Many
instructional contexts around the world do not encourage risk-taking,
instead they encourage correctness, right answers, and withholding
"guesses" until one is sure to be correct. How might this affect a
language learning classroom where communicative language teaching is
being used. Try to relate your answer to the principles discussed.
(Additional comments on this post no longer earn points. Please choose a more recent entry).
Suppressing risk-taking may save the less confident students from embarrassment, but it does little to help students really delve into the soul of a language. Children learning their L1 take risks constantly, and their parents correct them. However, children do not put social judgments on their mistakes. They just move on with their speaking. However, as adults, we like accuracy.
ReplyDeleteHowever, let's say the teacher asks in the L2, "What did you do this weekend?" Let's say the students have been pressured so much for accuracy that they respond with, "I slept." Rather than what they are thinking which is, "I went to the football game. We won! And then I went home to sleep because I was exhausted from the after party." Saying the more complex sentence will undoubtedly be filled with mistakes. However, by ATTEMPTING such a sentence, the student is using creativity and really starting to "play" with the L2. If the student was encouraged to use the more complex answer, they might bring about new things to learn, might also show gaps in their learning process, and might help observers learn vocabulary or grammar they didn't know before.
The key to the success of this lies in the ability of the teacher to encourage mistakes. He or she can correct them in a helpful way as needed. The root of this problem of risk-taking is really a problem of the teacher's own openness and creativity. I think a teacher should engage in friendly, fun dialogue with the students at the beginning or end of class just as if we were talking as friends. This gets students laughing and interested and willing to contribute if they are Type A personalities. And at least Type B personalities can observe the language use if they do not contribute to the discussion.
More traditional instructional approaches encourage correctness and right answers. These approaches will stifle the CLT classroom environment and limit student progress as they withhold their answers, waiting to make sure they have their pronunciation and grammar exactly right.
ReplyDeleteUnlike a traditional classroom, in a CLT classroom, students are encouraged to actively participate and produce language in real-world situations. For this approach to be effective, students must take risks and make mistakes as a natural part of the learning process. The language ego principle reminds us that as students struggle to learn language, they must overcome feelings of inadequacy as they try to communicate in a new language. As their skills improve, their language ego develops and they build confidence in their ability to communicate in the new language. During this time, as teachers, we need to be sensitive to students needs for reassurance. Additionally, we need to be careful choose tasks that are challenging, but not overwhelming for students. Risk-taking and willingness to communicate are closely aligned with self-confidence as students improve their communication skills. Our gentle reassurance will create an environment for success as students try out their new skills without the fear of ridicule or strong negative feedback.
In a CLT approach to teaching, fluency and accuracy takes turns being important goals for student learning. In order to become truly fluent in a given language, students need to practice speaking the target language. Spontaneity is also an important part of a CLT classroom, with students encouraged to take risks and use actual language that may not have already been taught. Students are also encouraged to be autonomous and focus on their individual learning strengths to develop appropriate 'real world' language skills. This may be problematic for students coming from cultures where it is more important to be correct than it is to be proficient. Couple this with the principle of language ego, where students may not only be hesitant to respond if they are not sure of the correct answer but doubly nervous about losing face in front of their peer group. This aversion to risk-taking learning may also be hindered by anxiety and/or self-efficacy as seen in the principle of willingness to communicate. Of course, the language-culture principle connection is evident any time you are teaching persons of different culture. It is interesting to note that the CLT approach may also help to lessen anxiety, as co-operative learning where several student collaborate on arriving at an answer does not single out a particular individual and may help to promote more risk taking in trying new things.
ReplyDeleteIf a teacher discourages risk-taking in a CLT classroom, then perhaps he or she may no longer be able to claim themselves as a proponent of CLT. In contrasting the Audiolingual Method with CLT, Brown says that in the second approach “The target linguistic system is learned through the process of struggling to communicate.” (p. 49). If this is truly characteristic of CLT, then keeping students within the bounds of “correct” language would constrain them to a lengthy mental struggle to communicate before any real verbal or written communication attempts can occur. Students may then be delayed in developing autonomy or confidence, slowing the learning process.
ReplyDelete--Elizabeth.
Of course, as Kathy pointed out, fluency cannot be neglected in favor of accuracy if the intent of a course is to produce competent speakers and not just grammarians. Also, the forms of language have little meaning or value to students if explained without any reference to the function of these forms. In my opinion, a course that uses a CLT approach but encourages linguistic perfection may well go the way of high school Latin.
Oops...I did not mean to post my name in the middle of my response.
DeleteRisk- taking is obviously the best way toward fluency. However in an institution like ELI, students are mostly concerned about their grades because passing is their only way to enter the university. These students will do everything by the book and never cooperate enthusiastically in any activity, which will ruin the whole idea of CLT. In this case teachers can make use of some of the teaching principles in order to help their students becoming more creative and risk-taking in order to hit the fluency level they are looking forward to reach. First, rewarding any attempts to think out of the box would absolutely encourage the students to think beyond the class material. Giving the student out of the class assignment that would require creativity and novelty is also a good idea to reduce the fear of evaluation. Moreover, introducing extra ungraded activities that also help students practice their language without emphasizing the correctness but the content of the outcomes would nourish the students’ desire to take-risks. Through these safe learning strategies, students will be more self-motivated and risk-takers that by the time they would go ahead and express their thoughts even without a safety net.
ReplyDeleteI think it will affect the learning process a lot. For example, if a student is always worried about the correct form/right answer, then he or she will usually have to spend more time thinking about the answer, and how to say it correctly, rather than absorbing the language. In other words, they spend too much time analyzing the form of the language, and this can hinder automaticity. Instead of subconsciously understanding and learning the language, it becomes too mechanical, almost like a robot, so you can’t achieve much fluency that way. Furthermore, if risk-taking is not encouraged, I think that might sometimes lower a learner’s intrinsic motivation. If the student really wants to speak the language but instead has to always worry about correctness and such, the student might gradually become discouraged to even learn at all. This also goes with the language ego principle, because being too rough on students might be more harmful than helpful. Since communicative language teaching is being used, then obviously there should be a willingness to communicate, which supports risk-taking and the concept of self-confidence (not encouraging risk taking is a contradiction to the method being used itself!). The best way to learn is through trial and error, but we must not suppress a student’s desire to try, fail, and try again (that is how people learn things, usually faster and for a longer period). Let the student gain confidence, get absorbed into the mode of the language, and then gradually make them more aware of correctness, right answers, and such.
ReplyDeleteThis was a huge problem for many of my EFL students in Asia. They were so concerned with correctness that I could never get them to say anything. Risk-taking is a necessary part of a CLT classroom, and without it students will be prevented from reaching fluency (and let's face it, a COMMUNICATIVE language teaching is a bit difficult if students are unwilling to communicate!). For this reason, I especially liked Brown's principle of automaticity, about which he says "Overanalyzing language, thinking too much about its forms, and consciously lingering on rules of language all tend to impede this graduation to automaticity" (p. 64). YES!
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I am personally one of those students who likes to know I'm right before I give an answer :) When I lived in Cambodia, I was required to do 3 months of full-time language study before I could start teaching at the university. The teaching was typical Asian style - very formal, with lots of rote-learning and book work, little encouragement to try things out and make mistakes. The goal was perfection. Even after I started teaching, I kept studying at the same language school for a year until I had to stop because I moved across the city. During the 3 months in which I didn't study study in a formal classroom, my language proficiency doubled. Like Brown said, I had been overanalyzing everything and in the process missed the forest for the trees. Brown continues on page 65 by saying that "adults can take a lesson from children by speedily overcoming our propensity to pay too much focal attention to the bits and pieces of language and to move language forms quickly to the periphery by using language in authentic contexts for meaningful purposes." It wasn't until I started taking risks and learning language in authentic contexts that I was able to overcome my mental barrier and move toward fluency. For that reason, I agree with Brown that one of the best things we can do to encourage our students in the CLT classroom to overcome their fear of mistakes is to create an environment in which they are thinking more about authentic tasks than about language structure.
-Debby Adams
One of the purposes of communicative language teaching is increasing students’ automaticity and spontaneity. On the various points of view, these principles related to students’ fluency run counter to some language teaching methods emphasizing students’ accuracy.
ReplyDeleteIn the past traditional language teaching methods like GTM, educators focused on correctness and grammatical competence rather than fluidity of speech. Teachers emphasized the correctness of learners’ speech and writing, and they indicated and corrected learners’ errors. Because even advanced level of L2 learners frequently makes errors, this excessive error correction could affect L2 learners negatively by reducing their using of target languages. Generally, these accuracy focused lessons do not have activities that bring out learners’ spontaneous utterances inside and outside classroom. Because of the strict and non-conversational curriculum, learners are boring and not motivated sufficiently. Especially in EFL environment how much learners are motivated is the key point for autonomy and willingness to communicate. Therefore, teachers should prepare well-managed communicative tasks in order to decrease learners’ anxiety and increase their self-confidence and autonomy.
Correctness is important for language learners especially in the classroom where the only aim is to do correctly in the exams. In CLT classroom, students should not only be all-correct ones but also to pursue the ways that make them use language in a real environment so that they can gain more language competence in the long run. Encouraging risk-taking is a good way to practice functional language and to achieve fluency and accuracy. For most language learners, afraid of speaking the wrong words or make errors is the common reason they are not willing to communicate. As teachers in CLT classroom, we should let students know that everyone will unavoidably make mistakes in learning languages and help them to build self-confidence and self-motivation. I prefer the strength of rewards including the intrinsic motivation because “the behavior stems from needs, wants, or desires within oneself; the behavior itself is self-rewarding”. When students cultivate the abilities to have the interests to learn inside and outside the classroom, they can have more chances to be exposed the real language environment instead of only pursuing correctness in exams.
ReplyDeleteInstructional contexts that concentrate on correctness may achieve significant language learning, but usually it is limited to particular dialogue and requires diligent study on the part of the student. In general students who achieve success by concentrating on correctness will be more serious in nature and willing to study from texts and tapes. The majority of students in America will achieve greater, long term success by the Communicative Language Approach (CLT). While there is a need for correctness, it can be obtained through communication over time even if the student's communication in grammatically incorrect by friendly, interactive feedback from a teacher or mentor. CLT's drawbacks are 1) the need for a qualified English speaker to interactive with and 2) the need for a small classroom. Both of these are difficult in many other parts of the world.
ReplyDeleteThis is an issue which I’ve seen work against students who have come from other cultures into the American educational system at the graduate level. For two years I worked with a handful of students, tutoring them in English and working with them to write graduate and post-graduate papers and in developing oral presentations. I found that when we were having informal conversation, at a coffeeshop or in another type of non-threatening situation where their language production had no impact on their grades, they could actually communicate quickly and with a high level of effectiveness. However, as soon as we started working on the formal (written or oral) and ultimately graded aspects of their work, they clammed up and couldn’t even put together a full paragraph coherently. The ability to set aside the reach for perfection and to shoot for communicative clarity really set certain students apart from the others. Those who insisted on reaching perfection actually ended up giving up entirely and began submitting papers that had not even been edited at all – they decided there wasn’t any point anyway, because if it couldn’t be perfect they didn’t care anymore. They had completely lost their self-confidence. For others who were more willing to adapt and recognize that what they were really trying to do was simply to communicate, success was much more easily achieved even at the graduate level. An unwillingness to communicate if perfection can’t be reached is the death-knell to language learning, and I think the more we can emphasize this to our students the better, no matter what their parent culture has instilled in them. I believe that including many activities and scenarios in which students are graded on participation rather than on production can assist in promoting this, along with encouraging production in settings outside the classroom. One other challenge which I’ve seen in connection with this striving for perfection is the fact that many students I worked with at the graduate level wanted to use huge vocabulary words or extremely complex structures they associated with ‘real’ academic writing, and in trying to do that their ability to communicate effectively orally or in written form just disappeared. As their tutor, I tried to strike a balance between encouraging them to think in terms of communicating using simpler forms, while not discouraging them from their inquisitiveness about new vocabulary options.
ReplyDeleteThe student in my wants to insist that getting every answer absolutely correct any time a teacher asks you a question is half the reason for showing up to class, but I know from my personal experience that this is a horrible way to learn a language. First of all, as soon as a teacher says "we will be going around the class and..." I immediately start looking it up in the textbook or my notes and rehearsing exactly what I'm going to say over and over and over in my head. I know this defeats half the point of the activity: I'm barely paying attention to what the other students are saying, and how the teacher responds to them, and when it is finally my turn to speak, I was basically imitating what I had heard or read previously whether or not I understood it. If I actually let myself make a mistake in front of the teacher/class, the teacher has an opportunity to explain and help me understand the concept.
ReplyDeleteSecond, if I'm planning out everything I say, so I don't make any mistakes, I'm not "thinking" in the second language. I'm taking each vocabulary word and putting it into groups according grammar rules or patterns from the textbook and rehearsing the sounds carefully. However, if I ever found myself needing to use the language, there would be no opportunity to check the dictionary, grammar book ect. to make sure I have perfect accuracy when asking "where is the bathroom" or "I'm lost and cannot find my hotel". Even completely grammatically faulty language that still gets it's point across is more useful than not being able to communicate at all for fear of making a mistake.
Third, my fluency in any language I've tried to learn greatly improved when I met friends who were also trying to learn that language, particularly if they were a level or two ahead of me. Being able to hang out and casually talk in German after class or during lunch meant I was actually using German without fear of being thought stupid, or of getting a bad grade if I made too many mistakes. Repeated usage made verb forms more familiar than if I had carefully looked each one up to make sure it was exactly correct.
Kailey Watson
Encouraging not speaking until one is absolutely sure of the correct answer hamstrings communicative language teaching. In order to develop automaticity, one must move beyond rehearsed lines to using learned pieces of language to create one’s own thoughts and sentences. This is not possible if one clings only to rehearsed lines and is afraid to experiment with language and make the mistakes necessary to reach automaticity. Over-focusing on correctness also keeps one from meaningful learning since students are more concerned with learning correct forms than expressing meaning. They may also be more afraid of making mistakes than anticipating the rewards of using language, damaging their intrinsic motivation.
ReplyDeleteFrom a socio-affective standpoint, answering only when one has the right answer can sabotage one’s language ego into being in a constant state of hesitation, self-questioning, and fear of being wrong. Teachers will have a hard time creating a warm-fuzzy atmosphere if they are also creating an environment where students shouldn’t speak unless they are sure to be correct. Teachers will also have difficulty encouraging their students to be willing to communicate as students will be averse to risk-taking.
On the other hand, a concern with correctedness may have a positive affect on helping students develop correct language. For students whose native language is markedly different from the language they’re learning, extra attention to correct pronunciation, grammar, and intonation may help them develop a solid foundation for speaking a language with which they were unfamiliar. For example, a native English speaking friend of mine worked very hard to perfect her tones when learning Mandarin. This has helped her to sound more like a native speaker and improved her communicative competence.
Risk-taking is part of the learning process. The act of producing can make speakers aware of gaps in their knowledge of the L2. That’s one strong argument to encourage risk-taking even when not 100% sure of correctness.
ReplyDeleteAnother supporting argument for risk-taking is that it can create an opportunity to be exposed to new input. Imagine a situation where you want to engage in a new topic, but aren’t familiar will all of the related language. A “guess” might be all you’ve got. But, your interlocutor’s response can clue you in on the correct form, which can then be learned (I learned new language this way shopping in Spain). They address this in our SLA book, “By encouraging risk-full attempts by the learner to handle complex content beyond the current competence, such conditions of language use may drive learning” (p.63 Ortega). With that in mind, we can say that encouraging guesswork is beneficial to learning.
To borrow again from SLA, we’ve discussed the series of acquisition stages that are universal to L2 learning. Making mistakes is unavoidable. Instead of fearing them, it’s better to encourage students to take calculated risks in order to overcome them, and gain communicative fluency. Just because there is one mistake in a sentence (for example, past tense -ed on an irregular verb) it doesn’t mean the sentence as a whole is a failure. In fact, it shows there are creative processes being internalized, which is good! Additionally, apart from the mistake, there is probably much more in the sentence that is RIGHT –word choice, pronunciation, prepositions, syntax, collocations, etc. I think it’s equally important to recognize what’s right, not merely what’s wrong.
Communication involves many different processes going on all at once. So expecting perfection from a learner is not realistic. Acquiring fluency is about learning to coordinate all of the linguistic processes going on all at once, with the goal of them becoming automatic. This coordination takes practice, and maybe a lot of trial and error before achieving automaticity. During a learner’s performance, one of the “ingredients” in a sentence might be left out at the expense of all the others, and that’s ok. The recipe gets better each time. In my own L2 experience, making mistakes is a learning experience in itself. As soon as I make an error, I am often *painfully* aware of it without anyone needing to tell me. And so I try again. And again. Perhaps many times before getting everything right! But, withholding doesn’t get me there. It takes trying to get better.
Although I did not learn my L2 in a context such as the one described above, I tend to impose those principles on myself and it has taken me quite some time to get over my fear of making a mistake in the classroom. This attitude is a huge hindrance to developing automaticity because your L2 will not ever come out automatically if you are terrified of making a mistake. Also, you might never know the right way to say something if you don't make a mistake out loud. I feel a good way to help students ease into a communicative language learning classroom is to begin by telling students that the point of language is effective communication, not necessarily flawlessly grammatical communication. The idea that all rules of a language must be learned flawlessly on paper before the speaker can use them out loud is simply ineffective, and slows the student's progress toward fluency. The more you speak the faster automaticity develops, of course accuracy is relevant and should be strived for at all times, but not to the point where it impedes on a student's verbal confidence. The principle of meaningful learning discourages rote memorization and encourages the idea of taking in a language in bigger chunks, this is clearly related to verbal communication as sentences/phrases are not made up of bits and pieces, but rather fit together and allow students to become familiar with the syntax and rhythm of the language. A classroom full of verbal L2 use is a classroom full of inductive learning. Basically, I feel that the more comfortable the classroom setting, the more confident students will be to speak, and the more they speak, the sooner they will become fluent.
ReplyDeleteI can say that I have learned my L3 and L4 in an environment where risk-taking was encouraged. As a student I will want to try harder but I can learn from my mistakes. When its ok to make mistakes is ok and not being perfect is stressed more students in the class including myself would answer more questions or proved opinions and that lead to learning from each other as well from the instructor.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have learned talking to my mother, my grandmother worked hard at teaching me proper High German. She wouldn't tolerate mistakes and there was always negative feedback but I learned the language properly and I seemed to have developed my perfectionism from that. This tactic seemed to have worked because by the age of 4 I was speaking at the level of an adult. Would learning a language in this manner work for me now. I don't think so. I need a bit of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Being perfect might look good on paper but in communication outside of a classroom probably won't happen because I am too worried to make mistakes and thus I will not try unless I know that my response or utterance is perfect.
Some students are the types that will not communicate in class unless its perfect and I think it's a teacher's job to allow them to make mistakes and try to provide feedback that will help them because if they are afraid to make mistakes in the classroom they will never speak to anyone outside of it. Practice makes perfect and no one is perfect from the start.
Stefani Goode