Motivation Where does it come from? Where does it go?

In recent years, I have had the privilege to visit many classes around the world, to talk to teachers and sit in on their lessons.  I remember very clearly one experience in particular which started me thinking about the whole question of motivation.

I was visiting a secondary school, and my first visit was to a first year class of 11-12 year olds, early in their school year.  As soon as you opened the door, you could feel and see the motivation to learn in these students.  Big, bright eyes, and smiles, eager to show the visitor what they had learned.  They had been looking forward to the visit by ‘the Englishman’ and now the moment had arrived.  The bubbling energy of these students was overwhelming, and so too was their desire to learn English.

Next lesson, I went a little further along the corridor to visit a second year class, a year older.  Here, the tone was very different – more purposeful but more subdued with none of the spark that I had seen just before.  Their eyes no longer had a twinkle and the smiles were now replaced by a somewhat expressionless look on some students.  We had a pleasant encounter, and they read short pieces of their work to me but the overall tone was rather polite.

Next, I visited a third year class, and here I found a quite different atmosphere.  At front of the class, there were a few students who were clearly interested in the visit by ‘the Englishman’. We talked about the things they liked and disliked in learning English and their interests.  It was, however, always the same students who talked and most of the students remained silent throughout.  More significantly, there were two students who clearly couldn’t care less – or so it appeared.   One of them, sitting at the back of the class, had his feet on the edge of his desk, not a book, a pen or a piece of paper near him.   He was removing what looked like motor oil from his nails.  Every so often he would shout something out to another student, and receive a glare from the teacher.   The other student, also at the back, was evidentially asleep, with his head flopped over his desk, and no sign of any school equipment near him.

Many teachers, I am sure, will recognise the scenarios here.  They are, in fact, situations that I have since seen time and time again in my visits to schools.  Many teachers, too, will also recognise the sketch of the ‘couldn’t care less – don’t want to learn’ students. The most striking thing for me, however, was the transition from the 1^st year students –all seemingly eager and energetic- to the wide differences amongst the 3^rd year class, with some students now apparently completely negative about their learning.  Assuming that the 3^rd year class had once been like the 1^st year class, what had happened in the intervening three years?  Where did the students’ initial motivation come from? And where did it go?

Sources of motivation

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to point to a single factor which would account for the apparent changing levels of motivation and involvement that I had witnessed.    As all teachers know, and as Marion Williams in an earlier article (ETP, Issue 13) has explained, there are many, many factors which affect students’ commitment to study. Many things – perhaps most – are beyond our control as language teachers, and fall outside the confines of the few lessons that we have with them in a week.  Home background, physical tiredness, events in their personal life, health, previous educational experience, personality and the onset of adolescence, are just some of the factors that can affect how individual students appear to us in our classes.  Nevertheless, I believe that in many cases, the explanation of why the smile disappears from the faces of some students – whatever their age – may indeed lie in their experience of their English classes – in short, in how their classes are organised.

In very general terms, educational psychologists point to three major sources of motivation in learning (Fisher, 1990).  Simply put, these are:

1        The learner’s natural interest:  intrinsic satisfaction

2        The teacher/institution/employment: extrinsic reward

3         Success in the task: combining satisfaction and reward

Intrinsic satisfaction

Sad though it may be, we must, I believe, recognise that only a relatively small number of students get a sense of intrinsic satisfaction from learning English.  For the vast majority of people, language is not, in itself, very interesting, and it is unlikely to spark and, still less, to sustain motivation.  For some older learners, the satisfaction of learning and using a foreign language may be connected to what Gardener (1985) has called an ‘integrative motivation’ – a desire to identify with the culture of the foreign language – but this is not widespread and it is not likely to be the case with younger learners.    Some teachers of younger students endeavour to relate to what they see as their pupils’ sense of intrinsic satisfaction by using games, songs and puzzles in the class.  Often these have a positive impact in raising the motivation of the pupils – but the effect is usually temporary, and once they return to normal classroom work, the effect wears off.  In general, then, the learner’s natural interest is not, therefore, something which we can rely on to generate sustained motivation in language learning.

Extrinsic rewards

Aware of these facts, many teachers, and indeed whole educational systems, turn to a second source of motivation, extrinsic reward, and its opposite, extrinsic punishment, as a means of motivating students.  In the classroom, for example, teachers may ‘reward’ students with good marks, or, in effect, punish other students with low marks.  ‘Better’ students may be rewarded by being given more advanced work to do, or by being placed in a higher level group, which increases their sense of self-worth.  The principal problem in this approach, however, is that rewards only lead to sustained motivation if you actually get them.  For the failing student, unlikely to get rewards, it does not take long to work out that it is always someone else who gets the rewards – no matter how hard he or she works.  In this case, the reward system itself can be demotivating for the weaker students. The increase in the motivation of the better students is more or less proportional to the decrease in motivation of the weaker students.

Success in the task

While teachers and school systems have drawn on both of the first two sources of motivation, the third source is perhaps under-exploited in language teaching.  This is the simple fact of success, and the effect that this has on our view of what we do.  As human beings, we generally like what we do well, and are therefore more likely to do it again, and put in more effort.

If we put in more effort, we generally get better, and so this sustains our motivation. Feelings of being able to do something and feelings of sustained motivation can therefore be linked into an upward spiral which causes us to commit ourselves to what are we doing and to improve.

Unfortunately for many students, this spiral relationship between motivation and ability can often function in reverse.  Few people like to fail and we generally avoid circumstances in which we anticipate failure.  In the classroom, this can mean that students who develop an image of themselves as ‘no good at English’ will simply avoid situations which tell them what they already know – that they aren’t any good at English.   Feelings of failure, particularly early on in a student’s school career, can therefore lead to a downward spiral of a self- perception of low ability – low motivation – low effort – low achievement – low motivation – low achievement, and so on.   It is the existence of these upward and downward spirals in the motivation-ability relationship that explain a situation commonly found by teachers.  In many classes where there are differing levels of student ability, the gap between the ‘weaker’ students and the ‘stronger’ students appears to get wider and wider over time, as some students thrive in an upward spiral, whilst other students actually deteriorate in a downward spiral.

The attempt by some students to avoid recurring failure suggests that we need to rethink some of the beliefs that we may have about them.  While it may be true that the students with their feet on the desk at the back of the class really aren’t interested in learning, it may equally be true that what they are actually trying to do is to avoid repeated failure – by pretending that they don’t care.  It is their sense of self-esteem that is at stake here.  By pretending that they aren’t interested and don’t want to learn, they can protect themselves from seeing themselves as failure.  Such extreme displays of disinterest or rejection of learning are probably at the bottom end of a downward motivation-ability spiral.  For many students, the spiral will have begun long before, as they learned to see themselves as failures, and then began to engage in various kinds of avoidance strategies – sitting at the back of the class, choosing a seat where they wouldn’t be noticed, misbehaving, pretending illnesses at crucial moments such as tests, and blaming failure on the teacher or the school or other students.

Self esteem and confidence

What all this points to, I think, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of self-esteem and a sense of competence in language learning as crucial factors affecting motivation.  For the failing student, in particular, it is important that we try to develop their sense of success and a feeling that they can do something, rather than a feeling than they can’t.

In practical terms, this means that we need to be sensitive to the psychology of language learning.  When we plan a lesson, devise a test, or use a particular type of exercise, we need to ask ourselves a very important question: how will the weaker students feel if they can’t do this? Let me give an example.  One of the commonest exercises used in language classrooms is the gap-fill. This is a text with every 7^th or so word missing, which the students have to supply.  Confident, motivated students who have a history of success are likely to approach such exercises feeling that they have done these exercises before and, as they have usually done well, they will probably be able to do this one too.  And, if they do complete the exercise successfully they will have in front of them confirmation of what they already knew, and their confidence and motivation are renewed again.   Weaker students, however, may have exactly the opposite experience. Previous failure may create a lack of confidence as they approach the task, and if they find that they can only complete one or two of the gaps correctly, then once again they are presented with a picture of what they can’t do – and so the spiral relationship of motivation-ability takes another step downward.

I do not want to suggest by this that we should never use gap-fill exercises.   Used appropriately, they can serve a very useful purpose.  The basic point I wish to make, however, is that there is a psychology involved in everything we do in the classroom, and that this is concerned with the students’ feelings of success/failure, high/low self-esteem, high/low confidence and this has a direct impact on motivation.  Viewed in this way, we may be able to understand some of the reasons why, over time, motivation may fail, and explain the differences in the three classrooms I described at the beginning of this article.  It suggests that, where we see students beginning to fail and beginning to lose motivation, one route to repairing the situation may lie in choosing tasks which we believe the students can do, in order to develop a sense of competence and confidence.  It also suggests that all students need to feel a sense of progress and that their efforts actually lead to results.

Feedback

One important element in shaping the students’ view of themselves is the feedback that we give them.   Research has shown that even very young children, in their first years at school, able to identify who the ‘clever’ pupils are and who the ‘not very clever’ pupils are.  They do this by monitoring the teacher’s oral feedback, and develop a fairly clear picture of where they stand in the classroom league table.  The importance of this in shaping the pupils’ self-esteem, feelings of competence and motivation cannot be underestimated.  It suggests that we need to be very careful about how we give feedback, who gets praise and who doesn’t.   It also suggests that we need to be careful about the type of feedback that we give students, and whether it recognises and values effort, content, ideas and potential.

To end this short article, I have given a list of some practical suggestions which you may like to experiment with, but you will find more examples and practical accounts in Breen and Littlejohn, 2000. There is no ‘magic formula’ for sustaining motivation in learning.  As the first point in the list of ideas says, we need to experiment and take risks.  The starting point, however, needs to be to try and understand why some students are not motivated and not simply blame them for not being interested.  If we start from the assumption, which I believe is true, that all human beings in the right circumstances are naturally motivated to learn, we need to ask ourselves: where does that motivation go?

Add comment December 23, 2009

Lazy Language Learning with NLP

As a linguist by trade, I was immediately grabbed by the language side of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (hereinafter referred to as NLP).  If you listen to what people are saying, you’ll discover exactly how they’re processing their thoughts.  Some of us think best in pictures (visual), some of us in sounds (auditory), and some of us like to process our thoughts through our bodies (kinaesthetic: remembering that the kinema showed moving pictures makes this piece of jargon  easy).  Visual people think very fast – they need to keep up with their pictures; while, at the other extreme, kinaesthetic people may take longer to give you an answer.  Have you ever asked a question of a teenager deep in his or her feelings, and got no response?  Next time, wait a bit and you’ll get an answer: it takes time to process thoughts through every muscle.

People in visual mode will say things like: Look!  If you see what I mean.  From my point of view.  Let’s get this into perspective.  Watch it!  Picture this.  Look here!  I can’t see the point.  See you soon. They’re thinking in pictures, and imagining that you are doing the same.  They’re probably also talking very fast.

People in auditory mode will use phrases like:  Listen!  A little bird told me.  Music to my ears.  That rings a bell.  I hear what you’re saying.  A harmonious discussion.  That sounds about right.  A word in your ear.  Speak soon. Sounds are their medium, and they think they are yours too.

People in kinaesthetic mode will probably talk more slowly, and they’ll say things like:  How do you feel about that?  I can’t grasp what he’s saying.  I’m comfortable with that.  My feeling is.   It was heart-warming/moving/touching.  Hold on!  He/she doesn’t turn me on. The language of feelings needs to stir something in you.

Tastes and smells also come into language:  food for thought, a bitter pill to swallow; digesting a proposition,   sugaring the pill, a bitter argument; and smells, in particular, demonstrate a deeper level of consciousness:  I smell a rat.  Follow your nose.   It stinks!   She was rather sniffy about it.  The French will tap their noses and say:  j’ai le flair when they’re suspicious about something.

Of course, we all switch from mode to mode; but most of us prefer one mode of processing over others.  For example, if you want to sell a car to a visual person, you’ll need to focus on the overall effect of the design: do they like the colour?  Do they like the visual layout of the dashboard.  If the person is auditory;  you’ll focus on sound of the engine (for a sports car lover), the quality of the stereo, the quiet inside the car, etc.  And, for the kinaesthetic person: the comfort, the accessiblity of the functions, the feel of the steering wheel, and so on.

The same applies to teaching/learning:  for example, people in kinaesthetic mode may not understand an explanation that paints a picture.  People in auditory mode may appear to be staring out of the window all through your lesson, when what they are actually doing is paying you the courtesy of turning their best ear towards you.  People who look up in the air when you ask them a question are searching for a picture in their mind’s eye.  People who look down towards the hand they write with are checking out new information with their feelings.  People who fidget in class are just trying to get the information into their muscles.

Things to do: Students work in threes, and set up three sales pitches for, say, a house, a car or a holiday:  one to be visual, concentrating on the look of the item;  one to be auditory, concentrating on the sound;  and one to be kinaesthetic, concentrating on the feel.  They then present their pitches, in any order, to the rest of the class;  and, by the way each member chooses which they will buy, the students will discover what matters most to their classmates.  (NB  It’s not the quality of the sales pitch that gets the most votes, it’s the specificity of the language.)

Trying is very trying: I believe that, the more we struggle and give ourselves a hard time, the less we learn;  whereas, the more we relax and have fun, the more we learn.  The Brits think the French are arrogant, because they won’t speak English;  whereas, the reason the French won’t speak English is because they are terrified of making mistakes.    The ability to make fools of ourselves is probably the greatest asset to language learning;  hence the value of games – we don’t have to take them seriously.

Distracting the conscious mind: I learnt most of my French either on a horse, or round the bridge or dinner table.  We learn things much better when the conscious mind is distracted.   If you encourage your students to listen for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic language, and encourage them to use it back to their interlocutors, their conscious minds will be nicely distracted.

Things to do:   Students trawl their dictionaries for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic phrases, and compare them to their translations into their native language;  for example, English is the only language I know that ‘looks forward’ to things;  this demonstrates a completely different mental process from French, which waits for them with impatience, or Spanish which delights itself in advance, or German which pleases itself towards it.  If this is done in pairs or threes, they will bring their different brains to the process, and come up with an excellent assortment; if they have different mother tongues, the results will be even more interesting.

Different thinking modes = different physiology.   Visual people will keep looking up at the pictures in their minds’ eye;  they will probably talk very fast – to keep up with their pictures; their voices may be fairly high pitched and they will breathe high in their chests;  they will probably sit fairly upright, and will walk with their feet parallel;  they will go upstairs on the balls of their feet.

Auditory people will look from side to side, to check the sounds in their minds’ ear;  they will talk at a reasonable pace;  their voices will be well modulated, and they will breathe with their rib cage.  They will walk with their feet slightly turned out.

Kinaesthetic people will look down towards the hand they write with, to check out their feelings;  they will talk much more slowly than visual people;  their voices will be lower, and they will breathe with their stomachs;  they will have a lower centre of gravity, and a more rounded physiology.  They will walk with their feet turned out,  and will go upstairs flat footed.

Things to do: Take on the physiology of someone who is different from you, and discuss what changes in your world when you ‘become’ someone else for a bit.  See also Modelling, and A Mile in Your Moccasins, below.

Modelling: If you also encourage students to model the physiology of the people they are talking to:  stand the way they’re standing or sit the way they’re sitting;  breathe when they breathe, and so on, they will find the rapport level deepens immediately.  And, if they do this with native speakers, they’ll discover what it’s like to have a different nationality.  They will discover that we have different identities for every language that we speak.  They will also discover that, because of the increased rapport, they will understand the foreign language at a much deeper level, because the connection is made heart to heart, rather than mind to mind.

Things to do: A mile in your moccasins. Students find a native speaker of the language they want to learn, and go for a walk with (or behind) them.  For ten minutes, without speaking, the student walks behind or beside the native speaker, moving in exactly the same way:  stride for stride, swinging their arms the same way, holding their head the same way, stopping when they stop, looking at what they’re looking at, listening to what they’re listening to, and so on.  Sharing what they discover afterwards can be very revealing.

Language comes from deep within us, and is an inherent part of our culture.  Not only does culture affect language, but language affects the way we think.  Think about phrases that other people use that you wouldn’t use in a million years:  these phrases fit in with the way they think, and don’t fit in with the way that you think.

Things to do: Find out where words come from. Students select two spots on the ground (their mother tongue spot and their target language spot).  They choose a word and its translation; for example, if they’re English and learning French: ‘anger/colère’.

In their mother tongue spot they say ‘anger’, and notice whereabouts in their body the word comes from.   They then move to the target language spot and say ‘colère’, and discover where that comes from.  If they feel like it, they can move back and forth from spot to spot and discover more differences;  and the corresponding differences in how they feel uttering the description of the same concept in different languages.

As an Irishwoman, I am lazy in that I like doing things the easy way.    This is a very brief insight into how NLP can help with language learning.  You can find out more from my NLP for LAZY LEARNING, which is back in print again (at last!) from mid-March 2002, published by Vega @ £8.99.  You can order it direct from my website www.dianabeaver.co.uk via Amazon.  The book has been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovene, Estonian, Hungarian, Chinese, Turkish, Polish and Russian.    If you want to make your whole life simpler, you might like my EASY BEING:  Making Life as Simple and as Much Fun as Possible.

Two favourite books for EFL students, which are wonderfully funny about the little ways of the English:  George Mikes:   HOW TO BE AN ALIEN and Pierre Daninos:   NOTEBOOKS OF MAJOR THOMPSON (which appears to be temporarily out of print).   The first is available from Amazon.co.uk, and the second, if you read French from Amazon.fr as LES CARNETS DU MAJOR THOMPSON.   Click here for the Useful Books link on my website, which will take you through to whichever Amazon you want.

There is also: Lynn, Jonathan and Jay, Anthony: YES, MINISTER and YES, PRIME MINISTER.  These are on video as well – so ideal for watching before looking at the text.  Your students can impress people by saying they are studying British Politics.   They are seriously funny, and very, very English. Click here to get yourself to Amazon. Then, using ‘all products’, type in both titles, and everything will come up on the same page.

For serious linguists, THE STRUCTURE OF MAGIC Vols I & II, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (who created NLP), demonstrates how we seriously mess up our thinking by the language we use.    If you want lighter NLP and/or useful-for- learning reading, click here for my Useful Books page;  you’ll be able find out more about them from Amazon, and order them direct.

Add comment December 23, 2009

Teaching Vocabulary To Advanced Students: A Lexical Approach

1.ADVANCED STUDENTS AND THEIR NEEDS

Advanced learners can generally communicate well, having learnt all the basic structures of the language. However, they need to broaden their vocabulary to express themselves more clearly and appropriately in a wide range of situations.

Students might even have a receptive knowledge of a wider range of vocabulary, which means they can recognise the item and recognise its meaning. Nevertheless, their productive use of a wide range of vocabulary is normally limited, and this is one of the areas that need greater attention. At this stage we are concerned not only with students understanding the meaning of words, but also being able to use them appropriately, taking into account factors such as oral / written use of the language; degree of formality, style and others, which we are going to detail in Part 2.

2.    THE TEACHING OF VOCABULARY

Traditionally, the teaching of vocabulary above elementary levels was mostly incidental, limited to presenting new items as they appeared in reading or sometimes listening texts. This indirect teaching of vocabulary assumes that vocabulary expansion will happen through the practice of other language skills, which has been proved not enough to ensure vocabulary expansion.

Nowadays it is widely accepted that vocabulary teaching should be part of the syllabus, and taught in a well-planned and regular basis. Some authors, led by Lewis (1993) argue that vocabulary should be at the centre of language teaching, because ‘language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar’. We are going to discuss aspects of the ‘Lexical approach’ in Part 2.

There are several aspects of lexis that need to be taken into account when teaching vocabulary. The list below is based on the work of Gairns and Redman (1986):

·      Boundaries between conceptual meaning: knowing not only what lexis refers to, but also where the boundaries are that separate it from words of related meaning (e.g. cup, mug, bowl).

·      Polysemy: distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form with several but closely related meanings (head: of a person, of a pin, of an organisation).

·      Homonymy: distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form which has several meanings which are NOT closely related ( e.g. a file: used to put papers in or a tool).

·      Homophyny:understanding words that have the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings (e.g. flour, flower).

·      Synonymy: distinguishing between the different shades of meaning that synonymous words have (e.g. extend, increase, expand).

·      Affective meaning: distinguishing between the attitudinal and emotional factors (denotation and connotation), which depend on the speakers attitude or the situation. Socio-cultural associations of lexical items is another important factor.

·      Style, register, dialect: Being able to distinguish between different levels of formality, the effect of different contexts and topics, as well as differences in geographical variation.

·      Translation: awareness of certain differences and similarities between the native and the foreign language (e.g. false cognates).

·      Chunks of language: multi-word verbs, idioms, strong and weak collocations, lexical phrases.

·      Grammar of vocabulary: learning the rules that enable students to build up different forms of the word or even different words from that word (e.g. sleep, slept, sleeping; able, unable; disability).

·      Pronunciation: ability to recognise and reproduce items in speech.

The implication of the aspects just mentioned in teaching is that the goals of vocabulary teaching must be more than simply covering a certain number of words on a word list. We must use teaching techniques that can help realise this global concept of what it means to know a lexical item. And we must also go beyond that, giving learner opportunities to use the items learnt and also helping them to use effective written storage systems.

2.1. MEMORY AND STORAGE SYSTEMS

Understanding how our memory works might help us create more effective ways to teach vocabulary. Research in the area, cited by Gairns (1986) offers us some insights into this process.

It seems that learning new items involve storing them first in our short-term memory, and afterwards in long-term memory. We do not control this process consciously but there seems to be some important clues to consider. First, retention in short-term memory is not effective if the number of chunks of information exceeds seven. Therefore, this suggests that in a given class we should not aim at teaching more than this number. However, our long-term memory can hold any amount of information.

Research also suggests that our ‘mental lexicon’ is highly organised and efficient, and that semantic related items are stored together. Word frequency is another factor that affects storage, as the most frequently used items are easier to retrieve. We can use this information to attempt to facilitate the learning process, by grouping items of vocabulary in semantic fields, such as topics (e.g. types of fruit).

Oxford (1990) suggests memory strategies to aid learning, and these can be divided into:

·      creating mental linkages: grouping, associating, placing new words into a context;

·      applying images and sounds: using imagery, semantic mapping, using keywords and representing sounds in memory;

·      reviewing well, in a structured way;

·      employing action: physical response or sensation, using mechanical techniques.

The techniques just mentioned can be used to greater advantage if we can diagnose learning style preferences (visual, aural, kinesthetic, tactile) and make students aware of different memory strategies.

Meaningful tasks however seem to offer the best answer to vocabulary learning, as they rely on students’ experiences and reality to facilitate learning. More meaningful tasks also require learners to analyse and process language more deeply, which should help them retain information in long-term memory.

Forgetting seems to be an inevitable process, unless learners regularly use items they have learnt. Therefore, recycling is vital, and ideally it should happen one or two days after the initial input. After that, weekly or monthly tests can check on previously taught items.

The way students store the items learned can also contribute to their success or failure in retrieving them when needed. Most learners simply list the items learnt in chronological order, indicating meaning with translation. This system is far from helpful, as items are de-contextualised, encouraging students to over generalise usage of them. It does not allow for additions and refinements nor indicates pronunciation.

Teachers can encourage learners to use other methods, using topics and categories to organise a notebook, binder or index cards. Meaning should be stored using English as much as possible, and also giving indication for pronunciation. Diagrams and word trees can also be used within this topic/categories organisation. The class as a whole can keep a vocabulary box with cards, which can be used for revision/recycling regularly.

Organising this kind of storage system is time-consuming and might not appeal to every learner. Therefore adapting their chronological lists to include headings for topics and a more complete definition of meaning would already be a step forward.

2.2.        DEALING WITH MEANING

In my opinion the most important aspect of vocabulary teaching for advanced learners is to foster learner independence so that learners will be able to deal with new lexis and expand their vocabulary beyond the end of the course. Therefore guided discovery, contextual guesswork and using dictionaries should be the main ways to deal with discovering meaning.

Guided discovery involve asking questions or offering examples that guide students to guess meanings correctly. In this way learners get involved in a process of semantic processing that helps learning and retention.

Contextual guesswork means making use of the context in which the word appears to derive an idea of its meaning, or in some cases, guess from the word itself, as in words of Latin origin. Knowledge of word formation, e.g. prefixes and suffixes, can also help guide students to discover meaning.  Teachers can help students with specific techniques and practice in contextual guesswork, for example, the understanding of discourse markers and identifying the function of the word in the sentence (e.g. verb, adjective, noun). The latter is also very useful when using dictionaries.

Students should start using EFL dictionaries as early as possible, from Intermediate upwards.  With adequate training, dictionaries are an invaluable tool for learners, giving them independence from the teacher.  As well as understanding meaning, students are able to check pronunciation, the grammar of the word (e.g. verb patterns, verb forms, plurality, comparatives, etc.), different spelling (American versus British), style and register, as well as examples that illustrate usage.

2.3.        USING LANGUAGE

Another strategy for advanced learners is to turn their receptive vocabulary items into productive ones. In order to do that, we need to refine their understanding of the item, exploring boundaries between conceptual meaning, polysemy, synonymy, style, register, possible collocations, etc., so that students are able to use the item accurately.

We must take into account that a lexical item is most likely to be learned when a learner feels a personal need to know it, or when there is a need to express something to accomplish the learner’s own purposes. Therefore, it means that the decision to incorporate a word in ones productive vocabulary is entirely personal and varies according to each student’s motivation and needs.

Logically, production will depend on motivation, and this is what teachers should aim at promoting, based on their awareness of students needs and preferences. Task-based learning should help teachers to provide authentic, meaningful tasks in which students engage to achieve a concrete output, using appropriate language for the context.

2.4.      THE LEXICAL APPROACH

We could not talk about vocabulary teaching nowadays without mentioning Lewis (1993), whose controversial, thought-provoking ideas have been shaking the ELT world since its publication. We do not intend to offer a complete review of his work, but rather mention some of his contributions that in our opinion can be readily used in the classroom.

His most important contribution was to highlight the importance of vocabulary as being basic to communication.  We do agree that if learners do not recognise the meaning of keywords they will be unable to participate in the conversation, even if they know the morphology and syntax. On the other hand, we believe that grammar is equally important in teaching, and therefore in our opinion, it is not the case to substitute grammar teaching with vocabulary teaching, but that both should be present in teaching a foreign language.

Lewis himself insists that his lexical approach is not simply a shift of emphasis from grammar to vocabulary teaching, as ‘language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary, but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks’(Lewis, 1997). Chunks include collocations, fixed and semi-fixed expressions and idioms, and according to him, occupy a crucial role in facilitating language production, being the key to fluency.

An explanation for native speakers’ fluency is that vocabulary is not stored only as individual words, but also as parts of phrases and larger chunks, which can be retrieved from memory as a whole, reducing processing difficulties. On the other hand, learners who only learn individual words will need a lot more time and effort to express themselves.

Consequently, it is essential to make students aware of chunks, giving them opportunities to identify, organise and record these. Identifying chunks is not always easy, and at least in the beginning, students need a lot of guidance.

Hill (1999) explains that most learners with ‘good vocabularies’ have problems with fluency because their ‘collocational competence’ is very limited, and that, especially from Intermediate level, we should aim at increasing their collocational competence with the vocabulary they have already got. For Advance learners he also suggests building on what they already know, using better strategies and increasing the number of items they meet outside the classroom.

The idea of what it is to ‘know’ a word is also enriched with the collocational component. According to Lewis (1993) ‘being able to use a word involves mastering its collocational range and restrictions on that range’. I can say that using all the opportunities to teach chunks rather than isolated words is a feasible idea that has been working well in my classes, and which is fortunately coming up in new coursebooks we are using. However, both teachers and learners need awareness raising activities to be able to identify multi-word chunks.

Apart from identifying chunks, it is important to establish clear ways of organising and recording vocabulary. According to Lewis (1993), ‘language should be recorded together which characteristically occurs together’, which means not in a linear, alphabetical order, but in collocation tables, mind-maps, word trees, for example. He also suggests the recording of whole sentences, to help contextualization, and that storage of items is highly personal, depending on each student’s needs.

We have already mentioned the use of dictionaries as a way to discover meaning and foster learner independence.  Lewis extends the use of dictionaries to focus on word grammar and collocation range, although most dictionaries are rather limited in these.

Lewis also defends the use of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ material from the early stages of learning, because ‘acquisition is facilitated by material which is only partly understood’ (Lewis, 1993, p. 186). Although he does not supply evidence for this, I agree that students need to be given tasks they can accomplish without understanding everything from a given text, because this is what they will need as users of the language. He also suggests that it is better to work intensively with short extracts of authentic material, so they are not too daunting for students and can be explored for collocations.

Finally, the Lexical Approach and Task-Based Learning have some common principles, which have been influencing foreign language teaching. Both approaches regard intensive, roughly-tuned input as essential for acquisition, and maintain that successful communication is more important than the production of accurate sentences. We certainly agree with these principles and have tried to use them in our class.

3.    RATIONALE OF THE LESSON

We believe that the Lexical Approach has much to offer in the area of vocabulary teaching, and therefore we have tried to plan a lesson that is based on its main concepts, specially exploring the use of collocations.

3.1 CHOICE OF MATERIAL

As both the Task-based and the Lexical approach suggest, we wanted to use authentic material to expose our students to rich, contextualised, naturally-occurring language.

For the topic of holidays we chose a big number of holiday brochures (about twenty five) and read them through, trying to notice recurrent patterns of lexis. Confirming what Hill (1999) affirmed, this analysis showed us a large number of collocations, specially adjective + noun ones, and that some were extremely common, such as golden sandy beaches, rolling countryside and others.

We did not want to overload students with much reading, which would detract them from the main task of working with vocabulary, and therefore we selected twenty-one short yet meaningful extracts in which common collocations appeared.

3.2. NOTICING COLLOCATIONS AND DEALING WITH MEANING

Although the extracts are authentic, we do not think students will have many problems in understanding most of the collocations, as they contain vocabulary which they probably know receptively. This again should confirm the idea that students know individual words but lack collocational competence.

We are going to work as a whole class in step 5 to make students aware of the collocations we will be focusing on, and hopefully this will enable students to find other collocations. Regular awareness raising activities like this should help students improve their collocational competence, and even fluency, as discussed in part 2.4.

For the few words that we predict students will not fully understand meaning of, or are not sure how they are pronounced, we are going to ask them to look these up in monolingual dictionaries. As we said in part 2.2., dictionaries are a vital tool for Advanced learners, and so is contextual guesswork, which we are going to encourage before they look the words up. We are also going to ask students to notice examples given in the dictionary, observing and recording other possible collocations of the words, as suggested by Lewis.

We have also taken into account the importance of recording the vocabulary observed during the class. The list that students will produce in step 9, to prepare for the final task, is also a way of recording vocabulary in an organised, personalised and meaningful way, as suggested by Lewis in part 2.4.

3.3. GROUP WORK

Working in groups help fostering learning independence, and specially in vocabulary work, learners can exchange knowledge, asking others to explain unknown items.

We also hope that group work will be a motivating factor, as students talk about places they have been on holiday to, trying to remember details together, exchanging impressions and even good memories!

3.4. CHOICE OF TASK

As we said earlier in part 2.3, we find it vital that students are given opportunities to use the language they are learning in a realistic context. Therefore, we have devised the final task to meet this principle.

Writing a leaflet is a possible task in the Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English, which these students are preparing for. It is also a relevant, real life task that we expect will interest students. I always like to mention that the standard of leaflets written in English in Brazil is very poor, and that they could do a much better job.

We expect that this writing should also enable students to use the vocabulary they have studied in a realistic context, and that they could be motivated to learn even more vocabulary they feel they need to accomplish the task.

The completion of the final task for homework will also help to reinforce and revise the vocabulary learnt, giving students a better chance to store the items in their long-term memory, as we mentioned in part 2.1.

We are going to explain what the final task will be right after step 3, in which they should notice what kind of text the extracts come from. By doing this we want to motivate students to do the enabling tasks, mainly to show them the need to learn new vocabulary.

As this is a borrowed group, it might be the case the students are not yet familiar with the leaflet format, in which case more input would be necessary before the conclusion of the final task.

If students are really interested in the task, this could be transformed into a project, involving research and the production of a leaflet or web page in the multi-media centre.

Add comment December 23, 2009

Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling

The following is a transcript of a teaching experiment, using the Socratic method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school. I present my perspective and views on the session, and on the Socratic method as a teaching tool, following the transcript. The class was conducted on a Friday afternoon beginning at 1:30, late in May, with about two weeks left in the school year. This time was purposely chosen as one of the most difficult times to entice and hold these children’s concentration about a somewhat complex intellectual matter. The point was to demonstrate the power of the Socratic method for both teaching and also for getting students involved and excited about the material being taught. There were 22 students in the class. I was told ahead of time by two different teachers (not the classroom teacher) that only a couple of students would be able to understand and follow what I would be presenting. When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The three other students’ eyes were glazed over from the very beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at all. The students’ answers below are in capital letters.

The experiment was to see whether I could teach these students binary arithmetic (arithmetic using only two numbers, 0 and 1) only by asking them questions. None of them had been introduced to binary arithmetic before. Though the ostensible subject matter was binary arithmetic, my primary interest was to give a demonstration to the teacher of the power and benefit of the Socratic method where it is applicable. That is my interest here as well. I chose binary arithmetic as the vehicle for that because it is something very difficult for children, or anyone, to understand when it is taught normally; and I believe that a demonstration of a method that can teach such a difficult subject easily to children and also capture their enthusiasm about that subject is a very convincing demonstration of the value of the method. (As you will see below, understanding binary arithmetic is also about understanding “place-value” in general. For those who seek a much more detailed explanation about place-value, visit the long paper on The Concept and Teaching of Place-Value.) This was to be the Socratic method in what I consider its purest form, where questions (and only questions) are used to arouse curiosity and at the same time serve as a logical, incremental, step-wise guide that enables students to figure out about a complex topic or issue with their own thinking and insights. In a less pure form, which is normally the way it occurs, students tend to get stuck at some point and need a teacher’s explanation of some aspect, or the teacher gets stuck and cannot figure out a question that will get the kind of answer or point desired, or it just becomes more efficient to “tell” what you want to get across. If “telling” does occur, hopefully by that time, the students have been aroused by the questions to a state of curious receptivity to absorb an explanation that might otherwise have been meaningless to them. Many of the questions are decided before the class; but depending on what answers are given, some questions have to be thought up extemporaneously. Sometimes this is very difficult to do, depending on how far from what is anticipated or expected some of the students’ answers are. This particular attempt went better than my best possible expectation, and I had much higher expectations than any of the teachers I discussed it with prior to doing it.

I had one prior relationship with this class. About two weeks earlier I had shown three of the third grade classes together how to throw a boomerang and had let each student try it once. They had really enjoyed that. One girl and one boy from the 65 to 70 students had each actually caught their returning boomerang on their throws. That seemed to add to everyone’s enjoyment. I had therefore already established a certain rapport with the students, rapport being something that I feel is important for getting them to comfortably and enthusiastically participate in an intellectually uninhibited manner in class and without being psychologically paralyzed by fear of “messing up”.

When I got to the classroom for the binary math experiment, students were giving reports on famous people and were dressed up like the people they were describing. The student I came in on was reporting on John Glenn, but he had not mentioned the dramatic and scary problem of that first American trip in orbit. I asked whether anyone knew what really scary thing had happened on John Glenn’s flight, and whether they knew what the flight was. Many said a trip to the moon, one thought Mars. I told them it was the first full earth orbit in space for an American. Then someone remembered hearing about something wrong with the heat shield, but didn’t remember what. By now they were listening intently. I explained about how a light had come on that indicated the heat shield was loose or defective and that if so, Glenn would be incinerated coming back to earth. But he could not stay up there alive forever and they had nothing to send up to get him with. The engineers finally determined, or hoped, the problem was not with the heat shield, but with the warning light. They thought it was what was defective. Glenn came down. The shield was ok; it had been just the light. They thought that was neat.

“But what I am really here for today is to try an experiment with you. I am the subject of the experiment, not you. I want to see whether I can teach you a whole new kind of arithmetic only by asking you questions. I won’t be allowed to tell you anything about it, just ask you things. When you think you know an answer, just call it out. You won’t need to raise your hands and wait for me to call on you; that takes too long.” [This took them a while to adapt to. They kept raising their hands; though after a while they simply called out the answers while raising their hands.]

Add comment December 23, 2009

Teaching With Twitter: Not for the Faint of Heart Students are emboldened, but they can also hijack discussions

Maybe Sugato Chakravarty should wear a helmet to class. The professor of consumer sciences and retailing at Purdue University repeatedly attempts the instructional equivalent of jumping a motorcycle over a row of flaming barrels.

OK, asking 250 students to post questions on Twitter during a class doesn’t risk life or limb. But it can cause ego damage if the mob of students in his course on personal finance gets disorderly online.

He has given them the power to do just that. As Mr. Chakravarty paces the front of a stadium-style lecture hall, wearing a wireless microphone to make sure his lecture reaches the nosebleed seats, some students crack jokes anonymously in an official Web forum. The course is one of two at Purdue that are testing homemade software called Hotseat, which lets students key in questions from their cellphones or laptops, using Twitter or Facebook.

A constant stream of comments, often tangential, accompanies his talks. An incident of cheating came up early in the semester—a student asked classmates for a quiz answer. During one session this month, students took over the back channel to ask the professor to cancel class Thanksgiving week so they could have a longer vacation. “So with 41 votes are we not having class that monday of Thanksgiving?” asked one hopeful student after others had endorsed the sentiment. (The class is still on.)

The moment is telling. Opening up a Twitter-powered channel in class—which several professors at other universities are experimenting with as well—alters classroom power dynamics and signals to students that they’re in control. Fans of the approach applaud technology that promises to change professors’ role from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.” Those phrases are familiar to education reformers, who have long argued that colleges must make education more interactive to hold the interest of today’s students.

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Jeffrey R. Young

Sugato Chakravarty, a professor of consumer sciences and retailing at Purdue University, has welcomed Twitter into the lecture hall, even though the service lets students engage in back-channel discussions.

Jeffrey R. Young

Sugato Chakravarty, a professor of consumer sciences and retailing at Purdue University, has welcomed Twitter into the lecture hall, even though the service lets students engage in back-channel discussions.

The unanswered question, though, is whether that theory can work in practice, in a room packed primar ily with 18- to 22-year-olds who can seem more interested in high grades than in high-mindedness.

That uncertainty actually excites Mr. Chakravarty and other daredevil professors attempting this teaching trick. “You are vulnerable out there,” he said when I talked with him in his office after class. “Students really don’t hold back. If you say something wrong or something that they don’t agree with, then they’ll let you know, and everybody else will see it.”

Many colleagues are watching such experiments with a mix of curiosity and disbelief to see how the professors land.

Students seem to love the chance to make their voices heard in class without having to actually speak. About 75 percent of the students make use of Hotseat, even though it is not required.

Emboldened Students

As one student, Ben Van Wye, told me, “I’m not that outspoken in class, so I would never ask a question out loud to the professor. But you can type it in as anonymous, so nobody really knows if what you’re asking is a dumb question.”

That anonymity leads to questions the professor says he never heard before in a course he has taught for years. But it has also raised new issues of classroom management.

Early in the semester, for instance, there was the cheating incident. While students were taking a short multiple-choice quiz, a student asked his classmates—anonymously, he thought—for an answer via Twitter. But the way Purdue set up its home-built software, students must log in to use the system. Mr. Chakravarty could identify the student, even though the tweet was labeled “anonymous” in the view that students saw. Busted.

“So I called him into my office and said, ‘Don’t do that, it’s cheating,’” said the professor. “And he started crying and said he’d never do it again.”

At other times, lecture topics have been pulled in unexpected directions. On the day I sat in on the class, the topic was car insurance. Mr. Chakravarty was telling students that getting married usually lowers your insurance rate when a student typed in a clever question that caused one of the teaching assistants, Adam Hagen, to laugh out loud. The professor stopped his lecture midsentence to ask Mr. Hagen what the students were up to.

“There’s a question here that says, ‘What happens if you get married, and then you get divorced at 24—would your insurance go back up?’” said Mr. Hagen, prompting laughter from students. The answer, apparently, is no, as the TA explained aloud to the class. “So if you want to get married for the sake of having lower insurance, go right ahead,” he said playfully.

Though the lecture then turned to other issues, students in the course continued to joke on Hotseat about the idea that someone would get married for an insurance discount. Wrote one anonymous student: “I drive a mustang and need cheaper insurance, any lucky ladies need a husband?”

“That happens,” said Mr. Chakravarty after class, when I told him about the chatter that had been going on under his nose. “You have some meaningless stuff, but it’s followed by some very good questions that would never be asked.”

He usually stops his lecture a couple of times during class to address questions on Hotseat, he said. At first he stood at the lectern glancing at the screen frequently as he spoke, but that proved too distracting.

I asked him if he thinks the system shifts too much control to students. He said students in class are online or texting on their phones anyway, so why not try to channel that energy to class discussion? “To force them to behave in a certain way is not respect,” he said. “If you want respect, you have to earn it. To mandate respect is stupid.”

I asked Mr. Van Wye, the student, whether some students end up derailing class sessions thanks to Hotseat. “Yeah, perhaps, because sometimes you have people writing funny comments, and we have to stop and kind of acknowledge that it happened,” he said. “And sometimes that takes away from it a little bit.”

On balance, though, he would vote to keep the software: “It does more good than it does hurt.”

Potential for Disaster?

Monica A. Rankin, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas, ran a similar experiment last semester, using Twitter as a back channel during an American-history class with 90 students.

“There is certainly the potential for disaster,” she agreed when I reached her on her cellphone last week. During one class session about abortion, for instance, students began an argument on Twitter that Ms. Rankin characterized only as “nonproductive and nonacademic.” She said her teaching assistant quickly brought the flame war to her attention, and “we basically kind of changed topics at that point.”

The university produced a video about Ms. Rankin’s class that makes Twitter seem like the next great revolution in teaching—it conveniently leaves out any downsides.

Ms. Rankin made clear that she approached Twitter cautiously—this daredevil professor did wear a virtual helmet. The class met three days a week, but only one part of one session each week involved the back-channel discussion. “The rest was a traditional format,” she said.

Only two or three out of 90 students in the class said they had used Twitter previously, so some time was sapped helping them sign up for accounts and get used to the technology. And because some students did not like to bring laptops to class, and some had cellphone plans that charged them for each tweet, the professor decided to offer a decidedly low-tech alternative: Students could write their questions or comments on slips of paper and hand them to the teaching assistant, who then typed the messages into Twitter.

The details of the experiment are available on Ms. Rankin’s blog.

Her conclusion is that the experiment went pretty well (no real disasters), but that setting up a back channel is not for every professor, or every course.

“Instructors in the classroom really have to teach toward their personalities,” she said. “Colleagues have told me there is no way they would do this in their class—this would make them uncomfortable.”

Add comment December 23, 2009

Teaching Effective Communication Through Graded Reading Materials

I have worked hard to make creative lessons for my students, but I haven’t always met with success. Even when a lesson was fun and well done in class, it often fails to produce any lasting results. I sometimes ask students to recall what we learned the previous class and am met with blank stares. That’s always a disappointment.

The activity described in this article is not like that at all. It produces results. I swear by it. It is the single most effective activity in my bag o’ tricks. And the best thing about it is that it has a duo purpose: it helps students learn the language that is set before them and, more importantly, it teaches them to be effective communicators.

So what is this activity? It’s simple. I break the students up into groups of four. I hand out graded articles, which I have written myself (and made available here by Chris). I give the students 10 or 15 minutes to read the articles and remember the contents (they are not required to memorize the contents word for word).

Usually, two students get article A and two students get article B. After they have been given time to read the articles, I take the articles away. The two students who have article A work together to explain what they read in detail. And the two students who read article B do likewise. I generally don’t let them take notes because notes are a way to shortcut the process of becoming effective communicators.

After the explanations are finished, I move all of the students who read article B one group clockwise. And then in the new groups, the As give the new Bs a test and the new Bs give the As a test. The test is a simple comprehension test. Note: If you use the articles that you can download above, you should fold them in half before you give them out. The students should only be able to read their own article.

The first time they try this activity. They enjoy it, but they invariably score about 4 out of 20 questions. And the reason is that they communicate passively. The pair that describes the article gives a simple retelling and the pair that is listening just listens passively without asking questions.

This initial failure is instructive to them because it shows how ineffective their communication is. It tells them that they have to be more aggressive in communicating. They have to confirm that the message was delivered or that they received the message clearly. This is where classroom English comes in and this is where we, the teachers, can walk around the room and give our input and corrections.

Though students do poorly at first, the activity is so motivating that, generally, they will ask to do it again in the next class. And they will do better. Usually, they can get as much as 15 out of 20. They enjoy seeing the improvement and they seem to just spontaneously become more active in their communication. On the second go around, you will find that they start using these strategies:

(1) They begin informing their partner pairs when they don’t understand something.

(2) They begin defining words for each other.

(3) They begin asking for and giving spellings.

(4) They beginning spelling out numbers: 10,000 equals one zero zero zero zero.

(5) They begin confirming that what they understood was correct. (listener)

(6) They begin confirming that what they said was understood. (speaker)

(7) The pair that is explaining the article begins summarizing what they think are the key points for the pair that is listening. (They will for example tell the pair that is listening that they should remember this number or that fact).

As part of process 5 and 6, I have seen some students who were listening actually retell the article to the students who initially read the article! And I have seen some students who read the article quiz the students who were listening to the explanation of the article; that is, they give a practice quiz before I give them my quiz. They begin anticipating what are the important details.

The next class, I review by asking the students to recount the articles from the previous class. They can usually do this quite well, which says something about the effectiveness.

When making these articles I try to follow a few basic principles. The articles are graded; they are stripped of most of the difficult idioms and lengthy sentences are broken down into smaller sentences. Target vocabulary and expressions are seeded into both articles so that they end up reading the expressions and saying the expressions, followed by hearing the expressions immediately afterwards.

The results from this kind of activity are amazing because of how fast their communication skills improve. And they are equally amazing because of how effective they are for getting students to remember expressions and content. In the next class, when I review, the students are able to recall very accurately what was in the articles. They remember most of the phrases and expressions and practically all of the key details.

Add comment December 23, 2009