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How Languages Are (And Aren't) Learned (With Patsy Lightbown)
Second language acquisition researcher, Patsy Lightbown, joins us to discuss how languages are learned, and also, how they aren’t. We hear about problems of training teachers, how learners overcome challenges and aspects of language teaching which still lag years behind research.
Transcript
Ross: Welcome to the TEFL Training Institute podcast, the bite-sized TEFL podcast for teachers, trainers, and managers. Hello everyone, welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute podcast. This episode we have a very distinguished guest, Patsy Lightbown, who is Professor Emerita at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
And I asked Professor Lightbown about her research into second language acquisition, what works in language teaching, and what's been shown not to work in language teaching. And I hope you enjoy the interview. Professor Lightbown, you've been involved in language learning research for many years now.
Can you give us some examples of things that we know work from second language acquisition that actually often get applied in our classroom? Yeah, you know, it's astonishing. Of course, I've been doing this sort of thing. I've been interested in language teaching and language learning for a very long time.
Professor Lightbown: I began doing my own research at a time when the dominant approach, at least in North America, was a structure-based, audiolingual approach. And I actually remember meeting students who, or I'm working with in our research projects, working with students who at the end of a year or more of instruction actually had never learned to ask questions like, what does this mean? Or how do you say that? Or I don't, even to say I don't understand, they simply had gone through all the motions of these pattern practise activities and exercise, grammar exercises and so forth, but they had not learned to put themselves in a conversation. And so we would, I used to laugh because these were francophone students in Quebec, and we would ask them a simple question, something having to do with their daily lives or a personal, about age or something like that.
And they would respond by saying, we haven't had that yet. And I think that although we're long past the structure-based audiolingual instruction, I think there are still students who can have two or three years of instruction in a language and come out saying, I can only answer the questions that I have been taught in the classroom. And is that a problem then with our coursebooks? Or do you think it's washed back from tests? Or is it a problem with how teachers teach and how teachers have been trained? Well, I think it is certainly the case that many teachers are themselves fearful of wandering too far away from what's in the textbook, because they may feel that they don't have the ease of language use.
And certainly that's true internationally. And it's certainly true with students in early schooling, young students whose teachers are often people who've learned pretty much from the same textbooks. And no matter how much we think we revolutionise teacher education and how much we think we revolutionise approaches to pedagogy, there is still that powerful apprenticeship of observation that we read about in the teacher education literature, where we tend to teach the way we were taught.
And so even if the textbooks are meant to be more interesting or meant to be more broad in the topics that they cover, in the language that they use, there's a tendency always to revert to something that is familiar, something that we know from our own education. And I don't think for a moment that teachers who are not native speakers have a bigger problem with this than teachers who are native speakers. But I think sometimes teachers who are not native speakers lack the confidence to let things expand a little bit.
And they may be worried that if they don't follow the textbook strictly that they will miss something important and the students will miss something important. So they tend to be maybe more fearful of freeing up the conversation in the classroom. I don't know, that's why most of my research was done in Canada or in the US, where the teachers were not necessarily monolingual native speakers, they were more likely to be bilingual speakers.
Ross: I still think I observed some of that concern about letting things get out of the teacher's control. And I think something else that tends to happen there is that teachers often think, well, this worked for me, like this was how I learned a language. And so this is what I'm going to use for my students.
Professor Lightbown: Well, sadly, we also know that even if it didn't work for me, I'm going to use it because that's what I know. I say that in the context of some of the research I've been doing related to a project that I'm participating in with the development of a new school in country of Guinea in West Africa. And in working on that project, I have done a lot of reading about the teaching of West African children, particularly in Francophone West Africa.
There has been a very, very serious lack of success, I'll put it that way, in education of young children. And the recent studies that have been done by the World Bank and other agencies have shown the shocking fact that at the end of three or four years, the children are often not able to read or produce basic French sentences. And they have been taught in the same way for decades.
And for some reason, that approach to teaching has been extremely difficult to change, in spite of the fact that it has not succeeded. So people are, you know, you could say that somebody would say it worked for me. But those for whom this approach has worked are very exceptional people.
And of course, anything will work for certain people. That's what we, that's one thing we know as teachers, that there will always be some students in the class who will manage to make the most of the opportunities they do have and get way beyond anything we ever taught them. But there will also be students who will struggle.
And no matter how well we are teaching, those students will continue to struggle until they give up. And that's, I should say, how well we think we're teaching, because we've somehow failed to reach those individuals. And unfortunately, in a lot of schools in West Africa, more students are missing it than students who are getting it.
Ross: So we talked there a lot about what didn't work. Very simple question, what does work? We need to make sure that what we're doing is motivating students on a minute-to-minute basis, not motivation that looks to some long-term goal that, you know, if you will just stay with me, I promise you that in 10 years, you'll be able to get a job in which you're using the language that you're learning. We want motivation that grabs students' attention in the now, and gives them a reason for learning now, using the language now.
Professor Lightbown: That's part of the value of what we call content-based language teaching, because that's sort of the definition of content-based language teaching, that you create a situation where the student needs to learn the language in order to do what it is that is interesting right now. And it tends to be learning that is appropriate to their age. It tends to be learning that is cognitively challenging, not just trivial answers to questions that you have no interest in understanding, but actually engages you with trying to understand content that's being brought to you in a language that you have to learn in order to understand that content.
So is this similar then to task-based learning, where maybe we focus on students doing tasks that are relevant to them, or maybe similar to Brian Tomlinson's text-based approach towards writing materials? Yeah, I mean, I think that's, when we talk about task-based learning, we're usually talking about an instruction that takes place in a classroom where everybody knows that the purpose of the class is to learn the language. There's no ambiguity about that. So when we use the term task-based instruction, it's usually in the context of an EFL or a foreign language instruction.
But in fact, the principles are the same for task-based instruction and what I call more generally content-based language teaching, where it's the understanding and engagement with the content that motivates the language learning in content-based language teaching, such as immersion instruction, for example. There are clearly two goals. One is to learn the language, but also to learn the content, because you're going to be held responsible for knowing the content at the end of the year or at the end of the week in your science exam or your math exam.
So you need to know both. You need to learn both the content and the language. But in both cases, whether it's task-based instruction in the context of an EFL class or math instruction in the context of an immersion classroom, the idea is that the students are engaged in content material that is of interest, inherently of interest to them and appropriate to their age and appropriate to their cognitive abilities.
And too often, I'm afraid, in many language classes, the content is chosen purely for the sake of having something to talk about, because you really are just trying to teach a language point. But with task-based instruction and with content-based language teaching, the idea is that you engage the learners so that they can understand the content, so that they can communicate about that content. So the idea of maybe putting the text or the content at the centre of planning, as opposed to maybe what often happens in most classrooms, maybe where teachers start off with the name of some language they want the students to learn, and then they go from the language to the activities and then from the activities to the context.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Clearly, it's on a continuum, and you go from one end where you choose to do some kind of content so that you can teach a specific language point, and you just choose an activity that has a particularly high frequency of use of that specific language feature. That's one end of the continuum where you use content to carry a language lesson.
And then at the other extreme is where you use language to carry the content, and priority is given to the content. But there's a sweet spot in between where you are teaching content that is interesting and challenging, and you are at the same time drawing attention to how the language carries that meaning. Because it isn't the case, contrary to some wishful thinking, it isn't the case that content-based language teaching means that language takes care of itself.
If you just understand the content, you'll eventually understand the language. That might be true if you had forever to do it, but we know from lots of research that even in immersion classes where students have hours a day of content-based instruction, they need to have periods of time when they focus on the language itself, but the priority is given to understanding the content. I mean, I remember having adult and teenage students in my first year, and they just didn't seem to be interested by anything at all, and finding almost anything that they would be interested in reading or talking about was very difficult.
Ross: Do you have any tips then for how teachers can get around that problem of finding content that's engaging for students that maybe don't really feel very engaged?
Professor Lightbown: I can't agree with you more there. It is not easy to choose content that's of interest, but maybe that's also a further suggestion that teacher-centred instruction is not the most effective instruction, and trying to find ways not only to find content that will engage, quote, the class, but to find content that will engage an individual, maybe that's, or three individuals in a class, instead of assuming that everybody will be interested in the same content. So maybe there are ways of using groups and tasks and cooperative learning principles where students work in smaller groups.
It's the teacher helping the students find what is interesting to them, and then having the courage or the skill to let the students do some of the learning on their own, instead of feeling always that it's necessary for the teacher to be in control of the learning from moment to moment. Maybe decentralising the class a little bit more will help with that problem of trying to find something that's interesting to everybody, because it's absolutely true if you're dealing with a group of adolescents or adults, it's not likely that everybody will be interested in the same content or will want to read the same material.
If you enjoyed that interview, then I urge you to check out How Languages Are Learned, written by Patsy Lightbown along with Nina Spada, or more recently, Focus on Content-Based Language Teaching, which was shortlisted for the English Speaking Union's Duke of Edinburgh Book Prize.
They're both from Oxford University Press. I'll stick some links on the website. Hope you enjoyed the podcast, and see you again next time! Thank you.
