June, 2018 - The Intuitive Language Teacher

CLT Principle 4: Instructors and Materials Should Provide Appropriate Level Input – Part 2

This week we are continuing our look at CLT Principle 4: “Instructors and Materials Should Provide Appropriate Level Input (and Interaction)” from Bill VanPatten’s book While We’re on the Topic (ACTFL, 2017).

Last time we considered VanPatten’s definition of “input” in the field of second language acquisition:

“Input means one and only one thing in language acquisition: language embedded in a communicative event that the learner attends to for its meaning”

We also looked at various scenarios to determine whether or not input was being provided. Unfortunately, in far too many classrooms, the input is minimal – and thus delays acquisition.

Language teachers are, or at least ought to be, concerned with efficacy and efficiency of instruction. Is their instruction producing results? How effectively? Are the strategies, activities, procedures, etc. the best use of class time? Are teachers and students getting the “biggest bang for the buck”?

Once we accept VanPatten’s (and others’) basic premise that we learn language only through understanding messages in the target language, then we recognize that the only efficacious use of time in a language class is to provide students with comprehensible input.

The only efficacious use of time in a language class room is to provide students with comprehensible input

With this recognition, our attention shifts to considering the nature of the input and its delivery.

VanPatten addresses this concern in terms of quantity and quality.

The question of quantity is simple: Provide students with as much input as possible.

The question of quality is more complex. For the input to be efficacious, it must be understandable – and not just understandable but understood.

Currently, a discussion is going on about “comprehensible” vs “comprehended”. I believe these are simply two ways of looking at the same thing. From the teacher’s point of view, the concern is with providing comprehensible input. That is, lesson preparation is done with consideration of what student already know and how to make any new terms or structure clear.

From the student’s point of view, the concern is with understanding the language being used.

VanPatten describes these two aspects of the debate under the rubric of Quality of Input. He write, “By quality we mean two thing:
1. whether input is level appropriate;
2. whether learners are engaged with the input (interacting with it).
(P. 59)

By “level appropriate”, VanPatten simply means that the teacher chooses language that the learner can comprehend “without struggling too much”.

By “engaged with the input”, VanPatten means that students attend to what is being said (or read). He does not mean that students are learning formal rules of grammar because acquisition is an unconscious process. VanPatten warns: “Instructors can’t just ‘throw input’ at learners; they must structure activities and tasks such that learners constantly indicate comprehension and react to messages they hear.”

Instructors can’t just “throw input” at learners

Here, I point out that indicating comprehension and reacting to messages do not necessarily involve language production, verbal expression, or even an oral response. Gestures, actions, and facial expressions can all indicate comprehension and be reactions to messages.

James Asher built a “method” around the concept that actions can indicate comprehension. We call it Total Physical Response.

Many teachers ask students to make certain gestures as indicators of comprehension. (This may be more or less valid, depending on the circumstances.)

I often tell jokes and make humorous comments in German while teaching. My students indicate comprehension by laughing or otherwise responding to what I just said. Sometimes I make ironic comments, and students indicate comprehension through their reactions to those comments. Students also indicate comprehension by performing acts that I ask them to do, like taking out pencil and paper, handing papers in, putting cell phones away, etc.

So, how is input level appropriate?

First, it must be comprehensible. This is almost a tautology but not quite. There is the rare case in which comprehensible language is too simple to be level appropriate. Fortunately, most of the time students will tell a teacher when the language is too simple for them. Unfortunately, they often don’t tell the teacher when the language is too difficult or otherwise not comprehensible.

How, then, do we make language comprehensible? VanPatten gives some guidelines. Teachers make language comprehensible and level appropriate through

short sentences – because long, complex, and compound sentences are often confusing to learners; as the language ability of the learners increases, the sentences become longer and more complex. However many teachers begin with sentences that are far too long and complex.
repetition – because we know that the brain does not long retain most things that we hear or see only once (there are exceptions). How many repetitions do we need? It varies from person to person, word to word, and situation to situation. But in general, we need far more repetitions in the context of meaningful communication than most traditional classroom setting provide.
rephrasing – because this is part of negotiating meaning. Providing synonyms, circumlocutions, a slightly different word order, etc. can be a powerful tool in helping students understand and acquire language.
content that is clear – because ambiguity leads to misunderstanding and lack of clarity impedes understanding. To help make the content clear, teachers need to begin with the here and now; that is, new language (for the beginner) is grounded in the context of what students can see right before them.
slow(er) rate– because learners need extra time to process all of the things they are hearing. Studies that I have read indicate that most adults speak too rapidly for children and young teens in their native language. Children in middle school can, on average, process speech in their native language at 135-140 words per minute, but adults speak at 160-180 words per minute. (Read an article about this here.) That means that older children miss a full fourth of what adults say to them simply because they can’t process their native language fast enough. The reply to many parents’ query, “Didn’t you hear what I said?” is honestly “no” for many children. The problem is compounded for a language learner. Teachers need to slow down.
pausing at appropriate places – because this also provides learners with processing time
learner engagement with the input – because we learn language only when it is used for genuine communication, and that means being engaged in the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning.

The interesting thing is that, if teachers talk with their students and not at them, they will naturally adjust the level of the language until it is appropriate. We do this all the time in real life when we are conversing with people.

One other thing to remember in this discussion is that interest often has as much to do with how something is presented as what is presented. The US Department of State has some interesting comments on Relevance and academic rigor of content. According to the website, content becomes relevant when

we have a prior intellectual or emotional connection to it
it is connected to real life
it is appropriately timed (i.e. when we are not hungry, exhausted or distracted by some other, more important need)
it actively engages or involves us
someone else has a contagious passion or enthusiasm
it is novel

Much, much more could be said about strategies, activities, procedures, etc. that the teacher can use to make certain that language is comprehensible and level appropriate, but that will have to wait.

For now, I leave you with this quote from VanPatten (p. 62):

Students do not sit in class like little sponges. The teacher talks with students, not at them. Students are engaged from the beginning.

CLT Principle 4: Instructors and Materials Should Provide Appropriate Level Input – Part 1

After several weeks of looking at CLT Principle 3 (Language Acquisition is Constrained by Internal and External Factors) in Bill VanPatten’s book While We’re on the Topic (ACTFL: 2017), we are moving on the CLT Principle 4.

It seems to me that this is a principle with which everyone agrees. That does not make it settled and not controversial, however. The differences of opinion arise over what constitutes “input”, what interaction should look like, what an “appropriate level” is, and the nature of the materials that should provide that input.

If we accept the position elucidated by VanPatten in Chapters 1 and 2 that the language itself is the only data that the brain is able to use in constructing a mental representation of the language, i.e. acquiring the language, then VanPatten’s fourth principle is already constrained in terms of materials.

However, just to be clear, VanPatten defines the term input in the context of language acquisition. (It has other meanings in other contexts.)

Input means one and only one thing in language acquisition: language embedded in a communicative event that the learner attends to for its meaning.

This means that anything in a language other than the target language is not input and not useful or usable by the brain for acquisition. It also means that target language that is not understandable is not input. And, it means that understandable target language that is not being used for communication is not input.

Three scenarios illustrate VanPatten’s position. I will paraphrase.

The teacher asks a student, D’ou êtes vous? The student responds, De la Californie. This is an exchange in which the student has attended to the language for meaning, so the French is input. The teacher might follow up with Ah. Mais vous vous trouvez loin de chez vous. The students answer, Oui, mais je vais retourner. The entire encounter was communicative; both teacher and student attended to meaning.

In a different class, the teacher asks the student to repeat the sentence, Je me trouve loin de chez moi. The student dutifully does so. This time, the French is not input because the student was not attending to meaning but simply repeating sounds. Thus, acquisition is not facilitated.

For the third scenario, VanPatten imagines a class in which the teacher simply tells students that trouver normally means “to find”, but se trouver means “to find yourself in the sense of being located somewhere or being in some situation.” Since the explanation was in English, no target language input was provided, so acquisition was not facilitated in any way.

I am adding a fourth scenario that VanPatten does not include:

The teacher begins the very first class with Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. Je m’appelle Madame Bovary et je suis la professeur de français. Je suis de la Côte d’Ivoire. Vous allez apprendre la langue de la poésie, de la philosophie et de l’amour dans cette classe. Students look at the teacher but do not respond because they have understood nothing of what she said.

Was input provided in this last scenario? It depends. If students were attempting to understand, then input was provided; it simply was incomprehensible and therefore not useful or usable. If students have, for whatever reason, either ceased or not begun to attend to meaning, then no input was provided.

Some might argue that as long as the language is being spoken, some good is being done: students’ ears are being attuned to the sounds of the language, students are getting a feel for the rhythm and melody of the language, just being exposed to the language is somehow beneficial. The question remains: Beneficial for what? Certainly not for acquisition. I’ll have more to say about this later.

The second and third scenarios are very common in public school settings – at least in the United States.

To an extent, they represent different views of what constitutes input. That is why a definition is so important. If you do not accept VanPatten’s position on the first two principles, you will have a different definition of input. However, we are not arguing that point right now. For discussions of the utility of grammar and rote repetition, see VanPatten’s book or my posts on his earlier chapters.

Allow me to finish this post with a personal anecdote.

On Wednesday of the past week, my department had a retirement lunch for me and another faculty member who is retiring. To my surprise and delight, a former student came. This particular student’s love of languages awoke in my German class during the 1998-1999 school year.

Since graduation, he went on to study linguistics and eventually became a creator of “artificial languages”. That is, when a film or TV series needs an alien language, he is one of the people who can create one. (Not every writer is like JRR Tolkien; many of them put in words or short phrases but have no full language, so when their work is translated to the screen, a coherent structure must be provided, and there are people who do that for a living. My former student is one of them.)

While David, my former student, has several languages that he has created, his most famous one is Dothraki for Game of Thrones. When I asked him about the actors and “learning” the language, he said that they take a couple of different approaches. Some of the actors simply want to say their lines. David sends them a recording of their lines, and they imitate the sounds and inflection. End of story. They aren’t even interested in knowing the meaning of the words they are saying except as it impacts the delivery of the lines. This is similar to the situation in which teachers ask students to repeat sentences. Usually it is for the sake of “improving or perfecting the student’s accent”.

Other actors want to know what they are saying and will ask for a translation of the lines. Then they can speak the lines in a way that reflects meaning. This is still not really communication, but it is much more like it than the first situation because the actors are attending to meaning and also listen to other actors for meaning. Given enough time, these actors might actually begin to acquire Dothraki.

So, it is certainly possible to recite in a foreign language without any acquisition taking place. Singers and actors do this all the time. Exposure to a language is not sufficient for acquisition. The input must have a certain quality, what VanPatten calls appropriate level.

We’ll take a look at that in subsequent posts.

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and surrogate fathers out there. Teachers are often not simply legally in loco parentis but become surrogate parents and father (or mother) figures. May God bless you for all you do.

CLT Principle 3: Language Acquisition is Constrained by Internal and External Factors – Part 5

So far we have seen that language acquisition is not haphazard nor capricious. It is not unique to each individual. For earlier discussions, click here, here, here, and here.

Various factors, both internal and external, constrain our language acquisition. These constraints involve the nature of language, the nature of acquisition, the nature of data with which the brain can work, affective factors, and more.

These constraints mean that certain instructional practices, strategies, and techniques are more efficacious than others.

Bill VanPatten draws four Implications for Language Teaching from his consideration of the constraints placed upon language acquisition. We’ve already looked at two of them:

The effects of explicit teaching and practice with language are severely limited. Instruction should focus on things that foster acquisition.

We should work with the learner’s natural acquisition processes, not against them.

Today we will look at the final two of these Implications for Language Teaching. (See Bill VanPatten. While We’re on the Topic. ACTFL 2017, pp. 52-54.)

We must educate students, parents, colleagues, and administrators about the nature of acquisition (as well as the nature of language and communication).

Because the concept of providing students with Comprehensible Input as the sole sufficient cause of language acquisition is so radically different from what most students, parents, colleagues, and administrators have experienced in the past, we must educate them on what we are doing.

This is good practice for any teacher. The better the stakeholders understand the process of instruction and the research that lies behind our instructional practices, the more likely they are to accept what we are doing in the classroom. And that is a good thing.

It is also a change from advice that Dr Steven Krashen gave in the early days of promulgating his Comprehensible Input Hypothesis. As Dr Krashen puts it:

I have changed my position on only one issue: At the end of Principles and Practice, I suggest the use of a form of deception – students may think they are acquiring vocabulary or learning subject matter, but unknown to them, they are acquiring because they are getting comprehensible input at the same time. I now think it is very important to make a strong effort to inform students about the process of language acquisition, so they can continue to improve on their own. (Steven Krashen. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. 1982.)

VanPatten suggests that “Knowledge of acquisition helps teachers become advocates for a more appropriate curriculum designed to develop communicative ability.” (2017, p. 53)

How do we accomplish this?

I have attempted to do this in a variety of ways throughout my career. Here are some ideas:

Whenever an administrator stops by, even for a couple of minutes, make a point of thanking them and explaining a bit about what they saw.
Have a checklist of behaviors hanging beside the classroom door and ask every visitor to fill one out. It will help you remember what to do in your instruction, and it will help the visitor know what to look for in your classroom.
Explain language acquisition to your students at the beginning of the year and keep reminding them throughout the year. Make a reminder part of your daily or weekly routine. It doesn’t have to be long – just a sentence, really – but it needs to happen regularly. Alina Filipescu is masterful at this. Her students can explain language acquisition to visitors.
At Back-to-School Night and Open House, explain language acquisition to parents.
At any parent meetings, such as for grade checks, IEPs (Individualized Education Plans), and 504s (another form of individualized instructional plan), reinforce the nature of language acquisition. Talk about what the student is doing to acquire the language rather than the grade. [This is one of the things that bothers me most about meetings with parents and students: everyone is focused on the grade, not the learning or acquisition that should be taking place. Usually the first statement is what grade the student has in the course. That may or may not be relevant, and it certainly is not the most important item.]
Send administrators articles about second-language acquisition. But don’t ask them to read the entire article. Highlight 1-3 key points so that they administrators don’t have to spend a lot of time reading.
Support colleagues no matter where they are in their instructional practices. Find something that you agree on and then share something that you are doing. Remember Aesop’s fable of The Wind and the Sun.

Remember that colleagues and administrators are human beings who are trying to do the best they can. Always assume they mean well. Thank them and do nice things for them. Counsellors in particular have a tremendous influence on which courses students take. Do things that make them think favorably of you and your program.

The chapter (as well as this discussion) ends with what VanPatten believes is the most important Implication for Language Teaching:

Classroom and materials need to be spaces in which learners receive lots of input and have many chances to interact with it.

The nature of acquisition means that language classrooms will often appear more teacher-centered than other classrooms. However, this is not necessarily the case. We need to remember that understandable target language must come from somewhere, and only the teacher has the knowledge and interaction with students to determine with any accuracy whatsoever what they understand and do not understand. (Even this is not always totally accurate, but it is certainly more accurate than any book produced outside the classroom.) Thus, the teacher provides students with level-appropriate comprehensible input.

In addition, we need to remember that interaction with the input, particularly at the lower levels, is not necessarily verbal or even oral. Students can indicate understanding through a variety of gestures, facial expressions, movement, etc. Students (and teachers) can make judicious use of the native language to support and facilitate understanding and further use of the target language. How much native language? As Carol Gaab says, “Just enough to stay in the target language.”

I agree that this last implication is the most important. If we do not provide copious amounts of comprehensible input, students will not have the raw data they need to acquire the language and become proficient in the language. They also need opportunities to develop communicative competence, i.e. opportunities to express, interpret, and negotiate meaning in a specific context for a purpose.

Next week we will take a look at VanPatten’s thoughts on level-appropriate input and interaction.

CLT Principle 3: Language Acquisition is Constrained by Internal and External Factors – Part 4

The effects of explicit teaching and practice with language are severely limited. Instruction should focus on things that foster acquisition.

We should work with the learner’s natural acquisition processes, not against them.

We must educate students, parents, colleagues, and administrators about the nature of acquisition (as well as the nature of language and communication).

Classroom and materials need to be spaces in which learners receive lots of input and have many chances to interact with it.

The above four statements are Bill VanPatten’s “Implications for Language Teaching”. (While We’re On the Topic, 2017, pp. 54)

At the end of each chapter, VanPatten provides what he believes are significant implications for language instruction from the discussion in the chapter.

The effects of explicit teaching and practice with language are severely limited. Instruction should focus on things that foster acquisition.

VanPatten considers this implication to be quite clear.

If we accept the following precepts as true, then this is the natural conclusion. Unfortunately, it is not widely practiced. What are the precepts?
1. Internal factors (general learning mechanisms and demonstrated psychological factors – often called Universal Grammar) limit the data with which the brain/mind can work to language for communication, as well as constraining and guiding the formation of the mental representation of the language.
2. External factors (input and interaction) constrain acquisition through quantity and quality.
3. Talking about the target language in the mother tongue, fascinating as it may be to some of us, does not contribute to acquisition because it does not provide the right kind of data (language that learners hear or see in a communicative context), i.e. the mind/brain cannot process it for acquisition.

Therefore, the teacher must focus on activities that present learners at all levels – even level one on day one – with the raw data the mind/brain can process. That is, teachers must provide learners with comprehensible input, understandable language that learners hear or see in a communicative context.

Excursus: It might be well to ask ourselves if acquisition is truly the goal of most language programs. Most people would reply, “Well of course it is. Isn’t that why students take the course?”

From many years of teaching in a public high school in the US, I can tell you that learning a language is often NOT the reason students take the course.

In California, we have a set of requirements that students must meet in order to be accepted into the UC (University of California) or CSU (California State University) system. These requirements include a certain number of years in Math, English, Social Science, Science, Art, Foreign Language, and Electives. The categories are labeled with the letters “a” through “g” and are called, ingeniously enough, “The A-G Requirements”.

Many students take a foreign language solely to fulfill college entry requirements. Others take a language because their friends are taking the course, and they want to be with their friends. Still others take a language because that’s what they are expected to do – by parents, by counselors, by peers. Some students even take a language class because they have a slot in their schedule that they must fill and don’t know what else to take or can’t fit something they would rather into their schedule.

So, not all students are in a class because they want to acquire a language.

“But what about the teacher (and administrator)?” you ask.

Good question. Once again, from years of working in a public high school, I have observed that the emphasis is often on preparation for a test rather than acquisition of language.

Schools and districts take pride in the number of students who take and pass the Advanced Placement© exam. Certain courses are designated as AP courses, and the purpose of the course is to prepare students to pass the exam. The College Board also places emphasis on “vertical teaming” and articulation. One regularly hears the maxim, “AP begins in level 1 on the very first day.” So, test preparation pervades the system.

While the College Board has improved the AP Exam in recent years, the underlying problem is that the entire process is geared to passing a specific test rather than acquiring a language with an emphasis that supports the interests of the student.

In the district in which I teach, any students who wish to take four years of Spanish must sign up for the AP Spanish Language and Culture course. There is no opportunity to take a Spanish 4 course, even though it is listed in the district’s course catalogue. Students who want to continue with Spanish in order to improve their communication skills and use the language in a career rather than college have to accommodate themselves to the expectations of the AP course or forego taking the language in school. (I disagree with this position for a number of reasons.)

As generous as I would like to be, the attitude expressed by administrators and teachers alike often reminds me of the following exchange from Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix:

“Now, it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about.”

…

“I repeat, as long as you have studied the theory hard enough –”

“And what good’s theory going to be in the real world?” said Harry loudly, his fist in the air again.

Professor Umbridge looked up.

“This is school, Mr Potter, not the real world,” she said softly.

“So we’re not supposed to be prepared for what’s waiting for us out there?”

“There is nothing waiting out there, Mr Potter.”

The example is admittedly exaggerated, but sometimes learning the theory, i.e. learning about the language, rather than acquisition, seems to be the purpose of the language course.

Naturally, if your purpose is not to facilitate acquisition, then the implication for language teaching may not apply. I would hope, though, that ultimately the goal of a language course (as opposed to a linguistics or language appreciation course) is for students to acquire the language.

However, if our purpose is for learners to acquire the language, then it behooves us to remember that “Language is too abstract and complex to be taught and learned explicitly”. (2017, p. 520

We should work with the learner’s natural acquisition processes, not against them.

This implication assumes the validity of VanPatten’s position about the nature of language, the nature of acquisition, and the nature of the constraints on acquisition. Of course, VanPatten assumes the validity of his position, and he has done a credible job of presenting it thus far in the book. At this point, we will not confuse matters by addressing those who have other views.

If language, acquisition, and the constraints on acquisition are as VanPatten has described, then teaching in a manner that works against the learner’s natural acquisition processes will be counterproductive.

One of the discussions that continues in foreign language teaching circles is about method or approach and strategies or practices. Some teachers adhere very strictly to a single method or approach. Others talk about using an “eclectic” approach, taking strategies and practices from a variety of sources. They talk about having a “toolbox”.

The problem that I have observed with the eclectic approach is that too many teachers adopt a strategy, activity, or practice because they have just been introduced to it or because they have used it and the students enjoyed it. There is little or no thought about how the strategy, activity, or practice fits into communicative language teaching, i.e. teaching language through the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning and allowing the unconscious mind to develop a mental representation of the language by processing the raw data of the language itself.

Going back to the “toolbox” analogy, it seems that many eclectic teachers have tools for auto mechanics, computer repair, plumbing, first aid, and a host of other jobs in their toolbox. They then grab tools (strategies, activities, etc.) will-nilly irrespective of any guiding principle behind the selection. The toolbox analogy may be useful, but it’s important to have the correct toolbox.

Another problem with the use of compelling input in the classroom is viewing it as a strategy or approach. VanPatten addresses this in another of his writings. In the article “Creating Comprehensible Input and Output” (The Language Educator, Oct/Nov 2014, pp. 24-26), VanPatten writes:

For at least three decades, research on language acquisition has been pointing to a fundamental reconsideration of teaching, materials, and curricular goals. Understanding the roles of input and output in acquisition means that teachers and administrators may have to make some profound changes in how they approach the classroom if proficiency as communicative ability is the goal of the student’s experience. To drive the point home, without the expression and interpre- tation of meaning at the core of what we do, input and output become mere techniques. But input and output are not techniques; they are the very foundations of language acquisition and communication. (2014, p. 26; emphasis mine)

Implementing this implication in the language classroom will require language teachers to do some serious wrestling with the nature of language, the nature of acquisition, and the nature of the constraints on acquisition so that they can select activities, techniques, and strategies that support and work with students’ natural acquisition processes rather than against them.

It is a daunting task, but one that must be done if we are committed to doing what’s best for students.

We’ll take a look at the final two Implications for Language Teaching from this chapter next week.