Have you heard about the invisible gorilla experiment? It’s a video illustrating how human perception works, and how easy it can be to miss things that are right in front of us. In this blog post, Marcin Lewandowski explores how we can use these concepts when teaching grammar.
Grammar instruction
A friend of mine once told me that when she became pregnant she suddenly and inexplicably started seeing pregnant women everywhere! Another friend said that when he bought a new car, he noticed that everyone else was driving the same car. So what’s going on? It’s not that there was some unusual baby boom or that all other car makers had gone bust; no, it’s that if we for whatever reason select an item in our mind, we start noticing it more often. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as ‘observational selection bias’. Interestingly, most people actually believe these items or events are happening with increased frequency — which can be a very disconcerting feeling.
However, a variation of observational selection bias can be very useful in language learning. For example, it has been shown that making linguistic items ‘visible’ by drawing students’ attention to them can be conducive to language learning.
The most obvious way of drawing students’ attention to a linguistic form is to teach it explicitly. Explicit grammar teaching makes targeted forms ‘salient’ (that is, it makes them more visible or noticeable). Housen, Pierrard, and Van Daele, in their study on various approaches to teaching grammar, conclude that the explicit instruction has a beneficial effect on learners’ mastery of grammatical structures when used productively. They also suggest that this beneficial effect is even more observable in the targets’ unplanned speech.
This implies that explicit instruction may, in fact, promote not only explicit knowledge (as in planned targeted activities) but also implicit knowledge (e.g. in spontaneous exchanges). They suggest that this can be achieved by increasing saliency of linguistic items by directing the learners’ attention towards them, thus leading to increased awareness and noticing.
Making grammatical and lexical forms salient in this way may help learners improve their accuracy by helping them develop lasting positive language habits. However, at least initially, this might be at the expense of fluency as learners pay more attention to the forms and become more self-conscious in the process. Krashen argues that such monitoring of output – i.e. the conscious analysis of the grammar one is producing – is by and large effective only when thinking time is allowed, e.g. during writing activities. He believes that in real time this may actually hinder communication. Other researchers, however, believe that monitoring of output may, in fact, lead to improved accuracy and internalisation of forms. Thinking about a rule before a sentence is produced reinforces relevant neural circuits which, with time, should make this rule easier and quicker to retrieve (more automatic), resulting in a more fluent and accurate speech in the long term.
One way of drawing students’ attention to grammatical forms that has worked well for me is to ask students to look out for target language by setting them a challenge as homework. For instance, after teaching the Present Perfect tense, one could ask students to find, say, ten examples of this tense in online news stories, articles or books. One could also award bonus points where the examples are oral, e.g. from films, web-/podcasts, online news broadcasts, etc. This has several benefits as it draws students’ attention to the form used in a natural context. This context, in turn, provides meaning. This activity also reinforces the target language and encourages learner autonomy as they independently explore potential language learning sources and share them with other students. Marcin will be back next week with a second blog post on making the visible perceptible through self-reflection.
References
Housen, A., Pierrard, M. & Van Daele, S. (2005). Rule complexity and the efficacy of explicit grammar instruction. In A. Housen & M. Pierrard (Eds.), Investigations in Instructed Second Language Acquisition (pp. 235-270). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Krashen, S. (1981). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press Inc.
Lee, N (2004). The Neurobiology of Procedural Memory, The Neurobiology of Learning: Perspectives from Second Language Acquisition. John H. Schumann, Sheila E. Crowell, et al. eds. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 43-73.
Lewandowski, M. (2007) L2 Attainment in Work-Based Learning Settings: An Investigation Into the Effectiveness of Explicit Instruction and the Importance of Biological-Experiential Factors in Language Learning. BISAL volume 2