Spada, Chapter 5 - OBSERVING SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING

1. Comparing instructional and natural settings for language learning

NATURAL ACQUISITION CONTEXTS - those in which the learner is exposed to the language at work or in social interaction, or (in case of children) at school where most of the students are native speakers of the target language.

TRADITIONAL INSTRUCTIONAL ENVIRONMENTS - those in which the language is taught to a group of second/foreign language learners the focus is on the language itself, not on the information the goal of the students - to pass an exam, not to learn the language

COMMUNICATIVE INSTRUCTIONAL ENVIRONMNETS - focus on learning the language itself, but the instruction emphasises interaction, conversation and language use

There are 2 types of communicative instruction:

1. task-based instruction - topics of general interest to the learner are discussed (for example, how to reply to an advertisement)

2. content-based instruction - students are learning a subject-matter (history, maths and so on) through the medium of the second language student's success is measured by his ability to “get things done” in the second language, not to master the grammatical rules

characteristics	Natural acquisition	Traditional instruction	Communicative instruction
Error correction	rare	frequent	limited
Input gradation	none - language is not presented step by step	Input is structurally graded, linguistic items isolated	Input is simplified and made comprehensible, but not structurally graded
Time for learning	Almost unlimited, many hours a day	A few hours a week	A few hours a week, but time can be added by immersion courses* (see below)
Ratio of native speakers to learners	Very high	The teacher - the only native or proficient speaker	The teacher - the only native or proficient speaker; students also exposed to other learners' interlanguage(which contains errors)
Variety of language and discourse types	Many different types of language events and written forms	Limited range of language and discourse types, written language selected to represent specific grammatical features	Variety of discourse types introduced through stories, role playing, “real-life materials”: newspapers, TV programmes
Pressure to speak	High, but the emphasis is on getting meaning across clearly	Great pressure to speak and write correctly	Emphasis on comprehension rather than production
Access to modified input (comprehensible for learners)	Available in one-to-one conversations	Teachers often use the learners' first language to give instructions	Modified input - a defining feature of this approach

*Immersion courses - courses in which most of all the subject-matter is taught through the second language to a group of students who are all second language learners

STRUCTURE-BASED APPROACHES - emphasise language form through either metalinguistic instruction (for example, grammar translation) or pattern practice (for example, audiolingual). The whole lesson or segment of the lesson is organised around a specific feature of the language. Error correction is frequent.

Types of questions often asked by teachers:

a) display questions - those to which the asker knows the answer in advance; they're asked in order to practice a given grammatical structure. The research shows that display questions are most often asked by teachers.
“Are you a student?” a question asked to a student in a classroom

b) genuine questions - the answer is not known in advance; they're asked in order to obtain an information, meaning

“Where does your uncle work?”

2. Classroom observation schemes

Classroom observation schemes can be used to describe a range of teacher and learner behaviours. Many of them have been developed.

COMMUNICATIVE ORIENTATION OF LANGUAGE TEACHING (COLT) Observation Scheme - developed in 1995 by Spada and Fröhlich. Has about 70 categories divided into two parts.

Part A - describes teaching practices in terms of content, focus and organisation of activity types. It helps determine whether the pedagogical activities are teacher- or learner-centred, whether the focus is on language for or meaning and whether there are opportunities for students to choose the topics for discussion.

Part B - describes aspects of the language produced by teachers and students. It helps describe how much language students produce, whether their language production is restricted in any way, the kinds of questions teachers ask and whether or not teachers respond to students' errors.

The COLT and other observation schemes can be used in the training of new teachers, as well as in the professional development of experienced ones.

3. Feedback in the classroom

Some of the classroom observation schemes focus on feedback only.

Roy Lyster and Leila Ranta observed French immersion classrooms and developed a model that describes different types of feedback on errors and students' immediate response to them (= the uptake).

Types of feedback (in order of frequency of use):

1. Recasts - teacher repeats the student's utterance minus the error. They generally are implicit, not introduced by phrases like “You mean…”

2. Elicitation - consists of three techniques:
   - eliciting completion of the student's utterance (like: “It's a ???”)
   - using questions to elicit correct forms (like: “How do we say x in Polish?”)
   - asking students to reformulate their utterance (like: student: “He cleans all the plate” teacher: “He cleans all the???” student: “Plates”)

3. Clarification requests - indicate to students that their utterance has been misunderstood or is ill-formed, and that a repetition or reformulation is required. It includes phrases like “Pardon me”, “Excuse me” or a repetition of the error as in “What do you mean by…?”.

4. Metalinguistic feedback - comments, information or questions related to the form of the student's utterance, without explicitly providing the correct form. It generally indicates that there is an error somewhere, or points to the nature of the error using grammatical metalanguage. It can use phrases like: “Can you find the error?”, “What is the ending of the 3^rd person verbs?”, and so on.

5. explicit correction - explicit provision of the correct form; the teacher clearly indicates that the student made a mistake (using phrases like: “You should say”, “Oh, you mean”, or similar)

6. Repetition - teacher's repetition of isolated student's utterance in which error occurred. In most cases the teachers adjust their intonation so that the error is highlighted.
   

Student's uptake (response to the feedback, correction) is most likely to occur after elicitations, clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback and repetitions. It is least likely to occur after recasts (which are the most frequently used techniques).

Recasts are also least effective in content-based second language classrooms. The students assume, that the teacher is responding to the content of their speech, rather than its form.

Types of input:

1. Comprehensible input - the meaning is the clear priority in the interaction. No specific aspect of the language is targeted

2. Structured input - the learner's attention is explicitly drawn to a specific feature of language, for example a tense.

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