CC BY
86
E.A. Karabutova, Candidate of of Pedagogy, Docent,
Foreign Languages Department, Teachers Training Institute, Belgorod State National Research University, Belgorod, Russia, karabutova@bsu.edu.ru
RECENT APPROACHES TO GRAMMAR TEACHING FOR COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES
The article deals with the survey of approaches to teaching adults grammar of foreign language through communication based on cognitive tasks in the contemporary classroom. New contribution of grammar teaching is to involve learners into interaction in given communicative contexts of classroom activity to acquire a way to create and understand meaning. Processing Input Approach includes mainly comprehension of the target structure tasks rather than its production. Interactional Feedback Approach, based on the variety of interactional strategies as repetition, clarification requests, confirmation checks, and the like, gives the adult foreign language learners the opportunity to modify their output, producing accurate grammatical forms implicitly or explicitly. Textual Enhancement Approach engages the learners in boldfacing, italicizing, underlining, or capitalizing activities to notice grammatical forms. These approaches highlight Communicative Language Teaching emphasizing the process of communication based on cognitive abilities of learners, rather than mastery of language. Communicative Language Teaching integrates the cognitive-communicative tasks requiring the use of such communicative processes as information sharing, negotiation of meaning, and interaction. Task-based instructions develop learners' ability to perform in spontaneous and meaningful communication solving problems, completing projects and reaching decisions. Working in groups, learners use whatever language they can to achieve their aims. They discuss how best to draw up their questionnaires and present their findings. The combination of form and/or meaning "focused" and unfocused tasks — structure-based production tasks, comprehension tasks, and consciousness-raising tasks (CRTs) — promote effective classroom communication.
Keywords: Input processing, task-based grammar, discourse-based grammar, target structure comprehension, interactional feedback, perceptual saliency enhancement.
According to the goal of foreign language teaching/learning focusing on the development of communicative competence, teachers need to enable learners to use language for communicative purposes where grammar and communication are integrated. A great number of current researchers are devoted to the proposals of effective ways combining some forms of grammar instructions with the provision of opportunities for learners' communicative input and output. Such ways concern treating grammar, based on processing instruction, interactional feedback, textual enhancement, including grammar tasks, collaborative output tasks, and discourse-based grammar tasks. The variety of tasks "is said to
make language teaching more communicative... since it provides a purpose for a classroom activity which goes beyond the practice of language for its own sake"1.
Processing Input Approach or "processing instruction" approach (VanPatten, 1993, 1996, 2002) suggests to combine an initial exposure to explicit instruction with input processing activities, including mainly comprehension of the target structure tasks rather than its production (R. Ellis, 1995, 2003), to help learners "in making form-meaning connections" during processing activities or "input processing" (IP)2. For this purpose, learners can be shown a set of pictures and asked to imagine them being one
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of the characters. The next task is to listen to a sentence in the target language and to select the most appropriate picture.
Interactional Feedback Approach, represented by the theory that the variety of interactional strategies as repetition, clarification requests, confirmation checks, and the like, gives the adult foreign language learners the opportunity to modify their output, producing accurate grammatical forms implicitly or explicitly.
Textual Enhancement Approach , related to input flood technique (Trahey & White, 1993), is assumed to push the learners to notice grammatical forms in boldfacing, italicizing, underlining, or capitalizing activities. Studies by Goughty (1991) and Fotos (1994) reported that such activities enhance the perceptual saliency of the target structures.
Approaches mentioned above highlight Communicative Language Teaching emphasizing the process of communication based on cognitive abilities of learners, rather than mastery of language. The cognitive approach and communicative tasks integrated (a «principled communicative approach») in Communicative Language Teaching serve to engage learners in communication, and require the use of such communicative processes as information sharing, negotiation of meaning, and interaction. According to D. Nunan, "grammar exists to enable the language user to express different communicative meanings"3.
Task-Based Grammar Teaching serves to link classroom language learning with language use outside the classroom, providing the learners with the opportunity to focus not only on language but on the learning process as well.
Nunan defines a task for pedagogical purposes as "a piece of classroom work that involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is focused on mobilizing their grammatical knowledge in order to express meaning, and in which the intention is to convey meaning rather than to manipulate form". The researcher underlines the importance of completeness of the task, "being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right with a beginning, a middle and an end" (Nu-nan, 2004).
Focused tasks, interpreted as focusing on meaning tasks, are aimed at producing gram-
mar forms salient to the second or foreign language learners in meaning-focused interaction through communicative activities. Doing tasks learners have a lot of freedom to decide on the topic they want to research and how they want to go about it. They work in groups using whatever language they can to achieve their aims. There will be a lot of language work going on in the groups as they discuss how best to draw up their questionnaires and present their findings. Learners can be engaged into checking things out using grammar books and dictionaries, and of course all of this language work is prompted by their wish to achieve a communicative purpose. Rod Ellis (2003; Nobuyoshi & Ellis, 1993) suggests to compare "focused" and unfocused tasks — structure-based production tasks, comprehension tasks, and consciousness-raising tasks (CRTs) — to promote effective classroom communication.
Though the material of structure-based production tasks is not grammatical in nature, the learners are involved into communicative activities making the target structures to complete the tasks. Comprehension tasks (usually response-making tasks), introducing grammar forms implicitly in communicative contexts, push the learners to attend to and comprehend target forms in accurately structured input (R.Ellis, 1995; Van Patten, 1996).
As for consciousness-raising tasks, they are created to involve the learners into communication with each other about target grammar structures, usually generating rules for their use, at the level of "understanding" (Ellis, 2003). Ellis considers CRTs should consist of: "1) data containing exemplars of the targeted features, and 2) instructions requiring the learners to operate on the data in some way"4. It's admitted that such tasks are particularly appropriate for teaching spoken grammar and may be appropriate for teaching linguistic features. Underlining the positive effects of consciousness-raising tasks on this level, Fotos and Ellis (1991) suggest comparing such as tasks with performance to allow the language learners to possess a processing capacity which involves learners for the creation of meaning. Such tasks might include, for example, asking the subject to convert nouns into verbs; e.g., "event" suggests "to report," "fruit" suggests "to eat," and so on. Another task might present an active sentence such as "Nick gave the book to Bill" and a passive equivalent,
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"The book was given to Bill by Nick" and learners might be asked the questions: "Who gave the book?" "Whom was the book given to?" "What did Nick give to Bill?" "Whom was the book given to Bill by?" It is important to find out what type of sentences is processed more easily (faster). If some learners are unable to understand passive sentences a teacher needs to make some tentative steps towards understanding certain types of language deficits.
When doing the tasks learners need to be involved in negotiated interaction: clarification, confirmation, comprehension checks, requests, turn-taking, and reacting. Such activities based on modified input and modified interaction together can make learners' initially unclear messages become meaningful.
Collaborative output tasks promote output through focused communicative tasks (dicto-gloss tasks, jigsaw tasks), pushing the learners to reproduce language forms cooperatively either in group- or in pairwork as accurately as possible. The effectiveness of such tasks is investigated in the studies by Swain and her colleagues (Kowal & Swain, 1994; Swain, 2000; Swain and Lapkin, 1998, 2001), suggesting dictogloss tasks as the meaning to provide a cooperative search for the solution and jigsaw tasks as the way to create a story illustrated by a series of pictures. According to the investigations of Swain and
Lapkin these two types of tasks "generated a similar and substantial proportion of language related episodes"5. It's assumed that task-based approaches to grammar instruction successfully promote awareness of target forms and accuracy gains. Evidently, properly designed collaborative tasks help learners to notice linguistic problems and make meaning clearer by debating language form. Performing collaborative dialogues learners are engaged in language production or according to Swain's definition "the joint construction of language" and reflection on it. In a language-related episode (LRE) defined as any part of a dialogue, foreign language learners talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or other- or self-correct 6. Swain considers that speaking dialogically about language two or more individuals develop "outstrip competence; it's where language uses and language learning co-occur"7.
Discourse-Based Grammar Teaching tasks involve the learners into authentic and simplified discourse, including corpus analysis, and supply them with a variety of contextualized usages of the target language to promote the establishment of form-meaning relationships.
Celce-Murcia suggests making even warming-up activity meaningful, contextualized, and reasonably authentic in terms of use. It is advised to practice negation in the context of cor-
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recting false statements. The example of such discourse activity is as the following:
A: I just found out that Paul is absent today.
B: He's not absent today. He's present.
A: Oh.
Practicing learners in use of several Present tenses (such as Simple Present, Present Progressive and Present Perfect) and two negative forms can't and haven't a teacher is advised to provide them with enough context to make clear a grammatical form8. It is recommended to be done in a short dialogue.
A: What's up?
B: I'm looking for my watch and I can't find it.
Have you seen it?
A: No, I haven't.
By analyzing students' discourse, teachers are able to gain insight into the effect of specific tasks on students' language production and, over time, on their language development.
In summary we postulate that in recent years grammar is understood more than a set of rules, with attendant sets of vocabulary, to be memorized. It is seen as a dynamic resource for creating meaning in the process of learning based on cognitive mechanisms, i.e. "the process of habit formation". Language pedagogy is based on two integrated principles: 'knowing that' and 'knowing how', to enable learners to deploy grammatical knowledge to communicate effectively. Placing communication at the centre of teaching/learning, learners acquire grammar by communicating. Acquiring morphology through communication learners are forced to attend to both the forms and their meanings, and acquiring syntax they are engaged into activity attending to the word order and the meanings the words are associated with. Moreover a communicative approach can and should be combined with analysis of text structure and linguistic features of text. Discourse analysis can
be a useful analytic tool for making informed changes in instructional practices. Discourse analysis involves looking at both language form and its function and includes the study of both spoken interaction and written texts. It identifies linguistic features that characterize different genres as well as social and cultural factors that aid in interpretation and understanding of different texts and types of talks. A discourse analysis of written texts might include a study of topic development and cohesion across the sentences, while an analysis of spoken language might focus on these aspects plus turn-taking practices, opening and closing sequences of social encounters, or narrative structure. ^
References
1. Richards, J., J. Platt and H. Weber. 1986. Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. London: Longman. — 289.
2. Van Patten, B. (2002a). Processing instruction: An update. Language Learning 52/4755 — 764.
3. Nunan, D. (2004) Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 4.
4. Ellis, R. 2003: Chapter 5: Focused tasks and SLA., Task-based language learning and teaching. New York: Oxford University Press. — 163.
5. Swain, M. & S. Lapkin (2001) Focus on form through collaborative dialogue: exploring task effect. In M. Bygate & M. Swain, Researching pedagogic tasks. Second language learning, teaching and testing. London: Longman. — 111.
6. Swain, M. (1998) Focus on form through conscious reflection. In c. Doughty & J. Williams, Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge University Press. — 70.
7. Swain, M. (1997) Collaborative dialogue: its contribution to second language learning. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 34: 115.
8. Celce-Murcia, M. (2007) Towards More context and discourse in Grammar Instruction. Teaching English as a Second or foreign Language. — V 11, — № 2. — 3.
НОВЫЕ ПОДХОДЫ К ПРЕПОДАВАНИЮ ГРАММАТИКИ В КОММУНИКАЦИОННЫХ ЦЕЛЯХ
Е.А. Карабутова, канд. пед. наук, доцент, кафедра иностранных языков, Институт подготовки преподавателей, Белгородский государственный национальный исследовательский университет, г. Белгород, Россия, karabutova@bsu.edu.ru
В статье рассмотрены современные подходы к обучению студентов современной высшей школы грамматике иностранного языка посредством коммуникации на основе когнитивных задач. Обу-
чение грамматике предполагает вовлечение обучаемых во взаимодействие в определенном коммуникативном контексте в целях освоения способа понимания и продуцирования грамматической формы и грамматического значения в процессе аудиторной деятельности. Обучение посредством обработки вводимого материала (Processing Input Approach) строится преимущественно на заданиях, направленных на понимание грамматической структуры, а не на ее продуцирование. Обучение грамматике, предусматривающее взаимовлияние участников коммуникации (Interactional Feedback Approach), основано на таких стратегиях взаимодействия, как повторение в речи грамматических конструкций (repetition), обращение с просьбой об уточнении значения и разъяснении способа образования и употребления грамматической формы (clarification requests), выяснение согласия/несогласия с высказанным мнением (confirmation checks) и т. п., обеспечивает обучаемым возможность изменить свои иноязычные высказывания, производя точные грамматические формы как имплицитно, так и эксплицитно. Обучение, предполагающее доработку текста (Textual Enhancement Approach), предусматривает вовлечение студентов в такую деятельность, как выделение жирным шрифтом или курсивом, подчеркивание или запись заглавными буквами грамматических форм, распознанных обучаемыми в текстах заданий. Данные подходы обучения грамматике соответствуют задачам обучения взрослых языку коммуникации. Примечательно, что процесс коммуникации направлен преимущественно на развитие когнитивных способностей обучаемых, нежели на совершенное владение языком. Обучение языку коммуникации строится на интеграции когнитивных и коммуникативных заданий, развивающих способности студентов к осуществлению спонтанного взаимодействия в процессе обмена информацией и обсуждения значений. Студенты сообща принимают решение по обозначенной проблеме, занимаются проектной деятельностью, обсуждают, как лучше представить свои выводы и составить анкету, изъясняясь на таком языке, который помогает им в достижении своих целей. Интеграция различных заданий — как направленных на практическое применение знаний в процессе определения формы и/или значения грамматической структуры, так и ориентированных на коллективный поиск решения проблемы — способствует развитию эффективной коммуникации студентов в аудиторной деятельности.
Ключевые слова: грамматические формы, грамматические значения, язык коммуникации, когнитивные способности, интеграция когнитивных и коммуникативных заданий, практическое применение знаний.
