IH London teachers Melissa Lamb and Richard Chinn stress the importance of listening to learners as their language develops in order to provide useful feedback.
What’s your starting point in a lesson? Fluency or accuracy? If you begin with fluency, then this provides opportunities to give learners feedback on how they have completed a task and on how they could do it better; thus upgrading their current linguistic abilities.
This kind of language is often called ‘emergent language,’ but for our purposes we’ll be using the ‘ing form’ of the word, as we feel it embodies the dynamic nature of how language ‘emerges’ in class.
- What is emerging language?
Emerging language that is unplanned and emerges in a lesson due to the learners need for linguistic input in order to communicate an idea.
- What is reformulation?
Reformulation is when a more knowledgeable other (teacher or peer) remodels what the learner is trying to say into a more natural form. This could be dependent on, a gap in lexical knowledge, grammatical accuracy, pragmatic appropriacy or generally moving the learner on in terms of their development.
- What is the process the learner goes through in order to develop their linguistic knowledge and abilities?
Noticing: The learner becomes aware of the difference in their own language use and the natural features of the Target Language. Input becomes intake – moving from explicit knowledge to implicit knowledge.
Implications for Class
- Training learners in ‘noticing’ language and what features to concentrate on
- The teacher’s duty is to focus on meaning and re-encode the message by making salient the appropriate form
- Giving learners what they need at their point of need
- There are 2 main areas of exploration with emerging language: horizontal (syntagmatic/structure or pattern) and vertical (paradigmatic: meaning)
- Drawing attention to Form from function (syntagmatic exploration)
Hearing learner language
This is an important skill to develop, particularly because it’s easy to grab at something the learner says and reformulate it inaccurately, not conveying the essence of the learners meaning.
Here are some strategies to help with this:
- Practise noting down learner language. Focus on the key messages the learner is trying to put across word for word and whether this communication is successful or not
- Look at this after class and write down what you would say. Where you are not sure what the learner is trying to say, cross it out
- When you become practiced at this, while monitoring or in open class feedback, you can practise ‘recasting’. If you’re not sure what the learner is trying to say, negotiate meaning before you recast
- When you feel comfortable with this, start boarding your ‘recasts’ and focus the learners on the reformulated chunk
- Once you’ve got this down, try some of the below
Reformulated leaner language
Instead of focusing purely on errors, ask yourself how natural the student’s utterance is and what exactly they’re trying to say.
It’s key to really negotiate what the learner means and provide them with a more target like form.
Here are some examples from an intermediate class and a pre advanced class. See if you can tell which is which.
Focusing on emerging language
So, what do we focus on exactly?
Recording Language on the board
As you are monitoring you can select language for the feedback stage. In some ways this language is going to ‘feedforward’ to another task or for learners to take with them.
Here are some choices that you have to focus on at this stage:
These are options which focus on form and provide a way of introducing, correcting or reformulating language. You can select what you will put on your board when monitoring.
Remember that you still have to be systematic when dealing with language, and learners need appropriate information with sufficient depth in terms of meaning (e.g. questioning), highlighting form and phonology (connected speech, prominence etc.).
You should also be selective about the language you highlight in response to learner needs.
Further ideas for focusing on, consolidating and recycling emerging language:
- Delayed or on the spot (delayed avoids interrupting learners on task – on the spot is more immediately important)
- Say something similar (teacher reads out 2 sentences and asks the learners to spot what is different)
- Count the words you hear (focus on recognition and phonology)
- Progressive deletion
- Create a poster summarising/categorising what you have learnt
- Create a dialogue, tutor reformulates and learners compare to their original text
- Silent drilling and shadow repetition
- Which would you say? Which would I say? (comparing on cards). Listen to the learners on task and write up what they said on cards and what you would say on other cards. The learners match them up and then you look at features of the language
- Students select the phrases they feel are useful and design a practice activity for other students or visa versa (mini whiteboards)
- Recycling cards and recall activities (see Nick Bilbrough’s book Memory Activities published by CUP for more ideas on this)
- Task repetition
- Flash the chunk up for a few seconds and then learners write what they remember
- Number the sentences and the learners throw dice. The leaner who throws the dice needs to recall the sentence and then the group need to put it into a meaningful context. The teacher checks and reformulates individually or delayed
- Dictionary/corpus work to find other patterns and collocations
What are your thoughts on these activities? Are there any of these you’d like to know more about?
10 Reasons for focusing on emerging language
- The learner – Psychological validity (Johnson 1988 in Thornbury 1997): Learners are more predisposed to notice features relevant to the task they have performed
- Theory of learning: ‘Matching’ (Klein 1986 in Thornbury 1997) or rather ‘noticing the gap’ in their current stage of interlanguage. Ellis (1995 in Thornbury 1997 ) uses the term ‘cognitive comparison’, as learners compare what is similar to the target form as well as what is different
- Teaching and the learners needs: responsive as more immediate in terms of linguistic need
- Avoids the hit-and-miss nature of prescriptive and traditional instructional methods, e.g. PPP
- The focus is on encoding a message and has relevance to the real world
- Encouraging learners to notice fosters learner autonomy
- It takes the individual into consideration and their needs
- Reformulation provides a model for more natural behaviour in the language (lexical, grammatical use, discoursal)
- Metagcognitive awareness: learners can develop strategies to become better language learners
- Allows for exploration of language using metalinguistic means (good learner training) – it provides a way to talk about language in the classroom and for students to investigate language
What are your views? How do you deal with this language in class?
Further reading
See Scott Thornbury’s article on this subject:
Thornbury, S. 1997 Reformulation and reconstruction: tasks that promote ‘noticing’ ELTJ 51/4 OUP
CELTA, CLTA and CPD
At IH London we have training courses for English and European language teaching and career development.