Key characteristics
Learners’ language may be both relatively fluent and
accurate but shows little evidence of appropriate grammatical development.
Complexity of learners’ language does not match their
proficiency level.
A common distinction in language teaching is between
fluency and accuracy. Fluency describes a level of proficiency in
communication, which includes:
The ability to produce language with ease.
The ability to speak with a good, but not necessarily perfect command of intonation, vocabulary, syntax, and grammar.
The ability to express ideas coherently.
The ability to produce continuous speech without causing comprehension difficulties, with minimum breakdowns and disruptions.
However, there is an additional important dimension in
language development, and that is the degree of complexity of the language
learners have acquired. The development of fluency may mean greater ease of use
of known language forms, but it does not necessarily imply development in
complexity. Skehan (1998) argues that fluency, accuracy, and complexity ideally
develop in harmony, but this is not always the case. In order for learners’
language to complexify, new linguistic forms have to be acquired and added to
their productive linguistic repertoire. This was referred to in my last post as
restructuring.
VanPatten (1993) suggests: “[that restructuring
involves processes] . . . that mediate the incorporation of intake into the
developing system. Since the internalization of intake is not a mere
accumulation of discrete bits of data, data have to “fit in” in some way and
sometimes the accommodation of a particular set of data causes changes in the
rest of the system. In some cases, the data may not fit in at all and are not
accommodated by the system. They simply do not make it into the long-term
store” (p. 436).
For example, if learners have mastered the present and
past tenses and are comfortable using them, once they encounter the perfect
tense, their linguistic system has to be revised to accommodate new
distinctions communicated by the perfect. There may be a time when learners
overuse the known forms (present and past) until their systems have
restructured to incorporate the perfect. But as VanPatten remarks, sometimes
this restructuring may not occur, and the newly encountered form will not pass
into learners’ linguistic systems. For learners’ linguistic systems to take on
new and more complex linguistic items, the restructuring, or reorganization, of
mental representations is required, as well as opportunities to practice these
new forms (the output hypothesis).
Ways of increasing the opportunities for restructuring
to take place can occur at three different stages during an activity: prior to
the activity, during the activity, or after completing an activity. In each
case, a language focus is provided in an attempt to support the learning of
more complex language items.
Addressing language prior to
the activity
Here, there are two goals: to provide language support
that can be used in completing a task, and to clarify the nature of the task so
that students can give less attention to procedural aspects of the task and
hence monitor their language use during their performance. Skehan notes (1996),
“Pre-task activities can aim to teach or mobilize, or make salient language
which will be relevant to task performance” (p. 53). This can be accomplished
in several ways:
By pre-teaching certain
linguistic forms that can be used while completing a task.
For example, prior to completing a role play task that
practices calling an apartment owner to discuss renting an apartment, students
can first read advertisements for apartments and learn key vocabulary they will
use in the role play. They could also listen to and practice a dialog in which
a prospective tenant calls an apartment owner for information. The dialog
serves both to display different questioning strategies and to model the kind
of task the students will perform.
By reducing the cognitive
complexity of the activity.
If an activity is difficult to carry out, learners’
attention may be diverted to the structure and management of the task, leaving
little opportunity for them to monitor the language they use on the task. One
way of reducing the cognitive complexity of the activity is to provide students
with a chance for rehearsal. This is intended to ease the processing load that
learners will encounter when actually doing a task. This could be achieved by
watching a video or listening to a recording of learners doing a task similar
to the target task, or it could be a simplified version of the activity the
learners will carry out. Dialog work prior to carrying out the role play serves
a similar function.
By giving time to plan the
activity.
Time allocated to planning prior to carrying out an
activity can likewise provide learners with schemata, vocabulary, and language
forms that they can call upon while completing the task. Planning activities
include vocabulary-generating activities such as brainstorming, or strategy
activities in which learners consider a range of approaches to solving a problem,
discuss their pros and cons, and then select which they will apply to the task.
Jack will be back tomorrow with some ideas on how you
can address language while the activity is taking place.
Excerpted and edited from Moving Beyond the Plateau:
From Intermediate to Advanced Levels in Language Learning by Jack C. Richards
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