Yesterday, Jack Richards – author of Interchange – considered how teachers can help increase opportunities for acquiring and using new linguistic forms, by addressing language before undertaking activities. Today, Jack focuses on what can be done during and after the activity.
Addressing language during an activity
A focus on language can be facilitated during the completion of an activity by choosing how the activity is to be carried out. The way an activity is implemented can determine whether it is carried out fluently with a focus on target language forms, or disfluently with excessive dependence on communication strategies, employment of lexicalized rather than grammaticalized discourse, and overuse of ellipsis and non-linguistic resources. Task implementation factors include:
- Participation: Whether the activity is completed individually or with other learners.
- Resources: The materials and other resources provided for the learners to use while completing an activity.
- Procedures: The number of procedures involved in completing an activity.
- Order: The sequencing of an activity in relation to previous tasks.
- Product: The outcome or outcomes students produce, such as a written or oral product.
Participation
The effect of participation arrangements on task performance has been noted by several scholars. Foster (1998) found that having students work together in dyads rather than in groups, coupled with the obligation to exchange information, is the best for language production, negotiations, and modified output (p. 18).
Resources
Resources that students work with can also affect task performance. The use of pictures in a story-telling activity might provide an accessible framework, or schema, for the story, clarifying such elements as setting, characters, events, outcomes, and so on, giving learners more opportunity to focus their planning or performance on other dimensions of the task. Or, in conducting a survey task, the design of the resources that students use could have a crucial impact on the appropriateness of the language used in carrying out the task. If the survey form or questionnaire students use provides models of the types of questions they should ask, it may result in a better level of language use during questioning and make other aspects of the task easier, since less planning will be needed to formulate appropriate questions.
Procedures
Procedures used in completing an activity can also be used to influence language output. An activity that is divided into several shorter subtasks may be more manageable than one without such a structure, allowing students to deal with one section of the task at a time.
Order
The order of an activity in relation to other tasks may influence the use of target structures. For example, if students are to carry out an activity that requires the use of sequence markers (e.g., first, then, finally), a prior activity that models how sequence markers are used may increase use of those sequence markers during the performance of the target task (see Swain, 1998).
Product
The product focus of an activity will also influence the extent to which students have the opportunity to attend to linguistic form. A task may be completed orally, it may be recorded, or it may require writing. In each case, different opportunities for language awareness and production are involved. Swain (1999) describes how tasks with a written product provide an opportunity for students to focus on form:
Students, working together in pairs, are each given a different set of numbered pictures that tell a story. Together the pair of students must jointly construct the story-line. After they have worked out what the story is, they write it down. In so doing, students encounter linguistic problems they need to solve to continue with the task. These problems include how best to say what they want to say; problems of lexical choice; which morphological endings to use; the best syntactic structures to use; and problems about the language needed to sequence the story correctly. These problems arise as the students try to “make meaning”, that is, as they construct and write out the story, as they understand it. And as they encounter these linguistic problems, they focus on linguistic form – the form that is needed to express the meaning in the way they want to convey it (p. 3).
Learners can also record their performance of an activity and then listen to it to identify aspects of their performance that require modification.
Addressing language use after the activity
Grammatical appropriateness can also be addressed after a task has been completed (see Willis and Willis, 1966). Activities of this type include the following:
Public performance
After completing a small-group activity, students carry out the same task in front of the class or another group. This may prompt them to perform the activity using more complex language. Aspects of their performances that were not initially in focus during in-group performance can become conscious as there is an increased capacity for self-monitoring during public performance of the activity.
Repeat performance
The same activity might be repeated with some elements modified, such as the amount of time available. Nation (1989), for example, reports improvements in fluency, control of content, and to a lesser extent, accuracy, when learners repeat an oral task under time constraints, and argues that this is a way of bringing about long-term improvement in both fluency, and to some extent, accuracy.
Other performance
The students might listen to more advanced learners (or even native speakers) completing the same task, and focus on some of the linguistic and communicative resources employed in the process. In other words, they can carry out noticing activities while listening to examples of other performances.
Jack will be back next week with some ideas on dealing with learners’ limited vocabulary range. You can find the earlier posts by Jack in this series here: 1, 2, 3
Excerpted and edited from Moving Beyond the Plateau: From Intermediate to Advanced Levels in Language Learning by Jack C. Richards
References and further reading