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Quotes about teaching

My new page, which will be growing until it’s the only thing you need to read to do a DELTA:

  • “Research suggests that traditional instruction on isolated grammar forms is insufficient to promote their acquisition (Long 1991; Long and Robinson 1998), yet purely communicative approaches have been found inadequate for developing high levels of target language accuracy (Harley and Swain 1984, Swain 1985, 1998; Swain and Lapkin 1998)” Sometimes it’s nice to have common sense backed up by the “experts”. Nassaji and Fotos in Form- focused Instruction and Teacher Education (OUP, 2007)
  • “…surveying English as a second/foreign language teachers, Nassaji (2005) found that while many teachers acknowledged the importance of SLA research, few mentioned that they regularly read such research” Nassaji and Fotos
  • “…some studies have found that explicit instruction may be more effective than implicit instruction when learning involves simple rules (DeKeyser 1995, Robinson 1996, de Graaff 1997)” Nassaji and Fotos
  • “…the relative benefits of of explicit instruction may be more related to factors such as the extent of instruction, the kind of task involved, the amount, nature and timing of planning (R.Ellis 2005), the learners’ differences in their cognitive abilities, the stages of L2 learning, frequency effects (N.Ellis 2002, R.Ellis 2002) and even L2 learning aptitude (Robinson 2005).” Nassaji and Fotos
  • “..a meta analysis of 49 FFI [Form-focused instruction, e.g.methods that include grammar explanations] studies …concluded that: (1) in general, FFI produces substantial gain of the target structure over the course of the study, (2) the effects of FFI seem to be sustained over time, (3) instruction that contains explicit instructional techniques results in more positive effects than that involving implicit techniques…”
  • “This…raises the question of as to whether language learning benefits most from focusing on a few problematic linguistic forms intensively or from a scatter-gun approach where multitudinous problematic forms are treated randomly and cursorily and where the treatment may or may not be repeated” Rod Ellis, quoted in Nassaji and Fotos
  • “… the dictogloss has been noted to improve learner accuracy in the use of the target form since learners reconstruct a TL dictation and thereby increase their awareness of the target structure.” Nassaji and Fotos
  • “…although much of first language (L1) acquisition involves implicit learning, these mechanisms do not suffice for second language acquisition (SLA) because of learnt attention and transfer from the L1. SLA must therefore overcome the processing habits of the L1 by recruiting additional resources of explicit learning.” Nick C. Ellis in Form-focused Instruction and Teacher Education- Studies in honour of Rod Ellis
  • “From various divisions of cognitive science and education we know that implicit and explicit learning are distinct processes, that humans have separate implicit and explicit memory systems, that there are different types of knowledge of and about language, that these are stored in different areas the brain, and that the different educational experiences generate different types of knowledge” Nick C.Ellis
  • “Empirical analyses of learners in ‘grammar-free’ communicative, natural or immersion L2 and FL programmes demonstrated significant short-comings in the accuracy of their language” Nick C. Ellis
  • “…those language forms which are attended…are subsequently learnt” Nick C. Ellis
  • “the more novelty we encounter, the more the involvement of consciousness is needed for successful learning…” Nick C. Ellis. In other words, we need conscious learning of L2 because it is strange to our brains, which are set up to automatically speak L1
  • “since many features of L2 input are likely to be infrequent, non-salient, and communicatively redundant, intentionally focused attention may be a practical (though not a theoretical) necessity for successful language learning” R. Schmidt, quoted by Nick C. Ellis
  • “(Rod Ellis) recommends holding off teaching grammar to beginning students because the early stages of acquisition are primarily lexically rather than grammatically based and because of the evidence from immersion programs that learners are able to acquire word order and ’salient inflection’ without direct instruction” Nick C. Ellis in Form-focused Instruction and Teacher Education- Studies in honour of Rod Ellis
  • “…you learn to be fluent in your first language long before you are accurate in it” Scott Thornbury in An A-Z of ELT

  • “It has been found…that CMC (computer-mediated communication) allows a more balanced participation than in traditional classroom settings [and] that its language displays greater complexity and lexical density than… face-to-face conversation” Scott Thornbury

  • “… the consonant sounds in English match those of other languages relatively closely. The vowel system, on the other hand, is much more idiosyncratic” Scott Thornbury
  • “Probably the most difficult consonant sound for learners of English is [the one in] three and breath. Happily, its mispronunciation is seldom if ever a cause of communication breakdown amongst non-native users of English” Scott Thornbury
  • “Complexity has been shown to vary according to task difficulty. Certain kinds of tasks, such as open-ended tasks… or tasks involving narration produce more complex language than others.” Scott Thornbury
  • “Allowing students time to plan the task also increases the complexity of the language they produce: ten minutes seems to be optimal” Scott Thornbury

  • “..having students repeat a task also shows gains in complexity” Scott Thornbury
  • “…if learners are exposed only to texts about things they know, they may over-rely on intelligent guesswork at the expense of their ability at bottom-up processing” Scott Thornbury
  • “Over 70% of the people in the world are bi- or multi-lingual” Scott Thornbury
  • “Most communication strategies are directed at filling in the gaps in the learner’s vocabulary knowledge” Scott Thornbury
  • “Resistance to CLT (communicative language teaching) in some contexts is justified on the grounds that it might not be appropriate in cultures where theoretical knowledge is valued more highly than practical skills” Scott Thornbury
  • “Coherence… is less a property of texts than of the relation between the text and its context, and the between the writer and the reader… a focus on teaching linkers and text organisation in the absence of any clear idea of who the reader will be, or what purpose the text will serve, may be a case of putting the cart before the horse” Scott Thornbury
  • Proponents of a lexical approach urge the teaching of a core vocabulary of, say, a thousand high frequency words and chunks as soon as possible. A core vocabulary, they argue, is both communicatively useful and also the raw material out of which a learner’s grammar will emerge. A more cautous approach might combine a mix of grammar, functional language, and vocabulary, until the learner’s more specific needs and abilities become apparent. Scott Thornbury
  • …teachers who have been told that their students are ‘high achievers’ (even if they are not) tend to get the kind of results associated with high achievement. Scott Thornbury
  • Teachers need to make a special effort to help learners notice (auxiliary verbs). Teaching the term ‘auxiliary verb’ (or ‘helping verb’) at an early stage can help. Scott Thornbury
  • Postive appraisal language is…noticeably absent from many learners’ spoken and written language, which suggests that it may need to be given more prominence in syllabuses. Scott Thornbury
  • Teaching aspect is not easy… because… aspect varies from language to language (in those languages that have them) and… duration and completion are abstract, often subjective, and difficult to explain. More successful are approaches that focus on the typical contexts that aspect is used in (or approaches that show) the kinds of words and expressions that commonly co-occur with them such as ever, for ages etc. Scott Thornbury
  • …research suggests that learners find it easier to say what they can’t do, rather than what they can do. Scott Thornbury
  • often the response to a request for advice for the speaker simply to narrate what he or she did in similar circumstances- What we did was we took a tour on a tourist bus… Scott Thornbury
  • In formal (i.e. classroom) contexts, adolescent and adult learners appear to do better on all linguistic measures (including pronunciation). But in the long term, and with continued exposure, children and likely to become more native-like and (with rare exceptions) only children are capable of acquiring a native accent in informal (i.e. non-classroom) learning contexts. Scott Thornbury
  • The younger,the better is an argument that has encouraged many education authorities to introduce second language learning into the school curriculum at an early age…. However, the results and benefits of this are still inconclusive. Scott Thornbury
  • “…researchers have also found, however, that the ability to understand the content and to function in (CLIL) classroom interaction does not ensure that students will continue to improve …in areas of accuracy on language… that does not usually interfere with meaning” Patsy.M.Lightbown and Nina Spada, in “How Languages are Learned 3rd Edition” (Oxford University Press)
  • “Children who do little overt imitation acquire (L1) as fully and rapidly as those who imitate a lot” Lightbown and Spada
  • “(L1) vocabulary grows at a rate between several hundred and more than a thousand words a year, depending mainly on how much and how widely children read” Nagy, Herman and Anderson, quoted by Lightbown and Spada
  • “At a minimum, research on learning styles should make us sceptical of claims that a single teaching method or textbook will suit the needs of all learners” Lightbown and Spada
  • “Fred Genesee found that, while intelligence was related to the development of French second language reading, grammar and vocabulary, it was unrelated to oral production skills” Lightbown and Spada
  • “Lily Wong-Fillmore observed that when children are ’submerged’ in a different language for long periods in pre-school or day care, their development of the family language may be slowed down or stalled. Wallace Lambert calls this Subtractive Bilingualism” Lightdown and Spada
  • “Many adult learners, especially those with good metalinguistic knowledge of their own language, express a preference for structure-based approaches… Learners’ beliefs about the kind of instruction that is best can influence their satisfaction and success” Lightbown and Spada
  • “One or two hours a week will not produce advanced second language speakers, no matter how young they were when they began. Older language learners may be able to make better use of the limited time they have for second language instruction” Lightbown and Spada manage to sum up half of what I wanted to say in the conclusion of my Teaching Pre-school article in one sentence!
  • “When learners receive only a few hours of instruction per week, learners who start later often catch up with those who started earlier” Lightbown and Spada
  • “The Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle study found that adolescents were by far the most successful learners (within 6 months of arriving in Holland). …the adult….scores were second best. By the end of the year, the children were catching up… the adults (but) it was the adolescents who retained the highest levels…” Lightbown and Spada
  • “The input flood (lots of input chosen because it contains many examples of the target language) could help them add something new to their interlanguage, but did not lead them to get rid of an error based on their first language” Research by Martha Trahey and Lydia White, quoted by Patsy M Lightbown and Nina Spada
  • “…substantial vocabulary growth through reading is possible, but students must read a great deal…. to realize those benefits” Research by Marlise Horst (2005), quoted by Lightbown and Spada
  • “Renate Schulz (2001) found that virtually all students expressed a desire to have their errors corrected while very few teachers felt this was desirable. In addition, while most students believed that ‘formal study of the language is essential to the eventual mastery of the language’, just over half of the teachers shared this view.” Lightbown and Spada
  • “Opportunities for freer communication did not cause learners to do less well on measures of linguistic accuracy” Research by Sandra Savignon, quoted by Lightbown and Spada
  • “…an almost exclusive focus on accuracy and practice of particular grammatical forms does not mean that learners will be able to use to use the forms correctly outside the classroom drill setting…” Research by Patsy Lightbown, quoted by Lightbown and Spada
  • “Attempts by teachers to use methods which emphasize the input rather than the output of language often serve to encourage a passive attitude which the children find it difficult to ever break out of” -David Paul

Please note that all quotes are given to stimulate thought and discussion and are not meant to be held up as the final views of anyone, least of all myself. But anyhow, bring the comments on…

Alex