3a. The possible number of linguistic features in a language and the many potential contexts of learning make this question impossible to answer. One tantalizingly suggestion, however, was supported in DeKeyser's (1995) finding that explicit instruction was more appropriate for easily stated grammar rules and implicit instruction was more successful for more complex rules.  

4a. The wide-ranging research on learner characteristics, styles, and strategies supports the conclusion that certain learners clearly benefit more than others from FFI. Analytic, field-independent, left-brain-oriented learners internalize explicit FFI better than relational, field-dependent, right-brain-oriented learners (Jamieson 1992). Visual input will favor visual learners (Reid 1987). Students who are "Js" and "Ts" on the Myers-Briggs scale will more readily be able to focus on form (Ehrman 1989).

ERROR TREATMENT

One of the major issues involved in carrying out FFI is the manner in which teachers deal with student errors. Should errors be treated? How should they be treated? When? For a tentative answer to these questions, as they apply to spoken (not written) errors, let us first look again at the feedback model offered by Vigil and Oller (1976). Figure 8.2 metaphorically depicts what happens in that model.

     The "green light" of the affective feedback mode allows the sender to continue attempting to get a message across; a "red light" causes the sender to abort such attempts. (The metaphorical nature of such a chart is evident in the fact that affective feedback does not precede cognitive feedback, as this chart may lead you to believe; both modes can take place simultaneously.) The traffic signal of cognitive feedback is the point at which error correction enters. A green light here symbolizes noncorrective feedback that says "I understand your message." A red light symbolizes corrective feedback that takes on a myriad of possible forms (outlined below) and causes the learner to make some kind of alteration in production. To push the metaphor further, a yellow light could represent those various shades of color that are interpreted by the learner as falling somewhere in between a complete green light and a red light, causing the learner to adjust, to alter, to recycle, to try again in some way. Note that fossilization may be the result of too many green lights when there should have been some yellow or red lights.

     The most useful implication of Vigil and Oller's model for a theory of error treatment is that cognitive feedback must be optimal in order to be effective. Too much negative cognitive feedback—a barrage of interruptions, corrections, and overt attention to malformations—often leads learners to shut off their attempts at communication. They perceive that so much is wrong with their production that there is little hope to get anything right. On the other hand, too much positive cognitive feedback—willingness of the teacher-hearer to let errors go uncorrected, to indicate understanding when understanding may not have occurred—serves to reinforce the errors of the speaker-learner. The result is the persistence, and perhaps the eventual fossilization, of such errors. The task of the teacher is to discern the optimal tension between positive and negative cognitive feedback: providing enough green lights to encourage continued communication, but not so many that crucial errors go unnoticed, and providing enough red lights to call attention to those crucial errors, but not so many that the learner is discouraged from attempting to speak at all.

     We do well to recall at this point the application of Skinner's operant conditioning model of learning discussed in Chapter 4. The affective and cognitive modes of feedback are reinforcers to speakers' responses. As speakers perceive "positive" reinforcement, or the "green lights" of Figure 8.2, they will be led to internalize certain speech patterns. Corrective feedback can still be "positive" in the Skinnerian sense, as we shall see below. However, ignoring erroneous behavior has the effect of a positive rein-forcer; therefore teachers must be very careful to discern the possible reinforcing consequences of neutral feedback. What we must avoid at all costs is the administration of punitive reinforcement, or correction that is viewed by learners as an affective red light—devaluing, dehumanizing, or insulting them.

     Against this theoretical backdrop we can evaluate some possibilities of when and how to treat errors in the language classroom. Long (1977:288) suggested that the question of when to treat an error (that is, which errors to provide some sort of feedback on) has no simple answer.

Having noticed an error, the first (and, I would argue, crucial) decision the teacher makes is whether or not to treat it at all. In order to make the decision the teacher may have recourse to factors with immediate, temporary bearing, such as the importance of the error to the current pedagogical focus of the lesson, the teacher's perception of the chance of eliciting correct performance from the student if negative feedback is given, and so on. Consideration of these ephemeral factors may be preempted, however, by the teacher's beliefs (conscious or unconscious) as to what a language is and how a new one is learned. These beliefs may have been formed years before the lesson in question. 

   In a very practical article on error treatment, Hendrickson (1980) advised teachers to try to discern the difference between global and local errors, already described earlier in this chapter. Once, a learner of English was describing a quaint old hotel in Europe and said, "There is a French widow in every bedroom." The local error is clearly, and humorously, recognized. Hendrickson recommended that local errors usually need not be corrected since the message is clear and correction might interrupt a learner in the flow of productive communication. Global errors need to be treated in some way since the message may otherwise remain garbled. "The different city is another one in the another two" is a sentence that would certainly need treatment because it is incomprehensible as is. Many utterances are not clearly global or local, and it is difficult to discern the necessity for corrective feedback. A learner once wrote, "The grammar is the basement of every language." While this witty little proclamation may indeed sound more like Chomsky than Chomsky does, it behooves the teacher to ascertain just what the learner meant here (no doubt "basis" rather than "basement"), and to provide some feedback to clarify the difference between the two. The bottom line is that we simply must not stifle our students' attempts at production by smothering them with corrective feedback.

   The matter of how to correct errors is exceedingly complex. Research on error correction methods is not at all conclusive about the most effective method or technique for error correction. It seems quite clear that students in the classroom generally want and expect errors to be corrected (Cathcart & Olsen 1976). Nevertheless, some methods recommend no direct treatment of error at all (Krashen & Terrell 1983). In "natural," untutored environments, non-native speakers are usually corrected by native speakers on only a small percentage of errors that they make (Chun et al. 1982); native speakers will attend basically only to global errors and then usually not in the form of interruptions but at transition points in conversations (Day et al. 1984). Balancing these various perspectives, I think we can safely conclude that a sensitive and perceptive language teacher should make the language classroom a happy optimum between some of the over politeness of the real world and the expectations that learners bring with them to the classroom.

   Error treatment options can be classified in a number of possible ways (see Gaies 1983; Long 1977), but one useful taxonomy was recommended by Bailey (1985), who drew from the work of Allwright (1975). Seven "basic options" are complemented by eight "possible features" within each option (Bailey 1985:111).

Basic Options:

1. To treat or to ignore
2. To treat immediately or to delay
3. To transfer treatment [to, say, other learners] or not
4. To transfer to another individual, a subgroup, or the whole class
5. To return, or not, to original error maker after treatment
6. To permit other learners to initiate treatment
7. To test for the efficacy of the treatment

Possible Features:

1. Fact of error indicated
2. Location indicated
3. Opportunity for new attempt given
4. Model provided

5- Error type indicated

6. Remedy indicated
7. Improvement indicated
8. Praise indicated

     All of the basic options and features within each option are conceivably viable modes of error correction in the classroom. The teacher needs to develop the intuition, through experience and solid eclectic theoretical foundations, for ascertaining which option or combination of options is appropriate at a given moment. Principles of optimal affective and cognitive feedback, of reinforcement theory, and of communicative language teaching all combine to form those theoretical foundations.

     At least one general conclusion that can be drawn from the study of errors in the linguistic systems of learners is that learners are indeed creatively operating on a second language—constructing, either consciously or subconsciously, a system for understanding and producing utterances in the language. That system should not necessarily be treated as an imperfect system; it is such only insofar as native speakers compare their own knowledge of the language to that of the learners. It should rather be looked upon as a variable, dynamic, approximative system, reasonable to a great degree in the mind of the learners, albeit idiosyncratic. Learners are processing language on the basis of knowledge of their own interlanguage, which, as a system lying between two languages, ought not to have the value judgments of either language placed upon it. The teacher's task is to value learners, prize their attempts to communicate, and then provide optimal feedback for the system to evolve in successive stages until learners are communicating meaningfully and unambiguously in the second language.

In the Classroom: A Model for Error Treatment

In these end-of-chapter vignettes, an attempt has been made to provide some pedagogical information of historical or implicational interest. This chapter has focused strongly on the concept of error in the developing learner language of students of second languages, and the last sections above honed in on error treatment in form-focused instruction. Therefore, one more step will be taken here: to offer a conceptual model of error treatment that incorporates some of what has been covered in the chapter.

    Figure 8.3 illustrates what I would claim are the split-second series of decisions that a teacher makes when a student has uttered some deviant form of the foreign language in question. In those few nanoseconds, information is accessed, processed, and evaluated, with a decision forthcoming on what the teacher is going to do about the deviant form. Imagine that you are the teacher and let me walk you through the flow chart.

Some sort of deviant utterance is made by a student. Instantly, you run this speech event through a number of nearly simultaneous screens: (1) You identify the type of deviation (lexical, phonological, etc.), and (2) often, but not always, you identify its source, the latter of which will be useful in determining how you might treat the deviation. (3) Next, the complexity of the deviation may determine not only whether to treat or ignore, but how to treat if that is your decision. In some cases a deviation may require so much explanation, or so much interruption of the task at hand, that it isn't worth treating. (4) Your most crucial and possibly the very first decision among these ten factors is to quickly decide whether the utterance is interpretable (local) or not (global). Local errors can sometimes be ignored for the sake of maintaining a flow of communication. Global errors by definition very often call for some sort of treatment, even if only in the form of a clarification request. Then, from your previous knowledge of this student, (5) you make a guess at whether it is a performance slip (mistake) or a competence error. This is not always easy to do, but you may be surprised to know that a teacher's intuition on this factor will often be correct. Mistakes rarely call for treatment, while errors more frequently demand some sort of teacher response.

  All the above information is quickly stored as you perhaps simultaneously run through the next five possible considerations. (6) From your knowledge about this learner, you make a series of instant judgments about the learner's language ego fragility, anxiety level, confidence, and willingness to accept correction. If, for example, the learner rarely says anything at all, shows high anxiety and low confidence when attempting to speak, you may, on this count alone, decide to ignore the deviant utterance. (7) Then, the learner's linguistic stage of development, which you must discern within this little microsecond, will tell you something about how to treat the deviation. (8) Your own pedagogical focus at the moment (Is this a form-focused task to begin with? Does this lesson focus on the form that was deviant? What are the overall objectives of the lesson or task?) will help you to decide whether or not to treat. (9) The communicative context of the deviation (Was the student in the middle of a productive flow of language? How easily could you interrupt?) is also considered. (10) Somewhere in this rapid-fire processing, your own style as a teacher comes into play. Are you generally an interventionist? laissez-faire? If, for example, you tend as a rule to make very few error treatments, a treatment now on a minor deviation would be out of character, and possibly interpreted by the student as a response to a grievous shortcoming.

  You are now ready to decide whether to treat or ignore the deviation! If you decide to do nothing, then you simply move on. But if you decide to do something in the way of treatment, you have a number of treatment options, as discussed earlier. You have to decide when to treat, who will treat, and how to treat, and each of those decisions offers a range of possibilities as indicated in the chart. Notice that you, the teacher, do not always have to be the person who provides the treatment. Manner of treatment varies according to the input to the student, the directness of the treatment, the student's output, and your follow-up.

  After one very quick deviant utterance by a student, you have made an amazing number of observations and evaluations that go into the process of error treatment. New teachers will find such a prospect daunting, perhaps, but with experience, many of these considerations will become automatic.

  

TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION

[Note: (I) individual work; (G) group or pair work; (C) whole-class discussion.]

1. (C) Pick several languages with which students in the class are familiar, and think about the phonological features of those languages that are most salient in "foreign-accented" English. List the features and, using the hierarchy of difficulty on pages 209 and 210, discuss the possible reasons for the saliency of those features (why particular features get mapped onto English speech performance, and not others).
2. (I) What is the difference between the САН and CLIP How does the subtle-differences principle (Oiler & Ziahosseiny 1970) move away from the notion that difficulty can be predicted? How does the weak version of the САН compare to your understanding of what is meant by CLI?
3. (G) In groups of three or four, compile examples, in languages that members of your group know, of (a) mistakes vs. errors, (b) global vs. local errors, and (c) overt vs. covert errors. Share your examples with the rest of the class.
4. (C) For a challenging class discussion, try to come up with examples of errors in four different cells: overt/global, overt/local, covert/global, and covert/local.
5. (C) If possible, secure an audiotape of a few minutes of the language of an advanced-beginning learner of English. As the class listens to the tape, listen the first time for the general gist. The second time, students should write down errors (phonological, grammatical, lexical, discourse) they hear. Then, in class discussion, identify the source of each error. Such an exercise should offer a sense of the "messiness" of real language.
6. (C) Has anyone in the class learned, or attempted to learn, a third or fourth language? Those students could share some of the difficulties they encountered, and the extent to which there was L1-L3, L2-L3, etc., cross-linguistic influence.
7. (I) Fossilization and learning are actually the result of the same cognitive processes at work. Explain this. Then, try to think of factors other than feedback that could cause or contribute to fossilization. Once a language form is fossilized, can it ever be corrected?
8. (G) Divide into groups such that each group has at least two people in it who have learned or studied a foreign language. Members of the group should share experiences with form-focused instruction (FFI).Try to decide as a group what the features are of the most and least effective FFI.
9. (C) Look at the error treatment model in the vignette at the very end of the chapter. Using examples   posed to the class, discuss the specific steps that a teacher goes through in determining whether to treat or ignore a deviant utterance, and in the case of a decision to treat, what the treatment should be.

SUGGESTED READINGS

     Jaszczolt, Katarzyna. 1995. Typology of contrastive studies: Specialization, progress, and applications. Language Teaching 28:1-15.

This state-of-the-art article offers a comprehensive update and summary of research on cross-linguistic influence.

James, Carl. 1998. Errors in Language Learning and Use:Exploring Error Analysis. Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Longman.

This book is an excellent overview of several decades of research on the field of error analysis, a topic that continues to draw the attention of researchers.

     Bayley, Robert and Preston, Dennis (Eds.). 1996. Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Variation. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Variability models accounting for learner language are scrutinized in detail in Bayley and Preston's anthology. The reading is very technical, and therefore would be difficult for the first-level graduate student.

     Doughty, Catherine and Williams, Jessica. 1998. Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

     Spada, Nina. 1997."Form-focussed instruction and second language acquisition: A review of classroom and laboratory research." Language Teaching 30:73-87.

Two comprehensive sources on form-focused instruction that are suitable for newcomers in the field of SLA are to be found in the above works. The first is an anthology of chapters, some written by well-known leaders in the field (Long, DeKeyser, Swain, Harley, and Lightbown), and the second is another state-of-the-art synthesis of research.

LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE: JOURNAL ENTRY 8

[Note: See pages 18 and 19 of Chapter 1 for general guidelines for writing a journal on a previous or concurrent language learning experience]

• Make a list of some of the specific contrasts between your native and target languages that have been or still are difficult for you. Can you analyze why they are difficult, using the information in this chapter?
• In your list above, are there examples of "subtle differences" which nevertheless present some difficulty for you? Analyze those differences.
• Think about some of the errors you are making (made) in learning a foreign language. List as many as you can, up to ten or so, being as descriptive as possible (e.g., the French subjunctive mood, Japanese honorffics, English definite articles, separable two-word verbs). Now, analyze where those errors came from. If they did not come from your native language, what other sources are possible?
• Have you ever reached a stage of fossilization, or in milder form, a "plateau" of progress where you seemed to just stall for weeks or months? If so, describe that experience. Then tell about what, if anything, propelled you out of those doldrums, or determine what might have helped you if you stayed there or are still there.
• Describe your language teacher's error treatment style. Does/Did your teacher overcorrect or undercorrect? To what extent does/did your teacher follow the model at the end of the chapter?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

CHAPTER 9

COMMNICATIVE COMPETENCE

 

The previous chapter and this one follow the historical development of research on applied linguistics and related second language pedagogy. The middle part of the twentieth century was characterized by a zeal for the scientific, linguistic analysis of the structures of languages with a focus on how languages differed from each other. This was followed by a cognitive/rationalistic period of research into the processes of cognition and affect and the resulting developing linguistic systems of learners, with a focus on errors as important keys to understanding the makeup of those systems. Both of those strains of research continue to be important as we now begin the twenty-first century. But, as noted in Chapter 1, a new wave of interest characterized the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, a social constructivist wave that found the discipline focusing less on individual development and more on the effect of learners' interactions with others.