Mind the gap!
How is it that people can attend years of classes or live in a country where they use the language they’re learning every day and yet still have problems with grammatical and pronunciation accuracy?
Often when people say the word fluent about someone’s ability what they mean is native or near-native abilities in that language. A more technical and measurable definition is to think of fluency as simply the ability to keep going and to convey information- it’s synonymous with communicative competence. This means that someone can be extremely fluent whilst at the same time having comparatively low levels of grammatical accuracy. Think of the tourist touts and vendors who stand on continental European squares. These people are often extremely fluent users of English. They are able to sell you a river cruise or convince you to stop for a meal somewhere, but they won’t necessarily have accurate pronunciation or grammar. But it doesn’t matter.
Nor does it mater for us when we try our hand at new languages. We haven’t bothered to learn anything other than μια μπίρα παρακαλώ for our trip to Corfu- we haven’t a clue how it’s written and we don’t care, we just want a beer. All I want to do with my Portuguese abilities is get by on holiday and read notices at train stations. I’m not fussed about being accurate, I just want the waiter to bring me a large glass of Beirão (with ice) and a coffee after my meal.
But when we do want to improve our accuracy in a language we’re learning, how can we go about it? One answer comes to us from Brazil via Hawai’i in the form of the Noticing Hypothesis. This language learning theory was formalised by the American linguist Richard Schmitt (1941-2017), a professor at the University of Hawai’i, and is based on his own personal experiences of learning Portuguese.
The central idea is that consciousness and attention to input are necessary in order for language learning to occur. This means that second language learning isn’t just something that happens. You can’t just listen to the radio a lot and do lots of reading. Even doing lots of speaking doesn’t matter that much either without noticing. In its most formal and cognitive definition, adherents to the Noticing Hypothesis maintain that learning cannot occur without noticing. So in order for me to learn a particular grammatical structure, I must consciously attend to it. Moreover, as well as recognising it, I need to notice that I’m learning it. Successful language learning is something explicit as opposed to implicit.
This cognitive definition is quite narrow and it’s not, I think, what most language teachers mean when they refer to the Noticing Hypothesis. Or at least… it’s not what I mean by it. I don’t mean that language learning can only happen in situations in which we consciously attend, but rather that our attention often needs directing towards specific things in order to progress. I think of noticing not as a theory but more as an approach to language teaching and learning.
When we first start learning a language, we don’t really do an awful lot of noticing. It’s all just noise and randomly collocated letters or symbols on the page to us. We can’t discern individual sounds or words. When invited to have a stab at speaking in the very first language class we attend, we don’t know whether we’re saying something accurately or erroneously. After a few lessons we might be able to manage a basic exchange of information about the here-and-now, but we won’t notice that we’re not conjugating verb correctly or that we’ve muddled up the grammatical gender of the odd noun.
And initially this really doesn’t matter. We can’t get things completely correct from the first lesson. If this were the case we wouldn’t need to pay for language classes and tuition.
But in order to become more proficient users of the language we need to start doing some noticing. In particular we need to attend to how our use of the language differs from other more accurate or proficient speakers. When we compare how we said something with how a more more advanced level speaker said something, we can start thinking about what exactly it is that we need to improve on.
Noticing tasks and techniques
A common and effective way of doing this is to get learners to record themselves completing a task and then compare themselves to someone else. This could be a recording of a more advanced level learner from another class, or the teacher can just provide a model. Learners can then fill out a simple table like the one below. This works particularly well when learners have completed a task that involves describing something such as the events that unfold in a short video or cartoon strip.
Noticing Review (English as a Second Language)
Another common approach is for teachers to focus specifically on errors in grammatical accuracy. This needs to be done carefully though. It’s incredibly dispiriting and irritating to be constantly interrupted by your tutor and corrected. This is especially so during conversation practice sessions where the aim is simply to improve communicative competence and interact in the target language. Aside from it knocking your confidence, being interrupted and corrected isn’t how most conversations in the real world work and so it hardly counts as meaningful language practice.
An alternative is for teachers to make notes of any errors in pronunciation or grammar and to provide these as feedback. You could to this as a review activity at the end of the session and get your language tutor to run through the list they compiled whilst you were speaking. I like to provide feedback in written form after the session in the form of some structured notes. I always give my tutees a document listing new words and sentence patterns which contains a “Watcha mas!” section at the bottom. It’s here that I record any grammatical errors the learner made. I provide a verbatim account of what they said and place the corrected version next to it. These sheets also have a pronunciation box in which I record any words that learners found tricky to pronounce or pairs of words that the learner found tricky to discriminate between in speech.
If you’re interested in reading more on Schmitt’s formulation of the Noticing Hypothesis, here’s a link.
