Activity 9

Consciousness-raising (C-R) is a technique that is much commented on these days (see Rutherford, 1987). This approach attempts to focus students' attention on particular forms. C-R is a fairly loose term that can cover any technique which attempts to make salient a particular language form, and tries to ensure that students 'notice' this form and somehow integrate it into their own language system (for an overview of C-R, see Rutherford, 1987, and Rutherford and Sharwood Smith, M, 1988). Ellis stresses that C-R is essentially learner-centred:

A C-R task is a pedagogic activity where the learners are provided with L2 data in some form and required to perform some operation on or with it, the purpose of which is to arrive at an explicit understanding of some linguistic property or properties of the target language. (Ellis, 1997: 160)

There are other terms similar to C-R: input-enhancement (Sharwood Smith, 1993) suggests that specific forms should be emphasized in the input so that they become salient for learners; 'noticing' (Schmidt and Frota, 1986) is the idea that learners should be encouraged to notice gaps between their own language ability and the authentic language they are exposed to. In essence, C-R is an inductive-FOF approach, so that learners are encouraged to 'notice' specific forms, and thereby make the rules explicit for themselves. Grauberg questions the benefits of this kind of 'discovery' approach: 'One can applaud the stress on pupils making their own grammatical discoveries, but to deny so categorically the value of any explanations by the teacher […] may hinder rather than further understanding' (Grauberg, 1997: 36).

C-R is not necessarily tied to any kind of syllabus, so there may not be a pre-determined list of structures to be studied. The C-R example in Activity 10 is based on Rutherford (1987).

Activity 10