[ Video Resource ]
- Title: Introductory Video
- Description: Spontaneous Interaction Resource
- Video Duration: 8 minutes
- Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/973530005
- Transcript: Tēnā koutou katoa.Welcome everyone to this presentation. Ko Monique Anderson tōku ingoa. I'm the Learning Area Lead for learning languages subjects within the NCEA Change Programme at the Ministry of Education.This will be the first in a series of short videos which will introduce and unpack key ideas from a resource entitled: “Spontaneous interaction in language learning: ideas for the development of fluency”.A full version of this resource
Tēnā koutou katoa.
Welcome everyone to this presentation. Ko Monique Anderson tōku ingoa. I'm the Learning Area Lead for learning languages subjects within the NCEA Change Programme at the Ministry of Education.
This will be the first in a series of short videos which will introduce and unpack key ideas from a resource entitled: “Spontaneous interaction in language learning: ideas for the development of fluency”.
A full version of this resource, including reference and hyperlinks to some of the research and related support material mentioned, is also available on the NCEA website.
Before digging into some of these key ideas, it is first important to have a clear understanding of why interaction should be such a significant aspect of language learning in the first place.
One succinct answer is provided by Professor Rod Ellis in his original list of 10 principles for instructed second language acquisition, which were distilled from a Ministry of Education commissioned review of the available research literature on language learning in 2005.
Principle 8 in the list of 10 states that the opportunity to interact in the additional language is central to developing additional language proficiency. In other words, providing a focus on interactive skill development plays a huge part in ensuring students acquire overall ability in the target language.
There is something about the combination of actions required to participate in a conversation — comprehension of the partner’s input, construction of one’s own output relevant to the context and negotiation of meaning between the two — which really helps to reinforce and extend on a student’s linguistic skill set.
In further support of this idea, investigations combining cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging technology and language learning have also shown some indications to suggest that social interaction is crucial when children learn an additional language.
In studies conducted by researchers Kuhl, Tsao and Li, in 2003, American babies exposed to Mandarin Chinese through pre-recorded audio visual or audio only material did not demonstrate learning of Mandarin phonetic categories, whereas babies who were exposed to the same material through a live condition, i.e., through an experimenter interacting with the infant during learning, did acquire that skill.
While adolescents or adults studying a new language can clearly call on more sophisticated cognitive skills than babies to support their learning, such as pattern recognition, application of ground rules and rote learning of new vocabulary, this type of evidence does suggest that social interaction may also play a hugely significant role in the development of proficiency in a new language at any stage of life.
Beyond the sphere of research, it is also clear that being able to converse with someone else in the target language lies at the heart of what language learning is all about. If you can’t engage in real time “in the moment” conversational exchanges, then it is difficult to say that you have truly learnt the language.
Additionally, for languages going through a process of revitalisation, being able to spontaneously speak in that language, especially as a vehicle for everyday communication, is absolutely vital to reaching goals for its increased usage and visibility.
To achieve intergenerational transfer, the target language needs to be the functional vehicle for communication in the home and community, and this requires family members to have adequate skill in spontaneous interaction.
Finally, the new NCEA learning matrices for language subjects also make clear that the development of interactive skills and strategies is a piece of significant learning that should feature in any secondary language programme. Copies of the learning matrix for each NCEA language subject can be downloaded from that subject’s learning tab on the new NCEA website.
The interactive capability is considered so important it is also the focus of one of the four new achievement standards in all language subjects, which will be assessed through the reviewed national secondary school qualification, NCEA. You can find more information about this assessment, achievement standard 1.1, in the assessment tab of each language subject on the new website.
Now that we have established the importance of interaction, let’s turn to the content of our resource, which aims to provide some key ideas to think about when planning to support the development of spontaneous speaking or signing skills in a language course. Near the beginning of the document, and visible on screen now, are the five key ideas we will be unpacking. These will each be the focus of five related short videos.
Key idea #1
Provide lots of quality, comprehensible spoken or signed target language input.
Key idea #2
Incorporate lots of opportunities for students to speak or sign from the beginning.
Key idea #3
Sequence speaking or signing activities to move from highly scaffolded to free production.
Key idea #4
Build awareness of the process and strategies involved in oral or signed language acquisition.
Key idea #5
Spend sufficient time on fluency development and introduce “desirable difficulties”.
It’s worth pointing out that these are not meant to be an exhaustive list of ideas. There may well be others of equal importance, but it’s often helpful to focus on a limited number of concepts to keep things manageable.
That concludes this initial video, which introduced the importance of interaction in a languages programme. Key ideas 1 through 5, and associated example activities, will be unpacked in separate short videos, like this one, to support programme design that includes a focus on the development of skill in spontaneous interaction. These videos, along with the complete PowerPoint resource, including reference links, are available to download on the new NCEA website.
[ Video Resource ]
- Title: Key Idea #1
- Description: Spontaneous Interaction Resource
- Video Duration: 11 minutes
- Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/973512540
- Transcript: Nau mai
Nau mai, hoki mai. Welcome back to the series.
The purpose of this video is to unpack the first key idea introduced in a companion resource entitled “Spontaneous interaction in language learning: Ideas for the development of fluency”, which is available on the new NCEA website.
Key idea #1
is that we, as language teachers, should design courses which incorporate lots of quality, comprehensible spoken target language input, or, in the case of NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language), signed target language input.
Sufficient exposure to comprehensible spoken or signed target language is vital to the development of speaking skills or skill in signing. So, ensure the incorporation of lots of listening activities or language input at the right level of difficulty that model the kind of output you want from students.
It's great to start with this idea because it’s very easy to forget that producing language doesn’t come from practising that skill in isolation. It comes after the student has also been exposed to a lot, and I mean a lot a lot, of the target language that they can attach meaning to or is comprehensible from context, and potentially the use of other supports.
I think we probably all know this instinctively from being aware of how babies and small children learn their first language. That is to say, they spend about the first two years of their lives being immersed in language during their waking hours and being interacted with in that language, and it’s only towards the end of that time that they start saying comprehensible single words or very short combinations of words independently.
But we can sometimes forget the significance of that exposure period in our rush to make progress through the curriculum.
Of course, we know that language teachers will sadly not have anywhere near the same luxury of time to help students develop an additional language as they did to acquire their first. But it is useful to remember how important it is to really model the kind of language output that we eventually want them to use. Part of that involves reminding ourselves as teachers that we shouldn’t rush students to independent language production and to remember that maximising our own use of the target language in the classroom is so important.
We are such a vital source of accessible language, and we can be interacting all the time with the students. When selecting other types of language input, whether spoken or signed, to expose our students to, we should remember to regularly choose recordings that also model the level of interaction and interactive strategies that we eventually want them to produce on their own.
Many textbook-style listening passages tend to focus far more on presentational style output rather than interactive style examples. The conversations that are there often tend to be more used to exemplify a particular grammar point or vocabulary, rather than to emphasise question, answer, and reaction patterns or strategies for clarifying or extending on the contribution of partners.
After introducing the first key idea of the importance of intensive receptive practice, before moving to productive work, the resource provides a couple of activity suggestions to exemplify possible ways to focus on listening in the classroom. The first example is one suggested by the language teacher, writer, blogger, and keynote speaker Gianfranco Conti, and it appears on his related website called “The Language Gym”. Conti calls this activity “spot the nonsense listening”.
Essentially, this is a really quick activity that Conti suggests teachers can create themselves, based on whatever language or context they are currently working with. The idea is to get students to listen really intently to a series of target language sentences and to have them identify the absurd words or phrases in the sequence that don’t fit the context. Something similar could be done for NZSL by viewing a series of statements.
On the first time of hearing or viewing, all students have to do is to note whether each sentence is possible and makes sense or is impossible or completely absurd. In subsequent listenings or viewings, they could try to provide an alternative to the identified silly word or phrase so that it will make sense.
In the examples provided on the screen we have the question “What did you do last week?” Answer: “I swam to the supermarket”. Students would obviously put an “I" for impossible after that sentence.
And then they might subsequently correct the sentence by changing the verb “swam” for “walked” or “went” or something similar, or by swapping “supermarket” for something more related to swimming like “island” or “other side of the river”.
The second impossible example could be altered to read: “My brother fell asleep on the sofa” or similar.
The second sample activity we have in the category of ensuring lots of comprehensible input as part of eventual spoken or signed interactive skill development, is one that comes from another language learning blogger, Liam Printer, though I believe he actually attributes the concept to other language teachers when he introduces it in Episode 15 of his “The Motivated Classroom” podcast.
This activity is referred to alternatively as the “special person interview” or the “star of the week”, and Printer promotes its use not only as it provides a huge amount of opportunity to model target language question and answer structures, but also because it enables relationships within the class to be strengthened, as the purpose of the interviews is for everyone to find out more about the chosen interviewee.
Initially, he recommends modelling a 5-minute interview at the beginning of the year with a made-up character or even a soft toy or cut out of a person who will stand in for a real student. This helps to introduce the activity without putting anyone on the spot or making them feel too exposed too early. Then he models the kind of question-and-answer technique the students could use to find out about someone else but is sure to pick interesting topics or responses to keep everyone’s attention. For example, “What’s the strangest food you have ever eaten?”, or “What superpower would you choose?”, et cetera. He also recommends only continuing for a maximum of 5 minutes.
As the year progresses and the class’s relationships and sense of a supportive learning community have been well established, he recommends choosing a real student each week to be the interviewee or star. Perhaps starting with the most extroverted members and eventually to allowing students to conduct the interviews by themselves.
Special person or star of the week interviews provide lots of opportunity for teachers to model and support students to produce question and answer patterns. Knowing how to formulate questions is absolutely fundamental to being able to initiate and to maintain an interaction with someone else.
Being able to ask questions is also a wonderful linguistic survival skill, particularly if you are having a conversation with a native speaker or someone with greater proficiency than you have. You can continue to prompt the conversation even if you don’t have a full range of vocabulary and structures, as long as you can manage to ask questions at regular intervals.
Printer recommends using a question circling technique during these special person interviews to establish patterns and has the class chorus answers which helps make the activity adaptable to both beginner and more advanced learners, and allows the teacher to use the activity to introduce new vocabulary.
The range of question types includes closed questions with a negative answer, either/or questions, closed questions with a positive answer, and open questions.
So if the question was “What is your favourite ice cream flavour?”, the interviewee can respond in a single target language word or even in English if they don’t have the vocabulary and the teacher can then model the full sentence target language answer and subsequently circle closed and open question and answer patterns to reinforce the language and structures necessary to keep the whole class engaged throughout the 5-minute activity.
Examples in English of the closed, either/or, and open question types a teacher might use are on the screen currently.
That concludes this focus on key idea number 1. Key ideas 2 through 5, and associated example activities, will be unpacked in separate short videos like this one to support programme design that includes a focus on the development of skill and spontaneous interaction. These videos, along with the complete PowerPoint resource, including reference links, are available to download on the new NCEA website.
[ Video Resource ]
- Title: Key Idea #2
- Description: Spontaneous Interaction Resource
- Video Duration: 7 minutes
- Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/973541675
- Transcript: Nau mai
Nau mai, hoki mai. Welcome back to this series.
This video unpacks the second key idea introduced in a companion resource entitled “Spontaneous interaction in language learning: Ideas for the development of fluency”, which is available on the new NCEA website.
Key idea #2
Incorporate lots of opportunities for students to speak, from the beginning.
This is based on the concept that we inevitably do best what we do most often. So therefore, we should be incorporating lots of low-stakes, highly supported speaking opportunities from day 1, from beginners through to advanced, as this is a way to normalise the activity and helps to reduce student anxiety around vocalising or communicating in the target language.
In this period of NCEA reform, we might be tempted to only prioritise the incorporation of regular speaking or signing activity for those classes preparing for national assessments. However, we need to reflect on what we are doing in our junior classes also, and how we're paving the way for the development of interactive skills. It’s not something that we can assure simply by cramming practice sessions just prior to high-stakes assessment.
The more familiar the act of interacting in the target language is, over an extended period of time, the easier it will be for students to eventually submit evidence against an interaction assessment.
Being asked to produce “in-the-moment" spoken or signed content can be quite confronting for many adolescent learners of a new language, as they will be so aware of how imperfect their communicative skill set may be and will have to manage the fear of potentially making embarrassing mistakes in front of peers.
If producing spoken or signed language is a routine and expected part of every lesson, this will help to reduce the nervousness and worry that students may associate with it.
The activity example presented in the resource for this key idea is just one of a myriad of speaking or signing activities that teachers can use to normalise and support the use of the target language by students in the classroom, even at a complete novice level.
I’m sure that you and your colleagues in schools will have many more examples that could be used in this category. Here, to illustrate the point, we’ve included another communicative task from Gianfranco Conti. He calls this the “reading aloud game” or “sentence stealer game”, and it can be adapted to basically any language content you might be working with, particularly with novice learners, but it’s potentially also useful for more advanced learners to ease them into more challenging tasks.
Reading aloud in pairs or small groups is non-threatening. It helps to improve decoding skills and train students to produce target language sounds, thereby contributing to the development of oral fluency.
Step 1 of the activity is to show a list of 12 to 15 target language model sentences that students have been practising and already understand the meaning of. Step 2 is to give each student in the class a set of 4 blank cards and to tell them to select any 4 sentences from those listed, and to write one of these sentences on each of their cards. Step 3 is the beginning of the game.
The aim of this game is for students to steal as many cards as possible from their classmates within the allocated time period. Perhaps a minute or 2. To steal a card from someone else, one student needs to approach another and read any four sentences chosen at random from the list on the board. If any of these sentences matches 1 of the 4 which the other student has written on their cards, that student will need to hand over that card. Step 4 is the end of the game, where the student with the most cards accumulated is declared the winner.
The second example activity in this category is about using images, gesture, and body language to reinforce and introduce key question words, and then use these prompts to support students to have extremely simple question-and-answer exchanges in target language right from the very beginning stages of language learning. An example of how to incorporate gestures with question words in Spanish by the English language teacher, researcher, and professional learning facilitator Rachel Hawkes is linked to in this part of the resource.
Gestures are a great way to prompt students to use questions in their initial interactions with others in the target language and combining physical movement with sound is likely to help students to remember and retrieve particular words more easily. Once key question words such as what, who, when, et cetera, as well as some other pieces of basic response vocabulary, have been introduced, students can be scaffolded to produce spoken interaction very early on in a sequence of learning. Teachers might put together a series of prompt cards, for example, like the ones on screen, which students could use in pairs to sustain a basic exchange along the lines of:
“What?” “Football.”
“When?” “Tuesday.”
“Where?” “The park.”
Being able to communicate and highly simplistic but still effective target language from the outset helps to reinforce students’ early sense of competence in a language classroom and, by extension, their motivation to keep engaging in the necessary long-term practice needed to embed interactive fluency.
That concludes this focus on key idea #2. Key ideas 3 through 5, and associated example activities, will be unpacked in separate short videos like this one to support programme design that includes a focus on the development of skill and spontaneous interaction. These videos, along with the complete companion PowerPoint resource, including reference links, are available to download on the new NCEA website.
[ Video Resource ]
- Title: Key Idea #3
- Description: Spontaneous Interaction Resource
- Video Duration: 11 minutes
- Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/973502730
- Transcript: Nau mai
Nau mai, hoki mai. Welcome back to this series.
This video unpacks the third key idea introduced in a companion resource entitled “Spontaneous interaction in language learning: Ideas for the development of fluency”, which is available on the new NCEA website.
Key idea #3
Sequence speaking or signing activities to move from highly scaffolded to free production.
Key idea 3 connects to and extends on key idea 2. It focuses on the importance of carefully sequencing the kind of speaking activities we use in our language classes so that students have lots of chances to produce the target language successfully. Begin with highly scaffolded spoken output and move progressively to opportunities for free expression.
This means not progressing too rapidly to less supported tasks. Making sure that students have the communicative skills to do well and therefore reinforce their sense of themselves as competent language learners.
Language teachers are already likely to be incorporating supported or scaffolded speaking activities into the range of tasks they provide their students. However, it is also quite easy to underestimate how much time students need in supported communicative activities before they can really confidently move to free production, and how useful it is to gradually take the trainer wheels off, so to speak, and to incrementally progress to free expression, rather than going from full linguistic hand holding to “off you go, you're on your own” with nothing much in between.
As competent speakers, it is easy for teachers to assume that certain communicative tasks are too basic to spend much time on. We might also be in a hurry to get to free production, because we assume that that type of activity is intrinsically more engaging for students.
However, we forget that motivation for learning isn't exclusively found in exciting contexts, although they do help. Student motivation can also be fed by ensuring that students feel successful in their language learning journey and are reinforced in their sense of competence as learners. Appropriately sequenced communicative tasks can help to maintain that idea of competence.
Liam Printer, the Irish language teacher, researcher, and presenter mentioned in an earlier video on key idea 1, has a lot to say about how to support student motivation and language learning, including how to ensure students feel competent.
Anyone interested to find out more can check out his “Motivated Classroom” podcast, particularly episodes 1, 3, 5, and 7. The link is included in the reference list at the end of the full resource.
Let’s have a look at some of the activity examples provided in this section of the resource which illustrate a few possible approaches to scaffolding oral or signed production, and move from highly supported to increasingly free.
The first suggestion, which is again sourced from Gianfranco Conti’s “Language Gym” site, is an example of a very directed communicative activity whose purpose is to give students the opportunity to practise language they are already familiar with and to show them how they can build sentences from very simple statements to progressively more complex phrases. Conti calls this type of activity a “pyramid translation".
It's worth pointing out that this wouldn't be considered a truly communicative-type task in which the understanding of participants and how they negotiate meaning using the target language is the main purpose of the activity. This kind of exercise is all about narrow skill building, specifically how you get from very basic utterances to more sophisticated sentences, and would be combined with a range of other activities which all work towards getting students to ever more successful free expression.
In our example, students work in threes: 2 players and a referee. The referee is supported by having reference to an answer sheet. The 2 players take turns translating each sentence orally or in sign from the top of the pyramid within a given time period. If the first one to attempt it makes a mistake, the other player has a turn, starting again from the top of the pyramid. Whoever translates each sentence aloud, or in sign, in the target language, without making mistakes and within the given time, is the winner.
The chosen sentences on the provided cards will reflect the particular topic or range of language which the class is currently working on. Our sample focuses on the past tense and the key verb “studied”. The first sentence is “Last week, I studied.”. This progresses to “Last week, I studied with classmates.”, and “Last week, I studied with classmates for a test.”, and so on, with increasing detail added at each step.
The second activity type in this section is one based around providing sentence frames or sentence builders to support students to put together comprehensible questions and answers during a scaffolded interaction. It is a less highly controlled type of activity than the pyramid translation presented previously, as when using sentence frames, students will have more agency to choose from a number of options, as opposed to having to follow an example sentence exactly.
On the screen we can see an extract of tables which provides specific ways of starting a sentence and then options for the way students might finish their phrase. So there is limited choice in terms of what to say, but also security in knowing that any choice will result in an accurate phrase. For example, in the left-hand table, students could build a “what” question type, which supports them to formulate the sentence “What shall we do?”, and then gives them a range of time references to complete the question: this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow, next week.
On the right-hand side, they are supported to construct a response which will start with “Let’s”, complemented with the choice of either “go to” or “meet at” and then a range of destination choices: the beach, the movies, your house, the shopping mall, to finish their answer.
A range of different sentence frame conversation builders could be made into laminated place mats that students could take to work with in pairs or small groups to practise constructing interactions.
Sentence frames are also adaptable, so you could make ones which feature progressively less support and therefore more opportunity for free language use as student proficiency improves. For example, teachers could also have a version of this sentence frame conversation builder where the final column is blank and students are invited to finish the questions or answers with an appropriate conclusion entirely of their choosing.
It’s helpful to model the construction of questions as well as answers when we make sentence frame scaffolds. As was mentioned in an earlier video, knowing and practising how to formulate questions is key to being able to initiate and sustain interactions. While some languages are easier to construct questions in than others, it’s always important to spend equal time enabling students to build questions as it is to construct answers.
The final example in this section represents a much freer type of support and focuses on written interactions, or perhaps in the NZSL context, the use of social media apps to create brief signed video posts which can be used to interact with. While practising written interaction might not seem on the surface to be related to the development of spontaneous skill in oral exchange, like most aspects of language, they are interconnected.
Oral interaction, as well as more spontaneous signed conversation, involves both expressing ideas and “in-the-moment” understanding. You need to react and respond to or extend on the ideas expressed by others. It requires a lot of thinking on one’s feet and practice to be proficient at it, and so is an example of a very free type of target language production.
Written interaction, particularly mediated through modern technologies provided by smartphones and social media applications, approximates some of the required spontaneous engagement with the thoughts, information, and questions of others, while still giving students a little more support than with spoken conversation, as the medium provides greater thinking time and the opportunity for a bit of review and adjustment before settling on a particular contribution to an exchange.
Even low-tech versions of a written interaction, such as an exchange generated on mini whiteboards or even on pieces of paper, can allow for good interactive practice without provoking the same kind of performance anxiety as is sometimes associated with face-to-face, immediate conversation. Having a written back and forth can also help to solidify vocabulary, sentence patterns, and interactive strategies, which can then be applied in an oral exchange.
That concludes this focus on key idea #3. Key ideas 4 and 5, and associated example activities, will be unpacked and separate short videos like this one to support programme design that includes a focus on the development of skill and spontaneous interaction. These videos, along with the complete companion PowerPoint resource, including reference links, are available to download on the new NCEA website.
[ Video Resource ]
- Title: Key Idea #4
- Description: Spontaneous Interaction Resource
- Video Duration: 11 minutes
- Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/973469437
- Transcript: Nau mai
Nau mai, hoki mai. welcome back to this series.
This video unpacks the fourth key idea introduced in a companion resource entitled “Spontaneous interaction and language learning: Ideas for the development of fluency”, which is available on the new NCEA website.
Key idea #4
Build awareness of the process and strategies involved in oral or signed language acquisition.
The image on this slide shows a picture of a whole lot of crumpled paper, and then finally, a perfectly folded origami paper crane. This is a visual reminder of the repetition and mistake making that is necessary to acquire skill in a language.
In its entirety, the key idea reminds us that we should let students in on the “how to” of spontaneous speech acquisition so that they understand the process involved. Explicitly showing them helpful tips, tricks, and strategies, and making them aware of the time, mistake making, and practice required.
This key idea is an important one, both to support student motivation to continue with language learning and to assist them in becoming efficient and effective learners while they study.
It also connects really strongly with one of the big ideas which appears in all of the international languages learning matrices, as well as in the NZSL matrix, which is:
Language learning is an empowering process that involves risk-taking and fosters resilience and perseverance.
We know that even students who continue their language study through to Year 13 still have a long way to go before becoming truly fluent speakers of the language. It is important that they realise that this is normal, but also that there are approaches and strategies that they can employ to help accelerate and support their learning journey, both in their current language and in any subsequent language study they might engage with.
It's very much the idea of equipping kids not only with the content: vocab, grammar, communication practice, et cetera, but also with the “how to” of language learning, the “thinking like a linguist”, which will help them to recognise and embrace the kind of repetition, targeted listening, engagement with others, and errors that are necessary to making progress and interacting in a language.
There are lots of ways that we, as teachers, can draw our students’ attention to process and strategy. Some of these may be formal activities — and we’ll introduce a couple of those in a moment — and some may be more incidental, “in the moment” reminders.
The first of these more formal activity examples is on screen now. It’s an inquiry chart reading activity or “I” chart reading activity. With beginners, you’re likely to have to do an activity like this in English as the language demands in the readings will be well beyond what these students would be able to handle in the target language. But for Year 12 or Year 13 students, in some languages, you may be able to find similar links in the target language so that the activity has a dual process of awareness and language development function. Essentially an “I” chart or inquiry chart reading activity involves posing a number of key questions about a topic of interest and then using 3 or 4 texts to investigate, compare, and contrast the available answers.
In our example, the topic is “Learning to speak a language” and we have generated 3 related questions to find out the answers to.
Question 1: How do babies learn their first language and why is this useful for us to know?
Question 2: What are the most important things to do to learn a new language? and
Question 3: Can you learn to be a fluent speaker or user of a new language using only online tools? Why or why not?
Before assigning the reading texts to the class or to groups of students, encourage students to discuss what their predicted answers to the questions might be. They could also suggest an additional related question they might like to try to answer through reading. After reading the assigned texts, students summarise the information from each text, which provides an answer or partial answer to the questions posed.
Depending on the texts, students could also note which ones do not address a particular inquiry question and which texts provided additional interesting detail, which didn’t strictly relate to the key questions.
The final step is for the class to discuss key findings and what useful conclusions they might draw for their own language learning experience. The complete version of this I-chart, including links to possible texts, is available in the full PowerPoint resource.
The second activity example in this section is also an interesting one to consider. This focuses on actively bringing students’ attention to the kinds of compensatory strategies that learners could and do use to practise and maintain use of a target language while working with a rudimentary or limited linguistic skill set.
The flower-shaped diagram in the resource on screen has compensatory communication strategies at its centre and then, in the surrounding petals, has a range of strategies or techniques which students can employ to help support them during interactions in a new or additional language. These range from:
- Asking for help or clarification in the target language — the kind of formulaic questions such as “Can you repeat that?”, “What does that mean?”.
- Playing for time — having a set of stalling or all-purpose filler expressions that can be used to give you time to retrieve more specific vocabulary and phrases. You know, the “Oh what a great question”, or “Let me just think about that”, kind of expression.
- Steering the topic is another strategy. Knowing how to move the communicative focus onto an area that you can confidently contribute on and away from one that you are perhaps not so confident in.
- Using circumlocutions, synonyms, or all-purpose words when you can’t remember or don’t know the exact term or expression. You might be able to say long, yellow fruit for example, if you can’t remember how to say banana.
- Avoiding structures you haven’t quite mastered yet is another strategy. This involves finding other structural work arounds to say more or less the same thing, even if your ideas have to be simplified a bit.
- Or, lastly, combining speech and gesture, or speech and facial expression, to help fill in gaps in lexical knowledge or to help reinforce ideas that are more difficult to do in words.
This range of strategies is taken from the work of Rebecca Oxford, originally published in a book called “Language Learning Strategies: What every teacher should know”, but it’s also available online in various formats and linked to in the reference list at the end of the resource.
A key value of incorporating reference to these kinds of strategies is that it normalises and reinforces the idea that language learning is a marathon, not a sprint, and that employing workarounds and compensatory measures is the sign of an effective learner, rather than evidence to the contrary. Something like this validates and acknowledges that spontaneous communicative skill does not develop fully formed. You work with partial control and build incrementally.
It's also useful as it draws students’ attention to what they can do if they get a bit stuck when communicating. It’s so easy just to have a mind blank in those situations, so having a visual reminder with examples in the target language of ways to keep the conversation moving is super helpful.
In addition to the compensatory strategy placemat, teachers might also think about developing reference material to other types of interactive strategies. Perhaps once students have developed sufficient basic skills. These strategies are not so much compensatory for limitations as the kind of techniques that can be used to make the overall quality of an exchange better. Things like careful listening to, or observation in the case of sign, of the interaction partner’s contributions to identify information or ideas that can be commented on or extended further, or practising patterns of questioning that start from open and then move to more targeted queries to help draw out or build on conversation.
That concludes this focus on key idea #4. Key ideas 1 through 3, as well as 5, and associated example activities, are unpacked and separate short videos like this one to support programme design that involves a focus on the development of skill and spontaneous interaction. These videos, along with the complete companion PowerPoint resource, including reference links, are available to download on the new NCEA website.
[ Video Resource ]
- Title: Key Idea #5
- Description: Spontaneous Interaction Resource
- Video Duration: 17 minutes
- Video URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/973455992
- Transcript: Nau mai
Nau mai, hoki mai. Welcome back to this series.
This video unpacks the fifth and final key idea, introduced in a companion resource entitled “Spontaneous interaction in language learning: Ideas for the development of fluency”, which is available on the new NCEA website.
Key idea #5
Spend sufficient time on fluency development and introduce desirable difficulties.
Key idea 5 is that it is important to spend sufficient time on the “fluency strand” of a course in order for learners to automatise the language they are taught. This is because automatic recognition and retrieval of relevant language is foundational to the development of spontaneous speaking or signing skills.
For this reason, we have the image of a conveyor belt in a distribution warehouse, where items of interest are picked automatically from storage shelves and sent to their required destinations.
Before looking at some examples of ways to work on the fluency strand within a language course, it is a first important to address the question of what is meant by the term “fluency strand”.
The “fluency strand” is a concept that has been written about by Professor Paul Nation, who is an Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington and an internationally recognised scholar on the topics of language teaching and learning. Amongst other references to the idea, Professor Nation had a research summary published in 1994 called “Listening and speaking: Vital parts of any second language programme” in which he talked about the 4 strands of a well-designed listening and speaking course, with fluency development featured as one of these strands.
A representation of these strands appears in the resource on spontaneous interaction development and is visible on screen now. When we look at the chart, 3 of the 4 strands are things that most experienced teachers would be expecting to see in a language course, meaning focused target language listening or input. Basically, providing opportunities for students to be exposed to the language and to interpret information it provides. We did talk about this with our key idea #1.
Form-focused instruction is another of the strands, which is things like deliberate teaching of vocabulary and structures or building awareness of grammar patterns. And meaning-focused speaking, the third strand, which is essentially lots of opportunities to try communicating in the target language. Again, something that we discussed as a key idea earlier. The fourth strand is fluency development, and this is something we've not touched on so specifically until now.
Interestingly, according to Professor Nation, it is recommended that a roughly equal time, overall, is dedicated to the building of fluency as to the other 3 strands, but also that as students’ progress to intermediate and advanced levels of linguistic proficiency, fluency development should start to take up proportionately more course time.
So what exactly is fluency development?
In the words of Professor Nation, in another article called “Improving speaking fluency”, fluency development is the time spent in class on activities which enable the learner to integrate previously encountered language items into an easily accessed, largely unconscious language system, as a result of focusing on the communication of messages. In other words, spending enough time on retrieving and reinforcing the familiar, things students have already been taught, in meaning-focused speaking tasks so that this language can eventually be called upon without undue effort.
Gianfranco Conti mentions Paul Nation’s fluency strand in one of his blog posts. And he talks about it in terms of the work needed to automatise language knowledge. Basically, the intentional, frequent, and distributed opportunities for students to recall, use, consolidate, and render automatic the spoken or signed language skills they have been taught.
Conti talks about how, in the initial phase of learning any new language, we make significant improvements really quickly. We can go from knowing nothing about how to refer to past events in a target language, for example, to happily putting together a range of past tense sentences over a fairly short time period. He also notes that this initial apparent mastery is often then measured by some sort of formative assessment, which shows that most students have tended to pick up the new concepts relatively well, at which point many teachers feel understandably free to move on to the next unit or concept.
However, Conti’s point is that without the right fluency activities built into the rest of the programme, automatic retrieval of this earlier learning just won’t happen. Students won’t be able to call on that prior learning to communicate at the moment they need it.
Automatisation of language skill, is a long process, so Conti’s suggestion is that our language course design should allow for lots of recycling, task repetition, and fluency practice once students have mastered the content of a unit of work.
In that same blog post, he also mentions that this automatisation practice is so important because it is essential for spontaneous language use, such as is required in a true, meaning-focused interaction. And it enables students to use what they have learnt more flexibly in real-life exchanges.
That ability to retrieve and apply language to a range of different communicative situations is the other key part of fluency development. It’s not just about having sufficient repetitions of language, but also about setting up performance challenges in its use, such as having increasingly less time to do the same communicative activity, or calling on previously learned linguistic content after a break focused on other things, or needing to apply familiar vocabulary and grammar but in a new or different context, or having to complete the same task, but with a different person whose responses and input will not be totally predictable.
Conti talks about this in his article “En route to spontaneity: The curve of skill acquisition and its implications for the language classroom” and also mentions how this idea of desirable difficulties in the learning of a new skill was coined by professors of psychology Elizabeth and Robert Bjork from 1994 onwards, citing studies that show that deliberately making things a bit hard on yourself as a student (though in a good way) when you’re practising a skill can enhance learning.
They discussed the importance of varying the conditions of practice, saying “When instruction occurs under conditions that are constrained and predictable, learning tends to become contextualised. Material is easily retrieved in that context, but the learning does not support later performance if tested at a delay, in a different context, or both.”
They referred to studies of children’s learning from the late 70s, amongst other evidence, which illustrate the benefits of varying the conditions of practice. In one study, children practise throwing bean bags at a target on the floor. One group always threw from the same fixed distance, while another group had to throw from varying distances either closer to or further away from the target. When the throwing accuracy of both groups was then tested from the same distance used by the fixed practice group, the group who never practised from the exact testing distance actually did better than the students who only practised from the testing distance.
The conclusion drawn was that training which takes place under novel or varied conditions can actually be more effective in developing new skills and something that could well apply to other types of learning, including language acquisition. So let’s look at some examples included in the resource of what these desirable difficulties might look like in the languages classroom as part of fluency development, leading to spontaneous interaction.
The first example is a classic of language learning technique. Conti refers to it in his writings. Paul Nation conducted well-known research into its effectiveness much earlier than Conti and, in turn, cited an even earlier description of it by K. Morris in 1983, in an article called “The Fluency Workshop”.
Essentially, it consists of giving a learner a communicative task in the target language. After a short period of preparation time, say a few minutes, the learner is paired with someone else and has 4 minutes to deliver their talk to that person. At the end of that time period, and in some variants, there may be an opportunity for feedback from the listener, the first student swaps partners and delivers the talk again, but this time has only 3 minutes in which to do so. Finally, there is another swap, and the talk is delivered for the third time with only 2 minutes available in which to complete the task. Other variants have a fourth repetition with only 1 minute available, or a change in audience size.
The contents of the talks can match any linguistic context with which the students are already familiar, and the activity can be repeated over time and distributed at varying intervals throughout a course.
Paul Nation’s research into this technique showed that the effect of the repetitions not only improved the smoothness and speed of delivery, the fluency, but also the accuracy apparent in the language use.
Nation theorised that this may not only be to do with the increased confidence that repetition of a task provides, but also with familiarity over content freeing up the brain to pay more attention to the form of language while it’s being delivered.
The next example we have is an activity called “Find someone who”, described by Conti in another blog post entitled “Another oral-skills-enhancing instructional sequence on the route to spontaneous talk”. As with “432”, it’s a task that can be adapted to almost any language content and it also includes practice of question-and-answer formation. Basically, to prepare, each student is given a card with some made-up personal details. This could be basic things like name, birth date, hobbies, et cetera, or more advanced things such as weirdest food ever eaten or ideal future partner.
Once students have had the chance to think about how to ask and answer questions related to their fictional persona, they are also given a “Find someone who” grid, which requires them to discover the names of the people in the class who fit a series of descriptors.
Students then circulate around the room, asking each other questions so that they can identify the person who fits each category. You could increase or decrease the degree of difficulty of the activity by the choice of questions students are allowed to use to find the right person. Closed questions such as “Do you hate Facebook?”, for absolute beginners or more open questions like “What’s something that you really hate?”, for learners with a little more language. Even more advanced students might not be given exact matches between the persona cards and the “Find someone who” cards. For example, “Find someone who is environmentally conscious. Give two pieces of evidence to justify your choice”, might be matched by someone whose persona card said “Your pet peeve is people who drop litter”, or “You drive an electric car”.
As with “432”, the great thing about this sort of activity is that it can be used over and over with different language and contexts each time. It’s also great that it puts an emphasis on the questioning technique as well, which is so crucial for initiating and maintaining interactions.
Our last activity example is called “Pyramid Discussion” and is also a staple of language learning tasks written and spoken about by many researchers and scholars in the field. A pyramid discussion is a speaking activity or signing activity where learners form progressively larger groups as they carry out a speaking task, which normally requires each grouping to reach agreement before joining another group. This provides the opportunity for repetition, which is also present in the “432” activity or the “Find someone who”, and the communicative variant of speaking to different sizes of audience at each repetition. Like those other tasks, it is adaptable to a range of communicative content. In the resource, we model a “decide who is the best superhero” context from a list of 4 possible heroes, but many other contexts would be possible, as long as they are calling on language that students have already been introduced to and have some mastery of.
This is a particularly good activity for practising communicative functions, such as expressing and justifying opinions, agreeing and disagreeing, negotiating, and summarising, all of which are particularly applicable to the context of an interaction.
It’s important to remind everyone, though, that these are just a very limited range of possible activities and certainly in no way represent an exhaustive list. Teachers watching this webinar and the ones prior focused on the other key ideas will no doubt have other tasks that they’re already using which also fit this fluency development category. And there are other suggestions in some of the items listed in the references on slide 24 of the spontaneous interaction resource.
The most important point to take away is to think about how to deliberately include the fluency development strand into the design of our language programmes so that students get sufficient opportunities and sufficiently distributed opportunities to automatise language combined with variation in the conditions of production so that they can adapt to the unrehearsed and unscripted nature of interactions.
And that concludes this focus on key idea #5. Key ideas 1 through 4, and associated example activities, are unpacked in separate short videos like this one to support programme design that includes a focus on the development of skill and spontaneous interaction. These videos, along with the complete companion PowerPoint resource, which includes reference links, are available to download on the new NCEA website.
Thanks for watching.