her additional vocabulary lists she would eagerly learn independently at home. Studying these vocabulary lists – in the most traditional way ever, i.e. rote learning – became almost an obsession for her.

Another strategy that she began using was to read the multilingual instructions that came with whatever product (e.g. electrical appliances, gadgets, computers) her or her parents bought, so as to learn new vocabulary. She also said that whenever she said or thought of a ‘cool’ phrase or sentence in English she would try to translate it into French using dictionaries or by asking the teacher for help with it.

Student K’s case is impressive in many respects and, if it were true of other talented linguists of similar caliber it would have important implications for learning. First and foremost, K’s story clearly illustrates how powerful facilitative anxiety can be in enhancing learning; facilitative anxiety, as conceptualized by Macintyre and Gardner (1989) refers to the state of arousal caused by mild levels of anxiety which may push a student to do better at something (e.g. my current approach is not working; I need to do something about it!). Obviously, this does not entail that teacher should deliberate be ineffective in class in order to foster effective autonomous learning. However, it does indicate that autonomous work by a student as young as K can yield amazing results; hence, teachers may have to find strategies to motivate students to learn vocabulary autonomously at home – easier these days due to the availability of mobile digital technology. Although equipping the students with effective vocabulary learning strategies may be important, K’s case shows that inspiring them, make them want to learn vocabulary independently may be more crucial.

K’s learning behaviour also seems to confirm Gu and Johnson’s (1996) finding that self-initiation and activation can play a huge role in vocabulary acquisition. K requested extra vocabulary lists and worked on them alone at home (self-initiation); she would then deliberately use the new words learnt from those lists in class to try them out in context to see if the use she made of them was accurate (activation). The implication is that teaching should concern itself much more than it currently does with modelling these two independent learning behaviours. I can identify with this, especially in my learning of English, Spanish, French and German; less so, with my Swedish and Malay – is this why I speak them much less fluently?

K’s use of vocabulary lists to learn new lexis is also interesting as it goes against what I have always said to my trainees. K does not use fancy mnemonic devices or engaging online vocabulary-building games. Yet, her vocabulary repertoire is vast and varied. This goes to show that motivation and the focal awareness it places on the target linguistic items can seriously impact vocabulary learning. To brush aside the old-fashioned way of using word pairs based on the argument that it is boring or obsolete may be wrong, after all. And K’s preference for word lists is echoed by a number of recent studies that show the superiority of this approach to vocabulary learning to the keyword technique.

Another important implication relates to G and T (gifted and talented) provision in schools. Teachers are often recommended to teach G & T students through higher order thinking tasks. On the other hand, K’s case defies this notion; learning L1/L2 word pairs from a vocabulary list does hardly involve higher order thinking skill. The implications for learning are that to best cater for our learners’ needs we may need to ask them what their preferred learning tools and strategies are rather than using our presumptions as to what best suits their higher cognitive and linguistic capabilities.

K’s learning strategy involving using multilingual translations, kind of echoes my point in a previous post on how parallel texts can foster vocabulary acquisition. It is an easy way to notice and learn the differences between the L1 and the L2 as well learn new words effortlessly.

Last, but not least, the impact of the inspiring teacher on K’s learning. K did self-initiate autonomous learning in order to compensate for the lack of progress in lessons; however, it was the inspiring teacher who brought her learning to another level by being less prescriptive than her predecessor and by letting K go beyond the learning intentions boundaries set in each lesson.

In conclusion, my interview with student K was a real ‘eye-opener’ as it defied many of my pre-conceptions about effective learning. Teachers ought to set aside some time every so often to interview students as a means to understand them better and sync their teaching to their needs – it can be one of the best professional development practices they may ever get. K’s account of how she learns vocabulary made me understand so much more about her and about students like her. These learners may not necessarily need to be involved in higher order thinking skills; they may simply need to be inspired and encouraged to learn autonomously in ways that best suit them.

Nine interesting foreign language research findings you may not know about

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Language acquisition principles, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

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In  this post I am going to share with the reader a very succinct summary of 9 pieces of research I have recently come across which I found interesting and have impacted my classroom practice in one way or another. They are not presented in any particular order.

  1. Green and Hecht 1992 – Area: Explicit grammar instruction and teaching of aspect

Green and Hecht investigated 300 German learners of English. They asked them to correct 12 errors in context and to offer an explanation of the rule. Most interesting finding: the students could correct 78 % of the errors but could not provide an explanation for more than 46 % of the grammar rules that referred to those errors. They identified a set of rules that were hard to learn (i.e. most students did not recall them) and a set of easy rules (the vast majority of them could recall them successfully). Their implications for teaching: the explicit teaching of grammar may actually not work for all grammar items. For example, the teaching of aspect (e.g. Imperfect vs Preterite in Spanish), would be more effectively taught, according to them, by exposure to masses of comprehensible input (e.g. narrative texts) rather than through the use of PPTs or diagrams on the classroom whiteboard/screen – in fact Blyth (1997) and Macaro (2002a) demonstrated the futility of drawing horizontal lines interrupted by vertical ones to indicate that the perfect tense ends the action.

My conclusions: I do not entirely agree with Blyth and Macaro that explicit explanation of grammar in the realm of aspect does not work and I do like diagrams (although they do not work with all of one’s students). However, I do agree with Green and Hecht (1992) that the best way to teach aspect is through exposure to masses of comprehensible input containing examples of aspect in context. The grammar explanation and production phase may be carried out at a later stage.

  1. Milton and Meara (1998) – Comparative study of vocabulary learning between German, English and Greek students aged 14-15 years.

197 students from the three countries studying similar syllabi for the same number of years were tested on their vocabulary. The findings were that:

1.The British students’ score was the worst (averaging at 60 %). According to the researchers, they showed a poor grasp of basic vocabulary ;

2.They spent less time learning and were set lower goals than their German and Greek counterparts;

3. 25 % of the British students scored so low (after four years of MFL learning) that the researchers questioned whether they had learnt anything at all.

The authors of the study also found that British learners are not necessarily worse in terms of language aptitude; rather, they questioned the effectiveness of MFL teaching in the UK.

My conclusions: this study is quite old and the sample they used may not be indicative of the overall British student population. If it were, though, representative of the general situation in Britain, teachers may have to – as I have advocated in several previous blogs of mine – consciously recycle words over and over again, not just within the same units, but across units.

Moreover a study of 850 EFL learners, by Gu and Johnson (1996), may indicate an important issue underlying our students poor vocabulary retention; they found that students who excelled in vocabulary size were those who used three metacognitive strategies in addition to the cognitive strategies used by less effective vocabulary learners : selective attention to words (deciding to focus on certain words worth memorizing), self-initiation (making an effort to learn beyond the classroom and the exam system) and deliberate activation of newly-learnt words (trying out using that word independently to obtain positive or negative feedback as to the correctness of their use) . Teaching should aim, in other words, at developing learner autonomy and motivation to apply all of these strategies independently outside the classroom.

  1. Knight (1994) – Using dictionaries whilst reading – effects on vocabulary learning

Knight gave her subjects a text to read on a computer. One group had access to electronic dictionaries whilst the other did not. She found that those who did use the dictionary and not simply guessing strategies, actually scored higher in a subsequent vocabulary test. This and other previous (Luppescu and Day, 1993) and subsequent studies (Laufer & Hadar, 1997; Laufer & Hill, 2000; Laufer & Kimmel,1997) suggest that students should not be barred from using dictionaries in lessons. These findings are important for 1:1 (tablet or PC) school settings considering the availability of free online dictionaries (e.g. www.wordreference.com).

  1. Anderson and Jordan (1998) – Rate of forgetting

Anderson and Jordan set out to investigate the number of words that could be recalled by their informants immediately after initial learning, 1 week, 3 weeks, and 8 weeks thereafter. They identified a learning rate of 66%, 48%, 39%, and 37% respectively. The obvious implication is that, if immediately after learning the subjects could not recall 66 % of the target vocabulary, consolidation should start then and continue (at spaced intervals – through recycling in lessons or as homework) for several weeks. At several points during the school year, I remind my students of Anderson and Jordan’s study and show them the following diagram. It usually strikes a chord with a lot of them:

ebbinghaus-graph

  1. Erler (2003) – Relationship between phonemic awareness and L2 reading proficiency

Erler set out to investigate the obstacles of learners of French as a foreign language in England. She studied 11-12 year olds. She found that there was a strong correlation between low level of phonemic awareness and reading skills (especialy word recognition skills). She concluded that explicit training and practice in the grapheme-phoneme system (i.e. how letters/combination of letters are pronounced) of French would improve L1-English learners’ reading proficiency in that language. This find corroborates other findings by Muter and Diethelm (2001) and Comeau et al (1999). The implications is that micro-listening enhancers of the like I discussed in a previous blog (e.g. ‘Micro-listening skills tasks you may not do in your lessons’) or any other teaching of phonics should be performed in class much more often than it is currently done in many UK MFL classrooms.

Please note: teaching pronunciation and decoding skills instruction are not the same thing.  Pronunciation is about understanding how sounds are produced by the articulators, whilst teaching decoding skills means instructing learners on how to convert letters and combination of letters into sound. Also, effective decoding-skill instruction occurs in communicative contexts (whether through receptive or productive processing) not simply through matching sounds with gestures and/or phonetic symbols.

  1. Feyten (1991) – Listening ability as predictor of success

Feyten investigated the possibility that listening ability may be a predictor of success in foreign language learning. The researcher assessed the students at pre-test using a variety of tasks and measures of listening proficiency. After a ten-week course she tested them again (post-test) and found that there was a strong correlation between listening ability and overall foreign language acquisition, i.e.: the students who had scored high at pre-test did better at post-test not just in listening, but also in written grammar, reading and vocabulary assessment. Listening was a better predictor of foreign language proficiency than any other individual factor (e.g. gender, previous learning history, etc.).

My implications: we should take listening more seriously than we currently do. Increased exposure to listening input and more frequent teaching of listening strategies are paramount in the light of such evidence. Any effective baseline assessment at the outset of a course ought to include a strong listening comprehension component; the latter ought to include a specific decoding-skill assessment element.

  1. Graham (1997) – Identification of foreign language learners’ listening strategies

This study investigated the listening strategies of 17-year-old English learners of German and French. Amongst other things she found the following issues undermining their listening comprehension. Firstly, they were slow in identifying key items in a text. Secondly, they often misheard words or syllables and transcribed what they believed they had heard thereby getting distracted. Graham’s conclusions were that weaker students overcompensated for lack of lexical knowledge by overusing top-down strategies (e.g. spotting key words as an aid to grasp meaning).

My implications are that Graham’s research evidence, which echoes finding from Mendelsohn (1998) and other studies, should make us wary of getting students to over-rely on guessing strategies based on key-words recognition. Teachers should focus on bottom-up processing skills much more than they currently do, e.g. by practising (a) micro-listening skills; (b) narrow listening or any other listening instruction methodology which emphasizes recycling of the same vocabulary through comprehensible input (N.B. not necessarily through videos or audio-tracks; it can be teacher-based, in absence of other resources); (c) listening with transcripts – whole, gapped or manipulated in such a way as to focus learners on phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

  1. Polio et al. (1998) – Effectiveness of editing instruction

Polio et al. (1998) set out to investigate whether additional editing instruction – the innovative feature of the study – would enhance learners’ ability to reduce errors in revised essays. 65 learners on a university EAP course were randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group who wrote four journal entries each week for seven weeks. Whereas the control group did not receive any feedback, the experimental group was involved in (1) grammar review and editing exercises and (2) revision of the journal entries, both of which were followed by teacher corrective feedback. On each pre- and post-tests, the learners wrote a 30-minute composition which they were asked to improve in 60 minutes two days later. Linguistic accuracy was calculated as a ratio of error-free T-units to the total number of T-units in the composition.

The results suggested that the experimental group did not outperform the control group. The researchers conjectured that the validity of their results might have been undermined by the assessment measure used (T-units) and/or the relatively short duration of the treatment. They also hypothesised that the instruction the control group received might have been so effective that the additional practice for the experimental group did not make any difference.

The implications of this study are that editing instruction may take longer than seven weeks in order to be effective. Thus, the one-off editing instruction sessions that many teachers do on finding common errors in their students’ essays to address the grammar issues that refer to them, are absolutely futile, unless they are followed up by extensive and focused practice with lots of recycling.

  1. Elliott (1995) – Effect of explicit instruction on pronunciation

Elliott set out to investigate the effects of improving learner attitude toward pronunciation and of explicitly teaching pronunciation on his subjects (66 L1 students of Spanish). He compared the experimental group (which received 10-15 minutes of instruction per lesson over a semester) with a group of students whose pronunciation was corrected only when it impeded understanding. The results were highly significant, both in terms of improved accent and of attitude (92 % of the informants being positive about the treatment). The experimental group outperformed the control group.

Implications: this study , which confirms evidence from several others (e.g. Elliot 1997; Zampini, 1994), confirms that explicit pronunciation instruction is more effective than implicit instruction whereby L2 learners are expected to learn pronunciation simply by exposure to comprehensible input. Arteaga’s (2000) review of US Spanish textbooks found that only 4 out of 10 Spanish textbooks include activities attempting to teach pronunciation. I suspect that the figure may be even lower in the UK. In the light of Elliott’s findings, this is quite appalling, as the mastery of phonology not only is a catalyst of reading ability but also of listening and speaking proficiency as well as playing an enormous role in Working Memory’s processing efficiency in general (see my blog: ‘ Eight important facts about Working Memory’).