Spoken language and the classroom
6.3 The role of spoken interaction in Communicative Language Teaching
classrooms
The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach that has dom-inated English language teaching from the 1980s if not earlier and the Natural Approach that retains a strong influence on teacher training were developed around the idea of meaningful interaction and the focus on communication rather than linguistic facts. Both therefore valued, and were interested in encouraging students to engage in, copious amounts of spoken language in the classroom.
Concept 6.1 Learning versus acquisition and input hypothesis in the
‘Natural Approach’
During the early 1980s Stephen Krashen developed his influential theory of second language development in what came to be referred to as the ‘Natural Approach’. This has been challenged on several fronts, but some of the central ideas helped to shape second language acquisition theory (SLA) and remain influential to this day. Two of his ideas – the distinction between learning and acquisition and the input hypothesis – are relevant to how spoken interaction is handled in the language classroom today.
In this framework consciously learning a language was at best a secondary process and the real focus of interest was acquisition. The L2 student, Krashen posited, like the child learning a first language, engaged with language at a deeper level than superficial grammatical knowledge and by exposure to it tapped into the underlying ‘hard wiring’ of the brain (i.e. the system which would be called ‘competence’ in Chomskyan theory). The strongest version of this theory suggested that one simply could not ‘learn’
a language and that too much emphasis on learning versus finding the right conditions for acquisition was harmful to L2 development.
In discussing the question of what the conditions for acquisition might be, the second key concept became relevant: the input hypothesis. This was presented in a formula ‘i+1’ (Krashen, 1982, 20–1) in which ‘i’ represents the current state of knowledge of a language and ‘1’ equates to the next stage of its acquisition. The ideal conditions for acquisition were, Krashen sug-gested, those in which stimulating and motivating input at the level just beyond ‘i’ were presented to the student, leading them to naturally engage with it and thus reshape their state of knowledge towards ‘1’. This very neat statement, although soon challenged as unverifiable (McLaughlin, 1987), provided a paradigm or framework for SLA which remains highly influential.
The handling of classroom talk has therefore become something of a marker of ability to promote good language learning environments. It is also used as a measure of the level of learner versus teacher centredness of a class, with a correlation being between low levels of teacher talking time (TTT) and higher levels of student engagement and autonomy.
The focus on the importance of speaking and its links to a dominant philosophy in the teaching of English has markedly affected the nature of classroom management and also influenced how particular instances of spoken interaction are valued. At the global level teacher training in the communicative method explicitly discouraged too much teacher input and one of several ‘alternative’ approaches was ‘The Silent Way’ (Gattegno, 1976). This, as its name suggests, promoted the reduction of teacher talk to an absolute minimum. The popularity of small group and pair work that emerged as teachers began to make constructs such as the communica-tively oriented ‘notional-functional’ syllabus real during the 1980s was also linked to the high value placed on students’ spoken interaction in the classroom.
Considerable attention is still paid to how to handle classroom dynam-ics effectively to promote greatest output from the student and position the teacher as a facilitator of exploratory and autonomous learning through negotiation rather than a dominant voice of authority on what is correct. This philosophy has continued to shape what is regarded as good practice in the classroom over the last 30 to 40 years. The more recent emergence of, for example, task-based learning and focus-on-form has been a refinement rather than a sea change in the primary status given to the role of spoken interaction and its management in the ELT classroom.
The emphasis has shifted more recently from a concern about the relative
‘air time’ of the teacher versus the student towards gaining a better under-standing of how spoken interaction between teacher and student or student and student can influence language learning (see for example Quote 6.2 with which the chapter opened).
CLT has itself become more refined and diverse over the years but the basic assumption that language is best approached as action and interac-tion rather than a set of rules has remained the bedrock of English lan-guage teacher training. An example of how classroom management of interaction is seen as influencing language acquisition is in the role of feed-back and error correction by a teacher. In the Focus-on-Form movement, for instance, the handling of immediate feedback by drawing attention to an item just said by a student is part of the approach. It is felt to enhance the process of becoming more aware of a correct form and promote accu-rate spoken output by the student (see Quote 6.5 for an example of this process in action).
Another influential development in CLT that places great emphasis on the spoken mode has been the Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)
movement (see Concept 6.2). This approach is not without controversy – in particular the role of explicit versus implicit focus on linguistic items – but the ideas underlying it chimed particularly clearly with the prevailing ethos of CLT and have meant that the task-based approach remains a current topic for scholarly debate and classroom applications.
Quote 6.5 Example of didactic focus-on-form
In Example 3, the student leaves out the definite article ‘the’. The teacher has no difficulty in understanding him but focuses attention on the error by cor-recting the utterance. The focus-on-form episode that results from this type of error treatment constitutes a kind of pedagogic ‘time-out’ from meaning-focussed communication and for this reason can be considered ‘didactic’. It involves a ‘negotiation of form’ rather than a ‘negotiation of meaning’. It is possible that students do not notice the target of such negotiation as no meaning is at stake. There is no evidence in Example 3 that the student has paid attention to the teacher’s feedback. Ellis et al. (1999) found that didactic focus-on-form was far more common than conversational [focus-on-form] in communicative ESL lessons involving adult learners.
Example 3: Didactic focus-on-form S: I was in pub
(2.0)
S: I was in pub T: in the pub?
S: yeah and I was drinking beer (Ellis et al., 2002: 434–5)
Concept 6.2 Task-based language teaching – TBLT
This is an approach to language learning based on insights first outlined in the late 1980s by Prabhu (1987) and which has remained a central topic in syllabus design and debate about language learning generally. Reporting on his work in India, Prabhu suggested that learners who were mainly focused on a real world task made as good if not better progress than language learners given explicitly language focused instruction. This led to a variety of attempts to implement ‘task-based learning’ more widely and to relate them to the language classroom more generally. This was done by designing tasks that promoted the use of authentic language and required active engagement by the student in their completion, generally with a high level of spoken inter-action being required. A typical pattern for a lesson would be to provide an introduction to the task in the form of a ‘warm-up’ discussion to focus the attention of the students on the topic in question and help to generate some of the language required, a phase introducing the task and checking that
A very extensive investigation of how to transfer TBLT theory into the classroom was carried out in Belgium and reported in van den Branden (2006). Quote 6.6 shows the importance of the spoken mode in this approach and gives a sense of the relationship that develops between teacher and student as the approach is implemented.
students have fully understood the task and their roles (depending on the stance of the teacher to explicit linguistic input this phase may include focus on particular language items needed to complete the task, or not), a phase in which the students carry out the task with the teacher taking the role of facil-itator and interlocutor, and a phase of rounding up and reflection on the task and the language used. One of the aspects that teachers found refreshing was that the typical pattern of structured input and very constrained practice of particular items was abandoned. In the task-based classroom students are placed in a role of greater independence and, in a carefully constructed task, the idea is that they will generate language before getting further feedback and clarification of it both from other students and from the teacher.
A useful overview of how these ideas developed can be found in Bygate et al. (2001) Researching Pedagogic Tasks: second language learning, teaching, and testing and Samuda and Bygate (2008) Tasks in Second Language Learning.
A more practically oriented title with ideas on how to implement TBLT in detail is Willis and Willis (2007). On the theoretical side, Peter Skehan has developed TBLT thinking in relation to task-design and the balance between cognitive demands, focus on language, and maintaining some level of authen-ticity in the task. Skehan (2007) gives a balanced summary of the state of thinking on TBLT, including an account of why it remains controversial.
Quote 6.6 The role of teacher–student spoken interaction in the task-based classroom
In task-based language teaching (TBLT), the teacher can be regarded in many ways as the learners’ most privileged interlocutor. Although the teacher’s role in TBLT differs from the role teachers assume in more ‘linguistic’, structure-oriented approaches, it is equally crucial. . . . In a nutshell we will argue and illustrate that there are two core actions that we believe the teacher should take in order for tasks to elicit rich learner activity and to enhance the chances that this activity turns into actual learning. These are:
a) motivating the learner to invest intensive mental energy in task completion;
b) interactionally supporting task performance in such a way as to trigger pro-cesses such as the negotiation of meaning and content, the comprehen-sion of rich input, the production of output and focus on form, which are believed to be central to (second) language learning.
Van Avermaet et al. (2007: 175)
The trends in language teaching theory outlined above have meant that it is almost commonplace to say that it is better for students to talk in the classroom than teachers, and that there is a strong link between talk in the classroom and language acquisition processes. This in turn affects how the spoken mode is handled in the classroom. However, its dominant role in some theories may, paradoxically, not be a good thing for teaching spoken language, per se. Promoting student talk and providing tasks that allow ‘meaningful interaction’ may not promote fluent, accurate, and stylistically diverse talk. The apparent focus on the spoken mode in the classroom may mask significant issues for understanding the nature of speech and how best to teach and assess this skill in its own right.
Quote 6.7 also captures something of this tension.
Quote 6.7 Interaction, important but under-researched?
Despite this enthusiasm for ‘interactivity’ as a defining notion in language teaching, a model of ‘Language as Interaction’ has not been described in the same level of detail as those models that have been developed for structural and functional views of language theory.
(Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 22)
The rest of this chapter provides a brief overview of some of the implica-tions of the nature of speech for the classroom. It looks at some of the needs that practitioners may have in relation to handling spoken discourse in the speaking class as opposed to a class in which speaking is treated as the medium for language acquisition more generally.