Lecture 4

4. Describing language and teaching

Children and language
 Language acquisition seems to be almost guaranteed for children up to about the age of
six. They seem to be able to learn languages with incredible facility.
 They are also capable of forgetting a language just as easily. It is almost as if they can put
on and take off different languages like items of clothing!
 Acquisition here describes the way in which people ‘get’ language with no real conscious
effort - in other words, without thinking about grammar or vocabulary, or worrying about
which bits of language go where
 In order for acquisition to take place, certain conditions need to be met: to hear a lot of
language (absolutely vital);it is clear that the nature of the language they hear matters,
too.
 When parents talk to their children, they simplify what they say, both consciously and
unconsciously.
 Children have a strong motivational urge to communicate in order to be fed and
understood.
 Together with their parents (and later other adults) they make language together. And
then they try it out and use it. This ‘trying out’ is shown by the way children repeat words
and phrases, talk to themselves and generally play with language.
 Three features need to be present in order for children to acquire a language: exposure to
it, motivation to communicate with it and opportunities to use it.
Acquisition and learning
 Stephen Krashen in the 1980s, has suggested that we can make a distinction between
acquisition and learning.
 Whereas the former is subconscious and anxiety free, learning is a conscious process
where separate items from the language are studied and practised in turn.
 Teachers should concentrate on acquisition rather than learning and that the role of the
language teacher should be to provide the right kind of language exposure, namely
comprehensible input.
 The principal function of learnt language is to monitor what is coming from our acquired
store to check that it is OK = learnt language tends to ‘get in the way’ of acquired-
language production and may inhibit spontaneous communication.
 What we will not do is to ask the students to focus on how the language works.
 teenagers and adults have perfectly good reasoning powers and may want to think
consciously about how language works.
 Learners in foreign language classrooms are in a very different situation from that of
children of loving parents.
 A rich classroom environment would not only expose students to language (of course),
but also give them opportunities to activate their language knowledge.
 Both acquisition and learning have their part to play in language getting for students after
childhood.
Different times, different methods
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 The acquisition-versus-learning debate: the great linguist Harold Palmer made a similar
distinction between spontaneous and studial capacities in a book published in 1921.
 Current teaching practice is the direct result of such argument and discussion, and not only
on the subject of acquisition and learning.
 In the 1990s, for example, there was considerable discussion about the Lexical Approach,
where it was suggested that we should structure our curriculum around language chunks.
 In the 1970s, methods such as the Silent Way (where teachers do little talking and the
onus is put on the students), or Community Language Learning (where bilingual teachers
help students to translate what they want to say from their first language into the language
they are learning) were advocated, still some of the techniques they included have been
incorporated into modern teaching practice.
 Amongst the plethora of ideas and techniques which have been offered over the years,
some trends have had - and continue to have - a significant impact on how languages are
taught today.
Grammar-translation
 was first named as such in Germany in the 1780s
 introduced the idea of presenting students with short grammar rules and word lists, and
then translation exercises in which they had to make use of the same rules and words.
 most language learners translate in their heads at various stages anyway, and they (and we)
can learn a lot about a foreign language by comparing parts of it with parts of our own
mother tongue.
 a total concentration on grammar- translation = stops students from getting the kind of
natural language input that will help them acquire language
= fails to give them opportunities to activate
their language knowledge.

Audio-lingualism
 originated in army education in the 1940s.
 = if we describe the grammatical patterns of English, we can have students repeat and learn
them.
 marries this emphasis on grammatical patterns with behaviourist theories of learning.
These theories suggested that much learning is the result of habit- formation, where
performing the correct response to a stimulus means that a reward is given; constant
repetition of this reward makes the response automatic. This procedure is referred to as
conditioning.
 made extensive use of drilling, in which students produced the same grammatical pattern
but were prompted to use different words within the pattern, in the hope that they would
acquire good language habits.
 lost popularity because commentators argued that language learning was far more subtle
than just the formation of habits. For example, students are quickly able to produce their
own combinations of words, whether or not they have heard them before.
 Methodologists were also concerned that in Audio-lingualism students were not exposed to
real or realistic language, and were therefore unlikely to produce natural- sounding
language themselves.
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 drilling (choral and individual repetition and cue-response drilling, especially) is still
considered a useful technique to use, especially with low-level students.
PPP
 Presentation, Practice and Production
 = the teacher presents the context and situation for the language (e.g. describing
someone’s holiday plans) and both explains and demonstrates the meaning and form of
the new language .
 then practise making sentences with ‘going to’ (this is often called controlled practice and
may involve drilling) before going on to the production stage in which they talk more
freely about themselves (‘Next week I’m going to see that new film’) or other people in
the real world (‘My cousin’s going to buy a new car’, etc).
 can teach pronunciation, too, using the PPP procedure.
 is still widely used in language classrooms around the world, especially for teaching
simple language at lower levels.
 is just one procedure among many, and takes no account of other ways of learning and
understanding; it is very learning-based and takes little account of students’ acquisition
abilities.
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) CLT
 has two main guiding principles: the first is that language is not just patterns of grammar
with vocabulary items slotted in, but also involves language functions such as inviting,
agreeing and disagreeing, suggesting, which students should learn how to perform using a
variety of language exponents (e.g. we can invite by saying ‘Would you like to come to
the cinema?’, ‘D’you fancy coming to the cinema?’, ‘What about coming to the
cinema?’, ‘How about a film?’, ‘Are you on for a film?’, etc).
 Students also need to be aware of the need for appropriacy when talking and writing to
people in terms of the kind of language they use (formal, informal, tentative, technical,
etc).
 if students get enough exposure to language, and opportunities for language use - and if
they are motivated - then language learning will take care of itself.
 The focus has been on students communicating real messages, and not just grammatically
controlled language.
 has had a thoroughly beneficial effect since it reminded teachers that people learn
languages not so that they know about them, but so that they can communicate with them.
Task-Based Learning (TBL)
 is a natural extension of communicative language teaching.
 the emphasis is on the task rather than the language (as getting information about bus
timetables, or making a presentation on a certain topic.)
 then they correct grammatical mistakes or think about aspects of style.
 the task itself is the main focus and jumping-off point for (possible) subsequent study
later.
 A typical TBL sequence starts with a pre-task (where students are introduced to the topic
and told what the task will be).
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 This is followed by a task cycle where the students plan the task, gathering language and
information to do it, and then produce the piece of writing or oral performance that the
task demands. In the final language focus phase, students analyse the language they used
for the task, making improvements and practising any language that needs repair or
development.
Elements for successful language learning (ESA)
 Current language teaching practice generally gives students
- the opportunity to think about how a piece of grammar works
- opportunities for language use in communicative activities and task-based procedures.
- security of appropriate controlled practice
- letting them have a go at using all and any language they know.
 eclecticism= choosing between the best elements of a number of different ideas and methods.
 a principled eclecticism avoids these risks. Believing that students need exposure, motivation
and opportunities for language use, and acknowledging that different students may respond
more or less well to different stimuli, it suggests that most teaching sequences need to have
certain characteristics or elements, whether they take place over a few minutes, half an hour, a
lesson or a sequence of lessons. Elements:
1. Engage (E)
- engagement is one of the vital ingredients for successful learning.
- Activities and materials which frequently engage students include: games (depending on
the age of the learners and the type of game), music, discussions (when handled
challengingly), stimulating pictures, dramatic stories, amusing anecdotes, etc.
- A lot will depend, of course, on what the individual students are like, and how well the
teacher provokes and encourages engagement.
- when students are properly engaged, their involvement in the study and activation stages
is likely to be far more pronounced, and, as a result, the benefit they get from these will
be considerably greater.
2. Study (S)
- where the students are asked to focus on the construction of something, whether it is the
language itself, the ways in which it is used or how it sounds and looks.
- can range from the focus on and practice of a single sound to an investigation of how a
writer achieves a particular effect in a long text; from the examination and practice of a
verb tense to the study of a transcript of informal speech in order to discuss spoken
style.
- presentation and practice (the first two stages) are focusing on the construction of an
element of grammar or lexis; after all, controlled practice (where students repeat many
phrases using the language they are focusing on) is designed to make students think
about language construction.
- Students can study in a variety of different ways.
- Such discovery activities ask the students to do all the intellectual work, rather than
leaving it to the teacher.
- Sometimes students can read a text together and find words and phrases they want to
concentrate on for later study.
- At other times, they may spend time, with the teacher, listening to or looking at the
language they have used to see when it has been more or less successful.
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- the study and practice of paragraph organisation (topic sentence, development,

conclusion) or of the rules for using ‘make’ and ‘do’.
3. Activate (A)
- describes exercises and activities which are designed to get students using language as
freely and communicatively as they can (as in CLT).
- The objective in an activate activity is for them to use all and any language which may
be appropriate for a given situation or topic = students get a chance to try out real
language use with little or no restriction - a kind of rehearsal for the real world.
Personalisation (where students use language they have studied to talk about themselves,
or to make their own original dialogues) provides a bridge between the study and
activate stages.
- activate exercises include role-plays (where students act out, as realistically as possible,
an exchange between a travel agent and a client)
- Describe and draw (where one student tries to get another to draw a picture without that
other student being able to see the original), story and poem writing, email exchanges,
writing in groups, etc.
- When students read or listen for pleasure they are involved in language activation.
- They are using all and any language at their disposal to comprehend the reading or
listening text.
- Activation can be a prelude to study, rather than necessarily the other way round.
All three ESA elements need to be present in most lessons or teaching sequences.
- always need to be engaged, if possible, so that they can get the maximum benefit from
the learning experience.
- an extended study period where chances for activation are few.
- majority of teaching and learning at lower levels is not made up of such long activities.
Instead, it is far more likely that there will be more than one ESA sequence in a given
lesson sequence or period.
ESA lesson sequences
 the order is bound to change depending on what we want to achieve.
 if we are running a task-based lesson, the study event may well come after activation. O
 if we are introducing a piece of grammar, we may study the language first before the
students are asked to try to use it.
 there is a danger that if we always do things in the same order, students will become
bored; predictability can diminish students’ enthusiasm and motivation - and ours, as
teachers, too.
 straight arrows: first the teacher gets the class interested and engaged; then they study
something; then they try to activate it by putting it into production:
1 Engage: students and teacher look at a picture, website or DVD of new generation robots.
Perhaps they can watch a brief clip of the movie I, Robot or some other contemporary film
with a similar theme. They say whether they like or don’t like the idea of robots.
2 Study: the teacher shows students (the picture of) a particular robot. Students are introduced
to ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ (how they are pronounced and constructed) and say things like ‘It can use
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a cash machine’ and ‘It can’t play the piano’. The teacher tries to make sure the sentences are
pronounced correctly and that the students use accurate grammar.
3 Activate: students work in groups to design and describe their dream robot. They make a
presentation to the class saying what their robot can and can’t do.
ESA straight arrows sequence
 It gives students a chance to practise the language in a controlled way (during the
study phase) and then gives them the chance to begin to activate the ‘new’ language in
an enjoyable way.
 if we teach all our lessons like this, we may not be giving our students’ own learning
styles; a fair chance.
 It won’t be of much use if we want students to get involved with a reading text or have
a discussion about something. It wouldn’t be terribly useful either if most of the
students already know how to use ‘can’ and ‘can’t’.
boomerang procedure:
1 Engage: students and teacher discuss issues surrounding job interviews. What makes a good
interviewee? What sort of thing does the interviewer want to find out? Hopefully, the students
get interested in the topic.
2 Activate: the teacher describes an interview situation which the students are going to act out
in a role-play. The students plan the kind of questions they are going to ask and the kind of
answers they might want to give (not focusing specifically on language construction, etc, but
treating it as a real-life task). They then role-play the interviews. While they are doing this,
the teacher makes a note of language difficulties they have and particular mistakes that can be
worked on later.
3 Study: when the role-plays are over, the teacher works with the students on the grammar
and vocabulary which caused them trouble. For example, students can compare their language
with more correct usage and try to work out (discover) for themselves where they went
wrong. The teacher may explain what the problems were or refer students to grammar books,
etc. They might do some controlled practice of the language (see pages 85-87).
4 Activate: some time later, students role-play another job interview, having absorbed the
corrections to the language they used last time round.
EAS(A) boomerang sequence
 this makes much better sense because the connection between what students need to
learn and what they are taught is more transparent.
 it places a greater burden on the teacher since he or she will have to be able to find
good teaching material based on the (often unforeseen) problems thrown up at the first
activate stage.
 feel much more like the kind of TBL procedures; the task came first, not a specific
language point. But then the boomerang comes back (if we need it) to remind us to
study some of the language used, more or less successfully, in the task.
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 is sometimes called test-teach-test where the students are first asked to use language in
an activation stage, and are then taught how to deal with things they made mistakes
with before trying the testing part of it again.
patchwork lesson:
4. 1 Engage —► Activate: students look at a picture of sunbathers and respond to it by
commenting on the people and the activity they are taking part in. Maybe they look at
each other’s holiday photos, etc. Then they act out a dialogue between a doctor and a
sunburn victim after a day at the beach.
2 Activate: students look at a text describing different people (with different skin types)
and the effects the sun has on their skin (see page 103). They say how they feel about the
effects of the sun.
3 Study: the teacher does vocabulary work on words such as ‘pale’, ‘fair-skinned’,
‘freckles’, ‘tan’, etc, ensuring that students understand the meaning and the hyphenated
compound nature of some of them, and that they are able to say them with the correct
pronunciation in appropriate contexts.
4 Activate: students describe themselves or people they know in the same kind of ways as
the reading text.
5 Study: the teacher focuses the students’ attention on the relative clause construction used
in the text (e.g. ‘I’m the type of person who always burns’ and ‘I’m the type of person
who burns easily’). The use of the ‘who’ clause is discussed and students practise
sentences, saying things like ‘They’re the kind of people who enjoy movies’, etc.
6 Engage: the teacher discusses advertisements with the students. What are they for?
What different ways do they try to achieve their effect? What are the most effective ads
the students can think of? Perhaps the teacher plays some radio commercials or puts some
striking visual ads on an overhead projector.
7 Activate: the students write a radio commercial for a sunscreen. The teacher lets them
record it, using sound effects and music.
EAASASEA (etc) patchwork sequence
 they also provide an appealing balance between study and activation, and between
language and topic.
 Engage, Study and Activate are the basic building blocks for successful language
teaching and learning.
ESA and planning
 balancing up the three ESA elements reminds us of the need for student engagement;
 it prompts us to ensure that there are study events built into the plan;
 it ensures that in almost all lessons there are also opportunities for students to have
 they get a chance for the kind of mental processing that makes all that learning and
acquisition worthwhile.
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 But even where lessons are based on coursebook pages, it is important to manipulate
the activities in the book so that the three elements, engage, study and activate are
evident in appropriate sequences.