Article reviews

Article review 1


Article Title
Language Teaching: State of the Art
Author
Mohammad Ali Salmani-Nodoushan


In its lifetime, the profession of language teaching has undergone many changes. Early attempts at language teaching almost entirely lacked a theoretical base. The first steps towards making language teaching scientific were taken in the twentieth century. In the first half of the twentieth century, the proposal of the notion of method shed new light on the processes of language teaching. In 1994, an attempt at finding an alternative to methods instead of an alternative method culminated in the introduction of the post method era. The present paper tries to provide the reader with a brief account of these trends.

The age of the field of language pedagogy can be broken into two periods: (a) the non-scientific period, beginning with Confucius and ending with the emergence of the language teaching methods based on structural psychology and linguistics; and (b) the scientific eon, starting with the emergence of the language teaching methods based on structural psychology and linguistics and continuing to the present time. The second period can be subdivided into three eras: the method era, the beyond method era, and the post method era.

The method era has witnessed two periods: (a) the period of methods informed by linguistic, psychological, and sociolinguistic theories, and (b) the period of methods informed by the personal philosophies of method developers.
According to Richards, all methods could be categorized under one of the two headings: language-centered methods, and learner-centered methods. The former is composed of those methods which are based on a theory of (the nature of human) language. The latter, however, includes methods based on a theory of the learning process.Methods, as Richards sees them, are attempts at creating opportunities for learners to acquire language. It should, however, be noted that different methods define language differently.

In a paper published in 1984, Richards claims that language-teaching methods have a secret life. The secrecy of methods has to do with the fact that methods have a life beyond the classroom; the rise and fall of methods depends upon a large variety of factors extrinsic to the method itself. Besides their descriptive (i.e. orientational) and implementational aspects, methods need to meet the criterion of accountability. This, in turn, means shifting our attention from methods towards the relevant facts and procedures of curriculum development. Such a shift of attention has received a unique name - the "beyond method" era. Beyond method is based on the claim that the notion of good or bad method per se is misguided, and that the search for an inherently best method should be replaced by a search for the ways for the interaction of teachers' and specialists' pedagogic perceptions. All of these claims boil down to what is called teacher plausibility.

The beyond method era was realized in two different forms: (a) effective teaching, and (b) reflective teaching. They are distinguished according to who should be held responsible for theorizing. The proponents of effective teaching suggest that effective language teaching is the outcome of the cooperation of theorizers and practitioners. Effective teaching does not absolutely contradict the traditional notion of method. In fact, it is not the method that works or fails to work. An effective teacher may find some of the traditional methods, or some parts of methods, useful enough to be incorporated into his classroom practices. What most of the proponents of the effective teaching orthodoxy suggest is that teachers should refrain from being dogmatic in their understanding of language teaching methodology.
The proponents of reflective teaching, on the other hand, suggest that theorizing or, at least, mediation responsibility should be placed upon the shoulder of teachers, rather than applied linguists (Widdowson, 1990; Freeman, 1991).A reflective teacher (also called a researcher of teaching) is a person who transcends the technicalities of teaching and thinks beyond the need to improve his instructional techniques. Being reflective draws on the need for asking "what" and "why" questions. It forces teachers to adopt a critical attitude to themselves as individual second language teachers, and to challenge their espoused personal beliefs about teaching.

The period of insecurity manifested by both the methods of the method era and the ideologies of the beyond method era formally culminated in the post method era - or post method condition. It has three distinct features: (1) a search for an alternative to method rather than an alternative method, (2) an emphasis on teacher autonomy, and (3) an attempt at principled pragmatism. The crucial problem with the traditional notion of method, according to the proponents of post-method condition, is an ethical one in the sense that method, as outlined by theorizers, keeps practitioners away from the practice of their potentials. "The post-method condition, however, recognizes the teacher's potentials: teachers know not only how to teach but also know how to act autonomously within the academic and administrative constraints imposed by institutions, curricula, and textbooks" (Kumaravadivelu, 1994, p. 30).

The post method framework suggests that teachers should foster the following ten macrostrategies:

1) Maximize learning opportunities.
2) Facilitate negotiated interaction.
3) Minimize perceptual mismatches.
4) Activate intuitive heuristics.
5) Foster language awareness.
6) Contextualize linguistic input.
7) Integrate language skills.
8) Promote learner autonomy.
9) Raise cultural consciousness.
10) Ensure social relevance.

The post-method pedagogy is now a three-dimensional system consisting of the pedagogic parameters of particularity, practicality, and possibility.The parameter of particularity facilitates the context-sensitive language teaching with a true understanding of local linguistic, sociocultural, and political particularities. Practicality ends the conventional role relationship between theorists and practitioners through empowering teachers to construct their own theory of practice. Possibility is the parameter which allows learners, teachers, and teacher educators to be sociopolitically conscious and to search for identity formation and social transformation.

Article review2:

Article title
The effect of different types of corrective feedback on ESL student writing
Author
John Bitchener, Stuart Younge, Denis Cameron

Debate about the value of providing corrective feedback on ESL writing has been of considerable interest to researchers and classroom practitioners in recent years. Some scholars claimed that error correction does not have a significant effect on improving L2 student writing, while others consider it as beneficiary and try to investigate which methods, techniques, or approaches to error correction can lead to short-term or long-term improvement.

The research reported in this article, attempted to investigate the extent to which different types of corrective feedback on three targeted linguistic errors can determine accuracy performance in new pieces of writing. 53 post-intermediate ESOL learners participated in this study. They were predominantly Chinese adult migrants who had arrived in New Zealand over the last two years. Ages ranged from early twenties to late fifties. For one semester, they followed a competency-based curriculum. As part of their course, they had to achieve one out of two writing competencies which were similar to the tasks set for the research.

The participants were divided into three treatment groups on the basis of the amount of hours they attended the classes. Group 1, the full time class of 19 participants, received direct written corrective feedback and a 5 minute student-researcher conference after each piece of writing. Group 2, the 10 hours per week part-time class of 17 participants, received direct written corrective feedback only. Group 3, the four hours per week part-time class of 17 participants, received no corrective feedback. They were given feedback on the quality and organization of their content.

Each participant completed four 250 word writing tasks. Each writing task was of a similar type –an informal letter which made it possible for the participants to use targeted linguistic forms. 3 linguistic errors occurred most frequently during the first writing task, therefore they were chosen by the researchers to be targeted in the research. The greatest difficulty occurred with the use of prepositions followed by the past simple tense and the definite article.

For each participant, the percentage of correct usage of each targeted linguistic form was calculated. For example, 3 correct uses of the linguistic form Definite Article from 10 obligatory occasions gave an accuracy performance of 30 % .The findings of the study indicated that the type of feedback provided had a significant effect on the accuracy with which the participants used the separate linguistic categories in new pieces of writing. Providing full, explicit written feedback, together with individual conference feedback, improved students’ accuracy when the past simple tense and the definite article were used in new pieces of writing. Nevertheless, this was not the case with the use of propositions. As Ferris (1999) suggests, the former are more treatable than the latter because their use is determined by sets of rules .Therefore, the two more treatable categories (the past simple tense and the definite article) were amenable to the combination of written and oral feedback. The study also revealed that the overall accuracy of participants varied considerably across the four writing times. As earlier researches have shown, in the process of new linguistic forms, second language learners may perform them with accuracy in one occasion but fail to do so on the other similar occasions.

The study also investigated whether there was an effect for the interaction of time and type of feedback. The group that received both written and conference feedback performed differently from the other two groups in the use of prepositions across the four tasks. This was not the case in their use of the past simple tense and the definite article, where performance patterns were similar for the three types of feedback.

Further research would need to be undertaken to see if this finding also applies to L2 writers at other proficiency levels and whether it is also true for other linguistic forms where rules of usage are more complex and more idiosyncratic than they are for the use of the past simple tense and the definite article.

Article review3:

Article title
The effectiveness of explicit attention to form in language learning
Author
Adel Abu Radwan

Despite the plethora of research on focus-on-form instruction, SLA research needs to explore the effects of various instructional conditions on learner’s level of awareness and their subsequent learning of different grammatical features. This issue suggests a need to further examine language learning from a cognitive perspective so as to reach a better understanding of the relationship between attention, learning condition, and language development.

The study reported in this article attempted to investigate the facilitative effects of various types of attention-drawing instructional conditions (explicit and implicit) on the acquisition of English dative alternation. This study addresses: (a) whether differences in the degree of explicitness manipulated in various instructional conditions differently affect the learning of the target feature; (b) whether differences in the degree of explicitness in which the target feature is presented differently affect the level of awareness developed during the treatment; and (c) whether the level of awareness developed by learners during the treatment sessions correlates positively with their subsequent learning of the target feature.

Four classes comprising 42 participants of low-intermediate level participated in this study. Due to lack of sufficient classes at the desired English proficiency level, the study took place in two separate places. Participants in these classes were a mixture of graduate and undergraduate students with an average age of 23 years, and they cine from different linguistic backgrounds.

The four classes were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: a textual enhancement condition (TEG), a rule-oriented condition (ROG), a content-oriented condition (COG), and a control group (CG). All the participants had to participate in a pretest and two posttests.

English dative alternation was chosen as the target of instruction. The problem with dative verbs stem from learner’s tendency to observe regularities in the input, and subsequently form overgeneralization of these regularities to cases where they don not apply. Twenty-six dative verbs were chosen for this study, half of which alternate and the other half which do not.

Three teaching packages were prepared for the three instructional groups, matching the treatment each group received. The materials were administered in two sessions the next day following the pretest. In the first meeting, participants were handed out the material which consisted of a short story that contained a high incidence of dative verbs. The TEG received the same text with all dative verbs bolded and enlarged. On the other hand, the ROG received the same text with a one page explanation of the rules governing dative verbs. And the COG received the same text without any modifications or explanations. The second treatment session, conducted the next day after the first session, was designed to serve two purposes: (1) reinforcement of what had been learned if any, and (2) collection of think-aloud protocols to assess the learners’ ability to notice the target feature during the instructional treatment. The last part of the treatment was the think-aloud protocol task in which participants had to describe a sequence of pictures based on the short story.

The next day following the second treatment, the first posttest was administered and followed by a debriefing questionnaire consisting of two questions. The first question asked the participants whether they paid any attention to any grammatical feature during the writing task, and the second required them to describe the rules governing the use of dative verbs. One month later, a second posttest was administered to assess the long term effects of the instruction.

The assessment task used in this study included a variety of tasks comprising: (1) a grammaticality judgment, (2) a preference task, and (3) a controlled writing task. While the first two tasks measured the participants’ recognition of the target feature, this third task measured the participants’ ability to produce in writing the target feature in a controlled context which intended to maximize the production of the relevant target feature.

The first research question deals with whether differences in the degree of explicitness manipulated in the various instructional conditions would differently affect the learning of the target feature. The result of the first task didn’t show any significant differences among the four groups prior to the treatment. Similar results were obtained for task 2. The ROG outperformed all groups on the immediate posttest. Similarly task 3 showed that ROG outperformed all groups on the immediate and delayed posttest.

Accordingly, analyses of participants’ performance on the three test tasks demonstrates that while ROG outperformed all the other groups in accuracy of the use of the target feature, TEG, in spite of some progress between the pretest and posttest in the three tasks, failed to distinguish itself from CG and COG and to pattern in performance with ROG.

The second research question deals with whether the degree of explicitness in which the target feature is presented differently affect the level of awareness developed during the treatment. The results revealed that ROG did significantly better than both TEG and COG. No significant difference was found between COG and TEG. The results of the analysis also demonstrated that participants in ROG who were exposed to explicit presentation of the rules governing the target feature were able to verbalize the rules more than those participants receiving considerably less explicit treatment.

The third research question deals with the relationship between level of awareness and language learning. Results of the analysis did not reveal any significant difference in performance on any task between those who reported noticing the target feature and those who did not, which means that awareness at the level of noticing did not correlate positively with participants’ performance on any of the test’s immediate and delayed posttests. In all comparisons, there was a steady progress from the pretest to the immediate and delayed posttest for those who were noticed; however, this progress was not sufficient to distinguish them from those who didn’t report noticing the target feature.

Results of the present investigation should be interpreted within the context of its methodology limitations. First, this was a small scale study involving only a small number of learners. Second, while the present study shows that explicit instruction is favored over implicit instruction or no instruction when the instructional period is short, it doesn’t rule out that longer instructional treatments produce different results. Moreover, the rules controlling use of the target feature were presented in a simple and clear form which might have favored the rule-oriented group.

Further research needs to investigate the effects of the various conditions on learners with different proficiency levels. Moreover, the effects of longer duration of treatment need to be addressed as well as collecting data from learners in less controlled and more spontaneous conditions.