7th LAb session from RILAE

Research Institute for Learner Autonomy Education (RILAE). 7th LAb session.

Friday 3rd December 2021. Agency and learner autonomy Location: Online (Zoom – free, but please pre-register)👇

https://kuis.kandagaigo.ac.jp/rilae/lab-sessions/lab7/

Featured speakers:

• 9.10am JST. Mayumi Kashiwa, Kanda University of International Studies, Japan: “SALC is mine!” : Supporting the development of learner agency and construction of language learning environments beyond the classroom (Abstract)
• 3.05pm JST. Xuesong Andy Gao, The University of New South Wales, Australia: Language learner agency as a pedagogical focus (Abstract)
• 4.10pm JST. Johnmarshall Reeve, Institute of Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University, Australia: Encouraging Autonomy and Agency in a SALC: Three Suggestions (Abstract)

Full schedule 👇

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nYosdkNS6g6OscnH78bGdjW1vlLhYDbmYUCtUg1Uv9w/edit

Mike Long

Mike died on Sunday morning after a brief illness. He will be greatly missed by the applied linguistics academic community, by the anarcho-syndicalist movement, by his wide circle of friends all over the world, and by the hundreds, including me, who owe their academic careers to his generous help. Over a period of more than […]

Mike Long

I Jornada de Investigación sobre la Enseñanza Secundaria

Trascendiendo el salón de clase: aprendizajes de inglés dentro y fuera del aula de alumnos de Enseñanza Secundaria

Ponencia realizada en la Cátedra Alicia Goyena, Montevideo, Uruguay.

14 de noviembre de 2019.

Descarga la presentación.

i-jornada-de-investigacic3b3n-sobre-educacic3b3n-secundariaDownload

SouthernCone TESOL Conference: Students’ Voices about English Language Learning at School and beyond

This is a summary of my talk Students’ Voices about English Language Learning at School and beyond at the SouthernCone TESOL Conference in Curitiba, Brazil. July, 17 – 20, 2019

Questions and suggestions about the topic are greatly appreciated as well as feedback on the presentation itself.

Thanks for having joined me at the event!

southernconetesol_-mariangel_carrec3b1o_blog-2Download

SLA research findings which should affect ELT

Really interesting post about assertions in ELT we take for granted because of who claim them and how misinterpretation (conscious or not) of research findings shapes the ELT world.

What do you think you're doing?

In response to a tweet from David Cullen, here’s a summary of SLA research that I think needs to be taken more seriously by the ELT community.

From time to time one sees well known “experts” on ELT refer to SLA research. The standard message is that researchers work in labs, know nothing about real-world classroom practice and that most of their findings are either irrelevant or unreliable. A few trinkets from the general dross are trotted out as evidence of scholarship, including these:

• Using the L1 is OK.
• Teaching lexical sets is not OK.
• Guessing from context is not a reliable way of “accessing meaning”.
• Spaced repetition is a must.
• Getting in the flow really helps learning.

Such accounts of the research are, I think, cynically frivolous, so, within the confines of a blog post, let’s take a slightly more serious look.

The empirical study of how people learn…

View original post 2,356 more words

Is it true that learners of English in EFL context don’t have enough exposure to English?

True or False?

The idea that EFL learners have limited amount of exposure to English may not be true anymore. If you teach in a context where internet access is limited or too expensive and you don’t have enough books, magazines, audios, films or other resources in English which cater to your students’ level and interests, then the answer may be: true. Otherwise, the answer is: False.

Ten years ago, I started to get interested in High school students whose high level of English could not be explained by the time they had been studying English either at school or with private tutors. I realized these students used English just for pleasure through activities they found interesting: listening to songs or reading whatever book in English they could get.

The world has changed a lot since then, now the accessibility to material and technological resources in English is much easier and cheaper. Two years ago I decided to research the topic for my master thesis (that will be available to be shared in a few months). You can see a poster with some data from my research at Research Gate.

One of the aims of my investigation was to analyse the uses of English outside of the school of 122 High School students (16-18 years old) in an EFL context (Uruguay) and these were the main results:

N/S: not specified
N/I: not identified
No private lessons: students who do not attend private English lessons outside of school.

The most common practice in English carried out by students beyond the classroom is watching films and series, followed by watching videos online.

Surprisingly, the students who get more involved in English-based activities autonomously do not attend English private lessons.

More girls than boys get involved in out-of-class activities in all modes except for online games.

Therefore, students are exposed to different types of English input outside of school, so teachers may take advantage of these affordances (Menezes, 2011) and integrate them into their classrooms. Below, you will see some ideas:

How to take advantage of students’ beyond the class modes of  learning English

• Setting class time to discuss which activities they have performed using English, what they have learnt and what strategies they have used to cope with difficulties.

• Checking what activities in English they engage in and bring them to the classroom, for example watching an episode from one of their favourite TV series or watching a music video of their favourite singer/group. You may also ask for volunteer students to prepare a lesson based on it.

• Another alternative is to provide activities to be performed as homework to foster language awareness. However, teachers should refrain from focusing too much on grammar or vocabulary activities out of context (i.e.: focusing on isolated items without considering the context of use). As each student may engage in a particular activity and it’s likely that you can’t design an individual piece of homework for each of them, a good idea is to ask them to keep a learning log where they record the activity they have done, what they have learnt by doing it and again the strategies they have used to cope with unknown language. 

Whatever option you choose, remember to take into account your students’ interests, as it is this personal interest and the student’ s capacity for autonomy which make these affordances so powerful for language learning.

Also, try to encourage these kinds of engagement by valuing them, offering suggestions and helping less motivated students to try out new ways of being in contact with the English language.

Reference

Menezes V. (2011) Affordances for Language Learning Beyond the Classroom. In: Benson P., Reinders H. (eds) Beyond the Language Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, London

 

 

Pardon my bad English, but I have something to say.

If you are not a native English speaker, you’ll probably find your English being corrected more often than you’d want or need.

This is especially common in social networks where people feel free to give opinions without much consideration for others or the consequences that such opinions may have on other people’s lives. Online forums, Facebook groups and pages, even personal profiles can be the arenas for unsolicited corrections.

Don’t get me wrong. I know my English is not perfect and I still have a lot to learn, but believe me it won’t help that you correct me in public.

I don’t know if it is an occupational habit, but many ESL teachers are very prone to doing that. There are students who want to be constantly corrected, it is their way of learning, but for the rest of the mortals it is disrespectful.

Language is not a neutral medium of communication, it is a site for struggle where voices fight to be heard (Heller, 1987) and I fight with my bad English because I know you can understand me.

I write (or speak) to express my opinions, to share my knowledge and experience, to connect with other people, I don’t write to be exposed by the ‘deficiency’ of my language. I write because, in spite of not being a native speaker or a highly proficient English speaker, I have something to say.

 

Reference

Heller, M. (1987) The role of language in the formation of ethnic identity. In J. Phinney
and M. Rotheram (eds) Children’s Ethnic Socialization (pp. 180–200). Newbury Park,
CA: Sage

 

Image credits

stock.tookapic.com

 

My former students say they didn’t learn in my class

Does it ring a bell? Sometimes you end up discovering that your efforts and hard work were not enough for your students. If you are a school teacher, you most probably get to know about the issue through your former students’ new teacher or, because your new students make the same complaint about their former teacher.

This may happen to school teachers or to teachers who work at language institutions, where students change teachers every year. For private tutors, the issue may arise when the students quit for no clear reason.

You feel disappointed and may even ask yourself, what’s the point? What happened to all the efforts you devoted to:

• preparing the lessons
• delivering the lessons
• preparing the following lesson based on how the last one worked
• searching for new resources to motivate your students
• searching for new approaches to teaching the topic to those learners who didn’t get it
• preparing different types of evaluation and correcting them
• setting up a good classroom atmosphere where every learner feels secure and appreciated
• Etc., etc., etc., etc…..?

Well, maybe you are doing too much. Yes! You are doing too much.

How come? Well, last year I researched how high school students learn English as an L2 beyond the class (not published yet) and one of the findings was that:

What most students need in order to learn is to have a demanding teacher.

Does it sound odd? Well, in fact, it is not a new idea. Vygotsky claimed a long time ago that to learn a person must go beyond his/her current level of knowledge/competency/proficiency. If a person is always in his/her ‘comfort zone’ (sort to speak), no learning is possible. Learning occurs when the person is ‘forced’ to go beyond what he/she already knows (Zone of Proximal Development); in any other case, he/she would be just practising with his/her previous learning.

In the field of SLA, Krashen uses the idea of comprehensible input to explain how learning takes place. Learners should be exposed to input which is a bit further from their current level of knowledge to learn.

Your students won’t probably tell you that they want you to be demanding because they feel comfortable doing what they already know, but you may try talking to your former students in an informal setting asking them for their feedback on your teaching.

Besides, as important as learning is that students feel they have learned so they will feel confident about using the L2 and motivated to learn more.

However, how can a student feel that he/she has learned if nothing new is presented to him/her? What is new may be different to different students, so checking their prior knowledge is essential to offer the right challenge for each learner.

If you teach large classes, what you expect from all the learners may be the starting point, then you can suggest more challenging activities or contents for more advanced students. Let them choose their own learning path offering additional resources as needed.

If you need more ideas, you can watch Jim Scrivener’s talk Demand High

Have you ever been through this experience? Share your thoughts with us!

Desire to learn: motivation in L2 education

It is no secret that a motivated person can achieve whatever goal he/she pursues, sometimes in spite of physical or environmental limitations. And it is no secret that every now and then, teachers face one or two students in a class whose interest in what is being learnt is absolutely zero. Unfortunately, sometimes it is a whole class which is totally uninterested in learning an L2.

Let’s start talking about motivation by defining it:

The motivated individual

‘is one who wants to achieve a particular goal, devotes considerable effort to achieve this goal, and experiences satisfaction in the activities associated with achieving this goal’ (Gardner and MacIntyre 1993, p. 2).

If we analyse the definition above, supposing the definition properly describes the complex phenomena of human motivation, what we have can be simplified as follows,

A motivated learner is one who:

• Desires to learn a second language (L2).
• Devotes considerable effort to learn an L2.
• Experiences satisfaction in the activities associated with L2 learning.

If you come across a class where every student has the desire, puts the effort and experiences satisfaction in learning the L2, then you are in heaven! Or you are teaching adults who are clear about why they are in your class or young learners who will learn anything you teach provided it is by playing.

For the rest of the teachers, lack of students’ motivation is usually a day-to-day challenge. Motivation in L2 learning is a complex phenomenon which can be defined in terms of two factors: learners’ communicative needs and their attitudes towards the second language community.

If learners need to speak the second language in a wide range of social situations or to fulfil professional ambitions, they will perceive the communicative value of the second language and will, therefore, be motivated to acquire proficiency in it. Likewise, if learners have favourable attitudes towards the speakers of the language, they will desire more contact with them.

Robert Gardner and Wallace Lambert (1972) coined the terms

• Integrative motivation: language learning for personal growth and cultural enrichment
• Instrumental motivation: language learning for more immediate or practical goals.

Research has shown that these types of motivation are related to success in second language learning. On the other hand, we should keep in mind that an individual’s identity is closely linked with the way he or she speaks. It follows that when speaking a new language one is adopting some of the identity markers of another cultural group. Depending on the learner’s attitudes, learning a second language can be a source of enrichment or a source of resentment. If the speaker’s only reason for learning the second language is external pressure, internal motivation may be minimal and general attitudes towards learning may be negative.

Looking at motivation from a different perspective

There are very good reasons to learn an L2, but for every reason, you will probably receive a good counter-argument when learners are unwilling to learn. Look at the examples I recall from my years of teaching,

If we cannot convince the learner of good reasons to learn an L2, why not starting the other way round?

Let’s go back again to the motivated learner,

We said that a motivated learner is one who:

• Desires to learn a second language (L2).
• Devotes considerable effort to learn an L2.
• Experiences satisfaction in the activities associated with L2 learning.

Let’s help the learner to experience satisfaction in the L2 activities. How?

• The content is interesting and relevant to their age and level of ability.
• The learning goals are challenging yet manageable and clear.
• The atmosphere is supportive and non-threatening.
• Tell students about forthcoming activities (at the opening stages of lessons and within transitions)
• Varying the activities, tasks, and materials.
  • Despite the importance of keeping class routines on which students can depend on (especially for students with special learning needs), lessons which always consist of the same routines, patterns, and formats have been shown to lead to a decrease in attention and an increase in boredom.
  • Varying the activities, tasks, and materials can help to avoid this and increase students’ interest levels.
• Using co-operative rather than competitive goals.
  • Co-operative learning activities are those in which students must work together in order to complete a task or solve a problem.
  • These techniques have been found to increase the self-confidence of students, including weaker ones because every participant in a co-operative task has an important role to play.
  • Knowing that their team-mates are counting on them can increase students’ motivation.
  • Cultural and age differences will determine the most appropriate way for teachers to motivate students. In some classrooms, students may thrive on competitive interaction, while in others, co-operative activities will be more successful. (Graham Crookes and Richard Schmidt, 1991).

William Glasser says, “we are born with specific needs that we are genetically instructed to satisfy” (cited in Sullo, 2007). Natural curiosity is built into our genetic makeup to help us best meet our basic needs, survive, and thrive as humans. These basic psychological needs are:

• Belonging or connecting
  • The classroom communities need to provide a space where students feel safe and welcomed by the teacher and their classmates.
  • The teacher/student relationship sets the tone for the classroom. Research shows that teachers who developed good relationships with their students have fewer discipline problems than teachers who do not make that effort (Sullo, 2007).

• Power or competence: it relates to the ability to do something successfully.
  • When we teach our students how to learn, we provide them with the confidence, skills, and tools they need to be competent and successful individuals and they are willing to take risks in their learning.
  • Modelling and feedback are important parts of mastering skills so here your attitudes and actions towards learning are important: share your experience as a language learner, tell them which strategies you use when faced with the unknown, discuss the pros and cons of a strategy according to the situation, let them share their strategies and skills with their classmates, etc.

• Freedom: by including learners in the decision-making process, they have more ownership of that process.
  • It can start with the students determining the classroom rules for the academic year or could be as simple as what topic they will write their essays about or as thoughtful as determining the criteria for grading that essay.
  • Students that have a voice in the classroom are more invested in the work they are producing for that classroom and thus more motivated.

• Fun: everything is better when there is a fun element and it does not need to be through a game all the time. An enthusiastic teacher brings passion, excitement, pleasure, and joy to the classroom. They bring their classroom to life, engage their students, and encourage exploration.

If the students enjoy the activities they do in class, they will soon start to devote more attention and effort to fulfil them and as both things happen, they will learn the L2 almost incidentally, which in turn will reinforce their desire to keep learning.

Click here and subscribe to receive in your inbox a free handout with many ideas to motivate your class! Plus my last newsletter to evaluate and choose L2 coursebooks

References and further reading

For a fuller treatment of the social psychological perspective on learners’ differences refer to Gardner (1985), Skehan (1989), and Ellis (1994, pp. 467- 560).

Church, E.B. (2003). Building community in the classroom. Retrieved July 24, 2015 from http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/building-community-classroom

Crookes, G., & Schmidt, R. W. (1991). Motivation: Reopening the research agenda. Language learning, 41(4), 469-512.

Dornyei, Z. (2006). Individual differences in second language acquisition. AILA Review, 19, 42-68.

Skehan, P. (1989). Individual Differences in Second Language Learning. London: Edward Arnold Associates.

Sullo, B. (2007). Activating the Desire to Learn. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Summary of main points of ‘Activate the desire to learn’

Younger is better to learn an L2?

How old were you when you started learning English?

Do you think you would be more fluent and accurate in English if you had started earlier?

Did you learn English ‘naturally’ or in a language institution? Is one way better than the other or does it depend on age?

Children, adolescents and adults have neurological, cognitive and psychological differences in the acquisition of L2. Children seem to be intrinsically better learners, while adolescents and adults have cognitive skills and self-discipline which enable them to utilize a larger volume of comprehensible input within the same exposure time period. On the other hand, older learners may be more greatly affected by the other factors in L2 such as motivation, anxiety and identity. The difference in the acquisition process demands different approaches to instructing learners of different age groups.

Age of acquisition: What does research say?

Age is easier to define and measure than personality, aptitude, or motivation. Nevertheless, the relationship between a learner’s age and his or her potential for success in second language acquisition is under debate.

Children from immigrant families eventually speak the language of their new community with native-like fluency, but the same does not happen to their parents. One explanation is that, as in first language acquisition, there is a critical period for second language acquisition.

Younger is better?

The Critical Period Hypothesis suggests that there is a time in human development (before puberty) when the brain is predisposed to success in language learning. Developmental changes in the brain, it is argued, affect the nature of language acquisition.

It is difficult to compare children and adults as second language learners. In addition to the possible biological differences suggested by the Critical Period Hypothesis, the conditions for language learning are often very different.

Younger learners:

• Younger learners in informal language learning environments usually have more time to devote to learning language.
• They often have more opportunities to hear and use the language in environments where they do not experience strong pressure to speak fluently and accurately from the very beginning.
• Their early imperfect efforts are often praised or, at least, accepted.

Older learners:

• They are often in situations which demand much more complex language and the expression of much more complicated ideas.
• They often get embarrassed by their lack of mastery of the language and they may develop a sense of inadequacy after experiences of frustration in trying to say exactly what they mean.

Critique of the Critical Period Hypothesis

The Critical Period Hypothesis has been challenged in recent years from several different points of view:

• At least in the early stages of second language development, older learners are more efficient than younger learners.
• Learners who began learning a second language at the primary school level did not fare better in the long run than those who began in early adolescence.
• There are countless anecdotes about older learners (adolescents and adults) who have reached high levels of proficiency in a second language.

Does this mean that there is no critical period for second language acquisition?

Patkowski (1980) found that age of acquisition is a very important factor in setting limits on the development of native-like mastery of a second language and that this limitation does not apply only to accent. These results gave added support to the Critical Period Hypothesis for second language acquisition.

Experience and research have shown that native-like mastery of the spoken language is difficult to attain by older learners. Nevertheless, there is some research which suggests that older learners may have an advantage, at least in the early stages of second language learning.

In the Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle study (1982), it was found that adolescents and adults learned faster than children in the first few months of exposure to L2. By the end of the year, the children were catching up or had surpassed the adults on several measures. Nevertheless, it was the adolescents who retained the highest levels of performance overall.

Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle concluded that their results provide evidence that there is no critical period for language acquisition. However, we should also consider that some of the tasks in the study (for example, sentence judgement or translation) were too hard for young learners.

Adults and adolescents may learn faster in the early stages of second language development (especially if they are learning a language which is similar to their first language) but young children eventually catch up and even surpass them if they are surrounded by the language on a daily basis.

Adults and adolescents can also make considerable and rapid progress towards mastery of a second language in contexts where they can make use of the language on a daily basis in social, personal, professional, or academic interaction.

The role of the critical period in second language acquisition is still much debated. Some researchers conclude that there are maturational constraints on language acquisition, but there are also others who consider that the age factor cannot be separated from factors such as motivation, social identity, and the conditions for learning. They argue that older learners may well speak with an accent because they want to continue being identified with their first language cultural group, and adults rarely get access to the same quantity and quality of language input that children receive in play settings.

Many people conclude on the basis of studies that it is better to begin second language instruction as early as possible if we seek the highest possible level of second language skills, the level at which a second language speaker is indistinguishable from a native speaker. But achieving a native-like mastery of the second language is not a goal for all second language learning, in all contexts.

What are the implications for educational settings?

In the chart below you will find a summary of the most important issues to consider when deciding on the most appropriate age to start learning an L2 in educational settings. These ideas apply to both formal and informal educational contexts (i.e.: school education and private L2 classes).

Conclusions

There is strong evidence of the existence of a Critical Period for L2 demonstrating the value of early exposure to the second language.

However, the initial point of learning cannot play the same role in a naturalistic and in a classroom context; the earlier may be the better but provided that it is associated with enough significant exposure, other important conditions include that exposure to young learners should be intensively distributed giving learners opportunities to participate in a variety of L2 social contexts.

In the end, more important than the starting age of acquisition is the amount and frequency of exposure to the L2.

 

References

http://carla.umn.edu/learnerlanguage/ind_diff.html

Lightbown, P; Spada, N. (2001) Factors affecting Second Language Learning in English Language Teaching in its Social Context (pp. 28-43)

Muñoz, C. (2010). On how age affects foreign language learning. Advances in Research on Language Acquisition and Teaching: Selected Papers. Gala

Qin Zhao, A; Morgan C. (n.d.). Consideration of Age in L2 Attainment – Children, Adolescents and Adults. Asian EFL Journal