People typically choose to enroll in a language class because they want to develop abilities to use that language. As learners, we trust that our teacher will select appropriate course materials, and teach us using methods that help us on our road toward using the language. Most students are fine with their teachers explaining sounds, vocab, and grammar clearly, especially if that's what will be on an upcoming test. Additionally, students often believe that noticing forms such as sounds, word order, word endings, and so on, will be of help later on when they want to use the language to interact with other people, read books and websites, write, and so forth. However, teaching communicatively--that is, teaching language for the purposes of speaking, writing, reading, etc. in real time with other people, and teaching toward these goals through frequently using the language to interact with students in the classroom--can get a little weird when the in-class communication is framed as "getting to know each other." I've made up a few examples here in different social contexts, to show how this looks in and outside the classroom.
In an ESL classroom: Teacher: "Did anyone do anything fun this weekend?" Student: (raises hand) Teacher: "What did you do?" Student: "I visited my grandma." Teacher: "'I visited my grandma.' Notice how she said 'I visited' with that -ed on the end. Excellent, who else did something fun?" On a first date: Person 1: "So, I work in finance." Person 2: "Oh, how long have you worked in finance?" Person 1: "Eight years now, and notice that I said 'in finance,' and not 'at finance.' The preposition there is important." Home for the holidays: Daughter: "Can I help prepare anything for dinner?" Parent: "No, that's ok, I got this. You go catch up with your brother." Daughter: "Ok, and I'm excited that we're eating at home and not in a restaurant or at a cafeteria." Parent: "What?" Daughter: "I need to use all of the words on this vocab list that my teacher gave me in our dialogue right now." Surfing with friends in Honolulu: Friend 1: "Bruh, you want go surfing over there?" Friend 2: "Can." Friend 1: "You notice how my intonation stayed high and then dropped down at the end, bruh?" I'm not saying I don't point out form when we use the target language to converse in class, and I do think students tend to tolerate it more than people would outside of class. But it would typically be very antisocial to do this outside of a classroom setting, maybe except in cases where a person asked for help with their speech. In class remedy this by leaning in stronger to show interesest in the person after I ask the class to notice some form in what we just said. I think there's also an extra social layer to my purpose for recapping what we just said to the class: I expect that not everybody understood what exchange just happened. By clarifying meaning, I aim to do two things in that moment: first, include everyone in the room in the discussion, and second, aid language acquisition through the clearer matching of form and meaning in the current context. I then go back into showing interest in the student I'm speaking to, to show them we weren't just practicing language to end with the focus on form as the most important purpose for our interaction. I genuinely want to build community in our classroom, and pedagogical goals are a part of the community-building. If I don't delicately re-focus our attention back to the person in the room, showing that we genuinely are interested in learning about each other, then I'm acting in a way that would be considered jerk behavior in any other context, like in the dialogues above.
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Reed Riggs (Author)
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