It's been a while but I'm very pleased to announce a guest post from a man who requires no introduction, none other than Leo Selivan (also know as lexicalLeo.) Leo is one of the people I've known online for years but haven't yet had the chance to meet. His posts are always informative and well-referenced, -something I always appreciate (and he shares my scepticism for all things Chomsky). Leo blogs at leoxicon.
Leo is writing here about one of my personal favourite topics, the oft discussed gap between theory and practice in ELT.
Nicola Prentis once described her first
experience of attending IATEFL as being in ELT
groupie heaven. Last year I had a
similar experience while attending for the first time the AAAL (American
Association of Applied Linguistics) convention – I felt like an Applied
Linguistics groupie. Where else would you get to sit in the same row with both
Ellises (Nick and Rod) and with Patsy Lightbown one row behind you? All the
names a diligent MA TESOL student would know from their readings were there in
the flesh.
Unfortunately, my attendance of AAAL also
confirmed my belief that the gap between ELT theory and practice is growing wider
and becoming more difficult to bridge. For the past few years, AAAL, which
started as an offshoot of TESOL, and TESOL’s own convention have been conveniently
held back to back in the same location (in Toronto last year). This
geographical and temporary proximity presumably gives professionals travelling
from all over the world an opportunity to attend both events.
It seems that very few actually do so. Out
of 10 or so attendees from my home town Tel Aviv that I ran into at AAAL – all
college and university lecturers (involved in undergraduate TEFL education) – none
were staying on for TESOL, which may be regarded as “too practical” and lowbrow
by the academia. “Looking down on us, ‘commoners’, from the Ivory tower”, I remarked
ironically to one academic acquaintance I bumped into at AAAL, a former high
school teacher, to which she replied, “The climb was too steep to look back
down now”.
But this is, of course, anecdotal evidence,
and since this blog is dedicated to questioning accepted views and practices using
solid, substantial evidence, I will now turn to such.
Case in Point No. 1:
MISLEADING TERMINOLOGY
One thing that contributes to the divide
between academia and practice is the abstruse language and incomprehensible
jargon used in academic writing. Have you ever seen an article in an applied
linguistics journal dealing with “lexical chunks”? Probably not, because
scholars opt for “formulaic language”, a term little known to EFL teachers. Grammar
teaching is referred to by applied linguistics as “focus on form” with both form
(how a structure is formed) and function (and how it is used) subsumed
under the unhelpful term. “Teaching” is disguised as “instruction”, which
always confuses my non-native speaking teacher trainees, and "classroom”
is referred to as an “instructional setting”. No wonder much published academic
research makes little sense to practitioners.
Take, for example, the unclear definition
of incidental vocabulary learning. I am
sure, to the reader “incidental” means encountering words in context while
reading or listening and not as part of a vocabulary exercise. Yet, in second language acquisition (SLA) research
literature, “incidental learning” is a different construct, often contrasted
with “intentional” with the latter defined as an activity geared towards
committing lexical information to memory (Hulstijn 2001). In L2 vocabulary
studies, in particular, learning is considered intentional when the subjects of
an experiment are warned of the upcoming test, i.e. told to go home and
memorise the items.
This effectively
renders most vocabulary practice, such as gap fills,
matching exercises and other activities you might do in class or find in
coursebooks incidental, because they merely provide exposure but do not require
the learner to commit new vocabulary to memory. The dubious incidental-intentional
dichotomy has been addressed by Anthony Bruton in an article in TESOL Journal (Bruton
et al, 2011), where he called on researchers to use more transparent terms. For
example, “deliberate / not deliberate” or “intentional / not intentional” would
be a better choice of terms to distinguish the different kinds of learning.
Case in Point No. 2:
MISINTERPRETED FINDINGS
One of the researchers I was really looking
forward to meeting at AAAL was Stuart Webb, who is known for his rigorously
designed studies on L2 vocabulary learning, and often getting his subjects to take
a battery of 10 (!) different tests in one sitting to measure various aspects
of acquisition of new words. Imagine giving your students 10 different
exercises with the same words - in a row!
In one of his studies (Webb 2007), a group
of learners was presented with new words in contextualised sentences and the
other group the same words with their L1 equivalents or, as SLA researchers
prefer to call it, “word pairs” (please refer to Section 1 for discussion on
misleading terminology). The results showed that presenting new words in
context is ineffective because learners can easily, and more efficiently, learn
words with their L1 equivalents.
However, given the nature of the target
words in the study, the finding is not surprising. After all, do you need much
context to learn the word “locomotive”? But,
say, the word “train” had been chosen instead, and, more importantly, learners had
been asked to use the target items (i.e. write sentences with new
words), I am sure, the findings would have been quite different. The linguistic
context might have come in handy then because learners would have needed to
know:
get on/off the train, catch the train, go by train etc
to be able to use the word “train”
appropriately.
When I asked Stuart Webb about his
diminishing the role of context, he seemed a bit baffled at first and could not
understand what study I was referring to. When it finally dawned on him, he
clarified that the study in question was one in a series of papers published in
various journals (as it is often the case with PhD dissertations) and, being
just one piece of the puzzle, may not give the full picture.
I re-read the article and found this
acknowledgement hidden in the Limitations section:
Richer contexts may show that context has a greater effect on vocabulary knowledge than was found in this study.
Not only does the study support the use of
context, it actually claims that more or better context might be necessary to
learn new words. But if taken at face value, the study can be misinterpreted as
a claim that context is not important for vocabulary learning. Indeed, I have
seen a conference presentation claiming just that and citing Webb’s study. This
is what I would like to turn to in the next section.
Case in Point No. 3:
MISGUIDED MEDIATORS
It’s all very well blaming the academia for
the theory-practice chasm but criticism can equally be directed at practitioners
themselves. Many reasons can be given to explain why teachers do not consult
the research literature which could inform their classroom decisions. Apart
from inaccessible language discussed above, the reasons can include a lack of
time or lack of incentive (see this article
by Penny Ur).
But is it really the role of teachers to
read research? After all, there are teacher trainers, coursebook writers, authors
of teacher’s handbooks, conference, all of whom are probably in a better
position to translate research into clear methodological guidelines? In other words, those who act as mediators
between SLA research and ELT pedagogy. Unfortunately, mediators do not always
take on board pertinent research findings (see for example my post
on teaching words in semantic sets) or, more disconcertingly, misinterpret
or misapply them.
At one of the recent IATEFL conferences, a
well-known presenter, in fact, one of the leading figures in the ELT world,
questioned the validity of highlighting and underlining as useful learning strategies.
The evidence that was cited in support of the claim comes from Dunlosky et
al.’s study (2013) which, as it turns out, was conducted on native English
speakers who were not even foreign language learners – they were learning
content subjects, such as biology or history.
Clearly, there is a difference between the underlining and highlighting
of portions of a history textbook to be learned and
marking lexical chunks which are worth remembering or grammatical
structures which merit attention. If anything, SLA research considers
underlining or highlighting, alongside other attention-catching techniques, as
one of the ways of making linguistic input more salient. Such input enhancement
has been shown to induce noticing and arguably aid
acquisition of new linguistic forms. (Jourdenais et al 1995, Simard 2009)
CONCLUSION
In addition to researchers and
practitioners attending and presenting at each others’ conferences, how can
each party contribute to bridging the divide between academia and the
classroom? I would like to see more research conducted on pedagogical issues
that practitioners seek answers to and not on what is easy to research (in
other words, more on “catching the trains” rather than “locomotives”). I think it is the role of ELT methodologists,
teacher educators and coursebook writers to evaluate relevant research
and its applicability, and translate it into pedagogical principles.
At the same time, teachers would do well to
read blogs that connect practice with theory in an accessible way, such as
Scott Thornbury’s A to Z of ELT, Rachael Roberts’s ELT-resourceful
or this very blog you’re reading now. Thank you, Russell, for inviting me to
contribute to it!
The full and slightly modified version of this
article will be published in Modern English Teacher 25(3)
References
Bruton, A., Lopez,
M. and Mesa, R. (2011) Incidental L2
vocabulary learning: an impracticable term? TESOL Quarterly, 45(4),
759–768
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E.J., Nathan, M.J., and
Willingham, D.T. (2013) Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning
Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology, Psychological Science in the Public
Interest, 14(1),
4-58
available from http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full.pdf+html
available from http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full.pdf+html
Hulstijn, J.H. (2001). Intentional and incidental second language
vocabulary Learning: a Reappraisal of Elaboration, Rehearsal and Automaticity.
In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction (pp
258-286). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Jourdenais, R., Ota, M., Stauffer, S., Boyson,
B., & Doughty, C. (1995). Does textual enhancement promote noticing?: A
think aloud protocol analysis. In R. Schmidt (Ed.), Attention and awareness in foreign
language learning (pp 183-216). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii, Second
Language Teaching and Curriculum Center.
Simard, D. (2009). Differential effects of textual enhancement
formats on intake. System, 37, 124-35
Ur, P. (2012, October 16). How useful is TESOL research? Guardian
Weekly. (Learning English). http://gu.com/p/3bvee
Webb, S. (2007). Learning word pairs and glossed sentences: The
effects of a single context on vocabulary knowledge. Language Teaching
Research, 11, 63-81