In our last post, Jack C. Richards explored the five key problems faced by learners seeking to make the transition from lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate. Today, he looks in more detail at the first of those challenges – the gap between receptive and productive competence – and offers some solutions.
Key characteristics
- While learners’ receptive competence continues to develop, their productive competence remains relatively static.
- Language items that learners recognize and understand in the input they hear do not pass into their productive competence.
All language users have greater receptive competence (language they can understand) than productive competence (language they can produce). I can read great novels for example, but I could never write one. Traditionally, in language teaching we recognize this fact in the distinction between active and passive language knowledge, particularly in relation to vocabulary learning, where it is normally assumed that learners should be able to understand far more words than they can use. And it has generally been accepted that in second-language learning, new items first become part of learners’ receptive competence before becoming part of their productive competence.
Krashen (1982) proposed that in language teaching, more effort should be devoted to developing learners’ receptive competence than their productive competence. He claimed that learners’ productive ability will arise naturally from receptive knowledge. In particular, Krashen stressed that mean- ingful comprehension rather than focused production is all that is needed to facilitate language learning.
However, this is not always confirmed in the experience of learners, who often find that their productive skills are well below the level they would like them to be, despite reasonably good comprehension skills. Learners may be unable to apply their language knowledge in actual use, hence their linguistic knowledge at the cognitive level is not utilized during performance. As Fan Yi (2007) points out, a consequence is that learners’ feelings of anxiety or frustration may increase. They may eventually lose confidence and determination, and their motivation to continue learning English may be affected.
Recent theories of second-language acquisition, however, no longer assume that productive skills will arise naturally from comprehension skills. Two other factors are necessary if we are to reduce the gap between receptive and productive competence: noticing (the noticing hypothesis), and focused output (the output hypothesis).
The noticing hypothesis
Richard Schmidt has drawn attention to the role of consciousness in language learning, and in particular to the role of noticing in learning. Schmidt (1986, 1990) proposed that for learners to acquire new forms from input (language they hear), it is necessary for them to notice such forms in the input. His argument is that we won’t learn anything from input we hear and understand unless we notice something about the input. Consciousness of features of the input can serve as a trigger, which activates the first stage in the process of incorporating new linguistic features into language competence. As Slobin (1985) remarked of first-language learning:
The only linguistic materials that can figure in language-making are stretches of speech that attract the child’s attention to a sufficient degree to be noticed and held in memory (p. 1164).
Schmidt (1990) further clarifies this point in distinguishing between input (what learners hear) and intake (that part of the input that learners notice). Only intake can serve as the basis for language development. In his own study of his acquisition of Portuguese (Schmidt and Frota, 1986), Schmidt found that there was a close connection between noticing features of the input and their later emergence in his own speech. Schmidt lists the following features as likely to contribute to the extent to which learners will notice features of input:
- Frequency of encounter with items
- Perceptual saliency of items
- Instructional strategies that can focus learners’ attention
- Individual processing ability (which is related to learners’ aptitude for language learning)
- Task demands, or the nature of the activity learners are taking part in (p. 139)
In teaching listening and speaking skills, for example, noticing activities can involve returning to the listening texts that served as the basis for comprehen- sion activities and using them as the basis for language awareness. For example, students can listen again to a recording in order to:
- Identify differences between what they hear and a printed version of the text
- Complete a cloze version of the text
- Complete sentence stems taken from the text
- Check off from a list the expressions that occurred in the text. Learners can then practice using some of the forms that they noticed.
The output hypothesis
Swain (1985, 2000) proposed that successful language acquisition requires not only comprehensible input, but also comprehensible output: That is, language produced by the learners that can be understood by other speakers of the language. Swain suggested that when learners have to make efforts to ensure that their messages are communicated (which she refers to as “pushed output”) this puts them in a better position to notice the gap between their productions and those of proficient speakers, thus fostering second-language development. Carefully structured and managed output (the output hypothesis) is essential if learners are to acquire new language. Managed output here refers to tasks and activities that require the use of certain target-language forms that “stretch” learners’ language knowledge and that consequently require a “restructuring” of that knowledge. The output hypothesis suggests the rather obvious notion that practice in using target language forms is necessary for learners to acquire new target language. Swain and Lapkin (1995: summarized in Saville-Troike 2006) suggest that meaningful production practice helps learners by:
- Enhancing fluency by furthering development of automaticity through practice.
- Highlighting gaps in their own knowledge as they are forced to move from semantic processing to syntactic processing, which may lead them to give more attention to relevant information.
- Testing hypotheses based on developing proficiency, allowing for monitoring and revision.
- Getting learners to talk about language, including eliciting relevant input and collaboratively solving problems.
When teaching listening skills, for example, output-based activities can consist of oral or written tasks that involve productive use of selected items from a listening text. Such activities could include:
- In the case of conversational texts, pair reading of the tape scripts.
- Written sentence-completion tasks requiring use of expressions and other linguistic items that occurred in the texts.
- Dialog practice based on dialogs that incorporate items from the text.
- Role plays in which students are required to use key language from the texts.
Next time, Jack will consider the second problem faced by learners moving from lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate: that fluency may have progressed at the expense of complexity.
Excerpted and edited from Moving Beyond the Plateau: From Intermediate to Advanced Levels in Language Learning by Jack C. Richards
References and further reading