Big Questions in ELT
By Scott Thornbury
A round publication
www.the-round.com
Copyright © 2013 Scott Thornbury
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Cover design by Mark Bain
Illustrated by Piet Lüthi
Edited by Alison Silver
Thanks
….to Piet Lüthi for the illustrations. Big thanks, too, to Lindsay and Luke for initiating and shaping this idea. Very special thanks to my editor Alison Silver for her expertise, insight and enthusiasm.
And thanks to all those who have contributed to my blog over the years. Without your comments this book would not have been possible.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Guardian News & Media Ltd for permission to reproduce an extract from an article by J. Foer.
Contents
Introduction 7
1 How many words do learners need to know? 8
2 Why are some learners unwilling to communicate? 12
3 Are there different learning styles? 16
4 Is the use of the learners’ mother tongue a good idea? 20
5 Where do errors come from? 24
6 Is language learning all in the mind? 28
7 What is the best age to start? 32
8 What is fluency and how do you teach it? 36
9 Should we push our learners? 40
10 Why focus on form? 43
11 What is scaffolding and how do you do it? 47
12 Is there a best method? 52
13 Is there anything wrong with rote learning? 56
14 What makes an activity ‘communicative’? 60
15 How do you achieve ‘flow’ in your teaching? 64
16 How does identity impact on language learning? 68
17 How do you get a ‘feel’ for a second language? 72
18 Can you learn a language if you’re not paying attention? 76
19 Do rules help you learn a language? 80
20 How do you teach reactively? 84
21 Is practice good and what is good practice? 88
Introduction
For two years now I’ve been regularly blogging about ELT-related issues that have caught my attention. The topics have been loosely organized around the format of an encyclopaedic dictionary I’d published previously, called An A-Z of ELT. I’ve since clocked up over a hundred posts that in turn have attracted thousands of comments comprising I don’t know how many tens of thousands of words.
A couple of things that have emerged from this ‘long conversation’ are: (1) the same issues come round and round, and (2) they are often framed as questions.
The issues tend to relate to my ‘other’ life as advocate of a Dogme approach to ELT teaching, i.e. the use of minimal materials so as to free up the classroom space (and the cognitive space) in order to allow student-initiated learning opportunities to arise naturally.
That the issues are framed as questions is partly due to the fact that there are still no answers to many of the concerns that exercise us, and partly because, in my teaching and in my training, I favour dialogue over monologue, and dialogue – almost by definition – entails asking questions.
Like many things online, the blog has started to become a little unwieldy, especially for new visitors, so I figured it was time to condense some of the issues and some of the questions into a friendlier format, taking a handful of the original entries as my starting point, re-working them a little to take into account the conversations that evolved online, and presenting them in the form of Big Questions.
Each Big Question, therefore, has been generated from one of the original blog posts (and I’ve thrown in a couple of new ones for good measure) and each entry is rounded off by a number of subsidiary questions – the offspring, if you like, of the Big Questions. These questions are designed as an aid to reflection (for the individual reader), or, in a training context, as a way of framing a discussion or workshop. In a sense, they are a means of re-activating, and continuing, the online conversations that the original blog posts triggered.
And, if you want to see how those conversations evolved, I’ve provided links to the original articles.
1 How many words do learners need to know?
In a recent article in The Guardian, Joshua Foer (2012) describes how he learned Lingala (a trade language of sub-Saharan Africa), and discovered the value of having a critical mass of vocabulary:
It goes without saying that memorizing the 1,000 most common words in Lingala, French or Chinese is not going to make anyone a fluent speaker. That would have been an unrealistic goal. But it turns out to be just enough vocabulary to let you hit the ground running once you’re authentically immersed in a language.
This reminded me of the anecdote that opens an article I wrote on the lexical approach (Thornbury 1998: 7):
A New Zealand friend of mine who is studying Maori asked me recently what I, as a language teacher, would make of his teacher’s method: ‘We just do masses of words – around a theme, for example, family, or food, etc. We have to learn these words before the next lesson. Then we come back and have a conversation – about family, food, etc., and we use the words. The teacher feeds in the grammar that we need to stick the words together.’ He added that he thought the method worked a treat. This contrasted markedly with my own experience of learning Maori, where the teacher took great pains to lead us, discrete step by discrete step, through the intricacies of Maori grammar. The net result, I suspect, is that my friend’s Maori is a lot better than mine …
Is there any (non-anecdotal) evidence that fast-tracking vocabulary acquisition provides a platform for subsequent language development? And, if so, how many – and which – words constitute a ‘critical mass’?
Certainly, it seems that having a large vocabulary is a pre-requisite for proficiency in the receptive skills. As Bhatia Laufer (1997: 31) puts it: ‘By far the greatest lexical obstacle to good reading is insufficient number of words in the learner’s lexicon. [In research studies] lexis was found to be the best predictor of success in reading, better than syntax or general reading ability.’
How many words, then, are sufficient to push learners over the threshold, beyond which texts start to make sense? In the 1990s, the bar was set at around 90 percent, i.e. comfortable reading could be achieved if 90 percent of the words in any given text were familiar to the reader. Ninety percent represents a receptive vocabulary of around 3,000 words. Since then, the figure has crept inexorably upward. But the target still seems achievable.
For example, Eldridge et al. (2010: 82) investigated the vocabulary needs of learners who are studying school subjects in a second language, and found that the evidence ‘suggests a distinct lexical threshold of around 1,600–1,700 of the most frequent word families.’ (A word family is a group of words that share the same root but have different affixes, as in care, careful, careless, carefree, uncaring, carer; 1,600 to 1,700 word families represent around 6,000 individual words.) They add that ‘students who fall even 200 or 300 word families below the threshold seem to have a vastly reduced vocabulary in total and consequently find it extremely difficult to cope with content studies in the medium of English.’
Setting the bar at even 2,000 word families means learning 20 word families a week over two years, starting from zero: a daunting task, but not an impossible one.
Nor a thankless one. There are grounds for believing that vocabulary size may be a relia
ble predictor, not just of reading proficiency, but of linguistic competence overall. Certainly, in first language acquisition, the processes of vocabulary development and grammar emergence are closely intertwined, with the former possibly driving the latter. Tomasello (2003: 93), for example, cites research that shows that ‘only after children have vocabularies of several hundred words [do] they begin to produce in earnest grammatical speech’, which suggests to him ‘that learning words and learning grammatical constructions are both part of the same overall process’.
Joshua Foer’s experience (ibid.) would seem to corroborate this view:
[a] basic vocabulary gives you a scaffolding to which you can attach other words as you hear them. It also lays down the raw data from which you can begin to detect the patterns that define a language’s grammar. As I memorized words in Lingala, I started to notice that there were relationships between them. The verb to work is kosala. The noun for work is mosala. A tool is esaleli. A workshop is an esalelo. At first, this was all white noise to me. But as I packed my memory with more and more words, these connections started to make sense and I began to notice the same grammatical formulas elsewhere – and could even pick them up in conversation.
All in all, this suggests that the learner needs to assemble as big a lexicon as possible, and as soon as possible – even if this means putting other areas of language learning, such as the learning of grammar, ‘on hold’.
The idea is not new. Over two decades ago, Henry Widdowson (1990: 95) challenged the then current (and still current) pedagogical approach whereby grammatical structures are taught first, and vocabulary is slotted into them: ‘I would suggest that the more natural and more effective approach would be to reverse this traditional pedagogic dependency, begin with lexical items and show how they need to be grammatically modified to be communicatively effective.’
At around the same time, research using language corpora was highlighting the combinatory power, and ultimate learning potential, of grammar words (or functors), such as auxiliaries, determiners, prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions. As Sinclair and Renouf (1988: 155) pointed out, ‘English makes excessive use, e.g. through phrasal verbs, of its most frequent words, and so they are well worth learning.’ And they add, ‘verb tenses, for example, which are often the main organizing feature of a course, are combinations of some of the commonest words in the language.’
This suggests to me that there are two ‘vocabularies’ that the learners need to acquire: the 6,000+ high-frequency lexical words (and chunks) that provide the threshold into fluency, and the 150 or so common functors that cement these lexical words together.
Questions for discussion
1. Have you had a language learning experience that confirms Foer’s intuitions about the value of a core vocabulary?
2. If lack of sufficient vocabulary is the main impediment to reading fluency, what are the implications, for the teacher of reading, on materials choice and task design?
3. What approaches could you use to teach word families (as opposed to individual words)?
4. What are the implications for course design and methodology of reversing the traditional order of grammar first, then vocabulary?
5. Widdowson talks about showing how words ‘need to be grammatically modified to be communicatively effective’. How would you go about doing this?
6. Frequency is commonly mentioned as a criterion for vocabulary selection. What other criteria are there? Is there a case for letting the learners decide which words to learn?
7. If verb tenses are simply combinations of high-frequency words, is there really such a thing as grammar at all (as distinct from vocabulary)? If not, what does this suggest about the way grammar could be taught?
8. In the article it is recommended that learners acquire the 6,000+ high-frequency lexical words (and chunks) that provide the threshold into fluency’. What do you understand by ‘chunks’ and how do these contribute to fluency?
References
Foer. J. (2012) ‘How I learned a language in 22 hours’, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/09/learn-language-in-three-months?CMP=twt_gu.
Eldridge, J., Neufeld, S. and Hancioğlu, N. (2010) ‘Towards a lexical framework for CLIL’, International CLIL Research Journal: http://www.icrj.eu/13–75.
Laufer, B. (1997) ‘The lexical plight in second language reading’, in Coady, J. and Huckin, T. (eds) Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Rationale for Pedagogy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sinclair, J. McH. and Renouf, A. (1988) ‘A lexical syllabus for language learning’, in Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (eds) Vocabulary and Language Teaching, London: Longman.
Thornbury, S. (1998) ‘The Lexical Approach: A journey without maps?’, Modern English Teacher, 7 (4), 7.
Tomasello, M. (2003) Constructing a Language, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Widdowson, H. G. (1990) Aspects of Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/v-is-for-vocabulary-size/
2 Why are some learners unwilling to communicate?
A communicative approach, or a task-based one, or a Dogme one, all presuppose a willingness to communicate on the part of the learner. But what if they don’t communicate? Or won’t? Not surprisingly, therefore, a question that comes up regularly in discussions about communicative language teaching is: ‘What do you do in the event that many of the learners in the classroom refuse to speak?’
But before we can address that question, we need to know why: why are some learners unwilling to communicate? There are at least three likely sources of learner reticence: a social-cultural one, a psychological one, and a linguistic one, and I will deal with each in turn.
Accepting the need to speak assumes that the learner has been socialized into a classroom culture that places a premium on active vocal participation. But this may seem strange to some learners who come from educational backgrounds where the teacher does all the talking. If, in their previous learning experience, there is little or no precedent for the kinds of informal discussions that are the stock-in-trade of most coursebooks, they are not likely to take the initiative in pair- or groupwork, or even to respond to the initiatives of others. So there is a fair amount of training and demystification needed, as to the role and purposes of such classroom talk. The teacher needs the learners’ consent, and this might have to be negotiated.
Teachers, too, may need to reconsider their own role here. A ‘talking culture’ assumes that the learners are given the space to talk, which in turn assumes that their teachers might have to relinquish some of their traditional control. In an article in the ELT Journal (2010) Xiaoyan Xie uses transcripts of classroom interactions in Chinese contexts to demonstrate how the teachers’ interaction style – including their dogged control of the discourse, their inflexible adherence to the lesson plan, and their failure to engage with learners’ contributions at any level other than in terms of accuracy – contributes to students’ reticence. She concludes:
The findings suggest that the teachers should relax their control and allow the students more freedom to choose their own topics so as to generate more opportunities for them to participate in classroom interaction. Doing so might foster a classroom culture that is more open to students’ desire to explore the language and topics that do not necessarily conform to the rigid bounds of the curriculum and limited personal perspectives of the teachers (2010: 19).
At the same time, this assumes a common denominator of shared community, a community of practice in which the learners all feel themselves to be members, with the rights and duties that such membership entails. This means the teacher needs to work, initially, on creating – and then sustaining – a productive classroom dynamic. Managing groups – including understanding, registering and facilitating their internal workings – is probably one of the teacher’s most important fu
nctions.
But, whatever the classroom dynamic, there will still be learners who feel an acute threat to ‘face’ at the thought of speaking in another language. It’s not just a question of making mistakes, it’s the ‘infantilization’ associated with speaking in a second language – the sense that one’s identity is threatened because of an inability to manage and fine-tune one’s communicative intentions. As Harder (1980) argues, ‘the learner is not free to define his [sic] place in the ongoing [L2] interaction as he would like; he has to accept a role which is less desirable than he could ordinarily achieve’. Or, as he more memorably puts it: ‘In order to be a wit in a foreign language you have to go through the stage of being a half-wit – there is no other way.’
Harder goes on to argue that silence is the logical outcome of this role reduction: the alternative to silence, for the second language learner, might often be the socially unacceptable (because painfully disruptive) and potentially humiliating negotiation of meaning involved in using communication strategies to get one’s meaning across. If students followed the advice given by those who promote ‘good learner strategies’, such as that learners should persist in attempting to communicate at all costs, they will likely come across as either ‘a pest or a simpleton’. ‘Most learners will probably, in deciding what to say (if anything) have a sort of cut-off point for the reduction [of personality] they will tolerate, below which silence is preferable. Instead of seeing silence as the extreme point on the scale of message reduction, it can also be seen as the alternative to it.’
This, to me, raises the (painful) question as to whether it might not be better to have students practise speaking in the context of rather banal, game-type activities, in which they have no personal investment so they can at least have the experience of communicating (and perhaps even get better at it), but without the inhibitory threat to self-esteem involved in trying to be ‘one’s real self’.
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