Instructed Second Language Learning

• Natural and Instructional SettingsNatural acquisition contexts should be understood as those in which the learner is exposed to the language at work or in social interaction or, if the learner is a child, in a school situation where most of the other children are native speakers of the target language. In instructional environments, the language is taught to a group of second or foreign language learners.

In natural acquisition settings1. Language is not presented step by step. 2. The learner is exposed to a wide variety of

vocabulary and structures. 3. Learners’ errors are really corrected.4. The learner is surrounded by the language for many

hours each day.5. The learner usually encounters a number of

different people who use the target language proficiently.

6. Learners observe or participate in many different types of language events: brief greetings, commercial transactions, exchange of information, arguments, instruction at school and in workplace interactions.

In structure-based instructional settings1. Linguistic items are presented and practised in isolation, one item

at a time, from simple to complex.2. Errors are frequently corrected. Accuracy tends to be given

priority over meaningful interaction.3. Learning is limited to a few hours a week. 4. In situations of foreign language learning the teacher is often the

only native or proficient speaker the student comes in contact with.

5. Students experience a limited range of discourse types.6. Students often feel pressure to speak or write the second

language and to do so correctly from the beginning. 7. Teachers use the learners’ native language to give instructions or

for classroom management.

In communicative instructional settings1. Input is simplified and made comprehensible by the use of contextual cues, props, and gestures,

rather than through structural grading. Students provide each other with simplified and sometimes erroneous input.

2. There is a limited amount of error correction on the part of the teacher, and meaning is emphasized over form.

3. Students tend not to overtly correct each other’s errors when they are engaged in communicative practice. Because the focus is on meaning.

4. Learners usually have limited time for learning. In a typical teacher-fronted classroom with 25-30 students, individual students get very little opportunity to produce language in a 60 minute class, and when they do, it is usually in the form of short response to a teacher’s question. When students work in pairs or groups, they have opportunities to produce and respond to a greater amount and variety of language.

5. As in structure-based instruction, it is usually only the teacher who is a proficient speaker. Learners have considerable exposure to the interlanguage of other learners, particularly in student-student interaction. This naturally contains errors that would not be heard in an environment where the interlocutors are native speakers, but it provides many more opportunities for students to use the target language than is the case in most teacher-fronted activities.

6. A variety of discourse types may be introduced through stories, peer and group work, the use of authentic materials such as newspapers and television broadcasts.

7. There is little pressure to perform at high levels of accuracy, and there is often a greater emphasis on comprehension than on production, especially in the early stages of learning.

8. Modified input is a defining feature of this approach to instruction. The teacher makes every effort to speak to students in a level of language they can understand.

• Teaching and language inputAn important element in L2 success appears to be how learners are treated: the teaching method they encounter, the language they hear, and the environment in which they are learning.The purpose of language teaching in a sense is to provide optimal samples of language for the learner to profit from-the best input to the process of language learning.

What advice can be given about input in the classroom?1. Be aware of the levels at which the learner enters into the

classroom. Over-using teacher talk undermines a communicative classroom.

2. Be aware of the different sources of input. Language may come first from the teacher, second from the textbook or teaching materials, and third from other students, not to mention sources outside classroom.

3. The input that the students are getting is far more than just the sentences they encounter. The whole context provides language.

4. Students learn what they are taught. For ex: students taught by listening methods turn out to be better at listening; students taught through reading are better at reading.

• Processing input and instruction1. Give learners information about a structure or

form.2. Inform learners about a particular processing

strategy that may get in the way of selecting the form/structure during comprehension.

3. Structure input so that learners must rely on form/structure to get meaning and not rely on natural processing tendencies.

Authentic and non-authentic languageA further distinction is between authentic and non-authentic language. Here is a typical textbook dialogue taken from Atlas I.A: H. Are you a new student?B: Yes, I am. I’m Claudia. What’s your name?A: Tom.B: Nice to meet you Tom.This is non-authentic language specially constructed for its teaching potential. People in real-life conversations do not speak in full grammatical sentences and do not keep a clear sequence of turns. Instead they speak like these two people.A: Oh, how extraordianary.B. So….’ cos quite a quite a lot of things like that. A. I mean were they frightened? Cos I think if I actually…B. … saw a ghost because I don’t believe in them really, I would be frightened, you

know to think that I was completely wrong.

This is then an example of authentic language, defined as language «created to fulfil some social purpose in the language community in which it was produced».

Two justifications for the use of authentic text in communicative teaching are put forward by Little et al. (1988):• Motivation and interest: students will be better

motivated by texts that serve a real communicative purpose.

• Acquisition-promoting content: authentic texts provide a rich source of natural language for the learner to acquire language form.

Teachability-LearnabilityLearners can only learn the next stage in the developmental sequence.{ If they are at stage N, they can only learn N + 1.{ If they are taught an N + 3 structure, they cannot learn it.{ They can only learn N + 1.{ This is a testable version of Krashen’s i + 1 hypothesis.

Focus on form and Focus on FormS Following Long (1991), two kinds of form-focused instruction can be distinguished—focus-on forms and focus-on-form. The former involves the pre-selection of specific features based on a linguistic syllabus and the intensive and systematic treatment of those features. Thus, in focus-on-forms instruction the primary focus of attention is on the form that is being targeted. A good example of a focus-on-forms lesson is one conducted by means of ‘PPP’ (i.e. a three stage lesson involving the presentation of a grammatical structure, its practice in controlled exercises and the provision of opportunities to produce it freely). In contrast, in focus-on-form instruction the primary focus of attention is on meaning. The attention to form arises out of meaning-centred activity derived from the performance of a communicative task.For example, students might be asked to perform an information-gap task and in the course of doing so have their attention drawn to one or more linguistic forms which are needed to perform the activity or that are causing the students problems.

• Complexity-Accuracy-FluencyComplexity: This presentes new, cutting-edge, and possibly risky language and foreshadows growth in the interlanguage system.Accuracy: This represents a striving for control and error avoidance, possibly the avoidance of cutting-edge language, and by avoiding fluency to enable more time to be used to achieve higher accuracy.Fluency: This represent a focus on meaning, automatization, lexicalization, and a push for real-time processing.