From classroom noise to the language of learning

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

ELTpics, @sandymillin,
 "Old School Room, Beamish Museum."
Feb 9, 2012  via Flicker,
Creative Commons Attribution

Over the past few years I’ve noticed that my lower-level students fall into two broad categories: beginners with minimal exposure to English and beginners who have had exposure, but don’t have the study skills or language learning strategies to take input and turn it into intake.  When I use the term input, I am referring to all language to which a learner is exposed, either in or out of class.  Intake, as a term, is a bit more difficult to get a handle on, but here I’m using Kumaravadivelu’s (2006) definition in which intake is a subset of input, “that has been fully or partially processed by learners, and fully or partially assimilated into their developing I[nter] L[anguage system. (p. 28)” 

This is all kind of vague, so let me give a concrete example, I have one student, A-kun who attended middle school classes regularly, passed his English exams (although was by no means a stand out student), has a working vocabulary of roughly 300 words and struggles to put together even the most basic sentence when engaging in communicative activities.  I have another student, let’s call her B-chan, who, do to personal issues, was able to attend middle school only sporadically and functions basically at the same level as A-kun.  They are both beginners and both need exposure to basically the same level of English.  But I find that A-kun, regardless of the types of efforts he makes in class, continues to show extremely slow progress when it comes to developing his inter language system.  B-chan shows the kind of sharp gains that is typical of a beginning language student.  Arguably, what I need to do is find out what is hindering A-Kun’s development while continuing to provide opportunities for B-chan to keep studying.  In order to find out what types of learning strategies and study skills A-kun is missing, as well as to help B-chan develop even more comprehensive learning strategies, I’ve come up with the following activities to help me identify students like A-kun and give them the little bit of extra attention they need to become more effective learners:

1. One Word Inference:  Here is an example of a paragraph I’ve used in class:
 

I lived on a small island near Okinawa for three years.  To go from my own island to the nearest (１番近い) island, I took a small boat with only one sail.  Even though it only had one sail, when the wind was strong, the boat moved very quickly.

Most of the students know all of the words in the paragraph, but they do not know ‘sail’ and might also might not know ‘nearest’.  But I want to keep the activity as focused as possible, so I supply the meaning of ‘nearest.’  I ask the students to read the paragraph and write down what the word ‘sail’ means.  For A-Kun, an unknown is a brick wall in a middle of a text.  He does not pick up the textual clues to infer meaning.  This means that if he doesn’t have a dictionary on hand, the word ‘sail’ is just so many lines on a piece of paper.  Once I know inferring is an issue with A-kun, I can give him a paragraph like the one above twice a week to develop inferring skills.
 

2. Dictionary race: I give the students a list of 5 sentences, each one containing a high frequency word which I’m pretty sure they do not know.  For example, “My brother was accepted to Tokyo University in April.”  Then I ask them to look up the words in a dictionary and write the sample sentence which most closely resembles the one on their worksheet.  Not all, but many of my students do not know how to use a dictionary.  I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time forcing students who do know how to use a dictionary to sit through a dictionary use lesson.  But in this activity, students who do know how to use a dictionary get exposure to new vocabulary and I can identify the students who need to stay after school for an hour of dictionary use training.

 

3. Word use report: All my students keep a word list and are required to add 25 high frequency words to the list per week.  But I found that many of my students wrote the words down on the list, studied them and promptly forgot them.  So for the first month or so of class, I started having students keep a tally of the number of times that they came across the words on their list in or out of class during a week.  All they have to do is draw a hash mark next to the word on their list each time they encounter it.  This helps me identify students who haven’t figured out the importance of looking for chances to take note of and reinforce language learned in the classroom.  Students whose word list is littered with hash marks are good to go.  Those who don’t have many (or in some cases any) hash marks get a bit of one-on-on time to practice noticing their developing vocabulary when working with spoken or written texts.

 

4. Note rewriting time and (very) short tests: if I do a guided discovery activity in class, for example uses of have vs. there is/are, I make sure to give the students a few minutes to rewrite their class notes at the end of the activity.  The next lesson I give a very short test during which time students can use their notes.  I don’t just grade the short test, but compare a student’s answers with their rewritten class notes.  For my students, many of whom have had limited classroom experience, often times they can understand the language point explored in class, but don’t know how to put their knowledge in a form which is useful for later studying.  When I give the test results back, I can go over their answers and their notes and help them notice aspects of the language that they might have understood in class, but failed to write down in their notebook.

 

5. Free talk using class notes and translation assistance: This is a 10 minute free speaking activity broken down into two sections.  During the activity, students are free to use their lesson notes and each student also has a pad of PostIt Notes.  If they want to say something, but don’t know how, they can write what they want to say in Japanese on the PostIt Note and hand it to me.  I write out a translation in English.  During the first five minutes of the activity, students talk in pairs.  The second five minutes, the students talk as a class.  I write down everything that is said during the class discussion.  During this time I can see if students are trying to use the language that they have been working with in class.  B-chan type students will often use and recycle classroom language.  They also copy their PostIt note translations into their vocabulary notebooks.  A-Kun type students make much less use of their notes and often times hand me PostIt notes with the same phrases two or three times over the course of a week.  When this happens, I can just gently nudge A-Kun to keep the PostIt Notes in his vocabulary notebook and ask him to add the phrases or sentences to his word list.  Over time, A-kun starts to rely more and more on his notes and less and less on me or my co-teacher.

 

6. Ambiguous Picture activity: this is an activity I got from Penny Ur and Andrew Wright’s Five Minute Activities.  I start by writing up a partial picture of something, say an apple with a bite taken out of it.  Students write down what they think it is in English.  Then I fill in a few more lines of the picture and students once again write down what they think the picture is.  For every step in the picture, they are encouraged to write down one guess.  They are also free to use their dictionaries during this activity.  There are a number of students who will simply not write down a guess unless they are certain what the word is.  This activity helps me identify low risk taking students.  I find students who will not write down a guess are also the students who have a hard time bringing themselves to speak unless they are able to formulate a complete sentence before they talk.  Especially in a class of lower level students, if I have a fair number of low risk takers, I will throw in a few activities to help students practice circumlocutions and augmenting conversation with gestures. 

7. 10 loan words: this is an activity to help me gauge if lower-level learner are using their full language resources.  First I have each student think of 10 English loan words in Japanese.  They then form pairs and together, check off any of the words on their lists which they think would be understandable if used as is in an English conversation.  Finally, they consult a dictionary to see which of their guesses were correct.  While there are a number of false friend loan words, or words whose meaning differ significantly in Japanese and English, many of the English loan words can be used in conversation.  This activity not only helps students quickly build up their vocabulary, but also shows them that they know more English than they think they do and provides them with a dash of confidence.

 

A few years ago I attended a keynote address by Paul Nation in which he identified a teacher’s main jobs.  Teaching language was ranked fifth out of the five things a teacher needed to do, two steps behind, “to train learners in language learning strategies so that they are encouraged to be independent in their learning.”  But to train my students, I often find that I need to start by evaluating if they have the most basic of study skills.  To tell the truth, sometimes, in the middle of a class, I feel like I’m a conductor forever practicing the same one piece of music with my orchestra.  But if that’s how I feel, I imagine it’s probably worse for my students.  For many of them, each class must seem like an hour of tuning up with no chance to truly play a song.  But if I do my job right, if I help students learn how to use a dictionary, take proper class notes, and learn to notice and recycle vocabulary learned in class, then even students like A-Kun can start to develop the skills needed to take the noise of input, and smooth it out enough to become the music of intake.

Tech for Tech's Sake

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I have about 15 minutes to write a post before I head off to the airport to meet one of students who is, even as I write this, winging her way back to Japan.  She’s spent the past year in Australia, shopping at the super marker just across from the Australian campus, eating dinner with her home stay family, heading up to the gold coast for Friday surfing lessons.  English is the language she breathes as she moves from day to day.  But not all my students are so lucky.  Most of them are trying to learn English here in Japan.  If I chat with my students on the train after school, we invite a certain amount of scrutiny, the stares falling on us like tiny hammers.  It can take a lot of courage to use English here in Japan.

Lately there have been a number of presentations at conferences and blog posts about how technology is a tool, how it should meet the needs of the students and enhance what happens in the classroom.  Most people seem to be of the opinion that tech for tech's sake isn’t very useful.  But what if you really have no idea how students are going to react to a new web site or novel ways to explore English with their smart-phones until you give them the space to try it out in class? 

For the past three years I’ve been working with my students to develop their vocabulary through the use of vocab cards and vocabulary note books.  I was pretty much of the opinion that opening up a notebook and dashing down a word, a meaning, and a sample sentence was the easiest way to go.  A notebook doesn’t run out of batteries, you don’t have to find a hot-spot, you can hand a friend your notebook and quiz each other.  I couldn’t see how spending class time to get the students to learn and use Quizlet, the on-line flash card site, could further the goals of the program.  But after reading some posts by Sandy Millin and catching a Tweet from Leo Selivan、I decided to give it a try. 

I wrote up a set of 24 words drawn from Paul Nation’s modified General Service List, booked an hour of computer lab time, and then spent the time necessary to introduce the site to the students.  This meant that I had to watch as students sweated over their username (because a username to a high school student is absolutely not an easily remembered combination of their first and last name, but an expression of personal identity) or forgot to check and fill in certain boxes insuring they had to start over again.  Halfway through the 20 minutes it took to get every student signed up, I had decided that this was a terrible mistake.  And once students started working with the card set, I didn’t change my mind much.  Most of the students ignored the sample sentences, which I had checked against COCA to ensure I was using the vocab in a way that might actually be useful.  They would listen to the word pronounced once by activating sound, but once they thought they had gotten the pronunciation, they basically ignored the sound in general.  I spent some time working with individual students to help them use shadowing techniques when using and listening to the cards.  But if I really wanted the students to get more out of Quizlet, I realized I would have to book at least another hour or two in the computer room.  Vocabulary notebooks and word cards in conjunction with electronic dictionaries with a pronunciation button were looking pretty good to me.

But then one of my students, S-chan, suddenly shouted out, “I got 100%.”  She had just taken a Quizlet test on the word cards she had been studying.  In all the chaos of getting students logged on to the system and struggling to get them to use the site more effectively, I hadn’t noticed S-chan working her way through the cards.  She had her headphones on and had been completely silent.  Maybe that’s why she shouted so loudly.  I watched as she pulled out her cell phone and snap a picture of the computer screen.  “I’m sending this to my mom,” she said.  She said it to the whole class.  She said it to herself.  And she said it with a kind of joy she rarely shows in class.

I’m not sure that S-Chan’s 100% success makes using Quizlet 100% worthwhile.  But it made me rethink why I should or should not use tech in my classroom.  Sure, I have ideas of what I want to see happen in my classroom.  But those goals and my ideas for class are like the lopsided world maps of early cartographers.  We never quite manage to sail over the sea of learning the way I think we will.  My learners chose what and when they learn.  For some of them, tech is going to give them the best chance they have for learning.  Whether I think the tech enhances what happens in class or complements my goals is superfluous.  So maybe there is a case to be made for using tech for tech's sake.  Not all the time.  But sometimes.  Maybe all that wasted time with passwords and broken internet connects and the like can be worth it.

I’m going to meet my student at the airport in 10 minutes and counting.  English was the language she breathed for the past year.  But not all my students are that lucky.  Tech for tech’s sake.  In an EFL environment like Japan, maybe there is no such thing as tech for tech’s sake.  Every new site, every way to explore language or get exposed to English in different ways has a value that can’t be measured in what I see as wasted class minutes.  Maybe for some of my students, tech might mean learning.

Praise for an in-service and big comfy chairs

Right before summer vacation, my school network held a three day in-service for teachers.  It was nice.  We got to sit in big, soft leather chairs which spun around when you pushed off from the desk.  The air-conditioning was on and the room was cool.  And everyone was willing to toss around some of the ideas they had been trying out in their classrooms.  So when I wasn’t spinning around in my chair, I was taking notes and wanted to post a few of the gems I picked up.  Here they are, along with a big shout out to the teachers who gave me their gracious permission to post their ideas here. 

Shadowing dialogues: At our school we never let students read off a page.  Instead, students are encouraged to always read, think, look up, and speak.  Basically, as Michael West has said, the point is to make a connection of language, “not from book to mouth, but from book to brain, and then from brain to mouth.” (Michael West in Nation, P. 2009. pp. 66-67)  The process also lets students gain a greater awareness of sense groups and natural breaks within sentences.  But Antonio, one of the teachers at our Tokyo campus, noticed that his students were getting a little bored with the same old same old read/think/look up/speak process, so he added a shadowing component.  Students would form groups of four.  While two of the students were practicing the dialogue, the other two students would try and shadow what was being said.  After practicing the dialogue a few times, all the students would change roles.  Often students are so focused on what they are supposed to say during a dialogue practice that they aren’t really listening to what their partner is saying.  Throwing in a shadowing component to dialogue practice helped make sure that students were engaged in a reading/speaking/listening 3-skill activity.

Error Correction for written work: After a student has completed a written assignment, give them time to underline anything that they feel is off or might be a mistake.  When correcting the paper, only correct those parts of the text which the student has identified as a possible error.  If there are any other errors, you can underline them, but do not correct them.  This was an idea from Joel, a teacher in our Yokohama Campus.  He uses this style of error correction as a type of awareness raising activity.  If the students are aware of a problem within their own writing, Joel feels that they will have a better chance of making a connection between what they wrote and the target form and there’s a better chance that they would be able learn the form.  And by underlining other errors, he primes them to notice similar errors during the next writing assignment.

Story Jigsaw (Sadistic Version): This is an activity which should only be used after students have worked with a text for a while and gotten pretty familiar with it.  Students form groups of three or four.  They pick one paragraph from the text and using lined paper, write one sentence per line.  Then they cut up the paragraph, shuffle the sentences, and give it to another group.  At this point it is just a simple jigsaw activity and each group must put the paragraph they received in the right order. But once they have put the paragraph in the right order, they are then allowed to pick up the strips of paper, mix them up, and lay them at various angles over each other, obscuring a number of words in the process.  The original group then has to try, without moving the strips of paper, to say the entire paragraph. 

I’m a reporter.  I have to ask questions: We use a text called “Stories for Young Readers” (Kinney, R. and Kinney, D. 2003) It’s filled with very short (~100 word), very basic stories of teenagers talking about their lives.  Trent, the teacher at Nagoya Campus, has students rewrite every sentence in the story in question form.  Then one student plays the role of a reporter while another student takes the role of the person from the story.  The reporter asks the questions while the other student answers.  This activity can be done in a 3/2/1 style where the interview has to be done in decreasing amounts of time. 

Bingo Storyboards: If you have a story with pictures, instead of the normal activity of having students put the pictures in the correct order, you can have students lay the pictures out on their desk as a kind of make-shift bingo board.  As students listen to the story, they just flip a picture over if it matches what they hear.  If they get a row of pictures flipped over, they call out bingo.  To turn this into a speaking activity, you can ask the student who got the bingo to use the pictures to aid them as they try to summarize the portion of the story which they just heard.

Oral Cloze: This is another activity from Trent in Nagoya and one that works best after you’ve worked with a text a few times.  It’s just like a regular cloze test, in which every n-th word is omitted, only you do it orally.  Read the story and stop after saying every 5^th word and don’t continue until a student from the class shouts out the next word of the story. 

Ok, that’s roughly half of the ideas I picked up at the in-service.  We also did a bunch of in-servicy things as well and those were all quite good.  But the fact that the program director believed in what we were all doing in our individual classrooms and wanted to give us time to just put our ideas out there was very refreshing.  I am not a big believer in just throwing up a bunch of ideas onto my blog.  I usually try and have a little more structure to my posts.  But maybe structure isn’t always such a good idea.  Maybe having a clear purpose and neatly partitioned blog posts and in-service sessions cuts us off from an important source of creativity.  So I’m wondering, do other teachers’ in-services and trainings usually have time set aside for just sharing ideas?  Do you have any ideas for less structured in-services?  Because while I also dig listening to the expert at the front of the room, I’m really feeling like the person sitting next to me at any training, conference, in-service might have just the idea I didn’t even know I was looking for.           

References:

Nation, I.S.P. and Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Routledge: New York.

Are the production lines running?

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Lately I'm a little troubled by the word 'production'.  The longer I teach and the more I read, the less sure I become about even the simplest terms in ELT.  When exactly does production start?  What is the difference between practice and production?  Can true beginners ever truly engage in production?  When I began working in ELT 13 years ago, I was a pretty big fan of Krashen.  I bought into the idea that mere repetition, or parroting, wasn't production.  Now I'm not so sure.  And I get less sure the more I work with the lowest level students at my school. 

Regardless of methodology, production often seems to be linked with autonomy.  But for Penny Ur (1991, p. 19), practice is, “the rehearsal of certain behaviors with the objective of consolidating learning and improving performance,” even when carried out completely autonomously.  So the line between practice and production becomes not a question so much one of what the students are doing so much as the goal of the activity. 

Maybe I’m getting lost in a maze of semantics here, but I think there is something crucial about understanding what and what does not constitute production.  I believe that my students need a chance to engage in production activities and that these activities can help them to notice and reorder their interlanguage at the phonological, semantic, and pragmatic levels.  But recently, when I reflect on what my students said and wrote in class, especially in my beginner classes, I’m like a boarder guard who has suddenly forgotten how to read the visa stamps from neighboring countries.      

In my first year classes, I have a set text with readings that usually consist of 50 words or so.  I try and get students to interact with the text as often as possible.  I've written about some of the exercises I use in class, including simple listening activities, reading with a thin strip of paper set down the middle of the text to create a cloze activity, and shadowing of key words while listening to a partner read.  I've also had students start reading out the text for a set amount of time and marking where in the text they could reach after 1 minute, again after 45 seconds and again after 30 seconds (thanks to Rachel Roberts for the basis of this activity).  I am also pretty hep on having students convert declarative sentences from the text into interrogatory statements and then ask the question form of the sentence to a partner who has to find the correct response from the text and reply appropriately. 

So does the declarative/interrogative exercise count as a production activity?  Is it really any different from the gap grammar exercises which have been so routinely bashed as artificial and disconnected from real language use?  Does simply placing the exercise within an interactional framework somehow change the essential nature of what the students are doing and drag it onto the land of production? 

And how about those reading aloud activities?  Is that really production?  When I wander around the classroom and help students with their pronunciation, I think it does qualify as production.  And when students are aware enough of their own reading to reread sentences which give them trouble the first time around, I feel like that also would qualify as production as well.  But what about the student who reads aloud to themselves, but is merely going through the motions, just mechanically reproducing what's in the text?

I was twittering back and forth with Ceri Jones (@cerirhiannon) the other day and she mentioned that perhaps the threshold of production depends on the type of guidance provided by the teacher, the number of choices open to a student, and a sense of "need to produce." 

Which got me thinking about my Drama classes.  In one sense, students’ choices are extremely limited when they are rehearsing lines for a play.  The language used is set down for them.  On the other hand, they have choice in the gestures they use, the tone of voice, the pacing of their lines and a whole host of other areas.  If they are actually paying attention to any one of these things as the work to deliver their lines, then I would have no problem seeing their scene practice as a form of production.  In fact, most of the activities I use in my class, including controlled dialogues, dictogloss, simple surveys, and any activity during which the students are actively focused on pronunciation are considered production by Paul Nation (2009).  But, regardless of the activity type, if the students are merely saying the words, it certainly doesn’t feel like production to me.   

And perhaps the word, ‘feel’ is what trips me up.  Like so many other things in language teaching, production seems to depend on the consciousness of the student, the black box of the students’ thoughts, intent, and level of awareness.  Perhaps that’s one of our more important roles as a teacher, to feel out if a student is truly producing language, and if not, to find a way to nudge them in such a way that what they say becomes something more than just the sum of their words.

References:

Nation, I.S.P. and Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. New York: Rutledge.

Ur, P. (1991). A Course in Language Teaching: practice and theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

But am I familiar with familiar?

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Lately I am so grooving on Paul Nation's 4-Strands.  I mean, it's got it all, right?  25% of your time on meaning based input (graded readers, book floods, news stories simplified with a frequency checker, movie clips, audio books), 25% on meaning based output (tasks, student directed conversations, role-playing), 25% on form or language focused work (ah, the glories of saying SVO, prefix and suffix challenges, comparing various uses of polite language) and finally, my favorite until recently, 25% of course time on fluency.  And you know why I used to love fluency?  Because it was something I just didn't spend enough time on before.  I was always in such a rush to give the kids something new to learn (there's quite a bit of pressure at my school to produce results) that I didn't take nearly enough time to practice what the students had already learned.  But you know what?  Fluency has fallen off my list of faves. 

Paul says the students should be using language which is "largely familiar" to them in fluency activities and that the key point is to push them to use the language a little faster, a little smoother than they are used to.  The pressure is the key.  Take that "familiar" language and push on it and turn it into a diamond of fluency.

So what's my beef with Paul Nation?  Almost nothing.  If it weren't for him, I would have never have even known about frequency checkers.  And that alone has changed my life for the better.  No, I'm not angry with Paul Nation.  I'm angry with my own inability to clearly identify just what language my students are "familiar" with.  For example, if I use key vocabulary (including phrases) and grammar (including functional grammar) from the previous lesson, but the students somehow managed to forget it over the weekend (imagine that), I somehow go from a fluency activity to a meaning based output or input activity.  Which has gotten me thinking, what does it mean for a student to be largely familiar with some aspect of language anyway?  I'm not trying to be facetious about this. 

Lately there was a little dust-up on how to teach vocabulary on the Osaka-JALT page on Facebook.  It all started with Mike McKay's request for help: "How can I get my students to understand that ‘smart’ means ‘intelligent’ instead of dressing like Dapper Dan?” Suddenly I was faced with the fact that students might think, "Hey, I know this language!"  But, in truth, not so much.  This could be due to L1 Interference, misunderstanding at the outset, or an inability to even recognize when they don't recognize something (a problem of awareness or what I like to think of as the 'lemon juice effect').   So just how familiar with the language do students need to be for their level of familiarity to qualify as familiar?  

Or maybe I'm just too hung up on putting things in their nicely labeled boxes.  Paul Nation never said that there wasn't a constant flow between the four strands.  If a student forgot most of the materials from Friday's lesson over the weekend, and the planned Monday morning fluency activity turns into meaning based output activity, that doesn't mean that in the middle of the activity that same student wouldn't be able to shift into practicing fluency…right?  I guess I just got lulled by those crisp clear "25%"s marching through the article.  I thought I had finally gotten ahold of a more concrete and perhaps less time consuming way to organize my courses.  But of course language teaching isn't crisp and clear. 

I'm also reminded of another number.  This one pops up in Lightbown (2003).  "1".  As in students, "cannot achieve native-like (or near native-like) command of a second language in 1 hour a day."  At my school, students aren't getting 1 hour of English classes a day.  And a majority of them aren't studying 1 hour a day either.  That doesn't mean students don't need to practice for fluency, just that I have to do the messy hard work of keeping track of where my students are to make sure that that particular 25% finds its way into class.

Lightbown, P. M. (2003) “SLA research in the classroom / SLA research for the classroom." Language Learning Journal 28, pp. 4-13.

Nation, I.S.P. (2007) “The four strands.” Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1, 1: 1-12.

Nation, I.S.P. (2003) “Vocabulary.” In D. Nunan. (ed.) Practical English Language

Schmidt, R. (1993) "Awareness and Second Language Acquisition." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 13, pp. 206-226.

             

Do I have the time for vocabulary?

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Paul Nation, which naturally leads to spending a lot of time thinking about vocabulary.  How do my students pick it up?  What kinds of exposure do they need to be able to infer meaning?  If you are looking to find out more about Paul Nation, I recommend Averil Coxehead’s (2010) article from Reading in a Foreign Language as well as Paul’s Teaching and Learning Vocabulary (1990).  Much of my vocabulary anxiety is do to a very short article Paul wrote on vocabulary teaching through task based activities.  Most of the vocabulary teaching I do is quite passive.  At most I might highlight words in a text I want the students to focus on, but I rarely create activities in which I expect those words to be used.  I leave it up to the students.  And as might be expected, some students take the time to learn the vocabulary, while others do not. 

So today, I decided to implement some of Paul’s ideas.  I used 2 stories from All New Easy True Stories (Sandra Heyer, 2004).  The students are second year high school students in an International Program which has 7 hours of English class weekly.  My school is a special environment in that most of the students did not/could not attend junior high school do to bullying, anxiety, family issues or a host of other reasons.  So while the amount of English classes they take in a week is probably slightly more than the average Japanese student, their starting point is slightly (or sometimes enormously) delayed.  I’ve found Heyer’s text to be just about the right level for my students.  Even the highest level students find 4 or so unknown words per ~200 word story, which averages out to a comprehension rate of 98% and the lower level students might encounter 8 or so words per story (96% comprehension).  Here are the first 4 paragraphs from the story, “Grandfather Hada’s Favorite Soup.” I’ve underlined the words that I think my students might have problems with during the class.

   It is New Year’s Day in Japan.  The Hada family is eating a special New Year’s soup.  The soup has chicken, vegetables and mochi in it.  Mochi are rice cakes.

   Grandfather Hada likes mochi.  He takes a big bite of mochi.  Then he begins to cough.

   Grandfather Hada coughs and coughs.  He can’t stop coughing.  The mochi is stuck in his throat.  Grandfather Hada’s face is purple.  He can’t breathe.  Someone runs to the phone and calls an ambulance.  When will the ambulance arrive?  Maybe in five or ten minutes.  That will be too late.

One of the beauties of this textbook is the fabulous picture of a grandfather with a vacuum hose stuck down his throat that each story comes with a relatively detailed storyboard. The storyboard pictures very clearly link up the story content.  I’ve embedded one of the storyboards as an image below:

  As you might notice above, some of the vocabulary I’ve identified is quite simple.  For example the word cough is actually probably known to almost all my students.  But their reading skills are such that they might not be able to identify the word just through reading (more on that in a later post on pronunciation I think). 

I passed out a copy of “Grandfather Hada’s Favorite Soup” storyboard to the students and jotted up the underlined vocabulary words on the white board.  I then read the story out loud to the students.   I encouraged the students to point to the corresponding pictures as I was reading.  I read at a natural rate, although I did leave a little more of a gap between sense groups than I might in a higher level class.  I read the story two times and the second time around I stopped after saying one of the target vocabulary words and did a short pronunciation practice.  As a kind of off-the-cuff evaluation, I have to say that my students didn’t reach for their dictionaries the way they usually do.  I had a feeling at this point that the images and the style of the story provided them with the context they needed to infer the meaning. 

In the next task, I passed out a copy of the written story.  Students had to match sentences with the corresponding images.  Students, working in pairs, circled groups of sentences and then wrote the corresponding number of the image above the first sentence in each group.  Students were encouraged (which is a nice way to say directed) to use only English in this activity.  Here is some of the language that students produced:

           Kosukei: [pointing to picture 5] He coughs and coughs.

           Rina:  Poor Hada Ojisan (laughter).  

           Sema: [pointing to picture 6] What is kyukyusha?
                         (Ambulance in Japanese)

           Ryunosuke: Ambulance.  See, she calls the ambulance.

So it turns out that students were indeed able to infer the meaning of the vocabulary words through context and the task of linking words to images gave them a chance to put the words into action (with the usual treasure trove of grammar errors). 

Finally, I had two pairs of students join up to make a group of 4 students.  I wrote the following three questions/tasks on the board:

          

1.          What are the most common things that people choke on?  List three. 

2.          Give three pieces of advice to help people to keep from choking.

3.          What are some jobs which use a special kind of vehicle?  Which of those jobs would you most like to try?

Students were instructed to first discuss the task before deciding on a final answer.  Here is a sample of the language they used during the discussion of the first task:

              1A:        They choke on bones. 

                            Children sometimes, you know, do with toys.

                            Hotdog.  Hotdogs are easy for it.

                            My mother choked on konyaku jelly. 
                                     I don’t like it.

                            Grape.  I did once.

Students sometimes, but not always, managed to use the target vocabulary while answering the questions.  While I was listening, I noticed students using the target vocabulary about 50% of the time.  The rest of the time students were cleverly finding ways to avoid using the relatively unfamiliar words.

              It’s pretty hard for me to come to any hard conclusions from one class.  Do I think students picked up the vocabulary faster and more firmly than they would have in a class where I didn’t take the time to have them focus on the vocabulary?  Couldn’t they have learned the vocabulary faster just by whipping out their dictionaries?  Probably.  But the fact that they didn’t feel the need to use their dictionaries at all is what really sticks with me.  They were processing the vocabulary in a different way than usual.  And while not all the students bothered to use the vocabulary during the tasks, some of them did and I think it resulted in multiple exposures in a more communicative way.  At the very least, I think this class gave the students some practice in inferring meaning and a few ideas about how to study vocabulary in a new way.  I will be using the same lesson structure tomorrow, so perhaps I’ll have a better handle on how useful it might be. But I’m pretty torn.  My students, considering their academic history, are not the best or most focused students when it comes to studying, so this kind of controlled practice insures some more exposure to vocabulary than might normally take place.  But the time…all that time…

Refrences:

Coxhead, A. (2010) “Grabbed early by vocabulary: Nation’s ongoing contributions to vocabulary

and reading in a foreign language.” Reading in a Foreign Language. 22 (1) pp. 1-14.

Nation, I.S.P. (1990) Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Nation, I.S.P. and Hamilton-Jenkins, A. (2000) "Using Communicative Tasks to Teach Vocabulary", Guidline 22 (2) pp. 15-19

Heyer, S. (2004) All New Easy True Stories.  Pearson Education.

I teach grammar...but I can quit any time I want...

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I recently read Michael Swan's detailed and at times wickedly funny critique of Task Based Instruction.  While his depiction of a pure TB syllabus seems to me a little too stereotypical (and in truth he does clearly say that he is not going after teachers who utilize TBI as one component of their program, but instead going after TBI purists), his frustration with wave after wave of paradigm shifts which often result in the devaluation of useful and effective teaching methodologies seems to me dead on.  And his main critique, that a narrowly structured, TB syllabus (or lack of syllabus as the case might be), is, "unsuitable for exposure-poor context where time is limited," and that in certain situations, "planned approaches incorporating careful prioritizing, proactive syllabus design, and concentrated work…offer the best chance of success," also seems extremely reasonable. 

One might quibble about exactly what Michael means by "success."  Perhaps his success, constrained as it is by time and language exposure issues, might be very different from a teacher working in a different environment and with a different learner population. But working in Japan, where a vast majority of junior high and high school English language classes are held primarily in Japanese (I would be surprised if learners are exposed to more than 10 minutes of English during an actual 50 minute class), I also find myself hoping to get the most functional linguistic bang for each minute of class time. 

Scott Thornbury muses on some of the same issues as Michael in an excellent blog post on input, although Scott's slant is a little more on the, "yes, balance is necessary" side of the spectrum.  There is nothing I could point to and say, "no, no, no, that's not right," but I wasn't nodding along in agreement as I read Scott's post either. 

Perhaps the reason is that for roughly 25% of my class time, I am teaching pre-selected grammar material, and about half of that time I am doing it in a pretty teacher-centered way.  Sometimes I catch myself feeling bad about it.  I'm just thankful to have read Paul Nation's 4-Strand article recently.  It helped clear away some of the shame.  And here I guess is the crux of what I want to say and what I think made Michael's article resonate with me…why the heck should I feel guilty about teaching grammar? And what exactly is wrong about occasionally leading a class through a traditional teacher-student dynamic? 

I'm not looking for an easy out.  I'm not going to suddenly start standing up in front of all my classes and turn into the great verbal fountain of grammar which runs nonstop for 50 minutes.  I'll go to work every week and keep trying different approaches in class.  I'll keep striving to make class more interesting, more fun.  But there is nothing inherently wrong with a balanced program which contains teacher-fronted and form focused classes.  And Michael's article is the first one in a long while to remind me of that simple fact.