(Summary of conference talk)
Texts – continuous pieces of spoken or written language – have an important place in language teaching. They can be used for a number of purposes; for instance, to provide material for practice in reading or listening skills, or to supply models for students learning to handle the linguistic and structural conventions of particular text types, or to act as springboards for discussion.
A further role – and a central one – is to provide the intensive input that all learners need: relatively short samples of language which are carefully attended to and partly internalised, and which can then serve as a basis for production. Unfortunately, things don’t always work quite like this in practice when texts are used for language teaching. All too often, the ‘intensive’ input isn’t really intensive, and the new language in the text doesn’t actually make its way into the students’ production. A text may simply be seen by the teacher and the class as something that they have to ‘go through’ in one way or another, without any very clear definition of the outcomes envisaged. One approach to ‘going through’ is the lesson where the teacher uses a text as the basis for a kind of free-association fireworks display. He or she comments on one word, expression or structure after another, elicits synonyms and antonyms, pursues ideas sparked off by the text, perhaps gets the students to read aloud or translate bits, and so on and so on. Meanwhile the students – or at least, the conscientious ones – write down hundreds of pieces of new information in those overfilled notebooks that someone once memorably called ‘word cemeteries’. What happens next? The students answer some so-called ‘comprehension questions’ (what exactly are these for?), and then perhaps go away to write a homework on a topic distantly related (or even not at all related) to that of the text. At the end of this pseudo-intensive cycle the students have been given much too much input, have engaged with it too superficially for much of it to be assimilated, and have used (and therefore consolidated) little or none of it. They have been taught – inefficiently – one lot of language, and then asked to produce a substantially different lot.
For successful language teaching, I believe that it is essential to link intensive text-based input and output effectively. What should happen is something like this:
1. Students engage in depth with a short sample of spoken or written language. They work hard enough on this text to make some of the language their own: words, expressions and structures stick in their minds; perhaps whole stretches of the text are even memorised (as when a dialogue is learnt by heart).
2. Then their acquisition of the new input is consolidated by controlled but creative output work related to the text – by using what they have learnt to express their own ideas, they fix it in their memories and make it available for future use.
It is not actually very difficult to link intensive input and output constructively. It is simply necessary to abandon the idea of a text as something to be ‘gone through’, and to keep in mind a clear understanding of how texts can be used effectively for language teaching. There are all sorts of possible approaches – here is one way of using a text with a lower-level class.
· Take a story or other text of perhaps 200 words, not too difficult, which contains some useful language.
· Read it to the class, with explanations where necessary.
· Ask what they can remember.
· Read it again and see how much more they can recall.
· Hand out the text / get them to open their books.
· Go through the text explaining and answering questions where necessary, but concentrating particularly on a relatively small number of useful language points (perhaps 8-12) which the students don’t yet have an active command of.
· Tell them to note and learn these points.
· Ask them to choose for themselves a few other words, expressions or structures that they think it would be useful to learn.
· Get them to close their books or put away the text, and ask recall questions (NOT ‘comprehension questions’), designed specifically to get them to say or write the words and expressions picked out for learning.
· Finally, set a written homework in which they are expected to use most of the new material, but in their own way. (For instance, ask them to tell the story they have studied in the form of a letter written by one of the characters in it; or to write about a similar incident from their own experience.)
There are plenty of other ways of achieving this level of close engagement with input material, followed by creative output using what has been learnt. Students can work on a dialogue, and then script and perform (or improvise) new dialogues on a similar theme. One class I heard about hijacked the whole of their boring textbook, rewriting the stories and dialogues with added elements (a pregnancy, an explosion, an arrest, a lottery win, alien invaders, …) to make them more interesting, and thus using what they had learnt in highly original and motivating ways. What is essential is that students should, little by little, build up a repertoire of key vocabulary and structures that they have made their own by working on them intensively and reusing them in this way. Compared with the typical ‘text study - comprehension questions - free writing’ cycle, the crucial difference is that learners do more with less, so that they really do learn, remember and are able to use what they take in, instead of forgetting most of it before the lesson is over.
In operating an effective input-output cycle, some obstacles may need to be overcome. One may be cultural. In countries where the educational tradition favours authoritarian teacher-fronted presentation and a traditional transmission model of education, there is likely to be a strong emphasis on input and a correspondingly reduced emphasis on learner output. And if public self-expression is discouraged, as it is in some cultures, students may need encouragement (and an explanation of the rationale of the approach) before they are ready to recycle input material creatively in personalised communicative activities.
A second obstacle is theoretical fashion. Contemporary applied linguistic theory is in fact fairly hostile to the kind of intensive input-output work discussed above. The theoretical preference today is emphatically for learner-centred models, with extensive spontaneous communicative output being highly valued. Intensive output, deliberately reusing what has been taught, is condemned as being unoriginal, not properly communicative, mere ‘regurgitation’ of other people’s language. But teacher-controlled input-output work has a key place in language teaching, alongside other types of activity. You cannot teach by eliciting what is not there, and the best way of making sure that new language is acquired for later extensive use is, very precisely, to give learners other people’s language (as we have to – they can’t make the language up for themselves) and to help them to make it their own as they use it intensively for personal and creative purposes.