Messaging: beyond a lexical approach in ELT

Messaging: beyond a lexical approach in ELT

George Woolard

Copyright George Woolard 2013

Published by the round at Smashwords

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A round publication

www.the-round.com

© 2013 George Woolard

Cover design by Mark Bain

Edited by Penny Hands

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Actual language and possible language

2. Consciously produced language and spontaneously produced language

3. Own-language use

4. Materials and methodology: the textSbook and lesson cycle

5. Additional resources and strategies

Final word

Acknowledgements and Permissions

Bibliography

Postscript

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Preface

Imagine that you are going to a country where you do not speak the language. You are given the choice of taking one of the following language learning resources with you:

- a coursebook in the language of the country you are visiting

- a Teach Yourself book with guidance in your mother tongue

- a traditional holiday phrasebook

- a grammar book

- a bilingual dictionary

Which resource would you choose?

Most people choose the phrasebook. Why?

When I tell someone that I teach English to non-native speakers of English, their immediate assumption is that I speak the students’ language and possibly other languages as well. When I tell them that all the teaching is done in English, a look of confusion is usually followed by the question: ‘How do you do that?’ People make the common-sense assumption that translation is an essential part of teaching someone a new language. As practising language teachers, we tend to forget that what we do seems counter-intuitive to those outside the profession.

I now believe that second languages can be taught and learned more directly and efficiently if we design our materials around the approach that structures the traditional holiday phrasebook. I also believe that we should reintroduce some forms of translation into the ELT classroom. In what follows, I will describe how we can redesign the traditional ELT coursebook to produce a more efficient learning resource called a ‘textSbook’. I will further argue that learning is most efficient when we focus on the meaning of messages rather than grammar and vocabulary.

I hope this has raised your curiosity and not your hackles!

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Introduction

Can teachers teach more efficiently and learners learn more efficiently?

There are many ways to learn a second language. Learners have different learning styles, learn in different contexts, and for a variety of purposes. This means that it would be naïve to argue for one particular methodology or approach to teaching and learning. What we can consider, however, is how efficient that learning is.

Today’s adult learners are probably more businesslike than ever before, and are looking for an approach that is not only fast but efficient. They need to feel that they are learning in the most direct way possible and that they are not wasting time on unnecessary tasks or activities. One way of approaching this is to look at aspects of our teaching which are not as successful as we would like them to be, and to consider ways of improving them.

From my own experience as both teacher and learner, I believe that there are two areas that merit consideration:

- Why do second language learners often produce possible language as opposed to actual language? Why do they often achieve native-like fluency but not native-like selection?

- Why doesn’t consciously produced language automatically become spontaneously produced language?

The first point highlights the fact that many second language learners communicate effectively in a second language, but that they often use language which is different to that of a native speaker.

The second point captures the frustration that many teachers feel when language which has been presented and practised in the classroom fails to appear during a free production task designed to elicit that language. In other words, language that is produced consciously at the practice stage does not appear when the learner is asked to speak spontaneously.

The first issue focuses on the type of language the learner produces, and relates to the structure of language itself. The second involves the mechanics of learning, and, in particular, the real-time production of language. If we can understand why these issues arise, we can develop approaches and strategies to address them, and, in the process, improve the efficiency of teaching and learning. The approach and materials outlined in this book represent an attempt to do this.

ELT and second language learning in general are still very much influenced by Chomskyian theories. Approaches to teaching and learning are dominated by a ‘slot-and-filler’ model, based on the separation of grammar and vocabulary. The attraction of this model lies in the high level of generalisability that it promises, enabling the learner to produce an infinite number of new sentences from a small set of grammar rules. However, Sinclair and Mauranen (2006) point out that simplicity and elegance in a model may not actually match what the brain does and that much of the language we produce is idiomatic in nature.

One implication of the substantial idiomatic nature of language is that the level of generalisability possible in language learning is far lower than we may assume. It also means that there is much more language to learn than we may think there is. It may be time for teachers and learners to give up the comfort of thinking that once they know a small set of general grammar rules and build up a vocabulary of single words, they will be able to understand, say and write lots of things in another language. The reality is that the number of items to learn, memorise, and automate is massive, and that this demands a great deal of time and practice. Language learning is a long, steady and perhaps rather tedious process, and it is essential that teachers and learners acknowledge and accept this right from the start.

Over the last decade I have attempted to tackle the issue of actual versus possible language by (i) adopting strategies based on a lexical approach and (ii) through the development of dedicated collocation practice materials. These do go some way towards helping the learner to produce natural English expressions; however, I found that unless I provided extensive consolidation activities, only a small percentage of this English transferred to my students’ free speech.

It became increasingly clear to me that I needed a better understanding of what is involved in producing language in real time, or how we ‘language’. In order to gain further insight into this, I adopted a ‘doctor-takes-his-own-medicine’ approach and decided to learn Spanish. Rather than beginning with general grammar rules and single vocabulary items, I concentrated on learning meaningful chunks of language. At the same time, I kept notes on what kinds of exercises and practice activities seemed useful in helping me to understand and produce language in real time.

The book represents a reflection on my teaching career, and on how I think I could do things better now. For example, I will propose making a number of changes to the structure of teaching materials. The outline I suggest for a coursebook breaks with the template that has come to dominate ELT textbooks since the introduction of the Headway series in the 1980s. Perhaps the most radical suggestion is that translations of all texts in the textbook should be made available online to the learner.

I will also propose a much simpler lesson structure, featuring a narrower range of activities than in many current materials. With an ever-expanding body of learning material available from publishers and online, I believe the key to effective second language learning is not to give learners more material, but rather to encourage a richer, more direct interaction with it.

I call the approach which has emerged ‘messaging, chunking, and texting’. I believe its attraction lies in the fact that it both simplifies and streamlines the process of teaching and learning.

Looking back at the coursebooks I have used over the years, two titles stand out as embodying this approach. Meanings into Words (1983) reflects the essence of what it is to use a language, while Streamline English (1980) suggests learning materials that are efficient, practical and easy to follow for both teacher and learner. The verb ‘streamline’ is defined in the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary as:

‘to make an organisation or process simpler and more effective’.

The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary adds:

‘to make an organisation or process more efficient by removing unnecessary parts of it.’

The expressions in bold neatly sum up the driving force behind the approach and materials outlined in this book.

Messaging and chunking

When I go on holiday to a foreign country, I don’t take a grammar book with me; I opt for a phrasebook with a word list at the back. This choice embodies what I think is the most efficient approach to the teaching and learning of a second language. Abroad, I need to communicate. In modern terminology, I need to be able to send and receive messages.

What do I mean by a message? Consider the following sentence from the poem Jabberwocky in Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland. It has grammatical form but no content:

All mimsy were the borogoves.

Although the syntax is familiar, we do not know what the words mimsy and borogoves mean: they are nonsense words. In contrast, the phrase ‘the next train to Edinburgh’ has recognisable content but feels incomplete in that it is not clear what the speaker aims to express. However, the utterance ‘When is the next train to Edinburgh?’ does feel complete. We know exactly what the speaker hopes to achieve in uttering it, and this is what I will mean by ‘a message’. It has form, content and a commonly recognised function.

Once a message is selected for learning, it is then translated so that the learner understands what it means. This reflects the approach taken in the standard holiday phrasebook. Once the meaning of the message is established, we follow a simple methodology to guide learning. We begin by dividing the message into parts, which are then changed to create similar but new messages:

When is the next train to Glasgow?

When is the last train to Edinburgh?

When is the next bus to Edinburgh?

In this book, modifying a message in this way will be called chunking. The term ‘chunk’ is used to reflect the fact that the parts we divide messages into are generally phrases rather than single words:

I’d like a return ticket, please

I’d like an off-peak return, please

I’d like an off-peak return to London, please.

In chunking messages, learning follows what Wray (2008) calls a Needs Only Analysis approach. According to this view, there is no immediate need to break down a multi-word chunk into all its constituent parts, provided we understand what it means as a whole. In the example above, ‘I’d like’ is understood as a single semantic unit with a one-to-one match between meaning