Chapter+4++++Theories+on__+Language-learning+conditions
Chapter 4Theories on Language-Learning Conditions
Last chapter mainly focuses on the “process-oriented theories” of language learning concerning what cognitive processes are involved in language learning; this chapter mainly focuses on the “co ndition-oriented theories” that emphasize EFL teaching strategies & learning environment for effective L2 learning.
1 The Conditions for Efficient “Intake”
1-1What “input” means to EFL learners
From Krashen’s “Input Hypothesis”, L2 learners should be exposed to as much comprehensible input as possible so that they can acquire the rules of the language in the process of “in take”. No matter we agree or not to this assumption, the following questions are to be answered by EFL teachers like “w hat input means to EFL students”,“w hat kind of input is needed to promote the cognitive process of “intake”, and “w hat environment may help to generate efficient intake in TEFL” etc.
In EFL teaching, input refers to the language that is heard or read by EFL students in their language learning process which takes place mainly in the classroom, including teacher talk, peer-students talk, all types of recordings, textbooks, workbooks, other supplementary teaching materials, handouts or worksheets that are selected, adapted, or developed by the teacher.
As for EFL students, the input is the language data for them to learn and use. The internal process of receiving or understanding input in listening or reading activities is known as “intake”. Actually EFL learners vary in the efficiency with which they are able to receive input. It is believed that the way of input and the environment of intake play important part in the efficiency of intake. And the input that is comprehensible, interesting, and motivating (e.g., useful for them to apply the language data and noticing for them to discover the rule of language) and the environment that is supporting and encouraging may lead to more efficient intake.
1-2Teacher talk & L2 input
The analysis on teacher talk, a very important part of classroom input, may help us understand what kind of input is needed for effective L2 intake. Comparing with L1 input, i.e., “motherese”, it is not difficult to see how L2 input is different from L1 input with the following characteristics. Although L2 tea chers always use “caretaker” language like motherese (in short, simple, correct sentences with repetition & adjustment –to adjust their speech to reflect feedback from the learners carefully in order to enable them understand better), they have to talk about something unreal (just in relation to the textbook, not to the learners’ interest and need) or ask the unreal
questions to which the learners already know the answers in unnatural ways (only in order for them to practise the structure of language, not to communicate messages). And they usually follow the 3-part pattern of “question-response-feedback” in the strictly controlled and teacher- centred talks with the students who have little freedom to choose what to say (e.g., to choose the answer different from what the teacher expected) or how to say (e.g., to choose either verbal or nonverbal responses like children do in the real-life context of L1 learning).
The above analysis may suggest about the following features of L2 input that is needed for efficient intake:
●The topics of L2 input should be the real-world topics that is close to students’ present life and
will really arouse their interest and enthusiasm.
●The reason for students to receive L2 input should not just to learn the rule of grammar, but
also to do things in the target language. In that way, students will feel L2 input is useful and purposeful, therefore the purpose will motivate them to process L2 intake more effectively.
●The students should receive L2 input through interaction with others freely, not just be the
listener or reader. The free interactive social process will provide students with rich language data (of both verbal & nonverbal information) and meaningful contexts (with clues & hints of meanings) for them to guess/ understand the meaning actively.
In addition, from Krashen, L2 input should be at a level, the “i+1” level, that is just slightly higher than the learners’ current level so that they can acquire the language naturally moving from “i” (their current level) to “i+1” (the next level) by understanding the input containing “i+1”. And people can understand what is heard or read even if it contains unfamiliar words or structures as the learners can guess the meaning from the context. Thus comprehensible input involves not only to identify the words and sentence patterns but also the use of content, visual aids, context clues or gestures to make messages understood.
1-3 The affective factors in the internal process of intake
Krashen’s “Filter Hypothesis” states that the following affective factors will affect L2 intake and learners’ language acquisition as the “filter”:
●Anxiety
●Motivation
●Self-confidence
Input
Filter Communicative
Competence
It means that if L2 learners in a negative affective state, there will be a “filter”, or mental block, which is to prevent them from fully “intake” as the diagram shows. The anxiety, lacking of motivation or lacking of self-confidence may stop them from entering the “language acquisition device” (the internal cognitive process for the inner language system) that is responsible for the development in L2 learners communicative competence. What the filter hypothesis suggests about EFL teaching and lear ning, and how to help EFL learners decrease the “filter” will be the problems for further discussion at the end of this chapter.
2 The Conditions for Efficient Output
2-1 What “output” means to EFL learners
From the discussion above, we know that “output” (the language which is produced by language learners) is indispensable in the whole cognitive process of L2 learning. M. Swain (1995, P. 105-108) believes that output even plays a more prominent part than input in L2 acquisition as enough input in her “immersion” teaching experiments did not naturally lead to students’ efficient production of language (output) as Krashen predicted. The main reason, in her opinion, is lacking the opportunity for output in the classroom.
Based on Swain’s output hypothesis, L2 learners have to be provided with more opportunities for output because of the following three important reasons or the functions of output:
●Noticing function
–When L2 learners produce language, they will notice the language rules (the features of language forms) as well as the relationship between the form and meaning of the language, therefore the notice of the form will trigger the cognitive processes and will be helpful for students to receive more input.
●Hypothesis – testing function
–Output provides L2 learners with opportunities to develop and test their hypotheses about how the language rules work in the real communication as the errors they made and discovered from the feedback of the other speakers or readers will make them be aware of if their hypotheses are successful or not.
●Meta – linguistic function / conscious reflection
–Output is not only the way for L2 learners to test their hypotheses but also is the hypothesis itself. In the process of output, L2 learners will reflect on their language consciously to find out the imperfectness or improperness in using the language.
2-2 Output & communicative interactions
The nature of interactions is the decisive condition for efficient output of EFL students. Some classroom interactions will not bring about students’ production of language since in most cases of FL learning environment, the typical interactions in the classroom are teacher-directed. The teacher usually talks more than the students do and deprives students from the right and freedom of testing out their hypotheses in their own words by asking questions, providing model answers, and making comments on students’ responses. As a result, students have no opportunities to use the target language though they do a lot of “speaking” and “writing” activities in classroom, such as acting out the role-play dialogue, answering the questions in drills, copying or writing compositions with the given topics etc.
Communicative interactions may lead to more efficient output that involves three important elements to build in L2 learners the communicative competence (Littlewood 1981).
●Information gap in interactions: it refers to a L2 learning situation where information is
known by some of those students present in order to promote real communication between the students as they cannot predict what to say as they do in real-life situations.
●Free selection of responses: the students have freedom to decide what to say and how to say. ●The feedback in interactions: it refers to any response (verbal or nonverbal) that listeners give
to speakers to indicate the success or failure of their communication, i.e., if they understand or not what the speaker is saying.
It is clear that lacking the above three factors, those classroom interactions like “speaking” or “writing” activities we mentioned before will be merely mechanical and artificial exercises, and they will provide little opportunities for EFL learners to produce language.
2-3 Output in classroom
Thus EFL teachers should try to provide students with opportunities for more than only form- focused drilling/ practice in classroom. Instead, they should try to create situations in which the students may learn and use language to do real things with more freedom. However, as we know that in TEFL environment, opportunities for real communicative interaction will be few. EFL learning will inevitably be form-focused sometimes.
According to Littlewood (2002), there are five categories of L2 learning for learners to acquire communicative competence in classroom. They are classified in light of how learners learn and use the language: are they more form-based or more meaning-based; more teacher- controlled or more students-independent:
●Non-communicative learning is the language learning focusing on the structure of language,
how they are formed and what they mean, e.g., through drills, exercises, teacher’s instructions and explanations.
●Pre-communicative practice is practicing language with some attention to the meaning but
not communicating new messages to others, e.g., in acting out role-play dialogues or in “question-and-answer” practice.
●Communicative practice is practicing language in a context where it communicates new
information, e.g., in information-gap activities or in the responses to the factual questions, or “personalized” questions.
●Structured communication is using language to communicate in situations, that elicit
pre-learnt language, but with some unpredictability, e.g., in structured role-play with different situations and simple problem- so lving, the commonly used structures & learners’ personal experience are required.
●Authentic communication is using language to communicate in the situations where the
meanings are completely unpredictable, e.g., in more creative role-play, more complex problem-solving, discussion, debate, or in discovery learning and collaborative learning.
All above categories of L2 learning are needed in the whole process of language learning, in different learning stages the focus on language structure or language use is changing as follows:
Use
Junior E College E.
Structure
3 Humanistic Learning From Tasks
3-1 The Input & Output framework of L2 learning
The following is a conceptual framework of L2 input & output adapted from H.J. Hung (2001)
(Environment)
It must be noted that in the framework, the affective factors (anxiety, motivation, and self- confi dence) represented by the broken lines “filter” (Krashen 1981) affect learners’ success in both “intake” and “output”. That means learners in a negative affective state will not process “intaking” and “outputing” successfully. Especially when they are not motivated to learn or use the language, they may not only fail to receive the language data (input), nor to test out the successful hypotheses about language (output), nor to construct their inner language system (uptake) through reflection on their hypotheses.
3-2The humanistic L2 learning
Therefore, L2 learning is not only a cognitive process but also a social and affective process (W. Littlewood 2002). The following principles may be considered to facilitate the input-output process as a whole in the “humanistic learning”:
●The development of a whole person in L2 learning including the learners’ knowledge, skills,
learning strategies, the learners’ motivation, learning attitude, and the awareness of cross- culture;
●The consideration of learners’ feels an d emotions. To set a supportive and encouraging
learning environment in which different-ability L2 learners may learn from each other and support each other;
●The social interactions adopted in the process of both input and output, by which learners
may not only learn linguistic knowledge and skills but also interpersonal skills and correct learning attitudes from friendly competition and collaboration;
●The growth in self-awareness and self-building of the inner language system, grammar is
not just learnt from the teacher or textbook inductively or deductively but also mainly through self- testing and building their successful hypotheses in autonomous learning.
3-3 Motivation in task-based learning
Among all the affective factors, motivation is the most important one that determines a person’s internal desire to learn and use the language for some purpose. Take EFL learning as an example, with different motivation, for instance, “instrumental motivation”(wanting to learn English for it is useful for certain “instrumental”goal, e.g., to read some English books, or to perform a specific task etc.) and the “integrative motivation”(wanting to learn English in order to live or communicate with people of English speaking countries), people may learn the language differently.
From all the sample lessons we have observed and described, in task-based learning, the purposeful learning tasks with the clear-cut task goal greatly motivate students to learn and use the target language. Underlying the method, some commonly acknowledged principles have to be known by EFL teachers:
●What students are going to learn or have learnt should be necessary and clearly relevant to
the learning purpose. In TBL, all the pedagogical tasks are interrelated with the final goal in relation to the target task, i.e., the thing students can do in their real life.
●Students can see what they have learnt in classroom are useful for them to do things when
leaving the classroom in their real life.
●Every student can gain personal benefits when they successfully finish their pedagogical
tasks in groups with the help and support from the other group members and the team spirit they learn from collaborative learning.
●From formative assessment by both the teacher and students themselves, they can feel the
sense of achievement and be aware of the real progress made in their L2 proficiency from the specific and measurable task outcome. The growth in self-confidence will make them to achieve more.
In order to promote more efficient input and output in task-based learning, the EFL teacher should also consider the factors below that are important for students to successfully perform tasks/ activities in classroom:
1.The consideration of language
E.g., how familiar and complex is the grammar that students need? How familiar and
varied is the vocabulary that students need? How quick the language is spoken? Etc.
2.The consideration of cognitive complexity
E.g., what mental operations do students have to perform? How clear is the information?
How familiar is the topic/ task?
3.The consideration of pedagogical support
E.g., have students been prepared for the task by means of a “pre-task” or demonstration?
Have some useful language items been practised before the task?
4.The consideration of Communication pressure
E.g., is there any time pressure? Can students control the interaction? How many people
are participating or listening, in groups or in front of the whole class.
Sample Lesson 7 & 8:Unit 9 How was your weekend?
This is the revision lesson of Unit 9 How was your weekend? J1B, Go for it! The teacher adopts the teaching materials in the textbook on page 58 (Self-check). The following is what we saw when sitting in on the two classes in a junior high school in Haikou.
The bell rings. T enters the classroom but several students are still fighting for a comic book in the front of the classroom. T takes the book and asks whose book it is.
A boy named Tony says it’s his. T asks Tony “Why did they want your book?” Tony answers, “They want to see…. It’s new… My father buy ….” T then turns to the whole class, “What did he say just now?” gradually guiding Ss to use the past tense to say correctly “His father bought it for him”. Then T questions the whole class “If we want to read Tony’s book, what should we do?” to introduce the topic of the lesson: Class, let’s help each other and learn from each other. Today, an old man Henry may need our help.
T introduces that something happened to Old Henry last weekend, but first gets Ss to talk about their last weekend “How was your last weekend? What did you do last weekend? How was the weather? Was it fine?” Ss respond with different answers. T summarizes that “everyone spends the weekend happily. We always enjoy our weekends, happy on weekends. But Old Henry did not.” T then instructs that they are going to read a story today about an old man Henry who did not enjoy his weekend.
T introduces Old Henry with the picture on P. 58 and gets Ss to make prediction about the story with questions “Where is Old Henry? Is he happ y? Did he enjoy his weekend?” Ss make a few guesses. T then asks Ss whether Old Henry did the same things as they did: Did he go to the park/walk with his dog/visit his friends? and Ss answer: Yes, he did. / No, he didn’t.
Ss then skim the text to check their answer to the question “Did he enjoy the weekend?” Ss find out that Old Henry did not enjoy his weekend. T further asks “Why not?” and gets Ss to read the story again carefully for details. T instructs they are going to have a competition after reading.
Ss read the text again and try to remember the information in Old Henry’s story. When finishing reading, Ss are required to close the book for a competition between boys and girls. T will read four statements and Ss will tell True/ False based on their understanding of the text by quickly standing up and saying “That’s right.” / “That’s wrong.” For the false statements, T will further question “Why?” Girls did a better job
Ss open the books and read the text aloud after T. T reminds Ss should read it loudly with good intonation. After reading, Ss underline and discuss the meaning of go for a walk, look for, find.
T guides Ss to summarize that “Old Henry is very sad and lonely. Can you help him?” One girl says, “I can take him to the park every morning”. T repeats her answer to the whole class and encourages more suggestions. However, Ss keep silent for nearly one minute. T asks Ss to think what they can do for their grandparents. Ss remain silent. T then suggests that Ss can speak in Chinese and she will put it into English. But Ss still do not say anything. T changes her question: Who lives with your grandfather or grandmother? Some Ss raise their hands. T further questions: What do you often do for them? A boy suggests “带他们去看电影”. Other Ss help to say “go to the movie”. T highly praises the answer and asks Ss what we can do for Old Henry. A boy says “look for Wang Wang”. T comments, “It sounds good. But can you find Wang Wang?”(Bb: look for/find). Another girl says, “Old Henry couldn’t find Wang Wang, so he feels lonely. But we can buy him a new dog, a better dog.” T guides Ss to judge the suggestion, “It may be very helpful, but Old Henry wants Wang Wang, not a new one.” In this interactive way, Ss provide a lot more wonderful ideas and learn to evaluate the ideas.They say “I can visit him every day.”T asks what they can do when they visit him. Ss give the following suggestions:
(1) play chess with him
(2) cook dinner for him
(3) clean his house
(4) dance and sing for him, make him happier
(5) go to the beach with
(6) go for swimming and fishing with him
(7) tell him a funny story.
(8) watch Beijing Opera with him
(9) talk to him
For the ninth idea “talk to him”, T agrees that old people like talking with others, and further questions: what can you talk about? Ss suggest five more: We can talk about Wang Wang/talk about pets/talk about TV plays/talk about healthy food/ introduce my family.
Ss then are asked to work first individually to choose the top three ideas from the above list, and then work with their desk mates to select three ones from their six selected ideas, and discuss with two other partners as one group for the best three ideas from their lists. Every group writes down their list and gives it to T. T browses through and then writes five most popular ideas from all the groups on Bb:
T then introduces that Bob who helped Old Henry last weekend wrote a report about what he did with Old Henry. Ss are instructed to read Bob’s report and see whether they think similarly.
After reading, Ss quickly identify the activities Bob did and T writes them down on Bb. T then asks Ss “Class, did Bob visit Old Henry last weekend? Did you plan to do the same thing like Bob?” guiding Ss to find out the same i deas they share with Bob and the different ones as well and discuss which would be better for Old Henry. After discussion prompted by T questioning, Ss agree that what Bob did the best is “went with Mimi” and “enjoyed the food together”, the most inappropriate one is “talked about Wang Wang”. Ss seem unable to reach agreement on the different ideas that Bob “talked about old and funny things” with Old Henry while Ss plan to “tell him something new/funny”. T suggests Ss to ask their grandparents for opinions as to whether they prefer to talk about the “old things” or to share “something new”.
T asks Ss to compare the tenses of the verbs in Bob’s report and their “to do list”, and guides them to summarize the past form of regular and irregular verbs with tables. First Ss say out the rule for regular verbs and read the present and past form of the regular verbs together. T corrects the “ed” pronunciation in some words, such as “talked”. Then Ss find out the irregular verbs and T asks them to turn to page 101 and tick out the verbs they have already learned in the Table of Irregular Verbs and tells Ss that they need to memorize the past form of the irregular verbs. Ss say out the present and past form of some irregular verbs after T.
Finally T leaves homework: 1. Report What Bob/Old Henry did, said and felt last weekend based on the understanding of Bob’s report; or 2. Imagine you went to help Old Henry last weekend, write a report about it. You can use the beginning on P.58.