[This is a
professional development seminar I led on Comprehensible Input. The blog version of this consists of the text
of the talk I gave (below) and the PowerPoint Presentation slides (embedded into blogger below—after the text of the talk, but also available on Google: Drive, Slides, Pub). I’ve also
got a number of footnotes, addendums, and disclaimers to add to this, but I’ll
put all of those down at the bottom of this post so as to avoid cluttering it
up too much.]
With apologies, this professional development seminar
is going to have a bit of an editorial edge to it. I’m going to argue that in our young learner
classes we should minimize our use of grammar focused lessons and increase
activities that give our young learners exposure to language. Now, I suspect I may be preaching mostly to
the converted here, because I suspect most of you are already doing this, and
perhaps you’re doing it with better activities than I am. So just bear with me here as I work through
the theoretical justification for this, and then hopefully we’ll have time for
everyone to share their own ideas at the end.
This professional development seminar is going to be
in two parts. First, I’m going to give
the theoretical justification for why young learner classes should be based on
comprehensible input instead of focusing on grammar points. Then, I’m going to suggest a variety of ways
in which teachers can provide their students with comprehensible input.
So, first off, the section on why we should
focus on comprehensible input.
To begin with, I want to talk about the differences
between young learners and adult learners, and what ideally a young learner
class should focus on.
It’s commonly believed that young learners are faster
than adults at learning languages, but actually this not true in all situations
and across all criteria.
There are two different situations. The first is in an immersion
environment. So, for example, this would
be when immigrating to a foreign country like America or Australia, or
something. When moving to a foreign
country, in a total immersion environment, adults actually start speaking the
foreign language faster than children do.
(Lourdes Ortega, p. 16-17)
Adults will start to try to speak the foreign
language almost immediately, but a child will have a long silent period in the
new language, lasting several months.
During these several months they will only listen to the new language,
but will not attempt to speak it themselves.
Or possibly they will speak only in one word utterances or use memorized
phrases, but not attempt to construct their own sentences until they have been
in the country for several months. (Stephen Krashen, Tracy Terrell p. 35-36).
Why is this?
Well, it appears that adults are able to use various meta-cognitive
skills and meta-linguistic knowledge to initially learn the language more
quickly than children. In other words,
adults possess much more of an ability to try to consciously learn the rules of
the language, whereas children don’t have as much cognitive ability to, on a
conscious level, try to analyze the language and figure out its rules. Instead, children pick up a language
subconsciously, much like we all learned our first language. But this means they get off to a much slower
start, and have a much longer silent period than adults. However, once they do finally start speaking
the language, they do eventually catch up to and surpass the adults. So after 10 months, the initial advantage of
the adults is beginning to disappear, and after 5 years’ time, the children have
surpassed the adults in fluency (Lourdes Ortega, p.16-17).
Now, all of that is in an immersion environment,
where they are actually living in the country where the new language is being
spoken. In a foreign language classroom,
which is what we do, the younger learners not only start out slower than the
adults, but they actually never fully catch up to them—or at least, studies
show that even after 5 years studying in a classroom, children are still behind
the adults (Ortega, p. 17).
Why this is isn’t exactly clear. Obviously one reason might be that there just
aren’t enough hours of exposure in a foreign language classroom to equal the hours
of exposure a child gets in an immersion setting. Another reason is perhaps that the way
foreign languages are traditionally taught, with an emphasis on grammar rules,
tends to be something adults are better capable of dealing with than children.
Lourdes Ortega says, “This [the ability of
adults to do better than children in foreign language classes] may have been
in part an artefact of instruction or tests that demanded cognitive maturity
and involved metalinguistic skills, because adults may be able to use cognitive
and metacognitive abilities and strategies to learn many aspects of the L2 [foreign
language] initially faster.” (p. 17)
In other words, adults probably have better
strategies for dealing with grammar exercises, and if the foreign language
classroom focuses primarily on grammar, that’s going to advantage adults rather
than children. Or, as Krashen says:
“Most adult students differ from children in that
they have a greater ability to consciously learn grammar rules,” (p.
Krashen, Terrell p. 61).
So, what are the strengths and weaknesses of young
learners?
Their weak points appear to be deductive grammar
exercises—that is, when they are given a grammar rule and asked to practice
it.
“Deductive methods are more effective for
older students (adults) [than for children]” (Krashen, Terrell p. 36).
And of course, the more complicated the grammar rule
is, the more young learners will struggle.
So, for example, reported speech, which is actually taught in many of
the young learner textbooks, asks the young learners to do a number of very
complex transformations. When students
are asked to transform a question into reported speech:
“What are you doing?”
Becomes:
She asked me what I was doing.
So the student has to:
Identify the auxiliary verb “are”,
Transform it into the past tense “was”,
Invert the order of the subject and the auxiliary
verb from question order to statement order,
Change the pronoun from “you” to “I”, and
Change the punctuation from a question mark to a
period
And this is something the young learners are going to
struggle to do. And, those of you who’ve
taught reported speech in young learner levels correct me if I’m wrong, often
not one student in the class can correctly do these transformations.
Secondly, young learners have less ability to
consciously monitor their speech for grammatical accuracy. They may pick up a lot of the rules
subconsciously, but when speaking they will have less of an ability to, say,
consciously remember to put an “s” on the end of every verb which has a 3rd
person subject.
Okay, so those are the weaknesses of young
learners. Now, what are the strengths?
Given sufficient exposure to the language, they are
better than adults at mimicking the sounds and pronunciation. They often have better listening
comprehension than adults do. And, given
sufficient exposure to the language, they can develop on a subconscious level a
more “intuitive grasp of the language” even if they don’t consciously understand
the grammar rules. That is, if you
expose younger learners to enough language, they are better at just
subconsciously absorbing it than adults would be (Distance Delta, Unit 2, Focus
on the Young Learner).
So, given all this, it would seem to me that the
ideal young learner program would focus less on learning conscious grammar
rules, and more on exposing the learners to language. And then possibly, the curriculum could
become more grammar heavy as the students progressed into the adults and developed
the cognitive skills necessary to consciously manipulate sentences with grammar
rules.
Or as Krashen puts it:
“…younger acquirers will tend to have less ability
and/or inclination to learn conscious rules.
The amount of homework devoted to conscious learning might therefore
vary according to age with adults receiving the most, teenagers somewhat less,
and children perhaps none at all. … Thus
a common mistake made in many language courses for children is giving students
learning tasks similar to the grammar exercises used by adults.”(Krashen,
Terrelll p. 178-179)
Now, unfortunately, many of the textbooks designed
for Young Learners have completely flipped this on its head. In fact, many of the textbooks for Young
Learners are actually more grammar focused than the textbooks designed
for adults. And in many of these
textbooks, the Young Learners are actually responsible for learning more
grammar points than their adult counterparts.
In my opinion, this is a mistake, and it’s a serious problem with many
Young Learner programs.
Now, there’s some debate about what the intention of
these textbooks actually is. I’ve had at
least a couple people tell me now that it was never the intention of the Young
Learner textbook publishers to focus on grammar, and if I was focusing too much
on grammar in my classes, then that was my own fault.
Well, maybe it was.
So let me phrase this as neutrally as possible: When you’re teaching
Young Learners for the first time and the only guidance you get is to be handed
a set of textbooks, there’s a temptation for new teachers to try to take their
cues for the lessons from the material that is covered in the textbooks. “What am I doing today? Oh right, lesson 13, indirect questions,
okay!” And so you end up teaching these
lessons where the whole class is focused on practicing and using one grammar
point, and then the next lesson you have to go onto another grammar point.
At least I know that’s what my first several terms
were like teaching Young Learners.
I would encourage you not to do that, however. Instead, I would encourage you to design
lessons based around supplying the young learners with comprehensible input.
“Input” refers to the language the students are
exposed to.
“Comprehensible” means the language is at a level the
students can understand. Now, this
refers to the basic meaning of the language.
It doesn’t mean they have to understand every word, or understand every
grammar structure perfectly, but they’re getting the basic meaning of the
message.
So, what are the disadvantages of grammar based
lessons?
Well, for one thing, lessons focused around grammar
points are hitting Young Learners at exactly their weakest point. So it’s setting up a situation that’s going
to be frustrating for both the teacher and the students.
For another thing, the idea that students should
learn a grammar point every lesson, and then hold all these grammar lessons in
their memory, and then someday in the future it will eventually all come
together and they’ll be able to speak the language, is an idea of language
learning that has been pretty solidly discredited 50 years ago. If the grammar points are all taught as
separate entities, they never really come together into any sort of language
fluency.
Rather, the way people acquire language is through a
lot of exposure to it when their attention is focused on message of the
language rather than on the grammar points.
This is especially true of Young Learners. If you can provide them with plenty of
exposure to the language, they will either consciously or unconsciously start
to notice a lot of the grammar points on their own. And this, rather than drilling them on a
single grammar point, will be the most effective way of building up their
proficiency.
The advantages of comprehensible input, on the other hand, are
that the students can learn all the features of a language at once from
comprehensible input—not only grammar, but pronunciation, vocabulary,
collocations, et cetera.
But as for grammar, comprehensible input provides the
student with all the necessary grammar structures at once, not just one
structure a lesson.
And, students can pick up a lot of language features on their
own if they are provided with enough comprehensible input.
“…research has shown that learners learn a great deal
that no one ever teaches them. They are
able to use their own internal learning mechanisms to discover many of the
complex rules and relationships which underlie the language they wish to
learn. Students, in this sense, may be
said to learn much more than they are taught.” (Lightbown and Spada p.
116).
This is true for anyone who acquires any sort of
fluency in the language, whether they are children or adults. There are way too many features of a language
to all be learned by consciously memorizing rules. When you think about all the features of a
language, all the verb tense rules, all the pronunciations rules, all the
voiced and unvoiced verb ending rules, all the collocations, and registers, and
fixed phrases, and pragmatic functions—there’s no way anyone could ever learn
this to any degree of fluency by systematically studying all the rules in a
certain order. Most of the language has
to be learned by picking up the features subconsciously through enough
exposure.
But this is particularly true for younger learners,
whose brains are more wired for subconsciously picking up the language, and are
less wired for studying grammar rules.
Now this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t focus on
grammar at all in Young Learner classes.
Grammar focused lessons can actually help a student learn a structure
faster than simply language exposure alone.
But the grammar lessons are going to work best as a clarification rather
than an introduction.
For example, here is the type of grammar lesson we
should try to avoid if at all possible:
* Students are introduced to a grammar structure that
they have never seen before.
* The teacher attempts to introduce the grammar
structure (form, meaning, pronunciation) and have the students accurately
understand it and be able to produce it all in one lesson.
I think most of us have been in these type of
lessons, where we are trying to introduce a grammar point from the textbook
that the students have never seen before and just don’t understand? And it’s usually a disaster, right?
So, here’s an alternative framework which may be more
successful:
*Over many weeks and months, students are exposed to
a large amount of input from the language at a level which they can understand.
*Over this long period of time, students start to
notice several features of the language on their own.
*Students, consciously or subconsciously, begin to
form hypotheses about what the meaning and function of these language
structures are.
*And then at this point, the teacher comes in with a
grammar intervention, to help clarify exactly what a certain structure is, and
how it is used.
I think this type of grammar lesson, a lesson where
the teacher is clarifying a grammar point the students have already had plenty
of exposure to, is going to be more successful than attempting to introduce
something completely new.
So, I’m not saying don’t do grammar in a Young
Learner class, but try to avoid the temptation to make it the main point of the
lesson. And I know this is hard, because
a lot of the textbooks tend to be very grammar focused. But try to make the main point of the lesson
to be exposing the students to the language.
Krashen recommend that the lesson be 80% exposure to language, and only
20% grammar (p.148). I’m not sure
there’s anything magical about that exact percentage. In my own classes, I try to make sure that in
a 90 minute class I spend at least one hour doing language exposure activities and then I might open up the textbook for the last 30 minutes.
Now, there are two qualifications for ideal
comprehensible input.
One is that it has to be comprehensible. Obviously if you’re giving the student input
at a level that is much too difficult for them, it’s not going to do them any
good. It’s like turning on a news radio
program in a completely foreign language.
You can maybe hear the sounds, but you’re not going to be able to absorb
any of the features of the language without understanding the meaning.
The other thing for comprehensible input to be
successful is students have to be engaged with it. If they lose interest, or completely tune
out, then you can give them all the input you want, but they’re not going to
absorb any of it.
Sometimes as teachers we forget how incredibly
cognitively demanding it is for our students to process a foreign
language. I know when I used to study
Khmer lessons, and my Khmer’s not very good, but I used to take lessons at one
point, I could handle about 40 minutes of Khmer lessons before my brain just
felt like it was fried and I couldn’t process anything more.
Or another example: when I lived in Japan I used to attend a church on Sundays. Now my Japanese was a lot better than my Khmer, so I could actually
understand most of the sermon if I concentrated very hard. But it was such an effort for me that after
about 10 minutes my brain would begin to shut off, and then I would just tune
out. So I would sit through a 40 minute
sermon, but only the first 10 minutes of it did me any good in terms of language
exposure. If your brain has switched
off, and you’re not paying attention to the language, and it’s just going in
one ear and out the other, then at that point the input is not doing you any
good.
So, if I’m recommending you spend 1 hour or 80% of
your lesson on comprehensible input, but the student’s brain is going to switch
off after about 10 minutes, then this is going to be a problem. When I first learned about the benefits of extensive reading, I was really pushing my Young Learners to do as
much reading in class as possible. But
they can’t handle much more than about 15 minutes of it at a time, and they
will let you know in no uncertain terms when they have reached their limit. The Young Learners are not shy about telling
you when they are getting bored or burnt out.
So, the idea then is not to use any one source of
input for much more than 10-15 minutes.
And, if your goal is, like me, to use at least the first hour of the
class on comprehensible input activities, then the challenge is to find enough
varied sources of input so you can have enough short activities that will
cumulatively fill up an hour.
So, here’s where it may
be useful to pool our ideas, because I suspect a lot of you have your own
activities you use. But here’s what I’ve
been using in my own classes so far:
Reading Stories
Watching Movies
Listening to Songs
Reading Poems
Telling Jokes
Reading/ Performing
Plays
Students Listening to Teacher
Talking Time
Students Listening to
Each Other
Students Reading Each
Other’s Written Compositions
In my own classes, I use the first 5 things on this
list every lesson. That is every lesson
we read part of a story together, we watch part of a movie together, we listen
to one song, read one poem, and I tell them one joke. And that fills up a whole hour pretty nicely,
often a bit more than an hour. And then
I try to squeeze in some of the textbook in whatever time we have left at the
end.
All of these activities are very just broad ideas,
and there’s a lot of different ways you can implement them. For example, last term we had a whole
separate professional development seminar by XXXXXXXX on just all the different
ways you could use songs in your lessons.
A couple years ago XXXXXXXX did a whole professional development seminar
on all the different ways you could use extensive reading in your
classroom. So for all of these
activities, in terms of how you want to set it up, what you want to emphasize,
what pre and post activities you want to do, there’s pretty much a million different
ways to skin these cats, and you don’t have to do it the way I do it. I’ll just make a few comments about the way I
do them, but you can do them whichever way you want.
Reading stories in class is an activity I picked up
from XXXXX, the former lead teacher. As
I got the activity from XXXXX, the students have a book they are working
through, and in class you read one chapter a lesson. Many ESL books come with a CD or audio files,
so the students can read the story and listen to the audio at the same time,
and that way they’re getting double the amount of input. Also that way, in addition to all the other
benefits of comprehensible input, they are getting input on sound spelling
correspondences.
So, obviously this works best if you can get some
sort of a book with an accompanying CD. However,
if I can’t find a CD or audio file, then I myself will become the human audio,
and I’ll just read the book aloud for the students. That’s not ideal, obviously, because I can’t
do the voice acting as well as the voices on the CD. But it’s better than nothing.
The way I inherited this activity from XXXXX was that
it’s only emphasizing reading for its own enjoyment. So you don’t do any comprehension questions
at the end, because that kills the enjoyment.
You just try to get the students involved in the story for its own
sake. That’s the way XXXXXX told me to
do it. For me personally, I often find
it hard to resist the temptation to do some vocabulary matching with some of
the words from the text. That’s just my
own human weaknesses. But I make sure
any vocabulary sheets I do are before the reading, so the hard work is out of
the way before we start the reading.
Now, obviously this will work best if the story is at
a level the students can understand, and if they’re interested in it. If the story is too difficult for them, or if
they get bored and switch off, it’s going to be off less benefit. The advice I got was, if in doubt, better to
go too easy than too hard. This is where
graded readers come in. A
graded reader is a book designed specifically for ESL students, where the
language and vocabulary has been deliberately simplified to make it
understandable for a student at a low level.
And they’re usually ranked according to level, so you can pick up a
level 1 or a level 6 depending on which level you think your students are
at.
As far as choosing something the students are
interested in, that’s admittedly easier said than done. But something you can do is give them a few
different choices, and have them vote on the one they want to continue. What I often do is on the first day we read
the first chapter of 4 different books, and then they vote as a class on which
book they want to continue. The first
time I did this, I had them listen to 4 chapters straight, and they got very
bored and irritable. This broke my own
rule of limiting only one source of input for 10-15 minutes. After that, I designed survey forms, where in between listening to a chapter of a book, they had to wander around the room and ask other people what they thought about the book. And then if you get them up and moving around
in between, you can actually get through 4 different chapters from 4 different
books, and have them still engaged enough to vote on it at the end.
Now, the benefits of extensive reading are just
enormous. For example, Alan Maley
writes, “Extensive Reading is the single most effective way of acquiring,
sustaining and extending a new language, especially in the field of vocabulary.”
(Alan Maley, An Inconvenient Truth) And this has been confirmed
by all sorts of studies. One of the most
famous ones was in Japan, where there was a group of students who were behind
in English. They did one semester where
they were put into a class where all they did was read books that they liked
and then talked about them, and by the end of the semester their English
ability across all levels, not only reading but also grammar and listening and
speaking, to the point where they had almost caught up with their classmates.
Now, to truly qualify as extensive reading, the
students need to be reading outside of class as well. But reading one chapter a lesson in class is nevertheless
a very good start.
And if you want to encourage your students to read
more outside of class, some teachers I know, like XXXXXXX have designed whole
lessons where they take their classes down to the school library to introduce
them to the library and teach them how to find books they like.
So, that’s reading.
Next on the list is songs.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about
songs, because first of all I think most of us are already familiar with using
songs in the lesson, and secondly, there are a million and one different ways
to use songs, and the way I do it is probably not the most creative. I just do a simple gap-fill worksheet with songs myself. But I do make
it a point to do one song every lesson.
Now, unlike the graded readers, it’s very rare to
find songs that are “graded” for ESL learners.
So, depending on the level of your students, it may be hard to find
songs where the language of the song itself is comprehensible to them. But of course in many songs the rhythm of the
words is more important than their actual meaning, and the students can
definitely notice the rhythm. In this
way, songs can act as a source of input for rhythm, pronunciation, and, if the
students are reading and listening at the same time, for sound-spelling
correspondences.
Actually, speaking of sound-spelling correspondences,
I’ve been noticing that many of our students are mispronouncing words that they
don’t have to mispronounce. For example,
they often pronounce the silent “s” in “island”, the silent “th” in “clothes”,
the silent “b” in “doubt”, and many more.
And the pity is, they don’t have to mispronounce these words. There’s absolutely no first language
interference going on here. They have
the phonetic ability to pronounce these words correctly, but they just
mis-learned the pronunciation of the words because they only encountered these
words in print. This indicates to me
that they’re not getting enough audio input.
And the real pity is that once they’ve learned the
wrong pronunciation of these words, then it becomes fossilized, and it’s very
difficult to correct. So we should do as
much to pre-empt this as we can.
Any activity in which the students are reading and
listening at the same time will help to pre-empt these kind of mistakes—reading
stories and listening to the audio CD at the same time, listening to songs and
reading the lyrics at the same time, watching movies and reading the subtitles
at the same time, listening to the teacher read a poem and following the words
at the same time—all of these activities should help the student get a good
idea of how printed words are supposed to be pronounced. So in that respect song lyrics, and many of
these other activities, could be a useful source of audio input even if the
students don’t understand the meaning of the song as a whole.
Next on the list is movies.
Movies are something I’ve done a complete 180 degree
turn on over the past couple years. I
used to think that kids these days spend too much time watching computer
screens anyway, and I decided that in my class they were going to interact with
real people and read real books for once.
But I’ve come around on this one once I noticed the great capacity
movies have to fully engage students’ attention. You notice this on the last day of class,
when the Young Learner students are pleading with you to watch a movie for the
whole 90 minutes. These kids can’t
concentrate on the reading for much more than 15 minutes at a time, but they’ll
happily sit through a whole 90 minute movie during the class.
I’m the same way actually. I can’t read for much more than 20 minutes without getting restless,
but I can watch TV for hours and hours. There’s just something about movies where
normal attention span rules don’t apply.
Not only that, but movies are so great for learning a
language because of all the visual support built into it. If you don’t understand a vocabulary word or
a particular grammar structure, you have a fair chance of figuring out the
general meaning anyway just by watching the visuals, and then maybe you can
even learn new vocabulary and grammar from this.
So, I’ve completely come around on this issue, and
decided that maybe 10 or 15 minutes of a movie every lesson isn’t such a bad
thing.
I think ideally you want to find a movie that has
subtitles, so the students can read and listen at the same time. And you want to find something that is
interesting for them, so they’ll be motivated to want to understand the
English. Again, maybe give them some
choices and let them vote.
As with all these other activities, there are a
million ways to skin this cat depending on how many activities you want to set
up around the movie. Perhaps the best
way would just to be to let the students watch it for enjoyment. In my own case, though, I’ve been unable to resist
the temptation to design some worksheets around it . So after the movie finishes, I’ll pick out
maybe 10 sentences of dialogue from the movie—sentences which I think are
roughly at about the comprehensible level of my students—and draw their
attention to those sentences after the movie finishes.
Then, for the next lesson, I design a worksheet to
help them review that section of the movie from the previous class. (The transcripts for most movies are
available on line at sites like www.imsdb.com, and I’ve found these
to be very useful.)
Next, poems. This is an idea I got indirectly from Adrian Underhill in Sound Foundations. He recommends using poems to teach the
pronunciation of English, focusing on things like rhythm and intonation. I actually don’t do any pronunciation
activities around the poems. In my class
we just read one poem a day, and I’m hoping that the exposure to poems will
subconsciously help the students to acquire some rhythm and pronunciation. And even if it doesn’t, then it’s still more
good comprehensible input. (Young
Learners especially have a limited capacity to consciously study things like
rhythm, intonation, word-stress, and stress patterns, but if they’re given enough
exposure to English they can subconsciously pick up a lot of this stuff on
their own.) I - personally - have - had - great - luck - doing - a - lot - of - Shel - Silverstein - poems. The - students - really
seem to enjoy those, and they get a good laugh out of them, which tells me
they’re understanding them. Roald Dahl
also - works - very - well.
And then jokes.
I’ve accumulated a list of 30 jokes to get me through a term of Young Learners, and I tell them one joke a class.
I’d be happy to share them with anyone interested. Or you can find your own just as
easily. Some of them are riddles, where
I write the question on the board, get them to try to guess the answer, and
then finally give them the answer if they can’t get it. Some of them are short stories, which I try
to act out or tell with visuals. Most of
them are real groaners, because the puns have to be very obvious for the Young
Learner student to get it, but the point again is comprehensible input.
Another thing you can do is have the students read
and act out plays in class. There are a
whole bunch of plays for ESL students already on line. For example, the British Council has a lot of
plays on their website. I’ve had good luck using their “Jack and the Beanstalk” play with my young learner classes. Now, this is much more active,
because they’re not only reading these plays, they’re reading and acting them
out. But it’s still great comprehensible
input.
Next is teacher talking time. Now, this is a bit more controversial,
because many of us are taught in our CELTA or TEFL courses that teacher talking
time is a bad thing, and should be minimized as much as possible. But I’d encourage you not to take that as
dogma, because it’s actually a debatable point.
If exposing students to plenty of comprehensible input in the classroom
is a valuable goal, then the teacher can actually be a very good source of
comprehensible input.
As Krashen says: “[during a grammar lesson] teacher
talk is actually more valuable [than the actual grammar point] ! When we “just talk” to our students, if
they understand, we are not only giving a language lesson, we may be giving
the best possible language lesson since we will be supplying input for
acquisition.” (Krashen, Terrell p. 35)
But students can not only learn from listening to the
teacher. They can also learn from
listening to each other.
Students talking to other students has both
advantages and disadvantages. The
obvious disadvantage is that the input is flawed, because the students’ speech
will not be perfectly grammatically correct.
An advantage, however, is that assuming all of the students are roughly
the same level of proficiency, they should do a good job of supplying input to
each other that is completely comprehensible to their classmates. Obviously student to student input shouldn’t
be the only source of input in the classroom, but it can be one source.
I recommend it with one caveat however. Many of our Young Learner students,
particularly the lower levels, are reluctant to speak a lot in English—either
because of low ability, or because of the extreme shyness that’s natural around
that age. If you have a class that’s
unwilling or unable to produce, you may find a lot of activities that revolve
around students talking to each other will either not work, or immediately
revert to Khmer, and become a waste of time.
In those classes, I might do less group speaking activities then. It just depends on the individual class as to
how well student to student interaction is going to work. You may have to feel them out on it. Also, Krashen makes a good point: “Younger
acquirers also tend to exhibit a longer silent period. A serious problem is thus created by trying
to force production before a wide range of listening comprehension has been
done,” (Krashen, Terrell p. 179)
Another idea for students to provide input for each
other is for them to read each other’s written texts. As with every other activity on this list,
there’s many different ways you could go about this depending on what you want
them to write about, how they share it, et cetera. It also depends on whether they read the
original text that their classmates wrote, or a cleaned up version provided by
the teacher. Student writing is great
because, as with student speaking, it is guaranteed to be at just the right
level of comprehensibility for their classmates. But if you want to provide them with clean
input, you can re-type the essay yourself, correcting all the errors, but still
maintaining the same flavor and basic level.
This is obviously quite labour intensive on the
teacher’s part, so I only do it once a term.
But it can be great fun as a class project. I typically get all the students writing on
the same task, and then share their writing with each other, or post it on a website where it gets shared with the larger world.
So, those are all my ideas. Now, let’s hear what your ideas are.
Footnotes/Disclaimers
1). The text of the
speech printed above represents what I intended to say, more than it does what
I actually said. I cut some points out
because of time consideration, and also I ad-libbed a bit.
2). I’ve also edited
this slightly for the blog version. I
cut out all references to specific textbooks used at my school, and specific
lessons from these textbooks. Because it
would not be of interest to anyone outside of my city, I’ve also cut out
references to where graded readers could be purchased in Phnom Penh. Also, in the interest of privacy, I’ve
removed the names of other people from this text. However, lest I take credit for ideas that
were not my own, I wanted to be clear about where I was borrowing ideas from
co-workers. So I didn’t remove the
sentences, but just replaced their names with XXXXX.
3). I’ve borrowed a lot from
Krashen here, but I should be clear that Krashen would not agree with me
completely on this. Krashen believes the
ideal classroom should focus 80% on Comprehensible Input, and 20% on conscious
grammar instruction (as do I), but Krashen believes that the 20% conscious
grammar instruction will never aid true acquisition. Instead, Krashen believes consciously studied
grammar rules will exist in a separate part of the brain—the part of the brain
that can be called upon to consciously monitor grammar rules (what Krashen
calls “the monitor”)—and will never become truly acquired language.
I, on the other hand, am making the assumption that
conscious grammar focused instruction can speed up acquisition if it comes at
the right time—i.e. if it comes when these forms are beginning to emerge in the
student’s interlanguage. So I’m taking
Krashen’s theory of Comprehensible Input for my starting point, but not for my
ending point.
4). Actually, referring to the
above point, I probably shouldn’t have phrased it as if it were my original
idea. I’m fairly sure this is more or
less the standard assumption in TESOL these days, although I’m unsure of who to
credit it with at the moment. So I’ll
make a disclaimer: if you don’t like it, it’s my own idea. If you like it, it’s standard TESOL theory,
and I’m just borrowing it.
5). So, the theory here is that
Comprehensible Input is the first step to get the students familiar with the
grammatical forms, and then conscious grammar instruction is useful only once
these forms have started to emerge in the students’ inter-language.
The obvious problem with this, however, is that the
order of grammatical forms studied in the textbook might not match the order of
the students’ acquisition. And even if
it did, all the students in the class will be acquiring at a slightly different
rate.
The solution to this comes from Rod Ellis, who recommends that even if students aren’t yet ready to produce
certain grammatical forms, these grammatical forms can still be taught for
comprehension.
In the early drafts of this speech, this point was
also part of my presentation. I felt
that many of the grammar points in the textbooks for young learners were beyond
their current level of acquisition, so I wanted to encourage my colleagues to
teach these points for comprehension only, and not push the students to produce
them.
This would have then fed back into the theory of
comprehensible input—teaching grammar points for comprehension has the
potential to help the students notice these points in future comprehensible
input, which in turn would aid in their acquisition. On the assumption, of course, that any
grammatical instruction was in the context of a constant stream of comprehensible
input that the students were continually exposed to. (Otherwise, the students would simply do the
grammar exercises in class, and then promptly forget about it the next
day. It’s only in the context of continually
exposure to comprehensible input that teaching grammar points for comprehension
makes any sense, I believe.)
However, this point was dropped from the
presentation. It was too much
information, I decided, to also include the theory of the order of acquisition
(W), and Rod Ellis’s ideas about teaching grammar points for
comprehension. Much better to just stick
to one main point.
6). In the above text, I put in
references where I could. But as this
was not strictly speaking an academic paper, I didn’t worry about it when I
couldn’t find a reference or couldn’t remember a reference.
The point about how most language acquisition takes
place subconsciously is something I’m fairly sure I read in the past couple
years, but I went back through all my old books on language acquisition, and I couldn’t find the reference anywhere. I included the point in my presentation anyway
because it makes intuitive sense to me—there’s just way too many features of
language for them all to be consciously studied and memorized.
The study about the Japanese students improving their
English scores only through extensive reading is one that had been anecdotally
been making the rounds of our staffroom for a while (among my colleagues who are
big advocates of extensive reading). I
actually tracked down an official reference to that study at one point when I
was writing this piece on the Benefits of Extensive Reading for my students, but I could not now remember where I found it, and so I left it
unreferenced in the above text.
I’ve also included in my references material from the
Distance Delta (Focus on the Young Learner).
This is material that is published in-house by the Distance Delta for
their course, and I don’t believe it is freely available to the general public.
1 comment:
Updated version of this workshop:
http://joelswagman.blogspot.com/2017/10/input-workshop-upgrading-your-input.html
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