Last week I wrote that we would take a look at a couple of questions that Eileen W. Glisan and Richard Donato address in their chapter on “Focus on Form” in Enacting the Work of Language Instruction.
At the end of their introduction to the High-Leverage Teaching Practice (HLTP), the author pose and answer three questions. We’ve already looked at the first one, but let’s review it and then move on to the other two.
Why can’t I just explain the rule and let students do the exercises in the book?
Glisan and Donato note that these “rules of grammar” are actually “rules of thumb”, often incomplete, and “inadequate for understanding how forms function as meaning-making resources in social and cultural contexts”. (2017, p. 92)
Then they propose “conceptual knowledge of language” as the solution. In this case, though, the cure seems worse than the disease. Students now need conscious knowledge that is “systematic and generalizable and not limited to any one specific situation of use”. (ibid.) Their example is the past tense:
“… a conceptual understanding of past tense narration in Romance languages requires understanding the speaker’s perspectives on past actions (verbal aspect) as initiating, habitual, completed, or sequential in order to tell or comprehend a narrative. The concept of verbal aspect contrasts sharply with the rules of thumb for the uses of past tenses that are presented as sentence-level rather than in a narrative and as predictable forms cued by certain time expressions in sentences such as ‘every day’ or ‘at 10:00.’ These rules of thumb, as appealing as they may seem to students for arriving at the correct verb form, actually complicate the use of the structure when learners eventually discover that their handy rules do not apply to all situations.” (2017, p. 92)
Really?
Students need a meta-linguistic understanding of the speaker’s perspectives on past actions before they can comprehend a narrative?
No wonder, then that generations of students leave Spanish classes lamenting the fact that they can’t say anything beyond “Yo quiero Taco Bell”. We expect a student to understand the speaker’s perspectives on past actions when they are at the linguistic level of saying “*I goed to the store”.
N.B: The asterisk * is used to indicate a sentence that is incorrect in the language.
I can’t wait to find out how Glisan and Donato suggest teaching this meta-linguistic understanding to novice-low or -mid language learners.
Beside the sheer volume of information that a learner must possess in order even to “comprehend a narrative”, there is also the problem of what kind of knowledge this is. If this knowledge is conscious, as what Glisan and Donato have written so far would indicate, then it is no better (or not much better) than “rules of thumb” for acquisition. It is not “psychologically real”, or as VanPatten puts it in his book While We’re on the Topic, “What’s on page 32 of the textbook is not what winds up in your head.” (2017, pp. 20ff)
It appears that both the “rules of thumb” and the “conceptual understanding” partake of the nature of conscious, propositional knowledge. These are what a Spanish teacher I once had called “gentle lies”. (True just often enough to get through most situations but not the full story or what is really going on in your mind.) Unfortunately, even “gentle lies” are still lies, i.e. will break down at some point so that students will find that neither their hand rules nor their conceptual understanding apply to all situations.
Furthermore, if as Dr Stephen Krashen and Dr Bill VanPatten maintain, conscious understanding of language does not lead to acquisition, then even this “conceptual understanding of language” serves at best some sort of monitor function.
I much prefer the answer that Krashen and VanPatten give to the question “Why can’t I just explain the rule and let students do the exercises in the book?”
Rules do not lead to acquisition, no matter how many exercises the students do – and neither does any conscious understanding of language, conceptual or otherwise.
This brings us to the second question posed by Glisan and Donato.
Why do students still make errors after I explain the rule?
Here, I think that Glisan and Donato provide a better answer.
They note first of all that learning is developmental [and so is acquisition]. There are stages in learning/acquisition, and progress is made through restructuring – or as VanPatten would say, modifying the Mental Representation.
Drawing on an analogy with first-language acquisition, they point out that one source of “errors” is overgeneralization, a fact that all language teachers should recognize and celebrate. We praise children when they overgeneralize the simple past in English and create forms like “*I goed” and “*I eated”. Our “correction” of the error is simply providing more comprehensible input rather than trying to explain the difference between weak and strong verbs.
I rejoice when my students say things like *Ich schwimmte (*I swimmed) rather than Ich schwamm (I swam) at a certain point in their language acquisition. It shows that they have internalized the German simple past formation without my having taught them how to do it.
The authors provide a graphic of a U-shaped developmental curve. At first, students learn everything as a lexical item. As they incorporate the language data into their Mental Representation, they will often produce incorrect forms. This is not bad. It is a natural progression (not regression) in acquisition. Eventually, learners will begin once again to produce the correct form.
Now, however, it is not simply a lexical item but an implicit, unconscious, abstract understanding of the structure of the language. [That last sentence reflects VanPatten, not Glisan and Donato.)
The third question that Glisan and Donato address is the following:
How do I address the issue of my students just wanting me to explain grammatical rules to them?
The answer, I believe, goes astray.
According to Glisan and Donato,
Teachers need to re-orient their learners’ traditional ways of thinking about grammar instruction so that they understand why they are being asked to dialogue about language form, meaning, and use.
Students need to understand how languages are acquired and that mastery of a long list of language rules is limited in its usefulness for meaning making.
Students (and teachers) also need to understand why grammatical structures are concepts rather than simple rules to follow for word formation and that concepts develop out of a process of observation, dialogue, hypothesis testing, and language use.
These three suggestions show Glisan and Donato’s acceptance of the Output Hypothesis, skill-building concept of language acquisition, and belief that propositional knowledge about a language somehow is transmogrified into procedural knowledge of a language – all concepts with which Krashen, VanPatten, and others disagree.
Let’s take a look at the recommendations individually.
“… re-orient … learners’ traditional ways of thinking about grammar …”
I agree that we teachers need to re-orient our student’s traditional ways of thinking about grammar. I disagree with Glisan and Donato’s solution.
Since I believe that Comprehensible Input is the sole sufficient cause of language acquisition (cf. Krashen and VanPatten), I question the need to “dialogue with students about language form, meaning, and use”.
What does that even mean?
Are we dialoguing in English (L1) or the Target Language (L2)? Only the L2 provides the mind/brain with the data necessary for acquisition (constructing a mental representation of the language). An extremely brief statement about form may be necessary to clarify meaning, but this is different from “dialoguing” about form.
The re-orientation that needs to take place is getting students (and teachers) to understand the need for Comprehensible Input as the sole sufficient cause of acquisition.
“Students need to understand how languages are acquired …”
With this statement, I wholeheartedly agree.
Unfortunately, Glisan and Donato seem to have a different understanding of how languages are acquired from Krashen and VanPatten. They seem to believe that some sort of meta-linguistic explanation in the L1 is part of acquisition. This is directly contrary to the understanding of Comprehensible Input as the sole sufficient cause of acquisition.
“… understand why grammatical structures are concepts rather than simple rules to follow … and that concepts develop out of a process of observation, dialogue, hypothesis testing, and language use.”
Once again, the response seems positive at first glance but fails to hold up under scrutiny when we realize what Glisan and Donato mean by their terms.
If VanPatten is correct that acquisition means creating a mental representation of a language using the only data that the brain/mind can process, i.e. the language itself presented in an understandable way, then the only one of these four elements of the process that is pertinent is language use. In addition, if that mental representation is abstract, unconscious, and implicit, then conscious, concrete, and explicit discussion of language adds nothing to acquisition.
In their earlier discussion, Glisan and Donato have shown that they understand “observation” to be a cognitive process of paying attention to form rather than meaning. “Dialogue” is talking about the L2 in L1. Hypothesis testing also seems to be a conscious process.
The last sentence in the authors’ response to the third question is telling:
By guiding students to observe and analyze form, the teacher equips students with the important ability to continue learning and expanding their language knowledge beyond the formal instruction of the classroom and without reliance on the teacher for explanations.
I disagree with the assumption of the sentence.
The assumption is that conscious knowledge about language (observe and analyze form) somehow transmogrifies into unconscious understanding of language.
I much prefer the following :
By guiding students to know how to gain more Comprehensible Input, the teacher equips students with the important ability to continue acquiring the language beyond the formal context of the classroom and without reliance on the teacher for explanations.
We haven’t even gotten to a deconstruction of the practice itself.
However, with a flawed starting point, I find it difficult to believe that the practice itself will turn out well. As I noted at the outset of this discussion in Part 1, this is the HLTP with which I have the greatest difficulty and disagreement.
Check back next week when we finally get to the practice itself.