Focusing on Form … Through PACE – Part 4

Before you wonder too much whether you missed three posts …

No, you didn’t. I have in the previous three posts used the title “Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context” because I was looking at the principles behind the practice. However, the full title of the chapter at which we are looking is “Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context Through PACE”.

Since we are looking in this post at the strategy or model for Focusing on Form that Glisan and Donato have chosen for their book Enacting the Work of Language Instruction, I thought it would be a good idea to put that in the title.

…

On Saturday, 10 February 2018, I led and presented at a workshop for COACH Foreign Language Project. Our guest speaker was Dr Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus at USC and renowned linguist. (BTW, that’s why I didn’t get this post finished until today.)

In his presentation, Dr Krashen discussed the two basic approaches to language acquisition: Comprehensible Input and Skill Building.

Just in case anyone has missed it, the Comprehensible Input approach is based on five hypotheses:

• The Acquisition-Learning Distinction: we acquire language unconsciously through procedural knowledge processing rather than learning it consciously through declarative knowledge processing;
• The Natural Order Hypothesis: we acquire language in a natural order, the basic structure (and some details) of which we know for English, and this order cannot be altered by instruction, but for various reasons we should not construct a syllabus that presents language in this order;
• The Monitor Hypothesis: learned language (i.e. declarative knowledge of the “rules”) has a limited function as a monitor or editor under highly constrained circumstances (know the rule, be focused on the rule, have time to apply the rule);
• The Input Hypothesis: we acquire languages only through Comprehensible Input, i.e. hearing and reading messages in the target language that we understand, and this is the sole sufficient cause of acquisition;
• The Affective Filter Hypothesis: affective (non-language) factors such as attitude toward the instructor and the language, external noise, time of day, hunger, sleepiness or tiredness, social interaction, and stress have a strong impact on the learner’s ability to receive Comprehensible Input as comprehended intake, such that teachers must work to “lower the affective filter” in order to help students acquire the language.

Comprehensible Input is the sole sufficient cause of language acquisition.

Instruction using Comprehensible Input (it is not a method but simply understandable language employed to express, interpret, and negotiate meaning) leads to communication first, which results in the acquisition of the language and its elements, .e.g grammar, pronunciation, syntax.

The Skill Building Hypothesis is based on the idea that learning a language is similar to learning to play a sport. The learner needs to build the skills – grammar, pronunciation, syntax, phonemic awareness, etc. – of the language. Only when these have been mastered will the learner be able to put the together and communicate.

Dr Krashen presented compelling evidence that the Skill Building Hypothesis contains two fatal flaws: It is boring and painful for the learner (except for an extremely small number of students), and it doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, within the traditional public (and private) education system in the United States (and probably other countries as well), most people accept the Skill Building Hypothesis as an axiom rather than as as a hypothesis that has been shown to be false.

What’s this about the Skill Building Hypothesis being false? Haven’t generations of students learned languages this way, and haven’t many of these students gone on to become quite fluent? The others just didn’t have the aptitude for learning languages, right?

Let’s look at those questions individually.

For a hypothesis to be considered false, we need to find only a single instance in which it is not true. Dr Krashen presented – and presents in many of his writings that are increasingly available for free on his website – several case histories in which learners had access only to comprehensible input and yet came to speak the second or third language fluently. Challenges to the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, however, have failed to falsify it after 40 years. (Yes, it’s been around that long.)

Case Histories

When I lived in Germany in the 1970s, I lived with a family in which the mother was Swiss and the father was Swabian. This was in the city of Stuttgart, Germany. Most of the time, I heard Swabian-influenced German and picked up without conscious study words and phrases of Swabian, as might expect. However, within the family, I often heard the mother speaking Schwyzerdutsch, in the dialect of her hometown near Zurich, to her children. Once again, with no conscious attempt to acquire the language, I came to understand this dialect, although I never received enough input to be comfortable speaking it – nor did I have any reason to do so.

The reason I know that this happened – and happened unconsciously – is the following incident.

Shortly before I returned to the US, I was having Sunday afternoon “tea” with the family and a local couple that they had invited for the afternoon. While we were sitting at the table talking, the phone rang. One of the children answered the phone and reported back to his mother that a friend wanted to talk to her. His mother told him to ask the friend what she wanted, and if it was okay for the mother to call back later. The child did as asked and reported back to his mother.

Following this exchange, the visiting couple – who were native Germans from the Stuttgart area – asked, “What was that about?” My response was a slightly incredulous, “You mean you didn’t understand that?” Everyone at the table turned to look at me and exclaimed, “And you did?!”

You see, the entire exchange had been carried out in Swiss German, a dialect that was unintelligible the Swabian-speaking couple. I, however, had acquired an understanding of the dialect without any formal study or even conscious effort.

This case history is, in and of itself, sufficient to falsify the Skill Building Hypothesis. But Dr Krashen presented other case histories in which the acquirers went even further than I did and became fluent speakers of the target language. One child acquired Mandarin by watching cartoons and later other movies and has no problem conversing fluently with native Mandarin speakers. An immigrant to the US learned both English and Hebrew at his job in a deli. Without any study of grammar, syntax, etc., he became fluent to the point that native speakers occasionally mistake him for a native speaker. The only correction he ever received from his Hebrew-speaking co-workers and employer was vocabulary (i.e. they only told him the correct name of things when he got it wrong or asked for it).

But what about generations of students, some of whom have gone on to become fluent?

The problem here is that we have so many variables to take into account. Furthermore, most of the people who report becoming fluent – and this is often a mantra of language teaching – did so by being immersed in the language by moving to a country where it is spoken or becoming involved in a community that spoke the language. The real cause of fluency, then, turns out to have been comprehensible input, not the skill building of grammar and syntax.

But aren’t these simply the students who had a natural aptitude for languages, anyway?

No. They are the students who had sufficient interest to surround themselves with the language. In his book While We’re on the Topic, Dr Bill VanPatten maintains that we need to stop thinking about “language aptitude” because 1) it has no bearing on language acquisition and 2) any person who has learned one language has the “aptitude” to learn a second or third or fourth etc.

Language “aptitude” has no bearing on language acquisition

PACE

So, what does this lengthy excursus on language acquisition have to do with the High-Leverage Teaching Practice of “Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context Through Pace”?

Simply this: PACE is based on the Skill Building Hypothesis.

Pace is based on the Skill Building Hypothesis

Here are the steps in PACE

• PRESENTATION of a text that contains the form on which the teacher wishes to focus
• ATTENTION is draw 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

In essence, this is simply a variant of the old PRESENT – PRACTICE – PERFORM model that has failed to provide generations of students with a pathway to proficiency and acquisition.

That is not to say the Glisan and Donato have no good ideas within this section. However, those ideas are compromised by the overall context of and service to the authors’ “focus on form” (i.e. grammar, syntax, etc.). Additionally, these ideas have been presented in connection with other High-Leverage Teaching Practices, so they would be included even if this section were absent from the text.

Ideas for selecting stories include relevance and age-appropriateness for the learners, interest level (e.g. engaging plot and characters), cultural relevance, and potential for expansion.

A key difference between the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and the Skill Building Hypothesis comes to the fore in this discussion, however.

According to Krashen and VanPatten, there is no need to target grammatical structures or other elements, because these are imbedded in the language. High-frequency words, phrases, and collocations will be repeated because they are … well … high frequency. On the other hand, Glisan and Donato lay upon the teacher the need to find stories that “contain natural occurrences in sufficient quantity of the particular form on which learners will focus attention and discuss at a later time with the teacher and each other.” (2017, p. 95)

There is no need to Focus on Form (i.e. target grammar) because it is all embedded in the language

The authors also discourage teachers from inventing a story. On the one hand, this is good advice if the teacher is writing a story to focus on an element of grammar. On the other hand, co-creating a story with the learners is an excellent way to help them hear and read a text in the target language that they understand. The kind of story you get will depend to a large extent on the kind of story you set out to write.

Next comes “Plan and Prepare the Story for Presentation”. I found it interesting that this portion of the model looks a lot like what Dr Beniko Mason does for her Story Listening with some significant differences. Dr Mason emphasizes choosing and telling a good story, one that has stood the test of time. She encourages the use of a variety of techniques to make the story both understandable and interesting: drawing, gestures, writing, glossing, comprehension checks, etc. The purpose of Story Listening is to lead students on to literacy, so Dr Mason includes this even at early stages in the process as a part of the whole. Glisan and Donato, however, suggest a printed version of the story only for an “upper-level class” and then as a substitute for the oral telling rather than as a supplement to it.

By the way, I agree with both Dr Mason and the authors that teachers will benefit from studying how to tell stories and from practicing this craft. An important element of this is to time the story so that the teacher knows how long it will take and can divide it into parts if necessary.

Teachers can benefit from lessons in storytelling

The next two phases of the PACE are where Glisan and Donato diverge significantly from the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis. After choosing, preparing, and presenting a story, as well as checking for comprehension, the teacher then begins a discussion of form by drawing “the learners’ ATTENTION to a meaningful form”. (2017, p. 97)

Here, Glisan and Donato explicitly state their adherence to to the Noticing Hypothesis, i.e. that a learner must “notice” the form in order to learn (or acquire) it. Thankfully, the authors insist that this phase should last only a few minutes.

However, I align with Krashen and VanPatten in questioning the validity of including this phase at all. If the evidence that Dr Krashen presents is to be accepted, then “noticing” is unnecessary and not an efficient or effective use of instructional time. VanPatten states, “If acquisition and communication are your goal, explicit teaching is not the best use of your time.” (2017, p. 100)

If acquisition and communication are your goal, explicit teaching is not the best use of your time

Furthermore, “… focus on form is not pre-planned or purposeful. It arises incidentally during a communicative interaction.” (VanPatten 2017, p. 103) This position stands in sharp contrast to the entire notion of using PACE to accomplish “Focusing on Form”. 

At the 2017 ACTFL convention, I participated in a Skype conference call with Dr Bill VanPatten. During the course of the conversation, someone mentioned the PACE model, and Dr VanPatten had a strong negative reaction to PACE. VanPatten reiterated a position he states in his book While We’re on the Topic: “… given what we know about the slow and piecemeal nature of acquisition, focus on form can hardly cause instantaneous acquisition of a particular property of language.” (2017, p. 114)

A further weakness of the PACE model is that the Co-Construction Phase is “dialogic grammar instruction” conducted in the native language. That makes it instruction in linguistics and not part of any process of acquisition. And, to make it work correctly, the teacher is expected to “diagnose the ZPD [Zone of Proximal Development] in each learner so that the assistance given can realistically be used by learners to mediate concept development about grammar, that is, so that the assistance is neither too easy and therefore unnecessary or incomprehensible to the learners and therefore ineffective and unusable.” (Glisan and Donato 2017, p. 98)

In other words, the teacher is expected to know just where each of his 40 students in each of his five classes per day is with regard to language acquisition and tailor not only the chosen story but also the co-construction phase of instruction to each individual student’s needs so that the “assistance is neither too easy … or incomprehensible to learners …” Can we say “burnout”?

In the EXTENSION phase of the model, “learners use the new grammatical concept in creative and interesting ways”. (Glisan and Donato 2017, p. 101) That is simply the Practice part of the old way of doing things. It wasn’t effective in the past, and it isn’t effective today.

It is a practice that VanPatten warns against in an article written for the October/November 2014 issue of ACTFL’s The Language Educator magazine. VanPatten writes,

Camarata, Stephen. The Intuitive Parent: Why the Best Thing for Your Child is You (Kindle Locations 343-345). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

As Dr Krashen might say, “Given sufficient Comprehensible Input, the brain chooses its own I+1.”

Given sufficient Comprehensible Input, the brain chooses its own I+1.

This is true not only of children but of adolescents and adults – and we will recognize that if we accept the fact of brain plasticity throughout life.

So then, “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.” (VanPatten 2017, p. 114)

As Susan Gross used to say at conferences and workshops, “Just talk to the kids”.