Month: September 2018

CLT Principle 6: Focus on Form – Part 6

So far, we have taken a look at Bill VanPatten’s basic premise for even considering focus on form:

Any focus on form … should be input-oriented [and] … couched within meaning-making.

This premise excludes traditional grammar-based teaching and many other practices that focus on form (or forms). The basis for this premise and the subsequent rejection of commonly used practices is the nature of language and language acquisition, to wit that
– Language is abstract and complex
– Acquisition is slow and piecemeal
– Acquisition is stage-like and ordered
– Instruction does not affect the stage-like or ordered nature of acquisition
– There are (several) internal constraints on acquisition
– Input provides the data for acquisition.

Then we noted that VanPatten questions the efficacy, and therefore the desirability, of Input Enhancement and Focus on Form as generally understood and practiced. I noted that from personal interaction, I know that VanPatten rejects the PACE model advocated by Glisan and Donato.

Next, we took a look at Structured Input, both referential structured input activities and affective structured input activities. I noted my concern that the examples that VanPatten provides look a lot like Activities (partially communicative and intended to teach language), something that he dismisses in a previous chapter. One thing that commends Structured Input is that it attempts to address ways in which learners make sense of language, including the Lexical Preference Principle and the First-noun Principle.

At the end of the discussion, VanPatten repeats an important dictum:

Nothing replaces input and the processing of input.

The chapter continues with a presentation of “Other Possibilities”  for “tools that teachers might use to push acquisition along without losing sight of meaning and the role of input”. (2017, p. 109)

The first of these is the Input Flood. That is, the teacher saturates the input with whatever he or she wants to “push along”. In general, this aligns with the principle that repetition is important to acquisition.

However, I wonder how the strategy aligns with the Natural Order of Acquisition. VanPatten maintains that the order acquisition cannot be changed, but perhaps it can be accelerated. However, Input Flood means choosing a particular feature of the language to “flood”. What if that is not the next item in the students’ order of acquisition? Will it accelerate acquisition of the feature at a later time? I’m not certain how someone could measure that.

It seems to me that Dr. Beniko Mason is correct: Providing students with rich, interesting, comprehensible input will take care of these concerns. There are many ways in which teachers can provide their students with rich, interesting – even compelling – comprehensible input. They are easier to implement than the strategies that VanPatten presents in this chapter. Why not use them?

A second strategy that VanPatten presents is the Dictogloss. In this strategy, students listen to a short passage and then work in pairs to reconstruct what they think they heard. They write out their text. One pair of students share their text aloud, and the class compares other versions, discussing differences. The teacher shows the original passage, and the class discusses the content.

VanPatten notes two issues with the Dictogloss:
1. It is less useful for lower and intermediate learners than for advanced learners. (This in and of itself removes the strategy from the repertoire of most secondary school teachers.)
2. Dictogloss results in explicit learning (not acquisition). (This should also make the strategy a non-starter in any classroom dedicated to acquisition.)

The third strategy that VanPatten presents is the Input-Output Cycle. It is similar to a Dictogloss but typically involves written texts. Rather than reconstructing a text, students interact with questions designed to “push learners to focus on particular forms or structure”. (2017, p. 112) Following his presentation of the strategy, VanPatten notes that there is a great deal of speculation about its efficacy, “Still, there is some evidence that input-output cycles can be useful if structured carefully.” (2017, p. 113)

Once again, it seems to me that the difficulty of implementation far outweighs the potential benefits that may accrue for any secondary school teacher to see this as a useful strategy.

In closing this section of the chapter, VanPatten writes, “… like the other interventions we have reviewed in this chapter, they clearly focus on meaning, involve input, and engage learners in using language to learn new information. This is the cornerstone of acquisition.”

Personally, I believe that VanPatten overstates the case. They seem to focus on something other than meaning although meaning is included in the process.

Finally, VanPatten discusses Implications for Language Instruction. He notes the following:

“Focus on form is not a singular thing. There is no one way to do it. Instructors have options.”

One of those options is not to do it. VanPatten notes this as well:

“Because we can focus on form does not mean we have to.”

VanPatten supports this second statement by noting, “Given how both language grows in the mind and communication develops over time, a communicative and proficiency-oriented classroom is already doing what it must do: helping the learner’s internal processes.” (2017, p. 114)

If that is the case, then why are we adding to the burden of both teachers and students?

For those teachers who find themselves in a situation in which they must do some focus on form, VanPatten’s final suggestion is worth considering and investigating: have students work on focus on form activities outside of class. Unfortunately, the interventions provided by publishers will disappoint the teacher who is interested in Contemporary Language Teaching.

VanPatten notes that one of the [main] outcomes of the chapter is to provide teachers with questions to ask about online materials. While that is a good thing, his questions are rather general and do not provide a great deal of guidance.

As I noted at the beginning of the discussion, I consider this the weakest chapter in the book.

Epilogue

The epilogue is far too short to warrant a separate post, so I am adding it to this one.

VanPatten leaves us with some advice and a lengthy example. I won’t try to reproduce the example, but I do consider the advice worth passing on.

If you must assess, assess how you teach and teach the way students will be assessed.

The goals of communicative, proficiency-oriented instruction are not the goals of traditional tests.

Throw out the old tests.

Become an expert in communicative language teaching and assessment.

Then you can explain what you are doing to administrators, students, and parents. A solid foundation of knowledge is your best ally in combatting myths and misunderstandings about language acquisition and teaching.

Next week I’ll take up another topic. Any requests? I hope you have enjoyed and benefitted from my in-depth look at two important books form ACTFL.

CLT Principle 6: Focus on Form – Part 5

Last time, I indicated that Bill VanPatten seems to be advocating Activities (class procedures that are partially communicative and have the purpose of teaching language) in his referential structured input activities that form part of Structured Input.

Referential structured input activities are not the only form of Structured Input that VanPatten presents. He also describes affective structured input activities. These activities occur during affective activities, that is activities in which the communicative purpose is to elicit information about students or to elicit their opinions, beliefs and attitudes. (2017, p. 106) [Is anyone else bothered by the number of times that the word “activities” occurs in this explanation? We have “activities” within “activities”.] The distinction between this and simple communication lies in the fact that the teacher “uses the form in focus in a structured way to elicit information …” (2017, p. 106)

Once again, an example probably clarifies the practice better than a description. An affective structured input activity proceeds as follows.

The teacher reads a series of activities in the past tense that he may or may not have done the previous evening. Students also have the statements in written form. Following the reading, which is also a review of the verb forms previously encountered in referential structured input activities, students discuss with a partner which activities they believe the teacher actually did. After students discuss the activities and indicate their choices, they discuss with the entire class. There are no right or wrong answers because the question is “What do students think?” Following the discussion, students put the activities in the order in which they think the teacher did them. This activity becomes a “test” of how well students know their teacher.

Once all of this has been done, the teacher will reveal “the truth” about the activities.

Once again, this looks very much like an Activity (upper case) because its purpose is to teach language, albeit while taking into consideration a “processing problem” that learners have. This, according to VanPatten distinguishes Structured Input from other techniques “used to foster the development of formal properties of language.

Somehow, I can’t help but think that Stephen Krashen would advocate providing learners with more comprehensible input rather than doing all of the preparation necessary for Structured Input.

In addition, I can certainly create communicative contexts that prompt past-tense forms without the use of artificial and only partially communicative Activities. For example, the affective structured input activity described in the chapter could be an activity that the teacher uses to become better acquainted with students, giving it both a cognitive-informational and a psychosocial (as well as entertainment) purpose within the context of the classroom. The fact that the class is discussing actions in the past provides a communicative context for using the past tense and is much more natural.

Before leaving the discussion, VanPatten provides another example of a processing problem that language learners encounter. It is the First-noun Principle. “Learners tend to tag the first noun or pronoun they encounter in the sentence as the subject or agent of the sentence.” (2017, p. 108) This is true for speakers whose first language is of the SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) variety; there are other kinds of languages. The result is that learners encounter problems with the passive. English speakers have problems processing German sentences when the first element of the sentence is not the subject. Let’s illustrate.

English relies heavily on word order for meaning because we do not use inflected forms (except pronouns). “The dog chased the cat” means something different from “The cat chased the dog.” However, in German “Die Katze jagte den Hund” and “Den Hund jagte die Katze” both translate as “The cat chased the dog.” How can this be? German uses case to indicate function in the sentence. “Den” indicates that “Hund” cannot be the subject or agent of the sentence; “Hund” must be the entity being chased, no matter whether it comes first or last in this sentence. However, students who rely on the First-noun Principle to process meaning will misidentify which animal is chasing the other when “Hund” comes first.

How do we help students overcome this processing error? VanPatten suggests creating structured input activities to “foster the development of formal properties of language.” (2017, p. 107) He notes, however, that Structured Input is “cumbersome and requires substantial background knowledge for teachers. And it takes time to create activities.” (2017, p. 109) Then, he notes that

Nothing replaces input and the processing of input.

Krashen would say, “Give them more comprehensible input in which the problematic construction occurs.”

I prefer Krashen’s solution.

Next time we’ll finish our look at this chapter.

CLT Principle 6: Focus on Form – Part 4

Thanks for your patience. I’m running a day late in getting this posted.

Just as a reminder, the full title of this chapter is “Any Focus on Form Should be Input-Oriented and Meaning-Based”.

Last time (Focus on Form Part 3), we saw that there are two very different perceptions of what Focus on Form means. Glisan and Donato present one that requires purpose and planning, whereas VanPatten presents Focus on Form as being spontaneous, not pre-planned, and not purposeful. For Glisan and Donato, Focus on Form includes a class discussion of the form in a way that seems very reminiscent of a traditional grammar class. For VanPatten, Focus on Form “does not derail the teacher from a primary focus on meaning.” (2017, p. 104) The PACE model is Glisan and Donato’s chosen vehicle for incorporating Focus on Form, whereas VanPatten strongly rejects the PACE model for language acquisition.

Finally, Glisan and Donato include Focus on Form in its pre-planned, purposeful manifestation in their list of HLTPs (High-Leverage Teaching Practices). VanPatten notes that “it is not clear to what extent such events actually ‘speed up’ or ‘help’ acquisition.” (2017, p. 104)

This brings VanPatten and us to a type of “Focus on Form”, the research on which “is very promising”.

That is Structured Input.

Unlike VanPatten’s understanding of “Focus on Form”, Structured Input “requires much more preparation on the part of the teacher, thus is much harder to include in any curriculum.” (2017, p. 105)

We will return to this aspect of Structured Input later. For now, let’s see what it is, the research behind it, its purpose, and how it works in the instructional setting.

Structured Input is part of processing instruction, a pedagogical intervention that VanPatten pioneered in the 1990s. That is, it incorporates strategies for processing language input as an initial stage of acquisition that learners unconsciously use. In simpler terms, processing instruction helps teachers design lessons that use those strategies as support for learners. I think the term is unfortunate because it doesn’t seem to mean that the instructor teaches strategies for processing language, rather the instructor designs a lesson that incorporates the strategies that the learner already uses. An example will make this clearer.

But first, what is “processing”? It is simply linking form and meaning during comprehension. This, of course, takes us into the heart of the acquisition debate. If, as Krashen and VanPatten maintain, acquisition is an unconscious process, then as long as the input is comprehensible (and preferably compelling), the learner will process it by unconsciously linking what is seen or heard to meaning. If, on the other hand, “noticing” is important in acquisition, then drawing learners’ attention to certain aspects of the language can be helpful.

This is where I have difficulties with the entire discussion. Since I accept the research and conclusions presented by Krashen (Comprehensible Input Hypothesis) and VanPatten (language is implicit and abstract and so cannot be learned consciously), I question adopting a practice that “requires much more preparation on the part of the teacher, thus is much harder to include in any curriculum.” (2017, p. 105)

But let’s return to Structured Input.

One of the strategies that learners use to process input (understand the language) is the Lexical Preference Principle. For novice learners, essentially everything is vocabulary. Learners zero in on content words because they carry the greatest meaning and ignore the parts that are “less meaningful” (i.e. provide nuances of meaning for which the learner is not yet prepared to cope), such as time indicators (e.g. tense markers on verbs). Because of lexical preference, lexical time indicators (yesterday, tomorrow, next week, last week, always, later, etc.) can actually interfere with learner acquisition of tense endings. (2017, pp. 105-106)

To overcome lexical preference and help students process tense markers, VanPatten suggests sets of “activities”. He uses lower case to mean simply something that you do during instruction. At the same time, these seem to be Activities (capitalized) in the sense of being only partially communicative and having no communicative purpose beyond “teaching language”. (cf. Van Patten’s discussion in 2017, pp. 83-85) Thus, they seem at odds with VanPatten’s own position on second language acquisition and instruction.

The first activities (Activities) that VanPatten suggests are referential structured input activities. They are input because the learner is trying to understand and does not have to give any output. They are structured “because the input is manipulated to push learners to process something they might miss otherwise.” (2017, p. 106) [This seems rather like the “Noticing Hypothesis” to me, although for VanPatten this “noticing” is not necessarily conscious.] They are referential “because they have an immediate right or wrong answer.” (2017, p. 106)

In the example that VanPatten gives, the activity looks something like this:

The teacher displays three designators of time for each sentence. The designators indicate present, past, and future.

The teacher then reads a sentence with no context and no indication of time. Students choose the time designator they think is appropriate for the sentence.

[This is why I believe this is an Activity. Students must process language in order to do the activity, so it is partially communicative. However, the purpose is to “teach language” rather than communicate.]

The teacher displays two possible reactions to a statement, e.g. follow-up questions.

The teacher reads a statement, and students choose the “correct” response.

For this example, not only do we have the problem with it being an Activity, but VanPatten has chosen an example that is ambiguous. Here it is.

Teacher statement: “My buddy hates tea.”

Student choices:
a. So why does he have it in his kitchen?
b. So why did he order it with lunch?

Do you see the problem? Both responses are equally reasonable in normal conversation. Let me illustrate by providing hypothetical contexts.

The “right answer” is, as we expect, the present-tense response. BVP and I are talking about tea. We have both visited SK and noted that he has a variety of teas in his kitchen. Naturally, he has Earl Grey for BVP, but he also has Assam, English Breakfast, and others. While we’re talking, BVP mentions, “You know that SK hates tea.” My response is, “So why does he have it in his kitchen?” [And the conversation continues.]

BVP, SK, and I go to lunch. At lunch, SK – a notorious coffee drinker – orders tea (probably ice tea). Later, BVP and I are discussing what kinds of tea we like. I might say “Assam, Darjeeling, or Oolong.” BVP, of course, states that he drinks Earl Grey and then adds, “You know that SK hates tea.” My response is, “So why did he order it with lunch?!” [And the conversation continues.]

Both responses are equally “correct”, plausible, and logical from a strictly communicative standpoint. However, since this is a referential structured input activity and has “an immediate right or wrong answer”, the reason for the right answer must be something else – and that reason is grammar. The “correct answer” is “correct” because its tense matches the tense of the prompt.  That’s grammar, and this looks like grammar instruction with the benefit of occurring in the target language. So, it is partially communicative but has the purpose of teaching language.

VanPatten’s other example is equally problematic because the responses are also equally “correct” when using criteria other than matching the tense of the verb. To me, this is a grammar Activity.

Perhaps I am missing something here and someone else sees it. If so, I would welcome comments and corrections.

VanPatten has a great deal more to say on the subject, but we will stop here for now. Thanks for reading.

CLT Principle 6: Focus on Form – Part 3

Last week we looked at Bill VanPatten’s comments on “Input Enhancement” and saw that he gives it a tepid endorsement at best but acknowledges that it at least seems to do no harm.

This week we’ll take a look at Focus on Form in this chapter of Van Patten’s book While We’re On the Topic.

Here are VanPatten’s opening remarks about Focus on Form:

Focus on form can be called a type of input enhancement but was developed as a separate idea by Michael Long. The idea behind focus on form is that during a communicative event, teachers might draw learners’ attention to some property of language in a way that does not break communicative flow. Unlike input enhancement in its original concept, focus on form is not pre-planned or purposeful. It arises incidentally during a communicative interaction. (2017, p. 103)

While he uses the same term, “Focus on Form”, VanPatten has a very different take on it from Glisan and Donato. For my discussion of their presentation of Focus on Form, see here, here, here, and here. In their book Enacting the Work of Language Instruction, Glisan and Donato champion the PACE model of focus on form. Just to review, here are the steps in PACE:

  • PRESENTATION of a text that contains the form on which the teacher wishes to focus
  • ATTENTION is drawn to the form that is important to understanding
  • CO-CONSTRUCTION of an explanation of the form through discussion and dialogue
  • EXTENSION and use of the form in a new context

A fundamental difference between what Glisan and Donato present and what VanPatten presents is the idea of planning. For Glisan and Donato, Focus on Form is highly planned and extremely purposeful. VanPatten maintains that “… focus on form is not pre-planned or purposeful. It arises incidentally …”

I know that VanPatten rejects the PACE model. At the 2018 ACTFL convention, I was able to be part of a group telephone call to VanPatten. During the conversation, someone mentioned the PACE model. VanPatten categorically and strongly rejected the validity of this model along the same lines that I outlined in my discussion of it: it relies on some form of the Output Hypothesis, it involves conscious learning and knowledge of language (which do not lead to acquisition), and it is really the old Present – Practice – Perform model in modern dress.

Nonetheless, VanPatten advocates some very common practices as part of his understanding of Focus on Form. These include

Recasts: The teacher “unobtrusively recasts” what the learner says so that it sounds like a native speaker. This raises some questions, but we’ll get to them in a moment. Most importantly, VanPatten maintains that the purpose is not correction but affirmation of the message and a continuation of the conversation.

One of the questions that VanPatten’s statement raises is the efficacy of recasting. If the purpose were error correction, then recasts would not be very efficacious (if at all). Students often do not even recognize that a recast has been made, especially if the recast is “unobtrusive”.

Another question is whether or not the recast accomplishes the purpose. As an affirmation of understanding, i.e. as part of the negotiation of meaning, the recast can be useful in that it allows the conversation to continue. And this brings us to the next strategy for “focus on form”:

Negotiation of meaning: If a student uses a present form of a verb but the sentence seems to indicate a past action, the teacher (or other interlocutor) may need to clarify which is meant. This will generally involve some rephrasing, if not recasting.

“According t0 focus on form, this negotiation may draw learner attention to an aspect of language through a natural facet of communication: clarifying meaning. In a nutshell, any attempt to negotiate meaning could be a focus on form.” (2017, p. 104; emphasis mine)

Here, it seems to me that VanPatten is hedging his bets. Once again, his endorsement is tepid at best. He also places strictures on the use of “focus on form” that are far different from the mainstream understanding – and Glisan and Donato’s presentation – of focus on form. VanPatten notes that “focus on form fits within the parameters of how acquisition happens:

  1. The event is couched within some kind of communicative interaction; it is not an ‘explicit teaching moment.’
  2. Somewhere in the interaction, the learner receives focused input that may provide more data for the internal mechanisms responsible for acquisition.” (2017, p. 104)

Thus, we see VanPatten returning to the unconscious, abstract, and implicit nature of language and language acquisition. There is still no ringing endorsement of focus on form. VanPatten notes that “As with input enhancement, it is not clear to what extent such events actually ‘speed up’ or ‘help’ acquisition.” (2017, p. 104)

I’m still trying to figure out why VanPatten has included these two strategies or practices in his book, given his unenthusiastic presentation of them.

Next time, we’ll look at Structured Input. For now, though, I’ll end this post with a reminder from Bill VanPatten that I find apt:

We can’t force the learning of mental representation – or the learning of communication, for that matter. We can only provide oppourtunities for it to develop.