Teaching Languages

Until the early 1960s, language learning was predominantly viewed as a behavioral process in which words and rules were learned and then pieced together through stimulus and response. Then Noam Chomsky's ideas began to undo the behaviorist claims that language was learned solely by reinforcement. Chomsky argued that the brain has innate abilities to take in and process language, implicitly learning the language's rules and features.

Receiving Input

Much of language is acquired by listening to it and being exposed to increasingly challenging vocabulary and grammar in meaningful contexts. For example, an Italian might say to me, “Loro sono molto stanchi,” [They are very tired.] as he points to the people and makes a tired expression on his face. He uses a new word (stanchi) but helps me understand it with contextual clues. As I take in new forms of this linguistic input over times, my brain begins to acquire it.

Producing Language

Producing language (output) pushes learners to process the new language at deeper and more lasting levels than just listening to it (Swain, 1995). Swain noted situations in which students needed to challenge themselves to take the needs of listeners into account, focusing not only on what they are saying, but also how they are saying it. Producing output made a positive difference. In most of the classrooms studied, students needed more opportunities to produce longer stretches of academic talk for the positive effects to take place.

Other studies have pointed out the significant differences between input and output, also arguing that just taking in language is not enough for acquisition (Carroll, Tanenhaus, & Bever, 1978). A listener focuses on meaning, which is recoded into the brain in a simpler syntactic form than the original message. Such recoding can later be expanded by the listener in the form of output, but will likely not be in the same form as the original input. Reading is a similar process. For example, you are probably summarizing the gist of this paragraph right now. Yet if you were to reproduce it five minutes later, you would not do so with the same vocabulary and grammatical structure (if you remember it at all).

Negotiating Meaning

Negotiation of meaning is the process by which participants come to a mutual understanding. This is what we do when we have different ideas of what words mean during communication. Negotiating meaning means using verbal and nonverbal strategies to interpret, express, expand, and refine the many ideas, thoughts, and subtle variations in meaning in a conversation (Hernandez, 2003). It is making it so we “are on the same page” as chapter 1 described. For classroom purposes, several important negotiation strategies that we can develop are comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and self-repetitions (Long, 1987).

Clarification checks are little words and phrases that we interject in our messages, such as Right? Got it? Clear? Understand? These allow the listener to ask questions about meanings of words and concepts during the message, rather than after when it is too late. Confirmation checks are when the listener interjects and paraphrases what the speaker has said to confirm comprehension: “So what you mean is…In other words…I think I get it. It's when…Are you saying that…” Self-repetitions are when the speaker repeats a message to emphasize certain parts and make sure it is understood. Because one-way communication tasks (e.g., lectures) cannot help students become skilled at making modifications that make their messages more understandable, two-way tasks tend to be more effective.

Information Gap Activities

Most conversations are basic examples of how language is used to fill gaps. A “gap” is filled when a speaker/writer/artist provides information that the listener/reader/viewer wants or needs. Information gap activities allow students to authentically communicate with other students and provide needed practice in checking for clarification and elaborating (Long, 1981; Pica & Doughty, 1986). Information gap activities also satisfy Ur's (1996) criteria for a successful speaking activity: learners talk a lot, participation is even and fairly distributed, motivation is high, and the language is at an appropriate level. As far as developing academic language, gap activities tend to provide redundancy of terms and content, challenge students to use new language to accomplish a task, and offer fun practice with academic language in small settings.

In a gap activity each student, A and B, has different information that the other person needs, somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle (like the jigsaw activity). The teacher provides new information to each, or students research it themselves. Each student is also given some kind of need for the other's information, such as a diagram to fill in, problem to solve, or project to design. Examples include: a scientist and a reporter talk about stem cell research, a contractor and a house owner talk about costs for remodeling a house, two characters in a novel talk about their motives, a Spanish conquistador and an Aztec leader discuss religious rights in the 16th century. Remember to set it up so that students have to talk-they shouldn't look at another student's information. Figure 6.2 is a graphic organizer that I sometimes use to help me design information gap activities.

Information gap activities are not just for language classes! All that you need to do is imagine two people in your discipline who need to talk about the discipline in some way or two types of information that two experts need to exchange in the real world. Think about how the target information might be talked about in the real world and who might talk about it. For example, how might a scientist and an environmental engineer talk about the uses for synthetic polymers?

(Condensed from Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms)