Six ‘useless’ things foreign language teachers do

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

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  1. Recasts

Recasts are the most frequent form of feedback that teachers give students in the course of oral interactions. They consists of utterances by the teacher that repeat the student’s erroneous utterance but ‘fix’ the mistake(s) without changing the meaning in any way. Example:

Student: hier j’ai allé au cinéma

Teacher: je suis allé au cinéma

Recasts, according to research (e.g. Doughty, 1994) are extensively used in the classroom representing up to 60 or even 70 % of all teacher feedback on oral performance. An interesting finding by Doughty is that recasts tend to concern themselves with minor errors rather than big problems.

As several studies have clearly shown, recasts do not really ‘work’ as they are not noticed most of the time. Havranek (1999) investigated to what extent learners recall corrective feedback from the teacher or their own or their peers’ mistakes. She found that less than one third of the learners who were corrected remembered having been corrected; peers did not pay attention to the correction of others and, most importantly, whether the corrections were recalled or not made little difference to whether the errors were or were not committed later.

The main reason why recasts do not work is that when the learners’ Working Memory is interrupted in the middle of speech production by the correction, it will not rehearse that correction for the time necessary to commit it to long-term memory -because it will be concentrating on resuming the interrupted conversation flow. Hence, the content of the correction will often be lost – which explains why Havranek’ subjects did not recall more than two thirds of the correction.

In view of the little surrender value of recasts in terms of acquisition, interrupting the students to correct them whilst they are talking may do more harm than good. Not only it may have a negative cognitive impact by disrupting their prospective memory; but it may also affect their self-esteem, especially if the correction relates to minor errors – as Doughty’s study found.

The above are valid reasons not to engage in recasts. It may be more productive and less threatening for the learners if teachers made a mental note of the mistakes noticed and treat them later on in contexts in which the learner’s attentional resources can be more productively channelled.

  1. Direct and Indirect error correction of written errors

Direct correction, whereby the teacher corrects an erroneous grammatical form and provides the correct version of that structure with an explanation on margin is pretty much a waste of valuable teacher time. Why? Tons of research (e.g. Cohen and Cavalcanti, 1990; Truscott,1996; Conti, 2001 and 2004) have demonstrated that most students do not process the correction in a way that is conducive to learning; most of them simply look at the mark, quickly read the comment and put the essay away, never to look at it again. Unless, as I argued in my post “Why teacher should not bother correcting errors in their students’ writing”, teachers engage students in more productive ways of processing teacher feedback, Direct correction is not going to enhance L2 acquisition. Error correction can be valuable when it places the errors into the students’ focal awareness, engages them in deep processing of teacher corrections, generates their intentionality to eradicate error and keeps it up for a sufficiently long period of time for any remedial learning to occur.

Indirect correction, on the other hand, is not likely to contribute much to acquisition as the learner will not be able to correct what s/he does not know (e.g. I cannot self-correct an omission of the subjunctive if I have not learnt it) and if s/he is indeed able to correct, s/he will not really learn much from it. To learn more about my views on this issue read my blog “Why asking students to self-correct their errors is a waste of time”.

  1. One-off learning-to-learn sessions

Not long ago I came across a beautiful Power Point on a teaching-resources website which purported to train students in effective approaches to the memorisation of vocabulary. It contained numerous slides packed with interesting suggestions on how to best commit vocabulary to memory and lasted long enough to cover a whole lesson. In the past, I myself produced similar Power Points and delivered one-off sessions on learning strategies which the students usually found quite interesting and engaging. But did they actually learn from them?

The problem is that, unless there are several follow-up sessions and some form of scaffolding reminding the students to use the strategies that the Power Point presented, thirty years of research (see Macaro, 2007) clearly show that this approach does little more than raising learner awareness of the existence of these strategies, but will not result in learner uptake, i.e. very few if any learner will incorporate these strategies in their active repertoire of learning strategies.

For any learner training to be successful it must involve learners in extensive practice of the target strategies.

  1. Identifying students’ learning styles and planning lessons accordingly

Research has clearly shown that learning styles and multiple intelligences are invalid constructs totally unsupported by theory and research. Moreover, there is not a single shred of evidence to show that teaching students based on their alleged learning style actually enhances their learning. Teachers should not waste valuable teaching time administering questionnaires or other ‘tests’ in an attempt to identify students’ learning style or ‘dominant intelligence(s)’. Most importantly, they should not bother planning lessons or remedial learning programs based on the findings obtained.

In view of the invalidity of these constructs, labelling students as visual, kinesthetic or other may lead them, especially the younger ones, to form a self-fulfilling prophecy that may ultimately be detrimental to their learning.

  1. Asking pre-intermediate/lower intermediate learners to peer assess oral performance

Although it has some (modest) surrender value in terms of metacognitive enhancement, the practice of involving fairly inexperienced learners in peer assessment is not justified by the learning gains it produces, especially in terms of language acquisition. Firstly, as these learners do not usually possess enough declarative knowledge of the language to be able to assess and feedback on language use in a way that can significantly benefit the recipient of the feedback; secondly, and more importantly, they do not possess sufficient levels of procedural knowledge to be able to apply any declarative knowledge they have whilst processing what they hear their classmates say – which means they cannot effectively evaluate their oral output.

In fact, even with more proficient learners peer assessment practice may not always be beneficial. In a little experiment I made last year, I got 16 students that I had practised peer assessment with almost on a daily basis to assess their classmates after a typical IGCSE conversation, using the CIE evaluation rubrics. When I compared their assessment scores to mine the discrepancies were huge, most of them having been on average 25 % more generous than me in allocating marks.

  1. Asking students to create digital artefacts in class

As I wrote in my blogs ‘Five central psychological challenges of foreign language learning’ and ‘Of SAMR and Samritans”, creating a digital artefact in class is not likely to be conducive to language acquisition enhancement at pre-intermediate to intermediate levels of L2 proficiency. The main reason is that human cognitive resources being finite, the working memory of an intermediate/lower intermediate MFL learner will not usually be able to process language effectively and efficiently whilst concurrently focusing on the operations he/she will be performing, e.g. cutting, pasting, ‘googling’ pictures, videoing, recording, ‘smashing’ Apps, etc.

Hence, forgetting by divided attention often occurs with not much learning at all taking place. I will never forget a group of Year 6 students telling me, after being involved for 5 weeks in making an iMovie about the topic ‘Ma maison’ in class, that all they remembered was the French for the rooms in the house.

Students, when involved in such activities should not do any ‘digital manipulation’ in lessons, unless we believe that this is very likely to enhance their target language proficiency. Classroom time should be devoted to learning the target language.

You can find out more about my approach to language teaching and learning in the book I co-authored with Steve Smith: “Breaking the sound barrier: teaching learners how to listen” available for purchase here

IF YOU WANT TO FIND OUT MORE, DO ATTEND MY ONLINE COURSES ORGANIZED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF BATH SPA, HERE: http://www.networkforlearning.org.uk

Five central psychological challenges facing effective mobile learning

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) General pedagogy, Teacher Ed. and professional development, Technology and L2 learning, Uncategorized

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A while ago, a very good friend and former colleague of mine, Fiona Seymour, popped around my classroom to have a chat with a group of year 8 students about how they felt the use of the iPad had impacted their learning since its adoption in our school. Some interesting facts emerged from the discussion which referred to some cognitive and metacognitive challenges that learners face when using the iPad or any other mobile device for learning.

Interestingly, in a very informative article that Fiona shared with me a few months later, two Scottish researchers from The University of West Scotland, Dr. Melody Terras and Dr Judith Ramsay address the very same challenges that my students mentioned, recommending that education providers take them into account when adopting mobile learning as the main or one of the main modes of delivery of the curriculum.

As a fan and assiduous user of mobile technology in the classroom I found this article a true ‘eye-opener’ as it not only confirmed some of the concerns I had about mobile learning but also triggered an ongoing process of reflection on their possible implications for teaching and on what I could do in my daily practice to address those concerns.

I believe than at an exciting time where ICT integration in the classroom is a reality in most developed countries every educator must be aware of these psychological challenges and endeavour to address them consistently and systematically in their teaching.

The five psychological challenges

Terras and Ramsay (2012) (at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01362.x/abstract ) identify the following crucial challenges of mobile learning:

  1. The context-dependent nature of memory

As I have already discussed in a previous blog (“Words in the mind – how vocabulary is stored and organized in the brain”), memory is context-dependent. In other words, the context in which we create a memory will enhance our chances to recall that memory later. Thus, for instance, if I am learning a set of new vocabulary in my classroom, whilst sitting next to my friend Joe and facing my teacher, who is wearing a bright red flowery shirt, the classroom, my friend Joe, my teacher and her shirt will enhance my chances to recall that vocabulary in the future. Memory is also state-dependent. In other words, individuals are more likely to effectively recall a memory when he/she in the same emotional, motivational or physiological state in which he/she was when he/she encoded that memory.

As Terras and Ramsay point out, research shows that the retrieval of recently learnt material is highly affected by the influence of context. These findings have huge implications for mobile learning, as mobility, the fact that the learner may be using the iPad or phone to study in different environments, may disrupt the support of the context as a cue for retrieval of the target information. Thus, for instance, a student who used the iPad to learn new vocabulary for a test in his room, may then be revising it in the car or school bus on the way to school,then, once in school, may be going through it again in the library or in the canteen; each change of environment being different, the context-related retrieval cues will be missing, with a possible negative impact on recall.

Hence, the main learning-enhancement advantage of mobile devices, i.e. the fact that one can carry them with oneself wherever one likes, has the potential to disrupt learning. What can teachers do to address this issue? Terras and Ramsay do not make any pedagogical suggestions. My take on this is that, like one should do with any learning tool, teachers have the ethical imperative to forge healthy learning habits; this entails (a) raising learner awareness of this issue and of how it can affect learning and (b) modelling effective memory strategies which may effectively compensate for the lack of context-based cues; for example, students may be taught that, on learning new vocabulary whilst reading a French text on the iPad, they can creatively associate them with images and L1 words through the so-called ‘Keyword technique’, index cards and other menmonics or by using Apps like ‘Poplet’ or ‘Padlet’ to store and organize it semantically during or after reading the text. The association created through these two approaches would function as powerful retrieval cues at recall.

  1. Human resources are finite

As I have often reiterated in my posts, one of the greatest ‘enemies’ of learning, if not the greatest, is divided attention caused by cognitive overload on Working Memory (e.g. processing inefficiency) or interference (e.g. being distracted by an another stimulus whilst trying to learn). As many of my students have pointed out over the years, mobile devices can generate a lot of distraction, mainly coming from notifications from Facebook, Instagram and e-mail. Terras and Ramsay report a study by Cicso investigating the ability of social media to distract students. The study revealed that UK students are ‘most distracted by social media’. Another sort of distraction that Terras and Ramsay do not consider, but that I notice day in day out in my school and surrounding areas, is that mobile devices allow for students to study whilst socializing (e.g. they sit around in groups each working on their iPad). This was less likely to happen with PCs and laptops. In sum, as Terras and Ramsay (2012: 824) advocate,

Mobile learners may need to be more skilled at inhibiting responses to extraneous stimuli. In particular, they may need to develop superior attentional control in order to be effective learners in environment that are not primarily designed for learning. Noisy and changing environments and the potential distractions posed by social media may place significant additional demands upon the learner’s auditory and visual attention.

As they also point out, one important harm that interruption causes to learning occurs at the level of prospective memory. Prospective memory supports the intended execution of future tasks and may be time-based (e.g. remembering to check an essay once more first thing in the morning the next day before handing it) or event-based (e.g. remembering to arrange ideas in a logical sequence when planning an essay). Disruption seems to have a particularly harmful effect on prospective rather than retrospective memory, especially on the stages of prospective memory involving execution and evaluation.

Divided attention can stem from the environment but also from the mobile medium itself. As Terras and Ramsay point out, research evidences that face-to-face communication always outshines mediated communication as the latter is usually less rich and more ambiguous. Mobile devices, websites and apps pose more cognitive challenges, especially for less able and flexible learners who may experience processing overload whilst accessing and/or manipulating it.

Another important harmful effect was highlighted by myself in a previous post on the SAMR model (“Of SAMR and Samritans…”) and refers to another powerful source of divided attention: the cognitive load posed on Working Memory by the ‘mechanics’ involved in the creation of a digital artifact. Often teachers involve students in tasks which require them to operate simultaneously on two levels: on the one hand they are required to generate, elaborate and organize ideas related to a given task’s brief, on the other they are required to convey the resulting intellectual product of that process through digital media (e.g. smashing apps). If teachers are not careful, the demands posed by such modus operandi can easily cause cognitive overload and impede learning.

Sources of cognitive overload must be anticipated and addressed in the planning of any activity in which digital media are integrated with MFL learning.

  1. Distributed cognition and situated learning

By this, Terras and Ramsay refer to the new phenomenon created by the Web, whereby learning contexts which in the past where very distant from one another are becoming increasingly interconnected via mobile social networking. Thus, mobile learners construct their comprehension of the world and knowledge through cognitive interaction with a much greater and more culturally diverse range of contextual sources of information than non-mobile learners. This has obviously the potential to greatly enhance learning. However, the challenge resides in the fact that not all individuals, nor all external input, will be of value for the learning process. Hence, mobile learners need to be ‘taught’ how to discern who and what on the web is relevant to their learning and reliable as a source. As Terras and Ramsay put it:

Learners will have to cope with an extra layer of complexity in their learning ecology: mobile social learning increases the density of the distributed cognitive network. So, although learners may benefit from this increase in the distributed and situated nature of their cognitive ecology, the challenge is to use their digital literacy skills in addition to more generic cognitive skills in order to screen out redundant or irrelevant input to their learning

Education providers, in my opinion, need to invest much more than they usually do in structured learner training programs aimed at raising learner awareness of this challenge, whilst modelling effective approaches to a safe, discerning and cognitive-/time-efficient use of web sources. Such programs should be implemented, in my view, concurrently and as extensively and intensively as digital literacy programs are – which, as research suggest, rarely happens.

In the MFL classroom this is an important issue across several dimensions of learning. Firstly, mobile MFL learners are more likely to be tempted to use online translators and must be warned about the dangers of their use. Secondly, they need to become more discerning as to the cultural or political bias of the target language sources they interact with. Thirdly, they must be able to grasp the differences in terms of register, between different types of text genres (e.g. how writing a facebook feed differs from writing a blog or journal article). Fourthly, plagiarism is highly encouraged by the mobile social networking culture where information is recycled at high speed with little regard for intellectual property.

  1. Metacognition is essential for mobile learning

This is undoubtedly the most important challenge. Mobile learners must possess the ‘psychological infrastructure, as Terras and Ramsay put it, to support mobile learning. In other words, they need to develop metacognitive skills to be able to cope with all the above mentioned challenges. They need to develop strategies in order to best prevent the already discussed sources of cognitive load and external distractions from interfering with their learning and to generally effectively self-manage the learning process; this is particularly important if we aim to develop truly competent autonomous learners. The development of mobile learners’ web-related metacognitive competence should start concurrently with the very early stages of mobile learning.

  1. Individual differences matter

Although Terras and Ramsay consider this as a different point to the previous one, I believe the two are  very closely related. What the authors mean here is that students need to understand how technology best suits their personality, age, gender, learning preferences, personal set of skills, aptitudes and attitudes. Teachers often take it for granted that mobile learners, simply because (in their daily life) spend hours on mobile devices will know how to use them for learning. Being able to use mobile apps, social and learning platforms in a way that best suits one’s own personality attributes, skills and academic goals is not easy – it is a complex skill to acquire. How many teachers, I wonder, have the know-how to effectively impart on their mobile learners training in this kind of competence? This implies that professional development in this area ought to be focused on by education providers so as to equip teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills to address this crucial aspect of learners’ metacognition.

I would add a sixth psychological challenge to the five that Terras and Ramsay have identified: Depth of processing. Young mobile learners are exposed in the social media (e.g  Facebook and Twitter) to an overload of information, much of which is ‘fast’, ‘sloganised’ (forgive my ‘neologism’, here) and tend to be ‘sensationalistic’ and ‘eye-catching’ in nature. This ‘high-impact’ / ‘high speed’ culture has created a mindset amongst youngsters which encourages a superficial approach to information and cognition. This mindset, in my view, engenders shallow processing and the skin-deep acquisition of facts and notions unsupported by substance and/or reliable and referenced evidence. The challenge is for teachers to engage students, through mobile learning, in deeper processing of facts, notions and ideas. It is no easy challenge in a fast-paced society like ours, where the digital world creates on a daily basis such a wide and divergent pool of information and entertainment opportunities. We need to always bear in mind, as educators, that it is depth of processing that, after all, creates effective learning.

In conclusion, mobile learning has an enormous potential for the enhancement of MFL learning and of learning in general. This potential, however, has to be effectively harnessed and channelled. Education providers have to be aware of the 5 challenges pointed out by Terras and Ramsay as they are central to the construction of our learners’ cognition and may affect learning. In a highly interconnected world where social networking dictates a fast-paced, scarcely regulated and rich flood of information, the 21st century mobile learners need to be trained effectively to become competent autonomous learners versed not just in digital literacy but, more importantly, in generic life-long skills which enable them to analyze, synthesise and evaluate judiciously, productively and safely the masses of information available online.

Narrow reading and narrow listening – enhancing receptive skills through focused and purposeful recycling

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

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As mentioned in previous posts, listening in my opinion is not taught effectively in many MFL classrooms as students are often engaged in listening comprehension tasks that ‘feel’ more like tests and involve almost exclusively top-down processing skills. Another reason is that instructors and textbooks often do not exploit the full potential of the target texts. Students listen to a recording two or three times, answer a few comprehension questions and then the text is ‘ditched’ and the teacher moves on to a new text  which may deal with a similar topic area but rarely recycles the same material. As far as reading is concerned, things are a bit better and occasionally textbooks do provide two or three activities on the same text. But even so, the full potential of a text is often wasted.

In what follows I propose an approach to listening and reading that I have used very often over the years, which, although quite time-consuming, can yield great results if executed properly and implemented regularly.

Narrow listening

When I was in my teens, Internet did not exist and finding the lyrics of a song, in Italy – where I lived in those days – was not easy. Hence, a lot of my school mates, aware of my anglo-phone background (my mother having grown up in England) would ask me to write up the lyrics of the British hits that were ‘invading’ and taking over Italy at that time. To be able to do that, although I was already near-native at that stage, I had to listen to each song over and over again, sometimes going over the same line a dozen times to decode problematic words.

Useless to say, that process was as useful as it was tedious; I learnt loads, both in terms of bottom-up processing skills and in terms of vocabulary. But can we ask students to do the same? Apart from a few highly self-motivated individuals, the vast majority of our learners would not. Yet, as I argued in a previous post, if students simply listen to a text once or twice only, the learning benefits will be relatively low; students often need to process the same text several times in order to fully understand and learn new vocabulary from it.

One obvious solution is to exploit each text several times by engaging the learners in four or five tasks based around it.  However, this can be boring and repetitive. So, what can one do, to ensure that the students listen to the same words over and over again without listening and re-listening to the same text?

I found a possible solution a few years back, whilst reading the work of Stephen Krashen and his ‘narrow listening’ technique. ‘Narrow listening’ involves asking several L2 proficient/native speakers to talk about a specific topic whilst recording them in the process; the questions should be quite ‘narrow’ in their focus so as to elicit similar content and, consequently, language (vocabulary and grammar). At the end of the process one would listen to all the recordings obtained thereby being exposed several times to fairly similar language.

When I first got acquainted with this technique, I liked its aims: firstly, to facilitate learner understanding of the target input, by creating the same ‘narrow’ context for each interview and by recycling the same vocabulary over and over again; secondly, to consolidate vocabulary through that recycling. However, Krashen’s approach, being based on a spontaneous response on the part of the interviewees, does not guarantee any control on the teacher’s part over the vocabulary contained in their input. This means that the effect that song-transcribing had on me could not be guaranteed 100 % all of the time through Krashen’s technique.

Hence I decided to adapt Krashen’s model and increase my degree of control over the input. In my model, the interviewees are not just improvising; each is given a script that will not take longer than 30 to 40 seconds to read for beginner to pre-intermediate learners and about 1 minute for GCSE level students. The wording of each script is quite similar – but not identical – and the input is ‘comprehensible’ (i.e. mostly familiar language or cognates, with a few unfamiliar words). The ‘secret’ is to make sure that the same pool of words is recycled constantly whilst the texts sound different and have slightly different messages (e.g. some negative; some positive; some ‘neutral’) – not an easy thing to do. Even though the process can be quite laborious, the learning benefits of this practice in terms of vocabulary acquisition, consolidation and self-efficacy are remarkable.

In international schools like the one I work at where there are lots of young native speakers of the target language(s) (and their parents) this approach is not too difficult to implement. But one can go about it a different way, by searching the web for short videos/recordings which are very similar in content. I did that, for instance, in the context of daily routine; I found a serious of youtube videos shot by French teenagers, which actually contained very similar language and used them for narrow listening tasks. In the absence of L2 native speakers, other L2 experts (e.g. colleagues) may be used.

But what tasks should the students be involved in whilst narrow-listening? Unlike Krashen, who believes they should not be doing anything but listening, I do believe the students should be demonstrating understanding one way or another. The type of activity we decide to engage them in will depend on what we are trying to focus them on: is it inferring the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary? Is it consolidating old vocabulary? Is it listening for gist? Is it identifying specific details? Or is it all of the above? The answers to these questions will determine the in-listening tasks we will set. I usually do one or more of the following:

  1. Given the word in English spot the French/Spanish equivalent on the recording;
  2. Identify the meaning of the following French words in the recording;
  3. Jot down two/three/four etc. main points each speaker makes;
  4. Spot the speakers who express similar/different opinions or do/have done similar/different things;
  5. Comprehension questions. As you will know if you read my previous posts, these are not my favourite kind of tasks.

Narrow listening activities should be preceded by warm-up vocabulary and schemata activation activities and followed by consolidation activities further recycling the target lexis in order to maximize retention.

Narrow reading

The same principle underlying narrow listening can be applied to reading with the same beneficial impact on L2 acquisition. In fact, I often use the transcripts employed in narrow listening for my narrow reading sessions. I strongly recommend using fewer texts for narrow reading than one would use in narrow listening. Narrow reading is easier to implement as there’s no need for native speakers and similar texts are easy to find. For instance, recently I was doing some work on the environment and finding five similar texts on things to do or not to do to protect the environment was easy – and each text was authentic L2 material.

In conclusion, narrow listening is a technique that I recommend to colleagues and that I wish textbooks and other published instructional materials adopted more often than they currently do. It has the great advantage of exposing the students to similar comprehensible input, which allows for easier access to unfamiliar language, due to the contextual and linguistic clues they get from listening to several similar texts; moreover, similar vocabulary is recycled over and over again which fosters consolidation and retention; finally, students get to listen to accessible L2 language for relatively long time as uttered by different people. However, it does require some extra-work and the availability of several L2 experts willing to co-operate.

In order to save time and effort, Krashen’s approach may be easier to implement and can work, too, if one chooses the right questions. I do it sometimes and ask students to go around school with their iPads – not in lesson time, obviously –  to interview as many L2 native speaker schoolmates as possible about a specific topic (e.g. food in the canteen). When the focus of the question is very narrow (e.g. talk to be about a typical day in school), the likelihood of the vocabulary overlapping across interviewees is quite high.

Five things NOT to do when you teach grammar

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

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The following are some of the ‘mistakes’ common to many lessons I have observed in 25 years of modern foreign language teaching. I have been guilty of most of these myself in the past. Most experienced teachers will be aware of these pitfalls, so, I guess, this post is mainly aimed at less experienced colleagues.

1. Do not use the target language when the structure is complex and cognitively challenging

If the target grammar structure is complex and it is likely to cause cognitive overload to our students, it is preferable to avoid using the target language in order to prevent divided attention. After all, we want all of their attentional resources focused solely on understanding the grammar point(s) we are aiming to ‘teach’.

2. Do not use unfamiliar language in your examples of target-grammar-structure usage

This point relates to the previous one. When modelling the deployment of any given target grammar structure, we may want to prevent any potential source of divided attention from impairing the students’ focus on that structure. Hence, any sentence used to model or even practise the target structure at the early stages ought to occur within linguistic contexts that are very familiar to the students. Any new term or structure which the teacher will ‘throw’ in his/her modelling examples will be a potential source of confusion and distraction with very low surrender value. If one does want to use modelling sentences which contain new items, it would be good practice to provide the translation aside (e.g. in brackets) at least.

3. Do not make students go ‘productive’ straight away

In order to reduce the cognitive load in the first stages of acquisition of a given structure, students (especially the less able or confident ones) should be involved in receptive tasks and not, as often happens, ‘thrown’ straight into productive ones (e.g. translate  sentence into the target language). After a fair amount of receptive processing of the target structure through various modalities (see point 5, below) students will be better prepared for its deployment in the context of productive tasks. Thus, for example, before being asked to use the target morpheme in a structured or unstructured task, students may be involved in recognition tasks (e.g. scanning a text for examples of the target structure); grammaticality judgment tasks (where students need to evaluate how accurately the target structure has been used); multiple choice gap-fills; metalinguistic quizzes; L2 to L1 (fairly easy) translations; etc.

Of course this recommendation should not be over-generalised. There are indeed students who can ‘go productive’ straight away. However, as a norm, in every class there will be a fair amount of students who would benefit greatly from having receptive practice beforehand.

4. Do not just focus on intellectual knowledge and cloze tasks

Very often, in grammar teaching sessions, L2 instructors focus mainly on passing on intellectual knowledge about a structure and then practise that structure through masses of gapped exercises or other mechanical drills, including audiolingual-style ones. This is fine, but grammar instruction must endeavour to go beyond that by providing opportunities for the students, once they have become more versed in the use of a target structure, to use it in the context of less structured activities. The aim: to develop procedural knowledge – what skill-theorists call ‘executive control’.

Executive control is the ability to use any given grammar structure accurately in real operating conditions, i.e.: in real time, under time constraints and communicative pressure, not in a vacuum as a lot of grammar practice takes place, but in contexts in which there is negotiation of meaning between two individuals or between a student and an in-put source (e.g. radio or television). One’s degree of ‘executive control’ over a grammar structure will ultimately determine to what extent one can say one has acquired that grammar structure. So, for example, a student whose control over a given structure limits itself to being able to fill in gaps in a text accurately will be positioned at the very beginning of the acquisition continuum; conversely, someone who can apply the same structure flexibly and correctly across various semantic and syntactic contexts in unplanned speech, will be located at the opposite end of that continuum. Hence, although intellectual knowledge, gap-fills and mechanical drills can be a useful starting point in L2 structural acquisition (Anderson, 2000), grammar morphemes can only be acquired through unplanned communicative practice.

5. Do not forget there are four macro language skills, not just one or two

Often teachers practise and ‘test’ the uptake of a target grammar structure through the written medium (e.g. through translation). However, in real life, students are as likely to ‘hear’, ‘read’ and ‘speak’ that structure as they are to ‘write’ it. Thus, teachers ought to provide the students with plenty of opportunities to process that structure through all four modalities (Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing); to verify uptake of a grammar structure (at the end of a lesson or cycle of lessons) one should involve students in activities which require them to ‘recognize’ and ‘produce’ it in the context of spontaneous spoken or written text/production. For instance, at the end of a lesson or cycle of lessons on negatives, students may be asked to:

  • Listen through a number of utterances containing the negatives and demonstrate understanding of the meaning of each utterance. N.B. teachers should ensure that the vocabulary contained in such utterances is as familiar as possible to the learners (as per point two);
  • Read through a number of sentences containing the negatives and demonstrate understanding of the meaning of each sentence;
  • Engage in structured (audiolingual-style mechanical drills) or semi-structured (communicative) speaking task in which the students are required to use the target negative structure(s).
  • Deploy negatives in highly structured writing tasks (e.g. through translation) or less structured activities (e.g. producing negative sentences based on cues such as pictures).

Listening -the often ‘mis-taught’ skill. Part one: the issues undermining aural skills instruction

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

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.)'s avatarThe Language Gym

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Listening is a very important skill, definitely the most crucial to first language acquisition. Yet, in my experience and in my review of the relevant literature, I have found it to be the one that is possibly taught and resourced least effectively. This is hardly surprising, in that of all four macro language skills, listening is  the most ‘obscure’ in terms of what we know about the processes it involves. Why? Because it is difficult for researchers and teachers to decode what ‘goes on’ in the listener’s head as s/he attends to aural input. Hence, there is little valid research evidence on which to build a reliable pedagogic reference framework for listening skills instruction.

I have decided to split this article in two parts as the subject matter requires more extensive treatment than other topics I have previously tackled in my blog and because the psycholinguistic rationales for the…

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How process-driven instruction may enhance foreign language upper intermediate students’ essay writing

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

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Say you are the coach of a team of novice football players. You wouldn’t throw them into a very difficult match straight away, without the necessary training. Right? Surely you would make sure they received lots of practice in all the most crucial aspects of the game from the most basic skills (e.g. passing, drilling, tackling and shooting) to the most complex ones (e.g. defensive and offensive tactics). This is common sense, and it should apply to language teaching, too. Yet, many of us, from the very early days of A Level or IB, ask students to write cognitively and linguistically demanding discursive essays of some length, without teaching them all of the skills necessary to accomplish that challenging task effectively.

Not long ago, at a conference I attended, a teacher was emphatically asserting the importance of getting students to write essays from the very first week of AS. “I ask them to write two essays every week”- he boasted – ‘and teach them lots of grammar’. When I asked them how they learnt to write essays he replied “By writing lots of them”. Fair point, if your students are gifted linguists who read a lot ( in the target language), have highly refined critical thinking skills and are strong first language writers. But what if you students are not as exceptional?

In what follows, I advance the notion that any instructional approach to L2 essay writing should first and foremost be driven by a focus on the processes the task involves and should aim at equipping learners with the skills and strategies necessary to execute those processes effectively under real operating conditions (e.g. in the exam hall under exam conditions).

In order for the reader to fully understand the approach i advocate, let us look briefly at the cognitive processes involved in L2 essay writing, which I have already described in some detail in a previous article on this blog (‘Mapping out the foreign language writing process’).

The writing process

As the Hayes and Flower model (see Figure 1, below) shows, there are three major components to L2 essay writing:

  1. Task-environment – The task, defined by the essay requirements (essay title, audience, word limit, etc.) as well as any external resources one may want to use;
  2. Writer’s Long-Term Memory –the knowledge storage in our brain from which the writer will retrieve any information relevant to the task
  3. The writing process

Figure 1: The Hayes and Flower model (adapted from Hayes and Flower, 1980)

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The writing process, as the figure above shows, is very complex and recursive – not linear as one would intuitively expect. The Planning process sets goals based on information drawn from the Task-environment and Long-Term Memory (LTM). Once these have been established, a writing plan is developed to achieve those goals. More specifically, the Generating sub-process retrieves information from LTM through an associative chain in which each item of information or concept retrieved functions as a cue to retrieve the next item of information and so forth. The Organising sub-process selects the most relevant items of information retrieved and organizes them into a coherent writing plan. Finally, the Goal-setting sub-process sets rules (e.g. ‘keep it simple’) that will be applied in the Editing process. The second process, Translating, transforms the information retrieved from LTM into language. This is necessary since concepts are stored in LTM in the form of Propositions (‘concepts’/ ‘imagery’), not language as we normally intend it (as made of words).

To execute all this processes when writing an argumentative essay in one’s first language is already quite a demanding task; but doing it in a foreign language is even more challenging. The human’s fragile and limited Working Memory has to juggle demands from all these processes, which often occur simultaneously, e.g.: whenever you set goals for the content of the next paragraph in the essay, you may evaluate them and decide you are not happy with them; so you may decide to re-plan. This means that Working Memory is loaded with lots of information. The resulting cognitive load becomes even ‘heavier’ when writing in a foreign language, when Working Memory must not only cope with idea generation, goal setting, organization and monitoring, but also with ‘translating’ propositions into L2 words and arrange them into grammatically correct sentences.

The translation process being particularly difficult to self-monitor for novice essay writers of intermediate proficiency, due to the demands posed by the higher meta-components, it is not surprising that these learners tend to rely massively on external resources and that the essay-writing process takes a lot of time (often with negative impact on motivation). Such reliance on external resources can often lead to plagiarism whether of the blatant or of the ‘smart’ sort (whereby the student picks bits from different sources and assembles them together intelligently, logically and cohesively). Although students are often blamed for such ‘unethical’ behavior, the truth of the matter is that they are often required to write essays when they are not developmentally ready for it both in terms of the higher order skills and of the lower ones.

Implications for L2-writing instruction 

The most obvious implication of the Hayes and Flower model for L2 essay writing instruction is that teachers should train their student writers to operate effectively at each level of the writing process, across all the different processes it involves. Hence, exactly as one would do with the football scenario outlined above, language teachers should teach in separate sessions the specific sets of skills students require to execute each writing sub –process. Thus, for instance, in one session or set of sessions they would stage activities aimed at practising Idea-generation and planning; in subsequent ones, the teachers would work on evaluating the relevance of the ideas generated to the essay title; in other sessions, organization (coherence and cohesion) would be focused on; etc.

Parallel to this work on higher order cognitive skills, L2 writing instruction would also have to work on the ‘Translating’ process of essay production, thereby focusing on the language level, syntax/grammar and lexical development as well as the functions and the ‘mechanics’ of written discourse. By functions of written discourse I mean acquiring the L2 discourse markers necessary to introduce and sequence information (Tour d’abord, en plus, qui plus est, etc.), contrast ideas (e.g. en revanche), express a purpose (dans le but de, afin de, etc.), etc. Practice in these skills can still be done in writing, but in less threatening and cognitive demanding contexts just like in football training you would play shorter games, maybe using only one half of the football pitch, so learner writers should be engaged in shorter and more controlled tasks in which they are required to focus on specific functions and grammar structures.

When working both at the ‘higher and ‘lower’ level of essay composition, student writers should be provided with plenty of examples of good L2 writing which they will be asked to analyze by focusing on the generation, evaluation and organization skills or on the linguistic features under study.

Through extensive discrete practice in each of the different set of skills and discourse functions, the students will be able to execute each of the different processes involved in essay writing more effectively. This will lead, in turn, to greater processing efficiency and control over the overall essay writing process with more ‘cognitive space’ available in the writer’s Working Memory to monitor the higher and lower levels of their output.

In conclusion, teachers, in my opinion, ought to rethink the way they teach L2 essay writing. Instruction should equip the learner writers with process-specific skills which will enable them to execute the Planning, Goal setting, Organizing, Self-monitoring and Translating processes effectively and efficiently (in terms of cognitive load). Hence the Schemes of Work should be adapted to include extensive instruction in each and every one of these specific skills.  Students should be made aware of the Hayes and Flower model components as instruction focuses on each sub-process; this will enhance their task-related metacognition i.e. their awareness of the skills each sub-process require.

Ultimately, it is process, not product, that should determine our L2 writing pedagogical approach. Teaching L2 learners how to master each and every stage of the writing process effectively will forge not just A* students, but more competent, independent and adaptive life-long writers.

Enhancing L2-writing grammar accuracy through ‘narrow focus’

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

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‘Narrow focus’, as I call it, is a technique I came up with whilst teaching a group of relatively weak and demotivated (mostly male) Year 10 IGCSE students of French as a foreign language. The first written piece they handed in to me being rife with grammar errors, and our examination board (CIE) awarding grades mainly based on structural accuracy, I was obviously quite worried and had to get ‘creative’.

As I have written in previous blogs, at this level of proficiency, learner writers find it hard to juggle all the demands that the writing process poses on their Working Memory. Errors mostly occur due to processing inefficiency, the inability, that is, to monitor the accuracy of one’s output, due to divided attention (e.g.from idea generation, organization and translation process). As I wrote in my previous blog, ‘Mapping out the L2 writing process’, less proficient L2 learner writers, when suffering from cognitive overload, tend to focus on meaning and neglect function words (e.g. conjunctions, prepositions and articles) and any other words that are not semantically salient (e.g. copulas and auxiliaries). This was definitely the case with this group of students, who made frequent errors with verb endings, omissions of auxiliaries (e.g. ‘je allé’, il mangé), omission of copulas (e.g. ‘il grand’), adjectival agreement, missing plural endings, wrong prepositions, word order, etc. Too many mistakes for them to deal with simultaneously.

Normally, with more linguistically mature students I would meet up and, in the context of one-to-one conferences I would talk them through their main errors and draft a personalised check-list containing six to eight mistakes to look out for in editing their next essays. But with this group of students it would have been asking too much. They had neither the maturity nor the motivation to cope with this approach.

I decided then, on setting the second written assignment of the year, to challenge them to get three and three only specific grammar structures right. I told them that I would not bother with the rest; that in my marking of the language level of the essay I would award points based solely on how accurate those three structures were deployed. Based on the nature of the essay which was about an outing they had gone on in the past and the places they had visited, I asked them to focus on the perfect tense, the imperfect and adjectival agreement.

In order to scaffold the process, the students were asked to code each instance of the three structures with different colours; they were also given a checklist – to be used in the editing phase – with reminders of the grammar rules governing those structures, which read something like this:

Perfect tense – you need two words, one is the verb AVOIR or ETRE and the other one is the PAST PARTICIPLE of the verb; it indicates a completed action like ‘I fell’, ‘I left’, ‘the phone rang’

Imperfect – description; continuous or repetitive action; telling the time; it indicates something “one used to do’.

Adjectival agreement – feminine ending if noun is feminine; add ‘– s’for plural.

It should be pointed out that during the first cycle I focused the students on the above three structures over a period of four weeks, recycling them later on in the year when I felt necessary. Each subsequent ‘narrow focus’ cycle lasted about three to four weeks.

The rationale behind this approach was to move those three structures from their subsidiary awareness – where they had been until then – into their focal awareness. Interestingly, as my narrow focus experiment went on, not only did the level of accuracy in the three target structures addressed in each cycle increase, but the accuracy of the other structures deployed in their essays gradually improved substantially, too.

In the interviews I carried out with them, the students reported that the process triggered greater focus on formal accuracy in general and that the fact that they were evaluated only on the content and on the execution of those three structures generated less anxiety. Half of the students reported that, although at each different narrow-focus cycle they did mainly focus on the three new target structures, the structures they had focused in the previous cycle were always somehow ‘at the back of their mind’ – as one student said. In other words for some of them the ‘narrow focus’ became gradually 3 new structures + 3 old ones and maybe at a later stage 3 new structures + six old ones, etc.

In the actual exam paper, they all did brilliantly considering their starting point, and although linguistic maturation may have played a major role in it, I am confident that the ‘narrow focus’ approach played a significant part, too. I invite any colleagues to try this strategy out, if not with a whole class, with less confident pre-intermediate to intermediate students who may need to be focused on accuracy and may be lacking self-efficacy as L2 writers. In my view, this is a less threatening and more effective approach than other traditional remedial methods.

Think-aloud techniques – How to understand MFL learners’ thinking processes

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

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A fair amount of MFL teachers’ daily frustration relates to their students’ underachievement or apparent lack of progress. On a daily basis you hear your colleagues or yourself complain about student X or Y ‘not getting it’, making the same mistakes over and over again, writing unintelligible essays or speaking with shockingly bad pronunciation. The most undertaking and caring teachers often act on these issues by encouraging the students to revise and work harder; providing them with extra practice and scaffolding it; devising some remedial learning program involving some degree of learner training, and engaging their entourage to get some support. However, something crucial goes often amiss: how does one know what the problem REALLY is?

Yes, observing the students’ behaviour and analyzing their output more frequently and closely than usual does help, but it is not enough to get the full picture, and the teacher usually ends up focusing on the usual culprits, i.e. ‘laziness’, indolence, lack of motivation, low aptitude for language learning, etc. But could something else, something less visible that occurs deep inside their brains which we fail to notice and understand be the root cause(s) of the observed problem? Could those factors actually determine the alleged ‘laziness’ or ‘lack of motivation’? Difficult to say by simply asking students questions in a survey or interview or by observing their behaviour in lessons. Hence the importance to ‘get into our students’ heads’ to probe their mind in search of clues as to what it is that is hindering their performance and progress. But how do we do that?

There are indeed techniques that were developed by social scientists in order to tackle the limitations of traditional enquiry tools such as observations, questionnaires and interviews. They include a set of research techniques referred to in the literature as concurrent and retrospective think-aloud protocols. These techniques truly allow us to get into our students’ thinking processes and reconstruct the way their brains go about executing the tasks we engage them in in lessons.

Every time I have used these techniques, whether in the context of ‘proper’ research studies (e.g. one funded by OUDES – Oxford University Department of Education, in Macaro, 2001) or in my role as a classroom teacher, I was amazed at how many presumptions I had made about my students’ ways of processing the language were wrong and how right my mentor in the field of Learner Strategy Research (OUDES’ Professor Macaro) is when he states that most of our students’ issues do not stem from low IQ or language aptitude but from poor learning strategy use.

What are think-aloud techniques?

Think-aloud techniques require informants (your students if you are a teacher) to verbalize what is happening in their brain (working memory) as they execute a task. In this case we call them concurrent think alouds. If we ask them to reflect on their thought processes retrospectively – after the task has been executed – we refer to them as retrospective think alouds. Obviously, since when dealing with speaking tasks, concurrent think alouds cannot be used, retrospective think-alouds can be very helpful in investigating our students’ issues in oral language production.

The objectivity and validity of these tools for formal ‘scientific’ research have been questioned by me in previous blogs; but the use I am advocating here is not aimed at data one would want to analyze so as to extract from them universal truths to inform educational policies or changes in pedagogy. Rather, I recommend them as useful enquiry tools to obtain useful qualitative data to understand our students’ learning problems. As such, these techniques can be very useful indeed.

Most useful models of language processing were obtained thanks to think-aloud techniques. The most famous of them is surely the Hayes and Flower model of writing that I discussed in a previous blog, which has been since the 80’s the most widely used framework for mapping L2-student writers’ cognitive processes (see my previous blog on writing processes). On this model much current writing pedagogy and research has been based. This is a great example of how think-aloud protocols have affected the way we teach.

Pure and hybrid models of application

‘Pure’ concurrent and retrospective think-alouds are carried out with very little intervention on the part of the teacher/researcher. The students are asked to execute a task and whilst s/he verbalizes his/her thoughts (in a stream-of-consciousness fashion), the teacher sits somewhere behind him/her in order not to be seen (so as to minimize any possible researcher-effect). I used this technique mostly for writing in an attempt to understand what caused my students’ errors and compensation strategies (avoidance, coinage, etc.), to gain an insight in their use of resources (e.g. dictionaries) and find out how I could improve that. The reader should note that the presence of the teacher/researcher is important for the reason that he/she may want to note down key moments in the think-aloud where he/she may want to know more about what was going on in the informant’s head and may need to ask more questions retrospectively. For this purpose it may be useful to film the student and ‘show’ him/her – on video – the point(s) in the think-aloud you want to ask about, as a memory retrieval cue.

In the ‘Hybrid’ think-aloud model, the teacher steps in asking, probing using questions such as ‘why are you doing this?’ , ‘Can you tell me more about this?, ‘Why are you making this assumption?’. I find this very useful in order to tap into not just the current processes being verbalized but any other process happening concurrently which is not being verbalized. Obviously, one cannot guarantee that the information the student will provide about cognitive processes that are not in his/her focal awareness will be necessarily objective and reliable, but the process will yield a lot of useful data. In one of my studies, for instance, which focused on writing skills and error-making, had I not interrupted the students think-aloud/ ‘stream of consciousness’ I would have not found out why they did not notice the mistakes they were making, even though they had the declarative knowledge necessary to correct them.

Two or more of the above techniques can be used synergistically to support each other, the second set (the ‘hybrid’ model) usually following the first. This synergy usually yields richer and more reliable data.

Of all of the above think-aloud techniques, retrospective think-aloud  are the least reliable, as the students are likely to have ‘lost’ (forgotten) most of the information in their subsidiary awareness as well as part of the information in their focal awareness. However, as mentioned above, they are the only way to explore our students’ thinking processes when investigating learner speaking. To maximize their power, one should implement the tactic quickly touched upon earlier: using a video or recording of the speaking session as a retrieval cue for the student’s recall of his own processes.

A very useful tip: before implementing any of the above techniques, one should model the to-be-used think-aloud technique to the students and give a chance to practise it using a warm-up tasks similar to the one they are going to be engaged in soon.

Other benefits of think-aloud techniques

I have touched upon the benefits of using think-alouds in terms of enhancing our understanding of our learners – which will inform our teaching of the target student or group of students. However, there are other benefits which have the potential to more directly impact our students’ learning: the metacognition-enhancing effect of involving them in reflecting on their own learning. Through think-aloud it is not just us who ‘get into’ their heads; it is also and above all them exploring their own cognition. In this respect, think-aloud techniques involving introspection can be very valuable indeed, especially when the questions asked by the teacher/researcher drive them as deep down as possible into their own cognitive processing.

In conclusion, think-alouds can be very powerful tools to understand how students’ minds process language tasks and learn. A good teacher is ultimately also a researcher, and the formative data he/she can get from think-alouds can support him/her very effectively in his/her effort to obtain as much formative data as possible. Think-aloud techniques do not require a lot of training, are not too time-consuming and can be applied to every single aspect of teaching and learning. More importantly, in my experience, they yield data which one cannot obtain by any other means of enquiry. In this lies their value to any self-reflective teacher. Their use in my own practice has definitely made me a better teacher and, more importantly, has made every single one of the students whom I have involved in think-alouds, a more self-reflective and generally metacognizant learner.

How to exploit the full learning potential of an L2 song in the language classroom

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

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How to exploit the full learning potential of a target language song in the L2 classroom

As Robert Lafayette wrote in his 1973 article ‘Creativity in the foreign language classroom’, ‘songs are often sung the day before a vacation, or on a Friday afternoon or when we have a few extra minutes’.

This resonates with my experience, and there is nothing majorly wrong with it – why not having a bit of fun for fun’s sake every now and then, especially when your students’ are tired or in festive mode? It can help create a nice buzz in the classroom, a sense of conviviality and breathes a bit of L2 culture into our lessons. And, who knows, some incidental learning might actually happen, with minimal preparation.

On the other hand, research does show that simply singing along to a song mindlessly, whilst being enjoyed by most students, doesn’t really do much in terms of learning enhancement. For instance, Carlsson (2015) found that, although the vast majority of her informants enjoyed singing songs, rather than benefiting from this activity in terms of pronunciation, some of them actually got worse in some problematic areas (e.g. ‘th’ in English) at the end of her experiment, whilst the majority made no progress at all

In 30 years’ experience I have observed many lessons in which classic or contemporary songs were used. However, I have rarely come out of those lessons feeling that the full learning potential of that song had been exploited. In fact, I often felt that very little was learnt at all in terms of the lyrics’ key vocabulary or structures.

This article attempts at providing a principled approach to the ‘linguistic’ exploitation of a song. This should not be taken, of course, as the only or best possible blueprint for exploiting a song as a learning enhancement tool. I am sure there are many other ways that I have not explored yet.

A nine-step framework for the exploitation of a song

Step 1: select the ‘right’ song

These are the most important principles one should heed when selecting a song for optimal learning enhancement:

(1) Comprehensible input – choose a song which you believe is linguistically accessible – with some support – to the target students.

(2) Flooded input – the song will ideally be ‘flooded’ with the target linguistic features, be them sounds, lexical items, and/or grammatical / syntactic structures. This is key.

(3) Linguistic relevance – select a song which is relevant to the linguistic goals of the curriculum, i.e. that contains lexis and grammar which is related to what the learning outcomes of the lesson and/or unit-in-hand are. Ideally the song should introduce, model, recycle or reinforce linguistic or culture features you have been teaching or planning to teach. It shouldn’t be a ‘pedagogic island’, as often happens, exposing students to language or other information that is not going to be revisited later on.

(4) ‘Socio-cultural’ relevance and sensitivity – by ‘cultural’ here I do not mean the culture of the country, but rather the relevance to the sub-culture of the students they ‘belong’ to. For instance, if the group you are teaching is mainly composed of teen age rugby players ‘with an attitude’ you would not choose a romantic song stigmatized in their sub-culture as a ‘girly’ song. By the same token one must be careful not to choose a song whose lyrics and/or official Youtube video contain culturally insensitive material.

This is crucial when working in an international school or other multi-ethnic environments. It may be useful, before using a song in class, to play it to two or three students of the same age as and similar ability to the ones you are going to work on that song with. Their feedback might be a lifesaver!

(5) Surrender value – the song should contain vocabulary which is worth learning, i.e. that has high surrender value. This will include mainly high frequency vocabulary and phrases;

(5) Availability of relevant multimedia resources – it is practical to choose a song whose lyrics, L1 translation and video are available online and free. The lyrics available on the internet should always be checked thoroughly as they more than often contain spelling errors or small omissions.

(7) Memorability -The following are factors that usually affect the memorability of a song:

  • the lyrics are repetitive and patterned;
  • the music is ‘catchy‘;
  • it’s packed with sound devices such as allitterations, rhymes and pararhymes;
  • it is distinctive, i.e. there are specific features of the song (and/or in the video that accompanies the song) which make it stand out;
  • its content is socio-culturally and/or affectively relevant to your students. In this term, much consideration must be given to gender differences;
  • the speed and enunciation must allow the students to clearly hear the words;
  • the song tells a ‘story’ which is fairly linear and predictable;
  • the linguistic content is high frequency, which means that the chances of the students having encountered those words previously and of encountering them in the future, is higher

Step 2 – Pre-listening activities for schemata activation

In order to activate the learners’ prior knowledge and the language related to the themes and semantic areas the song taps into, the learners should be engaged in a series of tasks which, whilst recycling vocabulary they have already processed in previous lessons, engage them on some kind of reflection on the song’s themes. For instance, on a lesson centred on Kenza Farah’s song ‘Sans jamais de plaindre’, which deals with the theme of parent’s daily sacrifices for their children, in the first activity I staged (see my worksheet here) I asked the students to:

  1. Brainstorm and write down in French, working in groups of two, five sacrifices parents usually make for their children;
  2. Think about three people in their own families and list the sacrifices they have made in recent years to help them;
  3. List the qualities of the ideal father, mother and sibling.

Just as I have done in this lesson, this kind of activities should elicit language, in their execution, which is very relevant to or even equivalent to the one in the song.

In this phase you may also want to develop the all-important desire to listen. You could do this by:

(1) displaying a slideshow featuring photos of the singer and captivating images you will have found on the web which refer to the content of the song;

(2) showcasing lines of the song which are shocking, funny, witty or ‘cool’;

(3) playing on the classroom screen the most enticing parts of the song’s official videoclip on silent;

(4) (if they don’t know the singer) relating interesting facts about them that may arouse their curiosity;

etc.

Step 3 – Pre-listening activities to facilitate bottom-up processes during the in-listening phase

At this point, the teacher may want focus on facilitating the students’ understanding of the text through activities which involve working on the key lexis included in the song’s lyrics. These activities will involve semantic analysis of that lexis through split sentences activities, gapped sentences, odd one outs, matching exercises, etc. In the example given above, for instance, I took key sentences from the lyrics and recycled them (see the second page in the hand-out) through five vocabulary building, reading skills and semantic/syntactic analysis activities which focused on lexis, morphology, and syntax.

Step 4 – Listening to the song for pleasure

You should let the students listen to the song for pure enjoyment the first time around; then ask them to do any in-listening tasks.

Step 5 – Recognizing and noticing

Get the students to listen to the song again. This time ask them to note down any words they recognize and any words they don’t know but they noticed (maybe because they kept re-occurring) – spelling doesn’t matter.

After the students have jotted down the words, get them to pair up with one or more peers to compare notes.

You could then ask the students to throw the words at you and you could list them on the board, explaining their meaning in the L2 or translating them in the L1.

Finally, ask them what they think the song is about (this can be done in the L1 with less proficient groups)

Step 6 – Promoting selective attention and further noticing

At this stage the learners are given a gapped version of the lyrics of the song, where the words are provided aside. In order not to overload the students, I usually place a gap every two or three lines.

You will gap the words or chunks you want the students to pay particular attention to, because of their linguistic, semantic or cultural value.

If I want to emphasize a specific sound pattern I usually draw the students’ attention to it by removing words that rhyme, chime or alliterate with one containing that sound. After listening to the song three or four times, show them the complete version of the lyrics on the screen and ask to check and correct/fill in any missing gap

Step 6 – Working on specific phonemes

Explicit learning

After the students have filled in all the gaps, produce or play a recording of a specific sound that you know they struggle with (e.g. [œ]), then play the song again and ask them to  highlight/circle the words which contain that sound. Do the same with other key phonemes, making sure that they use a different highlighting/coding system for each sound. Then play the song again asking them to focus on the specific letters they highlighted.

Inductive learning

Write on the whiteboard two or three combination of letters (e.g. diphtongs) or syllables which recur a few times in the target song. Then ask your students, working in pairs, to underline all of the occurrences of the target item in the lyrics of the song. Finally, ask them to listen  to the song and work out how those letter combinations/syllables are pronounced in the target language.

Step 7 – Working on segmentation skills

Segmentation, i.e. the ability to identify words boundaries is a key micro-listening skill.

1. Break the flow – Give your students a version of a portion of the song’s lyrics (e.g. the first two stanzas) from which you eliminated the spaces in between words. Their task is to listen to the song and mark with a line the breaks you deleted;

2. Spot the intruder – insert as many small function words (e.g. articles and prepositions) as you can in between the words in the lyrics and ask the students to delete the ones they don’t hear when they listen to the song;

3. Complete the beginning / endings – delete the beginnings and/or the endings of every single word in a stanza / section of the target song. The students will have to complete the ‘mutilated’ words.

Step 8 – Working on general GPC (grapheme-phonemes correspondence)

GPC refers to the print-to-sound correspondence in a language. You could do any of the following activities, depending on your focus:

(1) eliminate all consonants or vowels from a few words or even lines of a song;

(2) eliminate specific syllables;

(3) jumble up the letters in specific words;

(4) split words in half (one or two per line max);

(5) (in French) underline the endings of specific words and ask your students to underline which letters are silent;

(6) write a few words on the whiteboard and ask your students to listen to the song and spot as many words in the song that rhyme with them;

etc.

Step 9 – Reading comprehension : Lexical level

At this point get them to work on reading comprehension through deep processing activities such as the following classics

(1) Word hunt – the students are provided with a list of lexical items / chunks in the L1 and the students are tasked with finding their L2 equivalent in the lyrics;

(2) Categories – identify the key semantic fields the key words in the song refer to, e.g. relationships, weather, time, and ask the students to spot and note down as many words as possible in the lyrics under those headings.

(3) Near synonyms/antonyms – give the students a set of phrases/sentences which are near-synonyms of phrases/sentences found in the song and ask to match them up

(4) Chronological ordering – provide a list of main points from the song in random order and ask the students to arrange them in the same order as they occur in the song

Step 10 – Grammar level

When the learners have been acquainted with most of the vocabulary and the intended meaning of the song, it will be easier for them to process the grammar. Thus, at this stage one can get the students to engage with this level of the text by asking them to:

  1. identify specific linguistic features. For instance, give them a grid with metalinguistic labels as heading, e.g. Adjectives, Verbs, Nouns, Prepositions, Connectives and ask them to find in the lyrics as many words that refer to those categories;
  2. work on grammatical dichotomies within a specific category: regular vs irregular adjectives, masculine vs feminine nouns, imperfect vs perfect tense. The students must note down items from the song that falls under either category;
  3. ask metalinguistic questions (e.g., in French or Spanish: why is an imperfect used here rather than a perfect tense?; which form of the verb is ‘Comieron?’);
  4. rewrite a set of sentences lifted from the lyrics incorrectly, deliberating making a grammar mistake your students usually make and ask them to compare it to the original version in the song and correct it;

Step 11 – Syntactic level

  1. Write the literal L1 translation of a few sentences in the song where the L1 sentence structure is different from the L2’s. The task: for the students to notice the differences between the two languages and extrapolate the rule.
  2. Write a sentence structure using a shorthand/symbols you have used your students to, e.g.: SVOCA (subject + verb + object + complement + adverbial) or “Time marker + personal pronoun + verb + preposition + article + noun’; your students are tasked with identifying sentences that reflect that structure.
  3. Write a list of subordinate-clause types your students are familiar with on the whiteboard, e.g. : time clauses, final clauses, modal clauses, etc. Then ask your students to identify as many clauses in the song which refer to those types.

Step 12 – Meaning building and discourse reconstruction tasks

After all the work on lexis, grammar and syntax, the students should be able to approach the meaning level – arguably the most important – with much confidence. Once removed the lyrics and other worksheets you have used with so far, you could stage any of the following classics:

1. Jigsaw reading / listening – give the students a jigsaw version of the song lyrics and ask them, working in groups of 2 or 3 to rearrange it in the correct order. Then the students listen to the song and confirm or rearrange;

2. ‘True or false’ tasks (as reading or listening comprehension)

3. ‘Comprehension questions’ tasks (as reading or listening comprehension)

4.  Summarising content in the L1 or L2

5. Bad translation (pair-work) – provide a translation of the song lyrics which contains a number of fairly obvious mistakes. The students are tasked, under timed conditions, with spotting and correcting the mistakes

Step 11 – Enjoy the song

Now that you are confident the student understand the meaning of the song and most of the words in it, get them to sing along.

Step 12 – Recycling and consolidating

This step is crucial, as you do want to secure a strong retention of the linguistic material your students have processed. Here are some tasks you could use:

1. Spot the differences – doctor the lyrics by making a few grammatical or lexical changes to the song and ask the students to identify them. The students will have no access to the original text; they will have to do this from memory.

 2. Gapped lyrics – the students are tasked with filling the gaps from memory

3. Disappearing text – The teacher writes a stanza on the blackboard. Usually the text should contain about 50 or 60 words, but this depends on the ability of the class. She asks a learner or two to read it. Then she rubs out some of the words – it is usually best to rub out function words like a, the, in, of, I, he, etc. at the beginning. Then she asks another learner to read it aloud. The learner must supply the missing words as they read. Then some more words are rubbed out, another learner reads, and this continues until there is nothing at all on the blackboard, and the learners are saying the text from their memory. It is best not to rub out too many words each time so that many learners have a chance to read the text.

4. Mad dictation –

Mad dictation is a dictation in which you alternate slow, moderate, fast and very fast pace. This is how it unfolds:

1 – Tell the students to listen to the text as you read it at near-native speed and to note down key words

2 – Tell them to pair up with another student and to compare the key words they noted down. Tell they are going to work with that person for the remainder of the task.

3 – Read the text a second time. This time read some bits slowly, some fast and some at moderate pace. The purpose of these changes in speed is to get the students to miss some of the words out as they transcribe

4 – The students work again with their partner in an attempt to reconstruct the text

5 – Read the text a final time, still varying the speed of delivery.

6 – The students are given another chance to work with their partner.

7 – They are now given 30 seconds to go around the tables and steal information from other pairs

5. Dictogloss – the students listen to the song twice, each time noting down as many words as they can. They they pair up with another student and reconstruct the lyrics together.
6. Guided summary – Give them a list of words/chunks taken from the song lyrics and ask them to write a summary of the song including those items.
7. Substitution task – Underline key items in the song lyrics and ask the students to rewrite the song replacing those items creatively but in a way which is grammatically correct and semantically plausible
8. Deep processing tasks – you will stage classic vocabulary building tasks eliciting deep processing such as odd-one out, categories, find the synonym/antonym, split sentence, ordering, etc.
9. Quizzes to ascertain how much has been retained in terms of vocabulary, grammar, meaning, etc.

10 – Thinking-about-learning tasks – these may include any of the following:

  • Reflecting on the value of using songs for learning – Ask them to reflect on how songs, based on what you have just done with them, can be valuable for language learning and ask for suggestions on how they could benefit by listening to them independently. You can follow this up by providing them with lists of singers/songs they might enjoy or by giving them the task to find a French band/solo artist they like (to share with the rest of the class in the next lesson);
  • Noting down what was challenging about the song and the tasks performed;
  • Making a list of the new items learnt and rank them in order of usefulness for real life communication or reading comprehension purposes.

Why the reliability of UK Examination Boards’ assessment of A Level writing papers is questionable

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

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Often, our year 12 or Year 13 students who have consistently scored high in mock exams or other assessment in the writing component of the A Level exam paper, do significantly less well in the actual exam. And, when the teachers and/or students, in disbelief, apply for a remark, they often see the controversial original grade reconfirmed or, as it has actually happened to two of my students in the past, even lowered. In the last two years, colleagues of mine around the world have seen this phenomenon worsen: are UK examinations boards becoming harsher or stricter in their grading? Or is it that the essay papers are becoming more complicated? Or, could it be that the current students are generally less able than the previous cohorts?

Although I do not discount any of the above hypotheses, I personally believe that the phenomenon is also partly due to serious issues undermining the reliability of the assessment procedures involved in the grading of A Level papers by external assessors. The main issues refer to:

(1) the assessment rubrics used to grade the essays, which lend themselves, as I intend to show, to subjective interpretation by the assessors;

(2) the way raters form their judgement about the quality of an essay;

(3) the absence of an inter-rater reliability process – which compounds the previous issues.

1.Subjective interpretation of rubrics

1.1 The fuzziness of the terms ‘Fluency’ and ‘Communication’

The interpretation of what ‘fluency’ means is one of the most controversial issues in Applied Linguistics research. If one asks ten teachers what the word refers to, every single one of them will tell you they know. However, when it comes down to articulating what ‘good’ or ‘very good’ fluency involve and to giving criteria to measure it, each and every one of them will provide different criteria and measures. How do we know this? Several studies have been carried out which show that this is case (Chamber et al., 1995). Moreover, it will suffice to look at how greatly the measures of fluency vary across the plethora of analytical/holistic scales used in applied linguistics research to realize how ambiguous a concept ‘fluency’ is. As Bruton and Kirby (1987) put it:

“The word fluency crops up often in discussions of written composition and holds an ambiguous position in theory and in practice…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.” (p. 89)

Yet, rubrics used in the assessment of the writing component of the Edexcel AS level exams use ‘fluency’ as one of the criteria to attain the highest level of Quality of Language. This is taken from the writing assessment rubric on page 32 of the Edexcel specification:

“Excellent communication; high level of accuracy; language almost always fluent, varied and appropriate.”

If scholars and researchers around the world cannot agree on what this concept means how can teachers be expected to be able to do so? The solution? Edexcel could either eliminate the reference to fluency or provide a clear explanation of what it refers to, for teachers to understand what is expected of their students at the highest level of the Quality of Language scale.

Another issue is the use of the concept of ‘Communication’ in the above example from Edexcel. Communication is a very fuzzy concept, too, as it subsumes quite a wide range of skills as well as linguistic and sociolinguistic features. What does ‘Excellent communication” actually mean? Here, too, it would be useful for teachers to know what is meant by the examiners and what features would constitute a step up from ‘good communication’ (the criterion which characterizes the previous level).

1.2 What is a ‘simple’ and what is a ‘complex’ structure?  

Researchers have also found that teachers do not often agree on what constitutes a complex structure (Chambers et al., 1995). What may appear very complex to one teacher seems to appear moderately complex or relatively easy to another, depending on their own personal bias and experience. In the light of this ambiguity, one can see how the two top levels of the AQA ‘Complexity of language’ scale lend themselves to subjective interpretation.

  1. Very wide range of complex structures;
  2. A wide range of structures, including complex constructions;

How does one decide with absolute certainty when a structure is ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ or somewhere in the middle? Interestingly, the Edexcel specification lists in the Appendix (pages 72-74), all the structures an A Level candidate is expected to have learnt by the end of the course. Each time I go through them- despite an MA and a PhD in Applied Linguistics and 25 years of foreign language teaching – I find it difficult to draw the line between less and more complex structures. For instance, does Agreement count as a complex grammar structure? Some of my colleagues think it is not, whilst they think the subjunctive is; but I can think of contexts in which agreement rules are applied which the students find more challenging than the deployment of certain subjunctives rules. Moreover, say one produces set phrases (formulaic language) such as ‘Quoiqu’il en soit” (= whatever the case), which I teach as a ready-made ‘chunk’ to all of my students, before I even teach the subjunctive. Does it count as a complex structure, even though the students use it without knowing the grammar ‘behind’ it? And saying “One must use one’s professional judgment”, it’s not good enough, because that’s when we legitimize subjectivity!

1.3 When is language ‘rich’?

The Edexcel ‘Range and Application of language’ trait, a subset of the holistic scale used to assess the Research essay, contains the following criteria at the top two levels:

7–8 A wide range of appropriate lexis and structures; successful manipulation of language.

9-10 Rich and complex language; very successful manipulation of language.

We have already dealt with the issue of ‘complex language’. Now let us focus on the adjective ‘rich’? What constitutes ‘rich’ language? How does it differ from ‘A wide range of appropriate lexis and structures’? Although one can sense the difference between the two levels, it is not clear what A2 candidates need to write in their essays for the language to be considered as ‘rich’. Again, it would be helpful to obtain from Edexcel clear guidelines as to what constitute ‘rich language’ (e.g. how many and what kind of idioms one should use) so that one will not go about assigning a grade impressionistically.

1.4 Use of intensifiers in the rubrics to indicate progression

Let us go back to the example above from AQA:

5 (marks) – Very wide range of complex structures;

4 (marks) –  A wide range of structures, including complex constructions;

Considering that the word limit set by AQA is 250 words, how many ‘complex’ structures can an A level student ‘pack in’ in such a limited space so as to be considered as using a ‘very wide’ range of complex structures? Does the use of 10 different complex structures qualify as a ‘wide’ or a ‘very wide’ range? Does this encourage a student to artificially use as many ‘complex’ structures as possible potentially to the detriment of the message he/she is trying to convey in order to score a ‘5’?

This issue refers to an overuse, very fashionable in this day and age, in rubrics, of incrementally stronger intensifiers to define progression from one level to another; this looks intuitively right, and maybe it is, in theory, but in practice creates a lot of ambiguity along the way. Here is another example, from Edexcel, this time (A level specification, page 46), from the essay-organization rubric; the two statements below define the top levels of the taxonomy:

10–12 Organisation and development logical and clear.

13–15 Extremely clear and effective organization and development of ideas

I personally find it difficult to differentiate between ‘clear’ and ‘extremely clear’; when does ‘clear’ become ‘extremely clear’?. Moreover, doesn’t ‘effective organization’ mean ‘clear’ organization to most people, ‘clear’ meaning that the text is both cohesive and coherent? I believe that in order to be fair to teachers and students, Edexcel should provide several ‘extremely clear’ examples as to what constitute ‘clear’ and ‘extremely clear’ organization.

2. The exam format

This is an issue which refers to the Edexcel Research essay component. Let us look at the top descriptors for the scale “Understanding, reading and research”:

19–24 Good to very good understanding; clear evidence of in-depth reading and research.

25–30 Very good to excellent understanding; clear evidence of extensive and in-depth reading and research.

Considering that the set word limit is only 240 to 270 words, how can a student provide clear evidence of extensive reading and research? And what is meant by ‘extensive’, anyway?

3. General issues undermining reliability of essay-rater assessment

Research shows that there are issues which compound the problems already highlighted above. This issues have to do with findings as to the way essay raters go about grading essays, which have the potential to affect the objectivity of the assessment process.

3.1 The pre-scoring stage

It appears that during the reading of an essay, which the raters usually do in the pre-scoring stage, the raters are already forming a judgment which does not necessarily refer to the categories in the assessment rubrics. Although they do usually attempt to make their judgment fit the categories when awarding the marks it is difficult to dispel the positive or negative effect on the objectivity of the grading that that initial bias brings to bear on the assessment.

3.2 Idiosyncratic focus on specific categories

Some raters seem to focus on specific categories more than others. The type of category they focus can vary greatly from rater to rater. One rater, for instance, will focus on grammar, whilst another will concentrate on lexical choice or spelling. This is important, as the extent to which a rater focuses his attention onto grammar, for instance, may bias him/her negatively, in the case of an essay with quite a few grammatical mistakes but great content,towards that essay and lead him/her to be ‘harsher’, even when s/he tries to apply the assessment rubrics objectively.

3.3 Level of engagement with the rubrics during the assessment

Research also shows that some raters engage meticulously in the reading of the rubrics so as to apply them as accurately as possible, whereas others give them a much more superficial read and apply their own impressions. In the light of the first section of this article, an assessor ought to be as meticulous as possible in ensuring they apply the descriptors correctly, even when s/he is experienced in the use of the rubrics. How can one be sure that the rater assessing our students’ essays belong to the conscientious and meticulous sort rather than the more superficial kind?

Implications for A Level examination boards

The above issues highlight the importance of implementing measures to control for the threats to the reliability of the essay assessment process. Two measures can be undertaken:

(1) As already suggested above, the wording of the rubrics may be changed, in order to disambiguate the meaning of certain statements/criteria in the rubrics. As McNamara (1996, p.118) points out, “the refinement of descriptors and training workshops are vital to rating consistency”.

(2) Examination boards should train their examiners more frequently than they currently do in the use of assessment rubrics;

(3) Most importantly, Examination Boards should implement multiple-marking procedures whereby each essay is graded by two or more raters, who will, in the event of serious grading discrepancies – and of low inter-rater reliability – engage in a discussion to address the issues which cause them to disagree. As Wu Siew Mei in a brilliant study I could not locate the date of but found at http://www.nus.edu.sg/celc/research/books/relt/vol9/no2/069to104_wu.pdf  states,

“it is […] a good strategy to do multiple ratings where each script is rated by more than one rater and where there is a clear procedure for reconciliation of varied scores. However, such strategies are again limited by manpower availability and time constraints.”

Currently, (3) does not happen. This is a serious flaw in the current assessment procedures of UK examination boards in view of the subjectivity of the assessment scale descriptors they use and of other issues pointed out in the course of this article. Placing the onus of essay rating onto one marker only is unfair and unreliable. UK examination boards should act as soon as possible on this shortcoming, regardless of the extra costs, training and other issues which changing the current system would entail. After all, the grades our students obtain at A level can have huge repercussions on their university applications and their future in general. This consideration should come first.