Yesterday evening I experienced a wonderful lesson in Lakota language taught by a grad student in the Linguistics department at the University of Hawai'i (I will add her name here if she wants me to). This was her second attempt at CI teaching, and she excelled at going slow, parsing, speaking clearly, presenting a clear word list with pictures, pausing and pointing, asking questions in the target language, integrating culture in popups, focusing on form in popups, engaging the audience with questions, fishing for audience contributions, and more fine-grained practices that I'm not noticing here. At one point, an audience member asked, "Can I get a popup? You keep saying 'The dog, the cat, likes. Does that mean the dog likes the cat or the cat likes the dog?'" Clearly, pointing to the pictures of the dog and the cat in the order spoken was not clear enough to many people in the room, to clarify "who likes whom". This was important information for our unfolding, co-created scene, and audience participation could not continue if people weren't clear on what we had all decided to be true. I jumped in and mentioned a relevant finding in Bill VanPatten's research on Input Processing (IP; VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993), showing that learners tend to assume that the first noun is the agent or subject of the sentence. But the audience still wanted a clear mention of the intended sentence meaning. Upon reflection after this lesson, I realized that the key word in research is "tend to."
Experimental researchers are rarely concerned with unanimous outcomes, that is, every member in one group coming out equal. Instead, researchers seek out tendencies in averages. So if a teacher is aiming for equity among learners, then it's important to understand that averages found in research only imply averages in our classrooms. Exceptions to the average should also be implied from the research. So, if a teacher's goal is success for everyone, then findings from research should only serve as a helpful starting point (the teacher can think, "Ok, many students will likely assume the first noun is the agent or subject in the sentence"), but then the teacher should differentiate by checking for which participants are similar to the non-average members in the research. In this example, a teacher can still help many people in the room to more clearly understand the unfamiliar language structure by asking, "What do you think this sentence means?". The teacher can then briefly clarify using a shared language, and then return to the discussion in the target language (this is standard practice in the TPRS literature). In addition to facilitating language acquisition (connecting form with meaning frequently), these extra clarifications should help audience members (the learners) contribute to the ongoing discussion as they are more clear on what is being discussed (the content of the discussion).
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These are some of my responses on the CI Fight Club group on Facebook, in a recent discussion with language teachers about "types" and "tokens".
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Reed Riggs (Author)
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