Using the Mother Tongue to Teach another Tongue

I recently updated my book Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

“Language teaching must start afresh!” was the battle cry of a German language teacher, Wilhelm Viëtor, who published a manifesto of that name in 1886. His text lays out the weaknesses of the then-current grammar translation approach to language teaching, and proposes a surprisingly modern method to replace it.

This was one of the seminal moments for the Reform Movement in language teaching, and communicative language teaching is clearly part of the tradition that Fricke described so many years ago.

His thoughts on using the foreign language and the students’ native language in the classroom are worth noting. “It goes without saying that that the foreign language should always be spoken in class,” he says. However, “in certain circumstances, (questions about the content of a text) may have to be put in German first, then in the foreign language….” In his thoughtful commentary, he thus comes down on what I take to be the right side of an issue that has bedeviled reformers from his day to the present.

Sometimes called the principle of monolingualism, the idea is that you should essentially banish your students’ mother tongue from the foreign language classroom. This notion, which is very convenient for teachers who do not know the native language of the students they are teaching, has many advocates. This practice is essentially a product of the twentieth century. In no other age have language teachers been forbidden as a matter of principle to communicate with their students in their native language.

The widely respected methodology writer Jeremy Harmer, for example, makes a concession to the mother tongue in these words: “Where students all share the same mother tongue (which the teacher also understands), a member of the class can be asked to translate the instructions as a check that they have understood them.” The very wording of this proposal implies that the teacher should ban the mother tongue from the classroom. It certainly sounds as though Harmer wouldn’t stoop to use it himself!

Does this make sense? For some, using the students’ native language is not an option. These teachers may work in western countries where attendance sheets read like UN committee lists. Or they may have monolingual classes in developing countries whose language they have not mastered or even attempted. Much conventional wisdom about language teaching suggests that these situations are irrelevant, since the ideal language classroom should involve communication in the foreign language only. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there are strong arguments that the monolingual principle is an impediment to effective language teaching.

The balance of this commentary will reflect the ideas of a worthy successor to Viëtor, the 19th century German pamphleteer. Now a retired professor of language instruction in Aachen, Germany, Dr. Wolfgang Butzkamm argues that having the ability to speak the first language of your learners is a gift to be valued. All else being equal, a teacher fluent in her students’ mother tongue will be a better teacher than one who blunders in that language or doesn't know it at all. He assumes that the students are at least seven years old, by which time their native language is well established.

Here is his essential argument.

Using the mother tongue, we have learned to think, learned to communicate and acquired an intuitive understanding of grammar. The mother tongue opens the door not only to its own grammar, but to all grammars, inasmuch as it awakens the potential for universal grammar that lies within all of us….For this reason, the mother tongue is the master key to foreign languages, the tool which gives us the fastest, surest, most precise, and most complete means of accessing a foreign language.

This is a radical notion, but in many ways it makes great sense. The trick is to use the mother tongue sparingly in class. Offer brief explanations and instructions where necessary, but do not do so randomly; Butzkamm suggests particular techniques to use in the classroom. He adds,

In principle, conveying meaning is not a matter of vocabulary, but concerns the text, i.e. it takes place simultaneously on a lexical, grammatical and pragmatic level. The pupil first wants to understand not what an individual word is saying, but what the text is saying, as accurately and completely as possible. An oral utterance equivalent in the mother tongue is the best and fastest way to fulfill this basic need.

He adds that “interferences, those unwelcome imports from the mother tongue, are avoided by the sandwich technique.” The sandwich technique? This is when the teacher “inserts a translation between repetitions of an unknown phrase, almost as an aside, or with a slight break in the flow of speech to mark it as an ‘intruder’.” In this way the teacher briefly uses the mother tongue, but quickly re-establishes syntax for his students.

Butzkamm’s arguments are often complex, but they fall well within the structure of communicative language teaching. For example, he suggests that using teaching aids in the mother tongue can “promote more authentic, message-oriented communications than might be found in lessons where they are avoided…. (Also,) mother tongue techniques allow teachers to use richer, more authentic texts sooner. This means more comprehensible input and faster acquisition.”

In a comment on this post, Butzkamm pointed out that "my argument stands even if there is no such thing as a universal grammar common to all languages...in the Chomskyan sense." He continues,

Mother tongue grammars have paved the way to foreign grammars in as much as they have prepared the learner to expect and understand underlying basic concepts such as possession, number, agent, instrument, cause, condition etc, no matter by what linguistic means they are expressed in a given language. Naturally, if both the target language and the FL have adjectives, relative clauses or the pluperfect tense in common, they need not be taught from scratch, but are directly available for incorporation into the L2 system. However, the path breaking power of L1 grammar is not dependent on the fact that both languages share such grammatical features. One natural language is enough to open the door for the grammars of other languages because all languages are cut from the same conceptual cloth.

At first, some of his arguments sound like those of a CL teacher gone mad. Consider the beginning of this argument, for example: “Mother tongue aids make it easier to conduct whole lessons in the foreign language.” This sounds almost surreal until he explains that using such aids enables “pupils to gain in confidence and, paradoxically, become less dependent on their mother tongue.”

The mother tongue has a role in explaining vocabulary, Butzkamm says, but we have to me careful about it, as his explanation of the sandwich technique illustrates. In language teaching, other approaches do not work as well, he says, and can even be harmful. As importantly, “we need to associate the new with the old. To exclude mother tongue links would deprive us of our richest source” for building associations with words we already know. In general, he says, “the foreign language learner must build upon existing skills and knowledge acquired in and through the mother tongue.”

Butzkamm is not modest about his ideas. His theory, he says,

restores the mother tongue to its rightful place as the most important ally a foreign language can have, one which would, at the same time, redeem some 2000 years of documented foreign language teaching, which has always held the mother tongue in high esteem.

Hardly the first linguist to argue against the principle of monolingualism, Butzkamm’s arguments may be the most coherent and compelling. Language teachers – especially those whose students speak a common language – should remember a simple truth: knowing and judiciously using your students’ native language can make you better teachers.

A Beginning, a Middle and an End

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Whichever language skill you are teaching, each component of your lesson should comprise beginning, middle and end. On the surface, this sounds obvious. But in language teaching, nothing is as it seems – or so it seems.

A better way to describe this issue is to talk about pre-skill, skill and post-skill activities. The three sections of a lesson segment should include an introduction that activates any schema the learners may need to succeed in the activity; the activity itself; and a review of the activity. To use reading as an example, the moving parts of a good teaching activity should include pre-reading, reading and post-reading components.

In the balance of this discussion, we will use reading and writing activities to illustrate this general idea. However, you can equally apply it to instruction in listening and speaking.

The communicative language teacher’s main responsibilities are to choose class materials and activities and to set class standards; in many ways, the choices are the hardest part. CL teachers should adapt readings to the level and interest of their students. All else being equal, students learn best when they read items that interest them. When you are presenting a text to students, there are a number of steps you should take to help your students get the most from their reading.

These include pre-teaching essential vocabulary and engaging the students by having them try to predict the content before they actually do the reading. If you have a class full of young adults, for example, you might begin the section with the observation, “We are about to read a short love story. What do you think will happen?” These kinds of pre-reading activities promote comprehension. In turn, this encourages your students to react personally to what they are reading.

You should base a sequence of classroom activities on your reading text. In this way, you can integrate better reading with improvements in one or more of the other skills – listening, speaking and writing.

Student Generated Reading Materials: Sometimes, of course, you won’t want to provide your students with canned material. You may opt instead to have them generate their own reading material.

You can have intermediate or advanced students choose their own research topic and find their own study materials in the newspaper or on the Internet. Once they have chosen their reading materials, you can put them through pre-reading, reading and post-reading exercises. This kind of project will extend over several classes, or even several weeks.

If you have lower-level students, you can use the “language experience approach” to help a class of beginners extend their spoken language into reading and writing activities. Begin by discussing a shared experience in class. Then lead the students in telling you a story. Write words and phrases on the board. Gradually develop their language contributions into a story, prompting revisions as you go. Read and reread the story together. Depending on the language skills of your students, use “repeat after me” or “choral reading” approaches. You may want to extend the story by having the students illustrate it.

After it is complete, you can further exploit this exercise by preparing flash cards that give brief cues to the story. Then erase the board, and have each student tell the story using only these cues. You will probably want your learners to tell these stories in small groups, so they get maximum language practice.

Make student-generated material go a long way, by pointing out elements such as punctuation and repetitive grammatical forms. Point out parts of speech, and use readings as springboards for speaking, listening, and writing. Finally, post student-generated writings on the wall to remind students of what they have learned.

Also, after you isolate a word, phrase or sentence, put it back into context so you can re-establish “syntax.” Syntax is the teacher’s word for the rules we use to combine words into phrases and sentences.

Reading Skills: Of course, in reading lessons it is also important to present strategies for effective comprehension. Here are three key skills.

• Skimming is used to quickly identify the main ideas of a text. When you read the newspaper, you're probably not reading it word-by-word; instead you're skimming the text. Skimming is done at a speed three to four times faster than normal reading.
• Scanning is a technique you often use when looking up a word in the telephone book or dictionary. You search for key words or ideas. In most cases, you know what you're looking for, so you're concentrating on finding a particular answer. Scanning involves moving your eyes quickly down the page seeking specific words and phrases.
• Surveying a text involves beginning a reading by examining some of its parts. Read the headlines and sub-heads, the first and last paragraphs, captions, charts and tables and other graphic materials. These will give you the main ideas of an article or brochure before you begin more intensive reading.

Teaching these learning strategies can greatly improve your learner’s reading comprehension.You can learn about other strategies to improve reading in teachers’ books and on many Internet sites.

Teaching Writing: Writing reinforces general language development and helps develop language proficiency, but it is also a valuable form of self-expression. CLT gives listening and speaking skills a certain primacy, but students do not always have to speak before they can write. (Of course, when you are working with students who have not yet learned the Roman alphabet, writing is usually a long time coming!)

The well-known applied linguist Doug (H. Douglas) Brown lists six principles for designing good writing lessons.

First, he says we should teach our students what good writers do. What do good writers do? Well, they focus on the main idea. They consider their audience. They constantly revise their writing. They follow a general outline as they write. And they get feedback on their writing from others. Build these practices into your writing lessons.

Brown also talks about balancing process and product. When you work with your students on process, you are inwardly focused, on the writer. You help your learners understand what the writer must do to generate ideas and so on. A focus on the writing product is outwardly directed. Who are the audience and what are they willing to read? What form should the piece of writing take? You also need to explain why correctness is so vital.

Another of Brown’s principles is to show differences between writing in English and writing in the first language. The focus here is style rather than language. For overseas teachers who cannot speak the local language or read the local script, this is impossible, of course.

His fourth principle is to connect reading and writing activities. This follows the general principle that CL teachers should wring as much as they can from a given task, stopping well short of boredom.

Also, he says, make writing as realistic as possible. Have students write for a real purpose. There are many varieties of writing that you can teach, and they exist for just about every student level. A few writing schema your students will be familiar with include email, letters, postcards, stories and newspaper articles. Forms they may be less familiar with include essays, poetry and business letters. As you begin a writing exercise, you should be sure your students understand the form (schema) they will be working on. Once they understand the form, the rest will be easier.

Finally, Brown says, teach writing in three stages.

• Generating content is the first. He calls this prewriting, and it involves research, brainstorming and other techniques for idea formation.
• Planning, organizing and preparing the first draft make up the second stage. At higher levels, for example, common planning and organizing techniques include writing a thesis statement, preparing outlines and developing topic sentences.
• Revision and editing come last. Except in special cases (for example, advanced students), it is not helpful to correct all the mistakes you can find in your students’ writing assignments. Like the other aspects of language, the development of writing is a gradual process. However, you should encourage your students to get feedback on their writing from other students by peer review. Also, your students should have opportunities to rewrite their work after you (or their peers) have corrected it.

And this, of course, takes us back to the beginning. Good activities for teaching language skills comprise beginning, middle and end.

Podcast in the Classroom

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Thomas Edison didn’t exactly consider the phonograph a device for teaching language when he invented it in 1877. However, he did suggest that its ten possible future uses included “the teaching of elocution” and “the preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.”

He could hardly have imagined that a remote descendent of that device, the podcast, would one day offer such convenient, powerful potential for language learning and teaching.

A podcast is a multimedia file distributed over the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. For the language learner in particular it is the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Motivated learners can now download excellent content through iTunes or Breaking News English, for example, and listen to it at their leisure. Teachers should encourage their students to take advantage of these opportunities, as well as such excellent commercial listening materials for beginners as those provided by Pimsleur.

Podcasts also provide great value for language teachers. Many excellent materials are available, and it is becoming progressively easier to use them in the classroom. It is hard to understate the importance of this media phenomenon for both learners and teachers. Why is this so?

Because listening is the single most important skill in language learning. The failure to promote listening activities in the classroom is a teaching flaw that even the best language instructors are often guilty of. In the past this was somewhat justifiable, because listening activities depended on clunky machines that were frequently unreliable. Moreover, finding appropriate listening materials was often difficult. Advancing technologies are changing that.

Pods and Bytes: Before we get into the nuts and bolts – or rather, perhaps, the pods and bytes – of using these new media in the classroom, let’s quickly review why listening is so important. Here are a few points about teaching this primary skill.

Listening is the language skill most used by the average person, and it is our major source of comprehensible input. Learners must hear and comprehend before they speak, so listening should be the first skill that you teach. This worries some teachers, but it shouldn’t; aural activities can be intrinsically motivating.

You should teach this skill gradually and systematically. In a pure listening exercise, your students develop the skill in isolation from the other skills. For the most part, you do this by presenting your learners with the opportunity to hear a specific selection of authentic speech. This includes giving them additional opportunities to listen to the exact same thing several times.

Students must be explicitly taught to recognize the reduced language forms of colloquial speech. Presented with identical repetitions of a speech segment, they will learn to recognize the reduced vowels of English, for example. They will also gradually learn to dissect the structures in use, and the unfamiliar vocabulary. Also, part of aural comprehension is learning to decipher nonverbal clues – many of which are carried, for example, in the intonation of a speaker’s voice. Listening activities can bring these intoned meanings to life.

We listen in different ways for different purposes, and this is an important consideration when we think about language teaching. For example, we should include among our listening activities a wide range of activities and materials. So says applied linguist David Nunan, who has provided an excellent set of rules for effective listening practice.

Authentic Texts: He adds that our materials should be based on a wide range of authentic texts, including both monologues and dialogues. Add answering-machine messages, public transportation announcements, mini-lectures and narrative recounts.

Also, the content should be personalized. For example, have your students “listen to one side of a conversation and react with written responses.” You can find many other ways to get your students to respond personally to the material. You might take into account local culture or recent news, for example. If your students are young adults, don’t forget to provide them with a brief love story. From the beginning, learners should know what they are listening for and why.

Schema-building tasks should precede the listening – in other words, the teacher should introduce the listening activity proper with questions or a warm-up activity, for example, that wakes up the learner’s dormant sense of what the listening activity will involve. By creating a sense of anticipation, you can add more life to the lesson.

You should incorporate strategies for effective listening into the materials. If the speakers use “woulda,” “shoulda” and “whaddaya” a lot, introduce those structures and have your students practise them before listening begins. Of course, key vocabulary should be part of pre-listening preparation.

Give your learners opportunities to progressively structure their listening by listening to a text several times. Also, have them work through increasingly challenging listening tasks as the number of repetitions of the text progresses. For example, after the first listening, they may need to write down the main idea of the text. The second time out, they may need to answer written questions about specific details from the text. These activities enable them to probe progressively deeper into the text.

Hardware and Content: With this review of the basics, let’s return to the matter of teaching technology. Recording devices like Edison’s phonograph have been around for 130 years, but were little used in the classroom until the development of the tape recorder.

For their part, record players were expensive and often cumbersome. The stylus was hard on the record, which quickly became scratched and often skipped. These devices were little used for language teaching.

Audiotapes have been available for half a century, of course, but for much of that time they were so clumsy they were used almost exclusively in language labs. It was difficult to rewind to the exact beginning of the text; also, the tapes can stretch, stick or break. And tape recorders seem much more likely to malfunction than later recording devices.

Audiotapes have been available for nearly fifty years, of course, but for much of that time they were so clumsy they were relegated to language labs. They have always had the drawback that it was difficult to rewind to the exact beginning of the text. Also, the tapes can stretch, stick or break. And tape recorders seem much more likely to malfunction than later recording devices.

The CD began to replace this technology twenty years ago. It has the advantages of instant response, much higher audio quality and greater durability. Its major drawback is in finding good and useful content for a language class. Good material has been available, but often prepared by big media firms to accompany textbooks that were not appropriate, for example, in emerging countries. Not only is this material often inappropriate, it is often quite expensive for teachers and schools in developing economies.

Then came the podcast, a whole new medium that is barely three years old. Although problems still exist, the podcast is progressively helping solve the language teacher’s content problem. More and more excellent material is available on the Internet, and it is downloadable for free. To extract the exact segment you want, you will need a free sound editor like Soundbooth.

How do you use this stuff? Whatever the level of technological sophistication of your teaching environment, you have options. For one, download onto an MP3 player your edited podcast; ideally it should be one with a transcript for lesson planning. Take it to class with a small pair of portable MP3 speakers. Now, you are off and running.

A less elegant solution is to download your chosen podcast onto a laptop computer, bring the laptop into class and let it rip. Unfortunately, laptop computer volume is often inadequate for medium-sized classes and larger, so external speakers may again be necessary.

Your third choice is to burn your podcast onto a CD or download it onto a flash storage device. Almost everyone has access to a CD player; fewer have access to a system that can read from flash memory. With luck and perhaps an investment in technology, however, you should be able to use this basic option.

Whichever playback system works for you, just do it. If you choose good materials and develop good, sophisticated activities, listening practice makes learning and teaching even more fun.

Up from the Bottom or Down from the Top?

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Psychology long ago began to debate two views – “top-down interpretation” and “bottom-up processing”– of how we understand language. Although the evidence is ambiguous, researchers generally believe they are distinct but complementary processes. For language instructors, the debate is less important than an appreciation of the roles these parallel processes play in classroom teaching and learning.

This discussion argues that good teaching practice accepts both views of language learning. However, their relative importance largely depends on the skills of the language learner.

To appreciate this, let’s begin with points of view. The advocates of “top-down interpretation” argue that background knowledge and previous experience of a situation, context, and topic play primary roles in helping us interpret meaning. We use prior knowledge and experience to anticipate, predict, and infer meaning. By contrast, the advocates of “bottom-up processing” believe language relies more heavily on decoding the sounds and letters of a language into words, clauses, sentences, and such. We then use our knowledge of grammatical, syntactic and lexical rules to interpret meaning. In this view, language users work from the bottom – the sounds they hear and the letters they encounter – to identify meaning.

To put that broad debate into context, consider that the primary focus of communicative language teaching is to develop communicative competence. CL teachers develop this competence through the use of materials and activities that focus on using language functions – for example, describing people and telling time. Because native-speakers use higher mental schema when they are processing language, language teachers develop activities that will enable their second-language learners to do the same. Broadly speaking, activities of these kinds involve top-down learning skills.

Is this always a good thing? No. Some language teachers are too quick to jump on the top-down bandwagon. In our view, better teachers are those who strike a conscious balance between top-down and bottom-up learning, which both have roles in language instruction.

According to Robert Norris, who uses listening activities to illustrate, “If we…require (our) students to use native speaker processing skills without first giving (them) a firm grounding in decoding the stream of sounds they hear, we run the risk of causing (them) more frustration and confusion than they can handle.”

We will return to Norris’s thoughtful discussion shortly. In the meantime, remember that bottom-up processing is particularly important when learners use the receptive language skills of listening and reading, because it plays a big role in making input comprehensible. And comprehensible input is the engine of effective language acquisition.

Bottom-up…: The bottom-up view assumes that listening is a process of decoding sounds and graphemes (the letters of the alphabet). We start with the smallest units, and gradually decode them until we understand the content of what we are listening to or reading.

The number of micro-skills involved is large. For example, when we listen we discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English, recognize stress patterns and the rhythmic structure of English, and discern how we use stress and intonation to signal information. Also, we need to identify words in stressed and unstressed positions and in reduced forms. We also have to recognize grammatical structures and typical word-order patterns. Meaning and comprehension are the last steps in the decoding process.

When we read, we use the building blocks of language to make meaning of what we see on the printed page. Bottom-up processes include sounds and graphemes -- the representation of sounds by letters. In English this involves word recognition for the countless irregular spellings and a sophisticated system of punctuation. We then need to to process written information through grammar and sentences. From these blocks we build comprehension.

…and Top-down: By contrast, top-down proponents believe that language processing involves the reconstruction of meaning through prior knowledge or “schema.”

Listeners actively reconstruct the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds and other signals like body language as clues. Prior knowledge of context and situation enables us to make sense of what we hear. A native speaker, for example, may completely zone out while hearing the news, then snatch a few brief cues that quickly draw him in. Similarly, when we begin a phone conversation to make an appointment, we shift into formal speech-patterns for such situations. This is another instance of schema guiding language use.

We also use schema to help us understand what we are reading. For example, the format of letters, emails and magazine ads are similar from culture to culture. Their format, whether in the reader’s first or second language, provides specific and useful information about what we can be likely to expect. Other top-down skills include surveying, skimming, scanning, reading for full comprehension, reading between the lines (inference), and reacting personally to reading texts. Teaching these learning strategies to your intermediate students can greatly improve their reading comprehension.

The Language Level Issue: In his excellent discussion of top-down and bottom-up teaching, Norris argues that the teaching community’s eagerness to focus on top-down teaching is sometimes misguided. “Many of the listening materials on the market today are concerned chiefly with helping learners become more adept at improving top-down skills by having them (identify relevant information while ignoring unnecessary details.)”

He adds, “In order to simulate the knowledge that native speakers bring to listening, learners are often provided with vocabulary lists prior to the task and told who the speakers are, what the situation is, and what the topic is about. However, scant attention is paid to the phonological characteristics that mark informal speech. This seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse.”

Norris makes a strong case that teachers must develop both bottom-up and top-down skills, especially at the lower levels. “Teachers are asking a lot from their students… when top-down listening tasks are given without first assessing the students' ability to do bottom-up processing.” His argument is sound. Learners need many micro-skills learners for bottom-up processing, and a good teacher neglects them at his peril. This applies especially to beginning and early intermediate students.

Wrap-up: The main conclusion of this discussion is that we need to feed both learning processes when we are teaching our students.

How and when can we use top-down processing? When you are teaching, make sure your students are aware of the format and general content of a reading, for example. Tell them they are going to read a ghost story, for example, and then elicit ideas about what the content might be, what vocabulary might occur, and so on. This switches on the ghost-story schema in their brains, and also begins activating their English skills. You can do the same with listening. Tell them you are about to listen to a sports broadcast on the Football World Cup. Elicit information about football and the vocabulary they might expect to hear, and so on. Also, of course, a CL teacher is constantly using authentic activities to teach. Thus, a role-play “in the restaurant” is by its very nature a top-down comprehension activity.

In these and many other ways, you can take advantage of your students’ ability to use top-down comprehension to get them ready for the upcoming learning activity. As your students advance, you can use more sophisticated top-down schema and strategies.

Bottom-up skills are different. As we have suggested throughout, they are usually more basic and therefore more important for lower-level students. With those students, you need to spend time helping them recognize reduced speech, for example, and irregular spellings. In the early stages of language acquisition, automaticity in word recognition is critical.

Communicative language teaching emulates real-life language acquisition, which means our work has a top-down bias. Your class needs to use authentic activities and materials to function effectively, and those materials tend to be top-down. However, focusing exclusively on top-down teaching creates problems. Especially with beginning students, spend time developing bottom-up skills.

Aural and Oral Skills

 I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Please click to download a PDF of my book Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching. 

The two most basic language skills, listening and speaking, sound exactly alike when we describe them as oral and aural skills. “Aural” language, of course, refers to language as we hear it. “Oral” language is what we say.

These two words are “homophones” – words spelled differently that sound alike. There is no good reason why they should be homophones, but they are. Perhaps that accident of spelling can serve as a reminder that, while these two skills cannot be separated, they need to be developed in different ways.

Teaching Basic Skills: According to a hoary adage, “We are given two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we talk.” This is a maxim to remember when we plan our lessons – especially when we are dealing with a classroom of new learners.

Logically, listening should be the first skill you teach. In practice, however, most teachers get their students talking on the first day of class, and many make speech the major focus of their lessons. They tend to downplay the skill of listening, as do most foreign language textbooks. Yet listening is probably the more important skill involved in foreign language learning, as it certainly is in the acquisition of one’s native tongue.

Stephen Krashen and other thinkers have stressed that we acquire language best by using it in communicative ways. He was also one of the first to stress that language acquisition and language learning are not the same. Language learning (in the sense of making conscious discoveries about grammar, for instance) involves different mental processes, and those processes play distinctly secondary roles to those we use when we acquire language naturally. Language develops, he says, through exposure to and use of “comprehensible input” – target language the learner can understand and assimilate. All of this is textbook Krashen.

One reasonable conclusion from these observations is that language learners should understand what they are listening to before they begin to speak. Especially at the initial phase of language acquisition, teachers should avoid oral practice to some degree. Instead, they should have their students concentrate on comprehending what they hear. This idea parallels the experience of young children, who spend almost two years in linguistic silence before they begin to speak.

To use listening-focused learning, a communicative language teacher needs to incorporate active listening into their classes. This is done with activities in which the learners demonstrate that they understand, and receive gentle correction when they err. More advanced students must be explicitly taught to recognize reduced language forms heard in colloquial speech – as in “Whaddaya say?” Also, of course, part of aural comprehension is learning to decipher nonverbal clues.

Pure listening is rarely a good strategy for sustained language acquisition. Even if students are still in their silent period – a common phase for beginners, in which they speak very little if at all, – teachers should encourage active participation from them. This is the only way to confirm that they have understood. Participation can mean as little as a nod or a headshake, for example, or the words “yes” and “no” in English or their native language. Listening without speaking is important for foreign language learners, especially when their language learning has just begun, but at some level that listening should be participatory.

Listening activities do not always involve some other skill, but they generally do; the best classroom activities cross skill boundaries. Since the most typical pairing for a listening activity is to combine it with speech practice, a focus on listening can actually promote the effective development of speaking skills. To see how, let's turn to the activation of speech.

Focus on Conversation: Speaking activities best occur in classrooms in which learners feel comfortable and confident, free to take risks, and have plenty of opportunities to speak. While there are countless kinds of activities teachers use to develop speaking skills, they most commonly promote conversational speech. This, of course, requires the use of both listening and speaking skills.

Conversational language has four characteristics. It is interactive, in the sense that we talk back and forth in short bursts. Often, we do not even use complete sentences – “nice day, eh?” Conversation also has narrow time limits. We have to listen and respond without the luxury of thinking much about what we want to say. Conversation is also repetitive, in the sense that we tend to use a relatively small amount of vocabulary and a relatively small repertory of language structures.. And finally, of course, it is error-prone. Because of time limits, we may use the wrong word, pronounce something wrong or mangle structure. While we may hear the mistake and back up and correct ourselves, often we don’t.

Bearing in mind the earlier comments about listening, these characteristics of conversation illustrate an important difference between listening activities and speaking activities. Because listening is a learner’s primary source of comprehensible input, aural activities depend heavily on accuracy. To understand, learners must listen carefully, and their comprehension must be good. In many listening activities, we play a short recording of speech repeatedly until we think our learners understand it.

By contrast, learners shift heavily in the direction of fluency during conversation practice, which combines both listening and speaking skills. At this portion of the language class, the teacher kisses student accuracy goodbye. During speaking activities, the focus is on interactive, time-limited, repetitive and error-prone conversation. As is often the case in the language classroom, as we move from skill to skill, or from language study to language activation, we willingly compromise accuracy in the interest of fluency.

The How and Why of Language: Language originated with the two linguistic skills we have just reviewed – listening and speaking. But why? What is the purpose of language? And how did it evolve to play this role in our lives?

Whether we hear it or voice it, the purpose of language is to do the things that speech can do. In no way is it abstract. Like an axe, language is a tool with which we do things.

According to linguistic philosopher J.R. Searle, we use language to perform five kinds of “speech act”. These are commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative. Commissive speech commits the speaker to do something – for example, “I promise to bring it tomorrow,” or “Watch out or I will report you.” Declarations change the state of things – “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or “You’re fired!” Directive speech gets the listener to do something – “Please come in,” “Watch out!” or “Why don’t you take your medicine?” Expressive language explains feelings and attitudes: “Those roses are beautiful,” or “I hate broccoli.” Finally, representative speech describes states or events – “Rice is an important Thai export,” or “The United States is at war again.” All of our speech seems to do one or more of these five things.

Language is such an important part of our lives that we use it to meet virtually all of our daily needs. Consider psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which is often illustrated as a pyramid. In Maslow’s model, we can only move to a higher level of need after we have scrambled up the lower levels.

In his view, people have five kinds of need. Our most basic needs are physiological – food and water, for example. The next level up is the need for safety and security, which we achieve, for example, by dealing with emergencies. Tier 3 involves needs for love, affection and belongingness. The need for esteem – self-respect and respect from others – comes next, but the highest level in this hierarchy is the need for self-actualization. According to Maslow, in this last level “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write.” The point of this discussion is that we meet virtually all those needs through speech acts.

The gradual evolution of language has profoundly affected the nature of our species. As Stephen Pinker observes,

Human practical intelligence may have evolved with language (which allows know-how to be shared at low cost) and with social cognition (which allows people to cooperate without being cheated), yielding a species that literally lives by the power of ideas.

It is impossible to overstate the value or complexity of language. It is perhaps the most fundamental feature of our lives.