Teacher Training – chiasuanchong

In-Company training versus In-School training

First of all, allow me to apologise for the long hiatus I have taken from this blogsite.
I have been blogging regularly, but for the website ETprofessional.com
and would now like to make up for my absence from my own website by re-blogging some of my previous posts published on ETprofessional.com

The first of which is a very personal account on my experience moving from teaching at a language school to doing in-company training.

Most CELTA courses briefly touch on the teaching of Business English and in-company teaching, but most CELTA centres are language schools where Teaching Practice is naturally conducted with students who are within the school compound.

The only time CELTA trainees get to have a taste of what it might be like to be an in-company trainer is when they actually get a job teaching in company. And the first day as a newly qualified teacher being surrounded by the piercing stares of men in ties and women in suits can be more intimating than being confronted by a difficult grammar question.

Along with my recent move from London to Munich, my teaching context also changed rather drastically, and I was taken out of a comfort zone that I had firmly established for myself over the 10 years of teaching in language schools in London. I was now plunged into a world of in-company teaching. I hope that in sharing my experience, it will help pave the way for new in-company trainers who do not quite know what to expect.

Having taught years of Business English and trained Business English trainers in Cert IBET courses, on top of having dabbled in some in-company work in London during my early days as a teacher, I knew to expect logistical variation from my career shift. But ultimately, I had believed that the difference between a language classroom or a company meeting room was simply a matter of geography.

I soon found out that geography was no small matter. Geography can determine the facilities available to you. It can affect class atmostphere, rapport and motivation levels. Geography could affect attendance. But before I go into the differences, let me outline the nature of my two different teaching contexts.

My teaching contexts

The language school I worked for in London is a well-respected institution that has a steady flow of students registered to have classes for an intensive period of time. For General English students, this period could last from 2 weeks to a year. Class sizes go from 1 to 15. In our Executive Centre, many of the Business English students are subsidized by either their government or their company to work on their level of English, and usually would stay for a period of 2 weeks to 3-4 months. Classes are smaller in the Executive Centre, and had a maximum of 6 clients, and lessons took place everyday. Each lesson would usually last for 2-3 hours, and some students might have 2 lessons a day.

As an in-company trainer in Germany, I would travel to different companies on different days of the week for lessons that are usually held in one of their company meeting rooms. A productive day would involve 2 or more classes taking place in the same company on the same day, which would essentially save me travelling time. Classes are usually 90 minutes to 2 hours long, although on occasion, there would be intensive days of 6-10 hours, especially for courses dealing with specific soft skills such as Presentation English or Negotiations in English. Classes do not usually contain more than 6 students.

Perhaps saying that my move to in-company training was a culture-shock might be a bit of an exaggeration, but here are some of the things I quickly learnt about in-company training.

Facilities

In a language school, one might be equipped with Interactive White Boards, CD players or some kind of multimedia player, and even computers. Wifi connection is often provided, and students often have access to the internet through 3G on their smartphones.

When teaching in company, be prepared for lessons with little more than a flip chart. Markers are usually provided, but bring your own just in case. White boards are not common, which means that any exercise which involves rubbing away parts of sentences or phrases will need to be rethought.

CD players and multimedia players are not always provided, so if you are relying on a listening activity or a video clip, make sure you have it on your iPad or laptop and bring it in yourself.

Many companies don’t allow visitors to have access to the company’s wifi due to security reasons. Some go to the extent of putting up firewalls so that you (or your students) do not have 3G access on your smartphones while in the building. In some cases, you could request to have a special password which might allow you access from certain terminals, but if you plan to show students a particular website, taking screen shots beforehand, and printing them, or pulling them up on your iPad might save you a lot of hassle.

Attitude and Motivation

Students could seem less motivated. It is likely that these students have not paid for these lessons, nor have they travelled a long way to get to their lessons. Some they might be in the dark as to why they have been sent for language training.

The fact that they are in their own home ground and within their own office building means that their mind would always be partially on that urgent reply they need to give their clients or that proposal they need to read and sign off before midday. You can’t blame them for not switching off completely because they are technically still at work.

Not only do they have trouble switching off mentally, getting them to switch off their devices might be a tough call too. Expect interruptions from ringing mobile phones and buzzing pagers. That student who is constantly glancing at his watch may have a meeting to rush to straight after the lesson. We even had a client who once attended an hour-long conference call during his lesson. And disciplining students regarding the right classroom etiquette might not be appropriate. That million-dollar contract may be more important than coming to grips with the Present Perfect Continuous.

Communication Skills rather than tenses

Conversely, some say that in-company learners can often be more motivated than General English in-school students if their learning is directly applied to the working environment around them. This would mean doing a more detailed Needs Analysis at the beginning of the course and finding out why and how they might need to use English. Avoid teaching language for the sake of teaching language, and focus on helping learners improve their ability to communicate.

Prepare lessons that are directly related to what they are doing at work. You can:

Adapt published ELT materials so that tasks are current and relevant to the learners.
Make use of authentic materials, e.g. news articles, case studies, infographics, TED talks, etc as a springboard to discussions, skills practice and language input.
Consider tailor-making your own role-plays and get your learners to contribute to creating their own scenarios to enable for more realistic simulations.

Remember that your in-company clients do not necessarily want to be treated like school kids. Games and role plays are great, and can be extremely motivating, but be aware that boring grammar gap fills and following coursebooks to the tee might be less tolerated.

Tailor your lessons to suit your students needs and make them relevant to their use of English.

Attendance

Attendance can be sporadic. You might have two students one week, and then two completely different students the week after. This might make revision and recycling of language extremely difficult but bear in mind that there are many factors that could affect your learners’ ability to attend: company trips, important meetings, annual leave, the odd days off sick are all part and parcel of in company classes.

For the same reasons, students could have issues with being on time for classes. Despite this, in-company clients are not always tolerant of the class overrunning, and a teacher not keeping to the specified times. Understandably, if you have urgent work that needs to be attended to, or a lunch appointment with your manager, you might be less likely to leap for joy when your English teacher gives you an extra 10 minutes of class.

Homework

With all their daily responsibilities surrounding them, you might find some students less inclined to revise or do their homework. Some might even find the idea of homework reminiscent of their yawn-inducing rebellion-encouraging school years. Several trainers have found that re-naming homework ‘action points’ or ‘tasks’ and ensuring that homework tasks continue to be interesting and relevant to the client’s work could help get around this tricky issue.

What ‘geography’ can also mean

Finding your way to the company could require some navigation skills, especially if you are new to the country you are teaching in. But thank goodness for transport and navigation apps on smartphones, because now, a person with no sense of direction like myself can somehow make my way there.

Once you get there, you might need a visitor’s pass in order to enter the building, and you often have to make known to reception the person you are here to see. Taking the above into consideration, ensure that you allow for travelling time and for the time it would take for you to be collected at reception.

Making use of a company meeting room as your classroom could mean last minute room changes, or even interruptions during a lesson due to confusion in room bookings.

It is quite common for in-company lessons to run for 90 minutes to an hour without a break, emulating a company meeting. If you are scheduled for two different 90-minute lessons, back-to-back, this could mean teaching three hours straight without a break for you. Don’t be shy about asking your second lot of students if it’s okay you have a five-minute break. And make sure you keep it to five minutes.

Unlike intensive courses where you see your students every day for a short period of time, most in-company courses occur once a week over a longer duration. I know a trainer who has been with the same group of students for more than 3 years! Although, this might mean that students could take several weeks before they warm up to you, this also means that you are able to truly get to know them and their area of work, and to shape their progress in a way that ensures that they are indeed making improvements to the way they are communicating in English at work.

Most importantly, try not to be intimidated by the piercing stares of the men and women in suits that are your students. Make sure you dress smartly and look professional, and remember: You might not be an expert in their field, but you are certainly the expert in dealing with language and communication issues. And with your expertise, you can help them do their job better.

IATEFL Plenary – Deniz Kurtolu Eken

Greeted by PowerPoint slides featuring moving animation of dancing flowers and rainy islands, The audience were treated to other novelties like a strategically placed umbrella right next to the podium and a pair of pink-petal led shaped sunglasses worn by Dr Eken herself as she started her talk with the metaphoric title ‘The ELT Weather Forecast: Perceptions on Effectiveness and Teacher Motivation’.

Dr Eken then goes on to invite someone who’s having a birthday (Beyza), someone who got married in March (okay, that was us), and someone who is going to have a baby onto the stage and gave us all presents. (Great motivation to listen to the rent of the talk now!)

Quoting Humphreys (1996) on the power of the emotions that infuse the people, and not thoughts alone, Dr Eken emphasises that rainy wealthy could be seen as a welcomed blessing by the farmer but an unwelcomed disaster by holidaymakers.

After introducing us to her research framework and detailing the breakdown of her research respondents, Deniz shared some of the metaphors her respondents gave for their roles.
Here are some examples:
A plate spinner, a glorified secretary, a turtle in a race against the hare, a caged bird, one who’s trying to pluck an apple from a very high tree and never being able to, a kangaroo (which can never jump backwards, only forwards), slaves with no faces, an unused anchor on a lifeboat that is floating aimlessly in a vast ocean of ideas and theories, etc.

Moving on to perceptions of effectiveness,it was interesting to note that people felt that those in their context were doing better across the board than those at an average national level.

Rated lowest in terms of effectiveness in both ‘context’ and ‘country’ categories were ‘Academic Management’ and ‘Teacher Motivation’. Among seen as effective managers are those who are highly qualified and adaptable who can manage talent and different types of personality and those chosen because of their qualifications and not tenure.

The feedback given to managers are as follows:
Be there in need so that they are loyal employees.
Treat teachers as professionals not as skilled workers in need of constant supervision
Trust teachers more and interfere less. realise that teaching is a creative act, the results of which are not always quantifiable.
Please don’t let technology become the be all and end all of ELT because it is not. Language is firstly communication, but using technology all the time is making the students passive and uncomfortable.
Help teachers to develop and grow personally and professionally.
Communicate more and better. Smiling does not harm; be responsive and constructive; your positive attitude matters to us.
Do some normal teaching yourselves and not just cherry-picked courses.

Commonly mentioned teacher training and development opportunities appreciated by teachers are as follows:
In-service training an staff development
TT courses eg Celta or Delta
Opportunities to attend conferences and seminars
Post-Delta/Post-MA opportunities
SIGs, teacher forums
Collaborative research, action research
Developmental observations and feedback, peer observations
Educational/teacher exchange
English language development opportunities
Hosting a conference or an academic event
Sample lessons from teacher trainers

Ending her talk with another metaphor by Dr Eken’s sister: she sees herself as a partly cloudy sky with the sun shining from behind, suggesting an optimism when looking at her personal and professional life.

Influencing Second Language Learning – Personality Factors

This is a repost of a previous blogpost I wrote for ELT Knowledge (see here).

I thought it would be good to get a discussion going on the following topic and so here it is again:

A fellow teacher told me about two learners in his class – one, he says, is a better learner than the other. Which one do you think that might be?

Liliana is a university student from Argentina. She is shy and insecure about her English ability. She feels stupid when she speaks English, and is afraid of making mistakes. She loves travelling and meeting people from all over the world but prefers speaking English to ‘native speakers’ from Britain or America because they speak ‘correct’ English. For Liliana, the ultimate compliment would be if someone asked her if she were English.

Jochan is a manager of an important department in a multinational company based in Germany. He is talkative and confident, and used to being in control. A good team player, he enjoys participating in group activities. He has had a few bad experiences with some of the Americans and Brits, and so have his friends in Germany, and Jochan has decided that he does not like the American or British culture.

So, who do you think is the better learner?

(a) Liliana – Her love and respect for the British/English culture and native speakers would propel her to learn the target language and she would seek out opportunities to speak English to ‘native speakers’, whereas Jochan’s status in his company might mean a lesser ability to relinquish power and therefore be more resistant to correction and being adventurous with language. In addition, Jochan’s distaste for the American and British culture is bound to affect his motivation levels as well.

(b) Jochan – He’s confident and therefore would not be averse to taking risks. This should mean that he would be adventurous with language and not be afraid of making mistakes. His talkative nature also means that he would get lots of speaking practice. He’d be motivated because he can see how useful English is at his workplace. Liliana, on the other hand, is shy and this would lead to her not wanting to practise speaking and using the language.

(c) This is just silly. I can’t decide based on the above descriptions. Doing so would be stereotyping and putting people in boxes. People’s personalities and behaviours change and evolve depending on the situations they are in. After all, Jochan’s confidence in his job does not mean confidence in language learning, and Liliana might just be shy in the classroom but not when she’s with her friends.

If you picked Jochan (b) as your answer, you perhaps believe that the personality of a learner has a large part to play in one’s success in language learning, and that these innate characteristics are biologically determined, and therefore some people make better language learners than others. It’s all in the genes.

If you picked Liliana (a) as your answer, you might think that one’s culture and experience of life moulds the way we learn to see the world, and that our view of the target culture of the language we are learning can largely affect our motivation, and therefore, our success rate. Loosely categorised as social structuralist or constructivist in outlook, you see external influences, such as social variables, as shaping the language learning process.

If you picked (c) as your answer, you probably are balking at this blogpost right now and wondering how anyone could make sweeping statements about issues as complex as Second Language Learning abilities and learner identity. Taking a more post-structuralist stance, you know that we play different roles and display different personality characteristics depending on the situation and community we are in, and the people we are talking to. And you are angry that some teachers blame the learners’ personality for failure in language learning.

Theories about how different factors could lead to success in the second language learning process have been a core part of studies into second language acquisition for decades. This is a series of blogposts attempting to categorise and summarise research that have been done in these different areas, and we start today with more biologically deterministic approaches, with a look at the different characteristics of a learner’s personality that are said to influence learning.

Individual differences among learners, such as personality variation, have long been seen as the cause of different learning abilities, and researchers like Gardner and Lambert (1972) have focused principally on the individual’s internal influences on Second Language Learning. There have been disagreements over the categorisation of affective variables, and although some might admit that personality variables are abstract concepts that are difficult to define, and that the validity of psychological tests that attempt to measure them are often challenged and criticised, their categorisation is still necessary to understanding the Second Language Learning process.

Self-esteem

An important variable included in much SLA research, high self-esteem, or self-confidence, is believed to be an important construct for success in Second Language Learning. Often taken to be relatively stable in adults and resistant to change, a person is seen to either have high self-esteem or low self-esteem, regardless of the situation they find themselves in.

However, Malinowski (1923) provides a different view of ‘self esteem’ seeing it as the reflection and acceptance of oneself in interactions with others, which presumably vary depending on the different interlocutors and social networks. Self-esteem was thus divided into three types: global, situational/specific, and task (Brown, 1994).

Nevertheless, it is usually assumed that global self-esteem is an intrinsic personality trait that improves proficiency, and not much focus was given to situational- or task-based self-confidence.

Inhibition

Learners with low self-esteem are believed to display more inhibition, leading to the building of defences and alienation from the target culture, as they are less able to tolerate threats to their existence.

The process of Second Language Learning could pose internal threats, such as learners judging themselves harshly for their mistakes, and external threats, where learners perceive others as judging them. However, the emphasis on what learners ‘perceives’ seems to suggest that threat was not necessarily real, thus making learners wholly responsible for their learning.

Thin ego boundaries are believed to allow learners to be open and tolerant of ambiguity, and therefore more creative when learning a second language, and it is commonly believed that by lowering inhibition in the language classroom, we can promote freer communication and a willingness to learn from trial and error.

However, this call for learners to simply ‘remove their defences’ suggests that inhibition is purely intrinsic and does not take into consideration the social factors that perhaps contribute to a learner being inhibited.

Moreover, learners of far-eastern backgrounds might value the judgements of others highly, and might be brought up to believe that mistakes are detrimental to learning. Such cultural factors are often neglected when considering individual affective variables.

Risk-taking

A fear of ramifications of mistakes made could deter one from taking risks with the language. Although some assume that good learners are high risk-takers (Ely, 1986), Beebe (1983) finds that highly-motivated learners are often moderate risk-takers, preferring to make intelligent guesses. It is widely assumed that learners with high global self-esteem take more risks, that fossilization is due to unwillingness to take risks, and that teachers should encourage risk-taking behaviour (Brown, 1994).

However, such overgeneralisations do not take into account that the willingness to take risks, especially outside the classroom, depends largely on what the individual stands to lose from being perceived negatively by his interlocutors and the costs of making mistakes.

Anxiety, Extroversion and Empathy

Anxiety, or the tendency to worry, can be seen as either a personality trait or a state due to a prevailing situation or event. Anxiety caused by a competitive environment can be facilitative or debilitative to success in Second Language Learning, but it is unclear why different effects are produced or what the optimal level of anxiety is in promoting Second Language Acquisition.

As abstract as the concept of anxiety is that of extroversion. Debunking the myth that extrovert learners are good learners, Brown (ibid) states that extroverts need their self-esteem reaffirmed by others and tend to have thick ego boundaries and less empathy.

Empathy is the ability to make accurate assumptions about state of the people one is talking to, thus leading to effective cross-cultural communication. This, again, makes the learner accountable for understanding the culture of the target language and interpreting non- and para-linguistic cues, on top of having to cope with interacting in an unfamiliar language.

Krashen (1981) mentions these personality factors as affecting learners’ affective filters, stating that a confident, secure and outgoing person who lacks anxiety would have low affective filters, thereby allowing comprehensible input to reach the language acquisition device, resulting in acquisition. However, there has been much disagreement about Krashen’s understanding of how these variables interact with social contexts (Norton, 2000).

Ultimately, the learner should not be made solely responsible for his or her learning. Putting the onus on the learner to be motivated and to find opportunities to increase their exposure to the target language can be just as extreme and as unhelpful as blaming their failure entirely on the people around them.

Bibliography

Beebe, L. (1983) ‘Risk-taking and the language learner’. In H. Seliger and M. Long. Classroom-oriented research in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, pp: 39-166.

Brown, D. (1994) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (3rd Edition). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Ely, C. (1986) ‘An analysis of discomfort, risktaking, sociability and motivation in the L2 classroom’. Language Learning, 36, pp: 1-25.

Gardner, R. and W. Lambert. (1972) Attitudes and Motivation in Second Language Learning. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Krashen, S. (1981) Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Pergamon.

Malinowski, B. (1923) ‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages’. In C. Ogden and I. Richards. (eds.) The Meaning of Meaning. London: Kegan Paul, pp: 296-336.

Norton, B. (2000) Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change. Essex: Pearson Education.

Things students say that break my heart

This is a post that I wrote for the ELT Knowledge website a month ago.

Click here for part two of this post.

Learning a language is hard work and requires copious amounts of patience and determination. Its process is a complex one that, despite prevailing research into SLA (Second Language Acquisition) and Psycholinguistics, most still struggle to fully understand.

Yet many have fixed ideas about the language learning process and judge themselves harshly when it comes to their language experiences and expectations.

Undoubtedly, learning to speak a foreign language is an emotional experience that at times can be daunting and make one feel like a child, void of control over the simplest forms of communication.

And such emotions can be overwhelming at times.

I have heard different learners say similar things prompted by such emotions, and I feel for them each and every time. And perhaps the best thing is to understand why they are saying these things, and to make them better aware of the processes involved.

Here are some of the heart-breakers:

What they say: I feel stupid when I have to think and hesitate when I answer a question.

What’s really happening: When asked questions like ‘What’s your name?’ or ‘Where are you from?’, students are less likely to hesitate when answering. That’s only because they have been asked these questions a million times and no longer need to think before they answer. This also means that there is no thinking or complicated mental process needed to formulate these answers. The needed language has already been learnt and no more language learning is taking place.

When students have to think and hesitate, this indicates that they are finding ways to construct the sentence by drawing on all the lexicogrammatical and discoursal resources they have, paraphrasing, looking for synonyms and antonyms, making use of cohesive devices and trying anything to get their meaning across. Complex mental processes are activated while meaning negotiation and accuracy and fluency practice are being carried out.

I love it when students hum and haw. That’s language acquisition happening right before your eyes!

What they say: I feel embarrassed and insecure when I have to speak English in front of native speakers.

What’s really happening: Native speakers are often seen as target role models that students would like to emulate, and this no doubt comes from the fact that people traditionally learnt foreign languages in order to speak to native speakers and to get to know the target culture.

But in an era where English is now the lingua franca, and more and more are learning the language to further their career prospects and to travel, the target interlocutors and target culture are no longer simply those from the UK and the US.

Furthermore, the fact that one is biologically a native speaker is no guarantee of their abilities to speak eloquently or write clearly, and definitely no indication of adeptness at effective communication with other non-native speakers. In fact, it is not uncommon to find UK businesses employing trainers to give their British employees English workshops so as to enable them to successfully communicate in a global environment.

Alternatively, students might say the above because they have had a bad encounter with a rude or impatient native speaker. If this was the case, I just tell them this: They can’t sympathise with your position because you speak two languages (or more), and they probably speak one. You should feel sorry for them.

What they say: My last teacher said ‘I need more grammar’.

What’s really happening: There is a traditional belief, rooted in the tradition of the way Latin and Greek were taught, whereby learning a language was equated to the learning of grammar. One could even go so far as to argue that with most European languages, morphology and verb inflections make up the foundations on which the languages are based. While vocabulary acquisition has always been thought to be a simplistic matter of memorization, the ability to string the lexis into a syntactically correct and coherent sentence is a mental process that few understand.

So, telling a student ‘You need more grammar’ is more like saying ‘You need to know more about the English language’.

What they say: I felt like I was improving at first, but now I feel like I am deteriorating.

What’s really happening: For students on an intensive course, what might be happening is that they started out feeling motivated and were taking on all the learning opportunities offered to them, and therefore felt like they were improving.

However, this also means that they have started to notice the gaps in their knowledge and become more aware of their mistakes and the things they can’t do. Unlike before the course, the student is now paying extra attention to his/her language use and feeling self-conscious about it. This naturally leads to a feeling that they are deteriorating.

In actual fact, they are improving.

Because awareness is the mother of all progress.

For students on a long-term programme, this issue might simply be a lack of motivation and a feeling that they would never arrive at their destination.

The novelty of learning a new language has worn off and ‘Mid-Int-initis’ has set in. Their improvement curve seems to have stagnated. And there is still so much more they don’t know.

If this is the case, perhaps it is time to review their goals. Set specific performance-related mini-goals that could be met in shorter time frames and flag up the fact that no one knows everything and every word in a language. It is being able to do the things one wants to do with the language that counts.
Besides, we know that embracing the journey is sometimes more important than the destination. And we as teachers are at liberty to make that journey all the more enjoyable.

Perhaps hearing students say these things might break my heart, but if I can give them the confidence to never need to say them again, I’d consider my job half done, don’t you think?

Understanding Discourse – Grice and Implicatures Part 3

This is the last of three parts on Grice and Implicatures.

4. Implications for the Classroom

In Bouton’s experiment (1999), a total of 6 hours of explicit instruction was given over a 6-week period using teaching materials (see Appendix below) that focused students on implicature interpretation. On the basis of Bouton’s albeit tentative findings (3.3.1), English teachers should draw attention to how utterances take on different meanings in different contexts, discuss when different implicatures are appropriate, how they function, and how they compare to implicatures from the students’ native cultures (ibid:60-61). Alongside raising awareness of the native culture to help with relevance-based implicatures, I believe teachers can develop new materials, adapt old ones, highlight implicatures when they arise and expose students to examples through film, situation comedies, Twitter postings (As Twitter postings are limited to 140 characters, ‘tweets’ have to be short and succinct. Popular tweets often contain implicatures used to present an attitude or an innuendo, and in most cases, to be witty and humorous), and other aspects of pop culture, without wasting valuable class time.

There are also times when interlocutors fail to realise that learners are infringing a maxim or opting out. Students can avoid generating unintended implicatures or creating wrong impressions by using discourse markers:

‘forgive me if I’m wrong’ (non-observance of quality maxims),

‘by the way’ (non-observance of relevance maxim),

‘for want of a better word’ (non-observance of manner maxim),

‘to cut a long story short’ (when faced with a quantity-quality clash).

Few coursebooks (the book ‘Conversation Lessons’ (Martinez, 1997) comes closest to presenting such lexical items in context. Most coursebooks e.g. Cutting Edge, Inside Out, and Vocabulary in Use Upper Intermediate (McCarthy and O’Dell, 2001:56-57) touch on them briefly but tend to present them in a de-contextualised, isolated fashion) focus on teaching such adverbials, perhaps not understanding that they could be essential to successful communication and deserve more classroom time. Teachers could work with emergent language, providing and highlighting the use of such lexical items when the context arises.

As English becomes an international language and is learnt as a tool to communicate with NNS (Jenkins, 2003:4), it is undeniable that the cross-cultural interpretation of utterances faces a new challenge. Currently, most intermediate-level NNS would negotiate meaning while giving each other a wide berth when interpreting implicatures. However, as most countries are now insisting on the learning of English from a young age, we will soon have a new generation of proficient English speakers confronted with a new breed of potential misunderstandings when communicating cross-culturally. The awareness of implicature interpretation in different cultures will necessitate more attention in future EFL classrooms, and a new understanding of CP will be called for.

5. Conclusion

Grice’s principles have offered the linguistic world a way of looking at conversations beyond the words and opened up new areas of exploration in the area of pragmatics, but the implications of these studies have yet to be filtered through to the English language classroom. For learners who are immersed in an English/American culture, it is essential that we help them to adapt by raising awareness of implicature interpretation. As we move into a new age of English as an international language, the subject of implicatures would need further study and applications to teaching.

Do you deal with pragmatics and discourse in your classroom? How can we help learners become more effective interactants through understanding the Co-operative Principle better? Comments with any practical ideas you may have will much appreciated. Meanwhile, here’s one practical worksheet developed by Bouton (1999) to get us started, followed by a bibliography to all three parts of this series. Thanks for following. I hope it has helped somehow.

Appendix

Sample materials developed as handouts for teaching implicature

Lesson 1: Introduction and Pope Q Formula

Introduction: In many languages, including English, people often do not say exactly what they intend to communicate. Sometimes in English we imply information and expect others to figure out what we really mean. One kind of indirect speech is called conversational implicature. Conversational implicature take different forms, but they are always a result of the interaction between language and context. The examples below illustrate one kind of conversational implicature.

Instructions: Read the following examples and answer the question following each example.

Example 1: Paul and Georgette are discussing a mutual acquaintance who is always running late.

Paul: Do you expect Sheila to be late for the party tonight?

Georgette: Is the pope Catholic?

What is the answer to Georgette’s question? What do you think she means?

Example 2: Celia and Ron are discussing their boss, who is very unpleasant.

Celia: So, do you think Mr. Stingy will give me a raise?

Ron: Do cows fly?

What does Ron mean?

Example 3: Larry and Charlene are talking about a test they recently took.

Charlene: Do you think you got an “A” on the test?

Larry: Do chickens have lips?

What does Larry mean?

Discussion: In each of the examples above, the second person answers the first person with another question, so we have the formula Question 1+Question 2 = Answer. In each case, the obvious answer to Question 2 becomes the answer to Question 1 also. For example, in the first case, Paul asks, “Do you expect Sheila to be late for the party tonight?” (Question 1). Georgette answers, “Is the pope Catholic?” (Question 2). Because the obvious answer to Question 2 is “yes” (the pope is the leader of the Catholics), Georgette’s answer to Paul is also “yes.”

Bouton, L.F. (1999:67-69) ‘Developing non-native speaker skills in interpreting conversational implicatures in English: Explicit teaching can ease the process’, in Hinkel, E. (ed.) (1999) Culture in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.

Bibliography

Austin J.L. (1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bouton, L.F. (1988) ‘A cross-cultural study of ability to interpret implicatures in English’. World Englishes 7/2: 183-196.

Bouton, L.F. (1994) ‘Can NNS Skill in Interpreting Implicature in American English Be Improved Through Explicit Instruction?: A Pilot Study’. Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph Series 5: 89-109.

Bouton, L.F. (1999) ‘Developing non-native speaker skills in interpreting conversational Implicatures in English: Explicit teaching can ease the process’. In Hinkel, E. (ed.) (1999) Culture in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.

Brown, G. and G. Yule (1983) Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cameron, D. (2001) Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage.

Carston, R. (2004) A review of Stephen Levinson Presumptive Meanings. Journal of Linguistics 40/1: 181-186.

Clyne, M.G. (1994) Inter-cultural communication at work: cultural values in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, A.D. (1996) Speech Acts. In McKay S.L. and N.H. Hornberger (eds.) Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cook, G. (1989) Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Davis, W.A. (1998) Implicature: Intention, convention, and principle in the failure of Gricean theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fox, K. (2004) Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. London: Hodder.

Gazdar, G. (1979) Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical form. New York: Academic Press, Inc.

Grice, H.P. (1975) ‘Logic and conversation’. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts.New York: Academic Press.

Grice, H.P (1978) ‘Further Notes on Logic and Conversation’. In Kasher, A. (ed.) (1998) Pragmatics vol. IV: 162-178. London: Routledge.

Hatim, B. (1997) Communication Across Cultures: Translation Theory and Contrastive Text Linguistics. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Jenkins, J. (2003) World Englishes: A resource book for students. London:Routledge.

Keenan, E.O. (1976) ‘The Universality of Conversational Postulates’. In Kasher, A. (ed.) (1998) Pragmatics vol. IV: 215-229. London: Routledge.

Leech, G. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman

Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, S. (2000) Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Martinez, R. (1997) Conversation Lessons: The Natural Language of Conversation. Hove England: Language Teaching Publications.

McCarthy, M. and F. O’Dell (2001) English Vocabulary in Use: Upper Intermediate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spencer-Oatey, H. and W. Jiang (2003) ‘Explaining Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Findings: moving from politeness maxims to sociopragmatic interactional principles (SIPs)’. Journal of Pragmatics 35:1633-1650.

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1987) ‘Précis of Relevance’, in Kasher, A. (ed.) (1998), Pragmatics vol. V: 82-115. London: Routledge.

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (2004) ‘Relevance Theory’, in Horn, L. and G. Ward (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Thomas, J. (1995) Meaning in Interaction: an Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman.

Wierzbicka, A. (1985) A semantic metalanguage for a cross-cultural comparison of speech acts and speech genres. Language in Society 14: 491-514.

Yule, G. (1996) Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Understanding Discourse – Grice and Implicatures Part 2

In my last post, I looked at Grice’s Co-operative Principle (CP) and how the observance or flouting of the maxims creates meaning and implicatures in interaction.

In this post, I will look at the criticisms of Grice’s theories and the alternatives to CP that were proposed. I will also examine the universality of CP and how they might or might not be applicable across cultures, with a special section dedicated to the use of irony and British humour.

3. Criticisms of Grice

Critics say that Grice’s maxims are not only inapplicable ubiquitously, but that he had not used the terms in 2.2.4 consistently. CP has also been criticised on a number of counts: lack of distinctions between the maxims and between types of non-observance when calculating implicature, and the inability to withstand evidence of real language use (Thomas 1995, Gazdar 1979, Leech 1983). However, the most substantial criticisms are as follows.

3.1 Relevance Theory

Sperber and Wilson (2004) questioned the need for CP’s maxims, saying that expectations of relevance alone are enough to guide the hearer towards speaker meaning. They suggest that the search for relevance is basic to human cognitive systems (Cognitive Principle), and when utterances are made, interlocutors combine the input with available background information, while using the least processing effort required, to derive meaning. Consider:

(xiv) I’ll google it.

Using the input plus the background knowledge (which can also be described as one’s schema of the internet) that ‘Google’ is an online search engine, one understands that the speaker intends to search online for the information. Grice was criticised for failing to address such loose uses of language, and for treating metaphor, hyperbole and irony equally as flouting of the Quality maxim (ibid). Relevance theorists claim that besides irony, all the above loose uses of language are used to convey optimal relevance more economically (ibid), while irony involves ‘an expression of tacitly dissociative attitudes’ (ibid:272) and requires a higher order of meta-representational ability.

Not believing in the co-operative nature of humankind, Sperber and Wilson (1986) suggests a Communicative Principle where the audience would only pay attention if the stimulus is worth processing and relevant enough, and that the speaker, might have to be capable and willing to draw the hearer’s attention to his/her intentions, away from competing stimuli. Grice was criticised for seeing speaker unwillingness as a violation and thus not conveying implicatures (ibid 2004), although I worry about such a misrepresentation, considering that a violation simply comes from a speaker not wanting to convey the implicature, and does not mean the hearer cannot infer from the unwillingness. Arguably, Grice tended to focus on implicature generation and less on hearer interpretation strategies.

3.2 Politeness Principle (PP)

(xv) I don’t suppose you’ve time to spare?

Based on claims that sentences do not always have information-bearing functions, PP is proposed as a necessary complement to CP (Leech 1983:80), to explain indirect sentences like (xv) which seem to violate the quantity maxim. While CP enables communication through the assumption of cooperativeness, PP allows for such co-operation by regulating social equilibrium and relations (ibid:82). Thus, PP is seen to override CP at times.

The Ironic Principle (IP), however, allows for PP to be exploited in order to uphold CP (ibid:82-83). In (x), Sue is afraid of causing offence to Brian and makes light of Brian’s flaws, allowing him to infer her real meaning through indirectness, by way of irony, ‘an “honest” form of apparent deception, at the expense of politeness’(ibid:83).

While CP has been criticised repeatedly for not being universal, PP allows for the study of how such principles are variable on different dimensions and are exploited differently in different societies (ibid:84). Nevertheless, how much of CP is non-universal?

3.3 The universality of CP

I have found disagreement over whether Grice believed in the universal application of CP. Spencer-Oatey and Jiang (2003) claimed that according to Grice, they were universal principles of language use. Leech (1983:80) believed that no claim has been made that CP applied in the same way everywhere. Sperber & Wilson (1987) and Davis (1998), however, both think of implicatures as social conventions, and therefore, interlinguistic, and lists quantity implicatures and irony as common to many languages (ibid:186). Gazdar (1979:54), on the other hand, takes Grice’s claim that CP is something ‘reasonable for us to follow’ to mean that the nature of the maxims are universal, and argues that Grice’s maxims ‘cannot be defended as universal principles of conversation’ (ibid:55). Clyne (1994:12) believes the maxims are anglo-centric, of limited relevance, and need reformulation to take non-English cultures into consideration.

Examples in 2.2.1 showed how some adherence to the maxims is already instinctive in my learners, but consider (iii) again. In parts of Northern Greece, ‘children’ conveys the GCI of ‘sons’. When interlocutors do not share the same schema of the word ‘children’, misunderstandings could arise. Considering the four factors Grice (1975) purported interlocutors use to communicate through implicature: the literal meaning of the utterance, the roles and expectations of participants, the situation, context and nature of the conversation, and the world around the participants, we can deduce that people from different cultural backgrounds would have different expectations, roles and world views, and see the contexts and nature of conversations differently (Bouton, 1999). Van Dijik’s (1977 in Brown and Yule 1983) Assumed Normality of the World suggests that our reactions to particular communicative situations are learnt through our experience of interpreting them in prior similar contexts. If the respondent’s sociocultural (Sociocultural abilities refer to the respondent’s skills at selecting speech act strategies appropriate to the culture involved, the age and sex, the social class and occupations and roles and status of the participants in interaction) and sociolinguistic abilities (Sociolinguistic abilities refer to the respondents’ skill at selecting linguistic forms to express a particular speech act strategy and their control over utterance’s register of formality) must be considered for the success of speech acts (Cohen, 1996), so it must be when interpreting implicatures.

3.3.1 Bouton’s cross-cultural study

Bouton (1988) found a significant difference between the way NS and non-native speakers (NNS) interpreted the implicatures presented within contextualised dialogues (the dialogues were presented on paper and lacked the paralinguistic and non-linguistic features that would normally be present when interpreting implicatures. This may have had some effect on his findings.), with the Germans/Spanish/Portuguese having more similar scores to NS than the Chinese/Japanese. We could perhaps conclude that certain cultures have more similar expectations and world views to the target culture than others.

Subsequently, Bouton (1994) noted that without explicit instruction, there was increased mastery of implicature types as time passes (particularly, those based on flouting the relevance maxim), although progress was slow after 17 months, and irony remained a problem even for those immersed for 54 months. The types of implicatures that remained difficult for those immersed for more than 17 months, however, were the ones that improved when a separate group was given explicit classroom instruction. Such instruction, conversely, did not help them improve on relevance-based implicatures.

Bouton (1999) believed implicatures differed in their opaqueness to NNS. Relevance-based implicatures required a lot of background information to interpret (idiosyncratic implicatures) and seemed impervious to teaching efforts, but depended on the building up of native-culture schemata over time. Formulaic implicatures, such as PopeQ (Bouton (1988) uses the term PopeQ to refer to typical ironic questions used in answer to another question. Other examples include, ‘Can ducks swim?’ and ‘Do bears sh*t in the woods?’) [see (xvi)], indirect criticism [see (viii)] and irony, however, have pattern-based structural or semantic clues, and these patterns can be taught, recognised, and used.

(xvi)

Deb: Do you like ice-cream?

Derren: Is the pope Catholic?

3.3.2 Irony and English humour

Much cross-cultural misinterpretation of implicatures concerns sense of humour. Consider:

(xxii)

(Pointing to a bottle of Coke on the table)

Nao: Is this coca-cola?

Me: It’s a pizza.

The Japanese Nao, who thought I had meant to treat her like a fool, was puzzled. Some months later, Nao said, ‘I understand! British humour is about bullying others!’ Both the Japanese and Chinese have one expression to mean irony and sarcasm, and being ironic carries a negative connotation of insult. Although Nao had identified the semantic pattern in irony, her sense that the English found humour in bullying others was misplaced.

Anthropologist Fox (2004:65-66) notes that the English treat irony as ‘a constant, a normal element of ordinary, everyday conversation’ and the ‘dominant ingredient in English humour’. What makes irony even more difficult for foreigners is that a deadpan face is the expected norm. Fox sympathises with foreigners, admitting that self-parodying is part of the English psyche deeply schematised in the culture.
If spoken irony is difficult for NNS, written irony poses a bigger problem. Hatim (1997) attributes irony to the English preference for understatements and the cryptic, enabling one to express an attitude without saying very much. Irony is hard to preserve when translating written texts. Hatim (ibid:196) suggests that Arabic is intolerant to such opaqueness, with translators of irony needing to flout the quantity maxim by being over-informative.

3.3.3 Making CP universal

Keenan’s (1976) investigation in Malagasy culture has spurred criticisms that Grice’s principles were monocentric and full of assumptions based on Anglo-Saxon norms and culture (Wierzbicka 1985, Gazdar 1979). Keenan (1976) admits the Malagasy community are not uninformative, but explains that Grice’s maxims do not hold in some societies. However, perhaps it is the critics themselves who have been monocentric and have interpreted Grice’s words from an English perspective. Arguably, being ‘as informative as required’ would stand with the Malagasy speakers if the ‘information’ expected and the schema of what ‘information’ entails differs in their culture. I believe CP could be realised in different cultures in different ways. Consider.

(xviii) Returning an unidentified missed call,

Singaporean: Hello. Who called?

Clyne (1994:192) states that in both European and East/South-east Asian culture, the more information/knowledge provided, the better. Singaporeans, however, sometimes seem comfortable with the bare information minus the niceties, so we could argue that what is ‘required’ depends on cultural variation and situational expectations. Clyne (ibid:194) proposes a set of revised ‘maxims’ (Appendix) to make CP more universal by considering different cultural norms and expectations when applying Grice’s principles. How can teachers then apply this knowledge to help students adapt to a foreign environment?

In the last part of this series, I will be looking at the implications that Grice’s theories have on teaching and asking for ideas as to how this could be relevant to what we practitioners do in the language classroom.

Appendix

Clyne (1994)’s revised maxims

Quantity: A single maxim – ‘Make your contribution as informative as is required for

the purpose of the discourse, within the bounds of the discourse parameters of the given culture.’

Quality: Supermaxim – ‘Try to make your contribution one for which you can take

responsibility within your own cultural norms.’

Maxims (1) ‘Do not say what you believe to be in opposition to your cultural

norms of truth, harmony, charity, and/or respect.’

(2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.’[1]

Manner: The supermaxim can be retained in its original form – ‘Be perspicacious.’[2]

Maxims (1) ‘Do not make it any more difficult to understand than may be

dictated by questions of face and authority.’

(2) Avoid ambiguity unless it is in the interests of politeness or of

maintaining a dignity-driven cultural core value, such as harmony,

charity or respect.’

(3) ‘Make your contribution the appropriate length required by the

nature and purpose of the exchange and the discourse parameters

of your culture.’

(4) ‘Structure your discourse according to the requirements of your

culture.’

Clyne, M.G. (1994) Inter-cultural communication at work: cultural values in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[1] Maxim (2) of Quality and Maxim (2) of Manner have disclaimers put onto them.

For more detail, see Clyne (1994:194).

[2] I believe there is a typing error here. Grice’s original maxim of Manner was to be ‘perspicuous’, rather than ‘perspicacious’. This slightly changes the meaning of the maxim, which I assume was not the intention.

Understanding Discourse – Grice and Implicatures Part 1

Ever since my last blogpost about discourse, I have been receiving requests to delve a little deeper into the area of pragmatics. It reminded me that a previous BESIG interview about pragmatics and politeness had led to the same kind of requests which I had not had the time to devote to before.

This has spurred me to share some of the reading and research I had previously done on this subject here.

Here’s Part 1 (of 3) of a summary of Grice’s maxims and implicatures – often considered to be the basis of any study into the pragmatics of language.

The bibliography will follow at the end of Part 3.

1. Introduction

1.1 Why Grice?

A lot has been written about the work of the philosopher H. Paul Grice and his contribution to the study of pragmatics. After a long spate of linguistic study focused solely on truth conditional semantics and the grammar, syntax and semantic meanings of words controlled fully by the speaker, Grice was the first to propose a set of principles to describe the nature of conversation as a co-operation between the participants (Cook 1989), and his Co-operative Principles (CP) and maxims have been the basis for the further exploration of the nature and power of what a speaker means and implies, and how it is understood by the hearer. His notion of conversational implicature is believed to be ‘one of the single most important ideas in pragmatics’ ( Levinson 1983:97) and even his greatest critics, such as Davis (1998:1) admitted his theories to be an ‘important phenomenon’, a major achievement’ and ‘a breakthrough in linguistics’.

In order to understand Grice’s theories, it is perhaps useful to first consider J.L. Austin’s ideas on language. Austin was Grice’s teacher at Oxford University, and was reacting against his contemporaries’ views that language was full of ambiguities, imprecision and contradictions which needed to be refined and purified (Thomas 1995:29), by purporting that the way ordinary people used everyday language could shed light on how people identified the distinctions that were worth making (Austin 1962). Consider this example.

(i)

Emma: Can you find out if the tube is running?

Tom: The internet is down.

On a purely semantic level, it seems that Emma is asking about Tom’s ability to obtain the information about the London underground and Tom’s answer seems to be an irrelevant one about the internet not working. However, the mere locutionary force of the words does not help us to understand that Emma’s question was a request for help and Tom’s answer implied that he was unable to do so. Austin (1962) introduced the idea of there being an illocutionary force in such implicit perfomatives, (in this case, that of the functions request and refusal) which we use in speech to produce an effect.

Grice’s systematic study of such cases where there was a significant difference between speaker meaning and semantic meaning led him to put forward a theory that could explain how we bridge the gap between the locutionary and illocutionary force of a context-dependent utterance in order to make sense of each other. While his principles bring logic into the use of language, they also account for the hedging used in everyday language (by the way, I might be wrong but…), and provide explanations for the phenomena of metaphors, irony, tautology, and hyperbole.

1.2 Grice in the foreign language classroom

Some teachers might argue that the interpretation of an utterance is universal, and that because students can already interact and communicate in their L1, the time in the classroom should be spent on the formal skills and knowledge of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar (Cook 1989). As a result of this assumption, the indirect communication explained by Grice’s implicatures are often not highlighted or dealt with in language coursebooks (Bouton, in Hinkel 1999).

However, if we were to consider the fact that the same utterance in the same context could be interpreted differently in different cultures (Keenan 1976, Bouton 1988 & 1994), it might explain why even fairly advanced students have trouble understanding the nuances of utterances, the intentions of the speakers, and an area of particular interest to me, English humour. This causes frequent cases of misunderstanding and confusion to the language student who lives among native speakers and/or is exposed to comedy and films through the global dominance of Hollywood. Perhaps the interpretation of utterances is not wholly transferable as previously assumed, and needs to be covered in the English language classroom. The issue of the universality of CP and its maxims will be dealt with after we look at the principles themselves.

2. The Co-operative Principle (CP) and the Maxims

2.1 What is CP?

In his paper Logic and Conversation, Grice (1975) proposed that all talk exchanges are cooperative efforts where participants recognise a common purpose or mutually-accepted direction of the conversation. If we were to take the dialogue between Emma and Tom in (i) at face value (i.e. the locutionary force of the utterance), the utterances seem disconnected, and thus irrational and illogical. The assumption that Emma and Tom were guided by the cooperative principle helps us to understand that Tom’s reply is indeed a relevant answer to Emma’s question. Grice’s CP is worded as follows:

Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

(Grice 1975:45)

Grice then goes on to specify how CP is followed in the form of 4 maxims.

Quantity: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Quality: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false.

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Relation: 1. Be relevant

Manner: Be perspicuous.

Avoid obscurity of expression.
Avoid ambiguity.
Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)
Be orderly.

(ibid:45-46)

Despite the unfortunate name of ‘maxims’ and use of imperatives, Grice (1975) emphasises that they describe ways of people’s behaviour which they have learned from childhood, and that they are not only something we should follow but that which is rational and ‘reasonable for us to follow’. Levinson (1983) recognises them as assumptions and guidelines that help us to use language effectively and efficiently, and thus should not be considered as rules of any sort. CP is by no means idealising human beings as having an intrinsically co-operative or altruistic personality, but refers to the assumptions about communication one operates on, even when we are in an argument (Cameron, 2001).

2.2 Implicatures

The term ‘implicature’ was coined by Grice (1975) to account for what the speaker implied, suggested or meant, as opposed to the semantic meaning of the words said. The conveyance of implicature enables one to determine the meaning of an utterance via inference because of the assumption that the participants of a conversation are adhering to CP and its maxims (Yule, 1996).

In what Grice (1975) terms ‘conventional implicatures’, the conventional meaning of the words conveys what the utterance implies and is not based on CP, as the following illustrates:

(ii) He was on social welfare but was not lazy.

The above sentence implies that people on welfare are expected to be lazy since the word ‘but’ generates the implicature that what follows will contrast the presupposed expectation. Thomas (1995) lists words like ‘but’, ‘even’, ‘therefore’, ‘yet’ and ‘for’ as words that could carry conventional implicatures. As such words are not context-dependent for their interpretation, and are often covered in the formal studies of a language learner, I shall move on to a category of more interest to the pragmaticist, conversational implicatures, that which is communicated based on the assumptions about a conversation’s rational nature, as stated in CP and its maxims (Levinson, 2000).

The nature of conversational implicatures have been characterised by Grice (1975) as such. In order for the hearer to work out the implicature, the following rationalising takes place:

1) The speaker is observing the maxims.

2) The speaker is saying X to imply Y. In fact, he would not say X if he did not want to imply Y.

3) The speaker knows that the listener would understand Y from X, and intends it to be so.

There has been much debate over the categorization and definitions of conversational implicatures, which has led me to sub-categorized this section in a controversial way. Grice (ibid) himself provides the sub-categories of generalised conversational implicatures (GCIs) and particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs). Levinson (1983:104), however, introduces the term standard implicatures to refer the ones expressed when a speaker is observing the maxims, while more complex implicatures are communicated through what Grice (ibid) calls the flouting of the maxims in the form of PCIs.

2.2.1 Standard Implicatures

Although Grice (1978) indicated that he wished to withhold the term implicature from inferences that only express the maxims themselves (as opposed to flouting the maxims), I have started with this category in order to illustrate how we unconsciously abide by CP and use it to make sense of the utterances we hear. I shall use examples in my classroom to show that, sometimes, the observance of CP might be universal and transferable from my learners’ L1.

Quantity

(iii)

Me: How many siblings have you got?

Student: I have 5 brothers.

I can infer from common understanding of this maxim, albeit unconscious, that the student is being as informative as possible and thus implying that he has no more than 5 brothers, although semantically, the statement could imply that he has more than 5 brothers.

Quality

When the student asserts that he has 5 brothers in (ii), I believe he indeed has 5 brothers and has adequate evidence that this is so.

Consider also this question.

(iv) Student: What does ‘greedy’ mean?

This implicates that the student is asking this question sincerely, does not know what ‘greedy’ means, and requires this information. (Levinson, 1983)

Relevance

(v)

Me: Is Claudio in school today?

Student: He’s sick.

The student’s utterance is not a non-sequitor one. It implies that Maria was not in school by giving the reason that she was ill.

Manner

(vi) Student: I did my homework and went to sleep.

Although the ‘and’ seems ambiguous semantically and could be taken to mean ‘also’, the meaning ‘and then’ is understood.

2.2.2 Generalized Conversational Implicatures

Although most discourse analysts tend to assume that pragmatically-inferred meaning is always dependent on the context surrounding the utterance and the observance of CP and its maxims (Carston, 2004), GCIs are those based on ‘general expectations of how language is normally used’ (Levinson 2000:22), and no special background knowledge of the context is required to make the inferences (Yule 1996). GCIs could be said to be somewhere between conventional implicatures and PCIs.

(vii) He went out with a woman.

The sentence implicates that the woman is not his wife, family member or platonic friend (Grice 1975).

Also consider,

(viii) I repaired a roof.

Without the use of the possessive pronoun ‘my’, one can infer that this was not the speaker’s roof.

2.2.3 Particularized Conversational Implicatures

In situations where the speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim, he is ‘flouting’ and such flouting is used to generate PCIs, which the hearer will in turn infer from. The procedure is termed ‘exploitation’. (Grice 1975)

Exploiting the maxim of Quantity

(ix) Sharon has recently watched a film that was hyped up in the media as sensational.

David: How was the film?

Sharon: Well, the costumes were nice.

Sharon is flouting the maxim of quantity by not giving enough of the information required by David’s question. David knows that Sharon has flouted the maxim but has no reason to think that Sharon is being uncooperative. He, thus, infers that Sharon is implicating that the film was awful. Such flouting is used to create what is called indirect criticism (Bouton, 1994).

Tautologies like ‘a lie is a lie’ or ‘first introduced’ could be seen as flouting this maxim by unnecessary repetition. However, the implicature generated by the former might be telling us that the speaker is unwilling to make exceptions to what might be meant as a white lie, and the later might implicate the first occasion when something was introduced (e.g. the term ‘implicature’), although it might have been introduced by several people in different places.

Exploiting the maxim of Quality

(x) You are an angel. (metaphor)

(xi) Upon seeing Shelly online every time Michael logs on, he comments,

Michael: You are always online.

Shelly: Me? Never! I never use the internet. (irony)

(xii)

Brian has just burnt his dinner.

Anna: You’re such a great cook. (sarcasm/irony)

(xiii) I can eat a horse. (hyperbole)

(xiv) Upon seeing that a wedding would cost £30,000,

Rakesh: It’s a bit expensive, isn’t it? (understatement)

The above examples all flout the maxim of quality and both participants expect each other to realise that the utterances are not to be taken literally. They could be used as stylistic devices, to create humour, or just simply to be interesting.

Notice, however, that each of these utterances requires a different set of reasoning to work out the implicature intended. (x) requires the hearer to make comparisons between the concept of an angel and one who is kind and saves another, the semantic meanings of (xi) and (xii) are opposites of the implicated meaning, while (xii) is overstates and (xiv) understates what the speaker really means. Grice does not seem to explain how an interlocutor is to know which set of reasoning to use when such flouting is carried out.

Exploiting the maxim of Relevance

(xv)

Dale accidentally mentions Steve’s ex-wife in a conversation with Steve and Rachel. Rachel quickly changes the topic.

Rachel: What do you think of the coffee here?

Rachel’s blatant flouting of the maxim is used to show Dale that he has committed a social faux pax and in danger of treading dangerous waters.

Exploiting the maxim of Manner

(xvi)

The parents are talking in front of their toddler.

Dad: We won’t B-U-Y the T-O-Y today.

Through being intentionally ambiguous and spelling out the words, the father is implicating that there’s something he can’t say directly and expects the mother to infer that he does not want the child to know what they are talking about.

2.2.4 Other categories of non-observance

It is not always that the non-observance of a maxim is done blatantly with the intention of creating an implicature. Grice (1975:49) mentions several ways where a maxim is not adhered to, aside from flouting: violating, violating because of a clash and opting out. He later added a fourth category: infringing; and others have purported a fifth: suspending (Thomas1995:72).

Grice has not only been criticised for not always using the terms consistently but also for failing to address the issue of how the hearer is to distinguish between the types of non-observance involved in working out the implicature intended (ibid:90). This could explain why some girls spend hours trying to work out what the voicemail message left by their date really implies. The following categories might somehow be controversial as different writers have chosen to group them in different ways.

Violating

Unlike flouting, violation is not meant to be noticed by the hearer perhaps because the speaker intends to deceive or hold back information (Cameron, 2001:78). Some speakers, such as politicians, might be intentionally ambiguous so as not to commit themselves to a proposition (ibid), hence violating a maxim.

Clash

Grice (1975) explains that sometimes a speaker cannot fulfil one maxim without violating another, and is faced with a clash. In example (xvii), the student cannot answer the question fully without being long-winded, and chooses to forgo the maxim of quality.

(xvii)

Teacher: What did you do this weekend?

Student: Nothing.

Opting out

One might opt out of a maxim by clearly showing that he is unable to cooperate, perhaps due to legal or ethical reasons, or the need to protect someone else (Thomas, 1995). The speaker might say, ‘I can’t tell you that,’ or ‘I promised not to say’.

Infringing

A speaker sometimes infringes a maxim because he is unable to abide by it (ibid). Infringement could take place if the speaker is not particularly eloquent, is drunk, or simply can’t speak the language well (as with a child or foreign language speaker). Here is a classroom example where my student infringes the maxims of quantity and manner due to a lack of language skills.

(xviii)

Teacher: How was your holiday?

Student: Nice.

Suspending

Critics of Grice claim that there are language communities that do not adhere to the maxims (Gazdar, 1979), and Keenan’s (1976) example of Malagasy speakers, who often make their conversations as uninformative as possible (see section 3.2), is often used to suggest that there are occasions on which Grice’s maxims are inapplicable and need to be suspended. Alongside Gazdar and Keenan, Grice has had many critics since he first postulated the CP and its maxims.

In the next part, I will be looking at the criticisms of Grice’s theories, including the exploration of the politeness principle, the universality of the Co-operative Principle, and how English humour and irony might or might not apply in cross-cultural contexts.

The CELTA Trainer’s Diary Part 9 – Functions and Spoken Discourse

Among the four language systems – Lexis, Grammar, Pronunciation, and Discourse, Discourse is often the one that is most neglected on the CELTA. Some tutors might do an input session on functional language a la the functional syllabuses on the 1970s, but that is inevitably presented as formulaic lexis and nothing more.

Yet, spoken discourse governs the things we say and how appropriate they are in different circumstances. It explores how we assign significance to utterances and make sense of conversations. Without the study of discourse, lexis, grammar and pronunciation would remain stagnant concepts for it is through discourse that the other language systems interact with each other in a dynamic and fluid manner to create meaning.

Perhaps because it is so fluid and dynamic, many teachers and teacher trainers fear it, and do not know where to start teaching it.

On my CELTA, I give my trainees a taster of what discourse is all about and since Güven has kindly referred to me in his blogpost about this input session, I felt inclined to give the details of the session.

The day’s session started with a roleplay.

Trainees were put into their TP groups, with 5 in each group.

5 different rolecards were given to each of them.

The scenario: You are 5 old friends who have known each other for more than 10 years. You meet once every year to catch up. Each of you have a different quirk/idiosyncrasy.

The 5 characters in brief :

a) 1 has relationship problems with their partner and loves to complain and moan about it.

b) 1 is extremely touchy feely and likes to give the impression of being kind and supportive and likes playing the comforter.

c) 1 is a doer. He/She is solution-oriented, and likes offering suggestions and advice.

d) 1 has a very short attention span, gets bored easily and likes changing the topic.

e) 1 likes to criticize but does so with tact. He/ She always sees the negative side of everything and hates wimps.

The roleplay takes a good 10-15 minutes or so, and while monitoring, the trainer transcribes sentences she hears containing semi-fixed and fixed expressions that relate to particular discourse functions.

Relating to role (a), you would find expressions like

‘You won’t believe what xxx did!’;

‘I’m don’t know what to do’;

‘That reminds me, xxx is always + -ing’

Relating to role (b), you would find expressions like

‘Don’t worry’;

‘That’s such a pity’;

‘I’m so sorry to hear that’;

‘It’s not the end of the world’;

‘Things are going to get better’

Relating to role (c), you would find expressions like

‘Why don’t you + -ing?’;

‘How about + -ing?’;

‘You could + bare infinitive’;

‘You really should + bare infinitive’

Relating to role (d), you would find expressions like

‘By the way,…’;

‘Anyway,…’;

‘Come to think of it,….’;

‘Now that you mention it,…’

Relating to role (e), you would find expressions like

‘With all due respect,…’;

‘I don’t mean to be mean/harsh, but…’;

‘If you don’t mind me saying, …’;

‘To be honest,…’;

‘I see where you are coming from but…’

You might also find:

Hedging and softening devices like

‘It’s sort of…’;

‘It’s just….’;

‘It’s not that…’

Semi-fixed expressions to focus and emphasize, like

‘The thing is…’;

‘At the end of the day, …’;

‘What this means is…’

And typical expressions for opening and closing a conversation, such as

‘Hi, how are you?’;

‘How have things been?’;

‘How is it going?’;

‘Long time no see!’

‘I’ve got to go’;

‘I really have to make a move’;

‘It’s been nice catching up with you’;

‘See you around’

After the roleplay, trainees are made to guess what each of their team members’ quirks might be, and the trainer then boards the phrases she has transcribed on to the board.

The trainees then have to discuss and decide if the phrases are fixed or semi-fixed, and if they are semi-fixed, which part is changeable. They also have to say which character they think uttered the phrase and what function it serves.

As trainees do this, the group often comes to a natural realization that although some phrases like ‘Why don’t you + -ing?’ can be assigned the function of ‘suggestion’ or ‘advice’ quite easily, some phrases or discourse markers could have more than one purpose.

Take the discourse marker ‘Well,….’ for example.

It could serve as a signpost saying ‘I disagree and I’m now going to tell you why politely.’
It could serve as conversation changer, not dissimilar to ‘Anyway,’ or ‘By the way,’.
It could also signal the start of a long answer to a question, e.g. ‘Well, since I was a child, I blah blah blah….’

The lesson to be learnt here (aside from the fact that perhaps John Searle had wasted his life trying to categorise all utterances into functions) is that some linguistic formulae serve certain functions and could/should be taught with the relevant functions. However, interaction is dynamic and meaning is often co-constructed and negotiated through the conversation process.

Context and co-text could thus be a much bigger clue to the meaning of the utterance than any prescribed function, and we as teachers should not get carried away with teaching the functions of an utterance out of context.

Following this debrief to the roleplay, the following questions were put up on the interactive white board for students to think about.

1. What do you say when someone says, ‘How do you do?’

What about ‘How are you?’

2. Look at the following dialogue. Who do you think Rachel is? What does Michael mean?

Rachel: The phone is ringing.

Michael: I’m in the bath

(Adapted from Prof. Henry Widdowsen)

3. What do the following utterances really mean?

Are you busy?

It’s stuffy in here, isn’t it?

That curry smells really good.

I totally forgot to bring my pen.

Will you be passing the supermarket on your way home?

I can’t reach the top shelf.

(Adapted from Vicky Hollett’s blog)

4. What is Sue trying to achieve here?

Brian has just burnt his dinner.

Sue (laughs): You’re such a great cook.

What is Sarah trying to do here?

Justin accidentally mentions Richard’s ex-wife in a conversation with Richard and Sarah. Sarah quickly changes the topic.

Sarah: What do you think of the coffee here?

5. Maria starts a presentation with ‘Now, I will start.’ And ends it with ‘Okay, I finish.’ What could you tell her?

6. The Germans and the Americans were having a business meeting. The Americans made a proposal and the Germans said, ‘The problem with that is…’ The Americans misunderstood their intentions.

What do you think happened?

(Adapted from research by Dr. Sabrina Mallon-Gerland)

7. Discourse researcher called the discourse styles of Latin America, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc ‘Rugby’, while those from Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan were called ‘Bowling’. Why do you think this is so?

8. How do we know when it’s our turn to speak? What do you do to hold the floor? How do you signal to someone that you’ve finished talking?

9. What happened here?

Kelly and Jun Sook are partners. Kelly has just returned home from work.

Kelly: You won’t believe what happened to me today!

Jun Sook stares at her and doesn’t say a word.

Kelly: Fine, if you’re not interested, then I’m not going to tell you!

Jun Sook: Huh?

10. How do you normally interrupt a conversation? What do you say?

I will leave you with these ten questions as food for thought and look forward to your comments.

The discussion will follow on in the next blogpost.

The CELTA Trainer’s Diary Part 8 – Loop Input

The 8^th Day of the CELTA was about introducing the trainees to the Lexical Approach and the idea of language existing as chunks, rather than individual pieces of vocabulary strung together to make meaning.

Trainees were getting experiential training through the use of a demo lesson of a jigsaw reading method I use to encourage learners to remember language in chunks.

Trainees, acting as learners, were divided into two groups (blues and yellows) and given different texts to read and summarise. The catch was that they were only allowed to make notes in the form of drawings to help them remember the content. This means that the learner would not be able to simply read the words off the page, but is encouraged to truly understand the meaning of the text and remember some of the chunks of language.

The trainees, now learners, are put in a carousel, with the Blues on the inside and the Yellows on the outside. The Blues then had to relay their summaries, with the help of only their drawings, to the yellows. The Yellows then moved a place to their left and had to re-tell what they had heard to their new Blue partner.

This achieves two things. It practises the very common communicative function of re-telling stories and reporting what one has heard, while allowing the new blue partner to fill in the gaps of the retold story, thus co-constructing the information learnt and reformulating the chunks of language from the text.

As Güven has very concisely summarized the lesson in his blogpost, I will refrain from describing the rest of the input session here.

What makes this input session slightly different from those with a demo lesson which employs the technique of a straight forward experiential learning/training, is that the text given to the trainees was about the Lexical Approach itself.

The Blues were given a page-long definition about the Lexical Approach from An A-Z of ELT (Thornbury, 2006) while the Yellows were given a page from the same book about lexis, lexical sets and lexical verbs.

Loops by Fighter Jets @irishmikeh — Loop de Loop
Photo by Mike Hogan, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/irishmikeh/

Combining content (i.e. What the trainee is trying to learn: the text about the Lexical Approach) and process (i.e. How the trainee is trying to learn: the ‘drawing jigsaw reading’ which enforces the Lexical Approach), this specific style of teacher training sessions could be described as a loop input (Woodward, 1986).

Being multi-sensory, loop input allows for lots of recursion and for the reverberation of learning to take place through content (the text) and through experiencing the process (pretending to be students in the demo Lexical Approach lesson), thereby resulting in a deeper understanding and learning of the concept (Woodward, 2003).

What is perhaps most important in loop input sessions, and in fact any experiential learning process involving a demo lesson, is that trainees are given the chance to unpack (or what Woodward calls ‘decompress’) the lesson.
This means that time is given to trainees to have a detailed discussion of the main stages of the lesson they have just experienced, the aims of each stage, the content and materials used, and the participant experience of the activity (ibid).

In this loop input session for example, I asked the following questions in the unpacking stage:

What were the main stages of that lesson?

Why did I only allow you to draw and not write words?

Why did I ask you to re-tell what you had heard?

What words did you use when re-telling?

Did you remember individual words or chunks of language?

How did you remember the words you had to use to re-tell what you had heard? How did you feel as a student?

And judging from Güven’s blogpost, it seems like the trainees got the gist of the Lexical Approach.

Bibliography

Thornbury, S. (2006) An A-Z of ELT, Macmillan.

Woodward, T. (1986) ‘Loop Input – a process idea’ The Teacher Trainer 1: 6-7.

Woodward, T. (2003) ‘Key Concepts in ELT: Loop Input’ ELTJ 57/3: 301-304

The CELTA Trainer’s Diary Part 7 – Correcting Students’ Mistakes

Where to timetable the input session on ‘Correction and Dealing with Student Errors’ is a tricky one and often reflects the trainer’s beliefs about teacher training and teaching.

Some trainers leave it till Week 3, preferring to focus on lesson structures where the target language is presented and then practice of that target language is given.

This could be based on the belief that language lessons should take on an input-output structure where teachers aim to teach a particular pre-decided lexico-grammatical item.

Or this could be based on the belief that teacher trainees on a CELTA are not ready to handle the clarification and correction of language that emerges from student output as they are new to the profession, and are better off having the chance to research and prepare to present a language item.

Of course, there is also the fact that the CELTA criteria expects trainees to articulate the aims of the lesson (e.g. By the end of the lesson, students will have been introduced to and given practice of the use of the present perfect for life experiences in the context of talking about countries they have been to) and show through the stages and procedure of their lesson plan how they are going to go about achieving that aim.

This naturally suggests that the other CELTA criteria regarding the ability to clarify meaning, form and pronunciation of language in Teaching Practice refers mainly to the clarification of the target language stated in the lesson aims.

Hence, in order to best equip teachers to deal with Teaching Practice, the first two weeks of input are often spent understanding the input-output lesson shapes like Present-Practice-Produce and ‘Language from a Text’, and demonstrating how to systematically clarify MFP in such lessons.

Being a Dogmetician, and a believer in the importance dealing with emergent language, I decided to deliver my input session on correction on Day 6 (Week 2, Day 1). After all, if it’s going to be difficult for trainees, they might as well start getting practice of it as soon as possible.

Indian English Sign 2 - virtualtourist.com — Photo from virtualtourist.com

Let us first start by looking at some sentences spoken by my students.

Decide where the mistake lies, whether it is a problem with lexis, grammar, pronunciation or usage, and why you think this mistake was made.

How would you correct the mistake?

Here are some examples:

1) She want some tea.

2) He saw a dream about winning the Olympics yesterday.

3) I am not agree with you.

4) I lied down on my bed when I got home.

5) He seed a film at the cinema last week.

6) I read a new about Team GB’s gold medals this morning.

7) If I am you, I will go home.

8) Last month, I had seen this film.

(1) is a grammatical issue where the student has dropped the third person ‘s’ in ‘wants’. A seemingly simple grammar rule to remember, new teachers are often surprised to find fairly advanced students of English still making this mistake. This is often not because the student is unaware of the rule, but simply forgot. If repeated often, the mistake becomes habitual (or in some literature, ‘fossilized’).

Not surprisingly, the third person ‘s’ is a late acquisition item even among children who speak English as a first language. This could be due to the similarity in the pronunciation of ‘want’ and ‘wants’, and the fact that there is hardly any impact on meaning if the ‘s’ is dropped.

Although (2) is a mistake with lexis and collocation, while (3) is a grammatical mistake, they both are a result of L1 interference, i.e. translation from the student’s first language has caused the mistake. The speaker of sentence (2) is Japanese and the collocation ‘to see a dream’, instead of ‘to have a dream’ is the norm in the Japanese language. Sentence (3) is a mistakes typically made by Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French speakers, as ‘agree’ is an adjective, as in ‘Estoy de acuerdo’, ‘Sono d’accordo’ or ‘Je suis d’accord’.

Number (4) and (5) feature the same grammatical mistake of using the regular verb past tense ending ‘-ed’ with an irregular verb.

However, the student who said (4) simply did not know the past simple of the irregular verb ‘lie’ and might have confused it with the regular verb ‘to lie’ (as in ‘not to tell the truth’).

The elementary student who said sentence (5) had been able to say ‘I saw’ previously. But when taught the rules for forming the past simple of regular verbs, the eager student over-applied the rules to the irregular verbs as well. As first glance, it might seem like the student has deteriorated. In actual fact, he/she was experimenting with a rule that was taught.

And without experimentation, there can be no language learning.

Sentence (6) also features an over-application of a rule. The student understood that plural nouns often take an ‘s’ in English, e.g. one medal, two medals. The student also knew the word ‘news’ and has assumed that it was a noun in the plural form. He then deduced that one piece of news must be ‘a new’. Very clever!

Sentence number (7) sees the first conditional, instead of the second conditional being used. This could be due to several possible reasons : (a) the student hasn’t had enough practice of the structure and isn’t ready to produce it, (b) the student forgot (c) the student has never come across this structure or hasn’t been taught it (d) the student was taught this in class but misunderstood the teacher and thought that ‘If I were you’ referred to a past time.

Sentence (8) is another example of a student experimenting with the tenses they have learnt and perhaps going a little overboard with it, and overcomplicating the sentence. The past simple would have sufficed.

Chinglish sign @pigletruth — Photo by @pigletruth from http://www.flickr.com/eltpics

To sum up, here’s why students make mistakes

They forgot.
It’s a habit.
L1 interference
Lack of knowledge
Lack of confidence
Lack of practice
Not ready to produce it
Misunderstanding the teacher
Over-application of a rule
Experimentation

But students want to have their mistakes pointed out and corrected. Many of them feel that this is what they are paying the teacher to do.

A director of studies once told me that the most common student complaint they got was that their teachers were not correcting them enough.

But can we correct every mistake we hear?

That would not only disrupt fluency to the point where real communication would be made nearly impossible, but would also affect the student’s confidence.

Instead, deal with issues that are

Affecting meaning and interfering with communication;
Recurring mistakes;
Mistakes made by several members of the class;
Mistakes made concerning the target language that you focused on in this lesson or in previous lessons.

Indian English sign - nitawriter.wordpress.com — Photo from nitawriter.wordpress.com

What are some different ways we can correct a mistake in class?

On-the-spot

(1) Reformulation/Recasting

Student: “I go to the cinema yesterday.”

Teacher: “Oh? You went to the cinema yesterday?”

This involves the teacher simply repeating the student’s sentence back in the correct form. In some arenas, a distinction is drawn between ‘reformulation’ and ‘recasting’, with a suggestion that ‘reformulation’ is when this is done as in a delayed language feedback slot.

However, I find such terminology unhelpful to my trainees and choose to use the term ‘reformulation’ both for on-the-spot and delayed correction.

(2) Elicit by indicating there’s been an error

Student: “I go to the cinema yesterday.”

Teacher: “I go?” (with raised eyebrows and rising intonation)

This works with students who already have been exposed to the language point but have simply either forgotten or have made the mistake a habit.

If students are unable to self-correct, elicit from the other students in the class.

(3) Explicitly tell students what the mistake is

Student: “I go to the cinema yesterday.”

Teacher: “ Yesterday is the past but ‘go’ is the present tense. What’s the past tense of ‘go’?”

or even more explicitly,

Teacher: “Yesterday is the past but ‘go’ is the present tense. So we should say ‘I went to the cinema yesterday.”

Other ways of correcting include using

finger highlighting,
identifying the type of error e.g. ‘tense?’ or ‘preposition?’
gestures to indicate word order,
using the board and writing up the phonemic script,
clapping out the stress pattern of a word or sentence, etc.

Japlish Sign — Photo from MyFunnyWorld.net

Delayed Language Feedback (Delayed Correction)

After an activity is over and feedback on content has been conducted, language feedback can be conducted.

In one-to-one lessons, it could be helpful to have a sheet of paper divided into two section – ‘What you said’ and ‘What you could have said’. During the spoken interaction, I write on this sheet frantically. In delayed language feedback, I cover the side that says ‘What you could have said’ and get the student to self-correct. I then gradually reveal my reformulations.

In a class, I would write the sentences containing student errors on the board. I would then put students into pairs to correct the sentences. The person who made the error remains anonymous, but every so often, students giggle and admit that the sentence came from them.

After giving students ample time to discuss the sentences, I elicit the self-corrections from them in open class and we learn from the mistakes together.

If you still use OHP projectors, you could write the sentences straight onto the acetate when monitoring, and flash it up on the wall during delayed language feedback. This would save you time writing it up on the board, but this means that you have to pick the sentences you’d like to focus on as you hear them.

Chinglish Sign 2 @pigletruth — Photo by @pigletruth from http://www.flickr.com/eltpics

Rather than an input-output model, a focus on error correction earlier on emphasizes the fact that learning is not linear, and that some of the best learning takes place when the teacher helps the students to notice the gap in their knowledge and how it could affect communication.

It might not be easy, but just like language learning, the more one practises dealing with language errors and emergent language, the better one is bound to get at it.

After all, why do we encourage our learners to make mistakes, yet feel like we have to protect our teacher trainees from making them?

As James Joyce said, ‘Mistakes are the portals of discovery.’

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