Widdowson's Error II: Focus on form during "communicative" activities

Following up on the previous post, here is a 2010 study by Ellis looking at how corrective feedback and intervention happens in what he refers to as "communicative" classroom instruction. What is typical and fascinating is that at no place in the description of the study does he provide any real detail as to what was actually going on in the classroom--or whether it was being done well. We are to assume that it was, and that we all agree what we mean by communicative--and that most any type of communicative activity is, for research purposes, of equal effectiveness and impact. That is almost standard practice in research related to pronunciation teaching practices.

Widdowson
Photo credit: ied.edu.hk

You will rarely get much information as to what went on clinically, only pedagogically--which means just providing the name of the technique(s) used. Imagine a psychotherapist trying to convince colleagues of the efficacy of a new protocol simply by focusing on the results, not the details of the process. From that perspective, it is just as reasonable in reviewing many studies of attempts to correct pronunciation in oral communication classes to ask whether the communicative dimensions of the class were conducted well. Unless proven otherwise, we have to assume that the problem with the focus on form may have been also caused by or at least exacerbated by poor communicative instruction.

True to "form," from a HICP/EHIEP perspective, that should almost always be the case: unless the class communicative narrative is strong, haptic anchoring of pronunciation change will not work either. Maybe Widdowson was right after all.

Correcting pronunciation: Widdowson's error

Widdowson
Photo credit: ied.edu.uk

Recall Widdowson's famous dictum "Learners should communicate to learn, not learn to communicate." It doesn't take a great deal of reading or research to come to the conclusion that "error correction" in pronunciation work is both essential--and probably not a very useful concept. The relationship between what comes out of the learner's mouth and the appropriate target form is, of course, very much context dependent. For example, I have often used Hammerly's 1991 article as an example of structuralist error correction that probably worked. In week 4 of a tightly controlled, audiolingual method-based foreign language program for college freshman, his framework for providing appropriate feedback seems both workable and potentially very effective. (I know that it was, in fact.) However, once you step outside of that type of setting and into today's post communicative methodology, it gets very messy.

In previous posts we have explored many of the factors that can override or at least undermine haptic-based integration of sound change, effective "uptake" of modified forms--most recently visual field distractions. Ironically, the most powerful distractor of all may be genuine, fluent communication, as strange as that might sound at first. Pulling learners away in the middle of good communication and then struggling to get them back on course can often be pointless, at best.  For that to work in HICP both the engaging nature of the ongoing communication and the strong, anchored felt sense of the focus of the brief haptic aside must be in balance.

In spontaneous, efficient haptic integration and anchoring in the classroom, it is as if learner and instructor momentarily are able to "drop out" of the flow of communication to attend to formal feedback and then step back in, returning to the "higher level" work of the lesson naturally, seamlessly--as long as the lesson, itself, is inherently coherent and attention-grabbing as well. The seed of change is well planted and the learner's immediate conscious point of reference and interaction is seemingly unaffected.

Widdowson was actually right--as long as we understand "communication" in our work to also involve "talking directly to the body," in a sense, by passing the frontal "executive" part of the brain during some pronunciation feedback and adjustment. In fact, what I just described, the effective cutaway to attend to form and then return to the narrative, is the basic stuff of hypnotherapy. If that doesn't make sense now, it will later . . . "These are not the Druids you are looking for . . . "

Pronunciation teaching: from methods to integrative "tool kits" and back again!

I'd characterize today's pronunciation teaching as presenting "integrative tool kits" to instructors, that is providing for instructors a wide range of options in terms of techniques and perspectives on how to work with pronunciation in their classes and programs. For what they are, there are several good ones, including Gilbert's prosodic framework. For instructors of a requisite level of training, that kind of support is potentially adequate. For those less trained, and those who do not have a good sense of how to create optimal sequencing of pronunciation work, that type of informed "recommendations" is often relatively useless--at best.

Clip art: Clker

The approach to working with pronunciation that has been developed on this blog is, in many respects a method, a relative fixed set of procedures, focusing on a limited set of phonological targets, presented to learners in a fixed order and then used in all aspects of language teaching. That such a system could be applicable or capable of being modified for most learners and classrooms is, I realize, quite a claim. In subsequent blog posts, I'll outline the EHIEP system in some detail, not as the "only" way to integrate pronunciation but as a model for how it can be done. In our "post-method" era, it may seem odd to propose one again, but, as always, methods will inevitably emerge from the current often bewildering, chaotic, mix-and-match-ness.