Integrating Focus on Form and Meaning through counterbalanced instruction
Keynote by Roy Lyster
-his main interest in L2 learning through context
-research suggests effective L2 instructions need to balance Focus on Form (FoF) & Focus on Meaning
(FoM)
-grammar translation: high scores on grammar tests but low communicative ability
-communicative language teaching: high levels of communicative ability, but shortcomings in grammar
-counterbalanced instruction
-gives language & content objectives equal & complementary status
-balances sts’ awareness of learning both language and content together
-pushes learners who are either form-oriented o meaning-oriented in the opposite direction in
order to strike a balance
-integrates CBI & FFI
- Content-Based Instruction (CBI): academic, vocational, or thematic content through the medium of a
language that they are learning as an additional language (AL)
-can be immersion, vocational ESL; content-driven EAP; sheltered instruction; content and language
instruction
-this is the future of L2 pedagogy
-Form-Focused Instruction (FFI): draws attention to learners’ problematic L2 forms that are misused or
avoided and often go unnoticed
-differs from grammar lessons that emphasize memorization of forms out of context
-usually embedded in content-based or meaning-orientated tasks that provide contexts for:
-noticing and awareness
-practice and corrective feedback
Presentation outline: counterbalanced instruction integrates a FoF and FoM across 3 key areas:
1. Instructional input
2. Student output
3. Interactional (corrective) feedback
1. Instructional input
-CB options: comprehensible input
-techniques that make content presented through L2 more comprehensible
-teacher talk; emphasis; making language more noticeable
-FoF options: enhanced input
-noticing and awareness activities designed to make L2 forms more salient
Noticing activities
-draw sts attention to problematic L2 features contrived to appear more salient or more frequent in oral
and written input
-input enhancement
-colour, bold, italics, caps
-increase frequency
-we need to take a b & w picture and make it coloured & vibrant
-not all language features need this treatment
-highlight possessive pronouns
-noticing is the first step; need awareness activities
Awareness activities
-sts need to do more than just notice enhanced information
-they need awareness-raising; metalinguistic information
-ask sts to describe the rule of thumb
-attention was drawn to differences between possessive determiners in Fr & Eng
Student Output
-CBI options: tasks that push sts to use the L2 as a cognitive tool for learning content other than the
language itself
-FF options: practice activities that push sts to use L2 forms that would otherwise be avoided or misused
-CBI tasks
-allow sts to use the L2 authentically and purposefully
-create opportunities for in-depth understanding, learning by doing, hand-on experience, but doesn’t
necessarily push sts
-teacher-guided reporting (TGR)
-during the TGR stage, the teacher pushed the sts to use a more scientific register
Practice: engaging in an activity with the goal of becoming better at it
-opportunities for learners to use the target language in ways that help them automatize their use of
target forms
-includes controlled practice & communicative practice
-predicitng and experimenting
-make predictions, then do an experiment
-using simple and conditional past tense forms in ESL science
-the activity create an obligatory context for specific forms: “I think the xxx will . . . “ & “I
thought the xxx would . . .”
-teacher asks “What did you think would happen?” oral feedback
Interactional feedback
-CBI options: feedback that scaffolds interaction with sts to ensure their participation and appropriation
of content (ie recasting)
-helps bts say what they need to in their L2
-FoF options: feedback that pushes sts towards accuracy and beyond use of recurring interlanguage
forms (ie prompting)
-pushes sts to self-repair
Corrective feedback
-responses to learner utterances containing an error (Ellis)
-effectiveness of CF confirmed by 3 recent meta-analyses
-most effective during communicative interaction when sts have something meaningful to say
-plays a pivotal role in the kind of scaffolding teachers need to provide to individual learners to promote
continued L2 growth
Scaffolding
-enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task to achieve a goal which would beyond
their unassisted efforts
Types of corrective feedback (Lyster & Ranta, 1997)
1. Reformuations
- reformulate sts non-target output
2. Explicit correction: the teacher supplies the correct forma and explains the reason why
3. Recasts: the teacher implicitly reformulates the sts utterance, minus the error
4. Clarification requests (prompts): using phrases like “pardon me” and “I don’t understand”, the
teacher pretends that the message has not been understood
-taking time for the learners to reflect can be very effective
5. metalinguistic clues
-without providing the correct form, the teacher provides comments, information or questions
about the form of the sts utterance
6. elicitation: the teacher directly elicits correct forms by asking “How do we say that in English?”
7. repetition of error: the teacher repeats the sts erroneous utterance, adjusting the intonation to
highlight the error
-sts won’t think that this is the correct way, because we always use rising intonation
-teachers use 55% recasts
-ambiguity: sts often don’t understand
-recasts fulfill helpful scaffolding functions in meaning-oriented classroom discourse
-recasts are functionally similar to teacher’s frequent repetitions of well-formed utterances
-sts focus on meaning, not morphology
-teachers might want to consider the whole range of techniques that they have at their disposal, rather
than relying so extensively on recasts
- A barrage of lab studies ensued, drawing on the intersection hypothesis to illustrate the
effectiveness of recasts
- -these lab studies
What about classrooms?
-Lyster & Saito did a meta-analysis of 15 classroom experimental studies
-CF > no Cf
-Prompts > recasts > no CF
-younger learners benefit more than older learners from CF
-younger learners might be especially sensitive to the impact of CF
-older learners: recasts = prompts
Theories supporting prompts
1. Skills acquisition theory
-prompts promote automatization in context of context
2. Output hypothesis
3. Socio-cultural (S-C) theory: learning moves away from other-repair towards more reliance on
self-repair
4. Conversation analysis: implicit feedback marks errors as embarrassing and problematic, which
contradicts the pedagogical message of it’s ok
5. Generation effect: learners remember information better when they take an active part in
producing it, rather than having it provided by an external source
-Long’s interaction hypothesis supports recasts, because they are implicit and non-obtrusive, they allow
the sts to remain focused on form and notice errors in their inter language production
-prompts and explicit
-Individual errors and affect
-low anxiety –high literacy level
-dev ready
-high working memory capacity
-high phonological memory
Linguistic factors affecting recast effectiveness
-shortness in length, minimal changes, intonational stress
-recasts of phonological errors & lexical errors are more easily
Contextual factors affecting recasts effectiveness
-more noticeable in lab settings rather than in classroom setting
-more noticeable in language –focused exchanges rather than communicative exchanges
Planning for language development
-based on research evidence, move away from FoF operationalized only as incidental and unobtrusive
focus on language as
Noticing, awareness, practice & feedback
-for continued language development
Recasts
-allow sts to remain focused on meaning
-enable sts to
-especially useful when the topic is new to sts, the form is beyond sts' current abilities, if the error is
phonological
Prompts
-move sts beyond their use of
-esp useful when sts are familiar with the topic; sts are familiar with the form; the erros occurs
frequently and appears to have fossilized
-over time, teachers tend to include less rather than more variety in their instructions; activities and so
are urged to try the opposite
-build in some unpredictability
http://people.mcgill.ca/roy.lyster/
Email: roy.lyster@mcgill.ca