The language focus stage
4.4.6.1
Beliefs check
4.4.6.2 Views on grammar teaching
4.4.6.3 Reflection
4.4.6.4 Consciousness-raising (CR), input and intake
4.4.6.5 CR and noticing
4.4.6.6 CR and lesson stages
4.4.6.7 An example CR activity
4.4.6.8 CR, authentic language, and learning expectations
4.4.6.9 Simple CR techniques
4.4.6.10 From words to patterns
4.4.6.11 Action point
4.4.6.12 CR starting point I: Words or parts of words
4.4.6.13 CR starting point II: Themes, notions and
functions
4.4.6.14 CR starting point III: Categories of meaning
and use
4.4.6.15 Basic stages of CR activities
4.4.6.16 Phonology and CR
4.4.6.17 Managing CR activities in class
4.4.6.18 Optional reading
4.4.6.19 Language practice in TBL
4.4.6.20 Practice as fun
4.4.6.21 Pedagogic corpus
4.4.6.22 Optional reading
4.4.6.23 Action point
4.4.6.24 Action point
- Do you agree that language students need to study grammar?
- How do you believe grammar should be dealt with in language lessons?
- How much time should be spent on grammar work compared to other activities?
- How much grammar terminology do you think language students need to know?
4.4.6.2
Views on grammar teaching
As you are no doubt well aware, opinion on the role of grammar instruction
in language teaching ranges from the view that 'You can't learn to communicate
until you have learned the rules', where 'rules' usually means the full
range of tense (and in some languages, case) systems, to the belief that
grammar cannot be explicitly taught and therefore should not feature in
language lessons at all. A consciousness-raising, or 'CR' view falls somewhere
between these two extremes. It has already been suggested that the notion
that you can teach a pre-selected 'chunk' of language to learners at a
time that you decide, and furthermore, expect them to learn this within
the span of a single lesson, is not tenable. However, the other extreme
position of 'no grammar' is equally questionable, as there is a mounting
body of evidence that this leads to fossilization of interlanguage and
over-reliance on communication strategies. (See DELPHI Module 3, 3.2
for further discussion of this topic.)
4.4.6.3
Reflection
Do you think there is a place for explicit consideration of grammar in
second language classrooms?
If so, what sort of activities do you advocate for doing grammar work?
If you introduce a new structure to students, at what point would expect them to have internalized this and be able to use it spontaneously?
Here is Jane Willis explaining her view of the role of grammar: Video JW16 Transcript
JW16
[CE: So there's a role for grammar then?] Oh there's definitely a role
for grammar. It's just that we're so aware that if you teach an item of
grammar, not many of them will learn it straight away, and it's certainly
not worth spending a long time on each grammar item, but it's certainly
worth recycling and getting them to look at text for particular items,
for particular things, and maybe cover four or five different aspects
of language, looking at either the transcript of the task recording or
a text. Or even picking up things they've said during their own reports
or picking things out of their own writing, picking nice phrases that
they've used picking good ideas, good signalling devices or good things
out of the writing and listing those, and then taking maybe some of the
things they haven't done so well and correcting them and putting those
on the list as well.
4.4.6.4
Consciousness-raising (CR), input and intake
The difference between CR and a traditional structural approach is that
with CR there is no expectation that input will immediately become intake,
and thus output. In fact, the precise nature of what learners absorb from
the wealth of meaningful input they are exposed to in a task-based approach
cannot be predicted, and will differ for each learner. In this sense,
each individual student will unconsciously construct their own syllabus-of-language-learned
as their course progresses, regardless of the teacher's pre-planned syllabus-of-items-taught.
But the quantity and quality of what each learner notices and absorbs
can be enhanced by spending some time focusing on language form (as opposed
to specific forms) in a general sense. CR activities aim, not to
drill all students in a particular pattern, but to encourage them to develop
their own language analysis skills and experiment with the language, to
help them to become more aware of the way languages operate in a general
sense, and to get into the habit of being constantly on the lookout for
new patterns. In other words, it helps the students to become more alert
to language patterns, and more highly aware or conscious of any specific
patterns that occur in the language data they meet in their lessons. (See
also Module 3, section 3.3.4 on
consciousness-raising.)
4.4.6.5
CR and noticing
The noticing that CR promotes (ie becoming aware of a feature and
realizing that is different from the learner's current grammar) is the
first step towards acquiring a new structure but is not the same as acquisition.
The final stage, of integrating the new feature into the existing grammar,
is likely to take time - certainly longer than the span of one lesson.
Even then, the integration may be imperfect in that it may lead to changes
in the learner's interlanguage system that only approximate the target
language system more closely but are still not 100% the same as this.
It can take several cycles of noticing (observing), hypothesizing about
the way the system works and experimenting with the new hypothesis before
finally (if ever!) getting it completely the same as that of a native
speaker. CR, therefore, recognizes that we cannot predict either what
students will acquire or when this will happen, but it also recognizes
that the learning process may be accelerated by focusing students' attention
on form.
4.4.6.6
CR and lesson stages
This brings us to the questions of when to do CR work during the lesson,
and what language data to use for it. If you have done the preceding activity
cycles in this module you will know the answer to these questions! Jane
Willis reminds us:
Video JW17 Transcript
JW17
Then when they've actually finished the task cycle itself and if you're
looking at the language that fluent speakers have used to do the task,
if you have made a recording of the task, so you have a sample recording
of fluent speakers doing the task, that's where you might well spend longer
looking at an item of language, or several items of language. There needs
to be quite a lot of language focus, but it builds on what they've done.
I think the important thing is that you look ... because they've already
done the task themselves and they've already thought about how to do it,
they've already been in a position where they've been expressing meanings,
expressing those meanings to someone else and understanding, exchanging
meanings, then they look at a piece of transcript of someone else expressing
the same meanings, the meanings are already familiar, and they're ready
to look at form. (CE: Right.) Whereas in traditional type teaching it's
been, 'Right, learn the form, and it has this particular meaning or these
particular meanings'. But what we're looking at now is, 'You've focused
on getting meanings across, how do other people get similar meanings across?
Let's have a look. Are there any words you could have used for your own
task? Are there any phrases that might have come in useful?'
To summarize: language focus work is best done after students have been using the language to communicate, ie after doing the task cycle, rather than presenting structures to them for learning before attempting to use these. At this point, they will be ready and motivated to focus on form, and by using transcripts of fluent speakers doing the task, the data they will be working with will be highly meaningful. (I have been trying in this module to recreate a similar experience for you: throughout the module I have been referring to a 'mystery objects' lesson, using it to illustrate different points. By this stage of the module you will be pretty familiar with the lesson, so when you come to think about the language focus stage for this particular example you can focus immediately and fully on this, as the transcripts you see will already be thoroughly familiar and highly meaningful to you in terms of the whole lesson context.)
4.4.6.7
An example CR activity
So what exactly are CR activities like? Here's an some example based on
the 'mystery object' task that you have met in previous activity cycles.
Try doing it for yourself before looking at the commentary.
|
4.4.6.8
CR, authentic language, and learning expectations
As with the other stages of a task-based lesson, you may find that many
of the activities you already use for language focus work can be used
for CR work, especially if you favour an inductive approach to working
out rules and patterns. The main difference is likely to be that instead
of the students working on a collection of concocted examples (often the
case with examples in coursebooks), they will be looking at authentic
language data in the form of the task transcript, (possibly supplemented
with some additional examples extracted from transcripts of tasks or texts
the students have encountered in previous lessons). And of course, there
will no longer be the expectation that by the end of the lesson they will
have learned the new language.
4.4.6.9
Simple CR techniques
As in the example CR activity above there are a number of other, deceptively
simple techniques that you may not already use, and that are especially
useful for lower level classes and students who are not familiar with
grammar terminology. Even where some basic terminology is needed in order
to be able to talk about the language, this does not mean that the aim
is to reveal or explain the sorts of grammar rule that we usually find
in a structural syllabus. In fact, Jane Willis goes so far as to suggest
that we should explicitly focus on only the simplest of rules: Video
JW18 Transcript
JW18
[CE: Where do the grammar rules fit in?] Grammar rules. Where they're
about to say something or about to report back, I don't think I'd explain
grammar rules unless they do remember a useful rule and you say, 'Hey,
don't forget - third person s', and then they pop it on. If it's something
they're familiar with already and they've just forgotten something you
know they know.
Remember, knowing how to use a language and knowing about a language are not the same thing, and explicit explanation and conscious learning of grammar rules are most definitely the latter.
4.4.6.10
From words to patterns
For the 'LOOK(S)' CR activity, the starting point is simply a word. If
students classify their collection of phrases into one group for those
beginning with 'it looks ...' and another group for all others, and then
sub-classify the first group into the 'it looks as if/though ...' examples
and 'it looks like ...' examples, they will have made some very useful
observations about the patterns and uses of 'look(s)' without needing
to use any grammar terms or formal knowledge of grammar rules at all.
At first, many teachers trying out this sort of CR work tend to feel that
it is just too simple to do any good, or alternatively, they have become
so used to only seeing in texts examples of the structures usually prominent
in a structural syllabus that they are 'blinded' to seeing other potential
areas for focusing on, but with a little practice, quickly become better
at this.
4.4.6.11
Action point
What would you pick from the 'mystery objects' transcripts (see 4.4.13)
as worthy of highlighting to students? Make a list before looking at some
suggestions in Commentary 4.4.8.
4.4.6.12
CR starting point I: Words or parts of words
Jane Willis (1996: 105-06) suggests
three main starting points for CR work, the first being words,
or parts of words.
This is the easiest starting point both for you, the teacher, to identify, and for the students to find. You could simply ask them to find all the phrases with the word 'looks' or 'sort' or 'some...' or 'if', etc, and record them in their notebooks, but normally students would then do something else with their data - sort it into categories of their choice, classify according to grammatical function or meaning, identify the odd ones out, find collocations (eg words which go with go: 'go together', 'go through', doesn't go very far'), check a dictionary or grammar book for definitions and further examples, decide how the different concepts expressed by the focus word in the target language would be expressed in their mother tongue, try to come up with alternative ways of expressing the same concept in the target language, and so on.
Interestingly, although this type of activity starts with words, it is an excellent way into focusing on grammar. This is because the most common words in a language (or in inflected languages, parts of words) usually have a grammatical function rather than referring to topic. Examples from the mystery objects transcripts are the 'If' clauses, most of which are part of conditional structures, the modal verbs 'could', 'would' and 'may', and (not shown in the commentary, but also of potential use) the prepositions 'up', down', 'back', 'off', 'into', 'over', 'on', 'in', 'out', 'through', which are nearly all part of phrasal or prepositional verbs. Other common words like 'right' function as discourse markers - an area often neglected in traditional structural syllabuses.
4.4.6.13
CR starting point II: Themes, notions and functions
Starting from a theme, such as 'objects and their parts', 'families',
'personal descriptions', or a notion such as 'movement', 'time', colour',
'place', 'age' or a function such as 'comparing', describing', 'giving
instructions' is a little harder since it requires students to look for
ideas in the transcripts or texts rather then specific words.
However, if you do this type of CR work with simple notions such as 'all
the phrases which refer to colour', before moving on to more abstract
ideas like 'all the expressions which indicate uncertainty', students
are unlikely to find this too difficult.
This type of CR starting point focuses the students' attention mainly on vocabulary and lexical sets, and helps students to build up their repertoire of lexical phrases.
4.4.6.14
CR starting point III: Categories of meaning and use
In reality, this is not so much a third starting point for CR work as
a different way of presenting activities based on one or other of the
first two starting points described above.
Instead of asking students to find their own examples and then work on this raw data themselves, you can present them with a collection of examples that you have already extracted, like the concordance for 'look(s)' (see Commentary 4.4.8), or one of the collections of examples in the possible starting points shown in Commentary 4.4.9A-4.4.9C and ask students to match each example to categories provided by you. For example, if your students are keen to do 'grammar' you could present all the sentences and clauses containing 'if' and, possibly with reference to a grammar book, ask them to say whether each was a zero or first conditional (interesting, because in some cases the 'if' clause and the independent clauses are inverted, or the independent clause is absent, reflecting natural use of such conditionals that are not always 'perfectly formed' in the way that grammar book examples tend to be). There is also one odd one out that is not part of a conditional structure ('it fits as if') which students would need to look up since the utterance here is truncated. This would make a very good grammar revision exercise. Another example would be to present all examples including the phrase 'sort of', in the order they occur in the transcripts, and ask students to classify them as being followed by a noun or noun group, a verb, or an adjective or adjectival group.
Like the other CR activities suggested so far, you don't need to take a traditional grammar approach (with its need for the appropriate terminology) at all. Take a look at the examples in Commentary 4.4.9C to see how you can ask students to categorize in a much simpler, but equally useful way. Note that the categories of meaning activities ask students to sort examples according to what they do in the text - describe something, compare something, and so on. The categories of use are simply patterns: which words (or classes of words) follow or precede the key word or phrase.
An advantage of this third starting point is that where only one or two examples of the target feature occur in the transcript, you can collect together a number of similar examples from other transcripts or texts that the students have met before. For example, there are a limited number of modal verbs in the 'mystery objects' transcripts, but they are an important way of expressing certainty / uncertainty. If you could find say a dozen examples of 'could' used in this sense from previously encountered texts, you could ask students to check their dictionaries or grammars to identify its meaning in this context, and to compare this with other common meanings of the word. Or you could give the students two or three meanings / uses that you have found in a reference grammar and ask them to match their examples to these.
As can be seen from the 'could' example, this type of starting point is useful if you want to focus on a particular grammatical structure, perhaps because you are expected to follow a structural syllabus.
4.4.6.15
Basic stages of CR activities
You will have noticed that, in terms of what students are instructed to
do, CR activities follow a simple basic pattern:
- Stage 1: students find / count / highlight examples of the language you have directed them to (or look at the examples you have provided). Instructions for this stage might begin 'Find six words...'; 'Find all the phrases and words ...'; How many words in the text refer to ...?'; Write down all the phrases that ...', etc.
- Stage 2: students sort the examples and / or try to identify patterns, or match examples to categories given by the teacher or in a reference book. Instructions might begin 'How could you classify ...?'; 'Can you sort ... into two or more groups?'; 'Find the odd one out in your set of examples. Explain why it doesn't fit in'; 'Look up the phrase ... in your dictionary and match the definitions to the examples you have found in the transcript'; ' The word xxx is commonly used in these three ways (give information). Can you match each of the examples you found to one of these three uses?'; 'What word / phrase most often comes after the word ...?' Which words ending in ... come before ...?', etc.
To prepare such activities, you can identify some potential starting points and then look these up in a good learners' dictionary and or reference grammar to identify the main categories of meaning and use.
4.4.6.16
Phonology and CR
There is one more area not yet mentioned that could be the focus of your
language analysis work: phonology. Intonation patterns, stress patterns
and sounds could all be intensively studied and practised using the tape
recordings of the tasks, perhaps alongside the transcripts, so students
can mark on intonation patterns using rising, falling or level arrows,
or circle stressed syllables, or note which letters or syllables are not
pronounced at all in the rapid stream of speech, and so on. For more details
on this, see Willis (1996: 109-10).
4.4.6.17
Managing CR activities in class
Regardless of the starting points you select, during the CR activities
students should be allowed to work in their pairs or groups without undue
interference from the teacher, just as they did during the task, so they
can work out and test their own hypotheses and discover things for themselves.
Of course, you will need to start things off by giving clear instructions,
and maybe show an example, but after that you should do no more than circulate
to check progress, encourage them to look things up or work things out
themselves, and answer individual questions if really necessary.
Don't be tempted to do the activity for them though! Remember that they will probably not notice the same things as you - they will notice the things that interest them and that they are ready for according to their individual stage of development. Noticing for them (ie telling them your ideas) is not likely to foster learning. If students discuss ideas in their mother tongue during this stage it does not matter (as long as they stay on task), but encourage them to gradually get used to talking about the target language in the target language by always doing so yourself. This is useful meaningful speaking practice in its own right.
After most students have finished the activity (remember to have some extension activities ready for the one or two groups who finish early) you will need to go through it with the class, summarizing findings on the board and encouraging students to note down new language in their notebooks.
4.4.6.18
Optional reading
The sixth optional reading provides further examples of CR activities
(see 4.4.9, Reading 6).
4.4.6.19
Language practice in TBL
The types of language practice activity that are suitable for use in a
task-based lesson will depend on your teaching situation and students,
but here are some ideas taken from Willis (1996:
111-13) and with some minor variations from me:
- Repetition of useful
words and phrases, individually or in chorus. Play short extracts from
your tape for students to mimic, or model them yourself. All the usual
variations of oral drills can be used, but treat it as a bit of a game
- the students should feel a bit like the audience all shouting out
'Oh no he doesn't' at a pantomime.
- Listen and complete
is a bit like a verbal 'musical chairs': play a recording and press
pause in mid-phrase (or read the transcript and stop in mid-phrase)
and see which team / pair can be first to complete the phrase successfully;
can also be done in pairs or teams where students read out part-phrases
for each other.
- Gapped examples:
a kind of class constructed 'quiz', where pairs or teams write out five
or ten useful phrases from the transcript but leave a gap in each, then
exchange with their partner / the other team and who try to complete
the gapped phrases from memory, scoring a point for each correct completion.
Can also be done with on an OHP transparency with the whole class in
teams and you acting as quiz-master/mistress.
- Progressive deletion
('invisible writing') of examples that you have collected on the
board after an analysis activity. Number each example, call out a number
at random and nominate a student to read the example, until each has
been read at least once. As each is read, rub out a word or phrase (if
you practised specific words and phrases in chorus earlier these are
good ones to delete first). Continue to call out numbers, even when
there are hardly any words left, and nominate individuals to 'read'
them as if they were still complete. If the class is good at this, they
may still be able to 'read' even when only the numbers are left. Students
are likely to get quite competitive over trying to outdo each other's
ability to read the 'invisible writing'.
- Unpacking / repacking
a sentence: choose a long sentence (you are more likely to find
a suitable sentence in a written text - see activity cycle five, 4.5).
Students rewrite the information without repeating any facts in as many
short sentences as they can, in say, five minutes, working in pairs/groups,
or calling out suggestions for you to write on the board. Once finished,
students cover the original sentence and try to put all the information
from the short sentences back into one long sentence. This does not
have to be the same as the original sentence but it must be grammatical
(you may need to circulate and advise, or get students to check each
other's sentences for both content and grammar). Write all the new sentences
on the board for comparison.
- Memory challenge:
take a set of one type of word, eg narrative verbs from a story, or
noun groups from a spoken task transcript, and write them out in mixed
order on the board / OHP transparency. See if students can remember
the complete phrase that each word / phrase appeared in. You might like
to stimulate memory by first seeing what else they remember, eg for
narrative verbs, what order did they occur in the story, who did them,
when, where, why, etc.
- Concordances for common
words: this is great for students who enjoy copying out lines of
text (it's surprising how many do - it's a confidence building activity
especially for lower level learners, and gives them something concrete
in their notebooks to take away with them). Divide a number of familiar
texts / transcripts between the class so each pair has one or two to
work on. Select a common word (eg a preposition, or other grammar word)
and ask them to draw three columns on a sheet of paper or OHP transparency,
with the central column just wide enough for the key word to fit into
(see the sample concordance for LOOK(S) in Commentary
4.4.8). The sheets should then be cut into strips. Students go through
the text and write neat concordance lines for each word, one per strip
of paper / acetate. For paper strips, they can then pool their lines
in progressively larger groups, sorting them into an order of their
choice as they do so, or with the transparencies, you can display them
and get the class to decide how to sort them. (The advantage of the
strips now becomes apparent!). Finally, the whole lot can be copied
into notebooks, or you can take them away (don't forget to number them
to get the students' chosen order right) to photocopy. These hand-made
concordances can then be used for other activities - odd one out, cloze
test, pattern spotting (see the section on CR activities above). Organizing
the same set in different ways can reveal different patterns - easy
to do on a word-processor if you are able to type them in.
- Dictionary work: you
need a good learner's dictionary for this, preferably monolingual. Learners
match words in context to suitable definitions (good where words can
have several meanings - try looking up 'sort of' and check the various
uses in the transcript!), then explain these to their partner. They
can explore collocations, eg looking up 'sort of' in the 'mystery objects'
transcript would also throw up 'all sorts', 'out of sorts', 'it takes
all sorts', 'nothing of the sort', 'sort out'. Students can generate
their own examples - having looked up one or two words they are not
sure how to use, they write two new sentences using their word(s).
- Personal recordings:
if students have access to a tape recorder, they can record any useful
phrases they want to remember, or record themselves doing the task (assuming
noise levels in the class are not prohibitive!), or record themselves
giving the report, or even make successively improved recordings of
the report to get a version they are satisfied with to play back to
the class rather than delivering this live.
- Computer games: there are many CALL games and exercises on the market and students usually enjoy using them. They work well if students work in pairs or threes so they discuss possible answers rather than just trying all options until the computer accepts one. This is especially true of those with multiple choice type activities.
4.4.6.20
Practice as fun
Note that all of the practice activities suggested here have a sense of
fun about them, and should be treated as challenges or games, not as exercises-that-must-all-be-completed-correctly-before-the-students-are-allowed-to-go-home.
This means keeping them short and snappy, stopping before they fizzle
out, and using a variety, maybe two or three in each lesson, and varying
these from lesson to lesson.
4.4.6.21
Pedagogic corpus
You may also have noticed that some activities suggest taking examples
of language from a range of texts and transcripts that are already familiar
to the students - not just that for the current lesson. This implies building
up a collection of such texts, sometimes called a 'pedagogic corpus'.
Jane Willis (1996) has more detailed
advice on this on in her book.
4.4.6.22
Optional reading
If you have a copy of Jane Willis's book A Framework for Task-based
Learning (1996) I recommend that
you now read pages 110-14.
4.4.6.23
Action point
Look at the language worksheet that I used with advanced level students
in the 'mystery objects' lesson. What was my starting point for the five
related activities? Which of the five activities help students to notice
or find a language feature, and which ones ask them to analyse language
for classes or patterns? For feedback, see Commentary
4.4.10.
- Here are the first few lines of the conversation about the clothes peg, but I have taken some words out. Can you remember, or guess, any of the missing words in the places marked *******?
| J | Umm I ******************* to do with a washing line |
| B | Yes. It ******************* clothes peg |
| J |
It looks ******************* could clip in there 'cos it ************* a clothes peg as well |
| B | And if you press the end no no no yes well if you press the end there |
| J |
It moves up and down, doesn't it? So **************** fit in there. **************** fit in that little hole. |
| B | Hmm |
| J | Don't break it |
| B | Well I mean it's a sort of a - I dunno - it looks ******************* |
| J | Does it actually open completely? It'll go the other way, won't it? |
| B | leverage principle involved. If you push that back it ******** opens the end |
- Listen to the tape and try to fill in the missing words and phrases in the spaces ________ (don't try to do the lines marked with .............. - they are too difficult to hear! You can find them later when you see the complete transcript.)
| 1 | J | Umm I ___________ it _____________________________ to do with a washing line |
| 2 | B | Yes. It .. clothes peg |
| 3a 3b |
J |
.
something
clip in there 'cos it ___________________________ a clothes peg as well |
| 4 | B | And if you press the end no no no yes well if you press the end there |
| 5a 5b |
J |
It moves up
and down, doesn't it? So _____________________ fit in there. ___________________________ fit in that little hole. |
| 6 | B | Hmm |
| 7 | J | Don't break it. |
| 8a 8b |
B |
Well I mean
it's a sort of a ... I dunno - it looks ...............................
there is _____________________ |
| 9 | J | Does it actually open completely? It'll go the other way, won't it? |
| 10 |
B |
leverage principle involved. If you push that back it ____________________ opens ... the end |
- Look at the complete transcripts
and highlight all the words and phrases you can find that are like the
ones you wrote down in exercise 2. (You first need to decide what sort
of words / phrases these are!)
- Sort the words and phrases into three or more groups. Write them down in the table below.
- One of the commonest phrases
is SORT OF.
SORT OF can be followed by a noun, e.g. 'Some sort of clothes peg'. What other classes of word can follow 'SORT OF?
Can you say anything about the classes of word which go before or after the other phrases you found?
4.4.6.24
Action point
Select two or three practice activities to follow your CR activities that
you think would suit your students. Write out instructions for these.
If possible, try them out on colleagues and revise them as necessary until
you are satisfied that they could work in class. The materials you
produce here will form part of the assessment task (see 4.4.11)
for this activity cycle.
