SLA Research and Materials Development for Language Learning

Brian Tomlinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138811966
• eBook ISBN: 9781317608028
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

SLA Research and Materials Development for Language Learning is the only book available to focus on the interaction between second language acquisition theory and materials development for language learning. It consists of contributions written by experts in SLA, experts in materials development, researchers who have expertise in both fields, and introductions and conclusions by the editor. The book is organized into four major sections – position statements; materials driven by SLA theory; evaluations of materials in relation to SLA theory; and proposals for action – that offer a diverse range of perspectives while maintaining a cohesive and comprehensive overview on the subject. This book is ideal for post-graduate courses in applied linguistics and second language acquisition and for researchers interested in the relationship between SLA and materials development.

PART I

Position Statements

1

ACHIEVING A MATCH BETWEEN SLA THEORY AND MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

Brian Tomlinson

Introduction

I am going to start my chapter by presenting an extract from the beginning of a lesson for A2/B1 learners of English. I will explain the relevance of this later.

Teacher:	Morning class.
Students:	Good morning.
Teacher:	Do you remember the sad poem I read you yesterday about the refugee mother and child? Well today I’m going to tell you a story. There won’t be any comprehension questions so just relax and enjoy the story. Is there anybody here from the USA? Is there anybody from Ireland?

The story is about an American and an Irishman who were travelling by air across the Atlantic. The Irishman was tired and wanted to go to sleep. The American was wide awake and wanted to play a game.

When the Irishman refused to play, the American said, ‘You’ll like this game. I ask you a question and if you can’t answer you give me ten dollars. Then you ask me a question and if I can’t answer I give you a hundred dollars.’

‘OK,’ said the Irishman. ‘Let’s play.’

‘What’s the distance between the earth and the moon?’ asked the American. The Irishman immediately put his hand in his pocket and gave the American ten dollars.

‘My turn,’ said the Irishman. ‘What goes up a hill with two legs and comes down with three?’

The American couldn’t answer. He thought and thought, he phoned his friends, he consulted Wikipedia. But he couldn’t come up with an answer.

The American woke up the Irishman and gave him a hundred dollars. The Irishman smiled and went back to sleep. But the American was still tormented by the question. An hour later he woke up the Irishman and said, ‘OK. Tell me. What goes up a hill with two legs and comes down with three?’

The Irishman put his hand in his pocket and gave the American ten dollars.

The teacher left the class for a couple of minutes to think about/talk about the story and then said. ‘If you liked that story you can take a copy from my table at the end of the lesson. If you want to read more stories like this there’s a web reference at the bottom of the story on the handout.’

What has this extract from a lesson got to do with the match between SLA and materials development? I will explain later in the chapter.

Questions

Now I would like to ask and answer some fundamental questions.

My first question is:

Are Global Coursebooks Typically Successful in Facilitating Language Acquisition?

My answer, after fifty years’ experience of using global coursebooks and of observing them used in primary, secondary and tertiary classrooms around the world, is that language coursebooks are not typically very successful in facilitating language acquisition. Some teachers who use global coursebooks are successful in facilitating language acquisition but often that is because they modify and supplement their coursebooks in ways which facilitate acquisition (Tomlinson, 2015b; Tomlinson & Masuhara, forthcoming 2016). They often succeed despite, rather than because of, their coursebooks.

There is evidence that using a global coursebook can improve your ability to use the coursebook and to improve performance on tests targeted by the coursebook. For example, Hadley (2014) claims to provide empirical evidence that using a coursebook in Japan facilitated language learning because students did better on the coursebook placement test at the end of the course than they did at the beginning. I am not convinced that this proves that the coursebook facilitated language learning and I have seen no convincing evidence that a global coursebook has facilitated durable language acquisition. But to be fair, I have seen no convincing evidence that a global coursebook has ever not facilitated durable language acquisition. What I have seen though are coursebooks produced by innovative projects (Tomlinson, 1995; Bolitho, 2008) or by enlightened (and financially secure) publishers which I would consider likely to facilitate language acquisition. The two best of these in my view are On Target (1994), written by thirty teachers in Namibia and Search 10 (Fenner & Nordal-Pederson, 1999), commissioned and published in Norway by an editor who had been involved in the On Target project. Both of these coursebooks followed the Text-Driven framework advocated in Tomlinson (2013c) and both of them were written in order to match the SLA principles I will discuss and exemplify later in this chapter.

My second question is:

Why Do Coursebooks Typically Not Facilitate Language Acquisition?

My answer is: There are many reasons but one is undoubtedly that coursebooks do not typically match what we know about what facilitates language acquisition. We know a lot about what does and does not facilitate language acquisition. We know about this from the data and theories provided by SLA research, from classroom research and from our longitudinal experience in trying to help classes of learners acquire languages. Many of us apply this knowledge and awareness to our own classroom materials but few of us have the opportunity to apply it to commercial coursebooks.

In Tomlinson (2013a), chapter after chapter provides evidence of the mismatch between published materials and what we know about languages and their acquisition. Evidence is also provided of such a mismatch in Tomlinson, Dat, Masuhara, and Rubdy (2001), Masuhara and Tomlinson (2008), Tomlinson and Masuhara (2013) and Tomlinson (2013b). This is especially true of global coursebooks. There are some notable exceptions though in local publications, e.g. Search 10 in Norway and On Target in Namibia.

Dörnyei (2009, p. 268) says, ‘for many, if not all, SLA researchers the ultimate goal is to develop insights and instructional strategies that will eventually improve the efficacy and efficiency of L2 learning’. Many such insights have already been developed but the problem is that most of them do not seem to have been applied.

So my next question is:

Why Do Coursebooks Not Typically Match What We Know About Language Acquisition?

My answer is: There are many understandable reasons. For example, many publications on SLA are inaccessible to teachers, writers and publishers because of their use of specialized terminology, because of their assumptions of prior knowledge and because they appear in journals not easily available to practitioners. Also there is a separation between theorists and practitioners. They each have their own conferences and publications and rarely meet to share mutually beneficial insights (with some notable exceptions such as MATSDA (www.matsda.org) conferences). In addition, the examinations that coursebooks prepare learners for do not match what we know about language acquisition because high-stakes examinations need to achieve and demonstrate their reliability by using mainly objective questions that test knowledge rather than communicative competence (Tomlinson, 2005). The ideal would be if these high-stakes examinations also focused on validity and used tasks which assessed communicative competence and therefore encouraged its development as the main objective of coursebooks. This did happen in Vanuatu in 1981 when the primary school leaving examination was changed to a communicative examination. Then teachers in a workshop wrote communication activities (which would now be called tasks) for a coursebook called Talking to Learn (Tomlinson, 1981), which was intended both to foster the development of communicative competence and to prepare students for their school leaving examination.

The main reasons, though, why commercial publishers do not risk producing a coursebook which matches what we know about language acquisition is that such a coursebook would not achieve face validity with administrators, teachers and parents and therefore would be unlikely to sell.

My next question is:

What Do We Know About Language Acquisition?

My answer is: There is a lot of disagreement in the SLA world but we do know there are certain prerequisites for effective and durable language acquisition. I am going to argue that a coursebook needs to achieve these prerequisites if it is going to help teachers to facilitate language acquisition regardless of the age, experience, qualifications or creativity of the teachers.

Prerequisites for Language Acquisition

I have already published criteria for facilitating language acquisition in, for example, Tomlinson (2011a, 2012, 2013b) and other criteria have been proposed by Nation (2007) and by Ellis in this volume. In this chapter I am going to focus on five criteria which I believe are prerequisites for durable and effective language acquisition and which I think should be used in both the development and the evaluation of coursebook materials. These principles are supported by second language acquisition research, by classroom research and by my experience as a teacher and teacher trainer. This is how I believe research should be applied to materials development. If principles emerging from research match with the experience of the developers then there is a responsibility to think of ways of making useful applications of these principles to practice. If principles emerging from research have no match with the experience of the developers then it would be irresponsible and possibly impractical to try to apply them. I would also argue that it could make a valuable contribution to materials development if SLA researchers investigated approaches which practitioners have found to promote language acquisition, as well as commonly used coursebook activities which practitioners suspect have little or no beneficial effect on their users’ language acquisition. See Tomlinson (forthcoming 2016) for a criterion-referenced evaluation of typical coursebook activities.

I would like now to consider my five main principles and their application to materials development for language acquisition.

Principle 1: That the Learners Are Exposed to a Rich, Re-cycled, Meaningful and Comprehensible Input of Language in Use

Before I go on I would just like to refer you back to the extract from the beginning of a lesson which I presented at the beginning of this chapter. This is an example of what I call a task-free activity.

What happens is:

The teacher starts every lesson by reading a poem, telling a joke, telling a story, recounting an anecdote, reading a newspaper report, acting out a scene, giving a speech, etc. It is a task-free activity because the students do not have to do anything except listen and hopefully use visualization and their inner voice to help them enjoy what they are listening to (Tomlinson & Avila, 2007; Tomlinson, 2011b). After the teacher performance the teacher leaves a brief silence for the students to process what they have listened to (Bao, 2014), then tells the students to take a written copy of the ‘text’ if they want to at the end of the lesson and put it in their file. If they want to they can also follow up the suggestions for further reading or listening which are listed below the text. The idea is that the students build up a file of texts which have engaged them and they return to and experience them again throughout their course (sometimes asking the teacher about things which puzzle them). Many teachers around the world who have attended my workshops now start every lesson with a task-free activity and they have been very pleased with the impact on their students (for example, students learning German at Leeds Metropolitan University rated the teacher’s reading of poems at the beginning of every lesson as the most interesting and the most useful part of their course).

Providing such a task-free activity at the beginning of every lesson is one way of offering a rich, re-cycled, meaningful and comprehensible input of language in use (Krashen, 1994; Nation, 2007).

It is rich because of the massive accumulated amount of input over a course, because of the variety of genres which the learners can experience, and because the authenticity of the texts ensures that learners are not restricted in their access to the target language (e.g. there are four different tenses used in the Irishman and American story as well as modal verbs and infinitives, and yet the story has proved easily accessible when I have used it with A2 students).

It is re-cycled because the text often contains repetitions (e.g. the questions are repeated at an interval in the Irishman and American...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I Position Statements
• 1 Achieving a Match Between SLA theory and Materials Development
• 2 Brain Studies And Materials For Language Learning
• 3 Applying SLA Principles to Whole-Class Activities
• 4 No Place for Coursebooks in the Very Young Learner Classroom
• Comments on Part I
• Part II Materials Driven by SLA Theory
• 5 A Case Study of Principled Materials in Action
• 6 Research-Informed Materials for Teaching Pragmatics The case of agreement and disagreement in english
• 7 From SLA Research on Interaction to TBLT Materials
• Comments on Part II
• Part III Evaluations of Materials in Relation to SLA Theory
• 8 Vocabulary Learning Exercises Evaluating a Selection of Exercises Commonly Featured in Language Learning Materials
• 9 An Evaluation of Textbook Exercises on Collocations
• 10 What Grammar Activities do Elt Workbooks Focus On?
• 11 Comprehensibility and Cognitive Challenge in Language Learning Materials
• 12 What Aspects of Creativity Enhancement do elt Textbooks take into Account?
• Comments On Part III
• Part IV Proposals for Action
• 13 Language Teaching Materials as Work Plans An sla perspective
• 14 Supporting Language Learning on the Move An evaluative framework for mobile language learning resources
• 15 Framing Vocational English Materials from a Social Semiotic Perspective The design and use of accounting english materials
• 16 Corpus-Based Materials Development for Teaching and Learning Pragmatic Routines
• 17 Why One-Size-Fits-All Is Not Fit for Purpose The Problem With Mass-Produced Teaching Materials, and how One Might Creatively and Sensitively Confront this Problem
• 18 When It's Not What You Do, but the Way That You Do It How Research into Second Language Acquisition can Help Teachers to Make the most of their Classroom Materials
• Comments on Part IV
• Conclusion
• Index