Greetings,

It seems we've covered a lot of ground in a short space of time. I thought I'd begin by describing my teaching context and how it relates to what we've been discussing and reading about before commenting on points that I regard as significant found two of the texts from last week's readings.

I teach a CESOL (Certificate in ESOL) course for Open Wananga (Te Wananga o Aotearoa). It's designated as Level 4, which means I have students who've been studying with us now at least 3 semesters and might be described as being within the intermediate range (pre to upper). It's a full time course (20 hours a week) comprised of immigrants, mostly of 'Asian' thnicity, primarily Korean and Chinese (including Taiwanese), with relatively fewer southeast Asian, and Indian adult learners (almost all over forty). However, there are also some Eastern Europeans and Russians. Many of them have lived in New Zealand for many years (e.g. 15 years), and began their studiens of the Enlgish language in intermediate and secondary levels of schooling back in their countries of origin. Yet most often you wouldn't believe it to hear them speak.

Their motivations are varied. Many enjoy the socialising. Many of them live in ethnic ghettos and get by just fine never speaking English on a day to day basis, but their children go to NZ schools and are being 'kiwi-ised. As parents, they're eager to better understand what their kids are up to in school and their social lives. If any of my students have a job (most do not), then they are exposed to, indeed immersed in, the English language on a daily basis and they are highly motivated to improve their English language skills abilities.

The course itself is built around themes or topics and strongly content-based. The first four themes are explored over the first eight weeks: Memories, Education, Fashion, and fourthly Animals. Sounds a bit corny, perhaps, but I work hard to make it meaningful, stimulating (in terms of discussion) and thoughtful, and I take a critical approach. For example, with animals we take a deeper look at the importance of biodiversity to the survival of our planet and, indeed, humanity and so critically examine the threats that are unravelling the delicate balance of life on Earth which could even lead to our (or our civilisation's) demise. Later in the course, we explore 1) Teamwork (students work in teams to complete a project, 2) Problem Solving, 3) Conflict Resolution and finally 4) Te Ao Maori and Intercultural Communication. Bascially, the course is about using the English language to explore, critically examine and discuss ideas, drawing conclusions from what we've leaned (not about the language necessarily, but about the ideas we've explored). It goes well beyond a "task-based approach" to teaching ESOL. And the students are really challenged.

I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from students Ive taught during the past two semesters. However, that's subjective feedback. The objective feedback comes through assessment -- i.e., the students successfully complete the tasks assigned to them over the 18 weeks, producing the required outcomes and meeting the various performance criteria. However, I have observed that although the topics and what they must do to complete the associated tasks generate a lot of fluency, the students' accuracy falls well short of anything "native-like" in most cases (there are a few exceptions, of course, with a few students who have reached post-intermediate stage).

I suspect part of the problem with accuracy lies with the pedagogical approaches used back in their homeland schools (e.g. probably grammar translations and/or notional functional), along with intense fossilisation and coupled with the fact that they have generally failed to immerse themselves in the English speaking environment here (among other things).

Focus-on-form(s) (on the infrequent occasions I do it that way), error correction, feedback on errors seem to fall on deaf ears generally, and students carry on as before. My experience is that I have very little control over what my students actually learn and reproduce in their spontaneous language use. What to do?

By way of response, the readings from Lewis (2000) and Hoey (2005) have been inspirational to me. Lewis's (and others') writings on the Lexical Approach that I've read highlight the importance of and appropriate means to "acquire" the language. The learner through noticing comprehensible input should be able to produce the language in a more natural and accurate (i.e, native-like) manner. The methodology allows learners to experience language (items or natural langauge phrases) as they arise in natural contexts and to learn from their experience. This meshes well with the course syllabus I'm currently working to. My students are continually confronted by authentic materials that embody real, relevant language, which they must notice, interpret, exchange with others and use in performing the requisite tasks.

Lewis did throw me a couple of curve balls: the idea that teaching does not cause learning raised the question for me of "then what the heck am I doing in the classroom everyday?". After some reflection, I came to the conclusion that I'm not a 'teacher'; I'm a coach. The students are responsible for their learning. My job is to help my students explore the language through creating the correct environment and by providing them with high-quality, authentic input. Iprovide training so as to enable them to notice relevant aspects of that input, and compare those features with their own intra-language so that they might be able to notice the gap -- on their own (i.e. independently; not through my telling them what's wrong with what they've said or written; or explaining all over again the rules of grammar that they know full well already).

The other idea that Lewis brought through, which is one that I baulked at, was his claim that classroom interaction does not support language acquisition. "You cannot acquire a language by producing it." (Lewis 2000, p. 159). Nor, he says, does the normal practice by students of what is noticed contribute to acquisition. While this may be the case, surely acquisition is just one of various other purposes or aims that a teacher (or the student) may have in the LL classroom which interaction supports. Most students want to practice their speaking, if only as a confidence booster. Another purpose for production is that of assessment. How does a teacher (or the student for that matter) determine whether progress is being in the absence of any production?

How is a student to notice the difference between what is communicatively effective in their interlanguge and what is formally 'correct' and thereby have reason to modify their current intergrammer if they do not engage in communicative production? Indeed, in what appears to me to be a contradiction, Lewis (2000), in discussing his OHE model in which E stands for 'experiment', says that "Experiment involves using the language on the basis of the learner's current intergrammar (that is, his or her current best hypothesis), thereby stimulating new input at the appropriate level to provide examples, which confirm or contradict some part of the learner's current hypothesis. Mastery happens -- if ever -- when new input serves only to conform the learner's intergrammar" (p.178).

Finally, to a point made by Hoey (2005) in his writing about what he called "lexical priming" with respect to collocations: a point he made that caught my attention got me thinking about the fluency vs. accuracy dichotomy if referred to in the beginning of this blog (they are rather fluent, but significantly inaccurate in speaking). My hunch is that so many of my students are quite seriously fossilised to the extent that I might hypothesise that they have some quite strong, but inaccurate lexical primings of their own stored away in their mental lexicons, in the same way that native speakers have correctly stored and can retrieve their own, correct lexical phrases that are primed. As Hoey defines them, primings (of words) nest and combine and in quite certain contexts. Hoey makes the point that lexical primings may crack, and one of the causes is education. So if a word is primed for someone to collocate with a particular other word and a teacher tells the person that it is incorrectly primed (e.g. you and was) the result is a potential crack in the priming. Could this form the basis of an approach, or at least a tool, for cracking wrong primings in my learners in order to crack open the fossilised forms and replace them with correct forms?

I think this may tend to support and idea for some action research I want to put into effect in my classroom at some point his semester (apart from fuller intergration of the Lexical Approach into my class work). I plan to make audio recordings of my students' discussions about the news, which we do everyday at the beginning of class for about 15 minutes -- talk about a news item they saw, heard or read about in the news media the night before. These records would provide a compendium of error types which I would then categorise, backed up by authentic interlanguage examples. I could then use selected examples in class as part of a lesson in which students are exposed to (listen to) the audio recorded errors and then engage in a whole class discussion (under my coaching) to search for lexical chunks/phrases that a native speaker might use instead to say the same thing. That's an action research plan that's in the development stage at the moment.

Ka kite ano, Mike

Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical priming: a new theory of words and language. London: Routledge


Lewis, M. (2000). In Lewis, M. (ed.), Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications