Acquisition or learning, comprehensible input or correction?

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
21

[quote=“lostinasia”]Just to be a bit cynical for a moment about error correction: most of us here are hired as teachers. Yes, our philosophical/ pedagogical goal is to improve our students’ English, but our students/ employers want us to be teachers. In Taiwan, and most everywhere actually, that means they expect us to correct mistakes.

Whether or not error correction particularly helps students, I do find it useful as a technique because it helps make students BELIEVE that something is actually going on. With private students, this helps lead to continued employment; in a classroom, it helps avoid the “English is a joke and my foreign teacher is a clown!” attitude that develops all too easily. I certainly don’t make error correction a major focus, but I throw it in there, because that’s what the student - the customer - expects.

I guess I view error correction as something like dressing professionally. It’s not a crucial part of teaching, but it makes people think you’re a teacher.

(I also find error correction useful with complacent writing students that think they simply need to “fine-tune” their English and don’t realize their grammar is a disaster - and I see more than a few of these in my university classes. But that’s not what the OP is talking about.)[/quote]

Well, I have never heard of a placebo effect in language acquisition. Your other points about what is expected of teachers, and what the punters want, are well taken. Unfortunately teaching is a field in which most people feel they are fully qualified not only to comment, but to tell the teacher how to do the job. Just because they speak some language, they are language teachers I chew a lot, but that doesn’t make me a dentist. :smiley:

It become a balancing act of evaluating your situation and that of the students and management. Do they really want language improvement over all else? Or are issues of face/respect/expectations/teste/etc, etc, at a higher priority? Every situation has a unique mix of these factors. When I talk about language acquisition and how to teach language, I am always picturing the ideal situation where no one is going to second-guess the teacher, because they have left him or her alone long enough to appreciate the results. Believe it or not there ARE some situations like that. In Taiwan…well…not so sure. :astonished:

22

That is one of the struggles I have always felt that I have had when trying to learn Chinese. The Chinese teacher wants to go from 0-90 in five seconds. I feel the best teachers for beginners are people who can break things up into bite size chunks that only focus on one grammar point at a time. We need slow pitches directly over the heart of the plate. I’ve tried explaining this to some of my Chinese teachers and they do it a few times, but when they think I’ve mastered it they nail me in the stomach with a ninety-mile-an-hour fast ball that they haven’t properly pre-taught and prepared me for :fume: .

23

I agree with Fox and Dial. The students need to think analytically in order to make a commitment to change.

Do the students really and honestly, at an emotional level, understand that this stuff is important?

It is NOT stressed in high schools that verb conjugations are part of the structure of the language, in fact I’ve met very few high school English teachers who ever stop to think about language as having a structure. They treat it all as vocabulary, which means that if you use slightly the wrong word then there’s no real harm done.

I am reliably informed (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less) that Asian languages generally leave it to the listener to decode meaning, whereas European languages place far more of an onus on the speaker to be precise about the message being conveyed. Think then speak vs listen then think.

If your students don’t ‘grok’ that, for instance, “yesterday I go” contains two contradictory pieces of information about time, then they will never really care enough to fix their bad habits. Remember, “yesterday I went” and “yesterday I go” are the same in Chinese. If they’re still applying Chinese ‘logic’ and values to their English, you have no hope. First, you have to make them really want to stop saying things that make them look stupid.

One exercise I do with every new group is to have them count words. Give them an article, something generic and authentic, doesn’t matter what. Ask them to count the words. Then ask them to count how many times the word “the” appears in the article. It should be about six percent.

Six percent. I usually do this exercise after someone tells me that their ‘hobby’ is “see the movie”.

You used “the” incorrectly. That one word is six percent of everything. Six percent of everything you say may be wrong, all the time. This may not be a totally fair or acccurate interpretation of the real situation, but it serves to illustrate the importance of what I call “the small words.” It gets them thinking.

Then try having them count these: the, be, of, and, a, in, to, have, it, for

These are the ten most common words in English. (Actually, they’re the 11 most common because “to” is listed twice, as a preposition and an infinitive marker.)

Together, they should account for about 25% of all the words in the article. One quarter of everything you say may be wrong if you can’t get these words right.

TEST THEM. Give them something to fill in with these words replaced by blanks. Throw in a few blanks where they are likely to add a/the/to etc. Let them see that they are failing to use the basic building blocks of English.

FWIW, in the British National Corpus, the 117 most common words together account for 50% of everything.

There are almost no nouns in that 117, and very few adjectives. Fifty percent of English is … describing relationships between ‘stuff’ and the most common relationship to describe is time. All the variations of have and be are there in the 50% list. If you can’t use these words properly then HALF of everything you say is wrong. This shit is important! Fix it.

They usually get the message, and then it’s just a case of reminding them to think about it and not letting them persist with habitual patterns. I usually do a victory lap of the classroom if someone manages to tell a story in the past tense without fucking it up, because it means I’ve won. Make a big deal out of it when they get it right, because it is a big deal. Nobody ever told them that before.

24

[quote]I am reliably informed (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less) that Asian languages generally leave it to the listener to decode meaning, whereas European languages place far more of an onus on the speaker to be precise about the message being conveyed. Think then speak vs listen then think.
[/quote]

That’s very true. The other day we got a translation for a sawmill that had been turned into a commemorative museum as a result of Typhoon Morakot. The museum has been constructed and they want to make an introductory video and explanations of all the different stuff. I got the rough translation but it was impossible to decipher, because the information needed to be precise. Every time I asked the translator for clarification she couldn’t give it to me because the Chinese just wasn’t precise enough without the full context.

25

[quote=“Fox”][quote]I am reliably informed (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less) that Asian languages generally leave it to the listener to decode meaning, whereas European languages place far more of an onus on the speaker to be precise about the message being conveyed. Think then speak vs listen then think.
[/quote]

That’s very true. The other day we got a translation for a sawmill that had been turned into a commemorative museum as a result of Typhoon Morakot. The museum has been constructed and they want to make an introductory video and explanations of all the different stuff. I got the rough translation but it was impossible to decipher, because the information needed to be precise. Every time I asked the translator for clarification she couldn’t give it to me because the Chinese just wasn’t precise enough without the full context.[/quote]
Is this issue of ‘precisesness’ a linguistic or cultural thing? I have had conversations with gfs that were as vague as all hell and I don’t think it was to to language difficulties. I have foudn these people to be phenominally vague in speaking when both parties are speaking the same language.
I think part of this has to do with the face issue. When they are worried that the news will not be to the listeners liking, or when they are trying to get their way they give non-answers to questions, answer 'I don’t know :idunno: , or answer your question with a question and make it difficult to find an answer. Another favorite is ‘It depends…’ :wall:

26

As cynical as I am about Chinese culture, surely people don’t have too many difficulties in communicating because things still happen, or do they really happen that inefficiently? It seems counter-intuitive to me that a language would develop that would impede communication.

27

But language isn’t impeded between two native Chinese speakers. I’m not the most fluent Mandarin speaker here, but I know enough to feel safe in saying that Mandarin is generally a much more nuanced language. English is one of the most “brief” languages on the planet. I mean to say, there are fewer ways to express things in English and we DO depend much more heavily on grammar and structure to convey meaning.

I like Loretta’s stats, and I think that his methods, especially for middle aged business men, are good and likely effective. He is doing a great job, it sounds like, of instructing language use.

But this means that for him/his students, language is a business tool. It’s like if he gave me an iphone and then had to spend 30 hours instructing me on it’s proper use (and he’d have to do that :blush: ).

Language can be a tool. Language is used.

But language is also alive and dynamic, and not just a means to an end. If you can get a student to AQUIRE language, it’s like implanting the iphone in his/her head. They can rely on it in real time. They don’t have to take it out of their pocked and tap on the screen with a stylus–even for a couple of seconds.

So, I think the end goals of these different teaching methods are not the same.

I’m not, and I don’t think that Ironlady is, against error correction. We are against OVER correcting a beginning student. Communication MUST take place for language to be aquired in the brain. It cannot simply be a tool used to pass a test. It must be meaningful for the student. This is because our brains are so efficient and will skip non-essential “noise” in the persuit of comminication.

I learned to self correct in Spanish because my Spanish speaking friends would correct me in real time, or laugh at me in real time. But the point is, they were in it for the conversation–the communication still took place and we did not get side tracked or stopped because of my errors. I didn’t need to be corrected more than two or three times before I could aquire the correct usage–because I was in it for the communication. AND because I’d already aquired the language around the mistake!!

My Spanish instructor used to say, “If you can’t get in the door, go through the window.” And he meant to do what you had to do, say what you had to say, to be understood.

It’s a good metaphore. If you had a friend who would show up at your house, shout your name, and climb in through a window, what would you do? You’d say something like, “Damn, Housecat, there’s a door bell out there. Stop doing that!” And the next time I climbed into your window, you’d take me by the hand and show me the door bell–and maybe the key under the mat–and say, “stop doing that!” And then the next time I came to your house, I’d know how to use the door!

But if I just showd up at your door and you told me you weren’t going to open the door until I said the magic word, and said it correctly, then I’d quit going to your house!

28

housecat, what a wonderful Southern analogy! :smiley: I like that metaphor.

29

[quote=“Loretta”]I agree with Fox and Dial. The students need to think analytically in order to make a commitment to change.
[/quote]

That, to someone who believes in acquisition trumping learning, is like saying to someone, “You must make a commitment to grow taller.” The last thing I want a student with basic grammar issues to do is to get them to think analytically (unless I’m stressing editing a piece of writing, and there’s no way or time to work on the student’s grasp of English separately from the written product). Being told to be analytical and apply rules is how he got into that mess in the first place. I want to “trick” his mind into acquiring the correct patterns so that they just fall out of his mouth correctly.

[quote]TEST THEM. Give them something to fill in with these words replaced by blanks. Throw in a few blanks where they are likely to add a/the/to etc. Let them see that they are failing to use the basic building blocks of English.

FWIW, in the British National Corpus, the 117 most common words together account for 50% of everything.

There are almost no nouns in that 117, and very few adjectives. Fifty percent of English is … describing relationships between ‘stuff’ and the most common relationship to describe is time. All the variations of have and be are there in the 50% list. If you can’t use these words properly then HALF of everything you say is wrong. This shit is important! Fix it.

They usually get the message, and then it’s just a case of reminding them to think about it and not letting them persist with habitual patterns. I usually do a victory lap of the classroom if someone manages to tell a story in the past tense without fucking it up, because it means I’ve won. Make a big deal out of it when they get it right, because it is a big deal. Nobody ever told them that before.[/quote]

Having them get the message is great, but I do not believe that the follow-up of “not letting them persist with habitual patterns” and “reminding them to think about it” will actually result in long-term acquisition of correct English. It will likely produce short-term improvement, and it IS still input, so it’s something, but the teacher can be providing five or six correct “input units” of a certain structure in the time it takes to ask the student to stop cold, apply a rule, and produce a correct utterance.

If these methods DID result in rapid acquisition of the correct grammar patterns of a language, the students in Taiwan would be fluent.

There are times when, due to circumstance, one is reduced to the “apple…apple…banana…banana…” sticky-ball school of Engrish teaching. But if you have the freedom to do something more, I would strongly advise getting away from the traditional wisdom involving error correction and output being the road to fluency and accuracy.

30

That’s an odd comment to make, I think. There’s often disagreement about this, but many people say that English has the largest vocabulary in the world by far, with estimates of the number of words ranging from about 600,000-1,000,000, with the next closest languages (aside from those where new words can be created simply by stringing existing words together in long chains of infinite variation) several hundred thousand behind. Certainly for verbs and adjectives, there are usually at least two forms, one of Germanic origin that is the common usage and one that is of Latin origin via French that is a bookish form, and often there’s also a word that is more directly from Latin or Greek that is a medical or technical term. There are also slightly archaic versions of the same words. Of course, there are also all of the modern business/American forms where nouns are turned into verbs. Any glance at a thesaurus will show that English does not have only a few ways of expressing things. Also, English has an enormous number of idioms. Chinese speakers often remark to me that idioms are really difficult to learn because there are so many of them. As for grammar simplifying things, I find that if I am correcting a student’s essay, I can usually find at least four ways to rewrite the same sentence to convey the same meaning.

31

IL, I think you’re misunderstanding me.

My point is that the students are not really learning, and not really listening. They think they’re there to ‘practise’ what they already ‘know’ and will hear what they want to hear when I speak to them. They don’t differentiate between “I went” and “I go” in their own heads, both are equally comprehensible to them and they will draw their own conclusions about when I “go” based on the context, without taking any notice at all of the grammar I use. It’s something they feel they can safely ignore, as long as they recognise one as a variant of the other.

They recognise ‘the right answer,’ the gist of what I’m saying, but don’t produce correctly because they’re not differentiating between my English and theirs. It all translates to the same thing in their own heads, and the meaning depends on context. It’s a Chinese way of thinking that is blocking them from making progress, and won’t change until they understand why it should.

Like Housecat said, Chinese is more nuanced, but the nuances depend a lot more on the vocabulary or word combination. They don’t communicate meaning by conjugating verbs differently, or really differentiate between verbs, adverbs and adjectives. I had a student a few days ago stumbling over the word “competent” because she was familiar with the word “competency” already and couldn’t let go of it. We read the paragraph several times, me modelling it for her, but she couldn’t say the word. In her mind, the two were the same and there was only one way to say it.

Finally, I pointed out that one was a noun and one was an adjective. She sat there for a loooong moment staring at the sentence, coming to terms with this new and exciting piece of information, muttered “IS competent” and then read the sentence out loud without a hitch.

Having been compelled to actually parse the sentence and understand what it meant to me, rather than just comprehend the input on her own terms, she understood where her problem lay and fixed it.

32

[quote]
That, to someone who believes in acquisition trumping learning, is like saying to someone, “You must make a commitment to grow taller.” The last thing I want a student with basic grammar issues to do is to get them to think analytically (unless I’m stressing editing a piece of writing, and there’s no way or time to work on the student’s grasp of English separately from the written product). Being told to be analytical and apply rules is how he got into that mess in the first place. I want to “trick” his mind into acquiring the correct patterns so that they just fall out of his mouth correctly.[/quote]

Learning a language is like playing a sport or an instrument. An instructor can teach you the fundamentals but you cannot perform well if you are thinking about how to do it. I think that in language, sports, and playing an instrument there is a key link. The link is that your brain and muscles need to be trained to act without thinking. In these three activities the goal is not analytical instruction but doing exercises/drills that will lead one to react without thinking when the time comes to use one of these skills.

33

[quote=“ironlady”][quote=“Loretta”]I agree with Fox and Dial. The students need to think analytically in order to make a commitment to change.
[/quote]

That, to someone who believes in acquisition trumping learning, is like saying to someone, “You must make a commitment to grow taller.” The last thing I want a student with basic grammar issues to do is to get them to think analytically (unless I’m stressing editing a piece of writing, and there’s no way or time to work on the student’s grasp of English separately from the written product). Being told to be analytical and apply rules is how he got into that mess in the first place. I want to “trick” his mind into acquiring the correct patterns so that they just fall out of his mouth correctly.[/quote]

I strongly disagree with the last part.

The average Taiwanese ADULT learner is in a mess because she never stopped to think about what she was saying, and has been allowed to get away with sloppy English for years. She believes that it’s OK to disregard the basic rules “as long as she gets the message across.” If she has the habit of thinking about what she is saying, then she does not usually need to take an adult English class.

Growing taller is not a choice. Remembering the difference between go and went is something that they’re all capable of if you teach them that it’s important. It’s a choice they can make. They don’t do it because they don’t care, and it doesn’t matter how many examples you dump on someone if they automatically translate them to a language that doesn’t make these distinctions.

Once they get that it’s important, they need to practise thinking in terms of “what’s the correct grammar?” rather than automatically repeating the same thing they’ve been saying since they were 12.

34

Sounds like the Audio-Lingual (Army) method. It was one of the first methods used as a classroom method along with the direct method. When I fist started teaching that was how we were expected to teach. There is something in it, but also you get people learning long sentences where they have no idea of the meaning.

I’m one of those teachers that puts communication as the primary experience. I think that is the basic function of language and whatever facilitates it works for me as a teacher. However, I also know that it can be very frustrating when students continually make the same errors. I think to help them over come that they need to be getting a lot of similar content (grammatically) in many different contexts including explicit grammar, but not limited to that.

35

Some time ago, someone on these boards recommended that every adult English class should begin with the question “what’s new and interesting in your life?”

An interesting observation coming out of that is that a great many students will reply “my interesting is see the movie” or similar garbage indicating that they don’t know the difference between interest (noun) and interesting (adj). In fact, a lot of adult learners had trouble understanding that the question refers specifically to recent events, of general interest, in the lives of the students. They’ll talk about ‘news’ on TV, their hobby when they were ten, where they went on holiday five years ago, but completely fail to realise they have to describe something that is new, interesting, and in their life. They don’t understand the question.

You can spend hours repeating comprehensible examples of the correct reply, or you can just ask them to explain the difference between “interest” and “interesting”. Then they think about what they’re doing wrong and correct it.

In recent months, I’ve taken to devoting an hour or more to having a group analyse a bunch of common greetings in terms of what the basic form of the reply should be. Is it a question about you, your life, or your activities, or events happening to you? Am I looking for an adjective, or an action? Active or passive? etc.

How’s it going?
How are you?
What’s going on?
What’s up?
What’s new?
How are you doing?
What are you up to?
What’s happening?
etc.

Until they are compelled to think about this stuff they will respond “fine” or “nothing special” to almost every question, if you let them. Once they figure out what is appropriate, they will try to come up with something suitable, and it quickly gets easier. Every subsequent class now begins with me challenging everyone with a random unpredictable question that they generally manage to answer without too much difficulty. And their fluency increases as they find that they can actually speak better English, for the first time since they gave up hope a decade or more ago.

The point is that until you make them think, they will persist in ‘translating’ everything to fit their own understanding. Your input is wasted if it’s not processed properly.

On the other hand, once you get them thinking, I definitely agree that they need to hear good English and lots of it. I’m increasingly of the opinion that S-S interactions are harmful, because they ‘translate’ bad English into good Chinese, and reply with the same garbage. Nobody picks up anyone else’s mistakes, so they persist. Once you get a group properly re-oriented, and if you can find reasonably interesting topics, they can start to police each other in limited circumstances - which means that everyone is thinking about what is being said and what the correct form should be. But the teacher needs to be much more central than I was a few years ago.

Still, just getting them to chat with each other so that they’re not shy is an important step too. Once everyone is comfortable making mistakes, it’s a lot easier to get over them.

36

Agreed.

This, too, I agree with, although, I don’t know if understanding has to come before language input; I’d tend more towards moving back and forth between them as seemed useful.

I’ve tried to get my students to do this. At the bottom of my way-back-in-another-thread-now-post was the implicit question - ‘how do I get my students to be more aware of their mistakes?’ - and from there start to self, and other, correct. Here’s where you (Loretta), I, and Fox, agree, and Iron lady disagrees. We all think it’s necessary to activate the student’s awareness of their own language learning and processes. She doesn’t seem to think this helps, beyond the most minimal correction, if I understand her correctly.

And some good points made about making students aware just how vital it is to speak correctly. I tried to make the same point to my gf a while back when I told her that she would understand her own use of language easily because of the context and insensitivity to (or out and out ignorance of) precise language cues. Whereas, I, and other native speakers, could actually find ourselves confused when hearing tenses/genders/plurals used incorrectly. And get sort of exasperated…

37

This is a useful conversation Iron lady, you’ve provoked me into going back to the books that were my guide when I first started the class referred to in my OP. It’s been quite revealing. Authored by two profs from the School of Linguistics and Applied languages at Victoria University in New Zealand (Nation and Newton, Teaching ESL/EFL - Listening and Speaking, Applied Linguistics Series, Routledge, 2009) To quote from page 1:

[b]The basic argument of the book is that a well balanced language course should consist of four roughly equal strands. That is 25 percent of time for each strand.

  1. Learning through meaning-focused input; that is, learning through listening and reading where the learner’s attention is on the ideas and messages conveyed by the language.
  2. Learning through meaning focused output; that is, learning through reading and writing where the learner’s attention is on conveying ideas and messages to another person.
  3. Learning through deliberate attention to language items and language features; that is learning through direct vocabulary study, through grammar exercises and explanation, through attention to the sounds and spelling of the language… (they go on for several lines)
  4. Developing fluent use of known language items and features over the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing; that is, becoming fluent with what is already known.[/b]

They have this to say about comprehensible input: ‘Although many researchers criticise Krashen’s (1985) input theory, none would disagree with the idea that meaningful comprehensible input is an important source of language learning’… And, indeed, throughout the book, there is ongoing support for Krashen against his critics. That said, they also have this to say: ‘Compared with well-planned deliberate learning, incidental learning through input is fragile and is dependant on large quantities of input to gain sufficient repetition’ (Nation and Newton, p. 4)

What I take from this is that, while they do support the notion of comprehensible input as vital, they also place it within a framework whereby 25 percent of the time is given over to deliberate attention to ‘language items and language features’

Back to my class, which I approached under the influence of these two antipodean profs. The past year I’ve tried to fulfill this approach in my own fumbling fashion. I believe I’ve provided a ton of comprehensible input in the form of level appropriate, stimulating class material. I regularly give them readers/carefully chosen fiction as out of class input. And to add to that, they do the extra-class activities already mentioned. - they are very motivated pair. Yet, to my mind their progress is insufficient. Assuming for the sake of argument that their progress actually is insufficient, why is this so? Certainly more input would help, but looking at 1-4 in the prof’s list above, I’d say 3 is where they are most lacking. And my instincts say the same thing. They’re learning to cope with more and more difficult situations while still retaining a core of garbled language habits. How to address these habits is best done by putting a spotlight on them and getting the students brains more consciously involved. So I believe… I could be totally wrong, of course. I’m going to go back and try out some new things with the class as suggested in the original thread. Let’s see where they are in two/four/six months time.

If you care to speak more precisely to this actual class, what do you see as the way forward?

38

I think my comment to the textbook writer is that my 95-5 or 90-10 figures come from years of a group of teachers actually varying those proportions with students and seeing what happened. Professors are all very well and good, but they are rarely actually instructing the disciplines they pronounce their theories about (this includes Krashen, BTW…it took actual teachers with actual students to operationalize what he was talking about.)

I’m an applied linguistics sort, so I’m more interested in what’s called “action research” (provided the design is acceptably rigorous – much of today’s “action research” is just a knee-jerk reaction to get “those in the trenches” to do research at any cost, IMO). Too much of academic writing in language acquisition consists of people quoting people quoting people who never taught a day in their life, or if so, taught so long ago that they’re out of touch with classroom realities.

You need to sort of finesse what I’m saying based on the actual psychological reality of your students, their attitudes, the pressures they are coping with vis a vis their English, etc. etc…but basically, I would say this.

There is absolutely no point in going on with “advanced” stuff until these students have acquired basic English. You need to dress things up so that they feel that they are still interested in what’s going on in class (more personalization, perhaps exaggeration, use of interesting topics, etc.) but you still need to be banging on those basic patterns over and over in a principled way until they are acquired. The only way I know that will make that happen is input bolstered by small amounts of explicit instruction.

Most of the “art” in teaching via CI, IMO, comes in disguising the input, once you’ve learned to limit your own speech to the language you want to present. The really good CI teachers are providing almost constant comprehensible input, but the students don’t realize it – they are concentrating on the meaning, and it is through comprehension of these basic structures over and over that the grammar of the language will be built correctly in the brain.

39

I don’t think so.
Had the average Taiwanese learner been taught English via CI, which means that she would have been hearing correct English and concentrating on the meaning it conveys, with frequent comprehension checks to make sure that comprehension was in fact correct, she would not need to resort to the conscious application of rules to speak correctly. It’s not a matter of regarding or disregarding the rules. Native speakers – and fluent second (third, fourth…) language speakers – do not consciously apply rules for basic sentence patterns or phonological processes and things like that.

[quote]Growing taller is not a choice. Remembering the difference between go and went is something that they’re all capable of if you teach them that it’s important. It’s a choice they can make. They don’t do it because they don’t care, and it doesn’t matter how many examples you dump on someone if they automatically translate them to a language that doesn’t make these distinctions.
[/quote]

Ah, here is the crux of the difference in philosophy between a CI-based teacher and a non-CI-based one. CI-based teachers believe that it’s not about the student not caring, or not doing their homework, or not studying. We believe it’s simply a matter of the student not having had enough comprehensible input. The only effort required on the part of the student is to try to understand, and to answer questions that allow the teacher to know whether or not the student has correctly understood. CI-based teachers figure you can’t fight the brain; it acquires the way it acquires. All we have to do is provide the classroom-based input and take credit for (God’s, Nature’s, biology’s, evolution’s) results.

Rule application is probably the greatest destroyer of fluency. You can know thousands of words, but if you have to stop and search for how to express the comparative, or consciously use a rule to change your verb so that “he is doing it” rather than “they are doing it”, it will stop your speech dead in its tracks.

Only if they are in a situation where editing is possible and advisable (they know the rule, there is time to apply it, they realize it needs to be applied). In speech, this is usually not practical. Calling on students to consciously apply rules produces the “look up, think of the rule, whisper it to yourself to see how it sounds, then hesitantly make the sentence” kind of output seen so frequently in English classes.

Students who have acquired the language often say that the language just “falls out of their mouths” or something like that. They don’t need time to identify which rule to use, think of how to plug this particular set of words into the rule, and output the result. They don’t have to think about it. Even in writing tasks in the lower levels (where those basic grammar patterns are being acquired) most CI teachers impose a really short time limit – say, 100 words in 5 minutes – to make it impossible for students to stop and apply rules.

Basically, this is the same sort of debate that occurs all the time when CI-teachers come into contact with non-CI teachers (who are still in the majority in most places). Because the two approaches are almost totally opposite in a very basic sense (the roles of output and correction are very sensitive topics in most academic circles) usually the whole discussion ends up in a “we’ll have to agree to disagree” situation.

CI-based instruction sees anything that does not produce acquisition (CI and minimal direct instruction in structure and usage) as “extra”. Some extras are important – they may have a social function, an administrative function, a psychological function. But they are not central to getting the person to acquire the new language. “Traditional” instruction (if I may so term it) does not focus on input to that extent, and definitely does not handle input in the same way (the repetition, the frequent comprehension checks, etc.) and spends a lot of time on things that CI teachers regard as “extras”.

It may be that you’re thinking of these students as advanced because of their years in class already, and so thinking that more emphasis on accuracy and form is needed. I agree that as students advance, we do expect more from them on correctness of form, but I also believe strongly that the students you are talking about are just not advanced. I don’t care how many hours they have studied English; if they haven’t acquired the basics, they’re not advanced. (Of course, saying that doesn’t do much for the buxiban’s retention rate. :smiley: Those pesky social and institutional factors coming out to bite acquisition again!)

40

Grammar instruction is useful if it is clear, concise, readily applicable, actually understood and easily used. In other words practically never. What they need to know is what “they” mean to say. Work up from that. If they stumble and bumble around about it great! There is something you can teach them, how to say what they want to say. If they have to say it in Chinese that’s OK too. Just translate it. When they speak English they’ll generate “Yesterday I go movie,” so say "WENT."They’ll say “Huh” so you say “Yesterday you WENT to the movie. It’s in the past (guoqu) so that’s how you say it. Yesterday I WENT to the movie.”

“Oh.”

“I WENT to the movie yesterday too. God it was great. I WENT with my friends. We WENT to the theatre beside the trainstation? Did you GO to the theatre by the trainstation?”

“No”

Oh, that’s too bad. I wentuhthuhtheatrebythetrainstation" Everytime I go to a movie I go to the theatre by the trainstation. I go to a lot of movies. Almost every day. Yesterday I went. The day before I went. Two years ago I went and I am glad I did. I love that theatre. Which theatre did you go to?

“Dunno.”

“Did you go the theatre in Xinyi?”

“No.”

“You DIDN’T go to the theatre in Xinyi. Did you go to the theatre in Xinmending?”

“Yes, I went to the theatre in Xinmending.”

Fabulous! You WENT! to the theatre in Xinmending! What movie did you see?

I see Rambo.

SAW.

HUh?

You SAW rambo. That’s geat. I saw rambo too. I saw it with my friends. I saw is at the…

ETC.

The alternative to that is make yet another tedious slog through the issue of irregular verbs, usages of the past form, how it is mitigated by the use of did in questions and negatives and ask them to think through all that crap whan all they really need is to HEAR “YOU” SAY WHAT “THEY” WANT TO SAY. Lot’s of times (hence the tape recorder). When you get to things they will likely need to say in the near future, say it with them and get them to pronounce it almost perfectly, completely connected and completely reduced. It’s FUN to do that and help improve listening comprehension. Just ask another question and the conversation is off again.

It’s absolutely bizzare to me to hear of people using grammar textbooks and the like. What people remember best is the things they create together with other people. All you really need is an empty notebook, a tape recorder, and a really good LEARNERS dictionary IMHO.

For outside text use DVDs. People “like” movies at least.

I’ve been teaching pretty much that way for years except eventually the tape rcorder goes off as there is less crap grammar to clean up and we just talk, usually about movies. Recently more ToeflIbit students having been passing by and I swear to god EVERY one has shown phenomenal improvement, at least on the listening comprehension section.