Interview with Rod Ellis

Rod Ellis is the Head of the Applied Language Studies and Linguistics
Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of a
series of books on Second Language Acquisition.

Rod Ellis graciously accepted our request for an interview that was completed in
late December 2001 in Tokyo by then editor Kevin Ryan.

ELTNEWS
Before we get started, let's run through a quick history…

Rod
I started off as an English language teacher in Africa, working in Zambia in 1967.
I then went into teacher training in Zambia until 1977. After taking some
postgraduate courses at Bristol University, I was employed by St. Mary's College
in Surrey, based in Twickenham. And then I became head of the ESL Department
of Ealing College of Higher Education, which eventually turned into Thames
Valley University.

I left in 1989 to work, initially, for one year at Temple University in Japan. I liked
Japan so much that I decided to give up my position at Ealing. I worked at
Temple University in Japan through 1993 when I was offered a tenured position
at Temple University in Philadelphia. I stayed five years in Philadelphia until I
moved to my current position, which is at the University of Auckland in New
Zealand in the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics.

ELTNEWS
Should we mention your visiting professorship at Showa?

Rod
Tomoko Kaneko, Showa Women's University English Department head, was the
first Ph.D. graduate from Temple University in Japan in 1989. Since then we have
kept in contact and I do two weekend seminars each year for the graduate school
at Showa. This semester I'm a visiting professor here at Showa, and will continue
with twice-yearly visits to Japan for the weekend seminars.

ELTNEWS
What do you see as the relationship between research and teaching?

Rod
>My career in this field started out as a classroom teacher, and research is
something that I learned to do later. I have always felt that the kind of research
that I do has some kind of relationship to actual teaching, to its practice. These
days you read a lot about the gap that divides research and teaching. To a
certain extent, there is undoubtedly a gap. Researchers and teachers belong to
different kinds of communities, different allegiancies, and they are evaluated in
different ways.

In my own work, I've increasingly felt that what researchers do cannot be used to
describe what teachers should do. That all it can do is illuminate some things.
But it seems to me that some of the major developments that have taken place in
teaching have been top-down. They have been from researchers or theorists.

An example, perhaps, would be notional-functional teaching, the origins of the

communicative approach. But equally, a lot of the other ideas in teaching come
from the bottom up, from those who are daily involved in classrooms. I think to a
certain extent task-based teaching began that way. Very often ideas begin with
teachers and then are taken up by researchers and investigated that way, and
maybe further developed. So there is more of a symbiosis between teachers and
researchers than is often admitted. People tend to focus on the differences rather
than on their points of contact. And they are many points of contact.

ELTNEWS
Do you have any suggestions for teachers doing research?

Rod
The gap between research and teaching, as I said before, is less than it seems.
In a way, all teaching is research because when teachers go in with an idea for a
lesson they are, in effect, seeing whether that idea works. So teaching is
research, but there is one difference. Research by definition has to be something
that is systematic and has to, potentially at least, be public. And that is what
makes the difference between what we do as teachers and research.

Suggestions for teachers for research is perhaps simply to do some of the things
that you like doing, and you think work, but to try to find out, actually, whether
they do work, and be prepared to make public your findings in one form or
another, at a conference, for example.

So this can be done in a fairly simple way. One simple way is if you have an idea
for an activity that works in the classroom then, research it. But that means
thinking about how you can decide whether in fact it really does work, how you
can collect some evidence to actually find out whether it is working in terms of
the way that you think it might work.

ELTNEWS
So the first step is to form a research question?

Rod
Yeah, the research question could be quite simple, it could be, "Does X activity
work?" Then you have to operationalize what you mean by "X activity" and what
you mean by "work." Because it is how you operationalize those two terms that
will enable you to actually do the research.

ELTNEWS
And it also affects how much you can generalize your finding to other situations.

Rod
Right. I mean, many teachers' idea of an activity that works is an activity that gets
a good response from the students. So that would then lead you to think, well,
"How can I measure whether the response from the students really is good?"
What is an adequate way of measuring that, and therefore obtaining evidence as
to whether the activity works?

The easiest way would be to, perhaps, record a lesson and examine the nature
of the student participation. How many students are participating? How much are
they participating? How long are their turns? Are they producing one-word
responses or short phrase responses? Or are they producing somewhat more
extended responses?

ELTNEWS
Over the course of your research, how have your views of language acquisition
and research about it changed?

Rod
When I was a teacher back in 1967 the prevailing psychological theory that
informed teaching then was still really behaviorist, a notion that in some way you
could inculcate a habit through extensive, thorough practice. So I guess my
starting point was that.

But even before I ever began to research or read about language acquisition, I
began to have doubts about that. The things one was practicing, that students
were getting right, in the context of the practice, they didn't get right once they left
the practice. They went back to trying to use their own language.

So, it seemed to me that there was something essentially wrong with the
behaviorist view of language learning. And then of course I began to read people
like Pit Corder, and began to understand notions like "interlanguage." I began to
see that the process of acquiring competence in a language is an extremely
gradual one, and nor was it an incremental one, a bit by bit building-block
process. It was an organic process-an evolving a competence in the language.

And I guess the only thing that's likely changed is perhaps what the nature of
language representation is. I still used to adhere to the idea that learners learn
rules. Maybe the rules that they internalize are not target language rules but
rather interlanguage rules. But I still felt that they probably construct rules. A lot of
current theorizing about second language acquisition based on the connectionist
model of language and language learning suggests that there are no rules, that
all we have is a network of enormous, elaborate connections between neurons in
the brain. And that language is somehow represented in this complex network.

As a result of the exposure of using the language certain pathways in that

network get well trodden and as a result of that learners appear to be performing
in accordance with rules but those rules don't actually exist mentally. All that
exists is a hugely elaborate network of bits and pieces of information, not
necessarily even corresponding to words or morphemes, etc. And that I find a
compelling vision of how input comes to be represented in the human mind.

ELTNEWS
Yes, then behaviorism obviously cannot handle…

Rod
No, but neither can a generative Chomskyan model, or even the traditional
grammar model because they're all premised on the idea of rules. We can
formulate specific rules about grammar but they don't necessarily reflect what
actually is represented in the brain.

So we can talk about a rule for regular past tense, we can talk about a rule for
making relative causes but it simply doesn't follow that the knowledge that we
use in order to produce sentences with regular past tense, or sentences with
relative causes actually consists of those rules. Your behavior, if you like,
becomes rule-like without you representing knowledge in terms of rules. And that
is what current research is saying.

Of course it is still controversial, people still cling to the idea that even implicit
knowledge does consist of rules. But computer simulations and theorizing with a
connectionist model are going to take us an enormously long way towards
actually explaining what our knowledge of language consists of.

ELTNEWS
So there is no black box.

Rod
(Laughs) There is no black box, because the other thing that would follow from a
connectionist theory is that the mechanisms by which we develop these networks
are essentially the same as the ones involved in any other type of learning, like
perception. How it is we come to perceive objects and the way in which we
perceive them? And again it is the result of exposure to a variety of objects that
enable us to develop patterns in a network and so to very rapidly perceive things
in certain ways.
Similarly with language. Perception and language involve the same pattern
detector. Then if there is a black box, it is simply a pattern detector. That is to say,
we are simply equipped with the ability to see patterns and regularities in input,
whether it is visual or oral input.

ELTNEWS
What about consciousness-raising? How does that fit in with these ideas on
rules?

Rod
I have for long time thought that perhaps the best way to actually teach language
as opposed to simply giving learners experience with using and hearing
language is to treat it as an object so that we can teach a bit about it. The only
way that we can do this it seems to me that is compatible with what we know
about learning is through consciousness-raising. That is to say we don't actually
directly try to influence the construction of the complex network that I've been
talking about, because really learners can only do it themselves. We cannot
implant rules into that network.

Learners extract from the available information around them the regularities that
go into their knowledge system. If that is the case, all that we can do is make
them aware of some of these patterns and bits and pieces of language and how
they work under the assumption that if you have an awareness of them, then
ultimately your pattern detector might function a bit more efficiently. For example,
if you know that relative causes have a certain structure, a shape, then maybe
you are more able to detect them in the input to which you are exposed. And
through the process of the detection, you gradually build up the connectionist
network that I've been talking about.

Thus to me, consciousness-raising serves to equip people with explicit

knowledge, which in someway may facilitate the construction of implicit
connectionist systems.

ELTNEWS
The constructionists think that for people to really learn well, they have to
construct a pattern by themselves.

Rod
You can't do it for them. You can give them hooks. You can perhaps choose the
way in which the pattern detector works by making them aware of the kinds of
things they may well come across when they are exposed to language.

ELTNEWS
You've written quite a few books. Do you have a personal favorite, or one that
may be a good introduction to your ideas?
Rod
My books have been written over a period of 17 years. The first one that I ever
wrote was in 1984 called Second Language Classroom Development, which was
actually a version of my Ph.D. Shortly after, followed Understanding Second
Language Acquisition in 1985. I guess, in some ways, that was my most
successful book. It's still sold and used quite a lot today, though, in many ways it
is out of date. So, in some ways, I'm grateful for its success. If you're going to
have an academic career you have to write successful books. So that book has a
special place for me.

ELTNEWS
But as a starting point for our readers, what would you suggest?

Rod
There is a little book I wrote for Henry Widdowson's series in applied linguistics
by Oxford University Press that is just called Second Language Acquisition. That
is just a 90 page survey of what second language acquisition is about. That does
a reasonable job in introducing what is now very complex field.

ELTNEWS
I read this a report written by Brett Reynolds on a seminar of yours in February
99 where you talk about a definition of a language task. Has the definition
changed at all since then? Could you talk about learners being USERS rather
than LEARNERS of language?

Rod
"Ellis asked those present to consider some definitions of a task proposed by other
researchers. Once we had read them over, he proposed the following as hallmarks of tasks:
* A task is a work plan.
* A task involves linguistic activity.
* A task requires primary attention to be on message (cf. "exercise").
* A task allows learners to select the linguistic resources they will use themselves.
* A task requires learners to function primarily as language users rather than learners.
* A task has a clearly defined non-linguistic outcome."

That is one of the things I've been working on here at Showa, I've been finishing
off a book for Oxford University Press which is called Task Based Language
Learning and Teaching. It is an attempt to bring together all the kinds of research
that have been done on tasks. And also all the work that has been done on task
based language teaching. It provides a sort of account of these areas of work.
The book should be published sometime in 2002.

ELTNEWS
This difference between users and learners of language that you have pointed
out seems to be a very key difference, but one that is counterintuitive.

Rod
This is quite essential, I think for understanding the problems the Japanese
people have about language learning because, ultimately, to be a successful
language learner you have to be a language user. You cannot treat language like
any other school subject, a set of facts that have to be memorized, or set of
chunks and bits of language that you can perform. One of the things that is least
satisfactory about the main textbooks that you find in Japan is that they are all
predicated on the notion the Japanese students cannot produce their own
sentences in English and therefore what we must do is in some way either give
them the sentences that they need to use or, alternatively, simply ask them to
finish off a textbook sentence.

That's not language use. That's the kind of thing you do as a language learner.
When you are a language user, you must first formulate what it is you want to say
about a topic, and then you have to find the language to try to say it as best you
can. Now, everything that I know about second language acquisition tells me that
you just cannot be successful unless you become a language user.

That's not to say that treating language as an object cannot also help you. I think
it can. You can learn vocabulary and some useful chunks, etc. But ultimately
you've got to be able to express your own ideas in English as well as you can so
someone else can understand you.

It seems to me that is what Japanese learners have such enormous problems

with. I think this is a product of the sort of Confucian educational system which
basically leads to Japanese people envisaging language as a set of facts, a set
of words, a finite number of grammar rules that if you master you will somehow
learn the language. It just doesn't happen that way. So Japanese learners are
just very reluctant to play the role of language user. They think you have to be a
native speaker to be a language user. Otherwise, you have to be a language
learner.

Another thing I find a bit depressing about the Japanese view is that if we are
going to teach English what we must do is "get native speakers to do it for us
because we Japanese are useless at languages, and so cannot possibly teach it
to ourselves." Which is absolute nonsense. In most parts of the world it is
nationals of the country that do the teaching. This is what we have in Germany,
this is what we have in Spain, this is what we have in Zambia, this is what we
have in China, mainly.

The Japanese have to take the responsibility. They can't in some way slough this
off on native speakers. They have to take responsibility for teaching themselves.
And they need to recognize that this is perfectly possible. But to make it possible
Japanese learners of English have to learn to be users, and therefore they need
textbooks and materials that encourage them to be users of the language rather
than learners of the language, and such books are thin on the floor in both high
schools and universities.
ELTNEWS
Thank you very much for your time, along with those stimulating ideas. You've
rejuvenated a desire to look more closely at my teaching in this new and different
light. Can't wait until your new book comes out.