In Defense of Grammar

posted by Wolfgang Butzkamm, Aachen University (RWTH), Germany

“All you need is communication? No, because all you get is fossilisation.” (see Butzkamm (2009: 83-91): “The Language Acquisition Mystique: Tried and Found Wanting.”)

In the best known methodology handbooks, foreign language teaching is viewed through the lens of a few closely related European languages. Their grammars are often transparent for each other. This explains to some extent the severe doubts cast upon grammar teaching in general, rather than only against its misuse.

But a focus on grammar is not only indispensable for remote languages. It can really help the learner by making “odd” constructions meaningful and transparent, for instance through idiomatic and literal translation (“mirroring”) combined. That is why grammar should not be dealt with in a cavalier fashion. However, at all times the teacher must discipline himself to be brief, to confine the focus on form – in whatever way it is done – to matters of immediate practical relevance, and above all, to be clear. That is no easy matter for any language. On the other hand, for many foreign languages taught in schools excellent grammars have been made available, which represent a great advance on the grammars of earlier centuries.

British Council: Nine Videos on Developing Oral Proficiency in EFL Classroom Environments

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

Click here to watch teacher trainer John Kay discuss techniques and issues connected to teaching speaking, from building rapport to monitoring.

The Role of the Textbook in the EFL Classroom (2)

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

Back in 1934, McElroy stated that “the textbook is decidedly not the sole condition of an effective class; quality of teaching is more important” (1934: 5). 75 years later, an enormous body of research on the role of the textbook in EFL classrooms has accumulated around the globe, indicating that ’successful’ learning and teaching in primary and secondary EFL school environments is dependent on a wider spectrum of factors, not only on the quality (or quantity) of English language learning materials. The importance of the teacher is, of course, undisputed (see, for instance, Butzkamm 2005).

Over the past decades, it has become increasingly clear that context-sensitive EFL instruction requires teachers to take into account many anthropological and sociocultural factors which influence the conditions under which English is taught. Currently, global textbooks produced for teaching and learning English as a foreign language in many different countries are criticized for paying too little attention to this, especially for largely failing to assist EFL teachers in bridging the cultural background(s) of ‘their’ individual learners and the diversity of English-speaking target language cultures.

In Germany, global textbooks are rarely used in institutional contexts though. Instead, local textbooks and related materials and media, produced especially for the ‘German school market’ by a few major German publishers are usually employed in EFL classrooms. In my view, the overall quality of these products is high. However, as commercial products textbooks and related materials are – in Germany and elsewhere – last not least designed to occupy the textbook market, offering whatever is seemingly necessary and useful in terms of target language und intercultural education (see Kurtz 2002). In consequence, German EFL teachers are flooded with materials and suggestions. 

Psychologically, this makes it difficult to think about teaching options which go beyond those suggested by the textbook authors in the teaching manuals (arguing from a Gestalt theoretical perspective see Kurtz 2001). Viewed from an international perspective, this is a luxury problem, but it is not unproblematic; the more the better?

References:

Butzkamm, Wolfgang (2005). Der Lehrer ist unserer Chance. Essen: Buchverlag Prof. A.W. Geisler.

Kurtz, Jürgen (2001). Das Lehrwerk und seine Verwendung nach der jüngsten Reform der Richtlinien und Lehrpläne. Englisch, 36 (2), 41-50.

Kurtz, Jürgen (2002): Fremdsprachendidaktik als Dienstleistung und Ware: Verlagskataloge für das Fach Englisch unter der Lupe. Englisch,  37 (1), 8-12.

McElroy, Howard (1934). Selecting a basic textbook. The Modern Language Journal, 19 (1), 5-8.

Dimensions of Task-based Language Learning and Teaching

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

- task-based instruction
- task-based learning
- task-based language learning
- task-based language education
- task-based language learning and teaching
- task-based, task-oriented, task-supported, task-driven
- task design, task complexity, task sequencing, task cycle
- focus on form, focus on message, role of the mother tongue
- target tasks, pedagogical tasks, rehearsal tasks, activation tasks
- accuracy, fluency, complexity, appropriateness
- projects, tasks, activities, exercises
- task performance and assessment

Are you familiar with current research on task-based language learning and teaching? If not, here are a few presentations that give you an idea of what it is about:

David Nunan: Task-based language teaching: from theory to classroom practice

Kris Van den Branden: Task-based language education: from theory to practice .. and back again

Rod Ellis: Task-based language teaching: sorting out the misunderstandings

Paul Knight: Task-based learning: myth or reality?

Greg Ogilvie & Bill Dunn: Taking teacher education to task

Form-focused and Message-oriented Communication in Secondary School EFL Classrooms

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

In the International Handbook of English Language Teaching (Cummins & Davison 2007), Nina Spada (2007: 283) states that “there is an emerging concensus in the classroom research literature that the inclusion of form-focused instruction is needed within exclusively and primarily meaning-based approaches to CLT if learners are to develop higher levels of knowledge and performance in the target language. This has been demonstrated in descriptive, experimental, and quasi-experimental studies with adult, adolescent, and child learners in different second/foreign language contexts.”

This raises a number of fundamental questions concerning the current status of EFL classroom interaction and, more specifically, the optimal mix of form-focused and message-oriented instruction in everyday secondary school EFL practice.

Up to now, there is very little empirical evidence that frontline educators in secondary schools, for instance in Germany, actually orchestrate classroom interaction in accordance with “exclusively and primarily meaning-based approaches to CLT”. On the contrary, the overall focus of instruction behind classroom doors is still very often on target language form or forms, i.e. on the weak, rather than on the strong version of the communicative approach (see Howatt 1984).

This is what the current DESI-study (German-English-Student-Assessment-International), a large-scale assessment study (n = 11,000) commissioned by the German federal board of education (including a classroom video-study), designed and implemented by an interdisciplinary consortium of applied linguists and educational researchers indicates (for a summary, see the official German DESI homepage and the corresponding Powerpoint-Presentation in English created by Günter Nold, University of Dortmund, Germany.

EFL classroom interaction in everyday practice in Germany is often far from being appropriate to stimulate and scaffold lively, meaningful and creative interaction (especially self-regulated peer-to-peer communication in English) and to systematically stretch learners’ participatory abilities in the target language, primarily because message-oriented classroom discourse is mapped onto the traditional interactional architecture of form-focused and predominantly accuracy-oriented language practice (i.e. IRF: teacher initiation, student response, teacher feedback, mainly focused on immediate error-correction).

The “procedural infrastucture of talk-in-interaction” (Schegloff 1992: 1299) which has emerged in classroom practice over many years is suggestive of a form-oriented communicative cocoon spun by teachers to protect learners from the natural complexity and unpredictability that is typical of many communicative encounters outside the classroom. In consequence, there is very little room for spontaneous, less regulated (or scripted) and less predictable communicative exchanges which are necessary to induce a communicative metamorphosis among learners – from peripheral and dependent to increasingly more central and autonomous participants. In my view, this needs to be considered more thorougly when proposing the inclusion of form-focused instruction in secondary school EFL classrooms.

Howatt, Anthony P. R. (1984). A History of English Language Teaching. Ox­ford: Oxford Uni­versity Press.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1992). “Repair after next turn: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation.” American Journal of Sociology, 5, 1295-1345.

Spada, Nina (2007), “Communicative Language Teaching: Current Status and Future Prospects”, in: Cummins, Jim & Davison, Chris (Eds.). International Handbook of English Language Teaching. Part 1. New York: Springer: 271-288.

CLT in Theory and in Practice

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

Three months ago I pointed out on this blog that communicative language teaching (CLT) is a ’fuzzy’ concept which has been interpreted and translated into secondary school EFL syllabuses, textbooks, and everyday classroom practice in a variety of ways around the world since its inception in the 1970s (see: “A Cognitive Science View on Communicative Language Teaching”). In theory, advanced university students of English as a foreign language understand this in principle, as the following key-word summary which a class of mine came up with collectively illustrates (click on image to enlarge).

Unfortunately, this does not automatically mean that students of English as a foreign language can indeed implement CLT in actual classroom practice successfully (and many, but not all are well-aware of this). More classroom research is needed on how to enable students and novice teachers to translate the principles of CLT into practice in primary and secondary schools (including task-based and content-based instruction as well as CLIL; becoming aware of its potentials and problems). 

In Germany, however, arguing for a better mix of theory and practice, of knowing and doing in initial teacher education is problematic, because of the relatively low status of Fachdidaktik (i.e. domain-specific pedagogy and methodology) in general, and Fremdsprachendidaktik (i.e. research-based foreign language pedagogy and methodology) in particular, which is still seen by many decision-makers as a mere additum to, and not as a core element of initial teacher education in the twenty-first century.

Giving the Wrong Signal? The Role of ‘Signal Words’ in Teaching Tense and Aspect in the EFL Classroom

posted by Ulrike Altendorf, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

What would German learners of English do without ’signal words’? — ‘Signal word’ is TEFLSPEAK-G, a literal translation of the German classroom term Signalwort that refers to temporal markers, mostly adverbial and prepositional phrases, taught as automatic triggers of certain tenses or aspects. Ask a non-native student of English – at secondary school or at university level – when to use, for example, the present perfect and you will get the following: a list of ’signal words’, mostly just, ever, never, since and for, and, if you are lucky, the odd grammar rule of the categorical type.

And why not? After all, ’signal words’ have many advantages. They work with little cognitive effort. They are easy to remember and even easier to put into practice. They spare us the onerous meta-linguistic discussion that modern teaching professionals, many of them still working in the wake of Krashen, seek to avoid. They also spare us to go into detail about a complex and still under-researched area of English grammar that even advanced students and non-native teachers of the language tend to feel insecure about.

However, it is, in my opinion, exactly the heavy reliance on ’signal words’ that plays an important role in creating this insecurity in the first place. It makes non-native speakers dependent on a ’safety anchor’ which is often misleading and even more often absent. As Schlüter (e.g. 2000) has shown for the present perfect, only about a third of his approximately 3,000 verb phrases were specified by temporal markers. And if the desired temporal marker occurs, it does not necessarily ‘trigger’ the tense or aspect that students expect on the basis of didacticized grammar rules. Never, for example, which EFL learners usually interpret as a ’signal word’ for the present perfect can also occur with other tenses including the simple past. In the BNC (British National Corpus) World Edition it occurs even more frequently with the simple past than with the present perfect.

Apart form leaving students in the dark about the correct functioning of tense and aspect in English, ’signal words’ also deprive them of communicative options. After all, tense and aspect can be used to express a range of attitudes and functions, including tentativeness and annoyance. These and other communicative functions should be available to advanced learners of English, especially if their language education prides itself in aiming at communicative competence. In order to become familiar with these options, advanced learners need to be introduced to the more complex functioning of tense and aspect, from an early, at least intermediate level onwards. It is true that ’signal words’ come in handy for pre-pubescent beginners. With increasing cognitive maturation and language proficiency, however, teachers should gradually move away from the gross oversimplication of the ’signal-word’ strategy. For this purpose, one should also move away from the old-fashioned prejudice that language work is inevitably boring, theoretical and irrelevant. In the hands of an able teacher, language work can be interesting and intriguing as well as cognitively demanding.

The approach outlined by Jürgen Kurtz in this blog provides a flexible methodological framework for such an undertaking. In message-oriented communication students will encounter or be made aware of situations in which a more skilful handling of a particular tense or aspect would have helped their communicative cause. In the related medium-oriented intervals, the relevant meta-linguistic information can be provided, also inductively. In the following message-oriented section, the newly acquired insights can immediately be put to the test. Unmotivated pondering over seemingly superfluous linguistic structure, which some students will have forgotten again at production stage, will hopefully become a thing of the past.

Schlüter, Norbert (2000). “The present perfect in British and American English: selected results of an empirical study.” In: Christian Mair & Marianne Hundt (Eds.). Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 313-320.

TEFLSPEAK-G and the Idea of Encouraging Improvised Speech in the EFL Classroom (9)

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

Why is improvised speaking important and valuable? How can it be incorporated into foreign language classroom practice in a systematic way? Focusing on English language teaching, Davies & Pearse (2000: 82-84) point out that in order to “develop the ability to participate effectively in interactions outside the classroom”, learners need to be accustomed to “combining listening and speaking in real time”, because “in natural listening-speaking situations the listeners must be able to handle [..] shifts of topic and unpredictable language in listening, and then they must be able to improvise their responses.”

In The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Carter & Nunan 2001), Bygate (2001: 18) underlines the importance of improvisation as well, emphasizing that “improvised speech needs practice, but around some content familiarity.”

Lack of familiarity with content is of course not the only barrier to unscripted, increasingly self-regulated improvised speaking, i.e. to developing learners’ target language participatory abilities in secondary school foreign language classrooms. There is rather a whole range of potential barriers that may impede the development of spontaneous and flexible target language production in institutional settings, for instance:

• lack of creativity, flexibility and balance in the overall instructional design (focus on form versus focus on meaning; language as system versus language in use; scripted versus unscripted teaching; whole class, teacher-led discourse versus small-group, learner-led discourse; planned (largely predictable) versus unplanned (incidental, spontaneous, largely unpredictable) interaction in the target language;

• overaccomodation of teacher talk (TEFLSPEAK) combined with a forced immediacy of learner contributions in traditional IRF-sequences; textbook dependency and overuse / misuse; one-sidedness of error-treatment (because learners are viewed as deficient, and not primarily as successful communicators);

• thematic content failing to attract learners’ communicative interests (why should foreign language learners say anything, if there is nothing interesting to talk about from their perspective?);

• high level of speaking anxiety in the classroom; lack of learners’ self-confidence; lack of social cohesion inhibiting target language negotiation of meaning and lively peer-to-peer interaction;

• overemphasis of traditional PPP (presentation – practice – production) procedures; reduction of learners’ production to a disadvantageous minimum;

• overadjustment of target language production activities to test requirements and standardized test items (i.e. teaching to the test); lack of distinction between language learning versus language assessment activities and tasks – which, in my view, is a shortcoming in current empirical SLA research as well, resulting in serious problems concerning the ecological validity of some of the findings);

• uncontrolled use of the mother tongue, especially in learner-led, small group activities (see Butzkamm’s comment and his recommendations on this blog).

The “cultivation of the speaking skill”, as Rivers (1968/81: 94) put it forty years ago, takes time and patience. Next to and in combination with intercultural learning in institutional contexts, it is probably the most difficult challenge foreign language teachers are faced with in the Internet Age. Remembering what Rivers (1968/81: 246) wrote about this important aspect of learning is by no means anachronistic or inconsistent with modern foreign language education in the 21st century:

“The flowering of natural language use will come in its own time; it cannot be forced. When students begin to interact naturally, if only for a few minutes, we must be quick to recognize the change and let the natural interaction take over until its energy is spent. Being able to withdraw and leave students space and room to take over and learn through their own activity is the mark of the real teacher.”

However, qualitative research on improvised speaking indicates that EFL teachers can do a lot more to encourage learners actively to speak freely. Improvisational enactments can help to foster flexible target language production beyond incidental classroom speaking, if they are integrated into (well-balanced) classroom practice as early as possible and, above all, on a regular basis.

Bygate, Martin (2001), “Speaking.” In: Carter, Ronald & Nunan, David (2001). The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 14-20.

Davies, Paul & Pearse, Eric (2000). Success in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rivers, Wilga (1981). Teaching Foreign Language Skills. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press (first edition 1968).

Kurtz, Jürgen (2001). Improvisierendes Sprechen im Fremdsprachenunterricht. [Improvised Speaking in the Foreign Language Classroom]. Eine Untersuchung zur Entwicklung spontansprachlicher Handlungskompetenz in der Zielsprache. Tübingen: Narr. [also available at Google books].

A Cognitive Science View on Communicative Language Teaching

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

From a cognitive science perspective, communicative language teaching (CLT) can be thought of as an ‘idealized cognitive model’ (see Lakoff 2007), which has been interpreted and translated into secondary school EFL syllabuses, textbooks, and everyday classroom practice in a variety of different ways around the world since its introduction in the 1970s. Implementations of CLT in secondary schools usually vary in their subjectively perceived or intersubjectively agreed upon degree of typicality or similarity to its theoretical core assumptions and the set of general learning and teaching principles derived from it (for a brief overview see, for instance, Richards 2005). Some instructional designs, procedures, and forms of classroom interaction appear to bear close resemblance to the theoretical core of the overall CLT framework. It seems to be reasonable to see them as prototypical examples, as highly representative cases or ‘good members’ of the ‘CLT family’ (see Spada 2007). Other ways of instruction appear to share relatively little with the idealized core theory – their family resemblance is considered to be comparatively low. They may therefore be viewed as more or less ‘peripheral family members’ or ‘distant relatives’ only. Yet, excluding these supposedly less representative members from the CLT family entirely is problematic, because they often share a few of the central properties of the abstract prototype, or seem to be motivated by it at least in certain ways.

Judgements as to whether a certain instructional design or practice is or is not to be accepted as a member of the CLT family are notoriously difficult, because they call for ‘reference point reasoning’ (see Rosch 1975), i.e. for categorization of teaching practices relative to a culture, context- and person-independent theoretical prototype. This highly complex process is influenced by a large number of individual and contextual factors such as teacher biography and education, teaching experience and know-how, the specific cultural, institutional and situational context of teaching English as a foreign language, non-native English teachers’ subjective theories and beliefs of how the target language is taught and learned best, the curriculum and the textbook, to name just a few.

Judgments concerning the typicality of a specific classroom practice are all the more difficult when the underlying theoretical core assumptions and the basic set of principles of learning and teaching on which this practice is supposedly based are themselves vague. One of the central problems of CLT seems to be that in contrast to some basic everyday cognitive models such as ‘bird’, where many people would say that ‘robin’ is a typical member of the bird family and ‘penguin’ is a less typical member, because birds usually fly, agreement on what is or is not CLT is far more difficult to achieve. The main reason is the elasticity of the overall CLT framework which is relatively fuzzy with regard to the significance and the optimal balance of language form and language use in the learning and teaching process (strong vs. weak version). Furthermore, there are so many different theoretical manifestations of CLT nowadays, for instance TBI (task based instruction) and CBI (content based instruction), that it is difficult for EFL practitioners – and especially for teaching novices – to recognize whether their teaching is in line with the core CLT theoretical framework.

Coming to a better understanding of the complex relationship between theory and practice is vital. According to Larsen-Freeman (1997) this is ‘an area crying for research’ – and this has not changed enough since Larsen-Freeman first recognized the need for further research over ten years ago. Categorization, (proto-)typicality, family resemblance and category membership are central concepts in cognitive science. They could help us gain a more profound knowledge of the complex relationship of CLT in theory and in practice, of how core theoretical concepts in foreign language education are acquired / learned, mentally represented and accessed in practice. This in turn could help to explain the discrepancies which often become visible when CLT is translated into actual everyday classroom action by individual teachers.

Lakoff, George (2007), “Cognitive models and prototype theory”, In: Evans, Vyvyan; Bergen, Benjamin & Zinken, Jörg (Eds.). The Cognitive Linguistics Reader. London & Oakville: Equinox, 130-167.

Larsen-Freeman, Diane (1997), “Chaos / Complexity Science and Second Language Acquisition.” Applied Linguistics, 18/2, 141-165.

Richards, Jack C. (2005), “Communicative Language Teaching Today.”

Rosch, Eleanor (1975), “Cognitive Reference Points.” Cognitive Psychology, 7, 532-547.

Spada, Nina (2007), “Communicative Language Teaching: Current Status and Future Prospects.” In: Cummins, Jim & Davison, Chris (Eds.). International Handbook of English Language Teaching. Part 1. New York: Springer, 271-288.