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Originally published in APAC of News (APAC Associació de Professors d'Anglès de Catalunya magazine) Recently published in E. Tragant, T. Naves and R. Ribé (2000) ELT Methodology I / Text-guia d'Ensenyament de l'Anglès com a Llengua Estrangera I. Barcelona. Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona. |
LINGUISTIC PROFILING AND LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT*
A secondary school teacher’s reactions to the Processability TheoryRosa Trenchs
Originally published in APAC of News (APAC Associació de Professors d'Anglès de Catalunya magazine)
Recently published in
E. Tragant, T. Naves and R. Ribé (2000) ELT Methodology I / Text-guia d'Ensenyament de l'Anglès com a Llengua Estrangera I. Barcelona. Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona.
LINGUISTIC PROFILING AND LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT*
A secondary school teacher’s reactions to the Processability TheoryRosa Trenchs
After ten years experience as a teacher of English, there was something that puzzled me: why do students who are able to write beautiful passive sentences in the strangest verb tenses imaginable suddenly become Sitting Bull when it comes to speaking? - I’m not talking about making a speech in the House of Lords, only about answering a simple question or giving their opinion in class. I know that mastering the passive voice doesn’t mean that you know English, but still, why couldn’t they apply at least some of their “knowledge” to speaking? I have to say that after attending Mr. Pienemann’s course at the Mediterranean Institute I think I have an idea of the reasons why that happens.
Let me digress for a while and tell you a personal story. About a year ago I decided to buy a computer. I had never had one at home and had only used them seldom and for very specific tasks, so I was almost an absolute beginner in that field. I had only had my brand new computer for twenty-four hours when an enthusiastic colleague at school very kindly offered me something like thirty disks with all kinds of games, fonts, word processors and programmes to copy - I am conscious that I am acknowledging having done something illegal, but let’s be realistic: this is how things work round here. He spent a whole hour giving me instructions on how to load all that into my hard disk while I took notes very carefully and thought I had understood everything: it sounded so simple and straightforward. That very evening I decided to start. I had my computer, my friend’s disks, my notes and all my neurons ready so, there I went!
At about one in the morning the computer started asking questions that were not on my notes but I could not ask anybody for help so late at night. What did I do? I improvised; I tried to use my own neurons to solve, in what at that time seemed a logical way, the problems that came up in the order in which they came up. It seemed the most intelligent thing to do but the result was complete disaster. At four a.m. my computer decided to go on holiday to Jamaica and said it would send a postcard when it got there. It had got blocked, frozen. The worst of it was that I couldn’t even switch it off because to do so I was supposed to choose an option on the menu and both the mouse and the keyboard seemed to be on a British Airways flight to the West Indies. I was desperate and again I tried an “intelligent” solution: I unplugged the whole thing and plugged it in again. What was the result? Sarcasm - yes, my computer has the ability to become sarcastic at the worst moment possible for my nerves. The first thing that appeared on the screen was the following message: “You have switched off the computer in the wrong way. Next time please be so kind as to choose the switch off option on the Apple menu that you will find at the top left corner of the screen”. I’ll spare you the list of four-letter words I hurled at it and will only tell you that I felt strongly tempted to kick the computer out of the window. The only thing that refrained me from doing so was the fact that I still had the bill on the table, right before my eyes.
So, what does all this have to do with teaching English? Well, I now have the feeling that over the last ten years I have been doing to my students the same thing that I did to my computer that night. Mind you, I am not comparing my students to computers. While students are intelligent - if anybody knows exactly what being intelligent means - my computer is only sarcastic, certainly not intelligent. The problem that night was not the computer, it was only following my instructions in a very submissive way. I cannot put it all down to my neurons; I will never win a Nobel prize but I consider myself intelligent enough to use a home computer successfully. The problem was that I didn’t know enough about how computers work when I set about loading information into the machine.
Similarly, the problem is not that teachers are not intelligent - no doubt they are -, or that teaching methods are inadequate - some methods are better than others but they are all useful. The problem is not that students are not intelligent either; some are more brilliant than others but every single one of them, I believe, can improve. The problem is that we are giving them lots of information in the order that seems logical to us, but that order is not the same in which they can process and acquire that information. They are solving the problem of the passive voice in odd verb tenses in the same way as they solve mathematical problems: they take bits and pieces of sentences, put them together in a different order, apply some rules that they have learned by heart and there you have a beautiful, perfectly constructed passive sentence in the future perfect continuous! When it comes to speaking, they simply don’t have time to connect all those things -they are different abilities in different parts of the brain- and they go back to the English they really know and forget all the things they can do with English words. Then you have an interview with Sitting Bull when you were expecting Buffalo Bill! The teacher is disappointed, the student is scared and disappointed as well, and the whole of it becomes frustrating for both. The worst thing is that in that process some of our students just get blocked and decide to take a trip to Jamaica, as far as learning English is concerned, for the rest of their lives.
Personally, what I have learned in this course is that things that to me seemed logically easy to learn are in fact quite difficult and need a lot of previous processing in the brain. For example, the third person singular “-s” of the present tense should “logically” be quite easy to be learnt, especially for Spanish students, whose mother tongue has so many different verb morphemes. Come on! It’s only an “-s”! Why don’t they put it in the right place? At times I have even thought that the KGB was behind it, conspiring against me. Well, in order to put that “-s” in the correct place they have to be able to analyse the sentence, decide what the subject is, decide whether the tense is going to be present simple and then add the correct morpheme. A lot of things have to be acquired before they can actually produce that famous “-s”.
By the way, my computer finally came back from its trip to Jamaica and is working perfectly. In fact it is now helping me to write this article. I have to say that I felt great relief when I found out what it was that I had been doing wrong, something very similar to the feeling I have now after getting a grasp of Mr. Pienemann’s Processability Theory. I hope next year I will not send so many of my students on language trips to Jamaica.
Bibliography
Pienemann, M. (1989). Is Language Teachable? Psycholinguistic Experiments and Hypotheses. Applied Linguistics, vol 10(1).
Hyltenstam, K. & Pienemann, M (Eds) (1985). Modelling and Assessing Second Language Acquisition. Multilingual Matters.
Back to T Naves Electronic Units from Tragant, Naves & Ribé 2000 ELT Methodology coursebook
Last Updated on 19 October 2000 by Teresa Naves