Essay
An area of phonology which my learners have struggled with is pronouncing the /s/ and /z/ sound at the end of words.
This is something I first noticed when I started teaching in Cambodia. It surprised me at first, because it had not been a problem in the other countries I had taught in.
At times, it was not clear if this was a grammar problem or a pronunciation problem. When the omitted /s/ and /z/ sounds were at the end of plural nouns, or 3rd person singular present tense verbs, it appeared to be a grammar problem. However, when it was part of the lexical item, it appeared to be a pronunciation problem. (Some of the most common occurrences were “rice” pronounced as “rai”, “ice” pronounced as “ai”, “sometimes” and “always” pronounced as “sometime” and “always” and “is” pronounced as “i”).
What I also found strange is that it did not appear to be an articulation problem. The students could pronounce /s/ and /z/ sounds at the beginning of words. And they could pronounce the /s/ sound at the end of words in controlled practice if I prompted them (i.e. if I drew their attention to the error, and asked them to repeat it correctly.) However during free production, they frequently dropped the final /s/ or /z/ sound. I suspect this was because it sounded unnatural to them, and so they were reluctant to say it
It also appeared that for years this error had gone uncorrected, and, since often their primary source of English was from other Cambodian speakers, it was also constantly being reinforced. For most of my students, it appeared to be a fossilized error.
Over the years, I have tried many different strategies to address this.
When I was fresh off of my CELTA, I used delayed error correction. After every speaking activity, I would write a list of pronunciation errors up on the board, and ask the students to help me correct the errors. Most of these pronunciation errors would involve /s/ or /z/ at the end of words.
As the class went on, the students and I began to realize that the same errors would appear again and again. The students began to get embarrassed at their inability to correct these pronunciation mistakes, and some of them began to tell me that they believed it was counterproductive for me to constantly be writing these errors up on the board after every speaking activity. “We know it’s not right,” said one of them. “But when we are speaking, we don’t have time to remember everything.”
This coincided with literature I had been reading on second language acquisition. Namely, human attention is limited, and so in free production, the learner does not have the cognitive resources to attend to all the features of language accuracy while also focusing on the meaning of their message.
As a result, I stopped correcting errors with /s/ and /z/ during free production activities. Instead, I decided to only address these errors during times when the students were reading aloud.
I reasoned that because reading aloud activities did not require the learners to form new messages, they should therefore have the cognitive resources free to attend to pronunciation errors. So when the students were reading-aloud, I stopped them and corrected them every time they missed an /s/ or /z/ sound.
I also increased the amount of “read-aloud” activities in the classroom. I put several children’s picture books on PowerPoint, and had the students take turns reading out the text of the book during class.
In retrospect, I may have underestimated just how demanding “read-aloud” activities actually are. Although they appear simple, Martin Bygate points out that reading aloud actually requires “considerable attention” because you have to decide on the correct intonation as you read, and many times you have to predict the correct intonation before you know what the end of the sentence is going to be. (Martin Bygate, Speaking p.10). But this is something I would not realize until years later.
When I moved to Vietnam, I discovered a very similar problem existed with Vietnamese students.
However, unlike Cambodian students, I discovered that Vietnamese students often insisted on more overt correction from the teacher. I had a couple classes complain to me that I was not correcting their pronunciation often enough.
Although it went against my CELTA training, I started experimenting with doing more hot correction during speaking activities.
I did this despite the fact that my manager cautioned me against it. My manager warned me that it was possible that not all the students wanted immediate correction, but some of them may have been too shy to voice their opinions. My manager suggested I do learner training instead, and teach the students the difference between accuracy focused activities, and fluency focused activities.
Nevertheless, I decided that the easiest way to keep my students happy was to give them what they wanted. (I was working in an English school that was also a business based on customer satisfaction, and part of my job evaluation was based on positive feedback from my students.)
I found that immediate correction often had very little effect on grammar errors, particularly complex grammar errors. So the problems with the 3rd person singular “s” persisted.
However, immediate correction did have a very noticeable effect on pronunciation errors. Particularly errors were there were no problems with the articulatory features, and correction was just a matter of drawing the learner’s attention to the error. Whenever a learner would forget the final /s/ sound, I would draw an “s” in the air with my fingers, and they would correct themselves. Eventually we got to the point where drawing the “s” was unnecessary. I just had to look at them, and they knew they had to correct themselves.
Eventually, new habits began to form,
Many students that I have been teaching for a long time no longer have problems with pronouncing the /s/ at the end of words when it is part of base form of the word (e.g. “rice”, “is”, “always”). However they still have trouble with the /s/ or /z/ when it is a grammatical morpheme (e.g. plurals and subject-verb agreement markers).
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Monday, June 25, 2018
Bottom-Up and Top Down Listening for Elementary Learners (Research Essay)
Google: drive, docs, pub
[This is the research essay I needed to complete as part of my application for the Delta.
[This is the research essay I needed to complete as part of my application for the Delta.
Also as part of the application process, I needed to plan and teach a lesson based on this research paper. That lesson I have posted over on my main blog here.]
My Reason for Choosing Listening
There are several reasons why listening appeals to me as an area of research. First of all, it is the primary source of input for the learners, especially early learners. (In my personal experience, the low level classes that I teach, both children and adults, all follow textbooks that are light on reading activities, but heavy on listening activities.) According to David Nunan, over 50% of the time learners spend in a foreign language is devoted to listening (as quoted in Nation & Newton p. 37).
Also, I am sympathetic to Krashen’s input hypothesis which claims that all language features are acquired through comprehensible input. For example, Krashen believed that speaking ability can not be taught by oral drilling, but instead will naturally emerge if the student is exposed to sufficient language at a level they can understand. Although I believe in a modified form of this (which uses conscientious grammar study as a supplement to comprehensible input), I still believe that no acquisition can take place without plenty of input. Since most of this input is in the form of listening, especially at the early levels, I am interested in finding ways to aid learners in comprehending the input.
Within the general skill of listening, I have chosen to focus on top-down and bottom up listening skills for pre-intermediate students. Bottom-up listening is especially important for the grammatical features to be noticed, and thus important for Krashen’s input theory. However many TESOL authorities advocate that top down listening skills should always proceed any bottom-up work (for example Harmer, 1998, p. 100). So it is necessary to focus on both skills in the lesson. I have chosen elementary students for two reasons—one is the obvious practical reason that this is the class I am currently teaching. But also my elementary students struggle a lot with the listening exercises from the textbook, and I want to focus on ways to improve their listening skills.
Analysis
There is wide agreement among theorists that listening actually consists of two skills: Top Down Processing and Bottom Up Processing (a view supported in almost all the resources I consulted, including: Nation & Newton, Pinker, Harmer, Scrivener). Bottom Up Processing is succinctly described by David Nunan, who writes “The bottom up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units (or phonemes) to complex texts. According to this view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances are linked together to form meaningful text” (p. 200).
There is an intuitive logic to the idea of bottom-up processing. When we speak we articulate sounds, and we naturally assume listeners are decoding the sounds that we articulate. However, this is probably not the case. “Spoken language probably comes at you too fast to be able to adopt such an item-by-item approach on its own,” writes Jim Scrivener (2005, p.178).
In actuality, human beings do not simply decode sound patterns like robots. Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, devotes a chapter to the differences between how humans decode language, and how computers decode language. Often times the exact same phonemes could be interpreted as multiple words (e.g. I scream, ice cream), but unlike computers, humans decode the words according to context. Research and laboratory tests show that oftentimes learners will perceive the words that they expect to hear in a given context, rather than the actual words that are spoken (Pinker, 2005).
All of this indicates that actual listening perception may be a largely top-down procedure. Rather than mechanically decoding the sounds into words, we make large use of the context and our prior expectations to interpret speech.
This awareness has lead to a big emphasis on Top-Down Processing in second language classrooms. It is expected that learners will have huge difficulties decoding speech if they are not given sufficient context for the speech, or do not have any expectations. This has lead to the Schema Theory. According to this theory, everyone has a mental framework built up of past experiences and previously learned knowledge. We use this framework, or schemata, to help us decode phonemic sounds into meaning. (Nunan, p. 201-204). The English learner, while perhaps not knowledgeable about the English language, already has fair amount of general knowledge about the world, and they will use this knowledge to help them decode the sounds that they hear.
And in fact, schema building has been shown to help accuracy in listening exercises. Nunan reports on an investigation conducted by Spada on the effectiveness of structuring a listening lesson for learners. Learners who did a set of predictive exercises before the listening task did much better on the listening exercises than learners who did not do pre-listening tasks (Spada in Nunan, p.208).
It is therefore the job of the ESL teacher to try to activate the students’ schemata before the listening, and to provide sufficient context for the listening.
In my personal experience, many textbooks I have taught out of already follow this pattern, with pre-listening activities designed to familiarize students with the context, and to activate their previous knowledge of the topic. IELTS preparation textbooks also often encourage the student to visualize the situation before listening, and to predict the likely vocabulary that they will hear.
At the same time, however, it is important not to neglect Bottom-Up Listening skills. The process of listening is not solely Top Down or Bottom up, but rather a combination of both procedures at work (Nation & Newton, p. 40-41).
Bottom-up listening skills are especially important for listening tests when the correct answer does not match the content schemata. Research has shown that the students who correctly answered questions where the answer did not match the schemata made use of Bottom Up processing (p. Nation & Newton, p. 41).
Also, in terms of listening comprehension aiding language acquisition, Bottom-Up processing is especially important for noticing grammatical features. In my personal experience, I can think of many students who had very high listening comprehension abilities, but very grammatically flawed production. This is probably because the student has been overly-reliant on Top Down listening procedures to infer meaning, and as a result has not noticed many of the grammatical features available in the input. Swain’s study of English students in French immersion schools also confirms the existence of students who were doing quite well in the subject matter, but not improving their French grammar (as quoted in Nation & Newton, p.41).
It is the job of the language teacher, therefore, to assist students not only in developing their top down listening abilities, but also in their bottom up listening procedures.
Classroom Procedures for Top Down Listening
In my personal experience, I have taught a wide range of levels and I usually find it useful to make a distinction between lower level general English classes, and examination classes.
In an actual IELTS examination, there will be no teacher present to activate the students’ schemata before the listening test. The students must therefore take the responsibility for doing the pre-listening tasks themselves, although the teacher should help them with strategies. (And most IELTS textbook teach these strategies, for example reading the questions and trying to predict the situation and vocabulary.)
In lower-level classes, the students will not be familiar with these strategies, and the teacher should take a more active role in setting the context. In lower levels especially, the students often feel a certain amount of anxiety when listening to English, and it is important for them to gain successful experiences in listening tasks, so as not to feel disheartened (Scrivener, 2005, p.177). Therefore the teacher should give as much support to the students as possible in the form of setting context, activating schemata, helping with vocabulary, et cetera.
Listening tasks usually create a certain anxiety among students due to the fact that the listeners can not control the speed of material. Unlike reading, they cannot go back and forth in the text to resolve a point of confusion. Unlike conversation, they cannot interrupt to ask for clarification. As Jeremy Harmer says: “…the speed of the speaker(s) dominates the interaction, not that of the listeners. … It is perhaps this relentlessness of taped material which accounts for the feeling of panic which many students experience during listening activities” (Harmer, p. 99, 1998).
To overcome this feeling of panic, Harmer suggests that listeners be trained to first listen to the tape for a general understanding, rather than trying to pick out every little detail. “They must first get into the habit of letting the whole tape “wash over them” on first hearing, thus achieving general comprehension before returning to listening for specific details” (p. 99).
Therefore, every listening exercise should start out with what is commonly known as a “gist” listening, in which the CD is played once just to give the students a general idea of the content before moving on to more specific tasks.
Classroom Procedures for Bottom Up Listening
Several bottom-up listening activities are detailed in chapter 4 of Nation & Newton, but one is dictation. They write that this exercise is useful because “Dictations help language learning by making learners focus on the language form of phrase and clause level constructions, and by providing feedback on the accuracy of their perception” (p. 59).
Nation & Newton write that a good dictation text is “a piece of connected language about 100 to 150 words long” (p.59). The teacher reads the text to the class, and the students write down the words that they hear.
Nation & Newton detail several variations on dictations (running dictation, one chance dictation, dictation of long phrases, guided dictation, dictation for a mixed class, peer dictation, perfect dictation, unexploded dictation, monitoring dictation, dictogloss, et cetera).
Since this is the first dictation activity I will be attempting with this group of students, the completion dictation combined with the sentence dictation seems appropriate as this will give them the most possible support. In the completion dictation, the students have several copies of the text. In the first dictation sheet only a few of the words are missing. The next copy has more words missing. This continues until the students are writing the whole text.
This activity can be combined with sentence dictation, which is a technique where the teacher writes the correct sentence on the blackboard (or PowerPoint) immediately, to give the students a chance to see and correct their mistakes before moving onto the next sentence.
With Vietnamese students in particular, the /s/ sound on the end of words is particularly a problem. It is most obviously a problem in production, but I have noticed in my own classrooms that is often a problem in perception. (In my IELTS classes, for example, students will often lose points on practice examinations because they do not hear the final “s” on the end of the word.)
Therefore, I am anticipating that the final /s/ sound will be particularly challenging for my students in a dictation activity.
There is, however, a technique advocated by Nation & Newton to help students with any difficulty in perception. They advocate several pre-dictation activities (p.61-61). One such activity is to have the students study the text before the dictation, and to be directed to underline certain features such as “verb endings, plural s, etc.” (p.61)
There are several reasons why listening appeals to me as an area of research. First of all, it is the primary source of input for the learners, especially early learners. (In my personal experience, the low level classes that I teach, both children and adults, all follow textbooks that are light on reading activities, but heavy on listening activities.) According to David Nunan, over 50% of the time learners spend in a foreign language is devoted to listening (as quoted in Nation & Newton p. 37).
Also, I am sympathetic to Krashen’s input hypothesis which claims that all language features are acquired through comprehensible input. For example, Krashen believed that speaking ability can not be taught by oral drilling, but instead will naturally emerge if the student is exposed to sufficient language at a level they can understand. Although I believe in a modified form of this (which uses conscientious grammar study as a supplement to comprehensible input), I still believe that no acquisition can take place without plenty of input. Since most of this input is in the form of listening, especially at the early levels, I am interested in finding ways to aid learners in comprehending the input.
Within the general skill of listening, I have chosen to focus on top-down and bottom up listening skills for pre-intermediate students. Bottom-up listening is especially important for the grammatical features to be noticed, and thus important for Krashen’s input theory. However many TESOL authorities advocate that top down listening skills should always proceed any bottom-up work (for example Harmer, 1998, p. 100). So it is necessary to focus on both skills in the lesson. I have chosen elementary students for two reasons—one is the obvious practical reason that this is the class I am currently teaching. But also my elementary students struggle a lot with the listening exercises from the textbook, and I want to focus on ways to improve their listening skills.
Analysis
There is wide agreement among theorists that listening actually consists of two skills: Top Down Processing and Bottom Up Processing (a view supported in almost all the resources I consulted, including: Nation & Newton, Pinker, Harmer, Scrivener). Bottom Up Processing is succinctly described by David Nunan, who writes “The bottom up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units (or phonemes) to complex texts. According to this view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances are linked together to form meaningful text” (p. 200).
There is an intuitive logic to the idea of bottom-up processing. When we speak we articulate sounds, and we naturally assume listeners are decoding the sounds that we articulate. However, this is probably not the case. “Spoken language probably comes at you too fast to be able to adopt such an item-by-item approach on its own,” writes Jim Scrivener (2005, p.178).
In actuality, human beings do not simply decode sound patterns like robots. Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, devotes a chapter to the differences between how humans decode language, and how computers decode language. Often times the exact same phonemes could be interpreted as multiple words (e.g. I scream, ice cream), but unlike computers, humans decode the words according to context. Research and laboratory tests show that oftentimes learners will perceive the words that they expect to hear in a given context, rather than the actual words that are spoken (Pinker, 2005).
All of this indicates that actual listening perception may be a largely top-down procedure. Rather than mechanically decoding the sounds into words, we make large use of the context and our prior expectations to interpret speech.
This awareness has lead to a big emphasis on Top-Down Processing in second language classrooms. It is expected that learners will have huge difficulties decoding speech if they are not given sufficient context for the speech, or do not have any expectations. This has lead to the Schema Theory. According to this theory, everyone has a mental framework built up of past experiences and previously learned knowledge. We use this framework, or schemata, to help us decode phonemic sounds into meaning. (Nunan, p. 201-204). The English learner, while perhaps not knowledgeable about the English language, already has fair amount of general knowledge about the world, and they will use this knowledge to help them decode the sounds that they hear.
And in fact, schema building has been shown to help accuracy in listening exercises. Nunan reports on an investigation conducted by Spada on the effectiveness of structuring a listening lesson for learners. Learners who did a set of predictive exercises before the listening task did much better on the listening exercises than learners who did not do pre-listening tasks (Spada in Nunan, p.208).
It is therefore the job of the ESL teacher to try to activate the students’ schemata before the listening, and to provide sufficient context for the listening.
In my personal experience, many textbooks I have taught out of already follow this pattern, with pre-listening activities designed to familiarize students with the context, and to activate their previous knowledge of the topic. IELTS preparation textbooks also often encourage the student to visualize the situation before listening, and to predict the likely vocabulary that they will hear.
At the same time, however, it is important not to neglect Bottom-Up Listening skills. The process of listening is not solely Top Down or Bottom up, but rather a combination of both procedures at work (Nation & Newton, p. 40-41).
Bottom-up listening skills are especially important for listening tests when the correct answer does not match the content schemata. Research has shown that the students who correctly answered questions where the answer did not match the schemata made use of Bottom Up processing (p. Nation & Newton, p. 41).
Also, in terms of listening comprehension aiding language acquisition, Bottom-Up processing is especially important for noticing grammatical features. In my personal experience, I can think of many students who had very high listening comprehension abilities, but very grammatically flawed production. This is probably because the student has been overly-reliant on Top Down listening procedures to infer meaning, and as a result has not noticed many of the grammatical features available in the input. Swain’s study of English students in French immersion schools also confirms the existence of students who were doing quite well in the subject matter, but not improving their French grammar (as quoted in Nation & Newton, p.41).
It is the job of the language teacher, therefore, to assist students not only in developing their top down listening abilities, but also in their bottom up listening procedures.
Classroom Procedures for Top Down Listening
In my personal experience, I have taught a wide range of levels and I usually find it useful to make a distinction between lower level general English classes, and examination classes.
In an actual IELTS examination, there will be no teacher present to activate the students’ schemata before the listening test. The students must therefore take the responsibility for doing the pre-listening tasks themselves, although the teacher should help them with strategies. (And most IELTS textbook teach these strategies, for example reading the questions and trying to predict the situation and vocabulary.)
In lower-level classes, the students will not be familiar with these strategies, and the teacher should take a more active role in setting the context. In lower levels especially, the students often feel a certain amount of anxiety when listening to English, and it is important for them to gain successful experiences in listening tasks, so as not to feel disheartened (Scrivener, 2005, p.177). Therefore the teacher should give as much support to the students as possible in the form of setting context, activating schemata, helping with vocabulary, et cetera.
Listening tasks usually create a certain anxiety among students due to the fact that the listeners can not control the speed of material. Unlike reading, they cannot go back and forth in the text to resolve a point of confusion. Unlike conversation, they cannot interrupt to ask for clarification. As Jeremy Harmer says: “…the speed of the speaker(s) dominates the interaction, not that of the listeners. … It is perhaps this relentlessness of taped material which accounts for the feeling of panic which many students experience during listening activities” (Harmer, p. 99, 1998).
To overcome this feeling of panic, Harmer suggests that listeners be trained to first listen to the tape for a general understanding, rather than trying to pick out every little detail. “They must first get into the habit of letting the whole tape “wash over them” on first hearing, thus achieving general comprehension before returning to listening for specific details” (p. 99).
Therefore, every listening exercise should start out with what is commonly known as a “gist” listening, in which the CD is played once just to give the students a general idea of the content before moving on to more specific tasks.
Classroom Procedures for Bottom Up Listening
Several bottom-up listening activities are detailed in chapter 4 of Nation & Newton, but one is dictation. They write that this exercise is useful because “Dictations help language learning by making learners focus on the language form of phrase and clause level constructions, and by providing feedback on the accuracy of their perception” (p. 59).
Nation & Newton write that a good dictation text is “a piece of connected language about 100 to 150 words long” (p.59). The teacher reads the text to the class, and the students write down the words that they hear.
Nation & Newton detail several variations on dictations (running dictation, one chance dictation, dictation of long phrases, guided dictation, dictation for a mixed class, peer dictation, perfect dictation, unexploded dictation, monitoring dictation, dictogloss, et cetera).
Since this is the first dictation activity I will be attempting with this group of students, the completion dictation combined with the sentence dictation seems appropriate as this will give them the most possible support. In the completion dictation, the students have several copies of the text. In the first dictation sheet only a few of the words are missing. The next copy has more words missing. This continues until the students are writing the whole text.
This activity can be combined with sentence dictation, which is a technique where the teacher writes the correct sentence on the blackboard (or PowerPoint) immediately, to give the students a chance to see and correct their mistakes before moving onto the next sentence.
With Vietnamese students in particular, the /s/ sound on the end of words is particularly a problem. It is most obviously a problem in production, but I have noticed in my own classrooms that is often a problem in perception. (In my IELTS classes, for example, students will often lose points on practice examinations because they do not hear the final “s” on the end of the word.)
Therefore, I am anticipating that the final /s/ sound will be particularly challenging for my students in a dictation activity.
There is, however, a technique advocated by Nation & Newton to help students with any difficulty in perception. They advocate several pre-dictation activities (p.61-61). One such activity is to have the students study the text before the dictation, and to be directed to underline certain features such as “verb endings, plural s, etc.” (p.61)
Bibliography
David N. (1999) Second Language Teaching & Learning Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers
Harmer, J. (1998) How to Teach English Essex: Pearson Education Limited
(No page numbers are given for Krashen and Terrell in the in-text citation because I have no copy in front of me and am referencing from memory).
Nation, I.S.P., Newton, J. (2009) Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking New York: Routledge
(No page numbers are given for Pinker in the in-text citation because I have no copy in front of me and am referencing from memory).
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