Collins Teaching Techniques for Communicative English. Jane RevellЧитать онлайн книгу.
discuss the differences. They then would re-enact the situation in English using French gesture before moving on to try it entirely in French (verbally and non-verbally). Needless to say they had to learn a lot of useful expressions – ‘Je ne comprends pas’, ‘Comment dit-on …?’, ‘Eh bien, … ’, ‘truc’, ‘machin’, etc. – right from the start.
What I would suggest for bridging the skill-getting and skill-using gap are activities where learners are playing a part in situations which are not predictable – e.g. role-play (see Chapter 4, ‘Playing a Part’).
Teaching communicative competence means a reassessment of our attitude towards error. Having decided that perfection at the pattern drill level is not enough, and that communicative competence is our goal, are we going to allow our learners to make mistakes? And if so, to what extent and of what kind?
In the late 1970s there was a swing away from the idea that every mistake should be stamped out immediately or else the student would develop bad habits which were then impossible to get rid of. It was also believed that emphasis on correct production at all times could lead to serious inhibitions in the learner.
Instead, making mistakes was considered to be a necessary part of a foreign learner’s progress towards mastery of the language, or their ‘interlanguage’,[1:11] the sum total of their knowledge of the language at any given moment, which is constantly changing. It was thought that these mistakes would right themselves in the normal process of things as the learner received more information. They would not right themselves however unless the learner was encouraged to test out the hypotheses they are continually making about the new language, that is, unless they were given the opportunity to make mistakes.
When a learner acquires a new word or structure or function, they can only find out what the boundaries of its use are by trying it out in different contexts. If they are always terrified of making a mistake, they will never really come to master that piece of language but only have a partial understanding of it.
What this means for the classroom is that once students have had an opportunity to practise a new bit of language in a fairly controlled way, they should be able to try it out on their own without too much interference from the teacher. Hypothesis-testing mistakes must of course be corrected so that the learner can widen or narrow boundaries, but this needn’t be done on the spot. As teachers, we need to develop sensitivity as to when and how to correct (see the section ‘Dealing with Mistakes’ in Chapter 2).
In this chapter we shall be looking at activities for the classroom which encourage students to get to know – and trust – one another and which help them gradually build up their confidence. All of these ideas have actually been used with foreign learners – most of them with adults, and one or two of them with children – and they have worked successfully.
Activities involving simulation and role-play (see Chapter 4) require a certain amount of psychological preparation: there is a need to break the students in gently and gradually overcome any inhibitions that they may quite naturally feel.
Although most young children seem to take to role-play activities like ducks to water, some adult students who have never done anything quite like it, and many adolescent students, are less enthusiastic. They are afraid of being made to look silly in front of their fellow students, and exposed to their criticism. A teacher who rushes into this type of activity without adequate preparation exercises runs the risk of scaring their students off for good. Building up the students’ confidence, creating an atmosphere of trust (see 2.4 ‘Getting to know you games’ below), teaching the students to relax – all these things take time and demand exercises where the individuals in a class are working together, getting to know each other well. The activities in this chapter are designed to have this effect, and include games, group and pair exercises intended to loosen up the class and create a relaxed and harmonious atmosphere conducive to role-play activities. Even physical exercises are mentioned: they relax people physically and so make them less inhibited generally. The exercises described in this chapter should ideally be used over a period of time – one or two of them could be brought into every lesson.
Before describing the activities, I should like to mention two difficulties that can arise.
The first problem is a physical one: in classrooms with fixed desks all facing forwards in rows, group-work is difficult, and having people move around is even more difficult. If teaching is to be truly communicative then it almost goes without saying that the teacher should not be the focus of attention all the time but that the interaction should be general. Seating the students in a large circle is ideal as it means that every student is in contact with both the teacher and every other student, and a large space is left in the middle for activities that require a lot of room. I know that not all classrooms lend themselves to the circular layout, however, so we have to make the most of what we have.
The second problem is one of discipline, if the learners are not adults. This can be a very serious problem and often deters teachers from embarking on a noisy and potentially riotous activity! Three points should be mentioned here. Firstly, the physical grouping of the class is an important factor: the circular arrangement suggested above enables the teacher to be in eye contact with everyone and does seem to give them more control than other groupings. Also of prime importance is motivation: students who are interested in what is going on in the classroom and who find it relevant, realistic and fun will be less likely to cause trouble. Thirdly, the gradual build-up advocated in the last section should make it easier for all the members of a class to participate and to relate well to one another. This harmony tends to work against potentially disruptive students.
We have already mentioned the treatment of error (see ‘Accuracy versus fluency’ in Chapter 1) and the importance of focusing on fluency rather than accuracy in communicative language practice. The students will probably make quite a few mistakes, so what should a teacher do when, having vowed not to interfere, they hear a mistake that makes their hair stand on end?
There are ways of dealing with these ‘bad’ mistakes without disrupting the activity and alarming the student concerned.
Mario Rinvolucri advocates ‘hot correction’ in group work: he slips a piece of paper to the student with the correction written on it – feeling that if he leaves it until later the student will have forgotten what it was all about. Even this tends to be a little disruptive at first, although it is much less so with a group of students who are really used to the technique.
Teachers can also keep a note of any mistakes they hear, and go through them anonymously when the activity has finished, by writing them up on the board and inviting corrections