Improving Foreign Language Teaching

Towards a research-based curriculum and pedagogy

Ernesto Macaro, Suzanne Graham, Robert Woore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317674740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Improving Foreign Language Teaching provides teachers and teacher trainers with a research-based structure for the effective teaching and assessment of second languages. As well as outlining a model for teacher development, the book identifies and exemplifies eight key principles for effective language learning, which can be used to guide curriculum design and decisions about classroom pedagogy. Improving Foreign Language Teaching also presents practical activities, related materials, and guidance on how student progress can be monitored and recorded.

Based on the research of the authors and other international experts, together with the work of a consortium established by the authors and teachers in a range of secondary schools, the book focusses on the development of language skills and communicative competence. It also proposes an assessment system which better reflects how learners progress in language learning than current models.

Taking as its starting point the challenge of a curriculum in flux and complex pedagogical approaches, this book offers clear research-informed guidance for effective planning, teaching and learning. It will be essential reading for all those concerned with the improvement of language learning and teaching in the secondary classroom.

Chapter 1
The problem with ‘improving language learning’

1.1 The language learning industry

The second language learning industry is huge and can seem bewildering. There is an astonishing array of information on bookshelves and on the internet regarding the teaching and learning of a second language. Further, there are enormous sums of money to be made from people telling other people, through one medium or another, how to learn a second language and how to go about teaching it. Some of this ‘telling’ is explicit and some implicit.

There are people who write coursebooks for language teachers. Here, the ‘telling’ is usually more implicit than explicit: the ‘how to do it’, the pedagogy, is in the background to the texts and the activities in the student’s book. Coursebook writers do not usually tell the student:

You are about to do this task because it will improve your spoken fluency and we know that it will do this because we have read research showing that it will.

They also do not say:

We have experimented with this task lots of times and in many different second language learning contexts, and the students’ reaction has always been fantastic! They said it made their speaking improve and they felt much more motivated.

Coursebooks often do not inform the teacher where the authors’ thinking comes from. Teachers are sometimes told how ‘experienced’ the coursebook writers are, which assumes that experience of teaching equates with knowing ‘what works’. The ‘Teacher’s Guide’ accompanying the coursebook sometimes gives a brief indication of the authors’ thinking behind the texts and activities on offer, but generally little more than that.

Many second language coursebooks are organized according to ‘topics’ on the one hand and grammatical structures on the other, often combining the two in the ‘contents’ pages. What is rarely made clear is the relationship between these topics and the grammatical structures or elements being focussed on. If that relationship is hinted at (e.g. topic: talking about a holiday you have been on; grammar: using the past tense), we are generally not told the theoretical basis – or for that matter the practical rationale – for drawing together those two dimensions in particular from a potentially vast curriculum pool.

Some textbooks have ‘stood the test of time’ and have been revised only to bring them up to date in terms of material and illustrations. Some are new and offer ‘the latest methods in language learning’, yet it is generally unclear what the evidence is behind the reasons for either their longevity or their claims to innovative practice.

Private language schools contribute in a very explicit way to the bewildering array of information about what works in language learning. Their websites might tell you that using technology is an effective tool in achieving the best outcomes. They might inform you that pair and group work encourage learner autonomy. They might suggest to you that their teaching approach is based on research evidence, and that this evidence suggests that a combination of developing language skills and an explicit understanding of grammatical structures is the best way to learn a second language (L2). Some language schools or language colleges offer articles or ‘position statements’ written by people who are associated with them, telling you what they think are the most effective teaching methods. Indeed, with the rise of personal blog pages, it is often difficult to ascertain the true identity of the person telling you the best way to teach and learn and whether they are associated with a profit-making organization. All very confusing!

Then there are academic and practitioner journals that deal with research into L2 learning and teaching. Here, the ‘telling’ is usually implicit, supposedly being based on ‘neutral experiments’ or ‘unbiased observations’. Yet when the reader gets to the final few paragraphs, it is sometimes the case that the researchers start telling you what they really believe – and this does not always tally with the case that has been made so far by the research data!

There are countless journals on language learning, or on closely associated themes, and new journals seem to appear from one year to the next. Some are available both in paper versions and electronically, some only on the internet. Some are ‘open access’ (freely available to all) whilst for others a fee must be paid. Most journals are written in English. These, no doubt unfairly, are often considered more ‘prestigious’ journals than those written in other languages; we may well wonder what discovery or insight about language learning we might be missing out on because we cannot access some articles written in languages other than English.

Then there are the policy makers: usually government agencies that write (and sometimes publish) language policies and may, quite explicitly, expect teachers and teacher educators to implement them in their classrooms and Teacher Education programmes. Newspapers and other media also cash in on the industry. They sell their products by claiming – particularly, but not exclusively, in the UK – that there is a deficit in the nation’s L2 proficiency. The policy interventions then interplay with (and are filtered through) media reports, shaping the public understanding of L2 education. An example of this is the policy in relation to L2 learning in primary schools. In various educational settings, including the UK, a particular view being peddled – very successfully – is that starting L2 learning earlier will help redress the nation’s poor performance in this area. Yet, in our estimation, there is as yet very little research evidence to support this view.

So a learner or a teacher (and for that matter a researcher) wishing to find out about the latest thinking on L2 learning will have access to enormous amounts of material, the quality and origins of which will probably be unknown to them. Using a major search engine without some kind of filtering system will inevitably lead to confusion and time wasting. On 20 November 2014, we obtained 239,000,000 results from Google using the search terms ‘Language Learning’ and 12,000,000 using the search terms ‘journals second language’. Perhaps, then, we need to question the belief, which we sometimes hear expressed, that L2 research is inaccessible to language teachers, if by ‘inaccessible’ is understood ‘unavailable unless you belong to a university’. However, whether research is truly accessible to teachers, in the sense that they can easily arrive at an understanding of what the general research is telling them, is another matter.

We should, finally, not forget that there are the writers of books about language learning – books telling you, either implicitly or explicitly, how to teach and learn an L2. Of course, there is very little financial reward for these poor authors: their motivation is entirely altruistic! Putting aside edited books of research (often one chapter per research project), books on language teaching and learning often fall into two broad categories. The first comprises books which put across a theoretical perspective on a particular aspect of L2 learning. They may include some research that the author has carried out, but essentially they try to tell a story about an aspect of language teaching and learning through the experienced lens of the author. The second category comprises books which are, essentially, ‘manuals’. They often have titles along the lines of ‘An introduction to…’, and they bring together bits of research in Second Language Acquisition or Second Language Education. They may then engage their readers in tasks which are intended to improve their knowledge, understanding and skills in some way.

1.2 Something about this book

So, which of these categories does this book fall into? Well, actually it falls into both. On the one hand, it attempts to tell a story about L2¹ learning and teaching; and on the other, it also engages the reader in activities (see Chapter 8) which may develop their thinking and practice. What we hope it does not do is preach a particular teaching method. A teaching method is one where there are clear, set sequences of activities leading to predicted outcomes. This book, by contrast, tells the story of a different way of thinking about how to teach an L2, and about how one might go about improving language learning in a particular educational setting.

We begin our book with the question: ‘How is it possible to make sense of it all?’ Given the enormous body of opinions, statements and research claims referred to above, and given the historical developments, both theoretical and practical, which have shaped decade upon decade of beliefs about language teaching, how is it possible to extract a rational and coherent body of knowledge that can inform what we do in the L2 classroom or in a programme of professional education for L2 teachers?

One way is to imagine what it would be like if we brought together teachers, researchers and policy makers and asked them to start again with a tabula rasa: without all the historical baggage and the multitude of inputs described above. How would they begin to formulate their ideas about what an L2 curriculum should include, what an L2 pedagogy should look like and what an effective system would be for assessing L2 learners’ progress?

If teachers, researchers and policy makers were brought into a room in order to start thinking about language teaching and learning in this way, we can imagine that their discussion might relate to three fundamental and recurring dilemmas, as expressed in the following over-arching questions:

1. To what extent should the formal L2 learning situation (the language classroom) simulate, emulate or mirror the situation outside the classroom, where currently or eventually the student will use what they have learnt?
2. Given that time spent in the classroom is limited compared to time spent learning a language in a natural situation (such as in a bilingual family or community), to what extent should teachers use that limited time to help students to become more independent of the formal learning situation – thus enabling them to benefit not only from the limited learning opportunities inside the classroom, but also from those available beyond the classroom?
3. There are many different language learning contexts and many different languages that could be learned as an L2. However, given that there are only a handful of ‘big world languages’ spoken by millions of people, how do we make a decision about which L2 our students should learn, in a school context? Having made that decision, how do we motivate students to learn that language during a particular phase of their life?

1.3 The project: The Professional Development Consortium in Modern Foreign Languages

As authors of this book, we are all multilingual and have experienced a variety of language learning situations. We have all been L2 teachers, researchers and teacher educators – that is, people who are involved in the initial and continuing education of language teachers. Although we would not claim that this experience permits us to tell the reader what the answers are to the three big questions above, we do believe that we can assert with some confidence that these questions are key ones which would be likely to come up in the scenario posited earlier. Indeed, we have found that these questions do come up in many situations in which we find ourselves: working with student teachers; meeting with mentors² in schools; talking to researchers and teachers at language conferences.

In the course of our professional activities over the last decade and more, we have regularly worked with secondary school teachers on the three big questions listed above. The teachers have helped to shape our thinking on these issues and on how we might set about improving language teaching and learning. In particular, the project described in this book grew from a sense of there being a major disjuncture, in England (the context in which we particularly work), between policy and practice in L2 teaching and learning on the one hand and research-informed approaches on the other, and of this disjuncture being driven in particular by the prevailing assessment frameworks and practices. We wanted to do something to address this situation. So, drawing on both our work with teachers in our local educational communities, and on research evidence that resulted from activities connected to those communities, we formulated – initially at a very prototypical level – a set of principles for L2 teaching that all our colleagues, we hoped, would buy into. As a result of establishing those initial principles, we were able to obtain funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to carry out a project with a selected group of teachers, focussing on the professional development of language teachers and teacher educators. This became the Professional Development Consortium in Modern Foreign Languages – or ‘PDCinMFL’ for short. In addition to the current authors this consortium comprised the following members:

• Sarah Rae and Jenny Skinner, The Willink School, Reading;
• Florence Sherrington, The Cherwell School, Oxford;
• Jenny Ramsdale and Caroline Wilton, Bartholomew School, Eynsham, Oxfordshire;
• Alison Seath, Larkmead School, Abingdon, Oxfordshire;
• Katie Lee, Whitecross School, Hereford;
• Rachel Hawkes, Comberton Village College, Cambridgeshire;
• Barbara King, University of Reading;
• Lucy Beharrell and Heike Bruton, our research and development officers on the project.

The PDCinMFL project forms the background to this book. The book describes the process in which we engaged, one of interacting with a variety of stakeholders in the field of L2 learning. We offer this as a model for future projects. The process involved:

1. Two-way knowledge exchange between researchers and teachers.
2. The establishment of a set of pedagogical principles for L2 teaching, based on the initial list we had formulated.
3. The creation of materials that, in a variety of ways, illustrate some ways in which the principles might be addressed in the L2 classroom.
4. Researchers and practitioners combining to communicate and disseminate our principles and materials to a much wider community of stakeholders in L2 teaching and learning.
5. Evaluating the impact of the whole process.

Chapter 7 explains in detail how we went about each of the steps listed above. For the moment, however, we would like to set out the set of eight principles that the consortium arrived at.

1.4 The project principles

The PDCinMFL principles are as follows:

• Principle 1: ORAL INTERACTION. Target language input is essential for learning, but it becomes more effective if learners are encouraged to check the understanding of it by asking questions of what the teacher is saying or asking the teacher to repeat.
• Principle 2: ORAL INTERACTION. Learners need to be encouraged to speak spontaneously and to say things that they are not sure are correct.
• Principle 3: ORAL INTERACTION. Less spontaneous oral interaction should nevertheless be of high quality. By high quality we mean including substantial student turns; adequate wait time; cognitive challenge (e.g. by requiring a verb phrase or subordinate clause); appropriate teacher feedback; nominating students rather than waiting for volunteers.
• Principle 4: ORAL INTERACTION. Students should be explicitly taught strategies to use when faced with communication difficulties. These should be used alongside techniques for developing their oral fluency, such as repetition of tasks and chunking of pre-learnt words into whole phrases.
• Principle 5: READING AND LISTENING. Learners need to be taught how to access a greater range of more challenging spoken and written texts, through explicit instruction in comprehension strategies and in the relationship between the written and spoken forms.
• Principle 6: SELF-EFFICACY AND MOTIVATION. Learners need to develop their self-efficacy and see the link between the strategies they use and how successful they are on a task.
• Principle 7: WRITING. Writing should be developed as a skill in its own right, not just as a consolidation of other language skills. For this to happen, students should frequently write using the language and strategies they already know, rather than resources provided by the teacher (e.g. textbooks, writing frames, dictionaries).
• Principle 8 (underpins all other principles): The principal focus of pedagogy should be on developing language skills and therefore the teaching of linguistic knowledge (e.g. knowledge of grammar and vocabulary) should act in the service of skill development, not as an end in itself.

1.5 Motivation to learn a language

Principle 6 relates to self-efficacy, a construct which has strong links with ‘attributions’ and with motivation mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 The problem with ‘improving language learning’
• 2 Oral interaction in the second language classroom
• 3 Reading and listening: Developing knowledge and making the most of it
• 4 Developing the learner through writing: Recursion and compromise
• 5 A pedagogical assessment system
• 6 Preparing to become and continuing to be a language teacher
• 7 The PDCinMFL project
• 8 Putting the principles into practice
• 9 By way of conclusion
• References
• Appendix: Assessment framework for MFL
• Index