Within the last year, the American Council on Teaching Foreign Language has published two books that have created a lot of interest and commentary in the language circles in which I move.
The two books are Enacting the Work of Language Instruction; High-Leverage Teaching Practices by Eileen W. Glisan and Richard Donato and While We’re on the Topic by Bill VanPatten.
Although I’ve had the Glisan and Donato book much longer than the VanPatten book, I recently finished both of them at nearly the same time. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that long flights have aided the reading considerably. When you are stuck in an airplane for several hours on your way to some conference, reading is a good way to pass the time – at least it is for me.
I found the two books interesting and complementary.
Enacting the Work of Language Instruction
presents six “High-Leverage Teaching Practices”, also called “Core Practices”:
- Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility
- Building a Classroom Discourse Community
- Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts
- Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context
- Focusing on Cultural Products, Practices, Perspectives in a Dialogic Context
- Providing Oral Corrective Feedback to Improve Learner Performance
The authors consider the first two high-leverage practices foundational for language teaching. “… this HLTP [Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility] is the foundation upon which all language instruction occurs …” (p. 34) “The building of a discourse community is critically important in a language program …” (p. 55)
[Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility] is the foundation upon which all language instruction occurs
Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility
While all of the HLTPs (High-Leverage Teaching Practices) are important, this one seems to be the sine qua non of language instruction. It dovetails nicely with the ACTFL position statement that language teachers (and learners) need to communicate at least 90% of the time in the target language.
What needs to be reiterated, though, is that the target language must be comprehensible to the learners. All of the research-based theories of second language acquisition agree: Although Comprehensible Input does not guarantee acquisition, acquisition cannot occur without massive amounts of Comprehensible Input.
It is the teacher’s responsibility to provide that input. As a result, “… learning how to engage learners in comprehensible talk-in-interaction is fundamental to all language instruction and at all levels.” (p. 20) [Emphasis in original] Talk-in-interaction is another way of saying Interpersonal Communication.
But how do we accomplish this? According to Glisan and Donato, we make language comprehensible by
Creating Comprehensible Language
Ways to do this include paraphrasing new words and expressions, defining new words with examples, slowing down the rate of speech*, using vocabulary and structures that the learners already know and building on them over time, repeating and re-entering new words, expressions and language elements during communication, signaling new words and structures with tone of voice, and using connected discourse rather than presenting isolated words for drill and repetition.
Creating Contexts for Comprehension
Teachers can do this by using gestures to make new language clear, using visuals and concrete objects to support comprehension, focusing learner attention on the topic and objective of the lesson in advance of presentations and discussion, and creating lessons with a purpose relevant to the learners.
Creating Comprehensible Interactions with Learners
Glisan and Donato suggest interacting with learners using active comprehension checking strategies, interacting with students and checking how well they are following what is said by cuing for recurrent words and phrases, using question sequences that move from constrained to open-ended, and providing useful expressions and phrases to help learners negotiate meaning.
Applying this High-Leverage Teaching Practice alone could revolutionize second language acquisition instruction.
The building of a discourse community is critically important in a language program …
Building a Classroom Discourse Community
Simply put, this means that teacher and students create a group identity through (and in some sense around) the target language, a context or setting in which they use the target language to communicate with one another.
In this context, I like what Greg Thomson, former SIL worker and creator of the Growing Participator Approach to language learning, has to say about language:
A language is not an academic subject. A language is something that happens between people in flesh and blood. That is where it is. That is what it is. No more. No less. Individuals experience the world individually. That is called perception. Communities experience the world together. That is called language.
Thomson even has a principle to go with this: Communing, i.e. joining with people around experience(s) using language.
While we should derive contemporary meaning from usage rather than etymology, I think it interesting and germane that the words “commune”, “community”, “communicate”, and “common” all go back to the same original Latin term meaning “shared by all”. We commune with one another around shared experiences and express those experiences, i.e. communicate, through our shared language. We create a community out of our shared experiences, their shared expression in language, and a shared context. We are tied together by all of the things we have in common, i.e. that we share.
All too often in the school setting – at least the public school setting – we develop an “Us-vs-Them” attitude. Some students deliberately set about making life as miserable as possible for teachers. (Fortunately, these students are rare.) Some teachers view students as adversaries and subscribe to the maxim that teachers shouldn’t smile before Christmas.
As I language teacher, I simply cannot adhere to these ideas. Since language is all about communicating, i.e. expressing, interpreting, and negotiating meaning with other people, building relationships and community is essential. In addition to helping students acquire language, I teach them how to communicate with other people in real time.
So, how do we go about this?
Obviously, we foster communication by communicating. (“Duh,” I hear you say.)
But what does that look like in the classroom?
First, we have to abandon the ideas of control and single correct answers.
The old pattern, according to Glisan and Donato, was IRE:
– The teacher INITIATES conversation through an assertion or question;
– The learner RESPONDS;
– The teacher EVALUATES the response by making evaluative statements such as “excellent” or by asking similar questions of other students.
The question is, Is this truly communication or is this language practice? Whatever the answer, it does not lead to the creation of a community. Nor does it promote the type of communication that occurs in the world outside the classroom. The teacher very clearly controls the “conversation” and generally intends solely to discover whether or not students have learned the prescribed linguistic feature. The teacher remains the authority figure and does share in the experiences of learners; they don’t have much in common.
Research in classroom discourse patterns and the role of social interaction in developing oral interpersonal communication has led to the proposal of IRF as a strategy to promote talk-in-interaction, i.e. a type of communication that occurs in the world outside the classroom. Using IRF,
– The teacher INITIATES conversation through an assertion or question;
– The learner RESPONDS;
– The teacher gives FEEDBACK by moving the conversation forward and encouraging students to respond at higher levels.
Feedback can take the form of expressive reactions (“Wow!” “That’s great!” “How interesting!”), assisting questions (“Could you explain?” “How did that happen?” “Then what happened?” “Could you give more details?”), and negotiation of meaning (clarification, comprehension check, confirmation request, confirmatory assent). This is what happens in the world outside the classroom but not in learning grammar rules or through IRE patterns of discourse. Communicative skills must be taught “in the context of having meaningful exchanges in which the focus is on meaning and not form.” (p. 44)
Glisan and Donato cite J.K. Hall (1995, “Aw, man, where we goin’?” Classroom interactions and the development of L2 interactional competence. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 6, 37-62) in asserting “that for learners to become communicatively competent as opposed to communicatively incompetent, classroom discourse should reflect the interactive features of conversation that learners experience outside the classroom for various purposeful social practices.” (p. 44)
A ramification for the classroom is that Interpersonal Communication becomes central to the conduct of the instructional time. Key to effective interpersonal communication is the understanding that it is spontaneous and not rehearsed. Thus, scripted dialogs, conversations, or skits are not interpersonal communication. Nor are student reports. Nor are role play activities typically found in textbooks.
Interpersonal Communication is spontaneous; it serves a non-language purpose, either cognitive informational, psychosocial, for entertainment, or some combination of the three; it takes place within a meaningful context; it requires conversational partners to listen actively to one another.
Building a classroom discourse community is not an easy task, but it is definitely a worthwhile one.
To accomplish the goal, the teacher will need to
1. provide scaffolding, such as conversational gambits, language, and strategies for negotiating meaning;
2. give students interactional space by increasing wait time and allowing students to think and process language;
3. get to know students and make certain students get to know one another;
4. make use of the shared common context of school;
5. allow learners to guide the conversation, e.g. through suggesting topics for discussion;
6. make time for Chit-Chat, or spontaneous interaction;
7. use humor and have a sense of humor:
8. employ the IRF (not IRE) model of interaction.
I can attest to the fact that enacting these two High-Leverage Teaching Practices will transform the classroom and lead to tremendous gains in language acquisition for students in a setting that students and teacher can enjoy.
This post has gotten long enough. I’ll have to discuss the other HLTPs and VanPatten’s book in later posts.
Thanks for reading this far. I hope you will begin to enact these practices in your own classroom or work to improve their implementation. After all, we can all get better, no matter how well we do something.