Elements for successful language learning (ESA)

Most current language teaching tries to offer a judicious blend of many of the ideas and elements
discussed above. It recognises the value of language exposure through comprehensible input,
while still believing that most people (apart from young children) find chances to concentrate on
language forms and how they can be used extremely helpful.

Current language teaching practice generally gives students the opportunity to think about how a
piece of grammar works (or which words group together, for example), while at the same time
providing opportunities for language use in communicative activities and task-based procedures. It
offers students the security of appropriate controlled practice (depending on variables such as the
students’ age, personal learning styles and the language in question), while also letting them have
a go at using all and any language they know.

Such eclecticism - choosing between the best elements of a number of different ideas and
methods - is a proper response to the competing claims of the various trends we have described.
However, the danger of eclecticism is the possible conclusion that since we can use bits and pieces
from different theories and methods, ‘anything goes. Our lessons can then become a disorganised
ragbag of different activities with no obvious coherence or philosophy to underpin them. This can
be just as damaging as the methodological rigidity that eclecticism aims to replace.

However, eclecticism that makes use of an underlying philosophy and structure, in other words, 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. These elements are Engage, Study and activate. Having discussed what
they mean, we will go on to look at how they can occur within three typical sequences (out of
many).

Engage (E)

Most of us can remember lessons at school which were uninvolving and where we ‘switched off’
from what was being taught. We may also remember lessons where we were more or less paying
attention, but where we were not really ‘hooked’. We were not engaged emotionally with what
was going on; we were not curious, passionate or involved. Yet things are learnt much better if
both our minds and our hearts are brought into service. Engagement of this type 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. Even where such activities and
materials are not used, teachers can do their best to ensure that their students engage with the
topic, exercise or language they are going to be dealing with by asking them to make predictions,
or relate classroom materials to their own lives. A lot will depend, of course, on what the
individual students are like, as we saw in Chapter 1, and how well the teacher provokes and
encourages engagement.
The reason why this element is so important in teaching sequences, therefore, is that 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.

Study (S)

Study activities are those 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. Study
activities 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. In the PPP
procedure described above, both 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.

When we have students repeat words with the correct pronunciation (or say the words we want
them to say based on cues we give them), it is because we want them to think about the best way
to say the words. We want them to think of the construction of the words’ pronunciation.

But study here means more than the PPP procedure - although PPP is, of course, one kind of study.
Students can study in a variety of different ways. Sometimes we may show them a new grammar
pattern, repeating each element separately or putting a diagram on the board before getting them
to repeat sentences, and that is very much like a PPP procedure. But at other times, we may show
students examples of language and ask them to try to work out the rules. 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. All of these (and many
other possibilities) are examples of the study of language construction.

Some typical language areas for study might be the study and practice of the vowel sound in ‘ship’
and ‘sheep’ (e.g. ‘chip’, ‘cheap’, ‘dip’, ‘deep’, ‘bit’, ‘beat’, etc), the study and practice of the third
person singular of the present simple (‘He sleeps’, ‘she laughs’, ‘it works’, etc), the study and
practice of lexical phrases for inviting (‘ Would you like to come to the cinema/to a concert?’, etc),
the study and practice of the way we use pronouns in written discourse (e.g. ‘A man entered a
house in Brixton. He was tall with an unusual hat. It was multicoloured ...’, etc), the study and
practice of paragraph organisation (topic sentence, development, conclusion) or of the rules for
using ‘make’ and ‘do’.

Activate (A)

This element describes exercises and activities which are designed to get students using language
as freely and communicatively as they can (as in CLT - see page 50). We will not be asking them to
focus on the use of a particular structure, or to try to use words from a list we give them. That
would make what they are doing more like a study activity, where they are expected to focus on
the accuracy of specific bits of language, rather than on the message they are trying to convey or
the task that needs to be performed. 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. In this way, 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, often as the third or production phase of PPP) provides a bridge
between the study and activate stages. But more genuinely activate exercises include role-plays
(where students act out, as realistically as possible, an exchange between a travel agent and a
client, for example), advertisement design (where students write and then record a radio
commercial, for example), debates and discussions, 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.

Activation is not just about producing language in speech and writing, however. When students
read or listen for pleasure (or when they are listening or reading to understand the message rather
than thinking about the form of the language they are seeing or hearing), they are involved in
language activation. They are using all and any language at their disposal to comprehend the
reading or listening text. But, of course, students may, once they have been through an activation
stage, go back to what they have said or to the text they have read, and focus upon its
construction. 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. Whatever the
main focus of the lesson (e.g. a grammar topic or a reading skills exercise), students always need
to be engaged, if possible, so that they can get the maximum benefit from the learning
experience. Most students will readily appreciate opportunities to activate their language
knowledge, but for many of them the inclusion of study elements, however small or of short
duration these are, will persuade them of the usefulness of the lesson.

Some events, for example a debate or a role-play, a prolonged Internet-based search or a piece of
extended writing take a lot of time and so, in one lesson, teachers may not want to interrupt the
flow of activation with a study stage. But they may want to use the exercise as a basis for study
(perhaps in a different lesson). The same might be true of an extended study period where
chances for activation are few. But, in both these cases, the only limitation is time. The missing
elements will appear at some other time.

The majority of teaching and learning at lower levels is not made up of such long activities,
however. Instead, it is far more likely that there will be more than one ESA sequence in a given
lesson sequence or period.