Language Learning and Teaching (стр. 38 из 46)

Error treatment options can be classified in a number of possible ways (see Gaies 1983; Long 1977), but one useful taxonomy was recommended by Bailey (1985), who drew from the work of Allwright (1975). Seven "basic options" are complemented by eight "possible features" within each option (Bailey 1985:111).

Basic Options:

1. To treat or to ignore

2. To treat immediately or to delay

3. To transfer treatment [to, say, other learners] or not

4. To transfer to another individual, a subgroup, or the whole class

5. To return, or not, to original error maker after treatment

6. To permit other learners to initiate treatment

7. To test for the efficacy of the treatment

Possible Features:

1. Fact of error indicated

2. Location indicated

3. Opportunity for new attempt given

4. Model provided

5- Error type indicated

6. Remedy indicated

7. Improvement indicated

8. Praise indicated

All of the basic options and features within each option are conceivably viable modes of error correction in the classroom. The teacher needs to develop the intuition, through experience and solid eclectic theoretical foundations, for ascertaining which option or combination of options is appropriate at a given moment. Principles of optimal affective and cognitive feedback, of reinforcement theory, and of communicative language teaching all combine to form those theoretical foundations.

At least one general conclusion that can be drawn from the study of errors in the linguistic systems of learners is that learners are indeed creatively operating on a second language—constructing, either consciously or subconsciously, a system for understanding and producing utterances in the language. That system should not necessarily be treated as an imperfect system; it is such only insofar as native speakers compare their own knowledge of the language to that of the learners. It should rather be looked upon as a variable, dynamic, approximative system, reasonable to a great degree in the mind of the learners, albeit idiosyncratic. Learners are processing language on the basis of knowledge of their own interlanguage, which, as a system lying between two languages, ought not to have the value judgments of either language placed upon it. The teacher's task is to value learners, prize their attempts to communicate, and then provide optimal feedback for the system to evolve in successive stages until learners are communicating meaningfully and unambiguously in the second language.

In the Classroom: A Model for Error Treatment

In these end-of-chapter vignettes, an attempt has been made to provide some pedagogical information of historical or implicational interest. This chapter has focused strongly on the concept of error in the developing learner language of students of second languages, and the last sections above honed in on error treatment in form-focused instruction. Therefore, one more step will be taken here: to offer a conceptual model of error treatment that incorporates some of what has been covered in the chapter.

Figure 8.3 illustrates what I would claim are the split-second series of decisions that a teacher makes when a student has uttered some deviant form of the foreign language in question. In those few nanoseconds, information is accessed, processed, and evaluated, with a decision forthcoming on what the teacher is going to do about the deviant form. Imagine that you are the teacher and let me walk you through the flow chart.

Some sort of deviant utterance is made by a student. Instantly, you run this speech event through a number of nearly simultaneous screens: (1) You identify the type of deviation (lexical, phonological, etc.), and (2) often, but not always, you identify its source, the latter of which will be useful in determining how you might treat the deviation. (3) Next, the complexity of the deviation may determine not only whether to treat or ignore, but how to treat if that is your decision. In some cases a deviation may require so much explanation, or so much interruption of the task at hand, that it isn't worth treating. (4) Your most crucial and possibly the very first decision among these ten factors is to quickly decide whether the utterance is interpretable (local) or not (global). Local errors can sometimes be ignored for the sake of maintaining a flow of communication. Global errors by definition very often call for some sort of treatment, even if only in the form of a clarification request. Then, from your previous knowledge of this student, (5) you make a guess at whether it is a performance slip (mistake) or a competence error. This is not always easy to do, but you may be surprised to know that a teacher's intuition on this factor will often be correct. Mistakes rarely call for treatment, while errors more frequently demand some sort of teacher response.

All the above information is quickly stored as you perhaps simultaneously run through the next five possible considerations. (6) From your knowledge about this learner, you make a series of instant judgments about the learner's language ego fragility, anxiety level, confidence, and willingness to accept correction. If, for example, the learner rarely says anything at all, shows high anxiety and low confidence when attempting to speak, you may, on this count alone, decide to ignore the deviant utterance. (7) Then, the learner's linguistic stage of development, which you must discern within this little microsecond, will tell you something about how to treat the deviation. (8) Your own pedagogical focus at the moment (Is this a form-focused task to begin with? Does this lesson focus on the form that was deviant? What are the overall objectives of the lesson or task?) will help you to decide whether or not to treat. (9) The communicative context of the deviation (Was the student in the middle of a productive flow of language? How easily could you interrupt?) is also considered. (10) Somewhere in this rapid-fire processing, your own style as a teacher comes into play. Are you generally an interventionist? laissez-faire? If, for example, you tend as a rule to make very few error treatments, a treatment now on a minor deviation would be out of character, and possibly interpreted by the student as a response to a grievous shortcoming.

You are now ready to decide whether to treat or ignore the deviation! If you decide to do nothing, then you simply move on. But if you decide to do something in the way of treatment, you have a number of treatment options, as discussed earlier. You have to decide when to treat, who will treat, and how to treat, and each of those decisions offers a range of possibilities as indicated in the chart. Notice that you, the teacher, do not always have to be the person who provides the treatment. Manner of treatment varies according to the input to the student, the directness of the treatment, the student's output, and your follow-up.

After one very quick deviant utterance by a student, you have made an amazing number of observations and evaluations that go into the process of error treatment. New teachers will find such a prospect daunting, perhaps, but with experience, many of these considerations will become automatic.

TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION

[Note: (I) individual work; (G) group or pair work; (C) whole-class discussion.]

1. (C) Pick several languages with which students in the class are familiar, and think about the phonological features of those languages that are most salient in "foreign-accented" English. List the features and, using the hierarchy of difficulty on pages 209 and 210, discuss the possible reasons for the saliency of those features (why particular features get mapped onto English speech performance, and not others).

2. (I) What is the difference between the САН and CLIP How does the subtle-differences principle (Oiler & Ziahosseiny 1970) move away from the notion that difficulty can be predicted? How does the weak version of the САН compare to your understanding of what is meant by CLI?

3. (G) In groups of three or four, compile examples, in languages that members of your group know, of (a) mistakes vs. errors, (b) global vs. local errors, and (c) overt vs. covert errors. Share your examples with the rest of the class.

4. (C) For a challenging class discussion, try to come up with examples of errors in four different cells: overt/global, overt/local, covert/global, and covert/local.

5. (C) If possible, secure an audiotape of a few minutes of the language of an advanced-beginning learner of English. As the class listens to the tape, listen the first time for the general gist. The second time, students should write down errors (phonological, grammatical, lexical, discourse) they hear. Then, in class discussion, identify the source of each error. Such an exercise should offer a sense of the "messiness" of real language.

6. (C) Has anyone in the class learned, or attempted to learn, a third or fourth language? Those students could share some of the difficulties they encountered, and the extent to which there was L1-L3, L2-L3, etc., cross-linguistic influence.

7. (I) Fossilization and learning are actually the result of the same cognitive processes at work. Explain this. Then, try to think of factors other than feedback that could cause or contribute to fossilization. Once a language form is fossilized, can it ever be corrected?

8. (G) Divide into groups such that each group has at least two people in it who have learned or studied a foreign language. Members of the group should share experiences with form-focused instruction (FFI).Try to decide as a group what the features are of the most and least effective FFI.

9. (C) Look at the error treatment model in the vignette at the very end of the chapter. Using examples posed to the class, discuss the specific steps that a teacher goes through in determining whether to treat or ignore a deviant utterance, and in the case of a decision to treat, what the treatment should be.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Jaszczolt, Katarzyna. 1995. Typology of contrastive studies: Specialization, progress, and applications. Language Teaching 28:1-15.

This state-of-the-art article offers a comprehensive update and summary of research on cross-linguistic influence.

James, Carl. 1998. Errors in Language Learning and Use:Exploring Error Analysis. Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Longman.

This book is an excellent overview of several decades of research on the field of error analysis, a topic that continues to draw the attention of researchers.

Bayley, Robert and Preston, Dennis (Eds.). 1996. Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Variation. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Variability models accounting for learner language are scrutinized in detail in Bayley and Preston's anthology. The reading is very technical, and therefore would be difficult for the first-level graduate student.

Doughty, Catherine and Williams, Jessica. 1998. Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Spada, Nina. 1997."Form-focussed instruction and second language acquisition: A review of classroom and laboratory research." Language Teaching 30:73-87.

Two comprehensive sources on form-focused instruction that are suitable for newcomers in the field of SLA are to be found in the above works. The first is an anthology of chapters, some written by well-known leaders in the field (Long, DeKeyser, Swain, Harley, and Lightbown), and the second is another state-of-the-art synthesis of research.

LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE: JOURNAL ENTRY 8

[Note: See pages 18 and 19 of Chapter 1 for general guidelines for writing a journal on a previous or concurrent language learning experience]

•Make a list of some of the specific contrasts between your native and target languages that have been or still are difficult for you. Can you analyze why they are difficult, using the information in this chapter?

•In your list above, are there examples of "subtle differences" which nevertheless present some difficulty for you? Analyze those differences.

•Think about some of the errors you are making (made) in learning a foreign language. List as many as you can, up to ten or so, being as descriptive as possible (e.g., the French subjunctive mood, Japanese honorffics, English definite articles, separable two-word verbs). Now, analyze where those errors came from. If they did not come from your native language, what other sources are possible?

•Have you ever reached a stage of fossilization, or in milder form, a "plateau" of progress where you seemed to just stall for weeks or months? If so, describe that experience. Then tell about what, if anything, propelled you out of those doldrums, or determine what might have helped you if you stayed there or are still there.

•Describe your language teacher's error treatment style. Does/Did your teacher overcorrect or undercorrect? To what extent does/did your teacher follow the model at the end of the chapter?

CHAPTER 9

COMMNICATIVE COMPETENCE

The previous chapter and this one follow the historical development of research on applied linguistics and related second language pedagogy. The middle part of the twentieth century was characterized by a zeal for the scientific, linguistic analysis of the structures of languages with a focus on how languages differed from each other. This was followed by a cognitive/rationalistic period of research into the processes of cognition and affect and the resulting developing linguistic systems of learners, with a focus on errors as important keys to understanding the makeup of those systems. Both of those strains of research continue to be important as we now begin the twenty-first century. But, as noted in Chapter 1, a new wave of interest characterized the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, a social constructivist wave that found the discipline focusing less on individual development and more on the effect of learners' interactions with others.

Social constructivist perspectives drew our attention to language as communication across individuals. Researchers looked at discourse, interaction, pragmatics, and negotiation, among other things. Teachers and materials writers treated the language classroom as a locus of meaningful, authentic exchanges among users of a language. Foreign language learning started to be viewed not just as a potentially predictable developmental process but also as the creation of meaning through interactive negotiation among learners. "Communicative competence" became a household word in SLA, and still stands as an appropriate term to capture current trends in teaching and research.

DEFINING COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

The term communicative competence was coined by Dell Hymes (1967, 1972), a sociolinguist who was convinced that Chomsky's (1965) notion of competence (see Chapter 2) was too limited. Chomsky's "rule-governed creativity" that so aptly described a child's mushrooming grammar at the age of three or four did not, according to Hymes, account sufficiently for the social and functional rules of language. So Hymes referred to communicative competence as that aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts. Savignon (1983: 9) noted that "communicative competence is relative, not absolute, and depends on the cooperation of all the participants involved." It is not so much an intrapersonal construct as we saw in Chomsky's early writings but rather a dynamic, interpersonal construct that can be examined only by means of the overt performance of two or more individuals in the process of communication.

In the 1970s, research on communicative competence distinguished between linguistic and communicative competence (Hymes 1967; Paulston 1974) to highlight the difference between knowledge "about" language forms and knowledge that enables a person to communicate functionally and interactively. In a similar vein, James Cummins (1979,1980) proposed a distinction between cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS). CALP is that dimension of proficiency in which the learner manipulates or reflects upon the surface features of language outside of the immediate interpersonal context. It is what learners often use in classroom exercises and tests that focus on form. BICS, on the other hand, is the communicative capacity that all children acquire in order to be able to function in daily interpersonal exchanges. Cummins later (1981) modified his notion of CALP and BICS in the form of context-reduced and context-embedded communication, where the former resembles CALP and the latter BICS, but with the added dimension of considering the context in which language is used. A good share of classroom, school-oriented language is context-reduced, while face-to-face communication with people is context-embedded. By referring to the context of our use of language, then, the distinction becomes more feasible to operationalize.