Ten questions you may want to ask yourself in planning a unit of work

August 11, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

Here are ten questions that I believe – ideally – curriculum designers should be asking themselves in planning and evaluating a topic-based unit of work in the context of an eclectic instructional approach with a communicative focus where grammar is taught explicitly and whose ultimately aim is the acquisition of cognitive control over TL use. The reader should note that I have avoided any explicit reference to the expression ‘learning outcomes’ (although they are implicitly referred to throughout the below). This is because this term in my perception – and maybe only in my perception – evokes an excessive concern with the product of learning, whereas I advocate that the pedagogic focus shift onto the process of learning, that is, the acquisition of procedural linguistic ability, i.e. effective executive control over language reception and production.

1.What kind of language do I expect my learners to be able to understand (in reading and listening) and produce (speaking and writing) in terms of:

Range and depth of vocabulary;
Range of grammar structures;
Range of tenses;
Range of language functions?

2.How complex should teacher input and learner output be at different stages in the development of the unit of work? This is a very useful question as it usually results in the curriculum designer putting more thought and effort in the sequencing of activities based on the developmental needs of the learners. Teacher needs to have this issue in their focal awareness so as to agree on what constitutes comprehensible input and achievable output. The most challenging issue is possibly – as I discussed in my last post – deciding on what constitutes a complex grammar structure.

3. What levels of fluency do I expect the learners to have acquired at key points in the development of the unit of work? This issue is hugely important as it refers to the notion of automatization of language production. Sadly, in my experience, this is a dimension of proficiency which is usually neglected by curriculum designers – with disastrous consequences for language learning. Teachers must agree where they would like their students to be in terms of spontaneity of production at key stages in the unfolding of the unit of work.

4. What levels of accuracy in and (cognitive) control over the target language do I expect students to exhibit at key stages in the development of the unit? This is linked to the previous point but develops it a notch or two further in that it does not refer simply to the ability to be fluent and comprehensible, but also to perform accurately under real operating conditions. In other words, it refers to the extent to which grammar structures, the phonology system, etc. are not merely learnt declaratively but also procedurally;i.e. where on the declarative (explicit knowledge of the TL) to procedural (automatic application of grammar rules) continuum do we expect our learners to be?

5. Which ones of the following areas of competence am I going to focus and to what extent?

Phonology (awareness of the TL sound system) and Phonetics (production of the TL system)
Orthography
Morphology (word formation)
Syntax (word order)
Language functions (e.g. compare and contrast, asking questions, predicting, agreeing and disagreeing, sequencing, summarizing)
Communication skills (e.g. listenership) – this is a crucial, yet very neglected skill-set, especially in PBL;
Learner strategies / Life-long learning skills – this is another neglected area in curriculum planning;
Learner autonomy (the extent to which we promote and scaffold beyond the classroom independent learning) – also a very neglected area of competence;
Cross-cultural competence

6. Which of the above should be prioritized? – This decision will be dictated by the stakeholders’ demands/needs as well by the espoused instructional methodology.

7. What would I like learners to do independently? – This does not include homework. It refers to what you would like students to do independently, without any teacher request, to enhance their own learning and how you would go about triggering this desire to learn out of the classroom.

8. How and how often am I going recycle the target language items, competences and skills/strategies throughout and beyond the present unit of work? – my regular readers would know how obsessed I am with short-/medium- and long-term recycling. I strongly believe this is the most crucial and most neglected area of teaching and learning.

9. How am I going to resource the teaching and learning of the target language items, competences and skills/strategies?

10. How and how often am I going to assess all of the above?- This is the most challenging question to answer. However, if one has answered the previous questions, it will be relatively straightforward. The issues which are most often neglected in assessment design are:

Does the test actually measure what it purports to measure? (construct validity) – hence, if following the above framework, issues a to f must be taken into account here;
Is the assessment going to have a positive wash-back effect on learning? – it should, really;
Is the assessment fair? – Students must be prepared effectively for a test; hence, the test papers should be ready and piloted way before the teaching of a unit begins;

Moreover, several low-stakes assessments (not too many, obviously) should take place before the end-of-unit test(s) in order to be fair to our students and not base our evaluation of their performance over a term based on one snapshot at the end of it.

Conclusion

It is obvious that the answer to the above questions will be to a great extent influenced by the teaching and learning methodology espoused and/or adopted by the department as well as by the demands and needs of the stake-holders. MFL curriculum designers may find certain areas more or less relevant to their learning context or more or less worthy of an explicit focus. To expect busy teachers to do all of the above thoroughly and ‘perfectly’ would be unrealistic, especially in view of the time constraints.

However, there is one thing that every curriculum designers MUST definitely plan carefully for: how to foster and facilitate the process of automatization of every skill and language item they set out to teach. This includes extensive recycling and practice and will often require going beyond the textbook and the time normally allocated to curriculum delivery (the ‘two- chapters-or-topics-per-term syndrome’, as I call it). As I have often reiterated in my posts this is the most important, yet the most neglected dimension of language learning.

Crucial issues in the assessment of speaking and writing (Part 1)

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

In the last few weeks I have been thinking long and hard about the assessment of the productive skills (speaking and writing), dissatisfied as I am with the proficiency measurement schemes currently in use in many UK school which are either stuck in the former system (National Curriculum Levels) or strongly influenced by it (i.e. mainly tense driven)

However, the challenge of finding a more effective, valid and cost-effective alternative for use in secondary British schools like is no easy task. The biggest obstacles I have found in the process refer to the following questions that have been buzzing in my head for the last few weeks, the answers to which are crucial to the development of any effective approach to the assessment of proficiency in the productive skills

What is meant by ‘fluency’ and how do we measure it?
How do we measure accuracy?
What do we mean by ‘complexity’ of language? How can complexity be measured?
How do we assess vocabulary richness and/or range? How wide should L2 learner vocabulary range at different proficiency stages?
What does it mean to ‘acquire’ a specific grammar structure or lexical item?
When can one say that a specific vocabulary and grammar item has been fully acquired?
What linguistic competences should teacher prioritize in the assessment of learner proficiency? Or should they all be weighted in the same way?
What task-types should be used to assess learners’ speaking and writing proficiency?
How often should we assess speaking and writing?
Should we assess autonomous learning strategy use? If so, how?

All of the above questions refer to constructs commonly used in the multi-traits scales usually adopted by researchers, language education providers and examination boards to assess L2 performance and proficiency. In this post, for reason of space, I will only concern myself with the first three questions reserving to deal with the rest of them in future posts. The issues they refer to are usually acronymized by scholars as CAF (Complexity, Accuracy, Fluency) but I find the acronym FAC (Fluency, Accuracy, Complexity) much more memorable… Thus I will deviate from mainstream Applied Linguistics on this account.

The issues

2.1 What do we mean by ‘fluency’ in speaking and writing? And how do we measure it?

2.1.1 Speaking

Fluency has been defined as ‘the production of language in real time without undue pausing or hesitation’ (Ellis and Barkhuizen 2005: 139) or, in the words of Lennon (1990), as ‘an impression on the listeners that the psycholinguistic process of speech planning and speech production are functioning easily and automatically’. Although many, including teachers, use the term ‘fluency’ as synonymous of competence in oral proficiency, researchers see it more as temporal phenomenon (e.g. how effortlessly and ‘fast’ language is produced). In L2 research Fluency is considered as a different construct to comprehensibility, although from a teacher’s point of view it is obviously desirable that fluent speech be intelligible.

The complexity of the concept of ‘fluency’ stems mainly from its being a multidimensional construct. Fluency is in fact conceptualized as:

Break-down fluency – which relates to how often speakers pause;
Repair fluency – which relates to how often speakers repeat words and self-correct;
Speed fluency – which refers to the rate of speaker delivery.

Researchers have come up with various measures of fluency. The most commonly adopted are:

Speech rate: total number of syllables divided by total time taken to execute the oral task in hand;
Mean length of run: average length of syllables produced in utterances between short pauses;
Phonation/time ratio: time spent speaking divided by the total time taken to execute the oral task;
Articulation rate (rate of sound production) : total number of syllables divided by the time to produce them;
Average length of pauses.

A seminal study by Towell et al (1996) investigated university students of French. The subjects were tested at three points in time: (time one) the beginning of their first year; (time 2) in their second year and (3) after returning from their year abroad (in France). The researchers found that improvements in fluency occurred mainly in terms of speaking rate and mean length of run – the latter being the best indicator of development in fluency. Improvements in fluency were also evidenced by an increase in the rate of sound production (articulation rate), but not in a major way. In their investigation, Towell et al. found that assessing fluency based on pauses is not always a valid procedure because a learner might pause for any of the following reasons:

The demands posed by a specific task;
Difficulty in knowing what to say;
An individual’ personal characteristic;
Difficulty in putting into words an idea already in the brain;
Getting the right balance between length of utterance and the linguistic structure of the utterance.

Hence, the practice of rating students’ fluency based on pauses may not be as valid as many teachers often assume. As Lambert puts it: “although speed and pausing measures might provide an indication of automaticity and efficiency in the speech production process with respect to specific forms, their fluctuation is subject to too many variables to reflect development directly.”

2.1.2 Writing

When it comes to writing, fluency is much more difficult to define. As, Bruton and Kirby (1987) observe,

Written fluency is not easily explained, apparently, even when researchers rely on simple, traditional measures such as composing rate. Yet, when any of these researchers referred to the term fluency, they did so as though the term were already widely understood and not in need of any further explication.

In reviewing the existing literature I was amazed by how much disagreement there is amongst researchers on how to assess writing fluency, which begs the question: if it is such a subjective construct on whose definition nobody agrees, how can the raters appointed by examination boards be relied on to do an objective job?

There are several approaches to assessing writing fluency. The most commonly used in research is composition rate, which is how many words are written per minute. So for instance, in order to assess the development of fluency a teacher may give his/her class a prompt, then stop after a few minutes and ask the students, after giving guidelines on how to carry out the word count, to count the words in their output. This can be done a different moments in time, within a given unit of work or throughout the academic year, in order to map out the development of writing fluency.

Initial implications

Oral fluency is a hugely important dimension of proficiency as it assesses the extent to which speaking skills have been automatized. A highly fluent learner is one who can speak spontaneously and effortlessly, with hardly any hesitation, backtracking and self-correcting.

Assessing, as I have just discussed, is very problematic as there is no international consensus on what constitutes best practice. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which is adopted by many academic and professional institutions around the world provides some useful – but not flawless – guidelines.(http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/elp/elp-reg/Source/Key_reference/Overview_CEFRscales_EN.pdf ). MFL department could adapt them to suit their learning context mindful of the main points put across in the previous paragraphs.

The most important implications for teachers are:

Although we do not have to be as rigorous and pedantic as researchers, we may want to be mindful in assessing our students’ fluency of the finding (confirmed by several studies) that more fluent speakers produce longer utterances between short pauses (mean length of run);
However, we should also be mindful of Towell and al.’s (1996) finding that there may be individuals who pause because of other issues not related to fluency but rather to anxiety, working memory issues or other personal traits. It is important in this respect to get to know our students and make sure that we have repeated oral interactions with them so as to get better acquainted with their modus operandi during oral tasks;
In the absence of international consensus on how fluency should be measured, MFL departments may want to decide whether and to what extent frequency of self-repair, pauses and speed should be used in the assessment of their learners’ fluency;
If the GCSE or A level examination adopted by their school does include degrees of fluency as an evaluative criterion– as Edexcel for instance does – then it is imperative for teachers to ask which operationalization of fluency is applied in the evaluation of candidates’ output so as to train students accordingly in preparation for the oral and written exams;
Although comprehensibility is a separate construct to fluency in research, teachers will want their students to speak and write at a speed as close as possible to native speakers’ but also to produce intelligible language. Hence, assessment criteria should combine both constructs.
Regular mini-assessments of writing fluency of the kind outlined above (teacher giving a prompt and students having to write under time conditions) should be conducted regularly, two or three times a term, to map out students’ progress whilst training them to produce language in real operating conditions. If this kind of assessment starts at KS3 or even KS2 (with able groups and ‘easier’ topics), by GCSE and A-levels, it may have a positive washback effect on learner examination performance.

3.Accuracy

Accuracy would seem intuitively as the easiest way to assess language proficiency, but it is not necessarily so. Two common approaches to measuring accuracy involve: (1) calculating the ratio of errors in a text/discourse to number of units of production (e.g. words, clauses, sentences, T units) or (2) working out the proportion of error-free units of production. This is not without problems because it does not tell us much about the type of errors made; this may be crucial in determining the proficiency development of a learner. Imagine Learner 1 who has made ten errors with very advanced structures and Learner 2 who has made ten errors with very basic structures without attempting any of the advanced structures Learner 1 has made mistakes with. To evaluate these two learners’ levels of accuracy as equivalent would be unfair.

Moreover, this system may penalize learners who take a lot of risks in their output with highly challenging structures. So, for instance, an advanced student who tries out a lot of difficult structures (e.g. if –clauses, subjunctives or complex verbal subordination) may score less than someone of equivalent proficiency who ‘plays it safe’ and avoids taking risks. Would that be a fair way of assessing task performance/proficiency? Also, pedagogically speaking, this approach would be counter-productive in encouraging avoidance behavior rather than risk-taking, possibly the most powerful learning strategy ever.

Some scholars propose that errors should be graded in terms of gravity. So, errors that impede comprehension should be considered as more serious than errors which do not. But in terms of accuracy, errors are errors, regardless of their nature. We are dealing with two different constructs here, comprehensibility of output and accuracy of output.

Another problem with using accuracy as a measure of proficiency development is that learner output is compared with native like norms. However, this does not tell us much about the learner’s Interlanguage development; only with what degree of accuracy she/he handles specific language items.

Lambert (2014) reports another important issue pointed out by Bard et al.(1996):

In making grammaticality judgments, raters do not only respond to the grammaticality of sentences, but to other factors which include the estimated frequency with which the structure has been heard, the degree to which an utterance conforms to a prescriptive norm, and the degree to which the structure makes sense to the rater semantically or pragmatically. Such acceptability factors are difficult to separate from grammaticality even for experienced raters.

I am not ashamed to say that I have experienced this myself on several occasions as a rater of GCSE Italian oral exams. And to this day, I find it difficult not to let these three sources of bias skew my judgment.

3.1 Initial implications for teachers and assessment

Grammatical, lexical, phonological and orthographic accuracy are important aspects of proficiency included in all the examination assessment scales. MFL departments ought to collegially decide whether it should play an equally important or more or less important role in assessment than fluency/intelligibility and communication.

Also, once decided what constitute more complex and easier structures amongst the structures the curriculum purports to teach for productive use, teachers may want to choose to focus in assessment mostly or solely on the accuracy of those structures – as this may have a positive washback effect on learning.

MFL teams may also want to discuss to what extent one should assess accuracy in terms of number or types of mistakes or both. And whether mistakes with normally late acquired, more complex structures should be penalized considering that such assessment approach might encourage avoidance behavior.

Complexity

Complexity is the most difficult construct to define and use to assess proficiency because it can refer to different aspects of performance and communication (e.g. lexical, interactional, grammatical, syntactic). For instance, are lexical and syntactic complexity two different aspects of the same performance or two different areas altogether? Some researchers (e.g. Skehan) think so and I tend to agree. So, how should a students’ oral or written performance exhibiting a complex use of vocabulary but a not so complex use of grammar structures or syntax be rated? Should evaluative scales then include two complexity traits, one for vocabulary and one for grammar/syntax? I think so.

Another problem pertains to what we take ‘complex’ to actually mean. Does complex mean…

the number of criteria to be applied in order to arrive at the correct form‘ as Hulstijn and De Graaff (1994) posit? –In other words, how many steps the application of the underlying rule involves? (e.g. perfect sense in French or Italian with verbs requiring the auxiliary ‘to be’)
variety? Meaning, that, in the presence of various alternatives, choosing the appropriate one flexibly and accurately across different contexts would be an index of high proficiency? (this is especially the case with lexis)
cognitively demanding, challenging? Or
acquired late in the acquisition process? (which is not always easy to determine)

All of the above dimensions of complexity pose serious challenges in their conceptualization and objective application to proficiency measurement.

Standard ways of operationalizing language complexity in L2 research have also focused on syntactic complexity, and especially on verbal subordination. In other words, researchers have analyzed L2 learner output by dividing the total number of finite and non-finite clauses by sentential units of analysis such as terminal units, communication units, speech, etc. One of the problems with this is that the number thus obtained is just a figure that tells us that one learner has used more verbal subordination than another but does not differentiate between types of subordination – so, if a learner uses less but more complex subordination than another, s/he will still be rated as using less complex language.

4.1 Implications for teachers

Complexity of learner output is a very desirable quality of learner output and a marker of progress in proficiency, especially when it goes hand in hand with high levels of fluency. However, in the absence of consensus as to what is complex and what is not, MFL departments may want to decide collegially on the criteria amongst the ones suggested above (e.g. variety, cognitive challenge, number of steps required to arrive at the correct form and lateness of acquisition) which they find most suitable for their learning contexts and curricular goals and constraints.

Also, they may want to consider splitting this construct into two strands, vocabulary complexity and grammatical complexity.

Finally, verbal subordination should be considered as a marker of complexity and emphasized with our learners. However, especially with more advanced learners (e.g. AS and A2) it may be useful to agree on what constitute more advanced and less advanced subordination.

In addition, since complexity of language does appear as an evaluative criterion in A-level examination assessment scales, teachers may want to query with the examination boards what complexity stands for and demand a detailed list of which grammar structures are considered as more or less complex.

Conclusions

Fluency, Accuracy and Complexity are very important constructs central to all approaches to the assessment of the two productive macro-skills, speaking and writing. In the absence of international consensus on how to define and measure them, MFL department must come together and discuss assessment philosophies, procedures and strategies to ensure that learner proficiency evaluation is as fair and valid as possible and matches the learning context they operate in. In taking such decisions, the washback effect on learning has to be considered.

Having only dealt with three of the ten issues outlined at the beginning of this post, the picture is far from being complete. What is clear is that there are no clear norms as yet, unless one decides to adopt in toto an existing assessment framework such as the CEFR’s (http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/elp/elp-reg/Source/Key_reference/Overview_CEFRscales_EN.pdf ). This means that MFL departments have the opportunity to make their own norms based on an informed understanding – to which I hope this post has contributed – of the FAC constructs and of the other crucial dimensions of L2 performance and proficiency assessment that I will deal with in future posts.

A little experiment with Padlet. Of teacher myths and learning reality

August 8, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Technology and L2 learning, Uncategorized

I often read on the Internet or hear from ‘techy’ teachers of the presumed learning benefits of various Apps. More than often, when I investigate those claims with my students they are down-sized. The truth is that the way adults’ cognition – especially teachers’ – interacts with a learning tool often differs from an adolescent’s.

A few months’ back, one such claim was made in my presence. The context: an ICT training session in which one of the participants criticized Google classroom based on the fact that, unlike Padlet, when a student works on an assignment the other pupils cannot see what their peers are writing and consequently the opportunities for learning would be drastically reduced.

Reflecting on that claim on my way home I thought about myself, an avid and highly motivated learner of 8 languages – would I, whilst doing a Padlet task, actually actively look at my class mates’ output so as to learn from it? My answer was: possibly not, maybe a fancy idiom might attract my attention and would ask the teacher about it, but nothing more than that. But maybe students would; so I decided to put my colleague’s claim to the test.

The next day I asked students from four of my Spanish classes (2 year 8 and 2 year 9 groups), immediately after creating a padlet wall to which all of them had contributed, to note down in their books or iPads three language items they found in their classmates’ writing which they found interesting and/or useful. Two weeks later I asked them to recall the items they had noted down. Guess what? Only two of the 68 students involved in this experiment actually remembered something (one item each). Not surprising. Even when a student does notice something in another learner’s output they must do something with it for some degree of deep processing to occur and retention to ensue.

I also asked my students how often they actually look at what their classmates write and ‘steal’ useful language items from them. The vast majority of them replied ‘very rarely’ or ‘never’. Yet another mismatch between teacher presumptions and foreign language learner cognition.

The lesson to be learnt: not much is known as yet about the way adolescent foreign language learners interact cognitively and affectively with many of the Apps currently used in many MFL classrooms. ‘Experiments’ like mine should be carried out as often as possible in order for teachers not to be misguided by Internet myths. Padlet can be a useful App, no doubt; but assumptions about what learners do with it, should be rooted in evidence not simply wishful thinking.

Five useful things many MFL teachers don’t do

August 6, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Grammar teaching, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

Teach word structural analysis

As I argued in my previous post ‘Why foreign language teachers may want to rethink their approach to reading instruction’, effective reading comprehension results from the successful use of Top-down and Bottom-up processing. In that post I did not provide an exhaustive list of all the bottom-up comprehension strategies L2 teachers can model to their students, but I did underscore the importance of enhancing learner word recognition skills.

One strategy that can be taught to our students in order to enhance their chances to comprehend unfamiliar words is a powerful strategy called Structural Analysis which is not often taught in the typical mainstream UK classroom and has literally ‘saved my life’ in many situations.

This consists in training students in analyzing the morphology of the unfamiliar words they encounter in the written input they are exposed to by dividing them into parts, i.e. separating the root word from its prefixes and suffixes. Instruction in Structural analysis will include teaching

what the most common prefixes in the target language mean (see: http://www.myenglishteacher.eu/blog/prefixes-suffixes-list/ for fairly comprehensive lists of prefixes meaning in English);
what the most common suffixes are and mean (see: http://takelessons.com/blog/french-vocabulary-prefixes-and-suffixes-z04 for a very exhaustive list of suffixes and prefixes in French); and,
with the help of web-based resources, the most useful root words and how to use them in order to infer the meaning of unknown lexis (e.g. https://www.learnthat.org/pages/view/roots.html; http://www.readingrockets.org/article/root-words-roots-and-affixes ).

Learner training in Structural analysis may be carried out using the following framework:

Step 1 – Rationale for the training (i.e. to enhance students’ ability to comprehend unknown words)

Step 2 – Raising awareness of what Prefixes, Affixes and Root words are;

Step 3 – Modelling strategy use (e.g. through think-aloud: teacher shows examples of how applying one’s knowledge of a prefix/suffix/root word as well as the context one can correctly infer the meaning of a word)

Step 4 – Extensive word-meaning-inference practice with written (or even spoken texts) preferably in the context of the unit-of-work topics. Also, the target words should not occur in isolation but in short texts;

Step 5 – Recycling the same strategy in three or four subsequent lessons in the context of 10 -15 minutes word-meaning-inference activities relevant to the topic-in-hand;

This kind of activities develop important compensation strategies, which are essential life-long language learning skills; they involve a high degree of creativity thereby tapping in high-order thinking skills. They may also have the very positive effect of enhancing our learners’ self-efficacy as readers as they will feel equipped with a new powerful tool for comprehending TL text without having to resort to the dictionary. This effect will only be brought about if the teacher plans the activities carefully, providing lots of initial ‘small wins’.

2. Train learners in oral compensation strategies

If the main aim of our language teaching is to develop our learners’ ability to cope with the linguistic demands of target language interaction, it should be imperative for us to train them regularly and systematically (not the one-off tip or session) in the effective use of compensation (communication) strategies – an important life-long survival skill. These strategies refer to the ways in which an individual creatively makes up for the expressive limitations of his target language competence (e.g. lack of vocabulary). Here are four useful compensation strategies to teach MFL learners:

Coinage – i.e. the individual makes up a word that does not exist using a related lexical item in their repertoire. For instance: a learner of French does not know the French verb ‘Nourrir’ (=to feed) but knows the noun ‘Nourriture’ (=‘Food’). He then makes up the word ‘Nourriturer’, which is wrong, but conveys the meaning;
Approximation – i.e. to go back to the above example, instead of saying ‘Nourrir’ the learner says ‘Donner de la nourriture’ (to give food), which is not exactly the best translation, but it is very close in meaning, conveys the idea and is acceptable French;
Paraphrasing – i.e. the students do not know a given word so they explain it, a bit like a dictionary definition would do;
Simplification – i.e. instead of using the same complex sentence structure he/she would use in his/her native language, the learner simplifies it so as to be able to convey the basic meaning.

The same framework outlined in the previous paragraph can be applied here, except that step 4 would include productive rather than receptive practice.

Compensation strategies are a very important skill and just like any other skill they must be practised extensively and regularly in order to be learnt. Some teachers may frown upon this type of instruction on the grounds that it may lead to sloppy L2 output or pidginization. Nonetheless, these strategies are powerful learning tools; for example when you produce a wrong but intelligible word through coinage, a native or expert TL interlocutor will understand you and usually provide you with the correct L2 form. This lexical transaction is more likely to lead to retention than looking up the same word in the dictionary.

3. Explain how the brain works

Foreign language learners, especially the more committed and metacognitive ones, do, in my experience, enjoy knowing more about how their brain works when they learn the target language. This does not mean that one should spend a whole lesson talking about neuroscience…However, showing them the diagram below, that maps out how the brain retains vocabulary over time and involving them in devising a personalised schedule based on that diagram would not take too much of your lesson time; would not require scientific jargon and would foster metacognition (thinking about and planning one’s learning).

With some of my groups I also venture in brief and concise explanations of (a) how Working Memory operates in an attempt to hammer home the importance of concentration, good pronunciation and associative strategies; (b) how forgetting is often cue-dependent; (c) why performance errors occur. Whenever one teaches about the above it is important to keep it as brief and visual as possible; not to over intellectualize and to relate the discussion to your students’ learning whilst showing them clearly why and how the knowledge you are imparting on them will benefit them in the short- and long-term.

4. Implement attitude-changing programs

In every class there are students who are less engaged, disaffected or even hostile. After a few pep-talks, disciplinary measures, referrals to pastoral middle-managers, things may get a bit better but there is rarely much change. This is often due to the fact that these scenarios are not handled through a structured, principled, well though-out attitude change program.

It is beyond the scope of this post to delve into the ins and outs of attitude-changing-programs implementation; here it will suffice to point out how for any attitudinal change to work, it must start by identifying the issues at the root of the negative attitude one wants to change vis-a-vis the following metacomponents of attitude identified by Zimbardo and Leippe (1991):

Behaviours (what students do in their daily approach to languages)
Intentions (what their short-/medium-/long-term objectives are with the language)
Cognitions (their beliefs about languages)
Affective responses (how much they enjoy language learning)

The picture below (from: http://sites.hamline.edu/~./psunnarborg/attchange.htm) illustrates where the most positive and committed of our students usually are in terms of these four attitudinal components:

The principles I outlined in my post on motivation (“Eight motivational theories and their implications for the classroom”) can then be applied to address the four areas one by one. For instance, one may want to start by inducing a level of cognitive dissonance to address learner beliefs (cognitions); by identifying what students excel at and enjoy so as to cater for their preferences in lessons and enhance their sense of fulfillment and enjoyment; to set short-term manageable goals in order to increase their sense of self-efficacy; etc.

Of course, most teachers are busy and over worked and may object that they do not have the time to do all this. My main point here is that, if one does wish to turn around a disaffected student or group of students, one should at least first try to ascertain what the actual roots of the problem are, through a structured and deep inquiry process based on the above framework.

5. Ask older language students to observe you

We often have our colleagues or senior teachers observe us. A recent trend in some schools in the UK is also to have students to observe us using checklists where they tick or cross things they see us do or not do. A strategy I have used in the past and that has paid huge dividends was to ask older A2 language students ( around 18 years old) to observe one or more lessons of mine and give me feedback on one or more specific areas of my teaching in which a younger person’s perspective may be more useful than an adult’s, e.g. motivation, empathy towards students, levels of pupils’ engagement, etc. What I find useful about having an older language student observe me is that students of this age are more in sync with adolescent-learner mentality and affective responses than my colleague’s whilst being still fairly mature and cognizant of what language learning entails; moreover, being former students of mine, these individuals are usually more able to relate the observed students’ experiences to their own when they were indeed taught by me and provide even more useful feedback as a result.

The best lesson planning ever…really? – Of the perils of educational sensationalism

August 5, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Uncategorized

As I was ‘snooping around’ the Internet I bumped into a title that attracted my attention: “9 ways to plan transformational lessons – Planning the best curriculum unit ever” (on the Edutopia site) . At first I thought the author may have been a tad arrogant but when I read that the article had been shared 4.9K times on various social media I said to myself “Let’s read this”. And I did. After reading I felt immediately compelled to write this post as I got worried: were the language teachers amongst the 4.9 K people who shared that article and/or the people who shared them with going to do what the article advises in the belief they will, by so doing, plan the best lessons ever?

The following are the points in the article that I had the most issues with:

A… ‘transformational’ lesson??!!

This was the first – but not the greatest of my worries. Transparent learning; Visible learning; Dynamic learning; Collaborative learning; Positive education; and now…Transformational learning? For real? Another label thrown upon teachers by educational consultants wanting to create a brand? Yet another trendy category that if you do not belong to you are not up-to-date and feel left out? EVERY SINGLE LESSON where a student learns something you taught them is a transformational lesson, as you add new cognition to their brains. Even if you do not do any fancy stuff, any backward design or pedantically follow pseudo-scientific learning rubrics.

For the best lessons ever shift from solo to collaborative design…really?

Whilst I do enjoy working collaboratively with my colleagues, especially doing long-term planning with them (e.g. preparing a unit of work), I am definitely at odds with the statement that in order to plan the best lessons ever I need to plan them with another teacher. When I plan my lessons I have every single student of mine in mind and the vocabulary and grammar structures they learnt with me in our last lesson as well as the mistakes and problem areas I want to address in their output; I know what strategies and learning activities keep them focused and motivated; my colleagues would not know that. Also, not all of my colleagues share the same theory or approach to language learning as me and often use or sequence the very same activities differently.

Create the assessment before developing content… the Wiggins and Tighe curse

There is nothing less educational in language teaching than the adoption of Wiggins and Tighe’s backward design approach to MFL lesson planning – whist I can see its merits in the planning of longer units of work. There is nothing more straight-jacketing than teaching a language lesson with the assessment in mind. Whereas I do agree that one must have aspirational learning outcomes to work towards in a lesson and sequence of lessons, to set these in stone and let them drive the way we teach language is not only unethical, but counter-productive in terms of language acquisition; unless, that is, we are willing to sacrifice sound cognitive and psycholinguistic development in the name of a trendy curriculum design principle. Unless we teach robotically to our schemes of work and we are not willing to adapt our plans when we feel that our students need more practice.

A good L2-classroom practitioner teaches adaptively, creatively and should not teach with a specific test in mind; learning a language structure or function is a process which may need more time than planned. A good teacher must be prepared to change their plans if needs be. Teaching is not simply about planning and assessing.

Don’t forget the introverts…

Quoting work by Susan Cain, the author points out how introverts enjoy working autonomously and how currently a lot of teaching includes group work. Is the implicit recommendation for the best lesson ever not to involve introverts in group-work? If it is so, I do not agree; whilst there has to be a balance of individual and collaborative work in most lessons, I deliberately encourage students who do not enjoy working collaboratively to do team work so as to get them out of their comfort zone and learn a major lifelong skill; also, learning a language is about communicating with others!

Then the author goes on to say that increasing wait time to seven seconds – when asking a question in front of the classroom – will play to the strengths of introverts. Really? I give any of my students, regardless of their personality as long as they need unless they say ‘pass’… I would be interested to know why seven seconds is the ideal wait time as for some of my students it would not be enough, and I would rather wait a bit longer than dent their self-esteem.

Integrate Productive struggle in the curriculum

This is a direct quote from the article:

Don’t lower the expectations of your next lesson plan. Instead, scaffold instruction and check to see that you are challenging students appropriately with Hess’ Cognitive Rigor Matrix.

In other words, in order to plan progression and challenge in the best lesson ever, teachers ought to refer to Hess’ Cognitive Rigor Matrix one of many Bloom taxonomy surrogates… Speechless!

In conclusion, I apologize to the author of the article for sounding a bit too harsh. The article does contain some sound recommendations (e.g points 7 and 8); however, the harshness was elicited by the sensationalist title which clearly alludes to outstanding – the best ever – practice. When one is passionate as I am about teaching and learning one can only find it unacceptable and even ‘dangerous’ for the pedagogic recommendations made in this article to be divulged as ‘the best ever’ practice, especially when they are endorsed by a very authoritative educational website as Edutopia followed by a vast number of teachers from all over the world.

What does the message sent by the author and Edutopia to novice teachers about what best teaching practice is entail? A fixed wait time of seven seconds? Planning challenge in language learning based on Hess’ Matrix (please read my article on the Bloom Taxonomy and you will understand my ‘fury’)? Teaching a lesson based on a set-in-stone piece of assessment? Or that best lessons must be planned collaboratively? Whilst many of this recommendation can be useful, they should not be presented as evangelical truths, the pre-requisites for the best ever practice.

Edutopia should know better and put ethics before sensationalism.

The top 10 foreign language learning research areas MFL teachers are most interested in

August 2, 2015May 3, 2017 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Research methodology, Uncategorized

When I started writing my blog I did not expect I would get many readers. I started it much in the same spirit as one starts writing a journal; as a way to reflect on my practice and on my beliefs about language learning. When, however, people from all over the globe started to contact me requesting to know more about specific areas of foreign language acquisition and pedagogy and “Six useless things foreign language teachers do” got more than 9,000 readers in one night, it finally hit me: there are keen and reflective classroom practitioners out there who do want to know more about L2 acquisition theory, neuroscience and L2 research than what they were taught on their teacher training courses or during a few hours of CPD by educational consultants.

In actual fact, the reasons why I decided to embark on a Master’s course in Applied Linguistics after two years of UK comprehensive-school teaching refer mainly to my deep dissatisfaction with the way I was taught how to teach on my teacher training course (PGCE). My PGCE tutors were great, do not get me wrong. However, on my teacher training I was basically quickly shown a few tricks of the trade – mostly through videos or demo lessons with the ‘perfect’ classes – equipped with a few ‘lesson templates’ and sent off to my teaching practice schools.

No need to tell you what happened there; you have all been through that nerve-racking baptism of fire; you have all come across the really motivated and inspirational teachers who tried their best to support you and the demotivated and disgruntled ones who tried to discourage you. The outcome: I learnt more tricks of the trade, but not a shred of understanding of how the human brain acquires languages; not a hint of what research says sound MFL pedagogy looks like; I left my last teaching practice placement with glimpses, intuitions of what may work and what may not, totally unsupported by a theory of learning or research evidence.

Things did not improve much in my first school as an NQT. More trial and error; more tricks of the trade; more useless training sessions; still not a sound pedagogic framework, a theory that I could refer to, rooted in neuroscience. I had to use quite a lot of my savings to finally get that framework and that research-based knowledge from some of the greatest names in EFL pedagogy and research at the Reading University Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS). Costly, but worth every penny!

Yet many of the colleagues I have worked with in 25 years of MFL teaching firmly believed that a good MFL teacher does not need to know about theory or research. I remember how one of them used to refer to the applied linguistics handbooks that I used to read during my frees as ‘silly books’. An understandable attitude considering how inaccessible many researchers have made their often very useful findings to classroom teachers with their convoluted jargon and obscure statistics.

A fairly recent survey carried out by my former PhD supervisor, Professor Macaro of Oxford University, however, found that although only 3% of the teachers interviewed found research accessible, 80% of them were actually interested in what research has to say about language acquisition and pedagogy. The following are the top ten areas of research Dr Macaro’s informants identified as most useful. Please note that the sample was not huge – only about 100 – and that the people who filled in the questionnaire were Heads of Department, i.e. very experienced teachers. The ranking is based on the means of the score each topic area received (1 being very useful and 4 being not at all useful):

Vocabulary acquisition – 74 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
How the grammar rules of the language are best learnt – 73 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
Motivation – 68 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
How learners make progress with language learning – 58 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
Differences amongst learners (e.g. age; gender) – 53 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
Speaking – 51 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
How the brain stores and retrieves language – 58 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
KS4 (lower intermediate) research – 37 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
Writing – 39 % of the teachers found this topic very useful
KS3 (beginner) research – 29 % of the teachers found this topic very useful

What is interesting is the absence from the above list of two topics that I have written about and seem to have been very popular amongst my readers, i.e. listening and reading research. In fact, of Dr Macaro’s informants only 25 % were interested in listening and 27 % in reading.

What areas of research are you most interested in? I would love to have your input!

L.I.F.T. – an effective writing-proficiency and metacognition enhancer

July 30, 2015September 18, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Metacognition, Writing skills

Many years ago, as an L2 college student writer of English and French I often had doubts about the accuracy of what I wrote in my essays, especially when I was trying out a new and complex grammar structure or an idiom I had heard someone use. However, the busy and under-paid native-speaker university language assistants charged with correcting my essays rarely gave me useful feedback on those adventurous linguistic exploits of mine. They simply underlined or crossed out my mistakes and provided their correct alternative. As an inquisitive and demanding language learner I was not satisfied. I wanted more.

So, I decided to try out a different approach; in every essay of mine I asked my teachers questions about things I was not sure about, in annotations I would write in the margin of my essays (e.g. should I use ‘with’ or ‘by’ here?; should this be ‘whose’ or ‘which’?) eagerly awaiting their replies – which I regularly got. Knowing my teachers were busy I would focus only on five or six things I had particular issues with and only after looking through my books and dictionaries in search for clues as to whether I was right or wrong.

This process ‘forced’ my teachers to give me more feedback than I had been getting; consequently, not only I learnt more, but I also became more ‘adventurous’ and ‘daring’ in my writing. This strategy really helped me a lot.

Later on in life, when I became a foreign language teacher, I recycled this strategy with my students. I call it L.I.F.T (Learner Initiated Feedback Technique). Although I had been using it for a long time already, a few years ago I decided to put its effectiveness to the test by conducting a little experiment. I used L.I.F.T. with one of two groups of able 14 years old I was teaching, whilst I used traditional error correction with the other. The students were asked to underline anything they were not sure about and write a question on margin explaining briefly what their problem or doubt was about; one condition I put was that they had to research the issues they were asking me about using web-based resources (e.g the www.wordreference.com forums). I used exactly the same teaching materials and covered the same topics with both groups.

When I compared how the two groups evolved over the time of the ‘experiment’, what I found out was interesting: they both made more or less the same type and number of mistakes; however, the group I had tried L.I.F.T. with had generally written longer and more complex sentences using more ambitious grammar structures and idioms. Moreover, I found that the questions the students were asking in their annotations had become increasingly more complex; a sign that they were becoming more inquisitive, ambitious and risk-taking. Why?

One reason refers, I think, to the fact that learners, especially the less confident ones, usually tend to avoid structures or idioms they are not sure about. However, L.I.F.T counteracts this avoidance behavior as it encourages them to try new things out and take risks; knowing the teacher is encouraging and endorsing this kind of risk-taking by ‘pushing’ them to ask for feedback elicits the use of this technique even more.

Moreover, since I made clear to them that they had to try and solve the problems by themselves first and then write down their questions, my students reported doing more independent study than before, especially the less committed ones. I also felt that they became more inquisitive as a result of the process as they were asking themselves and me more questions about grammar and vocabulary usage that google had no answer for (not a straightforward and easy-to-find one, at least).

Finally, quite a few of them reported paying more attention to my corrective feedback than before as they had requested it in the first place!

Another benefit was that, as part of the process, giving feedback became more interesting and enjoyable for me because it felt like a real dialogue between the students and myself, especially with the more adventurous and ambitious linguists; not just a top-down approach totally directed and owned by the teacher. Also, because I felt that– most of the time, not always – they had indeed tried to answer the questions themselves, I put more effort into it.

Also, and more importantly, this process provided me access to some of my students’ thinking process and to the kind of hypotheses they formulated about how French worked.

Recently I discovered a study by Andrew Creswell (2000) who used a very similar approach with higher proficiency students than mine and reported very similar gains. His students reacted very favourably to the technique and he states that training learners in this technique created ‘a context in which students were able to work responsibly’.

I strongly recommend this technique not only for the benefits reported above, but also because if your students eventually do incorporate this technique into their learning strategies repertoire, they will acquire a powerful life-long metacognitive strategy that they might transfer to other domains of their learning and professional life.

More on this and on my appraoch to language teaching and learning in the book I co-authored with Steve Smith “The Language Teacher Toolkit’, available here

11 questions I ask myself before the start of a new academic year

July 28, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Teacher Ed. and professional development, Uncategorized

The following are some of the teaching-and-learning-related questions that I ask myself a week or two before the start of each academic year and endeavor to act upon. They help me re-focus on my classroom teaching after the long summer break and set myself quality professional development goals. Although language acquisition and pedagogy are something I reflect on a lot on a daily basis, I always ask myself questions 1 and 2, below, too. Why? Because although my main espoused theory of language acquisition remains the same, I do review and revise some of my beliefs about L2 pedagogy every year that goes by as I read about research, reflect on my practice, listen to my students’ feedback and exchange ideas with colleagues in my department, at CPD events or on social media.

What are my beliefs about how languages are best taught and learnt? – this is a question that, in my experience, not many teachers ask themselves and that many find very difficult to answer. Try it yourself right now and you will get what I mean;

Does my teaching truly reflect those beliefs? – often teachers end up using the textbook or other resources available in the department as it is the easier way; however, that is unlikely to result in professional fulfillment and the fact that one does not really ‘believe’ in the approach one is using may impact learning negatively;

Is my teaching ‘task-driven’ or ‘methodology-driven’? – as I discussed in a previous post, it is our methodology and understanding of language acquisition that should determine the way we teach and/or our students learn in class and at home; not the resources or tasks we like or are readily available. Sometimes we like certain tasks, games, apps or other resources we found or created so much that they end up driving our teaching at the expenses of sound methodology; I see this happen in far too many ‘techy’ lessons – including mine…

What was my best lesson last year? What made it such a great lesson? – I find this question very useful to motivate myself, remind myself of what I am like at my best and help me set goals;

What did not work well last year that I may want to improve on next year? – this is the hardest question to answer and one which requires a lot of honesty and ‘courage’.

What was my worst lesson? Why? How can I prevent ‘bad’ lessons like that one from happening again?

Which skills/areas did I not focus on enough last year? Why? How did this benefit and/or damage my students’ linguistic development? We all emphasize certain skills over others in our daily practice; for instance, I tend to overemphasize oral/aural skills over reading and writing with my younger students. My next academic year resolutions include focusing more on those two skills, for example;

(Imagine yourself talking to a weak, an average and a talented student from each of the year groups you teach, at the end of the next academic year) What would I like him/her to be able to understand and say to me by the end of the year in the context of a target-language spontaneous conversation across various topics? How does this fit with the schemes of work in use in the department? – This is possibly the most useful question of all. It really helps me set my learning objectives for the year, much better than any schemes of work or government or school rubrics. You can obviously apply the same question to all four macro-skill;

What would I like my students to do INDEPENDENTLY (i.e. without any prodding on my part) to enhance their mastery of the target language? How can I get them to WANT to listen, speak, read and write independently? – This is in my view the most neglected area of teaching and learning in secondary schools around the world; yet, it is the most important. We need to reflect on this important aspect of learning and try to foster it as much as humanly possible considered the limited time and resources available;
(Imagine yourself happy and fulfilled at the end of the perfect lesson you have just taught to a specific year group that you find very challenging) What happened in that lesson? Why did it all flow so perfectly? Why did so much learning occur? – This builds on the best-lesson question above but brings it to the next level thereby giving me an aspirational goal to work towards; but also, and more importantly,it makes me reflect on the obstacles on the way;
Who or what resources can help me be that happy, fulfilled and contented teacher? How can I go about obtaining that help? – Be honest here: have you asked for the help and resources needed to address the issues in the way of your professional fulfillment in the classroom? Is there anyone in your department who may lend you a hand? Put aside your pride or ego and ask.

Eight motivational theories and their implications for the classroom

July 27, 2015October 4, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Affective factors in L2 learning, Uncategorized

In a couple of previous posts I briefly touched on theories of motivation and on how they can be tapped into to raise student achievement. In particular I concerned myself with a relatively unknown and yet powerful catalyst of motivation, self-efficacy, or expectancy of success, which, if nurtured regularly and adequately in the classroom can majorly impact learning. In this post I will very concisely outline the main principles underpinning other influential motivational theories and how I deploy them in my every day teaching in an attempt to enhance my students’ motivation.

Here is a very minimalistic overview of 8 of the 20 theories of motivation I brainstormed before writing this article. Please note that their tenets and implications for the classroom have been overly simplified; hence, if you are keen to apply them to your specific teaching context, you may want to find out more about them.

Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance occurs when there is an unresolved conflict in our mind between two beliefs, thoughts or perceptions we hold about a given subject. The level of tension resulting from such conflict will be a function of:

How strong the conflict is between the two dissonant thoughts;
How important the issue they relate to are to a specific individual or group;
How difficult it is to rationalize (justify through logical or pseudo-logical reasoning) the dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a very powerful motivator which, as I shall discuss in a future post, is often used in transformational change programs both in the business and educational world. The reason why it is so powerful is because, when used effectively, Cognitive dissonance creates a sense of discomfort in an individual which in order to be resolved results in one of two outcomes:

The individual changes behavior (possibly replacing the existing behavior with the newly modelled one);
The individual does not adopt the new behavior and justifies his/her behaviour by changing the conflicting cognition created by the new information, instead.

Implications for the classroom: Whenever you want to change a student’s attitude, first identify the beliefs at the heart of that attitude; when you have a fairly clear picture induce cognitive dissonance by producing powerful information and arguments which counter those beliefs. The degree of cognitive dissonance should be as high as possible for the attitudinal change we purport to bring about to be effective. For example, when dealing with a misbehaving child, to simply tell them off for what they did will be way less effective than raising their awareness of the ways their conduct affected others negatively and explaining why is morally/ethically wrong. Or, to impose a new methodology to one’s team of teachers by saying it is more effective than the one currently in use by merely providing statistics from a few research studies which point to its greater effectiveness will not be as powerful as explaining to them why the old approach is failing the target students and the new can more effectively address the identified shortcomings. Another example in the realm of language learning: many foreign language students in England hold negative views about the country(i-es) where the target language is spoken. If one wants to change such attitudes one may want to first find out what beliefs are at the root of those attitudes (e.g. are they xenophobic stereotypes?); then in a lesson or series of lesson (at the beginning of the year, maybe?) provide objective and solid reasons to prove that those beliefs are indeed false using supporting evidence which will resonate with the students’ sub-culture, thereby creating cognitive dissonance. Research suggests that over-using statistics may be detrimental and that engaging the target students in a discussion on the issues-in-hand after the new information has been provided, will enhance the chances of attitudinal change to occur. This process may induce the learners to restructure their cognition.

Drive reduction theory

This theory is centred on the notion that we all have needs that we attempt to satisfy in order to reduce the tension or arousal they cause. The internal stimuli these needs produce are our main drives in life. There are Primary drives which refer to basic needs (food, sleep, procreation, etc.) and Secondary drives which refer to social identity and personal fulfillment.

As we act on our needs we are conditioned and acquire habits and subconscious responses. So, for example: when a child needs to feel good about himself, he may recite a poem, sing a song, perform a dance or other ‘feats’ to his parents knowing he is going to get some recognition. Whenever he needs recognition in other contexts, this individual will possibly use the same tactics in order to get the same response from any other figure of authority – including teachers.

When the driven action does not satisfy his needs or the enacting of drives is frustrated, negative emotions (e.g. anxiety) arise. To go back to the previous example: if the boy is looking for a chance to show off to an authority figure his ‘skills’ but he is not given the opportunity to do so, he will feel frustrated, angry and/or unappreciated – a very common scenario in school, often dismissed as the child being ‘naughty’ or ‘unruly’.

Implications for the classroom: find out what drives your students, especially the difficult ones. Instead of approaching the problem by ‘punishing’ them, have a one-on-one chat with them and try to discover what is that they find fulfilling and see if you can find opportunities in your lessons for them to enact their drives. For instance, if you have a student passionate about drama who does not seem to enjoy language learning, ask them to contribute their acting skills by myming vocabulary or sentences in lessons or setting up a mini-production in the target language.

Attribution theory

When we make a mistake or ‘fail’ at something we tend to go through a two-step process. We first experience an automatic response involving internal attribution (i.e. the error is our fault); then a conscious, slower reaction which seeks to find an alternative external attribution (e.g. the error is due to an external factor). This is because we all have a vested interest in ‘looking good’ in our own eyes – a sort of survival mechanism. This type of response, however, is unlikely to lead to self-improvement, as it results in an individual not addressing the real cause of their error/bad performance in the future. Roesch and Amirkham (1997) found that more experienced and successful athletes made more self-serving attributions which lead to identifying and addressing the internal causes of their performance errors.

Implications for the classroom: when dealing with students who complain about not progressing because the subject, skill or task is too hard for them, show them – where applicable – that the reasons why they are not improving is not intrinsic in the nature of that subject, skill or task , but has more to do with other factors under his/her control (e.g. the study habits, such as lack of systematic revision). This will create cognitive dissonance and may have an impact on their attitude, especially if they are shown strategies that may help them improve in the problematic area(s) of their learning. The afore mentioned research by Roesch and Amirkham (1997) and their findings could be drawn upon and discussed with your students to reinforce the point; I often do, citing the example of famous athletes the students admire and pointing out how they learn from their mistakes by watching videos of themselves playing a match over and over again or asking peers/experts for feedback in order to identify and address their shortcomings.

Endowed progress effect

When people feel they have made some progress towards a goal, they will feel more committed towards its achievement. Conversely, people who are making little or no progress are more likely to give up early in the process. In my work with very low achieving ‘difficult’ students when I operated in challenging inner-city-area schools,sitting with them at the beginning of a task and guiding them through open questioning often ‘did the trick’ where threatening them with sanctions had failed miserably.

Implications for the classroom: Whatever the task you engage your students in, ensure that they all experience success in the initial stages. This may call for two approaches which are not mutually exclusive: (1) design any instructional sequence in a ‘stepped’ fashion, with ‘easy’ tasks that become gradually more difficult; (2) provide lots of scaffolding (support) at the initial stages of teaching.

Cognitive Evaluation Theory

When looking at a task, we assess it in terms of how well it meets our need to feel competent and in control. We will be intrinsically motivated by tasks we believe fall in our current level of competency and ‘put off’ by those which we deem we will do poorly at. This issue is often more about self-perception of one’s levels of competency than objective truth.

Implications for the classroom: we need to ensure that before engaging students in challenging tasks that they may perceive as being beyond their levels of competence we prepare them adequately, cognitively and emotionally. For instance, in language learning, before carrying out a difficult listening comprehension task, students should be exposed several times to any unfamiliar vocabulary or other language item contained in the to-be-heard recording so as to facilitate the task. Moreover, modelling strategies that may facilitate the tasks and giving them the opportunity to experience some success in similar tasks through those very strategies may increase their sense of self-efficacy; this will give them greater expectancy of success and a feeling of empowerment which will feed into their sense of competency and control.

Another important implications relate to the way we design the curriculum and assessment. For effective progression from a lower level to a higher one to be possible, students must be given plenty of opportunities to consolidate the material processed at the lower level before moving on. This does not often happen in courses which rely heavily on textbooks. For instance, in most of the institutions I have worked in over 25 years of teaching, I was asked to teach a unit of work every six-seven weeks, a totally unrealistic pace when contact time is limited to one or two hours a week. The result: the weaker children are usually left behind.

Self-determination theory; Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation.

Individuals differ from one another in terms of PLOC (personal locus of causality). Some will feel that their behavior is self-determined; they are the initiators and sustainers of their actions and their PLOC will be internal. Others will see external forces as determinants of their lives; coercing them into actions. These people’s PLOC will be external. The internal locus is connected with intrinsic motivation, whilst the external locus is connected with extrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation is when one is motivated by external factors, such as rewards, social recognition or fear of punishment. This kind of motivation focuses people on rewards rather than action.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, refers to the desire to do things because we enjoy doing them, hence it is a stronger motivator than Extrinsic motivation. Three needs lead to intrinsic motivation:

Being successful at what we do (i.e. I enjoy French because I am good at it);
Being connected with others (i.e. I love my French class because I have bonded well with the rest of the class)
Having autonomy (see below)

An important factor leading to Intrinsic Motivation creation is providing learners with the oppportunity to develop effectance. Effectance refers to one of the 3 points made above (being successful at what we do) and is given rise to when the learner accomplishes success at something that they perceive challenging and falling in what Deci (1997) terms ‘Optimal zone of development’ – i.e.: a task that it is perceived as difficult enough to be challenging but within the stretch of the learner’s ability. Effectance does not arise when we simply give students ‘easy’ work; that is why the ‘easy wins’ strategy often fails with students with poor intrinsic motivation; students are not stupid, they know you are dumbing down the work to make them feel good and the ensuing praise will not affect their self-regard as learners of your subject.

Self-determination theory assumes that there are individuals for whom a feeling of being in control of their life and responsible for their actions is very important for their personal fulfillment and, consequently, for their motivation.

Implications of Self-Determination theory for the classroom: it may be useful to identify which students in your classes have an internal or external PLOC. In my experience this is not difficult. Once identified the internal PLOC of the target individuals, it is very important to cater for their self-determination needs and grant them a degree of autonomy in and ownership over their learning. E.g.: when staging a reading session in the classroom; carrying out a project; asking students to practise vocabulary online, let them choose how to go about it (whilst setting some guidelines for the sake of consistency). People with high internal PLOC thrive in self-directed learning tasks and contexts; teachers must endeavour to exploit to the fullest this personality trait’s greater potential for autonomy in L2 learning. People with a high external PLOC will need more praise, direction from and a sense of accountability to teachers and caretakers.

Implications of Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation theory: Pretty obvious. The main ones: (1) make lessons as enjoyable as possible and make them experience EFFECTANCE regularly in your lessons, as this may help boost their intrinsic motivation; (2) Plan every single one of your lessons with the following questions in mind: ‘How can I make sure that every student goes out of my lessons feeling they have progressed?; (3) foster connectedness in the class by creating a team spirit and a sense that the whole class is working towards the same goal and that every student feels comfortable working with everyone else (e.g. make sure that people do not work with the same partners all the time when staging group work); give plenty of opportunities for positive peer feedback (e.g. get students’ to celebrate other students’ achievements). (4) Show them the benefits of learning the TL for their future job prospect, personal growth, etc. and of every activity you stage in lessons in terms of learning benefits; use praise as a means to validate their efforts but ensure that you do not over-praise or it will lose its motivational power (most students can sense when you are just trying to bribe them with compliments; this may engender complacency and even loss of motivation in the long-run).

There is a myth circulating amongst some educators these days (including some of my colleagues) that Extrinsic motivation should not be tapped into as a strategy to encourage students to improve. However, there is no sufficient credible evidence that Extrinsic Motivation is detrimental to learning to do away with it; on the contrary, research shows consistently that extrinsic motivation, when not overused and deployed in synergy with some of the other strategies discussed in this post, can eventually bring about Intrinsic motivation. Example: a student that does not enjoy French may, through experiencing a sense of effectance and obtaining consistent (thoroughly deserved and proportionate) praise and rewards become more appreciative of the subject, especially if she is experiencing steady growth in her mastery of the language and feels connected and supported by his peers.

It is self-evident that using Extrinsic motivation will work with certain individuals rather than others; hence, as already mentioned, identifying the orientation of their Personal Locus Of Causality (PLOC) is fundamental, prior to carrying out any intervention.

Valence- Instrumentality- Expectancy (VIE) theory

In this paradigm, motivation refers to three factors

Valence: what we think we will get out of a given action/behaviour (what’s in it for me?)
Instrumentality: the belief that if I perform a specific course of action I will succeed (clear path?)
Expectancy: the belief that I will be definitely able to succeed (self-efficacy)

Implications for the classroom:

(1) make clear to students why a specific outcome is desirable (e.g. getting and A/A* at GCSE speaking exams). Make sure you list as many benefits as possible, especially those that most relevant to their personal preferences, interests and life goals;

(2) provide them with a clear path to get there. This may involve showing them a set of strategies they can use (e.g. autonomously seeking opportunities for practice with native speakers in school) or a clear course of action they can undertake which is within their grasp (e.g. talk to your teacher about how to improve your essay writing; identify with their help the two or three main issues; work out with them some strategies to address those issues; monitor with their help through regular feedback and meetings with them that their are working and if they are not why; etc.). A clear path gives a struggling student a sense of empowerment, especially if they feel that they are being provided with effective tips and support to overcome the obstacles in the way;

(3) support their self-belief that that outcome can be achieved (e.g. by mentioning to them examples of students from previous cohorts of similar ability who did it) and by reminding them of similar/comparable challenges they successfully undertook in the past.

Goal-related theory

In order to direct ourselves in our personal, educational and professional life we set ourselves goals. These can be:

Clear (so we know what to do and what not to do)
Challenging (so we get some stimulation)
Achievable (so we do not fail)

If we set goals ourselves, rather than having them imposed on us, we are more likely to work harder in order to achieve them. Moreover, Locke and Kristoff (1996) identified specific and challenging goals as those which are more likely to lead to higher achievement.

Implications for the classroom: instead of setting goals for your students in a top-down fashion, involve them actively in the process of learning. Moreover, help the students narrow down the goals set as much as possible and gauge them as accurately as possible to their existing level of competence. E.g.: instead of simply telling a student to check his next essay more accurately next time around and give them a lengthy error checklist, sit down with them and ask them to choose three challenging error categories that they would like to focus on and to aim to attain 80, 90 or even 100% accuracy in those categories in their essay due the following week. Make sure that the knowledge required by the learners to prevent or fix the target errors is learnable and that the students are provided with learning strategies which will assist them in achieving the set goals. I did this in my PhD study with excellent results.

I picked the above theories as they are the ones that I have been using more successfully over 25 years as a classroom teacher and subject leader. It goes without saying that in order to apply them effectively one has to ensure first and foremost that they know and listen to the learners they are dealing with. Cognitive and emotional empathy are a must for the success of any of the above motivational strategies.

These strategies work best in synergy rather than in isolation. In a future post, for instance, I will endeavour to show how attitudinal change may be brought about by using a combination of the above principles to achieve the desired outcomes.

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

July 21, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Reading instruction, Uncategorized

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Top-down processing accounts of L2 reading

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

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

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

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

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

Interactive models of L2 reading

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

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

The role of phonological processing and oral fluency in reading proficiency

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

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

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

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

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

General implications for reading instruction in the foreign language classrooms

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

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

Practical implications

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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