Should we always be unconditionally open to change? What about “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?”

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

We live in an era in which, more than ever, ‘slogans’ dominate our lives. In the old days ‘Sloganism’ was mainly the language of adverts and politicians. Nowadays, courtesy of myriads of social networks and chatrooms, they are everywhere and are seriously affecting the very fabric of our thinking. ‘Sloganism’ – it is true – suits us in many ways, living as we do, in a very busy society with a short concentration span. However, on the other hand, they tend to ‘shrink’ and ‘trivialize’ thinking by aiming at quick, strong emotional responses rather than encouraging deeper thinking and analysis of an issue.

I don’t have a problem when slogans stay embedded in Tweets or Facebook posts or pinned to a virtual board. I have a problem, however, when people, especially those with some degree of decisional power, start adopting these slogans because they sound intuitively correct or arouse strong positive emotions or seem to have some sort of demagogic impact on the masses.

One such slogan which is very recurrent is ‘you must be open to change’. No-one could agree more than me on the value of openness to change. But, and this is what I mean by the thought-shrinking power of sloganism, one must be open to change occurring at the right time, in the right context and, most importantly, for a very good reason.

The old saying ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ is very topical, here. In foreign language learning we have seen many educational fads come and go and; let us be honest, how many of them have actually improved teaching and learning?

Any transformational change of a thinking, organizational, technological and educational system or approach must be supported by a valid rationale which demonstrates its potential benefits to the stakeholders (in education: the course administrators, teachers, students, their parents, etc.).

In education, the issue is complicated by ethical concerns that any proponents of significant changes must have in mind: the potential negative consequences of changing what is currently working well with something which may work less well. Hence, the ethical imperative is to ensure that any initiative one wants to implement has a rationale solidly rooted in credible research and has been extensively piloted in similar educational settings operating in comparable socio-cultural contexts. If an approach has worked well in a run-down comprehensive in the London, Paris or New York suburbs it doesn’t follow that it will work everywhere else in the world.

Please ‘note’ that by ‘credible research’ I mean research carried out by independent academics not affiliated to any government or corporation with a political/economic agenda; research that is based on valid and generalizable data.

A typical example of non-credible research which has affected many teachers around the world and has no significantly enhanced learning is the research on learning styles and multiple intelligences, carried out by Professor Gardener and his followers. No reputable academic apart from Gardener and his students has ever endorsed his theories and findings. However, every school in Britain and many others around the world adopted and still adopt his framework, and I still hear colleagues swear by the importance of taking into consideration our students’ learning styles in planning a lesson…

The advent of technology has further complicated the picture because of the revenue that technological devices can generate and the power that the corporations that manufacture computers, tablets and mobile phones hold. Nowadays, educational fads are determined by bigger players than politicians: multibillionaire businesses of the likes of Google, Apple and Samsung.

In order to thrive, such businesses MUST advocate significant changes in the way children learn EVERY subject, including foreign languages, which involve as much as possible the use of technology and as little as possible the input of the teacher. Does this mean that teachers will end up becoming redundant? In my opinion that will never be the case, as no computer or app will ever be able to provide a substitute for the affective input that a teacher brings to bear on learning and which is so crucial to it – especially in foreign language instruction.

As teachers, we have to learn to adapt and integrate what we know works best in foreign language learning and find ways to ensure that any new approach that governments or course administrators impose on us incorporate that. In the case of new technologies, we must learn to ‘know’ them as well as we can so that we can master them effectively and use them to serve us, rather than be dominated by them.

As one of my Twitter slogans go: “Technology can be very effective in the hands of effective teachers who can inspire and motivate and understand the true nature of learning.” Sadly, a lot of Modern Foreign Language teacher training courses do not lay much emphasis on making their trainees understand the true nature of learning. They usually provide them with teaching templates and then ‘throw them’ into schools where busy teachers need to show them the ropes and often help them to cope with rather than master the demands of teaching. In the absence of any solid knowledge of how languages are really learnt, it is difficult to dispute any imposed theory or technology in terms of its pedagogic value.

What can teachers, small cogs in a gigantic machine ruled by huge economic and political interests do? Not much, I am afraid. We could at least, though, instead of blindly embracing intuitively appealing educational fads and exciting technological advances, take a step back and being more discerning of what is really conducive to learning and what is not; to what is dictated by passion for learning and what is triggered by economic interest.

What makes our job great is its end goal: to be able to make the children in our care better individuals. We owe to this noble objective to try and be extremely reflective on and inquisitive about the promises made by any initiative or technology we embrace.

In conclusion, we must always keep our hearts and minds open to change. But change must have a very solid rationale behind it which demonstrates that its implementation has substantial benefits for all the parties most affected by it – especilly the students. Educators must be as conversant as possible with the way humans learn and consider that what can impact favorably students in a particular set of schools in one part of the world might not work in another. Finally, Twittering educators should keep using their catchy and impactful slogans (I certain will) as they are fun to read, – especially when they are at odds with the professional history and behavior of their authors.

Why do learners – in the same essay – sometimes make an error in the use of a specific target-language structure and sometimes they don’t?

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) L2 writing

Teenage girl (16-17) lying on bed, writing, close-up

This morning, whilst correcting Spanish essays written my year 8 students (12-13 year olds if you are not familiar with the British school system) one mistake attracted my attention : a girl had written – on the same line, but within different sentences – ‘llevé una camiseta’ (I wore a T-shirt) and ‘llevo una camiseta’ (I wear a T-shirt) to mean, in both cases, ‘I wear a T-shirt’.  When asked to self-correct, she noticed her mistake immediately and changed the ‘é’ in ‘llevé’ to ‘o’ (a sign that she had declarative knowledge of the first person of the Preterite and Present in Spanish).

But why would a student produce the present tense correctly in one sentence and not in another within the same essay? And how could my year 8 student get the verb right on the second instance when she had just got it wrong a few words before on the same line?

As I often do in my one-to-one corrective conferences, I asked the student in question why she thought she had made that mistake. She shrugged and said: “No idea, sir’. Maybe I was tired”. A plausible explanation considering that she had written a long essay and that the error occurred in last paragraph. But how can tiredness cause such mistakes?

The answer to this question relates to what applied linguists call Interlanguage Variability, a widely documented phenomenon that causes frustration to a lot of teachers but which is actually a developmental feature of L2 acquisition. What is Interlanguage variability? What causes it?

To fully understand this phenomenon, the reader will benefit from getting acquainted with two important concepts: Interlanguage and Spread of Activation. I will take for granted that the reader is familiar with the concept of Working Memory, already explained in some detail in a previous post (see below: “Why do our learners get prepositions, articles and verb and adjectival agreement wrong?”). Please note that in what follows I will focus only on the cause of variability which, in my view, are more relevant to teachers operating in explicit foreign language instruction settings and that I will not venture into sociolinguistic theories of the likes of Labov’s nor into nativist accounts of the phenomenon.

Interlanguage

Interlanguage is the name given by Selinker (1972) to the internal representation the L2-learner builds of the target language system in his/her Long Term Memory. How does s/he build it? Mainly through hypothesis-testing, often using his/her dominant language as a reference framework in an attempt to decode and make sense of the target foreign language. Since L2-acquisition occurs through trial and error, Interlanguage is not an exact system, but rather an approximation of the target language system one is acquiring.

It should be noted that the cognitive and affective feedback the learner receives from the target language speakers/knowers plays a pivotal role in the construction of the Interlanguage system, as it will ultimately determine which Interlanguage forms will be automatized and acquired. So, if a given Interlanguage form receives a lot of positive cognitive and affective feedback from the environment, it will eventually be internalized after the brain will have repeatedly been given reassurance that it is accurate.

What often happens, though, during the early stages of L2 acquisition, is that learners do not always receive consistently negative/positive cognitive or affective feedback on their errors; and even when they do receive it, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will internalize it. This happens for a number of reasons to do with the corrective approach used in the classroom (e.g. selective or no correction); its quality (e.g. ambiguous feedback); strong interference from their first language which makes the Interlanguage structure more resistant to correction; etc.

Moreover, when students engage in unmonitored L2-production (in or outside the classroom), as happens in the course of unstructured communicative activities, their output is likely to contain more errors.

Although errors made at this stage are not automatized immediately, they will not be discarded by the brain straight away either, especially when they are repeated several times – and errors due to L1 transfer are likely to occur quite frequently at the early stages of L2 learning.  Hence, it is very common for the Interlanguage of an L2 learner to ‘contain’ more than one representation of a given target language structure: the correct one and one or more incorrect ones. Example: ‘I went’ in French is ‘je suis allé’, however, L2 students often say ‘j’ai allé’ at the early stages of French acquisition because they overgeneralize the dominant way of forming the Perfect Indicative in French. These two forms ‘j’ai allé’ and ‘je suis allé’ often coexist in L2 learners’ of French Interlanguage and compete with one another for retrieval. I will come back to this example. Now with this in mind let us look at the concept of ‘spread of activation’.

Spread of activation and Variability from processing inefficiency

When we are attending to a task, like forming the Perfect tense of ‘Aller’ in French, as in the above example, Working Memory will have to retrieve from Long-term Memory the correct match for ‘I went’ in French. As Working Memory attends to this tasks, every single bit of information (lexis, grammar, imagery)  related to the concept ‘I went’ stored in our Long Term Memory gets activated. ‘Electrical impulses’ run through semantic memory’s neural networks and the information or ‘nodes’ along the network get more or less activation based on the strength of their associations with the proposition we mean to ‘translate’ into French – the so-called ‘fan effect’. The items along the activated neural networks which will receive the greatest activation will be ‘‘j’ai allé’ and ‘je suis allé’ and, possibly, in my experience, ‘j’allé’. Which one of the three forms will be retrieved and used in the written/oral performance will depend on the ‘weight’ of each form (i.e. the strength of the memory trace) and on the context.

If the learner knows the correct French translation of ‘I went’ and Working Memory is not experiencing cognitive overload thereby having enough free space to monitor the output, even though s/he might have an initial moment of indecision due to the concurrent activation of the other two activated forms, s/he will be likely to apply the correct Interlanguage form. However, if his/her Working Memory is experiencing cognitive overload (processing inefficiency) due to a challenging task-in-hand, in the absence of close monitoring, any of the three forms may be retrieved (pretty much randomly) if their ‘weights’ are more or less equivalent. Hence the importance, at the early stages of learning, not to engage in overly unstructured oral or writing tasks.

Variability as caused by formulaic language

Variability can also be caused by formulaic-language learning that is to say the acquisition of unanalyzed chunks or set phrases memorized without really knowing what each constituent of the phrase actually means or how the grammar rules which ‘holds’ them together actually work. Thus, if a learner uses ‘je suis allé au cinema’ correctly in a written piece because s/he has learnt that sentence as an unanalyzed chunk, it will not mean that s/he masters the use of the Perfect Tense of verbs requiring the auxiliary ‘Etre’ in the Perfect Tense. Hence, when, a few lines below, in the same essay, s/he translates ‘I went’ incorrectly in a different context (e.g. I went to the park) we should not be particularly surprised by the occurrence of variability.

Variability as caused by learner strategies

Variability can also be caused by the learner’s attempt at testing a specific hypothesis they formulated about a given target language structure. Let us look at Muskaan’s hypothesis-testing strategy. Muskaan is a year 9 student of Spanish I teach who, today, told me that when she is not sure whether her assumptions about how to use a given structure are correct, tries them all out deliberately in order to get feedback from me as to which one is correct. In the essay we were marking together today, for instance, she had used a conditional and an imperfect form to translate two very similar sentences which should have required the imperfect. She wanted to tested the hypothesis that, just like in English you would use the conditional tense in sentences like “when I was young I would play the guitar in my free time’ one can do the same in Spanish. In Muskaan’s case, the retrieval of the two concurrent Interlanguage forms is not automatic / subconscious, but is triggered by a deliberate risk-taking strategy.

Risk-taking is another frequent cause of variability in our learners’ output and a phenomenon that must not be discouraged as it has great potential for learning.

In conclusion, Variability is a complete normal phenomenon that should not cause us too much frustration, even when it seem to be caused by our teaching. The most important implication of this phenomenon for the MFL classroom is that we need to be cognitively empathetic with our learners when we find this kind of mistakes and while addressing them through appropriate remedial learning, we must not stigmatize them. Secondly, teachers must give students enough time to monitor their output and encourage them to edit their written work carefully and in ways which lessen the cognitive load on their Working Memories (as the problem which triggered the error in production is likely to hinder its detection whilst proofreading). One such strategy is to have several runs through the same text, each one aimed at checking a particular type of item at a time (e.g. first time, adjectival agreement; second time, verb agreement; third time, omissions of copulas; fourth time ‘small function words’). Sentences that are particularly long and require complex processing should be dealt with by investing more time and focus.

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

download (6)

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 arguments are complex and require lengthier explanations. Let us look at the main issues undermining effective listening skills instruction

The issues

Chambers (1996), cited in Macaro (2003), provides an interesting list of the issues undermining the development of the skill of listening in the typical modern foreign language classroom (in England):

  1. Typically, classroom listening activities involve listening to a recorded extract in conjunction with an exercise – which is not the way we usually listen in real life;
  2. Correcting of the exercise is the final stage of the activity. There is rarely a logical link to the next classroom activity;
  3. Listening becomes a test of comprehension rather than a learning experience;
  4. Progression in listening follows the sequence found in the course-book which does not include important steps, especially the building up of listening strategies;
  5. Listening is not integrated with other skills or to other tasks such as role-play;
  6. Listeners are not encouraged by the teacher to use inferencing from localized information and prior knowledge;
  7. Lack of differentiation: the whole class is set to work at an identical speed, which generates anxiety in less confident learners
  8. The stop-start button is misused by the teacher interrupting the listening track. This denies the learners the opportunity to listen to enough text to be able to put it into some sort of global context (by using top-down processing skills)

Another issue that undermines the effectiveness of listening skills instruction relates to the top-down processing vs bottom-up processing dichotomy. Until recently (the late 90s) most cognitive accounts of L2 listening comprehension posited that we understand aural input mainly through the use of our knowledge of the world (or ‘schemata’ as they are called in psychology). Thus, if we are listening to a text about a house, we apply our knowledge of what a house looks like and what usually happens in a house. By matching our expectations with key words we grasp here and there, we can infer the gist of the text.

More recent research, however, especially Ross (1997), Tsui and Fullilove (1998) and Wu,Y. (1998) have found that bottom-up processing, that is the understanding of the lexis and grammar/syntax of a text is as – if not more – important. This finding is crucial to the effectiveness of any sound listening-skills instruction approach, since – unless we stage listening activities simply as comprehension tests – it implies that listening activities should be preceded by a pre-listening phase in which the students have the opportunities to be acquainted with at least some of the vocabulary and grammar structures present in the to-be-listened-to text in order to ease up learner cognitive load and facilitate comprehension.

The issue of cognitive load in listening comprehension tasks refers to another serious pitfall of listening skill instruction, especially vis-à-vis the materials available in books and specialized websites: the fact that the progression of the listening activities employed on most courses is less mindful of the cognitive challenges they pose to the learner than of the (usually fairly vague) evaluative criteria set by the Ministry of Education of a country (e.g. the English national curriculum) or by examination boards.

One cognitive challenge which is usually ignored by course-book authors/publishers is speed of delivery. Speed of delivery should start from relatively slow at the beginning of a unit, when the target lexis and grammatical / syntactic structures have not been automatized (thereby enhancing cognitive load on Working Memory) to near-native speed at much later stages. However, not to sacrifice the feel of authenticity that many teacher wants to find in the listening extracts, I guess, this never happens and progression occurs along other dimensions of cognitive challenge, mostly lexical and syntactic complexity and length. This is a serious shortcoming, as both in first and second language acquisition contexts, caregivers/teachers talk to children/students at a slower pace and with greater clarity than they would to L1/L2 expert speakers.

Brown (1995) identified other challenging features of listening texts which increase the listener’s cognitive load, which, in my view, all authors of published courses should heed when planning for progression:

  1. How many individuals (participant in discourse) and objects are involved; the fewer the easier;
  2. How clearly distinct the individuals or objects are from one another;
  3. How simple the spatial relations are in the text (for example when listening to directions);
  4. Whether the chronological order of the telling matched the sequence of events in the text;
  5. Whether inferencing is necessaryto relate each sentence to the preceding text; the less inferencing the easier;
  6. How self-consistent is the new information with itself and with the information the listener already has.

Moreover, teachers need to consider two important factors when staging listening comprehension activities which, according to Rubin (1994) will affect students’ performance. One is the fact that tasks requiring the deployment of a different skill or make demands on the listener’s memory pose added challenges to our learners. Let us not forget that the learner-listener has to hold in his working memory the information s/he needs to complete the listening comprehension task whilst noting down the answers and simultaneously attend to the ongoing text – an impossible task for many beginner or less able learners. The second factor noted by Rubin was the fact that apprehension/anxiety correlates significantly to lower performance in listening comprehension. These two factors, in my experience are often not heeded by some language instructors.

Another important issue that often undermines successful listening skills instruction is the range of listening tasks students are usually involved in which is usually fairly narrow. As already discussed above, students are usually involved in closed-questions listening comprehension tasks (e.g. true or false). This lack of variety may affect students’ motivation to engage in listening activities in the classroom and at home. As I will explain in the second part of this article, there is more to listening activities than the test-like approach to aural comprehension found in most textbooks.

And how about videos? Videos are very beneficial in helping learner to access text. One problem, though, which often undermines their impact on listening proficiency; often, the visual support may lead to undermining the need to actually listen. What they see – especially in videos aimed at beginners – often cues them so patently as to what the actors are saying, that the learners are not really processing languages to grasp meaning, but images.

Last, but not least, many of us – including myself, in recent years – do not involve students as often as we should in (cognitive and metacognitive) listening strategies instruction aimed at enhancing their performance in listening tasks. Researchers (e.g Bacon,1992) have identified a vast array of strategies learners can deploy prior to listening and while listening, which appear to be conducive to enhanced comprehension skills.

In conclusion, I have outlined a number of issues that undermine listening skills instruction in the typical secondary school classroom (at least in British educational settings). The second part of this article will concern itself with the possible approach L2 educators may want to take in order to address such issues effectively in their teaching settings.

Why asking our students to self-correct the errors in their essays is a waste of time…

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

images (2)

In this very concise article I will argue that involving our learners in Indirect Error Correction on its own is an absolute waste of valuable teacher and learner time. By Indirect Error Correction (henceforth IEC), I mean highlighting or underlining the errors in our students’ written pieces (with or without error coding), pass the essay back to our students who will make the corrections and pass it back to us for any necessary amendments to be made. In addition, some of us will ask the students to rewrite the whole essay incorporating the corrections.

It sounds like a very time-consuming activity!

The pedagogic rationale behind this approach seems pretty clear: the students get cognitively involved in the correction process. They are not just the passive recipients of the teacher’s correction but they are actually doing something about it. Moreover, by working on their mistakes they will become more aware of their problems and in the long term they will stop making them.

Unfortunately, in actual fact, the learning our students get out of this corrective technique in terms of language acquisition and error reduction do not justify the above effort at all. Several studies, (e.g. Semke, 1984; Robb, Ross and Shortreed, 1986; Ashwell, 2000; Chandler, 2003) have shown that it is not significantly more effective than direct correction or even than no correction at all. Why?

The first reason why it does not significantly enhance acquisition, relates to the distinction between Errors (mistakes due to lack of declarative knowledge) and Mistakes ( inaccuracies due to processing inefficiency, i.e. Working Memory’s failure to cope with the demands of the task – see previous blog post “why our learners make mistakes with preposition, articles….”). Errors (lack of declarative knowledge) are caused by not knowing the rule which governs the language item we got wrong. So, for instance, if I write ‘Ayer voy al cine’ (intended meaning: yesterday I went to the cinema) because I do not know the Preterite in Spanish, I used the present ‘voy’ simply because I do not master (declaratively) the Preterite tense – as my teacher has not taught it to me yet, for instance. However, there might be another reason: I know the preterite tense, but because my brain (my Working Memory) was busy simultaneously trying ‘to sort out’ vocabulary choice, word order, agreement as well planning the content, I chose the wrong tense – but if someone asks me to translate ‘I went’ into Spanish, in isolation, I can do it correctly.

As it is clear, if the teacher highlights the mistake in the first scenario (i.e. the learner does not know the rule) the student will not be able to correct it – unless prompted to find out about the Preterite by the instructor. In the second scenario, the learner might be able to. What am I getting at is that, unless the teacher goes through the essay thoroughly with the students, s/he will never find out what the real reason for the mistake is, which may lead to underlining a mistake the learner will never be able to correct.

Another important implication of the dichotomy Errors vs Mistakes for the ineffectiveness of IEC refers to the surrender value of this corrective practice. If the student has the knowledge to correct the errors pointed out by teacher, s/he is not really learning anything new, right? Someone might argue that s/he will learn not to make that error again, that s/he will pay more attention in the future. Chances are s/he will not because, as it is obvious, self-correcting when you are cued to a mistake is totally different to self-correcting whilst you are proofreading without anyone telling you ‘hey there is a mistake right there’. Especially for beginners whose Working Memory, when they are proof-reading, is loaded with so much information to attend to, that they will not have enough cognitive space to spot every single mistake they made. Especially if under pressure.

In my research, Conti (2001, 2004) I found that students’ ability to self-correct effectively when they are told that a given sentence contains errors, is very low. In my experiments they managed to get less than 30 % right. However, when cued to the word where the errors was, they managed to self-correct more than double that.

To make things worse, past studies have found out that IEC can have a negative impact on students’ motivation in that it causes learner’s anxiety and frustration. Imagine being a weak learner and being given your essay back with lots of errors to self-correct and not having the slightest clue of how to correct half of them…

Another issue with IEC that I identified during my study as well as in my teaching practice refers to what I call the ‘if not X then Y’ correction strategy. This refers to a common scenario where, when cued to the presence of an error the students can self-correct NOT because s/he knows or understand the rule or the context that caused the mistake, but rather because there is only ONE possible change that can be made. Example: If a student writes ‘la chien’ (‘dog’ in French) and the teacher underlines the definite article ‘la’ because the noun ‘chien’ is masculine and should therefore be preceded by the masculine definite article ‘le’, the student will correct because there is no other option, not because he has an internalized mastery of that context. Nor can we assume that by self-correcting this way he will never make the same mistake again, as, in the absence of follow-up (recycling of that information) and depth of processing, this information is likely to be lost after a few hours.

On the other hand, if IEC is only the prelude, the first step in a more complex and, most importantly, long-term approach like the one of Lalande’s (1982) study, the impact of the corrective process can be more beneficial. Lalande (1982) compared the effects of two different types of feedback on the writing of FL German learners: Direct and Indirect error correction. Upon reception of the marked essays the learners were asked to correct their mistakes and re-write the entire essay. For the experimental group, this involved interpreting the codes. As the course progressed, the experimental group learners monitored the frequency and recurrence of error types by referring to Error Awareness Sheets (error charts in which students logged their mistakes). Lalande found that “the combination of error awareness and problem solving techniques had a significant beneficial effect on the development of writing skills” and “effectively prevented students from making more grammatical and orthographic errors.” (Lalande, 1982: 78).

The simple addition to the traditional IEC approach of the extra steps of having to interpret the code and log errors in the Error Awareness Sheets makes the process more valuable from a learning point of view, in that it enhances the learners’ metacognition (self-knowledge) and, consistently keeping a log of their errors causes them to be more sensitized to the issue of accuracy and, possibly, more motivated to eradicate those errors in order to see their error-chart stop growing. In my view, though, even Lalande’s approach is way too laborious and time-consuming for the result obtained.

In conclusion, teachers should not waste so much valuable time – that could be devoted to planning or teaching or to more fruitful feedback activities – on Indirect Error Correction.

Please note that I am not advocatinng doing away with error correction altogether. Not at all – I do believe negative feedback can indeed be useful. I do believe, however, that traditional forms of corrective intervention such as Direct and Indirect Error Correction are too consuming for the very modest results they yield in terms of enhanced proficiency and acquisition.

If you would like to find out more on Error Correction research and what I believe to be the best way forward, read my blog post : “Why teachers should not bother correcting errors in their students’ writing (not the traditional way at least)”

Why do our learners often get prepositions, articles and verb endings wrong?

Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) L2 writing

images

This article was prompted by a question (the one in the title) a colleague asked me recently at finding lots of mistakes in their students’ essays relating not solely to prepositions, but also to definite/indefinite articles, copulas (e.g. is and are) and other function words. The answer to that question is relatively simple, but in order for the reader to fully grasp its implications for classroom instruction, one has to first get acquainted with the concept of Working Memory and Executive Control.

Working Memory

To put it as simply as possible – since one of my colleagues keeps complaining about the complex jargon in my blogposts – Working Memory is the space activated in our brain when we process information, what in the old days was called Short-Term memory. Working Memory is a ‘buffer’ between the outside world and Long-Term memory which ‘holds’ any information we are trying to decode and retrieves the information we need from Long-term memory which we need to carry out the task-in-hand (e.g. writing a sentence or understanding a text). So, for example, when we are writing a sentence in a foreign language, Working Memory is the ‘place’ along our neural network in which we actually construct that sentence (i.e. where we choose the words we need from our mental lexicon, arrange them together in a grammatically correct sequence, make sure the spelling is correct and edit the final product).

Working memory has very limited channel capacity, in other words can only store a limited number of images, words and numbers at any one time and unless we keep rehearsing it, the information will be lost easily after a few seconds only (a word stays in our brain only 2-3 seconds unless we make a conscious effort to retain in through rehearsal). That is why, in order to keep a phone number in our head as we frantically try to key it in our phone we need to repeat it in our heads (or rehearse it) a few times. Miller’s (1965) magic number 7+/- 2 indicates the number of digits we can hold in our Working Memory at any one time – a very short number indeed.

The challenges posed by foreign language writing

Writing in a foreign language is much harder than a lot of us may think, especially under communicative pressure. Let us have a closer look at how a sentence is produced in writing. First of all, it is important to point out that the starting point, both in the first and the second language is a Proposition, in other words a representation in our brain (in Semantic Memory to be precise) of the concept or idea we are trying to convey. A Proposition, unlike what we may intuitively think, is not made up of words, thus, the brain has to translate into words, whether we are operating in the first language or second language.

According to Cognitive research (e.g. Cooper and Matsuhashi, 1983), the Translation process consists of four stages: Wording, Presenting, Storing and Transcribing. In the first stage, the brain transforms the Propositions into words (lexis). Although at this stage the pre-lexical decisions the writer made at earlier stages and the preceding discourse limit lexical choice, Wording the proposition is still a complex task: ‘the choice seems infinite, especially when we begin considering all the possibilities for modifying or qualifying the main verb and affected nouns’ (Cooper and Matsuhashi, 1983: 32).

Once s/he has selected the lexical items needed, the writer has to tackle the task of Presenting the proposition in standard written language. This involves making a series of decisions in the areas of genre and grammar. In the area of grammar, Agreement and Tense will be the main issues, especially in languages like French, or German where a lot of permutations are required.

The proposition, as planned so far, is then temporarily stored in Working Memory while Transcribing takes place. Propositions longer than just a few words will have to be rehearsed and re-rehearsed in Working Memory for parts of it not to be lost before the transcription is complete.

The limitations of Working Memory create serious disadvantages for unskilled writers. Until they gain some confidence and fluency with spelling, their Working Memory may have to be loaded up with letter sequences of single words or with only 2 or 3 words (Hotopf, 1980). This not only slows down the writing process, but it also means that all other planning must be suspended during the transcriptions of short letter or word sequences.

The physical act of Transcribing the fully formed proposition begins once the graphic image of the output (what the sentence physically looks like) has been stored in Working Memory.

In L1-writing the decisions taken at any of the four stages outlined above are taken automatically, thereby occupying little or no space at all in Working Memory. However, in L2-writing, especially in beginner to intermediate writer, every decision will take a lot of Working Memory space, making the process slow, cumbersome and difficult to monitor because the process happens mostly consciously.

Hence, the adaptive response of the brain, especially in beginner writers, is to prioritize the most important features of each proposition (the principle of ‘Saliency first’ being at play here), i.e. : the items that are most important in terms of conveying the intended meaning. The most semantically salient elements will include mainly: Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives. Function words, which carry considerably less meaning, will be relatively neglected by Working Memory’s attentional systems as, let’s face it, even if the writer gets them wrong, they won’t impede comprehension massively (example: whether I say, in French “Je vais au cinema’ or ‘je vais à la cinema’ I will be readily understood by a reader/listener).

This phenomenon is exacerbated by linguistic distance between the first language and the target foreign language. For instance gender (masculine and feminine) as well as verb endings are not likely to be perceived as salient by an English native speaker (as they do not exist in their language), which means that they are likely to be less monitored.

The less proficient the foreign language writer is and the less time he has to monitor his/her output, the more likely he/she will be to make mistakes with function words. Hence, errors are bound to be even more frequent in oral performance, where the self-monitoring capacity of Working Memory is drastically reduced compared to the written medium.

As the learner becomes more proficient, his/her ability to juggle the demands posed to his/her Working Memory by the processes outlined above will increase. This is due to the fact that with a lot of writing practice in the target foreign language a lot of sub-processes become automatized and require only peripheral attention, freeing up Working Memory space. This enhanced processing efficiency will also allow for more accuracy, too, in the production of less salient features unless Error Fossilization throws the spanner in the works.

The danger of fossilization

When errors go unmonitored a bit too often, they become automatized and it is very difficult to ‘unlearn’ or eradicate. Mukkatesh (1986) found that despite many remedial interventions such errors cannot be eliminate at all from L2 learners’ Interlanguage. This phenomenon, called by Selinker (1972) Fossilization, is obvious in a lot of foreign language speakers, especially when it comes to pronunciation; that is why, according to Selinker, only 5 % of foreign language speakers can be said to sound 100% native-like. Their second language will always contain some fossilized item. A very good friend of mine, for instance, speaks perfect English, with accurate pronunciation and grammar and an impressive lexical repertoire wider to that of an average native speaker; however, he cannot help voicing the ‘p’ in the word ‘psychology’ (influence of his first language: Italian), despite many corrections. Such is the power of Fossilization.

Function words and any other less salient L2 features (e.g. gender, plural and verb endings and minor pronunciation inaccuracies) are particularly amenable to fossilization as they are more likely to go unmonitored and uncorrected. Therefore, the danger is that when learners do not get enough negative (cognitive) feedback at the early stages of L2 acquisition, they are likely to fossilize mistakes with the above L2 structures and to keep making these mistakes all the way to A-Level and university – as I have often witnessed in my university lecturer days.

Communicative language teaching, especially in its strong version, by prioritizing fluency over accuracy, often leads to fossilization (and pidginization) especially when the students are asked to perform in unstructured oral practice, at a level of proficiency they are not developmentally ready for and under communicative pressure. (Skehan, 1994)

Implications for MFL teaching

 

The implications for the MFL classroom are manifold but hinge mainly on the teacher’s pedagogy and on the course end-goals. If we are teaching GCSE level students and we are happy for them to make a few minor mistakes as far as they can convey their intended meaning effectively, we should not worry too much about error and we can exercise a relatively high degree of tolerance. However, if we are dealing with individuals who want to make language their career and become one day interpreters, translators or teachers, then the attitude has to be less lax and mistakes with articles, prepositions, copulas and gender agreement WILL matter.

If we do want to address this issue radically, we need to keep students focused on the importance of accuracy from the very early stages of language acquisition whilst keeping the main focus of our teaching on the development of fluency. This is not easy, even for experienced teachers. Editing instruction – through games, quiz and other fun activities – should become part of almost every lesson (through snappy starters or plenaries, for example) to remind students of the importance of accuracy and to raise their awareness of which mistakes are more likely to occur at their current level of proficiency.

More importantly, the written tasks we involve are students in must pitched to the correct level, especially in terms of the cognitive challenges they pose to an inexperienced writer. If we do not, we are likely to engender more error than we and the students can effectively deal with in the remedial phase. Fluency, as I said above, has priority, it is true; however, fluent output that is rife with errors can be stigmatizing and irritating for the reader/interlocutor and we need to be aware of that in a global era in which, more than ever before, our learners are more likely to use the target language in the workplace.

Finally, Error correction – or rather Error remediation – can also play an important role if it engages the learners in a sustained long-term self-monitoring process initially moderated by the teacher which aims at focusing them on their most frequent mistakes.

How to lessen the negative interference of our learners’ mother tongue on their target language pronunciation

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

speechorgans

This article suggests teaching strategies based on sensory-motor research findings on bilingual speech aimed at reducing the impact of negative first language transfer on L2 target language speech. I will start by examining the process involved in language transfer and its consequence on the acquisition of L2 pronunciation in light of the latest recent research evidence. I shall then proceed to discuss the implications for the foreign language classroom.

Language Transfer

As we all know, our first language (or any other language we know for that matter) can cause interference in the process of acquiring a new one. We refer to this phenomenon as language transfer. Language transfer can be positive (i.e. facilitating learning or performance) or negative (i.e. impeding learning or performance) depending on the similarity/distance between the pre-existing language and the new language one is learning.

For instance, an English native speaker will experience negative transfer when it comes to pronouncing ‘P’ in Spanish ( negative transfer), because in this language the ‘p’ sound is a non-aspirated labial sound with a short onset time, whereas in English it is an aspirated sound with a relatively long onset time. On the other hand, a native speaker of Italian will have no problem with that sound as in his/her language it is pronounced in exactly the same way as it is in Spanish (positive transfer)

The main cognitive cause of Language Transfer is that when we learn a new language our brain uses our default language(s) – more than often our first language – as the starting point for the hypotheses we formulate to make sense of that language and/or as a communicative strategy to fill in any communicative gaps. In the specifics of foreign language pronunciation L2-learners transfer refers to the L2-learners’ application of their L1-phonological categories to decode and represent the foreign language sound system. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact that their motor commands (their control over larynx, phrarynx and articulators) have been conditioned by years and years of first language pronunciation. Hence, especially at the early stages, the ‘phonological distance’ (differences in pronunciation) between two languages will play a very important role in determining the accuracy of L2- learner pronunciation.

Negative transfer is more likely to cause error at pronunciation level, when speech occurs in contexts that are difficult to monitor or which require a greater mastery of motor skills. So, for instance, a beginner foreign language learner talking spontaneously in the context of uncontrolled communicative practice will have less time to monitor pronunciation because his/her Working Memory is focused on higher metacomponents such as meaning and grammar; in this kind of context, the target language sounds that s/he finds problematic will be seriously affected by the lack of monitoring. On the other hand, the pronunciation of those problematic sounds is usually much more accurate when they are uttered in isolation, as discrete items – just like a toddler’s blabbing – due to the absence of articulatory interference from the preceding and following sounds in the word/surrounding words and ease of monitoring.

Another way in which L1-transfer affects pronunciation pertains to the fact that skilled L1-readers are very familiar with the written form of their native language, and automatically decode every grapheme (i.e. letter or cluster of letters) they read by producing a phonological representation of the sound (Snow,2002). This means that, when a learner reads a foreign language word its Working Memory will automatically match that sound with a first language phonological representation (i.e. will pronounce it the first language way). Thus, even if that learner reads a given word aloud following the teacher’s rendition of it, the L1 phonological representation of that word in the learner’s Working Memory will cause interference, with negative consequences for learning.

Another less recent finding (Neufeld, 1979) suggests that second language learners’ pronunciation might benefit from a mute period – a period of intense auditory exposure to L2 before attempting to produce the sounds. In Neufeld (1979) students were trained on pronunciation of sounds from Inuktitut, a language to which they had not been exposed previously. The learning process involved intensive listening to the language, with no attempt at producing the sounds. They were later instructed to produce the sounds and their attempts were rated as being mostly native-like. Neufeld claimed that the silent period at the beginning helped the students to accurately produce the language later. Removing students’ own attempts allowed perception to remain more plastic, such that the L2 acoustic template is heard accurately before erroneous phonetic utterances in L2 become fossilised. Producing the sound too early, and therefore incorrectly, would have influenced this acoustic template and thus hindered their production.

A mute period may prove beneficial in enabling the learner to hear (and thus produce) subtly different phonetic features, new phoneme distinctions and unfamiliar sequences of stress patterns. One possibility is that an artificially induced mute period may protect the learner from using first language phonological categories to represent the L2 system, thus enabling higher levels of production performance and avoiding L1 transfer or interference.

The threats posed by L1- language transfer to the correct uptake of  L2- pronunciation at the earlier stages of language acquisition are worrying only if we are aiming at 100 % accuracy due to the risk of fossilization, a phenomenon which, as explained in a previous post refers to the automatisation – often impervious to correction – of L2 learner errors. In most L2- classroom settings, unless we are training future international spies, we will be mostly aiming at clear and intelligible pronunciation with the majority of our learners and near-native accent only with a few talented ones.

How can we reduce the negative impact of L2-transfer on pronunciation?

Firstly, in order to avoid interference from a grapheme’s L1 phonological encoding (see the point made five paragraphs ago) on first introducing a new word it would be preferable not to expose the learners to its written form – this would avoid automated representation of the native phonological representation in Working Memory. In other words, it is better to present it orally, first in association with an image and, after some listening practice, to show it in its written form.

Secondly, L2 learners should be exposed to as much listening as possible in the context of a mute period before engaging in oral activities. Realistically speaking, in a typical state school classroom setting the pre-communicative mute period cannot be that long; but the most important lesson to be learnt from Neufeld’s (1979) research is that students should not be thrown into unstructured communicative practice straight away after presenting the target lexical items. The listening activities the students should be engaged in during this mute period should not only include test-like listening comprehension activities in the traditional sense: e.g. question and answer or true or false which focus solely on meaning. They should also include bottom-up processing activities that focus students on pronunciation and intonation, which involve matching words to sounds,  such as jigsaw listening, gap-fills with options to choose from or , at the basic level, circling a word or phrase from a choice of three or four options.

Thirdly, the observation that students seem to perform challenging L2 phonemes (sounds) more effectively when pronounced in isolation would seem to suggest – according to Simmonds, Wise and Leech (2011) that a babbling phase in which students imitate the target speech sounds in isolation might also improve non-native pronunciation. This can be done at the beginning of a lesson as a warm-up activity – I have done it quite often and it can be fun, depending on how you pitch it to the student and how you conduct it. Or, it can be set a homework activity to be carried out at home for a few minutes, recorded and sent to the teacher for feedback (were the  target sounds performed correctly? What could be done to improve them, etc.)

Finally, students need lots of practice in the context of structured and unstructured communicative activities. Such activities should, in my view, be staged after:

(a) effective modelling of the correct pronunciation;

(b) the mute listening period discussed above;

(c) extensive vocabulary practice through plenty of deep processing learning activities (e.g. the work-outs found on www.language-gym.com);

(d) Structured oral activities (e.g. find someone who; structured surveys; role-plays with prompts; timed oral translations) preceded by sufficient preparation time

(e) Less structured oral activities (at a later stage) in which students, through interviews, simulations, improvised role-plays, etc. converse freely about the topic-in-hand.

Traditional pronunciation drills (audiolingual style), minimal pairs and tongue-twisters or any other activities focusing students on pronunciation can be thrown in at the pre-communicative stage, provided that they maintain students motivation high and the students understand and accept the rationale behind them.

In conclusion, it is up to teachers to decide – with the course requirement they teach on as well as the interest of the stakeholders in mind, of course – how much emphasis they should put on accuracy. What research shows is that plunging students into unstructured oral communicative practice straight away is not beneficial to the development of accurate pronunciation. The above strategies may not always be easy or practical to implement but are in my experience very effective in enhancing student grasp and execution of the target language pronunciation.

The fundamentals of L2 vocabulary teaching

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

This article aims to answer the following questions:

  • What does ‘learning a word’ actually mean? When can we be satisfied that a student has actually learnt a given vocabulary item?
  • How can we enhance our students’ recall of the target vocabulary? How can we ensure that they do not forget what we taught one, five, ten and twenty lessons ago?
  • How can we effectively embed vocabulary instruction in the teaching of morphology and syntax? How can one ensure that vocabulary learning does not take over and that the whole lesson is not simply about learning to recognize or, at best, recall lexical items in isolation,  but also about deploying them through a range of functional and notional contexts in ways which are communicatively effective as well as morphologically and synctactically accurate?

1. What do we mean by ‘learning a word’?

1.1 Levels of vocabulary acquisition

Learning a word or lexical phrase involves more than memorizing its spelling, pronunciation and denotative meaning if one aims to use that word or phrase effectively in the real world (e.g. when grappling with an online article, attempting to understand a native talking to you in the streets of Paris or when writing an application letter overseas). Acquiring an L1 or L2 lexical item, may it be a word or a lexical phrase, also involves someone’s ability to master the following:

  • its morphology (e.g. if it is a French or Italian adjective, how is it affected by the gender and number of the subject?)
  • its word class (e.g. being aware that a word is a noun rather than a verb)
  • its other (denotative) meanings – in the case of polysemic words (e.g. ‘macchina’ in Italian means ‘machine’ but also ‘car’)
  •  any connotative meaning that word may have  (e.g. in English, is ‘chicken ‘ being used to refer to an animal, or is it used metaphorically to describe a coward?)
  • its collocation(s) (e.g. when learning the French for ‘go horse-riding’ one must be aware of the fact that in French ‘horse-riding’ is preceded by the verb “Faire”, to do, rather than “Aller”, to go).
  • how the meaning of a lexical item changes when in it is used in combination with other words (e.g as part of an idiomatic phrase)
  • its register, that is, knowing in which contexts it is appropriate or inappropriate to use a given word
  • any cultural ‘value added’ (e.g. knowing that a ‘cow’ in India is considered a sacred animal)

Hence, the practice of teaching words, as discrete items, divorced from any communicative and cultural context is not only limited but often flawed and misleading. This is less the case with denotative words such as ‘chair’ or ‘football’ than with words which are polysemic and/or loaded with connotative meaning(s). In what follows I shall focus first on how to maximize the recall of the basic aspects of vocabulary acquisitions, that is the memorization of the denotative meaning of a lexical item and of its spelling and pronunciation. In the second section of this paper I will concentrate on how to deal with the higher order levels of lexical learning.

1.2 Recognition vs Recall

Vocabulary acquisition goes through two stages. The first stage of acquisition is when the learner can recognize the word through its audio and/or visual representation. The second stage, involves being able to recall the lexical item and reproduce it verbally, either in its oral or written form.

Implications for the MFL classroom: in planning a lesson and defining the outcomes, decide which vocabulary items you intend the students to store in their mental lexicon as receptive vocabulary and which ones you want them to use actively and with what degree of accuracy, in their speaking and writing.

1.3 Level of accuracy and processing efficiency

Accuracy and speed of retrieval are two other very important dimensions of vocabulary acquisition. The faster an individual can retrieve the correct desired L2 word from Long Term memory, the more fluent and effective s/he will be in communicating the intended meaning. A vocabulary item that is, so to speak, ‘fully’ acquired, will be retrieved by the learner without hesitation with little cost in terms of Working Memory processing efficiency across a wide range of contexts. Obviously, recalling an item in isolation at relative high speed and with good accuracy is easier than doing that whilst you are holding a conversation across various topics. For learners, novices especially, it can be a very tall order.

Implications for the MFL classroom: make sure you include in your lessons/units of work plenty of opportunities for student to practise words in as many contexts as possible.

2. The fundamentals of vocabulary teaching.

2.1 Recycling and reviewing

Figure 1, below illustrates very clearly why recycling is important. The human rate of forgetting is such, that we already lose around 25% of what we attempt to commit to memory 30 minutes after having rehearsed it in Working Memory (henceforth WM). Seven days later, if no regular reinforcement has occurred, we will have lost 80 % of it. One month later, we will have forgotten virtually everything. That is why distributed practice is important and constitutes a more powerful way to consolidate memory than massed practice (i.e. better four sessions of 15 minutes a week every other day, than two sessions of thirty minutes two days away from one another ).

Implications for the classroom: Well, first of all, one should ensure that the words within a given lesson are recycled over and over again with several mini-check points every now and then to verify uptake and identify problem areas. Secondly, the students must be given plenty of opportunities to practise those words at home. Thirdly, words should be methodically recycled not just within the same unit, but across units – although this seems pretty obvious, I have rarely seen this happen in any of the institutions I have worked at: whenever one has completed a unit of work, the items taught in that unit should constantly and systematically be revisited in the context of every single unit of work to come. For instance, if we have just covered ‘staying healthy’ and we are moving to the topic of ‘holidays’, we could recycle some of the health-related vocabulary just learnt by discussing whether the food at the hotel the students were staying at was healthy and why; how the hotel’s menu could be made healthier; how healthy the students were during the holiday and what they are planning to do to get back into shape after two or three weeks of reckless eating and drinking, etc.

2.2 Factors facilitating recall

According to research, an exceptionally able student needs to have processed a word 4 times to learn it at its most basic level, an average student, 14-15 times. However, although the Latins used to say ‘Repetita juvant’, “repetitions help”, it is not simply how many times one comes across or repeats out aloud a vocabulary item which seems to be crucial in enhancing its recall. The following factors play a very important role in determining how efficient end effective memorization will be.

1. Shallow vs Deep processing – The more complex the cognitive operations involved in the learning process, i.e. the deeper the processing, the stronger the memory trace will be. On the shallow-to deep processing continuum we find, at one extreme, repeating word-lists aloud – the most classical example of shallow rehearsal. On the other end of the spectrum we find  problem solving activities where the brain has to think laterally and creatively (e.g. creating a complex mnemonic). Examples of  problem-solving activities commonly found in textbooks are sorting/categorizing activities, odd man out, riddles, definition games, etc. (www.language-gym.com has a great variety of these).

Implications for the MFL classroom: the foreign language teacher should try as much as possible to involve students in forms of deeper processing in order to speed up the learning process. This means going beyond the textbook page, as very few MFL textbooks designed for the British curriculum, provide sufficient recycling for the words they aim to teach (that is why I created : http://www.language-gym.com )

2. Spread of associations – Human forgetting is often cue-dependent; that is to say, the words may be in our Long Term Memory (henceforth LTM), but we have lost the ‘access’ code so to speak to get to them.  Research has clearly shown that  the greater the number of associations/connections that we create at the physical (e.g. graphemic, phonemic, etc.), semantic and emotional level with pre-existing material in LTM, the greater the chances will be for the target item to be retrieved successfully and efficiently in the future. The explanation for this is that when WM (Working Memory) is trying to fish out the word we need from LTM, all the words related to it in meaning, spelling and sound, and word class become activated automatically, especially those that are closer in meaning and end and start with the same letters.

Implications for the MFL classroom: teachers should include as many opportunities in their lessons for new vocabulary to be linked to previously learnt one so as to create as many connections as possible. The more elaborate (deeper) the connections, the better. Point 3, below, mentions other forms of associations which widen the range of possible connections we can make.

3. Synergy of stimuli – empirical evidence has shown (e.g. Paivio, 1981) that using different stimuli synergistically to appeal to various senses simultaneously may enhance recall. This is why a lot of us have used or still use flashcards. But this explains also why videos, by combining sound, images and often the spelling of the target words are even more powerful. Getting the students to respond to a video introducing new language items by emulating the movements they see on the screen would enhance the power of the video a notch further.

Implications for the MFL classroom – (1) On presenting words with denotative meaning for the first time try to use a video combining sound, picture and written form of the word; (2) When a word appears challenging, get the students to create a mnemonic which combines as many stimuli as possible. For instance, for the Italian word ‘occhiali’ (= glasses), one could picture in their mind a big pair of OCCHI (=eyes) with ALI (=wings) flying towards a pair of glasses and choose a suitable background music. I have used this technique personally a few times and has always been very effective.

4. Distinctivenes – distinctiveness refers to whatever makes the encoding (learning) of a given item in LTM ‘stand out’, ‘special’, more ‘vivid’. The factors making an item distinctive could be purely accidental (e.g.the teacher fell from a chair whilst teaching that item); intrinsic to that item (e.g. the target L2 word sounds funny, or like a swear words in one’s native language); there are personal, emotional circumstances surrounding the learning of that item that make it stand out (the teacher showed a picture whilst teaching that item, which evoked personal memories or triggered some strong emotions in the learner).

Implications for the MFL classroom: teachers should try to make the presentation of more challenging words as memorable as possible and/or teach the students to make them so, as they try to learn hem independently, by associating them with (a) powerful images; (b) items or situations in their lives which stir strong emotions, (c) humorous anecdotes etc. The way we pronounce words as we model their pronunciation can make a huge difference in terms of their distinctiveness, too. It is not rare for students to complain about how dull the voice of their teacher or of the actor on the recording is – surely, dullness is the antonym of distinctiveness.

5. Personal/affective investment – this refers to the processing of the to-be-learnt item that taps into our affective world, our own personal experiences related to it and its relevance to our lives.

Implications for the MFL classroom: include activities which involve a degree of personal response. for instance, when teaching adjectives, ask them to use them to describe their best friend, favourite cousin, pets, etc.

6. Target-item learnability – One dimension of a word’s learnability refers to the intrinsic challenges posed by the word to Working Memory. A word is more difficult to process and therefore learn when it is hard to pronounce (Baddeley, 2005); when it is so similar to an L1 item as to cause ‘cross-association’; when it is long (this is due to the fact that WM efficiency is quite limited as it can only process between 5 and 9 digits at any one time -Miller’s magic number). Other threats to learnability may intervene when the target items are not seen by the learners as relevant to their interests/goals and when their meaning is fuzzy, unclear. Moreover, generally, abstract words which are more connotative in meaning, tend to be less easily learnt. The word class the item falls into will also affect its learnability; for instance function words (e.g. prepositions, indirect object pronouns, etc.) are going to be less easy to be recalled as they are less semantically salient. Finally, the extent to which the words taught in a lesson are semantically related will affect their intrinsic learnability. 

Implications for the MFL classroom: (1) when selecting which vocabulary items to teach, consider the threats to learnability posed by the the first language of the student and devise some strategy to enhance their learnability using the tips above; (2) when more than one word exist in the target language for an item, choose the one that is more learnable, especially if it is more frequent than the others anyway; (3) You may want to teach the learners to break up longer and/or more challenging words into chunks in order to make it easier and more efficient for the articulatory loop in WM to process the item; when possible, break the word up into chunks which resemble words in the students’ first or second language.

7. Focal attention on the target item – although this factor is the most important, I left it for last because is the most obvious of them all: for any effective learning to occur, the students must be focused on the target stimulus. All of the above will be meaningless if the students are distracted, as interference during rehearsal is the most lethal cause of forgetting. The most important fact to note is that any given information does not last in WM for longer than 15-30 seconds without rehearsal; if any disruption to attention occurs and no further rehearsal of that item takes place, forgetting by interference will occurr.

Implications for the MFL classroom: obvious, but not easy: make your teaching as motivating, engaging and stimulating as possible.
(to be continued)

Five things I do when I correct my students’ essays

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

download (1)

My Ph.D study,Conti (2004), (as cited in Macaro,2004 and 2005, Ko Yin Sun, 2009, Goonshooly, 2012, Barjesteh, 2014, Cohen and Macaro, 2014, etc.) has provided me with great insight into the strengths and limitations of error correction. The following is a very concise list of what I believe to be the most important strategies to deploy in the error treatment of surface level errors in foreign language writing.

0. Caveat

Please note, this is something teachers can afford to do when they have a relatively light timetable or with specific students who are particularly problematic and need a lot of attention. I wouldn’t recommend this approach with every single class and student of yours as it is very time-consuming. In language instructions the focus should be on teaching not on fixing.

1.Focus on the most important issues

No point in focusing on every single error you find in your students’ writing when you are giving individual feedback on their essays. There is only so much attention a student can invest in the remedial learning process. Select only a few errors (3 to 5) at a time using the following criteria

  1. Errors that can be treated – no point in focusing an absolute beginner learner on mistakes involving the use of the pluperfect … Only treat errors for which the learner is developmentally ready;
  2. Errors that seriously impact understanding – these errors are the most important to deal with as they mislead the reader;
  3. Errors that keep recurring and seem impervious to correction – these errors need a lot of attention because once an error is fossilized it is very difficult to eradicate. Since these errors require a lot of work, try and prioritize the ones which, in your professional judgement, are more important (e.g. the ones that mighty penalize a student in a forthcoming exam);
  4. Errors that the learner would like to eradicate – it is my belief, controversial amongst some colleagues, that the learner should have a say as to what they should address in their remedial learning process. The rationale for this is that since s/he is going to be main the agent in this process, the fact that s/he chooses which errors to target may enhance their intentionality to eradicate error.

Do not address, in individual feedback, errors that are common to most of the class, as they can be the focus of a series of remedial lessons for the class as a whole

2. Find out what the root causes of error REALLY are

One common mistake teachers make in the corrective process, is to give all errors the same blanket treatment (be it direct/indirect correction with or without explanation or editing instruction) as if they were all caused by the same cognitive process(es). A bit like some doctors do, by giving a broad spectrum antibiotic for any kind of infection.

Errors can be caused by either (a) a declarative knowledge failure (the learner does not know the rule) or (b) a Procedural knowledge failure (the learner does know the rule and can self-correct, but did not apply it correctly or forgot to apply it in a given context because of processing inefficiency issues – e.g. cognitive overload, interference, etc.). It is important to identify the correct source of error before dismissing it as a ‘careless’ mistakes. There is usually more to an error than meets the eye.

In my study I used a number of research tools to investigate my subjects’ errors and the best one was definitely asking the students to edit the essays they wrote under think-aloud protocol conditions (i.e. they verbalized their thoughts as they attempted to correct). The knowledge I gained from that process was crucial to the success of my error treatment experiment.

3.‘Make it personal’

In my opinion, like any other type of instruction, error correction is greatly enhanced by making it as personal as possible a process, especially when we are dealing with weaker and/or less confident learners. One-to-one conferences are the best way to start the never-ending dialogue between teacher and student that the corrective process should really become. Using the page or the audio track as an interface between the student and the teacher makes the process much more distant and impersonal; the human contact, on the other hand, especially in the presence of judiciously gauged motivational feedback can do wonders for student’s self-efficacy and intentionality.

Let us not forget that the teacher’s role in the success of any remedial learning is crucial just as it is in any other kind of instruction. I often use the analogy of the person who wants to lose/gain weight in the gym. If you look at the rates of people who carry on training after the first three-four sessions, those with a personal trainer/life coach are less likely to drop out by a whopping 50 %! Why? Because a lot of us need encouragement, reminders, praise and, sometimes, a good telling-off…

When embarking on the remediation process, the teacher needs to take on a role alike the one of a ‘personal trainer’ since, as I shall explain below, errors are not eradicated in one go, it may take months or in certain cases, when an error is fossilized, even years. S/he will have to remind, prod, encourage, push the learner to keep working on the target mistakes.

It goes without saying that like every personal trainer the corrector must be inspiring and empathetic both emotionally and cognitively with the correctee.

4.Ensure there is a serious and sustained cognitive investment on the learner’s part

Several studies including mine have identified lack of student cognitive/personal investment in the error treatment as a major determinant of the failure of corrective interventions. Student writers do not look at the teacher’s corrective feedback and when they do they are superficial and do not follow it up. Teachers often do the same. They do a one-off remedial lesson on finding masses of students making the same mistake, then they move on. What I learnt in the course of my investigation is that for error to be eradicated (as mentioned above) both teachers and students must work hard. The students must put a lot of effort in the process at many levels: research, self-study, writing practice, self-monitoring and introspection.

Scaffolding the feedback-handling process in order to involve the student actively in the process is crucial, in this respect. Feedback-handling activities that students may be asked to perform on receiving feedback include: explaining the teacher correction; hypothesizing why the mistakes was made; describing what the rule that was broken is; producing student-generated examples of that rule across various contexts; produce a mini-lesson to deliver to a group of peers,ect.).

In my study, all of my informants reported drawing great benefits from such activities as they enhanced their self-knowledge as to the mistakes they were more likely to make to a point that they reported looking for those mistakes without much thinking before handing in their written pieces.

Another ingenious way of involving the students in the corrective process is to ask the students to step in before the essay is even completed and the feedback given. How? By asking them to annotate on margin whilst writing the essay any doubt they may have about the deployment of a grammar structure or lexical item. I use this technique a lot and it pays great dividends. This technique, that I call LIFT (Learner Initiated Feedback Technique) is dealt with in greater detail in a dedicated post of mine on this blog (here: ‘L.I.F.T. – an effective writing-proficiency and metacognition enhancer’).

5.Provide extensive practice

Many interventionist studies which involved editing instruction have failed whilst others have succeeded in enhancing grammar and/or lexical accuracy based on their duration and intensity. As already hinted above, learners need extensive practice to eradicate the target errors. Why? Because in learners’ Interlanguage system the wrong and correct representations of a grammar rule that has not been fully or correctly learnt coexist and often have equal weight (or, when the wrong form is fossilized, this will have greater weight). This entails that when the brain needs to apply that specific grammar structure the correct and the incorrect representation will both compete for retrieval. Extensive practice (highly monitored at the beginning) is required for the correct representation of the rule to acquire greater weight until it has become so strong in terms of memory trace to win the retrieval ‘competition’.

The extensive practice envisaged should occur:

  1. across a wide range of semantic contexts;
  2. in syntactically simple sentences to start with, moving gradually to more complex and longer chunks of text;
  3. in highly monitored performances (such as non-timed essays/translations) to start with and at a later stage, in the context of less monitored ones (such as timed essays or oral conversation).

Teachers are very busy people and one cannot always do all of the above as well as they would like to. However, these strategies can make a serious difference, in my personal experience, when applied to error treatment consistently. I suggest, if one does not have the time to do all of the above with every single student one teaches, to implement these strategies at least with the most needy of our learners, or with the ones that currently, in you opinion, are not gaining much benefit from your corrective feedback.

I deal with the issue of correction much more extensively in a research-based article of mine (‘Why teachers should not bother correcting errors in their students’ writing (not the traditional way at least’) : 

More on this topic in the book I co-authored with Steve Smith : ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit’ available on http://www.amazon.co.uk and http://www.amazon.com. 

10369865_10153232628176744_6265467044143184835_n

Five common pitfalls of foreign language grammar instruction

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

Five common pitfalls of L2-grammar instruction

Most teachers nowadays agree that grammar instruction plays an important role in effective foreign language instruction. There are, however, a number of important factors that one has to take into consideration in the planning, delivery and evaluation of the effects of grammar instruction which are often overlooked, thereby undermining its efficacy. Such factors, which relate to both our epistemological assumptions about the nature of language learning and to neuroscience in general, can seriously undermine the effectiveness of our teaching as well as be important causes of daily teacher frustration. Here are five of the most common pitfalls of grammar instruction that I have witnessed in nearly three decades of MFL teaching.

Pitfall 1: too much focus on declarative knowledge 

A few years back I inherited from a colleague the ‘dream year 9 class’, a class that is, which included la crème de la crème of the students in my school. I was excited as I had taught some of these students before and I knew how keen and bright they were. On the first day of meeting them, one boy, Shaneel, told me ‘Sir, we have already learnt ALL of the (French) tenses!’. I was a bit skeptical but gave them the chance to show off their prodigious knowledge of the five tenses in question by asking them to translate sentences from English to French on mini-boards. The result was disastrous. ‘Wait, Sir’ this is not how we learnt it!’ protested Shaneel, we learnt them like this, and he recited to me  – fairly accurately – scores of verb conjugation tables much in the same way I had learnt Latin at Grammar School.

In other words, Shaneel had declarative knowledge of the Present, Perfect tense, etc. and all of the other grammar structures he had been taught, but was not able to transfer that knowledge to real life use (especially in the oral medium) across various semantic contexts. The reason? He had not been given enough opportunities in lessons, to acquire executive control over the target grammar structures across the following dimension of learning: (a) skills/modalities (L,R,S and W); (b) semantic areas; (c) communicative pressure.

The dichotomy Declarative/Procedural refers to the distinction between having intellectual knowledge about a target structure as opposed to the ability to apply the same knowledge subconsciously bypassing working memory’s attentional systems. According to many models of second language acquisition these two types of knowledge are completely separated, and several of them (see Stephen Krashen’s, for instance) posit that declarative knowledge can NEVER be converted into procedural knowledge. In other words, knowing a grammar rule, does not equate in the least with being able to use it spontaneously and automatically in unmonitored communication.

The obvious Implication for grammar instruction is that to assume that students have acquired a given structure based on their recall of grammar conjugation (by rote) or their effective executions of gap-fill activities is completely erroneous. The acquisition of a grammar structure takes a very long time and cuts across many dimension of morphology, syntax and meaning; hence, teachers should not feel as frustrated as in my experience often do at seeing structures that have been taught over and over again being deployed erroneously by their students in their oral or written output. It may simply mean that more extensive practice is required – not necessarily more intellectual knowledge.

In conclusion, online verb conjugation trainers (e.g. www.language-gym.com), Gap-fill exercises and all other activities aiming at enhancing morphological manipulation skills are useful but must be used in conjunction with translation and scores of real time communicative (oral and written) tasks.

Moreover, if we accept the notion advanced by most psycholinguists that intellectual knowledge about grammar (which is the one student obtain through correction and formative assessment) does not really impact acquisition, we will understand why error correction often has very little impact on our students’ mastery of the most complex structures (see the first article on this blog, below)

 

Pitfall 2: Developmental ‘unreadiness’

The Natural Order of Morpheme Acquisition Hypothesis is a theory based on a fairly large body of evidence which seems to indicate that humans acquire grammar in an order predetermined by nature. Although I do not espouse this theory of Language Acquisition, researchers working in this paradigm have gathered useful evidence indicating that there are some developmental constraints which limit our brain’s ability to learn the target language grammar structures. Such constraints are due to the challenges posed by such structures to the developing linguistic skills of the L1/L2 learner at given moments in time. To use an analogy: before teaching someone how to park, you would teach them how to start the engine, reverse, how to engage the clutch,etc. By the same token if grammar structure X requires the knowledge of grammar structure Y for its effective execution, one would have to be able to perform Y effectively before being able to learn X. The list below shows, for instance, the order of first language acquisition of English Morphemes in R. Brown (1973):

1 Present progressive (-ing)

2/3 in, on

4 Plural (-s)

5 Past irregular

6 Possessive (-’s)

7 Uncontractible copula (is, am, are)

8 Articles (a, the)

9 Past regular (-ed) 10 Third person singular (-s)

11 Third person irregular

12 Uncontractible auxiliary (is, am, are)

13 Contractible copula

14 Contractible auxiliary

Although I do not believe that the above order is necessarily correct and all of the evidence produced in its support valid, the Natural Order Hypothesis points to the importance of developmental readiness and has  one important implication for language learning: that without getting bogged down with which morpheme comes first or second or third, we need to sequence the order in which we teach grammatical structures  judiciously, based more on our cognitive empathy with the students and our experience of teaching equivalent groups of learners in the past rather than on the textbook or schemes of work provided by the Ministry of Education of Local authorities. Our presumptions of what constitutes an easy or challenging grammar structure for our students may not coincide with our student’s developmental readiness to acquire it. Grammar structures must be taught and corrected only when the students are developmentally ready to acquire them, in order for grammar instruction to be effective.

 

Pitfall 3: The rate of human forgetting / Poor recycling

Picture 1, below, shows the way us humans ‘forget’ the information we have been initially exposed to. As many studies have clearly proven, after only two days 70% of what we have been taught/processes on day 1, is lost. After seven days without any memory rehearsal, about 80 % of it is forgotten. Unless, through constant recycling, the modelling of effective revision strategies and continuous formative and summative mini-assessments teachers keep the memory traces alive, the human rate of forgetting is such that even the best grammar lesson will be forgotten.

Picture 1- Rate of human forgetting

download

Unfortunately, in my career I have rarely seen grammatical structures (or even vocabulary) being recycled constantly and in a principled way – fear of interference being often the obstacle, e.g. : if I revise the present tense now that I have just introduced the Perfect Tense, my students will be confused. Constant recycling, however, is absolutely imperative.

Poor recycling often also explains the inefficacy of a specific type of grammar instruction, correction, and why spending hours recording formative feedback on an App like Explaining everything may simply not impact learners much. The intellectual knowledge – which may not become procedural for the reason mentioned above – produced by these means will be mostly lost unless teachers provide constant recycling of that feedback over the five six weeks following the provision of that feedback (honestly: how many teachers actually do that?).

Pitfall 4: Low cognitive empathy

Cognitive empathy is a term I coined a couple of days ago during a discussion with a colleague. My point being that to be an effective teacher you must not simply be emotionally empathetic but also in sync with the learners’ thought processes and general cognitive development. AFL strategies do help a lot in terms of giving us an insight into how well our students our doing in learning what we are teaching them. However, they do not give us sufficient insight into the cognitive barriers to acquiring a specific target grammar structures. For instance, in the planning phase of teaching the Perfect tense in French one should think about all the possible obstacles posed by the following to the students cognitively (not just in terms of intellectual learning, but also in terms of acquisition as defined above):

  • The learners’ grammar background (how well do they master the present tense of AVOIR and ETRE?; do they know how to pronounce ‘e’ with an acute accent?; etc.)
  • The native language (does their native language have an equivalent of this tense? Will it cause interference?)
  • The various steps needed to be able to master the perfect tense (deciding whether it is the correct context for Perfect Tense use, correctly choosing the required form of the correct auxiliary; deciding if the verb is regular or irregular, select the correct regular or irregular form of the past participle; pronouncing it correctly)
  • The time available for it to be learnt DECLARATIVELY;
  • The time available for it to be learnt PROCEDURALLY (i.e. automatized)

Another useful strategy to deploy whilst planning our lessons is to cast our mind back to the days when we learnt the same grammar structures as L2 learners of French: what did we find hard? What strategies did we come up with to facilitate our own learning? How long did it take us to learn that tense? Our (L1 English) students will have more or less the same issues, after all. This should enhance our cognitive empathy.

Finally, there are useful techniques that I have used several times to gain a better insight into our students’ learners cognitive processes. One of them is think-aloud protocols a very powerful (if time consuming process) tool to get into our students’ minds:  students perform a task (e.g. writing an essay) whilst verbalizing every single thought that goes through their heads. Getting them to write an account of a past holiday after a cycle of lessons on the Perfect tense in front of you while thinking aloud will provide you with a clearer understanding of how well they master the Perfect Tense in real operating conditions and of their problems with that tense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_aloud_protocol )

I have observed poor cognitive empathy in many lessons over the years. Students resent it as much as they resent lack of emotional empathy or humour. High levels of cognitive empathy are, in my opinion, the marker of an excellent practitioner.

Pitfall 5: Lack of a common metalanguage

If teacher and students do not share a common metalanguage, grammar instruction is less effective. Several studies have shown that students who do have a solid repertoire of metawords (adjectives, mood, tense, ect.) learn grammar more effectively both in and outside the classroom (independently). They also learn more effectively from corrective feedback. One anecdote I will never forget was when I inherited a class from my former colleague Gill Bruce and since she had taught her students the difference between an adverb and an adjective, I could –for the first time ever – very quickly get my students to understand the difference between ‘mal’ et ‘mauvais’ in French by simply saying: one is an adverb and the other one is an adjective.

The implications for teachers is that we need to use metalanguage from the very start and make constant reference to it (in our marking, too).

In conclusion, in planning and delivering our grammar lessons one has to be very mindful of all of the above factors. We are often reminded by scholars and educators of the importance to empathize with our students emotionally since, as my colleague Dr Michael Browning rightly said to me once: “if they like you a lot they will learn better anyway, regardless of which technique or technology you use”. However, empathizing cognitively in terms of truly attempting to (a) sync our teaching to their specific individual linguistic needs and (b) to the way their brain works when acquiring a foreign language (as posited by neuroscience) is imperative in order for us to pace our teaching effectively and to intervene effectively through adequate remedial instruction.