The Foundations of Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Paul Lennon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000088960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

An introductory textbook that assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics or second language acquisition, this book presents a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundations, methods and practices of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) for pre-service teachers. Lennon covers the theoretical bases for TEFL and addresses second language-acquisition research, past and present EFL teaching methodology, as well as psychological and social approaches to individual language-learner variation. Further chapters provide extensive yet accessible coverage on essential foundational topics, including chapters on pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, literature and testing. Offering a sociocultural approach in which the teacher is seen as a facilitator and supporter of students' self-directed learning, this text provides the prospective teacher with the knowledge and skills to be an effective educator in the EFL classroom.

The targeted EFL focus makes this book ideal for pre-service teachers and for teacher training programmes around the world. Each chapter includes a Food for Thought section with questions for reflection and a Further Reading list.

1
Language Acquisition and Language Learning

Settings

First Language Acquisition Settings

Long ago the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1922: 40) noted the stark contrast between the almost universal and rather uniform success of children acquiring English as their mother tongue compared to the ‘defective and inexact command’ of the language often achieved by foreign language learners, whose success is also subject to tremendous individual variation. Children produce their first word at about the age of 12 months. By the age of about 18 months most children have an active vocabulary of perhaps 50 words, that is, words they can use, not just understand (Crystal 1986: 93; Saxton 2017: 156). By 24 months children have a command of several hundred words and by the age of six they can at least understand perhaps 10,000 words (Bloom and Markson 1998: 68) or even 14,000 words (Clark 1993: 13).

However, the key to acquiring a language is the acquisition of its syntax; in other words knowing how to combine words to form utterances. Otherwise all one can do is to name things. Although there is variation in the rate (speed) of acquisition of syntax, all children seem to follow more or less the same path (route) (Brown 1973: 272–275). The route remains the same because it is the relative complexity of individual structures which determines the order in which they are acquired regardless of individual differences in children and the exposure they receive to language. Clark and Clark (1977: 295) gave examples of typical utterances by children aged between 12 months and two years eight months. These range from one-word utterances (‘More’ at age 15 months), to two-word utterances (‘More read’ at age 20 months), to what is sometimes called ‘telegraphic speech’ (‘Where go car?’ at age two years one month) and finally to the production of simple sentences (‘What he can ride in?’, or even ‘I want to open it’ at age two years eight months). Some children are much quicker than others at moving through these stages, but, broadly speaking, one-year-olds start with single words and before they are two years old have progressed to two-word utterances. Telegraphic speech, marked by reduced syntax, is characteristic of two-year-olds and by the time they are three, children will be producing simple sentences, some of which may be fully acceptable in the adult language although others such as ‘What he can ride in?’ will still be grammatically deviant (Clark and Clark 1977; Crystal 1986; Saxton 2017).

Just being exposed to language, for example by overhearing the conversations of others, listening to the radio or watching TV, is not enough to acquire a language (Saxton 2017: 95–96). Children can pick up some vocabulary from overheard language or TV but they cannot acquire syntax in this way without interpersonal interaction (Saxton 2017: 96). Language acquisition is intimately linked to the child’s own social interactive needs from the very start (Bloom and Tinker 2001). Even before babies utter their first words at about 12 months of age, people talk to them as if they understood what is being said, and babies do understand some words before they can say their first words. Between the ages of six months and one year children develop the ability to engage in ‘joint attention’, that is, ‘the simultaneous engagement of two or more individuals in mental focus on a single external object of attention’ (Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017: 137). An example would be a parent holding up a toy for a child to look at, or looking at pictures with a child. Joint attention seems to be important for early word learning (Adamson and Chance 1998: 28).

Once they start to speak, children are trying to produce meaningful utterances rather than just reeling off isolated words (Clark and Clark 1977: 314–316; Elliot 1984: 57; Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017: 180–181). Thus, ‘more’ may mean ‘I want some more’ and ‘no’ may mean ‘I don’t want to go to bed, thank you very much.’ Toddlers try to communicate even though they cannot make all the sounds of the language, do not know the right word and cannot produce full sentences (Clark and Clark 1977: 295, 397–401, 492–496; Saxton 2017: 151–156; 240–244). Child language represents a systematically simplified linguistic system at the phonological, lexical and syntactic levels. At the phonological level, for example, because the voiced velar stop /ɡ/ is more difficult to make than the voiced alveolar stop /d/, /d/ may be substituted for /ɡ/ by two-year-olds, so that ‘go’ becomes ‘doe’ and ‘garden’ becomes ‘darden’ (see Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017: 166–167 on phonological simplification). At the lexical level, ‘garden’ may be used for gardens, parks and all open countryside as well (lexical overextension, see Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017: 179). At the syntactic level, ‘grammatical words’ such as articles and prepositions will be omitted so that ‘telegraphic speech’ will be produced (see Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017: 173). A combination of phonological, lexical and syntactic reduction might result in ‘doe darden’ for ‘I want to go to the park.’

Since it is often not clear to adults what the child wants to say, children are constantly being asked to restate. Adults go to great efforts to try to understand what the child wants to express and frequently ask the child questions to find out what it means. Such questions are termed ‘clarification questions’ (Demetras et al. 1986). They are also found in conversations with foreign language learners (Lightbown and Spada 2013 140; Sheen and Ellis 2011). Brown and Hanlon (1970) found that adults are more interested in understanding what the child wants to say than in correcting its errors and tend to correct only factual errors explicitly. However, factual corrections from the adult’s perspective may in some cases be language corrections from the child’s point of view, as in, ‘No, that’s a purple sweater, not a blue one’ (example from Saxton 2017: 104). Saxton (2017: 110–111) also suggests that clarification questions may sometimes be posed when a child makes a grammatical error.

Adults modify their speech style for children so that ‘child-directed speech’ forms a special variety or register of language (Saxton 2017: 88, 112–116; Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017: 48–49). One feature of this register is repetition of the child’s preceding utterance before the adult moves on with new information. This constitutes approval of what the child has said both factually and linguistically and helps to keep the conversation on track. If the child’s last utterance was deviant, the adult tends to repeat it in part but modify it or, in the case of telegraphic utterances, expand it so that it is an acceptable adult language utterance. These repetitions with variation are termed ‘recasts’. In this way, adults keep the conversation going while expanding the syntax of the child’s telegraphic utterances, improving morphology and making lexical improvements as they go along rather than always interrupting and explicitly correcting the child. ‘Recasts’, like clarification questions, function as implicit corrective feedback to the child (Demetras et al. 1986; Saxton 2017: 102–107).

Whether all this is sufficient to explain how children acquire the language is unclear. After all, some parents just say, ‘Shut up and eat your chips.’ Yet these children also acquire English. The nativist school of thought, associated with the American linguist Noam Chomsky, maintains that the progress in language acquisition which children make in the first few years of their lives is so rapid that they cannot be starting from scratch, cannot be a tabula rasa, but must have some sort of biological predisposition to acquire grammar; a sort of genetically established blueprint of the common or universal grammatical rules or principles which all languages obey. This is what is meant by universal grammar (Chomsky 1965: 6–9, 30–37 and see Saxton 2017, Chapters 8–10; Aitchison 2008, Chapters 3–7 for critical discussion). The blueprint would have to be for universal grammar rather than the grammar of any specific language because children will acquire whatever language (or languages) they are exposed to in infancy, as countless examples of internationally adopted children show.

The fascinating thing about first language acquisition is that it proceeds incidentally and in step with cognitive development (Saville-Troike and Barto 2017: 19). This is why the term ‘acquisition’ is used rather than ‘learning’. Children ‘pick up’ their first language in the first few years of life provided people talk to them and they talk back. They do not have to learn their mother tongue deliberately, nor do they get any instruction in it. They are not taught it by their mother, father, siblings and playmates in the way that a teacher teaches a foreign language (Lenneberg 1967: 125; Aitchison 2008: 71; Saxton 2017: 214–215). Even the most devoted parent does not say, ‘I am going to sit down with three-year-old Mary for two hours this afternoon to teach her some new vocabulary, revise the present simple and continuous tenses and practise the “th” sounds with her.’ Yet by the age of five or six children can carry on conversations with other children and even with adults, provided the adults make some concessions to them (Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017: 61, 211–213).

Whereas children acquire or pick up the skills of listening and speaking incidentally, they do have to be taught how to read and write. This usually starts in primary school, and the primary school years are marked by further massive vocabulary expansion, perhaps on average six new words per day between the ages of six and eight years(!) (Bloom and Markson 1998: 68; Saxton 2017: 160–161). However, in the early school years children also develop a better understanding of words they already know, for example ‘ask’ versus ‘tell’, and they start to use various clause-linking words such as ‘anyway’, ‘otherwise’ and ‘actually’ (Crystal 1986: 180–182). In writing, they progress from at first just stringing sentences together by ‘and’ to gradually producing complex sentences with a main clause and a subordinate clause linked by subordinating conjunctions (Hunt 1965, 1970). A further development is that they begin to command a variety of different speech styles and adapt their speech to situation, learning that you talk to teachers differently from the way you talk to other children and that you write differently from the way you talk (Crystal 1986: 188–189; Lightbown and Spada 2013: 14). Metalinguistic awareness (awareness of how language works) also starts to develop. Dawning metalinguistic awareness is manifested in the ability to play with language (Crystal 1986: 185–188, 1998). This is responsible for those corny language jokes, which children find so hilarious (Lightbown and Spada 2013: 13). When my nephew was about seven, he said, ‘I’d tell you a joke about a broken pencil, only it has no point.’

The neurologist Eric Lenneberg (1967: 142–179) suggested there is a ‘critical period’ for acquisition of the native language (or languages) which closes off at puberty at the latest. Lenneberg noted that the mentally retarded can make slow but steady progress in language acquisition until puberty, but then make no further progress. They seem to run out of time. He cited two further sources of evidence to support the critical period hypothesis. The first source is documented cases of various unfortunate children who were for whatever reason deprived of people to talk to them from infancy, with the result that they did not learn to speak. Such children find it difficult to acquire language in later childhood, even with specialist instruction (see Saxton 2017: 62–73; Lightbown and Spada 2013: 22–23; Saville-Troike and Barto 2017: 88–89). The second sort of evidence comes from clinical data on patients who have suffered language loss because of brain injury. Young children who suffer brain injury involving language loss can re-acquire language relatively quickly, presumably by using other areas of the brain. However, due to progressive loss of brain plasticity, this process becomes increasingly more difficult, slower and less complete the older the child is when injury occurs, and after puberty complete recovery may apparently often be virtually impossible.

Bilingual Settings

It is quite possible under appropriate conditions for children to grow up simultaneously acquiring two or even three languages from birth as if each were the native language (Romaine 1995; Baker and Wright 2017: 88–98; Brown 2014: 66; Paradis 2009: 123). This is simultaneous bilingualism. The two languages develop synchronously from infancy in keeping with cognitive development. For this to work, the children need to have adequate exposure to each language and appropriate people to speak to in each language. As in monolingual settings, personal interaction is necessary. Patterson (2002) found that the vocabulary of bilingual toddlers aged 21–27 months was significantly related t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Detailed Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Language Acquisition and Language Learning
• 2 Language Teaching Methods
• 3 Individual Learner Differences
• 4 Facilitating Classroom Learning
• 5 Pronunciation
• 6 Grammar
• 7 Vocabulary
• 8 Listening and Speaking
• 9 Reading and Writing
• 10 Literature in the Language Classroom
• 11 Language Testing
• Index