Language acquisition can occur at any age.

All people learn their first language in

the first few years of life and continue rapid development in reading and writing
skills through their years of schooling. Some children learn a first language at
home and then become skilled in a second language when they enter school, because
their parents’ language is not the area’s official language. Primary school
teachers in many countries are aware that many of their students, due to
immigration or simply a high number of local languages and dialects, enter school
with limited speaking and listening ability in the language of instruction. Various
solutions to this challenge have been devised, including varied forms of bilingual
instruction, to aid these children.

This section of the course is focused on language teaching methodologies for

teenagers and adults. Therefore, our approach is based on a learner who already has
developed and balanced language skills in the speaking, listening, reading, and
writing of one or more languages, and is now learning English. Unlike children,
these adult learners expect to apply coherent learning strategies to the task.
Given a capable teacher and a motivated learner, what elements are needed in a
successful language course? What strategies are suggested to optimize student
success?

Success in Language Learning

Exposure
Language Need: You may have heard that people learn a language best when they are
immersed in it. Some people travel to a new country to learn a new language, but
most try to learn while living in their home country. To learn English, people must
be exposed to an interesting and rich amount of the language in a consistent,
continuous manner. One of the real problems in many language classes is that too
much instruction occurs in the students’ first language, greatly limiting the
students’ exposure to the L2. Therefore, in your English class you should strive
for close to 100% instruction in English and close to 100% student-to-student
interaction in English. This does not necessitate a heavy-handed approach, but
rather repeated urging toward a shared goal.

Classroom Response: If you are teaching English in a non-English speaking country,

the time spent in your classroom may be the only hours in which students have
meaningful L2 exposure. That is 23 hours a day of exposure to their L1 and only 1
hour a day of English. The following strategies can help maximize English exposure
in class and expand students’ exposure to English outside class.

Provide lots of English from many sources through books, magazines, online
material, songs, advertisements, and even television.
Blend intensive in-class work with extensive homework assignments to make sure that
students interact with enough English to make progress.
Select textbooks and educational materials that are clear without relying on the
students’ L1.
Use English for the routine tasks of the classroom as well as at dedicated
instruction times: take roll, give announcements, and collect homework in English.
Grade the language of instruction by selecting vocabulary and structures that are
suited to the level of the students, i.e. at the students’ current levels and
slightly above it.

Through extensive use of mime and gesture, visual aids, and clear, graded, repeated
language the teacher can be a role model and a source of English exposure
throughout the course.
Need for Language Interaction
Language Need: Many language theorists believe that language learning is a social
response. A child learns her first language through her desire to communicate with
her family. An adult learns her second language also through a desire to
communicate. Learners listen to and observe others and then make their own efforts.
To be successful they must understand, at least in a limited way, what is said and
then have an environment and activities that encourage them to interact with
others, using language to achieve some goal.

A related concept to this student need for interaction and feedback is

comprehensible input. To be comprehensible, input must be generally, if not
totally, understood by the learner. It is clear that a person alone in a room with
a radio playing a very different language (Arabic for an English speaker or Danish
for a Mandarin Chinese speaker) could have exposure to a new language for 100 or
even 1,000 hours without learning a thing. The input was not comprehensible.
Exposure, therefore, is only part of the picture. There must be efforts from the
speaker to be clear and opportunities for the learner to indicate the need for
clarification. Both input and interaction are needed.

Classroom Response: In many ways, Communicative Language Teaching evolved from this
recognition that learning requires interaction. In the grammar translation or
behaviorist models you read about in Module One, students are exposed to language
to some extent, but they simply memorize it for the test (Grammar-Translation) or
parrot it back unchanged (Audio-lingual.) While some students successfully
transition this information into working language skills, the Communicative
Teaching Method provides structure for interactions. If you have also enrolled in
the more in-depth Educator Certificate course, information on specific lesson
planning structures is provided in Modules Seven through Twelve of that course.
However, teachers can always consider how to make their classrooms more student-
centered, design communicative tasks, and encourage problem-solving in student-to-
student work.

Allow full opportunities for your students to personalize all topics. Remember that
our students are adults and have already formed opinions and gathered life
experiences. For example, if the reading passage in the textbook is about a ballet
star, plan time before and after the reading for students to express their
experiences or opinions around the topic of dance. Your ten-minute pre-reading and
ten-minute post-reading tasks may be much better language learning opportunities
than the textbook’s reading and vocabulary exercise in the middle.
Encourage pair work and small group work. Often teachers fall back on teacher-led,
whole class discussions and activities. Limit these. Consider the interaction
pattern when a teacher asks a group of fifteen A-2 level students these questions,
“Do you enjoy dancing? “Do you enjoy watching other people dance? Describe a time
you watched some dancers.” If this is a whole class activity, one or two confident
students will respond to the teacher, and he will respond back to them. The
majority of students will listen or daydream. Now imagine that the teacher added,
“In groups of three, talk about when and where you saw this dancing. You have five
minutes.” Soon there are people talking and listening in all five groups. They are
interacting with each other and asking for clarification, “You mean, in a club or
where?” The interaction pattern is then quite different. If the goal of the
teacher is to quickly and efficiently proceed to the reading, the first approach is
better. If the goal is interaction, the second approach is far superior.
Design structures that support students during tasks. Most learners, especially
beginners, have difficulty sustaining conversations. Therefore, teachers can supply
materials that keep the conversation going. For example, a board game with
conversation prompts can be easily made from online templates. Here is a BOARD GAME
from ESL Galaxy.
Develop lesson sequences that move from teacher-centered tasks to more restricted
activities, to more independent and interactive ones.
We just mentioned teaching some unusual color names to a group of fashion
designers. Let’s consider a lesson sequence called Test-Teach-Test (discussed in
greater detail in the Educator Certificate course) to demonstrate this kind of
lesson plan. To put it simply, in the method Test-Teach-Test, the teacher first
informally “tests" students to see what they know and don’t know, then focuses her
lesson only on the unknown words or concepts. For example, with a color wheel, the
teacher could quickly review colors to determine which are new to the students. She
could then lead a brief oral drill to develop the pronunciation of the new
vocabulary and elicit or provide their spelling and syllable stress. (This is a
teacher-centered step.) As a vocabulary check, she could provide paint swatches and
ask students to drill each other in pairs on the names of the colors. (This step is
student-to-student but appropriate responses are very limited, or restricted.)
Finally, students could be asked to work in groups of three and decide which color
should be featured in the next window display at a local department store. Each
group must decide together, and they must be ready to explain the reasons for their
choice to the whole class. (This activity is more interactive and independent.) In
Communicative Methodology, this social interaction, problem-solving stage is
crucial to retention of information.

Provide teacher feedback on both the content and linguistic accuracy of the
student-to-student work. Students may forget that chatting about colors, dance, or
jobs is a learning activity. Reinforce its validity by listening carefully, making
notes and providing feedback to students about their work. Content feedback would
consist of responding to ideas expressed by the students: e.g., “Wow, you have
convinced me that mustard is a great fall color. I guess I’ll need to go shopping.”
Linguistic feedback would be on the accuracy of the meaning, phonology, or form of
the target language: e.g., “I’m still hearing people pronounce fuchsia with three
syllables. It’s only two. Repeat after me, ‘a fuchsia blouse.’”

Blend of Implicit and Explicit Knowledge

Language Need: Language learning, especially with adult students, is a blend of
analyzed and unanalyzed knowledge. Some language points can be gained almost
automatically in the right environment, and others require work. Sometimes students
can then easily recall or retrieve the information they need to communicate without
effort, but in other cases, there is significant delay. In other words, even though
language is a social skill and some people can observe, intuit, and apply a good
deal quite fluidly, teachers should be aware that explicit teaching and formal
practicing are also helpful for many learners on specific language points.

Many researchers believe that communicative language methodologies can, at times,

underemphasize the benefits of explicit instruction and language analysis. For
example, you may be aware that there are three common pronunciations of the past
tense suffix -ed. Notice the sounds of wanted, walked, and played. However, you
probably cannot state the rules regarding the sounds at the end of the base word
that affect the pronunciation of the suffix. That is because you learned this
information in an unanalyzed way and can use it accurately without effort. On the
other hand, many English learners pronounce all words with this suffix by adding an
extra syllable. Their progress is usually improved with some explicit work that
calls attention to the three sound patterns. Then some practice stressing accurate
pronunciation of the sounds in common words improves their ability to retrieve the
correct sound later. Explicit instruction is not needed for everyone on all
language items, but it is beneficial in many specific situations.

Classroom Response: Teachers need strategies that allow explicit instruction

without reverting to an ineffective teacher-centered lecture with passive,
unengaged students dozing in their chairs. Fortunately, with awareness and planning
we can achieve a balance of communicative activities and language analysis.
Provide accuracy work and communicative language activities as components of each
lesson. Plan opportunities for both. Focus on form is a term used in communicative
language teaching. There are elements of vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and
functional language that are needed to accomplish any communicative task. Focus on
form refers to explicit teaching of some language item that occurs within an
activity. The teacher can select one significant element and either pre-teach it
(so students have what they need before the task) or allow the task to reveal the
need for the new language element and teach it after the communicative activity.
Notice that in the lesson sequence with colors, the instructor pre-taught the new
words. She also included some linguistic feedback on the presentations at the end
of her lesson. This is one option for balancing opportunities for implicit and
explicit learning.
Plan and implement a brief but complete language focus stage in each lesson. As
indicated above, these opportunities for explicit language input from the
instructor may occur at different points in a lesson. Because it is important to
provide balance and full student engagement, it is necessary to limit the amount of
material that is covered and to be quite focused on how to concisely elicit or
present, and then practice, the identified teaching point. Still, each linguistic
element has a context, meaning, form, and phonology (sound), and addressing all of
these in one lesson represents a complete "language focus stage" within its
specific context. It is better to provide well-rounded information and practice on
one small point than to briefly touch on several or to overwhelm students with lots
of information on many points.
Develop specific strategies that lead students to notice language patterns.
Noticing some pattern or use in language is the source of wonderful aha moments in
the classrooms. According to Richard Schmidt, students notice or focus on an
element of language 1) when they need it; 2) when they have encountered it during a
communicative task; 3) when they have seen it repeatedly in a particular setting.
With experience, teachers can frequently anticipate students’ probable reactions to
certain materials, and tasks can be prepared with suitable ideas for language
clarification and practice. In addition, many guided discovery strategies are
really ways that we guide the students’ attention to (help them notice) the
patterns of English.

To return to those students who struggled with the three sounds of the suffix -ed:
a teacher could design an activity that asks students to select some words in a
song they hear and group them into rhyming pairs in order to compose a new song. He
could make sure that the potential choices included past tense verbs. To accomplish
the communicative task, which is writing a few song lyrics with a partner, students
would need to accurately notice which words have similar sounds (played and stayed)
and which are different (played and kissed). The structure of this communicative
activity (writing lyrics together) encourages students to notice the pattern of the
language point.

ood language teachers do more than expose students to their subject, the English
language and its patterns. In addition, they facilitate learning through guiding
students to their best learning strategies. Simply put, metacognition is thinking
about thinking. It is a powerful tool for effective teaching and learning because l
earners who are aware of what happens during their learning process review and
choose appropriate learning strategies.

According to Neil J. Anderson, professor of linguistics and English language at

Brigham Young University, when discussing strategy used in second language reading,
meta cognition can be divided into five areas:
Preparing and planning for learning
Prepare and plan for learning by telling your students the goal for the class, goal
for the exercise, the reason for pair work, etc.

Selecting and using learning strategies

Teach your students different methods of learning. For example, show them note
taking, practice outline and chart forms, and use different colored pens.

Discuss with your students which note taking strategy they prefer and why. What do
they find challenging about the other methods?

Orchestrating various strategies

Sometimes just one strategy is not enough. If two strategies are applied, they can
complement each other and improve the learning process. For example, in vocabulary
development, research has shown that the application of multiple strategies for
vocabulary acquisition is beneficial in accelerating the learning of a word and
increasing the length of time for retaining a word. If a learner practices the
strategy of writing all new vocabulary down, categorizing it, defining it, using it
in a sentence, reading the word frequently, associating some imagery with the word,
hearing it and orally using it in context, the learner will benefit more than a
learner who practiced only one of those strategies.

Evaluating strategy use and learning

Teachers should always remind their learners to evaluate their strategies for
learning. To aid in evaluation, give quizzes based on content that was learned with
a conscious strategy, or through several different learning strategies, and let
your students consider the outcome of the different strategies and what works best
for them.