Last week we took an initial look at Glisan and Donato’s fourth High-Leverage Teaching Practice. If you missed it, click here for the post.
For those who choose not to read the entire post, here is what we discussed.
The chapter starts with the idea that knowing grammar means having the ability to use language for real communication.
A question that is never answered is, “What does it mean to ‘know grammar’?” Do the authors mean to know it consciously or unconsciously? Is that knowledge explicit and discrete or implicit and abstract?
They don’t say.
Krashen and VanPatten maintain that the only knowledge of language that counts as acquisition is implicit, abstract, and unconscious. We know that we know, but we have difficulty expressing that knowledge, and it is certainly not reducible to the rules typically found in textbooks.
Glisan and Donato also maintain that because human communication is core to foreign language instruction, teaching students to “investigate, explain, and reflect on forms of language that constitute this communication is essential.”
Au contraire. What is essential is communication. Investigating, explaining, and reflecting on forms of language may be interesting, helpful when editing, even useful when navigating an unknown language – but they are not essential to communication, language acquisition, or language instruction.
This assertion and the accompanying Focus on Form reveal that the authors subscribe to some form of the Output Hypothesis, the idea that learners must produce the language in order to acquire it. The Hypothesis is disputed at best, and even Merrill Swain (the creator of the hypothesis) has backed away from any sort of strong version of the Output Hypothesis.
At least Glisan and Donato acknowledge that language instruction must take place in a dialogic context. That simply means that the teacher and students have a conversation, what ACTFL also calls Interpersonal Communication.
Having introduced the idea of Focus on Form, which is simply another way of saying “explicit grammar instruction” – though with a different focus and within a communicative context – the authors discuss deductive and inductive grammar instruction. They find both wanting.
Thus, they introduce Focus on Form as Social Process.
And that brings us to today’s discussion.
Here it is helpful to see how fundamentally different Glisan and Donato’s understanding of language is from VanPatten’s (and Krashen’s).
Glisan and Donato find “the essence of language to be social action”. (2017, 91) They explicitly state that “… language is not comprised of internal structures located exclusively in the heads of individuals” and “… language learning is fundamentally a social process”. (Ibid., 91-92) One has to wonder if this is a deliberate jab at VanPatten’s concept of “Mental Representation”.
Of course, VanPatten does not maintain that an individual’s mental representation is the essence of language – or at least that is not my impression of his writings. However, various case studies show that language can be acquired without what we normally consider “social interaction”. Krashen gives examples of individuals who acquired a language solely by listening to messages that they comprehended or by reading (a solitary pursuit). Acquisition was revealed in social action, but social action does not appear to have been the mechanism of acquisition.
Here Glisan and Donato reiterate the main point of the chapter:
“To know grammar means, therefore, the ability to use language forms for real communicative purposes and not just to display knowledge of rules for sentence formation, verb paradigms, and exceptions to linguistic rules …” (2017, p. 92)
As noted above, the authors do not state explicitly their position on whether or not this knowledge of grammar is explicit or implicit. However, the context indicates that they believe this to be explicit grammar knowledge, though not the typical “rules of thumb” (Lanolf & Poehner), “inert knowledge” (Larsen Freeman), or textbook grammar rules.
Instead, in response to the question “Why can’t I just explain the rule and let students do the exercises in the book?”, they discuss “conceptual knowledge of language”, which “deals with the types of language choices one makes to express intended meaning and the reasons why one form rather than another has been selected in acts of communication for one’s intended meaning.”
This greatly expands the amount of information that the learner must have in order to express meaning. If, as Krashen and VanPatten maintain, the learner cannot use explicit rules of grammar to support spontaneous communication over a period of discourse (i.e. you can’t carry on a conversation if you must constantly try to remember the rules of grammar, verb paradigms, etc.), then this increased cognitive load seems even more unmanageable. The conscious mind with its 7 ±2 bits of information in “working memory” simply cannot process all of the required bits of information and still attend to meaning. It seems to me that Glisan and Donato’s position makes the situation worse rather than better for acquisition.
N.B.: The formula 7 ±2 is a heuristic for reminding us that the conscious cognitive load is extremely limited. It is similar to the often-cited dictum that a learner needs 70 meaningful repetitions of a word in order to acquire it. Susan Gross, credited with creating this dictum, has said that she used the number as a memorable and usable reminder that learners need to hear language in context far more than the typical teacher thinks. (It’s another heuristic.) In a different context, Jesus tells his disciples to forgive people seventy times seven times. (Matthew 18:21-22) In other words, don’t keep count; just keep forgiving.
This, of course, raises the question:
If teaching rules of grammar does not enable students to acquire language and its accompanying proficiency, and the idea of conceptual knowledge of language exacerbates the situation, how do we teach language so that students acquire the necessary knowledge to express meaning spontaneously in a conversation?
The answer lies in a possibility that Glisan and Donato do not consider: Comprehensible Input is the sole sufficient cause of language acquisition.
Acquisition occurs perforce in some sort of interaction. After all, there must be an “expresser of meaning” and an “interpreter of meaning” for communication to occur, and it is only in the context of communication (the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning for a purpose) that acquisition occurs. “Social action” is not, however, the essence of language; it is a mechanism for transmission.
VanPatten makes a distinction between acquisition and communicative competence. For him, acquisition is the construction of a mental representation of the language within the mind/brain of the individual (contra Glisan and Donato). Since the mental representation looks nothing like textbook rules of grammar or, I imagine, “the conceptual knowledge of language” that can be explicitly and easily expressed, it can be constructed only with the raw data provided by communication in the target language.
Communicative competence develops through communication as well. This aspect of language proficiency may be the closest that we get to Glisan and Donato’s idea of language being a “social act”. However, it still is something that takes place unconsciously as it is procedural knowledge rather than propositional knowledge.
Next week we’ll see how Glisan and Donato address other questions about their concept of Focus on Form. These questions include the following: why students still make mistakes when the teacher has explained the rule and dealing with students who want the teacher to just explain grammatical rules. I think we’ll also get to a consideration of the PACE model, which is the vehicle Glisan and Donato have chosen to illustrate their Focusing on Form teaching practice.
Until then, just talk to your students in a way that they can understand the language. Everyone agrees that Comprehensible Input is essential to language acquisition.