Beyond imitation – Five L2 writing teaching techniques that work, yet few Modern Language teachers use

December 18, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) L2 writing, Uncategorized

Please note: this post was co-authored by Steve Smith of www.frenchteacher.net

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Introduction – Why modern language teachers need to re-evaluate their attitudes and strategies about teaching writing

In these writers’ experience, many foreign classrooms instructors’ attitudes and strategies about teaching writing are more product- than process-oriented. By this we mean that explicit writing instruction – when it does occur – tends to rely mostly on

(1) ‘imitation’ – the provision of lists of model phrases/sentences which in the best scenarios are ‘drilled in’ through gap-fill practice;

(2) explicit grammar instruction which is rarely contextualized in whole-discourse practice (e.g. essay writing);

(3) learning from feedback on written output (usually a creative piece of narrative or discursive essay) – which usually occurs through annotations on margins, lists of targets or, in the best scenarios, one-to-one conferences. Feedback usually tackles all the deficit areas through one set of corrections / conference session;

(4) essay writing practice – often from day one, in the belief that practice makes perfect.

Some teachers train their students to compose in their native language first and then translate the L1 output thereby generated into the L2. This cumbersome process, however, must be utterly discouraged by teachers if they want students to attain some degree of fluency in target language writing and become more ‘spontaneous’ writers. Moreover, as Kobayashi and Rinnert (1992) found, this approach does indeed lead to more complex L2 output, but also lead to making many more errors than composing directly in the L2, for obvious reasons: the sentences language learners create when composing in their native language are usually too cognitively challenging and linguistically complex for their existing levels of L2 proficiency. Hence, the translations are bound to be inaccurate. Finally, it is this kind of approach which encourages less resilient and committed students to ‘google-translate’.

None of the above focuses the learners explicitly on the process of writing intended as the transformation of concepts or ideas (or ‘propositions’ as cognitive pyschologists call them) into words and syntactic structures.

One scenario in which the process of writing is indeed focused on in the UK modern language classroom refers to the teaching of higher meta-components of essay composition, e.g. planning, prioritizing, organizing and evaluating ideas. In other words: content production and organization. To our knowledge, however, even this practice is not as frequent and systematic as it should be.

Another strategy is to engage students in L2 reading in the belief that the language items in the articles or narratives they read in class or as assignments will be internalized and eventually resurface in their written pieces. This is not an erroneous assumption if students do read frequently and extensively in the target language.

Our take on the above is that these approaches usually work with the more talented, committed, self-reliant and highly metacognizant language learners, especially those who are highly proficient writers in their first language. But what is the student is not a gifted L1 writer; does not memorize the lists of connectives, model phrases and key terms her teacher diligently prepared for her whilst writing her essay; does not read extensively outside the classroom; does not spend more than a few minutes’ time – as most students do – processing her teacher’s feedback and rarely refers to the targets set for her? How do we expect such students to improve their essay writing?

Strategies suggested in previous posts

In previous posts Gianfranco tackled the issue by suggesting that:

(1) teachers practice writing instruction which addresses different communicative and discourse functions/skills as discrete items in each lesson or set of lessons. The assignments set would engage students in intensive practice of those functions. So, for example, if the functions is ‘explaining’, instructors would teach a series of lessons on the relevant discourse markers (e.g. because, due to the fact that, etc.) – contextualized in the topic at hand – and provide in- and out-of-the classroom practice in those discourse markers. This would still be ‘imitation’, though, if the teachers simply provided lists and asked the learners to ‘get on with it’ and fill in a cloze text or make-up random sentences. It would focus on the process, however, if the students were asked to analyze the use of the discourse markers under study in model L2 texts; to work out different ways to convey the message contained in a sentence through using a range of discourse markers without significantly altering the meaning.

(2) teachers do not throw students in the deep end by asking them to write essay after essay from day one; but rather, that classroom and out-of-the-classroom activities focus on micro-writing, i.e. the process of writing an introduction/conclusion or developing one of the ideas brainstormed in the idea-generation phase into a paragraph.

(3) teacher feedback focus not simply on providing a correct L2 alternative to the student erroneous output (product-based feedback), but attempt to address the cognitive causes of learner deficits by collaboratively investigating the processes that underlie those deficits (process-based feedback). This entails that feedback on a piece of writing may be provided over several sessions each session focusing on different deficits identified in student output (e.g. one session on the relevance of some of the concepts selected by the students ; one on the organization of the essays; one on sentence level errors).

(4) parallel texts be used in order to raise learner awareness of the differences between L2 and L1 writing across a number of dimensions of the text. If done from the very early days of instruction, this kind of work can dispel the assumptions held by many language learners that the L2 is but a literal, word for word translation of the L1.

The writing process as transformation

In this post we shall tackle the issue from a different angle: we shall focus on one aspect of L2 writer proficiency development which is often neglected by modern language teachers: the development of linguistic variety (both in terms of vocabulary and grammar structures), clarity, concision and, most importantly, syntactic maturity (i.e. the ability to produce complex sentences). The rationale for choosing these aspects of writer development is motivated by the fact that, as Phillips (1996) rightly notes:

Currently, theorists regard writing not as a product but as a continuous process of arranging and re-arranging words and syntactic structures until a writer finds the ones which best communicate the desired idea or message.

Syntactic maturity is based on the principle that mature writers tend to use more transformations in their writing and therefore write with more syntactic complexity. William Strong says “that syntactic growth (in terms of increased sentence length, depth of modification, and subordination) is a natural and inexorable feature of normal language development ” (1986). In “An I-Search Perspective on Language/Composition Research” he identifies three indices of syntactic growth:

(1) increased noun modification by means of adjectives, relative clauses, and phrases;

(2) increased nominalization in clausal, infinitive, and gerund constructions;

and (3) increased depth of modification through embedding.

In the twenty-first century class, more than ever, teachers need to identify methods for teaching writing which provide students with choice and flexibility (both lexical and structural). Why ‘more than ever’? Because in this day and age, the ‘cut and paste’ attitude to processing and sharing knowledge is rampant. Hence, our learners need to be equipped with the cognitive and linguistic tools to transform whatever knowledge they process into their own words, effectively, not merely to avoid plagiarism, but also because transformation involves higher order thinking and consequently deeper learning and greater ownership over the information being communicated.

If we, as teachers, accept this premise, then the predominantly imitative / model-based approach to writing currently in use in most UK modern language classrooms needs to be replaced by or at least supplemented with a more dynamic approach which explicitly promotes and nurtures syntactic complexity by actively engaging the learners in more than mere imitation – i.e. the sheer application of a pre-packaged model; an approach, that is, that explicitly encourages the student writer to use the model phrases/sentences provided by teachers, L2 texts or reference materials in a transformational, creative and risk-taking fashion.

4.Beyond imitation

3.1 – Sentence-combining techniques

One set of techniques that does push writing instruction well beyond the boundaries of sheer imitation and has a highly successful track-record -evidenced by scores of L1 and L2 writing research studies – is Sentence combining, defined by Phillips (1996) as

A technique of putting strings of sentence kernels together in a variety of ways so that completed sentences possess greater syntactic maturity.

In her seminal review of L1 sentence combining studies Phillips (1996) concludes that

Most of the experiments on sentence combining relate sentence combining and cumulative sentence exercises to gains in syntactic maturity.

Mounting evidence indicates that L2 student writing, too, benefits from intensive sentence combining instruction (Cooper and Morain, 1980; Enginarlar, 1994; Riazi, 2002; Juffs et al., 2014).

3.1.1 Signaled combining.

Two sentences are provided and specific instructions for sentence construction are provided. Here is an example I have used with a pre-intermediate class

I have a sister (who)

Her name is Marie

The result would be :

I have a sister who is called Marie

Signaled combining is useful when one wants to drill in a particular grammar structure or connectives in a controlled linguistic environment.

3.1.2 Open sentence combining.

In this approach,the students are not cued. For example, the kernels below

I have a sister

My sister is called Marie

She is friendly, pleasant and helpful

I argue with her from time to time

she is too talkative

could be combined as

my sister, who is called Marie, is very friendly, pleasant and helpful but from time to time I argue with her because she is too talkative

As Mellon (cited in Daiker, 1985) notes, open combining has the advantage to allow the students to learn a variety of ways ‘to transform sentences, make linguistic choices, experiment with structures and discern which sentences produce the most effective results in written language.

3.1.3 The cumulative sentence (page 13)

This approach has Robert Marzano, Joseph Lawlor, Terry Phelps, Nancy Swanson, and Dennis Packard amongst its strongest advocates. The concept of the cumulative sentence evolved from Christensen’s belief that written composition is an additive process in which a writer begins with a major idea and then adds to it so that the reader can grasp the meaning.

The cumulative sentence, says Christensen, “is the opposite of the periodic sentence. . . . It is dynamic rather than static, representing the mind thinking. The main clause exhausts the mere fact of the idea. . . . The additions stay with the main idea”. A cumulative sentence contains a main clause and several modifying clauses. Here is an example:

she came to our house

she came yesterday

she was dressed in black

she was accompanied by her brother

her brother looked sad

Could be combined as :

she came to our home yesterday, dressed in black, accompanied by her brother who looked sad

As Phillips points out, cumulative sentences encourage students to vary their output, add metaphoric descriptions, rephrase confusing periodic sentences into clearer ones and eliminate redundant elements.

3.1.4 Whole-discourse exercises

These are more challenging but more useful if we are trying to forge effective essay writers as they do not confine syntactic transformation and manipulation to stand-alone sentences but contextualize them in the development of a concept or set of concepts. Whole discourse exercises build on the previous techniques by presenting the students with various sets of sentence kernels (Gianfranco usually uses 5 or six sets); the task: to create a sentence out of each set and then group the resulting sentences cohesively into a meaningful and logically arranged paragraph.

Mellon (1985) says that whole-discourse exercises have two benefits. The first is that by freeing students from concern with content, whole-discourse exercises help students improve their syntactic manipulations. The second is that whole discourse exercises help students improve writing both within and between sentences.

The way Gianfranco goes about creating whole discourse exercises is by decombining a paragraph from a textbook and asking the students to recombine it. Students enjoy it and learn a lot of vocabulary in the process, too.

3.1.5 Decombining

Decombining can be used as a starting point for any of the recombining activities described above, not simply for Whole-discourse exercises. In the absence of sentence combining exercises in published MFL materials, teachers can make their own by decombining sentences found in the coursebooks or L2 sources available to them.

However, decombining is a great learning activity for students, too, as by deconstructing texts they become more aware of the writing process, especially when they are required to analyze the choices made by the author. What Gianfranco normally does, is to ask the students to decombine a text in a given lesson and ask them to go back to it two or three lessons later and have a go at recombining it –without having the original in front of them, obviously.

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is an important skill to have and one which requires transformation. It develops students’ vocabulary by forcing them to use synonyms; their grammar/syntax by often having to drastically alter the sentence structure (e.g. from active to passive voice); it may even encourage the use of metaphors, imagery, analogy and other rhetorical figures in more adventurous learners.

One very fruitful activity Gianfranco carries out with his A2 students is to ask them to paraphrase sentences which sound ambiguous or even obscure in an attempt to enhance their clarity (he provides the sentence in the L2 with the intended meaning that the author failed to express effectively next to it).

Summarizing and Shrinking

Upper intermediate student-writers often lack concision. Summarizing is a very effective way to get students to learn to be concise, especially if they are given a word limit and are not allowed to repeat more than a very limited number of the language items included in the original text.

Shrinking, one of Gianfranco’s favourite writing activities, pushes the summarizing challenge a notch further by requiring the students to concentrate the meaning of a paragraph into a single sentence. A word or even character limit can be imposed, here, too. In the past Gianfranco has used Twitter for this activity – forbidding any word abbreviations/contractions or verb ellipses.

6. Tips

Do not spend too much classroom time on these activities – after a few lessons in which you would have modelled how to go about these activities (e.g. using think-aloud techniques) assign these activities as homework;
Distributed better than massed practice – Better do a little bit of the above every lesson, contextualized in the topic at hand, possibly after practising the vocabulary you will include in the sentence. Unless you have highly motivated or highly needy students, do not spend a whole lesson doing this – students may find it tedious. A lot of these activities make for excellent plenaries.
Avoid cognitive overload – Unless you are working with very proficient L2 writers, do not use too much unfamiliar language in the to-be-combined/paraphrased/shrunk texts.
Make it fun and/or competitive – sentence combining/paraphrasing and shrinking on MWBs or on Twitter under time conditions can easily be made fun and competitive.
Match to ability – whereas all of the above can be used with any of your upper intermediate learners, only the easiest forms of sentence combining and paraphrasing are suitable for your intermediate learners (e.g. signaled combining)
Extensive modelling – Do provide a lot of modelling before engaging the students into the more open ended of the above activities. There will be students who will find these activities very challenging. Since these are likely to be those who need this kind of practice the most, prepping them adequately so as to enhance their chances to succeed is paramount.

7. Concluding remarks

Much written instruction in UK high schools occurs through the imitation of models, feedback on writing practice and explicit grammar instruction. However, not much explicit and systematic effort is made to develop variety, clarity, concision and syntactic maturity, the ability to produce sentences that are longer, contain complex subordination and deeper modification. Yet, the attainment of these four goals is a must if we aim to forge effective writers and communicators in general.

Another reason to focus on the development of L2-learner ability to transform and manipulate language effectively refers to the fact that a lot of 21^st-century-student learning occurs through the digital medium, mostly on the Internet. Hence, today’s language learners need, more than ever, to be able to transform whatever L2 knowledge they find on internet based sources into their own words not only to avoid plagiarism but also to make it their own.

Sentence combining, Paraphrasing, Summarizing and Shrinking hold the potential to enhance these areas of L2 learner writing proficiency. The effectiveness of the sentence combining techniques discussed above is supported by a vast body of research evidence. As for the other three we could not locate any substantial research evidence. However, they worked well for us – as language learners – and for many of our students over the years.

We believe that if students received systematic practice in activities of this kind from their pre-intermediate days all the way to GCSE (intermediate to upper intermediate level), the notoriously huge gap between learner writing proficiency at the end of KS4 (14-16 years old) and the level of competence needed at KS5 (16 to 18 years old) would be significantly reduced.

More on this topic can be found in ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit’ , the book Steve Smith and I co-authored, published on http://www.amazon.co.uk

Using translation as a language-proficiency-enhancing technique – A teaching sequence

December 13, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Grammar teaching, L2 writing, Uncategorized

Please note: this post was co-authored with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net with some input from Dylan Vinales of GIS Kuala Lumpur

In a previous post Gianfranco provided the rationale for using translation in the MFL classroom rooted in common sense and cognitive theory. In that post the point was made that translation, a ‘legacy method’ frowned upon by many language educators for several decades, it is not simply a useful but a truly must-have skill if we are to prepare our students for life in the real world. Why?

Good translation skills can help you get scores of well-paid jobs and language knowers translate for other people on a daily basis. In the Internet age, possessing effective translation skills has become all the more important as (a) sources of information are often not entirely faithful to the original version and things get often lost in translation; (b) reading for gist can get us in trouble – even legal ‘troubles’ – when sharing something on social media or executing an online transaction; missing a crucial detail, such as failing to notice the negative nuance of a word or being misled by a false-friend cognate (e.g. ‘disposable’ which in Italian evokes ‘disponible’, ‘available’) a double negative, an unknown idiom or an obscure cultural reference can cause us to misunderstand the important part of a text.

Someone might object: doesn’t (b) above refer to effective reading skills? Yes and no. Research (as reported by Macaro, 2007) shows that less proficient readers (like the ones we teach at GCSE level in Britain) do often translate into their mother tongue when grappling with more complex and challenging text, rehearsing it in their working memory as they reconstruct meaning. I am a near native speaker of English and French and still find this strategy very useful when dealing with very complex literary texts. It eases the cognitive load and the processing of more challenging concepts.

As far as the benefits of translation for language learning please refer back to Gianfranco’s previous blog: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/07/12/translation-part-1-the-case-for-translation-in-foreign-language-instruction/ . Here’s a concise summary of the ways translation can benefits the novice-to-intermediate foreign language classroom:

Benefits of L2 to L1 translation (with dictionary)

– learning of new vocabulary in context;

– focus on detail – reading comprehensions do not require students to understand each and every word. Translations do. This often sparks off the use of a wider range of learning strategies (including dictionary use) than reading to answer comprehension questions does;

– because of the focus on detail translation is more likely to bring about the Noticing of new L2 structures than reading for comprehension would. Noticing is posited by many cognitive researchers as the starting point of the L2 acquisition process (see Schmidt’s, 1980,Noticing hypothesis)

– greater cognitive investment in the processing of L2 texts than reading. This is not necessarily always the case, but often, due to the necessity of having to translate each and every word, the learner will invest more time and effort processing the target text;

– the greater cognitive investment just mentioned above may lead to deeper learning than reading for comprehension would bring about;

– practice in the use of dictionaries, a lifelong learning skill;

– requires minimum preparation but can have high impact if used adequately.

Benefits of L1 to L2 translation (with dictionaries)

– enables teacher to ‘force’ students to focus on language items that other less structured writing tasks may allow students to avoid;

– allows teachers to recycle at will vocabulary and language structures that may not be used spontaneously by the students in other types of writing tasks;

– oral and written translations under time constraints are invaluable instruments for the assessment of oral/written fluency and constitute minimum-preparation starters/plenaries.

– elicits the use of lots of useful learning strategies and dictionary use;

– encourages greater focus on accuracy and on grammar and syntax – when it goes beyond word level;

– differentiation is easy.

The drawbacks are that some students do find translations boring, especially when they are long; some students may found it daunting; assessment is not always straightforward; there are not many examples in the current literature of how to use translation for teaching.

Rationale for this post

This post is motivated by the many queries Steve Smith (www.frenchteacher.net ) and I have received in the last four weeks by readers of our blogs asking how we would prepare students for GCSE level translation tasks. Steve has already written a great post listing a vast array of ways in which translation can be used to enhance language learner proficiency. This post should be seen as complementary to Steve’s in that it purports to provide a teaching sequence based on various L1-to-L2 translation tasks rather than a list of discrete activities.

The teaching sequence

When using translation, like any other learning technique we have to ask ourselves the all-important question: what is it for? Is it to drill in new vocabulary or consolidate ‘old’ language items? Is it to assess students’ oral or written fluency? Is it to teach dictionary skills? Is it to impart learning strategies/translation skills? Or is it to focus on connotative language and its nuances?

The sequence below can be used to enhance/consolidate vocabulary, grammar, fluency and translation strategies across all four skills. More translation-task-based sequences will follow in future posts. It should be noted that the sequence does not necessarily have to take one lesson.

Please note that this sequence presupposes that the students have declarative knowledge of most of the grammar structures included in the target translation task and of part of the vocabulary.

Step 1 – Planning

(a) Prepare or select the translation task. Make sure it is not too long. It should not take more than 20-25 minutes maximum for your average student to complete.

(b) Prepare/select four-five texts very similar in length and linguistic content to the target translation task with some comprehension questions. This is basically, what I call a narrow-reading task (see this example on https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/ks3-4-french-narrow-reading-on-hobbies-11098035 ), i.e.: a series of comprehension tasks based on texts that are extremely similar to each other (see my post on narrow reading and listening on this blog). Make sure the tasks include finding in the texts the L2 equivalent of L1 words.

(c) (Optional) If you have the time, prepare three or four more (shorter) texts with the same features for listening comprehension (narrow listening). It seems like a lot of work but it isn’t. All you have to do is to slightly modify the texts you produced for reading comprehension purposes by changing two or three details here and there. Five minutes’ work.

(d) Identify the words/structures you expect the students will have problems with and prepare a set of sentences in the L1 and one in L2 which feature them. Important: make sure the sentences are as similar as possible in grammar/syntax to the kind of sentences found in the translation task. Gap or cut in half the sentences in the target language by removing the key items you want the students to focus on. The gapped sentences in the L2 will be for aural processing; the ones in the L1 for written translation purposes.

Step 2 – Word level teaching

This can be flipped. Using Quizlet, Memrise, www.language-gym.com , etc. prepare a series of activities which drill in most of the key unfamiliar lexical items and the grammar structures included in the translation task.

Step 3 – Modelling of target language items through narrow reading

The modelling of the target language items occurs through narrow reading first as it is easier. Dictionaries are allowed. Narrow reading allows for recycling of the key target lexical and grammar items.

Step 4 – Eliciting selective attention to key items through listening with gap-fill

Use the gapped/cut-in-half sentences in the L2 that you prepared in Step 1 (d). You will utter the sentences at moderate speed (the purpose is modelling so speak clearly) to draw the students’ attention to the unfamiliar words/phrases you will have removed when you gapped them.

Step 5 – Reinforcing modelling through narrow listening

Same as Step 3 except that it is through the aural medium.

Step 6 (OPTIONAL) – Paying selective attention to the key target grammar items through grammaticality-judgement quizzes

Here you can stage a ‘Sentence auction’ whereby the students are presented with a number of sentences, some right, some wrong, containing the key items found in the target translation task. Each sentence has a price. Working in groups, the students must decide whether to buy or not the sentence the teachers wants to ‘sell’. If they refuse to buy when the sentence is wrong they win the equivalent of the sentence price; the same happens if they buy a sentence when it is correct. Conversely, if they buy a wrong sentence or refuse to buy a correct one they will lose money. The aim here is to focus the students on the kind of grammar mistakes that, in your experience, they are more likely to make in executing the target translation task

Step 7 – Sentence level translation

You can do this as a whole-class activity or in groups, turning it into a competition. Students translate the L1 sentences you prepared in Step 1 (d) under time conditions. The student(s) making fewer mistakes in each round win(s).

Step 8 – Translation task

You can go about this in two ways. 8a. If you want to assess fluency, you will do it under time constraints. You will break up the text in sentences and you will utter one sentence at a time.Equipped with mini white boards, the students will translate them into the TL in the time you allocated. 8b. If you are not bothered about their ability to operate in exam conditions, you will allocate the time you deem necessary for them to complete the task. Dictionaries allowed.

Step 9 – Follow-up

It would be ideal if you could set as homework a text which is extremely similar to the one done in Step 8.

Conclusion

This sequence does require some preparation time – about 45-60 minutes. However, we are confident the reader will see the advantages of the kind of recycling and selective attention to the key target items that this sequence brings about. The most important outcome of this sequence is that students, in our experience, get to the target task confident and prepared and usually do well. If a series of follow-ups of the kind envisaged in Step 9 occur, the gains obtained will become consolidated. The reader should note this is a ‘no-frills’ sequence, so to speak, devoid of fancy or flashy games; deliberately so, to be as low-effort as possible. However, we are sure there are ways to ‘spice it up’ and make it more engaging.

10 common shortcomings of secondary curriculum design and textbooks in the UK

November 8, 2015May 31, 2016 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

Please note: this post was written in collaboration with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net. Many thanks to Dylan Vinales of Garden International School, too, for the thought-provoking discussion we had on the topic prior to writing this.

Introduction

In this post I will concern myself with issues in typical secondary school MFL curriculum design as evidenced by the schemes of work – and the textbooks these are often based on – which in my view seriously undermine the effectiveness of foreign language instruction in many British secondary schools.

Effective curriculum design is as crucial to successful MFL instruction as effective classroom delivery is and must be based on sound pedagogy and skillful planning. As I intend to discuss in this post, much curriculum planning and textbook writing flouts some of the most fundamental tenets of sound foreign language pedagogy and neglects important dimensions of language acquisition. Although Steve Smith of www.frenchteacher.net – with whom I am currently writing ‘The MFL teacher handbook’ – noted in his blog that the new editions of some British textbooks are actually addressing some of the issues I am about to discuss, there is still much scope for improvement.

Issue n 1 – Coverage vs Time available

Schemes of work are typically over-ambitious as they often reflect the structure of the textbook adopted; they usually aim to cover a given topic (i.e. a chapter / module in the textbook) in 6-7 weeks. This does not allow the students to truly acquire the target material, especially when it comes to grammar structures. As I have showed in a number of previous posts, the acquisition of grammar structures which involve ending manipulations/agreement and differ substantially from their L1 equivalent may take months to internalize. Another problem is that schemes of work – when based on textbooks – often devote only one or two lessons to each of the five or six sub-topics that make up the unit-in-hand and then move on to the next sub-topic. This does often not allow for sufficient recycling.

Solution – obvious: teach less but in greater depth; recycle more.

Issue n 2 – Fluency: the neglected objective

In previous blogs I pointed out how effective foreign language teaching ought to aim at developing fluency across all four skills and especially into areas where speed of processing is paramount to be an effective communicator: oral interaction and interpersonal writing (e.g. instant messaging). Fluency was defined in previous post as the ability to produce intelligible oral or written speech in response to a stimulus at high speed. This is a crucial skill for students to develop if we want to enable them to use the target language in the real world, especially in the workplace. Yet, fluency rarely – if ever- features expicitly as a goal in UK MFL departments’ schemes of work. Hence, teachers neither plan for fluency development nor are allocated adequate resources and training to teach fluency. Nor do they formally assess fluency.

Moreover, the issue highlighted in the previous paragraph often works against the attainment of fluency as rushing through a unit entails neglecting horizontal progression. Without sufficient horizontal progression fluency cannot be obtained.

Solution – Plan for the attainment of fluency. Include activities to develop speech automatization and opportunities for its assessment.

Issue n 3 – Topic compartmentalization / Lack of recycling

Schemes of work – even those that are not based on textbooks – rarely recycle adequately. Many colleagues – obviously not language teachers – ask me why I have uploaded over 1,600 teaching resources in two years on http://www.tes.com and why I created a whole website devoted mainly to vocabulary teaching (www.language-gym.com). The answer is that textbooks and schemes of work usually compartmentalize teaching; term 1a one teaches topic X, term 1b topic Y, term 2a topic Z etc. Each time a topic or structure is covered, it is rarely consciously and systematically recycled in later units. I have had to produce my own worksheets and online resources to guarantee the necessary recycling; it has paid off, but teachers, as overloaded with work as they already are, should not have to do this.

Solution: include in the schemes of work a section in each unit headed ‘recycling opportunities’ and include activities aiming at consolidating old material. Also, make sure that each end of unit assessment tests students on material covered in previous units – or even previous years.

Issue 4 – What about communicative functions?

Most UK textbooks and MFL departments more or less explicitly adopt a weak communicative notional/functional syllabus with a variable focus (i.e. functions/notions + grammar). However, they usually patently neglect to focus adequately on important communicative functions. A glance at Finocchiaro and Brumfit’s (1983) classification of communicative functions (at http://www.carla.umn.edu/articulation/polia/pdf_files/communicative_functions.pdf ) will clarify what I mean. Much typical British secondary school teaching focuses mainly on Referential communicative functions and on only a few interpersonal functions. However, many Interpersonal and Imaginative functions are hardly touched on. Moreover, many important Personal functions are grossly neglected, too – although, I am sure you will agree, they are crucial in daily life.

In PBL-based schemes of work this issue is worsened by the nature of the approach adopted which focuses on the attainment of a product rather than interpersonal communication.

Communicative functions are pivotal to effective target language proficiency. They are way more important than many other things textbooks teach.

Solution: use Finocchiaro and Brumfit’s taxonomy to fill the gaps in this area that you will identify in your schemes of work. Make sure that you recycle functions over and over again throughout the year.

Issue 5 – The 2 neglected word-classes

Textbooks, schemes of work and specialized websites focus mainly on nouns and –tragically – neglect verbs and adjectives – and hence adverbs from which adjectives are obtained. Verbs, as I pointed out in previous blogs, are essential in order to acquire a high level of autonomous speaking competence (spontaneous talk). One of the reasons for this neglect, I suspect, is that state-school English learners are notoriously bad at conjugating verbs; hence, textbooks dumb down their comprehensible input and target vocabulary by including only few essential and often more ‘learnable’ verbs.

Solution: include lists of target verbs in the schemes of work. Using quizlet or memrise to create your own online activities to drill them in (in the infinitive). You could use my verb trainer at www.language-gym.com – the pictures help the students learn the verb meaning as they conjugate – or my Work-outs.

Issue 6 – How about improvisation?

Schemes of work are usually planned around specific topics, which, in England, repeat themselves every year – how boring! However, autonomous speaking competence (spontaneous talk) is about being able to talk ‘across topics’ so to speak; to be able to have a ‘natural’ conversation with a speaker of the target language which is not bound to a specific topic or sub-topic but touches different aspects of human life and experiences. MFL departments – at least to my knowledge – never really plan for this. Yet, nearly everyone these days states that spontaneous talk is high on their agenda.

Solution: plan for one or two lessons every now and then – maybe in between half-terms? – which are entirely dedicated to talking, reading, listening and writing in the target language without being tied down to a specific topic. A very easy-to-set-up task is a general conversation task where the students ask each other a wide variety of questions covering several topics, including some that have never been covered before – but that the students possess the linguistic tools to talk about.

Issue 7 – Grammar, the ‘poor sister’

This point is so obvious that I will not dwell too long over it. British textbooks devote a ridiculously small amount of space to grammar and to its recycling. Teachers have to toil on a daily basis to resource grammar teaching.

Solution: teach more grammar and recycle it to death (see my previous post: 16 tips for effective grammar teaching’.

Issue 8 – Intercultural competence

Textbooks and schemes of work often include sections about ‘La Francophonie’ or other facts about the target language civilization. However, one very important dimension of cultural awareness is nearly always missing: how to avoid culture shock or other ‘faux pas’ and, more generally, how to train students to deal with target language native speakers in a way which is culture-sensitive and can foster effective integration. In an era where the labour market is so globalized, intercultural competence has become an important lifelong learning skill which our students need to be equipped with.

Solutions: Cultural awareness teaching should be more about the (cross-cultural) skills than the facts.

Issue 9 – Variety of topics

Every year, from year 6/7 to year 11, English teenagers keep learning about the same blocked topics, often relearning the same words. Here again, textbooks play an important role. As I tweeted earlier on today, most English textbooks seem to replicate the Metro textbook blueprint.

Solution: try new topics or combinations of topics. Prioritize topics teenagers are really interested in like relationships, entertainment, gadgets, social media, fashion, etc, rather than house chores or pets…

Issue 10 – Teaching sequences

The ‘Metro textbook blueprint’ is evident in all its successors not only in terms of the topics which receive more emphasis, but also in the way they sequence grammar structures. In a future post Steve and I will propose how we believe grammar structures should be sequenced and the rationale for it. There are many things we believe textbook writers and curriculum designers in the UK should change. One thing that springs to mind, for instance is modal verbs (e.g. Vouloir, Pouvoir, Devoir in French). One wonders why they are always introduced quite late when they are so important in everyday communication and have very high surrender value. Imagine how ‘handy’ they can be to a beginner learner, before they even start conjugating verb, followed as they are by infinitives. Moreover, their acquisition earlier on would partly address issue 5 by enabling the students to use many verbs at will quite easily.

Solution: Consider the surrender value and learnability of the target grammar structures. Would learning them earlier or later facilitate acquisition in your opinion? If so, don’t wait for the textbook sequence to teach them.

Conclusion

Some of the shortcomings in the typical secondary school MFL curriculum and course-book design I have just discussed are much more important than others. My pet hates are the lack of recycling, the insufficient focus on oral fluency, the neglect of verbs and adjectives and the sketchy and superficial approach to grammar. The reader should note that I have deliberately not dealt with the teaching of lifelong learning skills as I do believe that MFL teacher contact time being so limited, most of them are best taught explicitly as separate from the foreign language curriculum – unless, of course they overlap with the aims of the course (e.g. independent enquiry skills, problem solving, intercultural communication, effective communication, empathy, resilience).

Your greatest priority as a curriculum designer – and every teacher to a certain extent is one – should definitely be the systematic recycling of the target vocabulary, grammar and communicative functions and the allocation of sufficient time for deep encoding to occur. This will entail doing away with the one chapter per half-term approach, a tragic legacy of the Metro-based Schemes of Work.

Foreign language instructors’ most frequent pitfall and implications for teaching and learning

November 1, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Grammar teaching, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

Please note: this post was written in collaboration with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net

As already discussed in previous posts, my instructional approach to foreign language teaching is rooted in Cognitive theories of L2 acquisition and, more specifically, in Skill theory (e.g. Anderson, 2000). Hence, my teaching is based on two main assumptions: (1) for any macro-skill to be fully acquired each and every micro-skill that that macro-skill can be broken down into must be fully acquired, too; (2) certain linguistic features are less teachable than others based on the cognitive challenges they pose to the learner, not on innate mechanisms (e.g. you would not ask a child who has not learnt the multiplication tables to solve a complex equation); many of the cognitive challenges will be of course posed by L1 negative transfer.

In twenty-five years of professional practice Steve and I have seen many language instructors frequently flout the above principles, often due to the pace and content dictated by ‘sketchy’ schemes of work or to the typical British MFL textbook structure. The new PBL trend further exacerbates the issue by neglecting the skill-building dimension of language learning.

This post concerns itself with a phenomenon which most teachers observe day-in day-out in their classroom with novice to intermediate learners: recurrent learner errors in the execution of the following micro-skills, which refer to the execution of high frequency and quite important linguistic features in most of the languages taught in the UK (e.g. French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin etc.)

Effectively manipulating word endings to make subject and verb agree
Effectively manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of gender
Effectively manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of number
Effectively manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of case (German and Latin)
Placing adjectives after noun (French, Italian and Spanish)
Positioning direct/indirect pronouns before (most) verbs
Effectively decoding target language words (ability to turn letters into sound)

Teachers complain about the recurrence of student errors in these areas on a daily basis. What is most worrying is that many of these errors occur in written output, when, that is, an L2 writer has potentially more time to monitor and, consequently, to self-correct. This can only mean two things: (1) either the student lacks declarative knowledge of the grammar structure to deploy or (2) s/he has failed to apply the grammar rule due to cognitive overload. Both scenarios indicate that the to-be-applied structure is far from being routinized. Why?

The answer: for any skill to be routinized, the brain must create what Skill-theorists call a Production. A Production is like a program embedded in our Brain’s operating system which is triggered by a cue. Skill-theorist call this cue the ‘IF-condition’ of a production and the brain’s response to that cue the ‘THEN condition’. For instance, in the case of Noun-adjective agreement,

IF an adjective qualifies a noun (in French)

THEN that adjective’s ending must agree in gender and number with the noun

IF the noun is feminine

THEN the adjective adds an ‘-e’ to the ending, unless it is irregular or ends in ‘-e’ already

This Production is – at least in theory – easy to create at declarative level (i.e. as a rule). The problem is that an English-speaking novice/intermediate student’s first language will work against its application at the early stages of internalizing the rule, because of negative transfer (in English you do not change adjectival endings in this context); this is especially the case when a student is working under time constraints or communicative pressure and is not asked to focus explicitly on agreement. Hence, two, three or even four lessons on adjectival agreement will never be sufficient, like many teachers seem to presume. They are often satisfied that their students seem to get adjectival agreement right during the lessons explicitly devoted to that grammar structure and they move on to another topic or skill.

The problem is that after two, three or even ten lessons that Production is only at the very early stages of its routinization. It will take many instances of application and positive feedback on its deployment for that Production to be automatized (i.e. applied quickly and effortlessly) as the brain is very cautious before ‘deciding’ to create any new permanent cognitive structure. Hence the fundamental micro-skills listed above must be practised as extensively as possible whether in class or through homework – ideally in every single lesson – before one can assume they have been mastered.

Although I am sure that most teachers would agree with most of the above, I wonder how many MFL classroom practitioners actually focus consistently and extensively enough on ensuring that they are effectively routinized. Yet, unless we do not care about accuracy, lack of routinization of the above micro-skills can undermine the subsequent learning of important complex structures and, consequently, progression along the L2 acquisition continuum. Here is an example. Think about the first three items in the micro-skills list above:

Manipulating word endings to make subject and verb agree
Manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of gender
Manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of number

A few years ago I observed a lesson where the instructor was teaching her students (French) reflexive verbs in the Perfect tense (e.g. je me suis habillée) where the Past Participle has to agree in gender and number with the subject. It was clear to me not only that the students had not at all routinized the three micro-skills above but that they had not received much practice in verb-ending manipulation at all – a fundamental skill to master when learning a Latin language. Their processing ability was poor and this hindered their progression throughout the lesson. They were clumsy and slow in manipulating verbs and this impacted their accuracy and fluency.

Much of the cognitive overload that hinders language acquisition in French, Spanish, Italian and German learning is due to the insufficient practice students receive across those micro-skills. The Anglo-Saxon brain being not wired for and not used to manipulating verb and adjectival endings, a great amount of effort must be put on a daily basis by teachers on practising this specific set of micro-skills consistently and systematically since the very early stages of learning. As I intend to show below, it is easy, not very time consuming and it pays enormous dividends. In my case, with CIE as an examination board, getting my student to be 100% correct in verb and tenses formation is a must, since the written exams assessment scheme requires high levels of accuracy (e.g. the written piece must feature the accurate use of 18 different verbs).

The same applies to any of the other micro-skills on that list. Consider word order of adjectives. Taken in isolation, the rule/Production “IF an adjective qualifies the noun, THEN place the adjective after the noun” seems easy to grasp and acquire. And at the end of a single lesson on it, teachers usually feel confident that it has been learnt. However, the above Production, when combined with the other related productions “IF the adjective qualifies a noun it must agree in gender and number with that noun” and “IF the noun is feminine THEN the adjective adds an ‘-e’ becomes much less easy to handle effectively and efficiently in cognitive terms unless the other two Productions have been highly routinized. Processing of the above Productions becomes even more cumbersome with novice learners when it occurs in the context of the creation of a complex sentence where they are coping with several structures simultaneously (e.g. conjugating the verbs in the sentence, choosing the right preposition, retrieving the correct lexis).

If novice to intermediate learners are not provided sufficient practice in the above micro-skills the risk of L1 transfer impacting student output will always be present, especially when the learners are working under pressure in contexts where there is not much time for self-monitoring (e.g exams, oral performance). This may lead to the fossilization of erroneous forms (i.e. the permanent internalization of mistakes) even when the learners know the rule(s) relative to those forms. This is a widely documented phenomenon in English secondary schools.

In conclusion, curriculum designers and teachers must reconsider the way they go about progression, in my view, or at least allow for more practice of the above micro-skills and related structures. Teachers using Independent Inquiry / PBL must be particularly cautious as this aspect of L2 learning is often neglected in their instructional approach. Creative ways must be found to embed any of the activities below.

Implications for the classroom – curriculum design and minimum–preparation teaching strategies

Systematic recycling in Schemes of Work: in the first two or even three years of instruction, schemes of work should make explicit reference to the above micro-skills and allow for constant recycling. Opportunities for regular formative assessment aimed at evaluating the routinization of the micro-skills should be included, too.

Micro-skill tracking : As I already advocated in a previous post, the use of a tracking sheet where one logs all the instances of recycling of each micro-skill in lessons can be extremely handy in assisting recycling

Grammaticality judgment quizzes (to be used only at initial stages): Write three phrases on the board of which only one is accurate: e.g. une belle femme – une beau femme – une bel femme

Gap-fills with or without options (still for the initial stages only): there are plenty of free gap-fills activities online (e.g. www.language-gym.com; www.languagesonline.org.uk ). I have uploaded lots of free ones onto www.tes.co.uk. www.frenchteacher.net has loads, too.

Online self-marking verb trainers (at any stage): I find verb-trainers very valuable to the point that I created my own (free at www.language-gym.com). I ask my students to go on it every day for five minutes purely as a habit formation tool. Do not presume that just because they get 100 % on a verb trainer module and they can conjugate verbs very fast they have routinized verb use, obviously. They need to demonstrate correct deployment of verbs under real operating conditions, first.

Mini White board activities (novice to advance stage depending on complexity)

5a. Translations (my favourite);

5b. Verb training – give pronoun, verb and tense and ask students to conjugate on the spot;

5c. From sound to letter (decoding skills) – pronounce a sound (e.g. ‘uah’ – in French) and ask students to write the combination of letters it represents (e.g. oi) ;

5d. Short dictations – utter a word that you have never taught your students and ask them to guess its spelling based on their decoding-skills repertoire

5e. Picture task – example: picture of a green car; students to write: una macchina verde (Italian) / une voiture verte (French)

Oral translation (novice to advance stage depending on complexity) – This is another favourite of mine. Students are given cards with bullet points and need to translate them into the target language in real time. Each bullet point will elicit the execution of the target micro-skill (e.g. agreement; verb conjugation; word order). This can be done impromptu, if one wants to assess student level of fluency or after some preparation. Although they require a bit more preparation – not much, though – the cards can be used across languages.

Conclusion

Teachers often complain about their students’ mistakes in the execution of the following micro-skills:

Effectively manipulating word endings to make subject and verb agree
Effectively manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of gender
Effectively manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of number
Effectively manipulating word endings to make adjective agree with noun/pronoun in terms of case (German and Latin)
Placing adjectives after noun (French, Italian and Spanish)
Positioning direct/indirect pronouns before (most) verbs
Effectively decoding target language words (ability to turn letters into sound)

However, the problem lies in the lack of extensive practice the students receive in the performance of those skills. At the early stages of instruction students must be given extensive practice as frequently as possible until there is evidence that they have automatized them and that their execution occupies only subsidiary awareness. Moving on to another topic or structure prematurely can have serious negative consequences for student learning.

Another oral-skills-enhancing instructional sequence for beginner to intermediate learners en route to spontaneous talk

October 25, 2015October 26, 2015 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Speaking and phonology

Please note: this post was written in collaboration with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net

1.Introduction

A point that I have often made in my posts is that for foreign language teaching CPD to be effective it has to go beyond simply describing a recommended learning activity, app or website. It also has to provide instructors with a solid rationale for its adoption and how it can be deployed effectively within a teaching sequence. Unfortunately, in my experience, this rarely happens – especially on teacher training courses. This is the third in a series of posts which Steve Smith and I have written in order to address this perceived deficit in the area of oral proficiency development.

This post proposes a low-effort/high-impact teaching sequence centred on the use of a very versatile learning activity, ‘Find someone who’ (with cards) which, whilst having the development of oral proficiency as its main focus, does also provide practice in listening, reading and writing skills.

Whilst ‘Find some who’ is a fairly straightforward activity to conduct, how to prepare the students effectively for it and to exploit its full learning potential is much less evident. In what follows I suggest ways in which this can be done without too much effort on the part of the teacher.

The task

Each student is given a different card with a number of details in the L1 or in the L2. In my version of this activity the cards usually have five to eight bullet points which look something like this:

Name: Jean
Date of birthday: 3^rd May
Siblings: one younger sister
Favourite hobby: reading novels and painting
Pet hates: cricket and Facebook
Favourite singer: Taylor swift

The students are also given a grid with a number of questions in the L1 or L2 (see image above). I personally prefer to put the questions into the L1 so as to avoid spoon-feeding the students. The questions read something like this:

“Find someone who…

…hates Facebook”
…has two siblings”
…is born in September”, etc.

The students are required to find a person for each of the above prompts (e.g. ‘Jean’ for question 1, above) by asking questions to the other students (in the target language). The student who finds them all first, wins. I usually prepare two or three different sets of questions in order to play more rounds.

I uploaded many (free) samples of ‘Find someone who’ on www.tes.com (e.g. https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/search/?q=conti%20find%20someone%20who)

3.Planning / Preparation

1. Decide on the grammar, vocabulary and other linguistic features you intend to focus on;

2.Prepare a set of cards with four of five bullet points;

3. Prepare one or more sets of questions making sure that each question refers only to one card so as to have more movement around the classroom;

4. Prepare a few very short texts in the target language for reading and listening comprehension purposes which you will use in the run-up to the activity implementation. The texts should contain the same sort of details the students will find on the cards. Example:

‘My name is Sean. I am 13 years old and my birthday is on June 20. I have two sisters. My favourite hobby is reading and playing the violin. I hate social networks such as Facebook. My favourite singer is Sia.’

5. (Optional) prepare vocabulary games, worksheets, quizzes recycling the language to be deployed during the to-be-staged activity to give as homework before the lesson

4. The sequence

Drill in vocabulary (15 minutes) – as suggested above, one can ‘flip’ most of this. However, it is beneficial to do some recycling at the beginning of the lesson anyway in order to activate the target vocabulary in Long Term Memory.

Reading and listening comprehension (based on cards) – 2a. Put the short texts containing the target linguistic features up on the screen. Ask reading comprehension questions on the texts of the sort you expect the students to ask each other later on as part of the ‘Find someone who’. Equipped with MWBs the students answer the questions (all in the target language, of course). 2b.Now read out the texts you will have prepared for listening comprehension purposes. Students still answer comprehension questions on MWBs. Since the purpose of this listening activity is not only to recycle the target linguistic features and assess comprehension but also, and more importantly, to model pronunciation, be mindful of the speed at which you utter each text and repeat as often as the students’ request you to.

Questions and answers – Now it is time to further practise the questions that you expect them to produce during the ‘Find someone who’. The easiest option – the one requiring the least preparation – is to ask the students to carry out a survey using the target questions (partner A asks and partner B notes down answers). This should be conducted entirely in the target language. Teachers will go around facilitating and monitoring.
Find someone who – Now carry out one or more rounds of ‘Find someone who’. Make sure that nobody ‘cheats’ by copying what they see on their peers’ grid – the most common offence.
Fluent writing – Now students work in groups. Students take turns in reading out – in the L1 – the details on whichever card they hold and the rest of the group has a set amount of time to put them into French in the form of a paragraph, writing on MWBs – note: this must not necessarily be a word-for-word translation. The purpose of this activity is to prep the students for the next task.
Fluent speaking – Now students go away in pairs with iPads or other recording devices. Each student is given three cards they have not worked with before. The task is to describe the details on the three cards in the target language talking in the third person whilst being recorded impromptu – without studying the cards prior to the recording (e.g. His name is Jean, he is 13 years old, he hates Facebook, etc.).

5. Conclusions

The instructional sequence just outlined is easy to prepare and manage; it allows for practice across all four skills and continuous recycling of the target linguistic features.’Find someone who’ can be implemented without creating cards with fictitious identities and details; however, this allows for less control over the language you want to drill in. I have been using the above sequence several times in my practice and the students usually enjoy and learn a lot from it.

Using picture tasks to develop spontaneous talk – A low effort / high impact teaching sequence

October 19, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Speaking and phonology, Uncategorized

Please note: This post was written in collaboration with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net with whom I am co-authoring the ‘MFL teacher’s toolkit’ (to be published in the new year).

Introduction

One of the approaches I undertake in order to promote L2 oral fluency and spontaneity involves the use of picture tasks. This post lays out a low-effort/high-impact teaching sequence based on the following pillars of my instructional approach:

Prep students before you start the teaching sequence through as much (flipped?) vocabulary building as possible.
Allow for lots of recycling of the target material throughout the sequence.
Provide lots of comprehensible written and aural input tbefore involving the students in written or oral production.
Start production with highly structured activities which become increasingly less structured. Withdraw support at the end of the sequence.
Aim at automatization of speech production as the end-goal (e.g. fast retrieval from long term memory). Prioritize fluency over accuracy in the process; hence tolerate errors unless they impede intelligibility.

The use of picture tasks is advantageous for the following reasons:

They require little preparation.
Elicit greater creativity with the language.
In life we often describe what we see- hence it is a real-life task.
The same picture can be used across various tenses.

Please note that the following sequence usually takes more than one lesson and that I supplement it with quizzes and games aimed at reinforcing the vocabulary as well as any grammar needed to execute the tasks in hand (e.g. verb conjugations).

Preparation

2.1 Select the images – Select pictures ensuring that they are not all going to elicit exactly the same kind of vocabulary from your typical student. Some degree of repetition is desirable, though, for the sake of recycling. Ideally the images that you selected would allow the students to answer a range of questions (e.g. When? How? What? Who?). For the sequence that I envisage in this post you will need two sets of pictures which are similar but not entirely identical; so, if Set 1 incudes picture 1a depicting a Ferrari in a city street, Set 2, will contain picture 2a portraying another means of transport in a similar setting with some variation (e.g. different weather, different looking people, different time of the day). The rationale for this will be evident below.

2.2 Decide on the language focus – In planning the activities try to figure out the sort of verbs/nouns the pictures you chose are likely to elicit. If you intend to focus on one or more specific tenses, do provide practice in time markers (e.g. for the present: usually, every day, always, never).

Activities

3.1. Brainstorming – Give students the pictures (Set 1 only) and ask them to brainstorm as many verbs per picture as they can in groups of two or three. Ideally, before this activity, some vocabulary building activities drilling in as many verbs as possible should be carried out for 10-15 minutes or, even better, ‘flipped’ in the run-up to the actual lesson. I have uploaded worksheets with such activities on www.tes.com and I have created a self-marking module in the grammar section of www.language-gym.com (see: Verbs monster work-outs).

3.2. Modelling via written and aural input – show on screen sentences (one at the time) in the target language (based on the Set 1 pictures) and ask the students to write on mini-boards (under time constraints) which picture(s) they think they could refer to. I usually do this as a listening activity, too, so as to model pronunciation, as a follow-up.

3.3. Scaffolded written production– Ask students to create one or more sentences for each picture working alone or in pairs. At this stage you can give the students a list of vocabulary as support. I often do this activity on Padlet or Edmodo for students to be able to share their output with others. This activity is carried out without any time constraints, which allows for more careful self-monitoring during production.

3.4. Scaffolded oral production – Ask students to work in pairs. Partner A chooses a picture and ask three questions (one at the time, obviously) in whatever tenses you have been working on. I put a wide range of questions on the board/screen. I get the students to do as many rounds of this with as many students as possible. 100% accuracy is not an issue. Teacher must go around, facilitate, monitor and provide feedback. This activity, too, is carried out in the absence of time constraints and communicative pressure.

3.5. Eliciting fast written response (teacher led) – So far the students have been working with only one set of pictures (e.g. Set 1). Now the teacher stands in front of classroom and shows three (or more) pictures on the board from Set 2 which, being similar to the Set 1 pictures, are likely to elicit language that has already been practised in the previous phases. The students must now write on MWBs as much as they can about each picture under time constraints. The aim of this activity is to recycle the language learnt so far but to also focus on developing fluency (i.e. fast retrieval from long-term memory under time constraint). The teacher can cue the students to the use of specific connectives and one or more tenses. For example, I divide the screen in three sections, ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ and place a picture in each section; the task is for the students to write something like: yesterday I went to beach, now I am shopping, later on this evening I am going to go clubbing with my friends.

3.6. Eliciting fast written response (student led) – students re-enact what the teacher did with the whole class (in activity 3.5) in small groups of 4-5. Students take turns in showing a picture from set 1 or 2 and asking a question about it whilst their peers answer in writing on MWBs (in the target language). This can be turned into a competition.

3.7. Unstructured picture-based conversation without support– Now students, equipped with iPad or other recording device, do oral pair-work again. This time with no support whatsoever and under time constraints. Partner A/B selects five or more pictures (a mix of set 1 and set2) for partner B/A and asks questions about them – totally impromptu. Recording is sent to the teacher without any editing. If time allows it, several rounds of this can be carried out; I usually do at least two per student.

4. Conclusion

The above teaching sequence is very easy to prepare and allows for tons of recycling. It is mostly learner-centred and lots of language is produced in the process. One of the advantages of the pictures tasks envisaged here is that it forces students to widen their repertoire of verbs, a wordclass that foreign language teachers often neglect.

Why foreign language teachers have to rethink their approach to grammar instruction

October 10, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Grammar teaching, Uncategorized

In one of my latest posts I made some recommendations as to how grammar instruction should be implemented. One particular point made in that post seems to have resonated the most with my readers:

Never say ‘my students have learnt structure ‘X’ effectively’ unless you have evidence that they can perform it accurately under Real Operating Conditions.

What this statement alludes to is a common misconception amongst many L2 teachers that a given grammar rule has indeed been acquired by their learners if these can articulate it and/or apply it accurately in the context of gap-fill exercises, multiple choice quizzes, translations or written pieces. This assumption leads to a misguided approach to grammar teaching, i.e. one that:

Teaches grammar through means which merely impart intellectual knowledge, i.e. how the target grammar rule works (e.g. verb formation, contexts in which structure ‘X’ should be used and not used);
Involves the students in the application of the grammar rule in contexts in which working memory’s attentional systems have more time to monitor performance than real-time communication would normally allow them ;
Does not aim at high levels of routinization (i.e. automization) of the target structure application, i.e. the transformation of declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge. In other words, focuses on the conscious application of the target grammar rule, not on its automatic (and accurate) implementation;

Such an approach can have harmful consequences for learning, especially in the absence of systematic and well-planned recycling of the grammar structures taught (another common flaws of much grammar teaching). The reason being that in the absence of routinization the learners are likely to make errors in contexts where they experience cognitive overload, such as oral unstructured communicative practice, essay writing under time constraints, or any other circumstances in which their working memory’s attentional capabilities are drastically reduced (e.g. when under stress).

The recurrence of such errors may lead to their automatization and to the consolidation in Long term Memory of erroneous forms relative to a given grammar structure which may end up competing for retrieval with the correct structure. For example, a student who has learnt the Perfect tense formation rule “Auxiliary ETRE + PAST PARTICIPLE’ (for verbs like ‘ALLER’ or ‘SORTIR’) but has not had the time and practice to routinize it, may get it wrong several times – as it often happens – and say ‘J’ai allé’, for instance’ when performing under R.O.C (real operating conditions). If that mistake keeps happening over and over again and it is not treated effectively it may become automatized; when that happens, the student will end up storing in their brain two cognitive structures referring to ‘Aller’ in the Perfect Tense: ‘J’ai allé’ and ‘Je suis allé’(the correct form). When under communicative pressure or stress, the two forms will compete for retrieval and the more automatized structure will win. Notice that the automatized structure – not necessarily the correct one – WILL win the retrieval race even though the student does consciously know the rule and will be able to self-correct the mistake once he is cued to its occurrence. This has huge consequences for teaching and learning.

Before delving further into the implications of the above point for L2 grammar instruction, let me quickly reiterate some key points made in previous posts about grammar acquisition and automatization

Automatization or Routinization –

Automatization (or routinization) means that the performance of an L2 grammar rule is applied without having to ‘think’, so to speak. In other words, the performance of the grammar rule bypasses consciousness and Working Memory. This is easy to understand, but how does one measure routinization, i.e. the extent to which a grammar rule is automatized?

To my knowledge, no studies so far have measured automatization in quantifiable terms. And for teaching purposes it is not necessary in my opinion to know how many milliseconds a native speaker takes to deploy a grammar structure. The kind of automatization that a teacher would want to detect in their students’ oral output will be dependent on many factors, such as the years of instruction, individual variables, the type of structure whose deployment one is assessing, the linguistic context in which the structures is being used (familiar or unfamiliar), etc. Hence, it is up to the teacher to decide, based on the specific context they operate in, how close to native speaker speed they would like their students’ performance to be and which criteria best serve their pedagogic purpose. I use the very simple scale below to assess the accurate automatization of a given structure. It allows me to assess speed and accuracy of deployment simultaneously. The categories are quite broad but allow me to get useful enough data.

Very fast Highly accurate Quite accurate Fairly accurate Inaccurate Highly inaccurate

Fast Highly accurate Quite accurate Fairly accurate Inaccurate Highly inaccurate

Fairly fast Highly accurate Quite accurate Fairly accurate Inaccurate Highly inaccurate

Slow Highly accurate Quite accurate Fairly accurate Inaccurate Highly inaccurate

Very slow Highly accurate Quite accurate Fairly accurate Inaccurate Highly inaccurate

The tasks one uses to assess automatization and the task linguistic environment will have a bearing on the accuracy and speed of rule application. Hence, one has to stick to the same task/linguistic context for the whole year if one wants to map progression consistently. I tend to use oral translation tasks in which the language used is familiar so as to focus the student’s cognitive resources solely on the target structure.

The three routes to grammar acquisition (routinization)

According to my espoused theory of L2 acquisition, Skill Theory, grammar rule routinization in a typical classroom setting occurs along three routes:

(1) Procedural to Procedural : this route does not involve explicit grammar rule learning. To go back to the “je suis allee’ example, the learner will learn the perfect tense of ‘Aller’ without having to consciously understand the mechanics of its formation. They will just learn ‘je suis allé’ as a chunk, like you do with a lexical item. They will also learn the other perfect tense forms of ‘Aller’ in the same way. This approach allows for quick routinization but lack generative power because the students do not have a rule to generalize to other verbs / contexts.

(2) Declarative to Procedural: this route is the most commonly used by L2 teachers. The target rule is taught explicitly before being practised. For instance, the teacher will teach how to form the Perfect tense of ‘Aller’ and of all the other verbs requiring ‘Etre’ as an auxiliary, ensuring that the students understand the underlying pattern. Automatization takes longer to occur along this route as the learner will have to automatize every single step in the application of the rule.

(3) Mix of (1) and (2): in this approach, which is my favourite, one uses the procedural-to-procedural way first, then, once the learners have had sufficient exposure to the target rule, the rule is brought into their conscious awareness and is explicitly taught – connecting the dots a posteriori so to speak. Using the ‘Je suis allee’ example: the teacher would first provide lots of exposure to the verbs requiring ‘Etre’ in the Perfect Tense teaching them as ‘chunks’ in context; then, after they feel that they have been routinized, the teacher will provide them/ask them to infer the rule(s). This approach combines the strengths of both approaches but requires more effort in planning and resourcing than the other two – and also more creativity, as one has to design activities which bring about opportunities to practise all the target verb forms before the onset of the declarative stage.

Implications for teaching and learnin

1.Aim at grammar rule routinization. Whatever the approach one elects to undertake, the crucial issue remains the same: the learners must automatize the target structure before one can safely assume that it has been internalized by the students. So, first and foremost, one must provide grammar practice conducive to automatization (i.e. fast and accurate rule application); secondly assessments of the kind outlined above gives us a fairly good idea as to where our students are in terms of accurate automatization and cognitive control.

As far as the learning activities which foster automatization are concerned, the same recommendations I have made for fluency development in previous posts apply here. The learners need lots of practice in applying grammar rules under time constraints in linguistic contexts which become increasingly more challenging. So after an initial stage which includes the usual gap-fills, ending manipulations (e.g. by using my verb trainer at www.language-gym.com) and written translations in the absence of any time constraint and communicative pressure, two stages should ensue: firstly, a stage in which the rule application occurs in writing under time constraints (e.g through L1 to L2 translations on MWBs ); secondly, a phase in which the grammar rule is applied in speaking in response to a stimulus (e.g. oral translation, picture task, conversation, etc.).

The key issue is that teachers aim consciously at automatization and plan for it by ensuring there is extensive practice in routinization and recycling of the target structures.

2. Do not jump steps and plan for horizontal progression. If grammar structure ‘Y’ requires the routinization of structure ‘X’ as a prerequisite for its successful uptake, then structure ‘X’ will have to be drilled in over and over again until it has been acquired. Hence, for ‘Je suis allee’ to be taught successfully (using route 2) the learners will have to have routinized the formation of the verb ‘Etre’ as well as past-participle formation. This is not often done; teachers do usually ensure that the students know the formation of the present of ‘Avoir’ and ‘Etre’ and of the Past Participle before embarking in the learning of the Perfect tense but do not ensure that they have been automized. In many cases the teacher explains Past-Participle-formation rules in the same lesson in which they teach and practise Perfect tense formation. This poses an unnecessarily heavy cognitive load on the learner. Thus it is crucial that teachers plan for horizontal progression by ensuring that extensive practice in target structure application is provided to learners until automatization has reached the desirable level (e.g. Fast application / quite accurate).

3. Assess grammar rule routinization – not understanding/knowedge of . Assessment of the kind envisaged above ought to be carried out to ascertain that the target grammar rules have indeed been automatized, especially when they refer to key structures. To ‘know’ / ‘understand’ how a grammar rule works does not equate with having acquired it; so do not use assessment tasks that merely test knowledge and understanding of the target rule

4. Teacher response to error on specific grammar structures should be based on their level of automatization. Teachers often get frustrated at seeing errors recurring over and over again despite many grammar explanations and corrections. However, neither the explanations nor the corrections are conducive to automatization. Teacher response to errors relative to a given structure should aim at provide extensive practice in that structure’s deployment leading to its accurate automatization. Only at that stage will the errors in the application of that structure cease to occur or at least drastically diminish. Hence, simply correcting errors with the Perfect Tense of ‘aller’ when they write ‘J’ai alle’ in an essay at the very early stages of routinization of the ‘Etre verbs’ rule may constitute a helpful reminder, but is hardly likely to eradicate the error.

Conclusion

Accurate automatization of the target grammar rule being the ultimate goal of any explicit grammar instruction, foreign language teachers may have to rethink the way they teach grammar and assess its internalization as well as their response to learner grammar errors. Foreign language learners must receive extensive practice in target grammar rule application under time constraints and R.O.C. (real operating conditions).

Teachers can only claim that their learners have acquired a specific grammar structures when they can deploy it fast and accurately across a fairly wide range of familiar and unfamiliar contexts. Hence, the assessment of grammar uptake must be carried out not through typical traditional means (e.g. gap-fills, grammar rule explanations or written translations) but through tasks which elicit from them a fast response in cognitively demanding contexts.

Curriculum designers must take into consideration the fact that grammar rule acquisition requires extensive practice. Hence, sufficient time must be allocated to grammar teaching – if it is one of the course’s priorities – and frequent opportunities for recycling must be carefully planned for.

Finally, let us not forget that accurate automatization of grammar rules contributes to fluency enhancement. This is a further reason for fostering its attainment as much as possible in our daily practice.

16 tips for effective grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom

September 28, 2015February 16, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Grammar teaching, Uncategorized

Please note: this post was written in collaboration with Dylan Viñales of Garden International School.

Do not use the target language for challenging grammar points– Using the target language when explaining a complex grammar point can cause cognitive deficit which may hinder understanding of the target structure you are attempting to teach. Hence, when introducing a new grammar structure it is advisable to use the students’ L1. Your decision as to whether to use the L1 rather than the L2 will also be dictated by time and resources constraints.
Identify the cognitive steps that the application of the target rule involves and teach one step at the time – Many complex grammar structures require the learner to apply a number of cognitive steps. Some steps will be more difficult to execute than others as they involve cognitive operations that the students are not used to performing in their native language. In many lessons I have observed these were taken for granted and not modelled and practised sufficiently. For a complex structure to become automatized, every cognitive operation its application involves must be routinized. Notice that here ‘routinized’ does not merely means ‘knowing’ how to perform each operation, but performing automatically, bypassing conscious attention. Think about the Perfect Tense in French; it is not enough for the students to know each person of the verb ‘to have’ and how to form the past participle of verbs in –er, -re and –ir. The students will have to have automatized each of those operations if we want them to perform Perfect Tense formation accurately under real operating conditions.
Teach irregular forms before you teach the regular ones – as I wrote in a previous post, in my experience it is more effective to teach the dominant rule governing a grammar structure after one is sure that the students have automatized the less dominant rule. Why? Think about irregular verb forms. You first tell the students that the conjugation of French verbs in the present tense follows a given pattern; then, after a few lessons – often before the students have even automatized those forms – you tell them that there are verbs that do not follow those patterns and you ask them to restructure the system that they have worked hard on creating. This will lead (a) to a lot of overgeneralization errors (where the learners will apply the regular verb formation rules to irregular forms); (b) disorientation. By teaching irregular forms first, on the other hand, without focusing on rules, but as lexical items, there will be no need for any cognitive restructuring later. Teachers must ensure, however, that the irregular forms are automatized before moving on.
Tolerate overgeneralizations and don’t correct them – If you choose not to follow the previous principle, do ensure that you do not correct any overgeneralizations (e.g. j’ai prendu* or j’ai veni*). In fact, do encourage them; after all, it is a rule you are teaching and you want to ensure that rule is incorporated in the brain’s operating system. To correct an overgeneralization slows down the rule acquisition process as it sends negative feedback to the brain, which will inhibit acquisition of the target rule.
Do not present the target grammar structure in linguistically challenging contexts – when illustrating and practising a new grammar rule you must ensure that the brain’s finite cognitive resources are properly channelled. Hence the load on working memory must be kept to the minimum to free up cognitive space. Minimizing the linguistic and conceptual challenge posed by any text used to model the target rule application is thus imperative. Avoid long and complex sentences; avoid examples containing unfamiliar language; provide the L1 translation next to each L2 example.
Provide plenty of receptive practice before you ask the students to go productive – Before asking your students to apply the grammar rule in oral or written L2 production provide plenty of opportunities to notice, analyze and evaluate its deployment in the context of listening and/or reading texts. This will enhance the acquisition process by lessening the cognitive load (recognition is usually less challenging in cognitive/motor-sensorial terms than production) and will support successful production by providing correct models in context often pre-empting potential L1 transfer performance errors. For example: take the third person of the present (indicative) tense of French verbs (e.g. ils regardent); by focusing students through lots of modelling on the pronunciation of the ending ‘-ent’ you will avoid the very common mispronunciation of that ending that many students perform and often fossilize. Receptive practice may include texts containing occurrences of he target structure and asking students to perform some sort of structural analysis on them (e.g. What form of the verb is this? Why is this adjective placed before the verb? Is ‘normalement’ a verb ? ). Grammaticality-judgment multiple choice quizzes are very useful in this respect, too.
Involve students in plenty of controlled practice within non-challenging contexts to start with – Steve Smith’s latest blog on controlled practice at www.frenchteacher.net illustrates very clearly how such practice can be implemented effectively through a number of tasks ranging from very easy gap-fills, mechanical audiolingual-style manipulation drills and more challenging written and oral translations. This phase is usually overlooked and not practised extensively enough, yet it is as important as practising extensive rallying in tennis before learning to play a proper match.
Aim at cognitive control in unplanned speech as the end-goal of grammar teaching – The teaching of every single grammar structure should aim at the learners’ ability to perform the application of a grammar rule under Real Operating Conditions. A teacher cannot claim that a grammar structure is acquired until a learner can perform it fast, accurately and spontaneously (in unplanned speech) under Real Operating Conditions. This refers back to my advocacy of frequent involvement of students in masses of interactional writing and oral communicative activities (peer coaching of the kind envisaged in point 14, below, can be used here to enhance learner focus on target structure performance). A large amount of structured drills and less structured communicative activities will be needed for students to automatise the target grammar rule(s).
Plan every grammar lessons with L1 positive and negative transfer in mind – Always plan for ways to control for the ‘threats’ to L2 grammar learning posed by the L1 grammar. Also, do seek ways to capitalize on the similarities between the L1 and L2.
Consciously recycle grammar structures frequently – funny how everyone that comes across this concept says ‘of course!’ but very few teachers actually do it. Yet this is so important and is the reason why it is crucial that a teacher carries on teaching the same class for as long as possible over the years. A good tip is to keep a tally of the structures you teach. I do this on a google document which looks like a grid which lists the key target grammar structures (horizontally) and my classes (vertically); every time I go over a structure I tick it. This gives me an overview of how often I have recycled each structure during a given segment of the academic year.
Use scaffolds and mnemonics with complex structures – When dealing with a complex structure (e.g. one involving multiple cognitive operations) scaffolds can help a great deal. Scaffolds can consist of a number of reminders such as, for adjectives, questions like the following:

a. Does this adjective have a regular or irregular ending?

b. Is it one of those adjectives that goes before or after the noun?

c. Is the adjective plural or singular? Make sure you use the appropriate ending.

Every time the students go through each adjective whilst writing a piece, they will have to log their answers and show it to the teacher as evidence.

Remember that for a grammar structure to be fully acquired it must be practised across all four skills – This is self-explanatory. A grammar structure must be acquired across all four skills; this calls for masses of listening, reading, speaking and writing practice.
Flipped learning of the target structure prior to lesson – Student-led inquiry on how certain grammar rules work prior to classroom instruction is a great way to enhance student learning – provided the target structures are relatively simple and within the developmental grasp of the learners. This can be done through inductive learning whereby the students are given examples of the target structure and are asked questions to answer by doing some autonomous research.
Peer/teacher coaching with narrow focus – during oral pair-work activities (controlled and/or unstructured) students may be asked to peer-coach with an eye to only evaluate the use of the target structure.
Metacognitive enhancement in the feedback process – Get the students, on getting your feedback on their errors to engage in deep processing of your corrections. You may do this in a structured way like I do by using ‘correction sheets’ which require the students to select five or six serious mistakes (which they are developmentally ready to deal with) they want to target; reflect on the causes of them (with your help, if needed); do some research on them (if they result from lack of knowledge); work out a scaffold and/or remedial strategy; produce own examples of the application of the broken rule. I have used this approach often and it can be very effective, especially with highly motivated students. In my PhD study, I obtained amazing results with this technique.
Conscious use of formulaic language containing complex grammar structures usually associated with a higher developmental level in order to pave the way for future learning – Example, my colleague Dylan Vinales teaches his students as early as year 7 or 8 the following phrases containing complex grammar structures as unanalyzed chunks: Si tuviera mucho tiempo me gustaria… / Ojala fuera más… / Si me hubieras preguntado hace 5 años habría dicho que + imperfect. By memorizing these and other phrases containing the same structures the students will be better prepared for explicit instruction on those structures later on in their learning when the teacher will ‘connect the dots’ so to speak by making references to all the unanalysed chunks he will have taught them by then. This approach is most effective if the introduction and recycling of the unanalyzed chunks is planned carefully.

In conclusion, for grammar teaching to be effective we need to convert the students’ declarative (intellectual) knowledge of a grammar rule into procedural knowledge (automatization). Teachers must recognize that this is a very lengthy process which starts from a very slow application of all the cognitive steps subsumed in the application of the rule to fast deployment of the rule which bypasses consciousness.

For this to happen students must be involved in a lot of structured and unstructured practice. Often, in my experience, many teachers do not do enough of either kind, yet they express frustration when their students keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Grammar is not acquired by only doing lots of gap-filling exercises or written translations. The only way to automatize grammar rules is by practising their application under time constraints with lots of support to start with and by slowly fading out any scaffolding until routinization has occurred. Hence, oral communicative activities have a major role to play in promoting L2 grammar acquisition.

Never say ‘my students have learnt structure ‘X’ effectively unless you have evidence that they can perform it accurately under Real Operating Conditions.

You can find more on this topic in the book ‘The language teacher toolkit’ I co-authored with Steve Smith and available for purchase at http://www.amazon.com

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Spontaneity in the foreign language classroom: how do we forge autonomous L2 speakers?

September 27, 2015August 14, 2018 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Speaking and phonology, Uncategorized

0. Introduction

In a previous post I concerned myself with the notion of spontaneity in target language production and provided some pedagogical ‘tips’ on how teachers can foster it in the typical foreign language classroom. Today, during the professional learning time that Garden International School allocates to discussion and reflection every Friday afternoon, I discussed the issue further with my colleague Dylan Vinales, Head of Spanish, and experienced MFL teacher. This post encapsulates the main points of our discussion and expands on it.

1.What do we mean by ‘spontaneous talk’ in target language production ?

What does the notion of ‘spontaneous talk’ actually refer to in the context of L2 learning? In our view it means that when an L2 learner produces speech to initiate a conversation or respond to an external stimulus they do so ‘thinking on their feet’ , so to speak, without any pre-planning and without relying on any sort of support (e.g. vocabulary lists, talking mats, dictionaries, etc.). In other words, spontaneity equates with unplanned autonomous speech production.

Of course, as I advocated in my previous post, a competent L2 speaker is not simply one who can produce language ‘spontaneously’; s/he must first and foremost be intelligible and fluent and will possess a wide-ranging enough repertoire of vocabulary and discourse functions to be able to communicate effectively across various contexts.

Hence, any sensible foreign language teacher would not aim at learner spontaneity as divorced from fluency and intelligibility as the end-goal of their instruction; and whilst reserving to place a greater focus on accuracy and complexity at later stages of development, they will also aim at developing a level of learner mastery of L2 grammar use high enough to allow for generative power – the ability, that is, to effectively manipulate language grammatically/syntactically so as to generate new utterances from phrases /sentences acquired as formulaic items (e.g. from ‘I want you to know’ to ‘I want them to know’; from ‘To go camping’ – they go camping; from ‘ he plays with us’ to ‘they play with me’).

2. Define the teaching and learning focus

Developing spontaneous talk has been a very ‘trendy’ topic in the international teaching community in recent years. These days every L2 language educator posits ‘spontaneity’ in language production as the ultimate desirable goal of L2 teaching. However, I do wonder how much MFL teacher professional development and planning time is invested in figuring out ways to bring about spontaneity; how much effort is put into planning for spontaneity-fostering activities; how much formative assessment is devoted to tracking learner development across this all-important dimension of oral proficiency development.

For spontaneity to be attained teachers must keep the achievement of the ability to produce unplanned fluent intelligible talk in their focal awareness from the very early stages on L2 learning. A big chunk of their short, medium- and long-term planning must regularly focus on this steep goal; and this needs not be detrimental to the development of the other skills since, as I will discuss below, listening, reading and even writing play an important role in the process.

3. Fostering Intelligible fluency

Fluency, conceived as a measure of time-to-word speech ratio, refers to the automatization of speech production; the speed, that is, at which words are retrieved from long-term memory to match a speech plan and uttered as part of an intelligible speech production unit (e.g. a sentence). Hence, it can only be achieved through masses of practice in retrieving language from long-term memory under R.O.C. (real operating conditions). Consequently, involving the students in oral interaction as much as possible is imperative; this calls for frequent student-to-student and/or student-to-expert speaker interaction.

4. Classroom practice: from controlled to unstructured

Let me reiterate here a point I have often made on this blog: the importance of starting from an imitative, highly scaffolded and controlled practice stage in which the students receive lots of prompts and support. This stage needs to be one of intensive and extensive practice; it can take a whole lesson, or even two, if the attainment of spontaneity is truly a priority. Throughout this stage the oral activities should become increasingly more challenging and should elicit more varied and complex responses. Activities may include: role plays/dialogues with visual or L1/L2 cues; Find someone who with real or fake identities; Oral translations; Surveys; Simulations; etc. Steve Smith, with whom I am currently authoring ‘The MFL teacher’s handbook’, outlines concisely what controlled practice activities may include in his latest blog: http://t.co/fkOSSeSAHC.

The highly scaffolded stage will be followed by a consolidation and expansion phase in which the language practised and learnt during the first phase is reinforced through activities aiming at strengthening retention in preparation for the next phase, in which communicative practice will occur without scaffolding. This phase, too, should allow for extensive practice. Interactional writing activities can be used during this phase (see my post at https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/the-writing-skill-most-foreign-language-techers-dont-teach-writership/ for this). During this phase the students should be encouraged to take risks and expand their vocabulary autonomously.

The final stage is the autonomous stage in which communication occurs without scaffolding and in which accuracy is not a concern unless it impedes communication and errors should go untreated (common errors raising concern can be dealt with at the end of each round of oral interaction or at the end of the lesson). Whilst scaffolding materials are removed, the teacher will play an important role, monitoring, facilitating and providing feedback on student performance. At the end of this phase the students can be asked to video themselves talking in pairs – rigorously without a script.

In a previous post I proposed a framework which integrates the three phases just outlined with emerging digital technologies used successfully in our school by myself and other colleagues (see: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/digital-learning-and-oral-fluency-in-the-mfl-classroom-rescuing-the-neglected-skill/ )

Please note that it is crucial that throughout each phase teachers ensure that students are exposed to an increasingly wide range of questions, as ‘spontaneous’ speakers must be able to react to as many external stimuli as possible in real time. The complexity of the questions should ideally increase, too. Research in L1 and L2 acquisition clearly indicates that the variety, length and complexity of the questions learners are asked play an important role in language acquisition.

This also calls for a form of flipped learning which is not sufficiently encouraged and scaffolded in the typical L2 classroom: actively seeking opportunities for oral practice outside the classroom. Funny how since the advent of certain emerging technologies educators put enormous effort in promoting flipped learning of the digitally-mediated kind; however, very few language educators seem to focus on this more potentially beneficial form of autonomous learning, which can but does not have to involve the digital medium.

Think of the enormous benefits of having the vast majority of your students practising oral skills regularly outside lesson time. Yet, how many MFL meetings are devoted to try and work out ways to create opportunities for and instill in L2 students the desire to do just that and to scaffold the process in a principled way? The real flipped MFL classroom is the classroom where students WANT to carry on learning by their own free will; where speaking happens after the lesson is over. In international schools like the one I work in, where there are plenty of target language speaker students and parents, not to explicitly and systematically foster this kind of engagement is a massive missed opportunity.

Another dimension of fluency refers to speed of sound production. When our articulators (larynx, mouth organs, etc.) have not automatized effectively the pronunciation of the target language sounds, speech production will slow down and vocabulary retrieval will be hampered too, as memory is phonologically mediated. It follows that pronunciation must be focused on consistently, too. This will call for instruction in micro-listening and decoding skills of the kind I have advocated in my posts on these topics.

Throughout the process, teachers must obviously ensure that their learners’ output is intelligible. Hence, the practice of getting students – when working in TL oral pair-work – to jot down the meaning of what their partners/interlocutors have just told them in response to a question may be useful. Yes, it does slow down the conversation, but (a) it is a real life task (L2 speakers interpret for their peers all the time); (b) it makes the listener pay more attention to their partner’s input; (c) you will not get the students to do it all the time. Say you have organized an oral communicative activity such as a GCSE style interview; you may want to engage each student in four rounds of interviews; the students will do the L1 translating/interpreting for two of the four rounds, whereas for the other two rounds, the listener will focus on providing feedback on their partner’s pronunciation, range of vocabulary, correct use of tenses or any other language feature(s) constituting the focus of the lesson.

Here are some other practical easy-to-set-up activities to promote fluency other than oral learner-to-learner communicative activities. They are very effective as pre-communicative activities as they foster fast retrieval from long-term memory whilst not involving the use of the articulators and the added emotional stress and cognitive load of oral interaction:

Fluency is about speed of retrieval of the required L2 items from long-term memory. Hence, getting students to respond to a visual stimulus, a sentence to finish up in their own words or questions under time constraints (possibly setting a minimum required number of words) provides good training. I do this quite often as a starter with my GCSE classes other with MWBs (mini white boards) or on a google doc shown on the classroom screen. It is paramount to vary the type of stimuli / questions as much as possible and avoid merely sticking to the topic-in-hand;
Engaging the students in translations of short sentences on MWBs – again under time constraints – accomplishes the same purposes whilst forcing the students to be accurate and allowing the teacher control over student output. Students are shown short sentences on the classroom screen and must translate under time constraints. 100% accuracy is not a must;
Where logistically and technologically possible, give the students an iPad or other recording device and ask them to record themselves talking about a specific topic, possibly one that is not too recent but that you know they can talk about. Better if you give them five or six specific sub-topics to focus on in the way of bullet points; including one or two sub-topics which you know they will find particularly challenging in terms of vocabulary will give you an idea of how well they can cope in terms of compensatory strategies deployment.
Interactional writing (see my post: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/the-writing-skill-most-foreign-language-techers-dont-teach-writership/)

A final point: teachers often ‘compartmentalize’ teaching and learning by topic; what I mean is that whilst dealing with a unit of work (e.g. work and career) the oral activities during the 6-8 week period devoted to that unit only cover the topic-in-hand. That should not be the case. To develop spontaneity, ways need to be found for learners to be engaged ever so often during those 6-8 weeks in conversation/information-gap activities on past topics or even on topics never encountered before to ‘test’ their communicative limits

5.Vocabulary repertoire and communicative functions

Speaking autonomous competence requires knowing a wide enough range of vocabulary to express yourself across a sufficient range of semantic and functional contexts. In other words, for a learner to spontaneously produce language utterances that enable them to meet their communicative goals, they must possess a repertoire of lexical items (words and stock phrases) with high surrender value which allows them (a) to talk about a wide range of topics; (b) perform the most important communicative functions (personal, interpersonal, directive, referential and imaginative; complete list at: http://www.carla.umn.edu/articulation/polia/pdf_files/communicative_functions.pdf ).

Hence, vocabulary teaching must be an important focus of classroom / out-of-the-classroom L2 learning. Whilst it is more time-effective to ‘flip’ vocabulary learning, it may be more beneficial to choose web-tools/apps which do not simply focus on word level and teach words as discrete items (e.g. www.linguascope.com, www.vocabexpress.com or www.languageperfect.com ) but which enable students to learn the words in context and across as many linguistic contexts as possible.

It is important for vocabulary teaching which aims at developing fluent spontaneity to aim at (a) fast retrieval and (b) transfer across contexts. Here, too, the MWB translation activities under time constraints of the kind outlined above can come in very handy. Recycling, as I often reiterate in my posts is extremely important for reason I have already explained to death on this blog. Teachers must plan carefully for recycling ensuring that each unit of work provide opportunities for the recycling of old ‘material’. This rarely happens in MFL department or course-book schemes of work, yet is possibly the most important factor in determining learners’ retention of the target vocabulary.

An important` point: very often British L2 textbooks and online resources provide detailed lists of nouns but not verbs. However, without the mastery of a wide repertoire of verbs the generative power of nouns is limited and the ability to talk across a wide range of topics is drastically reduced – affecting the learner potential to talk ‘spontaneously’ across context. Adjectives/Adverbs are often neglected, too.

For a principled approach to teaching vocabulary refer to my post ’13 steps to effective vocabulary teaching’.

6. Aural skill instruction: providing models and teaching listenership vs ‘quizzes’

In order to effectively foster fluent spontaneity teachers need to change their attitude to listening skills instruction. The listening tasks teachers must involve their students in will not be those which aim at testing their inferential strategies (e.g. true and false quizzes), but those that model useful language and teach learners to be effective interlocutors (e.g. be able to function effectively in the context of a conversational exchange by understanding and responding to their interlocutors’ utterances).

6.1 Modelling useful language

Students must be engaged in listening activities involving exposure to useful comprehensible input which aims at (a) reinforcing and expanding their existing repertoire of vocabulary and communicative strategies; (b) enhancing their pronunciation and decoding skills; (c) modelling ‘spontaneous’ talk.

For (a) and (b) to be achieved teachers must involve students in tasks which require them to pay attention to lexis and sound. A very easy-to-set-up activity is obviously translation. The teacher utters useful sentences and students translate them on mini boards. Transcribing short texts can also help. Another activity involves providing the students with a – as literal as possible – gapped translation of a listening text and play the audio track; the task: to fill in the gaps in the translation (in English of course). Jigsaw listening and L2 gapped-text tasks can be useful, too.

As far as (c) is concerned, videos of native speakers (not actors) engaging in spontaneous interaction / talk can be beneficial as they model useful linguistic and paralinguistic features of native-speaker spontaneous talk. Such videos can be found on the web or can be created by teachers interviewing native speakers (e.g. language assistants or L2-native-speaker colleagues). Because they don’t have to last more than a few minutes and have to be as spontaneous as possible, they require no planning – apart from deciding on the questions to ask. Thus the process is not very time consuming.

6.2 Listenership

Listenership development can be fostered by involving students in any listening or oral communicative activity which requires them to understand and respond. Some of the MWBs activities outlined above can be recycled in this context, too. Videos of conversational/transactional exchanges between native speakers where students need to demonstrate understanding of the questions being asked. Frequent practice in answering a wide range of questions and responding to statements – for instance, as a starter, make a statement in the L2 and ask the students to respond saying if and why they agree/disagree with it (example: the food in the canteen is unhealthy). If we are aiming at fluency too, we can do this under time constraints. Obviously, any oral communicative activity involving negotiation of meaning will serve this purpose,too.

7.Encouraging risk-taking and modelling and practising compensatory strategies

Students should be encouraged to take risks. For this it is crucial that errors are tolerated in unstructured oral communicative practice. Risk-taking, however, requires some scaffolding, too. By this I mean that students should be equipped with effective strategies to cope with communication breakdown, e.g. how to make up for lack of vocabulary.

We advocate the teaching of the following compensatory strategies:

Coinage – this involves showing the students how you can create an L2 word from and L1 word (this strategy does not obviously apply to all languages). For instance: how to get the French for university, city or proximity by changing the ‘y’ to ‘é’ or how to obtain the Spanish equivalent of verbs ending in ‘-ate’ in English by replacing ‘-ate’ with ‘-ar’ e.g.: exagerar, alternar, enumerar, etc. This also entails encouraging students to create new L2 words that may actually not exist but can be understood, such as ‘ her eyes are watering’ for ‘she is crying’;

Paraphrase – this involves teaching students how to make up for lack of vocabulary by providing a basic definition/description of a word (e.g. for ‘glass’ – you use it to drink water);

Approximation – this involves using a word that is close enough in meaning to the one you need (e.g. ship for sailboat) with or without the use of miming to enhance expressive power;

Teaching the above strategies can be a lot of fun. Some teachers may frown upon the idea of their students learning how to produce erroneous L2 items in order to get the message through. However, these strategies are not simply compensatory strategies; they are ultimately learning strategies in that their use usually results in a correction which provides the accurate L2 form.

Spontaneity does require the kind of risk-taking and creativity that the application of these strategies entails. Compensatory strategies allow a speaker to keep up the spontaneous talk even when they lack vocabulary and grammar; hence, they are important communicative ‘tools’.

8.Conclusion

Spontaneity in oral production can only be achieved through tons of practice, especially of the productive kind. For learners to be spontaneous they need:

Masses of vocabulary. The more vocabulary a learner knows the more they will be likely to communicate;
Practice in manipulating stock lexical phrases (formulaic language) to adapt them effectively to various linguistic contexts. This may require some teaching of grammar and syntax;
A classroom climate which encourages one-to-one oral interaction and risk-taking and prioritizes fluency and communication over grammatical accuracy;
Extensive controlled and highly scaffolded one-to-one oral interaction practice which leads to unstructured practice. Such practice should aim at developing transferrable communicative routines, whose automatization will ultimately lead to spontaneity;
autonomous vocabulary learning and seeking oral interaction opportunities outside the classroom;
practice in compensatory strategies;
listening which models useful language and transferrable communicative routines.

A final point: if teachers do value spontaneity, fluency and intelligibility in speech production as the most important end-goals of L2 learning, then they should ensure that this is reflected in their curriculum design and everyday teaching. The achievement of spontaneity requires relentless practice and systematic formative assessment. Fortunately, as I have attempted to show above, focusing on spontaneity in speech does not harm the development of the other three skills. Even reading, which I have not mentioned thus far, can indirectly play an important role in enhancing spontaneity by widening our students’ vocabulary – provided, that is, that they possess effective decoding skills which enable them to accurately transform L2 graphemes into L2 sounds.

Five tips to encourage spontaneous talk

September 12, 2015November 15, 2015 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Speaking and phonology

Today I came across the following tips for encouraging spontaneous talk whilst browsing the web.

Top 5 tips for encouraging spontaneous talk in the MFL classroom

Have keyphrases on the wall so they can use them when they want – e.g. ‘I would like…’
Take all opportunities to encourage students – ‘I need a pen’
Give as much supportas possible – literacy mats/vocab sheets/peer help
Rewardbravery!
Build it into routineslike entering the classroom (hold up a MWB of a key phrase at the door like ‘opinion in French’ and they have to give an example as they come in. That way each child has said something in TL before you’ve even done the register!)

(source: http://www.michellecairnsmfl.wordpress.com)

These are useful tips which can help teachers create a culture which may encourage pupils to talk in class, no doubt. But do they really promote spontaneous talk? In order to answer this question let us have a look at what ‘spontaneous’ means. The Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary offers the following definition of the adjective ‘spontaneous’:

Performed or occurring as a result of a sudden impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus:

Michelle Cairns’ tips reflect the kind of pedagogic advice given by several other MFL educators and are rooted in a misunderstanding of the notion of ‘spontaneous talk’ both in terms of the cognitive processes it involves and the developmental mechanisms that lead to the ability to produce speech autonomously.

Since ‘spontaneous talk’ refers to the ability to produce speech without prompts, Michelle Cairns’ tips, like those dished out by many other MFL educators, refer but to the very embryonal stage of spontaneous talk, what in my model of speaking skill acquisition I refer to as the ‘imitative’ stage. However, in order to bring our learners from the ability to ‘parrot’ phrases on the wall or on writing mats to what applied linguists call ‘autonomous speaking competence’ (i.e. spontaneous speech) it takes way more than those five tips, unless we hold a very simplistic view of oral proficiency acquisition.

For spontaneous talk to be developed effectively in large classes (i.e. classes of the size typically found in secondary schools), the top tip according to much research (e.g. Varonis and Gass, 1985; Pica,1996; Macaro, 1997; Donato and McGlone, 1997; Macaro, 2007) should be to engage students in NNS (non-native speaker)-to-NNS oral interaction in the context of tasks requiring negotiation of meaning (e.g. information gap tasks).

Whilst the ‘parroting’ stage alluded to above is important, especially when it ‘drills in’ carefully selected high frequency phrases useful in the real world, the most important part of the oral-skill acquisition process occurs when students are practising the skill of putting a message across to an interlocutor, regardless of the mistakes they make. Only after much such practice, supported by writing mats, dictionaries and expert TL speakers at the early stages one can develop spontaneous speech.

Many teachers refrain from staging oral tasks involving oral learner-to-learner interaction for the following reasons:

Students do not always stay on task and lapse in their L1
Teachers are concerned about the negative effective for learning of pairing students of different levels of proficiency; the more able learners might not be ‘stretched’ enough if they work with less able ones;
By working with their peers, learners might pick up erroneous utterance that they might end up fossilizing;
Not all students enjoy it.

As for (a), studies by Brooks and Donato (1994), Knight (1996) and Brooks et al. (1997), Anton and Di Camilla (1998) found that students do generally stay on task and do tend to use the TL most of the time. What is more interesting, even when they do lapse into their L1, they tend to use it for TL learning enhancing behaviours, i.e. (1) to facilitate the negotiation of meaning; (2) to talk about the task (e.g. how to conduct it; what the expectations were). These studies also produced an interesting finding: learner-to learner interaction tasks promote a whole host of self-regulation strategies which enhance TL acquisition and that I observe every day in my lessons during such activities (e.g. whispering to oneself to repeat a word they have just heard from a peer or teacher in order to commit it to memory) – a further reason to implement such classroom activities.

As for point (b) and (c), above, Iwashita (2001) investigated if pairing students of different levels of proficiency might have adverse effects on the frequency of interaction and the modified output that would result from the interactions. She got her students to work in three proficiency pairs: High-High, Low-Low and Hig-Low. She found that the lower proficiency students gained a lot from working with higher proficiency students and produced lots of modified output, whilst the higher proficiency learners were not seemingly disadvantaged.

Finaly, as far as point (d) is concerned, Macaro (1997) found that oral pair-work made most of the students feel comfortable and they reported learning and remembering a lot. Very few of the students reported negative attitudes.

Obviously, the process of acquiring spontaneity in TL speech production will have to be supported by the teaching of masses of TL vocabulary (not just nouns – but a wide range of verbs, too), of discourse function markers and by lots of exposure to comprehensible aural input.

Computer/ Tablet-mediated interactional writing (see my previous post on it) can also play a very important role, as it allows the learner to converse through the written medium at a speed high enough to practise fast TL processing but slow enough to allow for more self-monitoring.

The one tip from Michelle Cairns’ post that I would definitely ‘save’ as pivotal in fostering spontaneous speech is to ‘reward bravery’, not only to create an atmosphere conducive to risk-taking and tolerance of error, but also because it encourages the deployment of another important catalyst of spontaneous speech development: communication strategies, the ways, that is, in which MFL learners compensate for their lack of language by coining new words, paraphrasing or explaining unknown vocabulary, resort to gestures or onomatopoeias or overgeneralize TL rules.

These are my top tips for developing spontaneous talk beyond the obvious imitative stage that Michelle Cairns’ pedagogic advice in her very useful blog referred to:

Teach masses of vocabulary, ensuring there is a balanced mix of nouns, adjectives and verbs. As Macaro (2007) and Conti (2015) point out, far too often teachers neglect equipping their learners with a wide enough range of verbs. Extensive reading should be promoted as a way to acquire new vocabulary;
Involve students in lots of oral interaction involving negotiation of meaning and practising a wide repertoire of communicative functions (e.g. comparing and contrasting; persuading; agreeing and disagreein). Oral interaction tasks should be sequenced wisely in terms of the cognitive load they place on the learners; hence, one would start with highly controlled tasks (the imitative stage Michelle Cairnes alluded to) and gradually move to less structured communicative activities (e.g. the ones investigated by Varonis and Gass, 1985, and Macaro (1997);
Expose learners to lots of comprehensible aural input (e.g. through narrow listening tasks). Increase the amount of listening tasks which aim at modelling language use rather than testing students. In other words, use the listening tasks to draw students’ attention to the language items you want them to ‘pick up’ rather than simply ask to guess if statements are true or false or identify details in the text;
Model to students creative ways to put a message across to an interlocutor when they do not know vocabulary; i.e. train them in the deployment of communicative strategies;
Ask them to practise digitally-mediated interactional writing independently with their peers or other target language knowers on the internet – the way I picked up two of my languages.

In conclusion, the acquisition of ‘spontaneity’ in speech production (autonomous speaking competence) is a complex process which goes from an imitative stage in which the learner is highly dependent on models and scaffolding to an autonomous stage in which the learner has a sufficiently wide repertoire of vocabulary, discourse function markers and compensatory strategies. Teachers must plan for it carefully and work towards its attainment through the systematic application of the five principles just outlined whilst creating a non-judgmental learning environment conducive to risk-taking. Ultimately, the extent to which students become effective autonomous TL speakers will largely hinge on the amount of vocabulary they know, the speaking practice they will have received and their willingness to take risks.

A final point: spontaneous speech without the development of fluency intended as the automatization of intelligible speech production is not conducive to effective communication under real operating conditions (e.g. real life communication). Hence, in my view, MFL educators should posit ‘fluent spontaneous speech’ as the desirable goal of speaking proficiency instruction, where fluency refers to time-to-word ratio in intelligible-speech production.

Apologies to Michelle Cairns for the criticism of her tips, which is not specifically directed at her or her blog – which actually usually contains excellent teaching resources and advice for teachers – but to a general attitude towards MFL pedagogy found in many language teaching blogs which may be misleading as it presupposes and divulges an overly simplistic view of language acquisition.

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