Tag Archives: fluency

Can role-play help fluency?

In The Language Teacher, March/April 2010’s “Readers’ Forum”, Eric Bray writes about role-play in EFL (PDF, login and password required) (the TLT homepage mistakenly attributes the article):

Unlike more controlled language learning activities, roleplays [sic] are tasks which fall towards the freer end of the language learning activity continuum discussed by Nunan (2004) and Richards and Rodgers (2001), and give students practice accessing their current language resources. This builds fluency…

However, Krashen noted that a corollary of his input hypothesis is

Talking (output) is not practicing
Krashen stresses yet again that speaking in the target language does not result in language acquisition. Although speaking can indirectly assist in language acquisition, the ability to speak is not the cause of language learning or acquisition. Instead, comprehensible output is the result of language acquisition.

The article includes no evidence that roleplay helps students to develop fluency, although it does suggest ways in which it might “indirectly assist in language acquisition”.

if roleplays are set up carefully, students can get useful practice in situations they are likely to encounter abroad, while developing fluency and the confidence to deal with the unpredictability inherent in real world language use…

Indeed, Bray admits that “students must have adequate language ability to be successful with role-play”.

In Margarete Wells’ December 2008 review (PDF, login and password required) of Bray’s roleplay textbook (link to the publisher’s info page for this book), we find

the language of some instructions and model materials… is very high for EFL students… learners whose level is at least low intermediate, but preferably higher, would stand to gain the most in terms of  increased confidence and improved proficiency, by using this book. The course relies heavily on learners being willing to think on their feet and be linguistically creative, not to mention the heavy stress on question techniques, which would seem to be very demanding for lower level students. (Margarete Wells, “Moving on With English: Discussion, Role Plays, Projects”, The Language Teacher 32,12 (December 2008): 21)

Even her post low-intermediate students “needed considerable input in terms of language and ideas”. This would seem to indicate that, in order to do these roleplays, students already need to have acquired a certain fluency, which undermines Bray’s claim, but supports Krashen’s view (see above).

In his conclusion, Bray points to what might be a strong motivation for a teacher to use roleplays (and by the way, Bray writes it as one word in his TLT article, yet in the title of his book the term is written as two, unhyphenated, words):

Finally, successful roleplays can transform the atmosphere of the classroom into a more fun and exciting place where anything can happen and probably will.

Now, I’m not against fun and excitement. However, teachers need to be clear on what their purposes and their priorities are, lest we fall into the trap of becoming illusionists. And we are still left with the problem of how to develop our students’ fluency.

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Fluency in writing – what is it? How do you “teach” it?

Fluency in writing? What does that mean? How do you teach it?

Some problems I face teaching writing at university here in Japan are
a) a big spread of ability amongst students (some cannot put a sentence together, indeed have no idea what a “sentence” is, while others are nearly fluent)
b) (partly a result of a) above) unclear goals and unclear rubrics for assessment and evaluation.

I’m impressed with TPRS‘ focus on fluency, and am pondering how that translates into reading / writing activities.

Many TPRS teachers stress the importance of the fact that language is acquired audially, not visually: through the ears, not through the eyes (i.e. through listening rather than through reading). That seems to imply that the students who “can’t put a sentence together” should get lots of LISTENING in the early stages, rather than writing or even reading (tho perhaps reading and listening).

I teach one writing class twice a week, and I’ve been giving them free reading time on one day a week, and focusing on writing the other day.  What I have not been giving them is a clear sense of how they are doing. In my speaking classes, however, I’m working very hard to make sure that all students understand everything.

I’m re-thinking my objectives and what kind of assessments would fit those objectives, and what kind of rubrics would be needed.

Altho my students are getting lots of reading and writing practice, they’re not getting much assessment at the moment: I’m not telling them how they are doing other than by error correction, and to help promote fluency, I want to back off error correction for the time being. But I want to let them know how they are doing.

Over the weekend, I’ll be re-reading Susan Gross’ article on assessment (pdf), and taking a look at the rubrics for writing, reading and speaking created by Susan Gross and by Jason Fritze.

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TPRS and Krashen’s theories of SLA

TPRS was developed by Blaine Ray who was “converted” when he discovered James Asher’s TPR – Total Physical Response – method of teaching a second (or foreign) language.  Then he found students got bored with commands after a while, so he started telling stories and asking students for input on the details of the stories, and found it worked and was fun, and called it TPR Storytelling. Well, it’s not really Total Physical Response, and actually Ray’s since changed the name so that “TPRS” now stands for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling. It was only later that Ray (and others) came across Krashen’s theories of second language acquisition, and found therein lots of support for what they were doing, as well as pointers for improvement.

Krashen is known for the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the affective filter, and the natural order hypothesis (this last is not Krashen’s own hypothesis, and Wikipedia has removed the natural order hypothesis page; for details, see order of acquisition).

Acquisition-learning: “learning”, according to Krashen, is explicit learning about the target language: grammar explanation, for example, and associated exercises and worksheets. Acquisition, he posits, is a mysterious activity that requires a great deal of comprehensible input.

The input hypothesis says that people learn a second or foreign language the same way we learn our first language: by being exposed to (through listening and/or reading) massive amounts of comprehensible input, and not thanks to lots of explanations about how the language works. In other words, Krashen says that language is essentially acquired, not learned.

Even if you accept this, and many don’t, the question for a language teacher is, how to provide the massive amounts of comprehensible input that is required? I accepted the hypothesis, as it seemed to match how I had learned French, English and German and later, Japanese. However, I didn’t see a practicable way to provide the input in class, the same reaction that Susan Gross had, who later became one of the stars of the TPRS firmament. I then got interested in self-access centres and teaching students to be more autonomous because I realized that a) learners do need much more input than can be provided in class, and b) they need to go out and get it on their own.

Well, TPRS seems to go a long way to solve the problem: it provides a great deal of comprehensible input in class, and it also has developed a high standard for comprehension: everyone in the class should understand everything that is said in the foreign/second language. And they’ve developed simple tools to enable a teacher to at least aim for this.

“Comprehension precedes production” says Krashen’s theory. Well, TPRS does not require students to produce much language at least at the beginning (although you can if you want: you just need to tweak the questions). This was a relief, because I had found that students were not producing correct language and they weren’t getting any closer to it. They seemed to have hit a wall.

In fact, Krashen’s theory goes further and explains what happens if you force production too early (before language is properly acquired). Krashen also theorized that grammar is acquired in a natural order, that this order is pretty much the same for children regardless of language or culture, and that it cannot be changed by instruction.

What happens when you force production too soon? The result is garbage. I see this all the time with my writing students. Many of them expect me to correct their writing with a red pen, which I have not done. One simple reason is that their English is so screwed that I do not know where to begin. They need to go back to basics. I had started with an ambitious program of reviewing the rules of written English, starting with basic punctuation and the simple sentence. However, although they understood the explanations, they still weren’t able to write correct, simple sentences.

“Acquisition activities are central, though some Monitoring may be useful for some people sometimes”. Krashen posits that “learning” develops the Monitor, the “editor in the head” as it were, and that that is useful and helpful for more advanced learners, but it is death for the beginners, because it inhibits them production and makes them overly concerned with avoiding mistakes and producing correct forms. The cost is a serious lack of fluency.

Krashen’s hypothesis explains why learners produce garbage, even after “learning” the language for years: these students have not acquired the basics of English. They have been given too much explanations, they have “learned” too much and not acquired enough. In addition, they have been asked to produce before they are ready. In that case, they either rely on parroting or memorization, or they rely on their native language’s grammar and syntax (or, in the case of my writing students in the computer lab, they rely on machine translation, which produces garbage of an even higher order than they would themselves).

In my experiments this past month with TPRS, I’ve been using very basic, very simple grammar: the present tense, the past tense, first, second and third person verb forms. I have noticed that, even after 20 or so repetitions of “third-person ‘s'”, or using the past tense when telling a story, when I ask students for short phrases that require a subject and a verb, they still don’t use the correct form. OK, you’re thinking: 20 repetitions isn’t much. Yeah, but I’m getting the same results even after 4 weeks of 3 hours per week.

After reading Krashen’s theories, and what other TPRS teachers do, I’ve stopped requiring my students to produce correct language; I’ve also stopped correcting them, except by repeating correctly what they try to say. I’m deliberately taking the pressure off them to produce correct language. We’ll get to that later. At the moment, I’m focusing on what I now believe to be the key ingredients: personalization (because many of them have been turned off classroom learning) and lots and lots and lots of comprehensible input.

I tried TPRS with a 2nd-year class for the first time last Friday. Because they were 2nd-years, I figured I should try and make it more challenging: I threw in complex sentences like “Did you have breakfast before you got dressed, or after?” Boy, that threw them (I didn’t ask it right off the bat, of course, I built up to it, but even so, the result was a palpable silence: it was obvious I’d run into a complete wall of incomprehension).  No. Even 2nd-years still need what they obviously have not had enough of: comprehensible input and lots of repetition.

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