Chapters 3 & 4

Background issues in Language Learning

Linguistics (ELT) – 4th year – 2nd term / Lecture 6

E When you're ready!

Key terms: “readiness”

“Learner interlanguage”

“Teachability hypothesis”

“scaffolding”

• Many theorists and researchers have wondered whether a student's ability to learn new things depends on whether or not they are ready to learn it.

- When do learners become ready?

❑Manfred Pienemann’s 'teachability' hypothesis (1998)

• He suggests that teaching can promote acquisition if what we are teaching is close to the next form that would be acquired naturally in the learner's interlanguage.

• His 'teachability' hypothesis suggests that if you try to teach students language before they are ready for it, i.e. if you go directly from stage 2 to stage 4, without passing through stage 3, the student may always revert back to stage 2, because they were not ready for stage 4.

➢What does learner’s interlanguage mean?

➢ Interlanguage: (all definitions and features of ‘Interlanguage’ here are not found in the book)

• Interlanguage is the type of language or linguistic system used by second-and foreign-language learners who are in the process of learning a target language.

• Interlanguage is metaphorically a halfway house between the first language (L1) and the target language (TL), hence 'inter.' The L1 is purportedly the source language that provides the initial building materials to be gradually blended with materials taken from the TL, resulting in new forms that are neither in the L1 nor in the TL.

• "Interlanguage reflects the learner's evolving system of rules, and results from a variety of processes, including the influence of the first language ('transfer'), contrastive interference from the target language, and the overgeneralization of newly encountered rules."

• An interlanguage is an idiolect that has been developed by a learner of a second language which preserves some features of their first language, and can also overgeneralize some L2 writing and speaking rules. These two characteristics of an interlanguage result in the system's unique linguistic organization. Wikipedia

• Interlanguage is the learner's current version of the language they are learning. Interlanguage changes all the time but can become fossilised language when the learners do not have the opportunity to improve.

• In the classroomInterlanguage is often heavily influenced by L1 and interference from this may make it seem perfectly logical to the learner, although it is incorrect. It is important for teachers to understand this and also to see interlanguage as a series of learning steps.

❑ Influenced by this view of “readiness”, there is the belief that:

all learning, including language learning, is mediated by social interaction. Learning is 'assisted performance: and this happens when someone with more knowledge - say a parent or a teacher - helps the learner to progress.

This help is called 'scaffolding: a kind of supportive framework for the construction of knowledge, and the scaffolding is only removed when the learners can appropriate the knowledge for themselves.

A key element of successful scaffolding is that the learners can only benefit from it if they are in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) - in other words, if they are just getting to a stage (above their own current level of knowledge) where they are ready to learn the new thing with the assistance of others. [This is similar to Krashen's idea of i + 1].

• Teachability research is important primarily for helping teachers to understand why their students don't always learn what they are taught – at least not immediately.

• However, individual students will often be at different levels of readiness.

• In recent years the concept of scaffolding -that is helping students to progress through interaction with someone with better knowledge, such as a teacher - has gained idespread credence, and helped us to focus on how teachers and students interact.

• Scaffolding is thus seen as different from introducing new language in a more formal way.

• However, entering into such a dialogic relationship with students may be more problematic with a large class.

F Language play

• One main reason for this is the idea that it is not just work language or the transactional language of communicative tasks which attracts people when they are free to choose, but that of 'songs, games, humour, aggression, intimate relations and religion’.

• Language play includes mimicry and repetition, the explicit discussion of rules and the liking for 'form-driven rather than meaning-driven behaviour’.

• Play (and language play) is often a collaborative affair.

In recent years researchers and theorists have turned their attention to the

area of language humour and language play.

• Researchers found that 'Playful mislabelings and puns often generated extended repair sequences that could be seen as informal ''language lessons'' focused on formal aspects of language’.

• They found that student joking included artful performance, alliteration, code switching, laughter and variations in pitch among other things.

• Play is seen as something that children do, but the case being made here is that it is highly appropriate in all L2 classrooms. (e.g. The right kind of laughter works powerfully on student affect).

• A lot of play an Joke-telling is rule-bound and linguistically repetitive.

• Thus, the formulaic Jokes and dialogues of much ELT, when properly designed, may well be extremely useful for student language development.

Introduction to chapter 4Popular Methodology

A Approaches, methods, procedures and techniques

1. Approach:

• people use the term approach to refer to theories about the nature of language and language learning which are the source of the way things are done in the classroom and which provide the reasons for doing them.

• An approach describes how language is used and how its constituent parts interlock – it offers a model of language competence.

• An approach describes how people acquire their knowledge of the language and makes statements about the conditions which will promote successful language learning.

2. Method:

• A method is the practical realisation of an approach.

• The originators of a method have arrived at decisions about types of activities, roles of teachers and learners, the kinds of material which will be helpful and some model of syllabus organisation.

• Methods include various procedures and techniques as part of their standard fare.

➢What is a postmethod? (see B2)

3. Procedure:• A procedure is an ordered sequence of techniques (e.g. dictation procedure)

• A procedure is a sequence which can be described in terms such as First you do this, then you do that ... . Smaller than a method, it is bigger than a technique.

4 Technique:

• A technique is a single activity rather than a sequence. (e.g. silent view technique; finger technique)

❑What the interested teacher needs to do when confronted with a new method, for example, is to see if and/or how it incorporates theories of language and learning. What procedures does it incorporate? Are they appropriate and effective for the classroom situation that teacher works with? In the case of techniques and activities, two questions seem worth asking: Are they satisfying for both students and teachers? and Do they actually achieve what they set out to achieve?