Helping students notice words and grammar
- Students can learn more new language from what they listen to and read if their teacher uses techniques to help them notice and become aware of specific items.
- Teachers can highlight or draw attention to specific items in various ways.
- Students can use classroom routines of regularly checking for themselves whether language items and forms are familiar to them or need clarification.
Helping students to notice vocabulary and grammatical features
Second-language research tells us that a number of critical conditions must exist for students to learn language effectively. Crucially, students need a great deal of exposure to language – input . You may have had the experience of learning a language in a formal setting, such as a classroom, and then travelling to the country where the language is spoken. The difference between these two situations often seems immense. Many people say that when they are in a situation in which they hear and see the language all around them, they feel that they learn much more. The sixth of Ellis’s principles of successful language instruction states that “successful instructed language learning requires extensive target-language input” (Ministry of Education, 2006b, page 6).
Classrooms in which there are learners of English should, then, provide those students with a lot of exposure to English – that is, a lot of input. For the best learning to take place from spoken or written input, the input should be at the right level: not too hard and not too easy. (See the inquiry Learning from listening and reading .) Teachers usually become very skilled at judging how to pitch their language at the appropriate level.
Immersion education works on the basis of extensive exposure to the target language. However, a leading researcher, Merrill Swain, has observed that students immersed in French in Canadian schools did not progress as expected in the area of grammatical development. She says:
More than two decades of research in French immersion classes suggests that immersion students … are well able to get their meaning across in their second language. Even at intermediate and higher-grade levels they often do so with
non-targetlike
morphology
and
syntax
.
(Swain, 1998, page 65.)
The third and fourth of Ellis’s principles of successful language instruction state, respectively, that “instruction needs to ensure that learners also focus on form” and “instruction needs to be predominantly directed at developing implicit knowledge of the target language while not neglecting explicit knowledge ” (Ministry of Education, 2006b, page 5).
How can teachers help students notice language items?
Teachers can make language learning both more successful and more efficient by helping their students to notice language items and language patterns in the language they hear and read. This is best done in a way that does not interrupt the students’ attention to meaning. Here are some examples.
- One simple way to help students notice vocabulary is for a teacher, while reading a story aloud, to select words for attention and write them on the whiteboard without interrupting the flow of the story. (Most junior class teachers do this regularly.)
- Another way is to set up classroom routines so that at the end of a section of a text, or at other specific times, students have opportunities to ask about words or phrases they don’t know or are unsure of. The practice may be for students to answer each other instead of the teacher – for example, using reciprocal teaching of reading procedures. The students could also discuss the strategies they used, or could have used, to independently identify the unfamiliar language items.
- A third way is to highlight features in a text, as in the examples in Investigation B.
- When teachers are explaining or introducing new content, they can pause and repeat key words or phrases, drawing students’ attention to these items.
The Ministry of Education’s Selections series, for teachers of English-language learners in Years 7–13, includes teachers’ notes which unpack the features of texts suitable for older readers who are at earlier stages of learning to read in English. The notes suggest ways of teaching students to notice and learn to use these features.
