Learning from talking and writing
- When students produce language in speaking and writing, they engage in three processes that help them learn language: noticing, metatalk, and hypothesis testing.
- Hypothesis testing – trying language out – leads to feedback on their language usage from others. This kind of specific feedback can be a powerful source of new learning.
- Certain types of language-learning tasks, especially those where students need to exchange information with each other in order to complete the task, promote a lot of interaction and negotiation. Split information activities are one of these types.
- There are many kinds of split information activities.
Three functions of output
Listening and reading are not enough for full language development to take place. Students must also produce output through speaking and writing.
The seventh of Ellis’s principles of successful language instruction states that “successful instructed language learning … requires opportunities for output” (Ministry of Education, 2006, page 6).
Merrill Swain (1995, 1998) has studied second-language learners in schools for many years and says there are three specific functions of output that help learning. (See also the inquiry What do students learn from interaction? .)
-
One function is noticing . Learners notice something in the language they are learning because they need it to express what they want to say or write (their output).
For example, Sione wants to talk about a picture, but he realises he does not know the language he needs to do this. He searches the page for a label, title, or description for the picture, and then he uses the words he finds to talk about the picture. Alternatively, he might listen carefully to other people talking about the picture and then use some of their words to say something himself.
Swain (1998) says:
… the activity of producing the target language may prompt second-language learners to recognise consciously some of their linguistic problems: It may bring to their attention something they need to discover about their second language (possibly directing their attention to relevant input). This may trigger cognitive processes that may generate linguistic knowledge that is new for the learner or consolidate the learner’s existing knowledge.
(Page 67)
- Another function of output is to provide a context in which learners can talk about language. This is called metatalk . Learners clarify when and where to use certain words or language structures, and how to use them. For example, a learner might ask, “Should I say ‘Then he cooked the leaves’, or ‘Then he has cooked the leaves’?”
-
Hypothesis testing is the third function of output. Learners use output as a way of trying out new language forms to see if they are understood and accepted by other people. As Swain says, they use output just to see what does and doesn’t work. Learning through hypothesis testing depends on feedback on language usage from the teacher or peers.
The language-related feedback can focus on the learner’s meaning. For example, a listener might say: “I don’t understand that. Do you mean that you can eat taro leaves and taro roots?”
The feedback can also focus on the correctness of language forms. For example, “It’s not ‘leafs’, it’s ‘leaves’.”
The second and third of Ellis’s principles of successful language instruction state that “instruction needs to ensure that learners focus predominantly on meaning” and “instruction needs to ensure that learners also focus on form” (Ministry of Education, 2006, pages 4–5).
Rate of new language learning
Teachers and peers don’t provide feedback on everything a language learner says. They just pick out items that are important to them, usually focusing more on meaning than form.
Learners do not pick up all of the language-related feedback they are given. Swain (1998) has also found that learners pick up on or respond to only about one-third of the changes suggested by other people. In language learning, this is called uptake .
From a teacher’s point of view, it’s important to remember that students don’t receive feedback on all the language they use, and they don’t take up everything they do get feedback on. This means that at any one time, they learn only a small proportion of all the possible things they might learn. Although research shows that focused teaching can help increase the amount of information taken up, there also seems to be a natural limit to the rate of language learning.
The fifth of Ellis’s principles of successful language instruction states that “instruction needs to take into account the learner’s ‘built-in syllabus’” (Ministry of Education, 2006, page 6).
Everything new is not learned immediately, on the learner’s first exposure to it.
See Franken, May, and McComish (2005, pages 58–64); and Improving English Language Outcomes for Students Receiving ESOL Services in New Zealand Schools (pages 37–41).
