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Moving beyond the plateau: from lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate, Richards, 2015

Paper, Tags: #linguistics

Some problems in upper intermediate levels:

  • There's a gap between receptive and productive competence: listening, reading comprehension > speaking
  • There are persistent fossilized language errors
  • Fluency may have progressed at the expense of complexity
  • The learner has a limited vocabulary range
  • Language production might lack the characteristics of natural speech

1. Gap between receptive and productive competence

To reduce this gap:

Noticing

We won't learn anything from input we hear and understand unless we notice something about the input.

There's a difference between input, what the learner hears, and intake, what the learner notices. Features for noticing:

  • frequency of encounter with items
  • perceptual saliency of items
  • instructional strategies that can focus learner's attention
  • individual processing ability
  • task demands, or the nature of the activity the learner is taking part in

Focussed output

When learners have to make an effort to ensure that their messages are communicated, this puts them in a better position to notice the gap between their productions and those of proficient speakers.

Ways to teach listening skills:

  • pair reading of the tape scripts
  • write sentence-completion tasks requiring expression and other linguistic items that occurred in the texts
  • practice dialogue
  • role play where students use key language from the texts

2. Persistent fossilized language errors

Some research links fossilization to an over-emphasis on communication at the expense of accuracy.

Sometimes learners might feel that because they're learning a second language, it's perfectly acceptable for them to make mistakes and it's not particularly important anyway.

Ways to deal with this:

  • Incorporate a more explicit treatment of grammar within the curriculum
  • Build a focus on form through the use of activities centering on consciousness raising or noticing grammatical features of input or output

3. Fluency may have progressed at the expense of complexity

Ways of increasing the opportunities for restructuring to occur:

  • Addressing language prior to the activity. 2 goals
    • provide language support that can be used in completing a task
    • clarify the nature of the task so that students can give less attention to procedural aspects of the task and hence monitor their language use during their performance while carrying out a task
  • Addressing language during an activity
    • participation: individual, groupal
    • procedures
    • resources
    • order
    • product: the outcome students produce, written, oral
  • Addressing language use after the activity
    • public performance: repeat in public
    • repeat performance: repeat with slight changes
    • Other performance: listen to more advanced students do the same task

4. The learner has a limited vocabulary range

Once in an intermediate level, students typically stop learning so many words every year.

One of the key problems in helping learners improve their vocabulary is finding effective ways for them to help remember words they have encountered.

5. Language production may be adequate but often lacks the characteristics of natural speech

Native speakers have a repertoire of thousands of routines or chunks, phrases they just use like 'this one is on me', 'I'll be with you in a minute', and their use in appropriate situations creates conversational discourse that sounds natural and native-like, and that they have to be learned and used as fixed expressions.