I owe special thanks to Mery Diez Ortega for inviting me yesterday to present a comprehension-based language teaching workshop in her SLS 303 course at the University of Hawai‘i. I'll offer readers here context for the main idea that I intend to share here by first describing the workshop, and then I'll explain how I believe teachers and researchers can more productively talk about comprehension-based approaches to language teaching. At yesterday's workshop for language teachers, I passed around copies of the handout (file below), then I spent about ten minutes introducing myself, TPRS, and comprehension-based approaches to language instruction (presentation slides in file below). Then I launched into a TPRS Mandarin Chinese "story-asking" whole-class task. I continuously invited learners contributed to help complete a story about Profe Mery traveling the world to find the hot pot she desired (from the student's ideas). Then we read a new story together, chorally from the projector screen. It was a calm class of adults, and I saw a lot of smiles, accurate gestures, and attentive eyes throughout the story-asking segment. The speed of their responses showed me which words and sentences they were understanding more quickly, allowing me to choose when to add new words to our interaction. The class read increasingly loudly as we read chorally from the screen. We had a brief Q&A session after, and I answered their questions, mainly about curriculum design and assessment. The main goal for this post is to propose a way for teachers and researchers to talk about TPRS as a comprehension-based approach to L2 learning while also talk about about Story Listening and ALG as comprehension-based approaches, when these approaches (and often teacher beliefs about what learning experiences learners need) look very different. TPRS lessons tend to be highly interactive, yet still comprehension-based because only those learners who are ready to speak are expected to speak, leaving the teacher typically the person in the room producing most of the language. Learners respond with gestures, facial reactions, a word from the learners' native language, or a simple word or short phrase from the target language (if they "have" it). By contrast, Story Listening (SL) and Automatic Language Growth (ALG) instructional practices tend to emphasize focused listening and focused reading. SL teachers can vary in how often and what kinds of responses learners can contribute during the story. A mundane comparison I offered in the workshop yesterday was that of a comedian on stage who tells a joke, and in response nobody laughs. Even though audiences are discouraged from speaking during the performance (the person on stage will often treat "talkers" in the audience as "hecklers" or generally problematic), the comedian is continuously looking for audience reactions in the form of laughter and facial reactions, e.g. smiles, looks of surprise, etc. The performer thus has continuous opportunities to modify their talk in real time. Other speaker-audience contexts can include a lecturer lecturing and a storyteller sharing a story around a campfire. These kinds of settings in which response from the audience is highly restrictive can resemble what SL and ALG report about talking to groups of learners. Further still, there are segments of class time where learners are invited to choose a book from a free voluntary reading (FVR) library, and just read on their own time. Learners may also be tasked with watching a video segment, or listening to audio, in class or at home. In these kinds of learning experiences, there is no opportunity for the author to modify their talk or text in response to the learner in real-time. With these differences in mind, I propose that teachers and researchers talk about comprehension-based approaches to language instruction as following a continuum in "intensity of interaction". I borrow this term, "intensity of interaction," from Bardovi-Harlig (2013), and I'll include the beginning of her paragraph to offer readers here context for the term: "The classic measure of study abroad is length of stay (LOR, length of residence, in early SLA studies). It is easy to measure and learner self-reports are reliable; however, the relevance of length of stay as a meaningful variable has been severely criticized. Dietrich, Klein, and Noyau (1995) concluded that “[d]uration of stay is an uninteresting variable. What matters is intensity, not length of interaction” (p. 277)" (p. 80, underline added here). "Intensity" in this and in a prior study by the same author (Bardovi-Harlig & Bastos, 2011) only measure time spent talking to native speakers, talking with other international students, and time spend watching TV in the target language, in self reports on surveys. Study abroad and classroom contexts share in common the learners' potential exposure to target language input. They also share in common a variety of situations ranging from purely receptive, like watching TV or reading a book, road signs, or menus, to minimally interactive, such as seeing a live performance, to relatively interactive, such as asking a simple question about directions to a destination, and nodding to show understanding while a local resident explains directions. This is, more-or-less, how I explained the "interaction continuum" for comprehension-based approaches in the workshop yesterday (in slides, below). I will use the term "intensity" here not to refer to time spent in getting exposure to input, as Bardovi-Harlig & Bastos (2011) did, but instead in a more micro-level view in terms of turn-taking and the degree to which participants invite each other to contribute to the discussion. I'll also not use "intensity" here to refer to emotions or attention. A learner can very intensely read a book (with great interest or for a long time), intensely listen to a live storyteller while processing for meaning, and very intensely shout an idea in the context of a whole-group collaborative discussion. I'll distinguish intensity of interaction here in terms "way-ness," ranging from fully one-way to fully two-way interaction, following Long's (1983) discussion of one-way versus two-way interaction. Here, low intensity interaction refers to fully one-way interaction (reading, listening, or viewing pre-written or pre-recorded texts for videos, respectively). High intensity interaction here refers to fully two-way interaction, that is, audience members are continuously encouraged to contribute to the discussion, verbally or non-verbally. Other terms may replace this later, if needed. I can already imagine 'way-ness of interaction' and 'intensity of participant contributions' as alternate labels for this continuum. Next steps:
Thanks also to Diane Neubauer for first prompting this discussion by pointing out that a lot of research on comprehension-based instructional practices, such as FVR libraries, look far different from the interaction we commonly observe in TPRS classrooms. Reference: Bardovi‐Harlig, K. (2013). Developing L2 pragmatics. Language Learning, 63, 68-86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2012.00738.x Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Bastos, M. T. (2011). Proficiency, length of stay, and intensity of interaction and the acquisition of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8(3), 347-384. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2011.017 Files for download:
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Reed Riggs (Author)I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i. My research looks at entrenchment, frequency effects, and salience along with interactional behaviors from Usage-based Linguistics (UBL) and Conversation Analytic (CA) perspectives. Archives
June 2023
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