But I Thought the Teacher Was the Expert

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But I thought the teacher was the expert:

how student talk and overlap in the four skills can bring the world

into a language classroom.

K. Stein

Standing in front of twenty, thirty or even forty students for an English class

in which all of those in the room are supposed to somehow practice their

communicative English skills in the span of 90 minutes or less can be a

daunting challenge for any teacher. If that same class is taught in a teacher

centered manner, with a unidirectional flow of information, the students willhave little chance to experience the rich and dynamic ways in which

language is used outside of the classroom. Providing ample time for

students to interact with each other through task based activities or topic

based discourse not only allows students to practice the roles that are

usually reserved for the teacher such as correcting mistakes and to provide

scaffolding to facilitate conversation, it exponentially increases the amount

of time each student can engage in communication.

According to Swain’s “output hypothesis”, one of the benefits of giving

learners a chance to produce language is to allow for hypothesis testing

(Ellis, 1997). Through output, learners have the chance to see if the way in

which they use language leads to effective communication. If the

communicative act is not successful, or if the learners receive other

feedback through the act of negotiating meaning, they can recognize the

gap between their own language and the target language, a potentially

important part of the SLA process (Pica 1996).

But not all output is the same. A student discussing a book with a teacher

and the same student discussing the same book with a group of friends will

of course interact in very different ways. So it is not surprising that L2

learners also exhibit different communication styles and patterns when

talking in the L2 with teachers versus other students. In fact, without the

pressure involved in the teacher/student dynamic, students in small groups

talk more and use a wider variety of language as compared with teacher led

discussions (Long 1985)(Pica 1994). Setting up the classroom so students

Kevin Stein [email protected]



have the chance to use English during communicative exercises with each

other allows for learners to engage in more realistic and richer

communicative exchanges while simultaneously helping learners turn

conversation meaning into a source of comprehensible input (Pica 1994).

In my own classes, I have noticed that pair or small group work in which

students engage in personally directed conversations results in an increased

level of motivation where motivation is measured by the level of active

participation. This is true of all level of learners, from the very beginning

students who struggle to put together simple sentences about the foods

they like and dislike and often rely on formulaic chunks of English, to themore advance students who can discuss more abstract topics such as

environmental issues or psychology. When students feel that they have

something personal to say to a peer, they are much more willing to engage

in the sometimes lengthy task of negotiating for meaning. This higher

tolerance level for difficulties within a communicative act and the

development of communicative competencies will help serve the students

when they come face to face with novel non-classroom situations or

discourses for which they have little contextual knowledge.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the skills of speaking and listening can

benefit from small group work. What is not so obvious at first glance is how

the skills of reading and writing might benefit from small group work or

serve as a means of communications between learners of English. Perhaps

people might even think that reading and writing are secondary skills and

need not play a prominent role in an English course focused on

communication. But when it comes to using English, the importance of

writing cannot be discounted. Often a person’s written skills will have a

large impact on their social and economic choices (Hinkel, 2006). Cover

letters when applying for jobs or personal essays when applying for

educational opportunities are just two examples of how writing skills can

have a disproportionate effect on a learner’s future choices. In a world

where over a quarter of the population is, "already fluent or competent in

English," (Crystal, 2003) learners of English will find little value in their hard

earned language abilities if they are unable to read and write. And even in a

communication based classroom, writing and reading can be used as




mediums for students to communicate with each other and to increase the

amount of time students work within the target language.

Reading and writing are often used in tandem. What one person writes,

another person must read in order for the information to be communicated.

But most often class work writing is directed at an audience of one, the

teacher. While this might allow for detailed and focused feedback, it limits

the range and total amount of feedback available to any one student and

traps written assignments within the register and genre constraints of the

student/teacher social dynamic.

In a given day, a native speaker of English might use written English in a

number of ways which currently falls outside of a EFL or ESL course syllabus.

Recently I asked a class of thirty-five third year high school English students

in Japan to provide a list of ways in which they use writing in their daily lives

outside of school. Students lists included: notes to friends and family

members, to do lists, notes in the margins of novels, instant message chats

on a cell-phone, and collections of restaurants they wish to visit and why. All

of these types of writing could be brought into the classroom as writing

activities and all of these activities could produce writing directed at other

learners in the classroom as opposed to directed at the teacher. Further

steps could also easily be added to increase the number of language skills

being used. For example, after a student's writing is read, it could then be

paraphrased and shared verbally with a third or fourth student who might

then be encouraged to write a short note to him or herself about the

content.

Building on the idea of "notes to friends or family," from the student

generated list above, I ran a fifteen minute time constrained activity in

which students left short notes to other members of the class making simple

requests which had to then be answered in writing. The following is one

note from the class:

Daisuke to Kenta: Teach me what we studied in yesterday’s history

class. Reply Kenta to Daisuke: Read page 34 to 65!




The notes allowed the students not only to practice writing simple

commands, they helped students come to understand the difference

between polite requests and the less polite command forms that might be

used in an informal written discourse between friends. The practical nature

of the task and its similarities to how students actually use writing in their

daily lives resulted in a higher use rate of dictionaries and a higher rate of

active participation than most writing exercises in the class. In addition, the

students were able to engage in an activity which required them to use both

writing and reading skills. While this activity might appear too basic for a

more advanced class, I would argue that even in an advanced EAP class,

students could still benefit from short writing activities which mirrored howthey might use writing in academic situations other than formal papers,

such as requesting data from a fellow graduate student/researcher or

leaving and responding to comments on an academic blog.

In daily life, all four of the language skills regularly interact in ways that is

often missing within the classroom. Perhaps we read a novel and moved,

make notes in the margins; we tell our friend about it verbally and then lend

it to our friend when finished; a few weeks later we send emails back and

forth about how our reactions to the novel differed. True, it would be easy to

delineate each of the acts in this chain of events into one of the four skills.

But that would be missing out on the fact that all of these acts are in some

way enmeshed with those that come before and after.

Paul Nation succinctly points out that there is something unique about each

of the four skills which makes them different from the others and that in

order to improve at a skill a learner must spend quality time practicing it

(Nation, 2007). Now let's return to the hypothetical class of 40 eager

students all hoping to practice their communicative skills that we were faced

with at the beginning of this paper. By letting the students use the four

skills to communicate with each other in ways that more closely reflect how

language is actually used outside of the classroom, we can provide more of

the time needed to develop any one particular skill. But perhaps just as

importantly, we can help students learn how to negotiate meaning, turn

output into input, and explore a wider array of genres and registers. In

doing so, perhaps students will begin to see each other not only as fellow




learners, but as sources of rich linguistic interaction. If they do, it will knock

one more hole in the wall which continues to separate classroom and

everyday English.

Sources:

Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language (2nd Edition). Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Ellis, R (1997) Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hinkel, E. (2006), "Current Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills." TESOL

Quarterly , 40 (1) pp. 106-131

Lightbown, P. M. (2003), "SLA research in the classroom/SLA research for the

classroom." Language Learning Journal, 28 pp. 4-13

Long, M. H. (1985), "Group Work, Interlanguage Talk, and Second Language

Acquisition." TESOL Quarterly , 19 (2) pp. 207-227

Nation, P. (2007), "The Four Strands." Innovations in Language Learning and

Teaching. 1 (1) pp. 1-12

Pica, T. (1994), "Research on Negotiation: What Does it Reveal About

Second-Language Learning Conditions, Processes, and Outcomes?"

Language Learning, 44 (3) pp. 493-527

Pica, T. (1996), "Second Language Learning Through Interaction: Multiple

Perspectives." Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 2 (1) pp. 1-22


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But I Thought the Teacher Was the Expert