It finally hit me today in Brona’s lecture that I advocate 1/10 of the behaviourist way of teaching.
I used to teach Communicational English or English for Communicational Purposes. At the end of the day, students must be able to hold a decent communication in English with other speakers of that language according to various functions.
The proficiency level of my students ranges between beginners to intermediate where a majority falls in the beginner’s category. I have an extreme of low proficiency on one end and a medium proficiency on the other end. I have to highlight that proficiency here encompasses reading, speaking, listening and writing.
One topic that is taught in this syllabus is ‘Greetings and Introductions’.
I don’t give them a set of greeting and introduction structure to memorize instead I provoke them to give me the type of utterances or phrases used to greet and introduce oneself. I write them down on the board and the students copy the sentences down. Activities entailing the input session are trying out the sentences with a partner and role-playing a given situation where reading from a source is disallowed.
These activities only help them to reinforce that greeting and introductions are only made up of these utterances and ONLY these utterances where in reality proficient speaker of the language would be able to discern the pragmatics and discourse of this function.
Have I neatly taped and packaged this functional-based language for my students?
What I do know is that during the course of role-play where students utter sentences out of the set of utterances learnt in class, I don’t tell them that it is wrong instead I allow them to continue as such speech exist in real-life.
What I also do know is that the students use L1 to help them in creating the communication process in L2. Students then will either refer to me or their more proficient friends in constructing/translating sentences from L1 to L2. Yes, then learning takes place if students know at the end of the day certain output pertaining to the input has to be formed.
It seems cognitive psychology, cognitive science and SLA believes that learning does not take place without attention. Giving attention here is deemed important for further long-term memory storage of L2 information to take place. Highlighted here is the input given by the teacher being practiced by the students which in this case learners pay more attention to the target language while processing the grammar which would help them to recognize, interpret and produce altered forms or sentences after exposure to the input. (Adapted from Leow, P. R. 2007 Input in the L2 Classroom: An Attentional Perspective on Receptive Practice In DeKeyser, R. M. (ed) 2007 Practice in a Second Language Perspective from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology).
So my students have been learning syntax, semantics and discourse cognitively even though methodologically it seems leaning towards behaviourism. I can now heave a sigh of relief that I know *cross my fingers* that my students are learning the language consciously and acknowledging the acquisition instead of computing the information like an automaton.
