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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: narr STUDIENBÜCHER
- Sprache: Englisch
In contrast to literary or cultural studies linguistics is not taught in the EFL classroom, yet, it plays a major role in any English language teaching degree. Given this discrepancy it does not come as a surprise that students sometimes ask: "I want to be a teacher! Why do I need all this?" The main goal of this textbook is to demonstrate the relevance of linguistic expertise for the EFL classroom. It explores a wide range of topics (phonetics/phonology, lexis, corpus linguistics, text linguistics and the power of language) with a clear focus on providing a convincing answer to the question above. With its highly accessible style and layout, a wealth of examples and exercises as well as a large range of additional innovative online materials this textbook sets out to convince its readers that they will be better teachers if they are good linguists.
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Rolf Kreyer
The Linguistic Toolkit for Teachers of English
Discovering the Value of Linguistics for Foreign Language Teaching
© 2023 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen
Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetztes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.
Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. Fehler können dennoch nicht völlig ausgeschlossen werden. Weder Verlag noch Autor:innen oder Herausgeber:innen übernehmen deshalb eine Gewährleistung für die Korrektheit des Inhaltes und haften nicht für fehlerhafte Angaben und deren Folgen. Diese Publikation enthält gegebenenfalls Links zu externen Inhalten Dritter, auf die weder Verlag noch Autor:innen oder Herausgeber:innen Einfluss haben. Für die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind stets die jeweiligen Anbieter oder Betreibenden der Seiten verantwortlich.
Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]
ISSN 0941-8105
ISBN 978-3-8233-8611-7 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0492-0 (ePub)
Contents
To Marc, for many years of friendship
Preface
This book is an attempt to provide a convincing answer to a fundamental question that many students of English as a foreign language ask or have asked themselves: “Why do I need linguistics? I just want to be a teacher!” The short answer to this question is “Good linguists are better teachers!” The long answer is this book. It explores how teachers can benefit from a thorough understanding of basic linguistic concepts and methods and, this way, hopes to show how linguistics can become a very useful toolkit for the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom.
To a large extent I have to thank my teaching-degree students for this book. They never stopped challenging the relevance of my lectures and seminars and they always provided me with honest and helpful comments on my teaching. I hope this text will be a valuable resource for them, for future students and for EFL teachers. I would also like to thank Helena Hanneder and Lilly Garlepow for reading earlier versions of this monograph and for providing me with invaluable feedback. Finally, I would like to thank the publisher for considering this text for the narr STUDIENBÜCHER series and, especially, Kathrin Heyng for her advice and encouragement as well as Iris Steinmaier for her patience with my many wishes regarding layout and formatting.
Marburg, September 2023 Rolf Kreyer
Introduction
It hasn’t been made clear at uni, why it should be useful to study linguistics at such depth and how I can incorporate it in my lessons.(A TEACHER)
After years of practice, I see linguistics as the centre of lessons, especially when teaching pronunciation, grammar and usage.(ANOTHER TEACHER)
I just want to be a teacher
2
A toolkit and what’s in it
2.1What tools are good for
2.2The art of repairing
2.2.1Errors and why they are a good thing
2.2.2Interlanguage
2.2.3What is an error
Abstract
This part describes my motivation to write this book in the first place. It discusses in which sense linguistics can be regarded as a toolkit for foreign language teachers and, most importantly, it argues that, other things being equal, you will be a better teacher if you are a good linguist.
1“I just want to be a teacher”
I think linguistics is often not regarded as relevant because the connection to the future job is missing in some of the classes. We learn something but are not able to use this knowledge in future teaching.(A STUDENT)
[Linguistics] is very important but I realized the importance very late in my studies. The practical orientation of the theory was missing (why do I have to know this as an English teacher?)(A STUDENT TEACHER)
My ‘knowledge’ was too academic. Connection to teaching not made clear during university education […] Linguistics was truly horrible at university.(A TEACHER)
You may have experienced linguistics as a somewhat frustrating part of your studies. You have not done any linguistics at school and you know you will not teach it as a teacher. So, it might seem irrelevant for your future job. In your study programme, however, it plays an important role, comparable to literary and cultural studies or language practice. To make things worse, linguistics is not always easy and accessible and can be quite demanding at times. In this chapter you will learn that many students think that way, but you will also learn that linguistics can be very useful for you as a future teacher.
The first part of the box at the end of each chapter is a list of the tools that reading this chapter has added to your linguistic toolbox. These ‘tools’ can be research findings, insights into the nature of language or approaches on how linguistics can be put to use in the classroom. Each entry will name the tool and briefly describe what you can get from it.
Linguistics is a skill area▶ This insight suggests to read this text on the background of a particular mindset, i.e. in order to find out how linguistics can help to make you a better teacher.
The second part of the box at the end of each chapter provides a short list of suggestions for further reading. The short comments will give you some idea of the content. Obviously, there are other useful texts in addition to the few suggestions I make but I deliberately kept the lists short. I know from my own experience that too many recommendations can sometimes be a little overwhelming. These are the suggestions for this chapter:
CARTER, Ronald (ed.) (2011): Linguistics and the Teacher. London: Routledge. ▶ This edited volume is a selection of ten papers that demonstrate the relevance of linguistics for teachers. The papers range from theoretical discussions about linguistics and the teaching profession to practical examples, syllabi and course proposals.
KREYER, Rolf & Barbara GÜLDENRING (2016): “’But sometimes this potential is not used at all’. Views on linguistics in EFL teacher training and teaching”. In: R. Kreyer, S. Schaub & B. Güldenring (eds.): Angewandte Linguistik in Schule und Hochschule. Neue Wege für Sprachunterricht und Ausbildung. Frankfurt a. M., 265-297. ▶ The paper provides insights into how EFL students, student teachers and teachers assess the relevance of linguistics for their (future) profession and reflects on the relevance of linguistics for second language teaching.
KREYER, Rolf (2020): “Der sprachwissenschaftliche Blick auf Kommunikation – und was Lehrpersonen davon haben“. In: N. Meister, U. Hericks, R. Kreyer & R. Laging (eds.): Zur Sache. Die Rolle des Faches in der universitären Lehrerbildung. Das Fach im Diskurs zwischen Fachwissenschaft, Fachdidaktik und Bildungswissenschaften. Wiesbaden, 79-100. ▶ The paper shows why linguistics is still relevant for foreign language teachers even though it is not part of the school curriculum.
LIGHBOWN, Patsy M. (2017): “SLA Research and Foreign-Language Teaching”. In: E. Hinkel (ed.): Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Volume III. London. 103-116. ▶ The paper explores how findings from SLA research can be useful for foreign language teaching. It argues that an awareness of SLA research can help teachers set more realistic expectations for the classroom.
At the end of each chapter you will find a link with additional online material for you.
That’s enough for now. Have fun and prepare yourself to discover that linguistics is actually really helpful for you as a future teacher and that it can become your superpower for the EFL classroom!
1.1Welcome!
Welcome to what I hope will turn out to be a successful attempt to convince you, dear reader, that linguistics can contribute to making you a better teacher of English as a foreign language.
I wrote this book for several reasons. The first relates to comments like the ones at the beginning of this chapter. The question asked by the student teacher is a very relevant and valid one: “Why do I have to know this as an English teacher?” Let’s face it: you go to school for 12 to 13 years and will usually have spent at least 10 years learning the English language. In these 10 or more years you focus a lot on learning the language itself, i.e. you learn a lot about words, you are taught about orthography and pronunciation, you have to learn how the simple past and the present perfect are formed and how they are used, your teachers teach you how to form a question or how to negate a sentence and so on. In addition to the practical aspects of speaking and writing English correctly, you do a lot of literary studies. You read short stories, you interpret poems, you analyse the characters of plays and novels etc. Finally, you also explore the cultures of the different countries in which English is spoken. You might have heard about the Royal family in the United Kingdom, you might have learned about the voting system in the USA, you might have heard about the First Nations in Canada or about the Indigenous Peoples of Australia.
You have done this for at least 10 years and, obviously, you thought it was so interesting and fascinating that you decided to become a teacher of English as a foreign language. Well done and congratulations! You are now a student in some EFL-programme at some university (otherwise, you would hardly be reading this book). Within your study programme you recognise a lot of the things that you do from your days at school, even though you do them at a different level now. You improve your English, you keep on reading novels, short stories, poems etc. and analyse the many facets of them, you study cultural phenomena from many different areas of the English-speaking world. So far no surprises. What will be new to you is those parts of the study programme that are concerned with teaching the English language, i.e. didactics. Again, no surprise there, because after all you want to be prepared for your future job as a teacher and learning how to teach the English language will most likely come in handy. However, on top of all of this and as if this wasn’t enough to keep you busy, you find that those who designed your study programme make you spend a significant amount of time with the study of the English language, also referred to as ‘ linguistics at university … English linguistics’. While you might find English linguistics interesting and fascinating as a subject in its own right (and I’m very glad for you if you do), you might not be so sure about the relevance of English linguistics for your future career. You have spent most of your life in school and you know very well that linguistics was … no linguistics at school not a part of your English curriculum. You haven’t learned about phonemes, you have never explored the morphology of the English language and, most likely, you have not discussed the nature of the mental lexicon and you have not learned about collocations or semi-prefabricated phrases. What is more, you know that it will not be a part of your school life as a teacher, at least not in the sense that linguistics is something that is taught at school. So, it makes a lot of sense to ask “Why do I have to do all this? I just want to be a teacher!”
… take a minute to try and figure out how you have experienced the linguistic parts of your study so far and to what extent you think linguistics may be relevant for your future career, or not.
If you have asked yourself the question “Why do I need to do all this?”, trust me, you are not alone. In a survey by a colleague and me we found that of the four areas language practice, cultural studies, literature, and linguistics, linguistics is perceived as the least relevant among students, student teachers and teachers alike (Kreyer & Güldenring 2016: 279). Admittedly, we were a little surprised to find that roughly 74 to 80 % of the three groups did find linguistics relevant for future teachers of English, but we also found that our informants regarded the other areas as relevant in 90 % or more of all cases, sometimes even reaching a full 100 %. What is more, we found that the first three areas seem to increase in importance from student to teacher, whereas linguistics seems to become less relevant for teachers.Linguisticsopinions on
Other researchers come to even more damning conclusions as the following quote shows.
In my experience, the waste involved in [Linguistics or Applied Linguistics components of pre-service training courses] can be prodigious: the wasted time and effort of the lecturers, who complain of the apathy or stupidity of their students; the wasted time and effort of the students, who complain of the irrelevance and jargonized complexity of the subject, as well as of the indifference to language teaching of their lecturers. Worst of all is the waste of potential — the continuing alienation of generations of language teachers from an area of knowledge which should be a source of constant support to them. (Edge 1988: 9)
Whatever the degree to which you agree with the above, I myself, as a professor of English linguistics, find it very easy to agree with Edge when he laments the waste of potential. Linguistics can be a wonderful and extremely helpful resource for you as a teacher of English as a foreign language. It should and can be “a source of constant support” for you, and it is in this spirit that this book is written.
I am actually convinced that, other things being equal, good linguists make better teachers good linguists make better teachers. Obviously, there are many more important things that you need to become a good teacher. For example, the passion that you have for teaching itself but also for what you teach, or your ability to inspire fascination in your students, your ability to create rapport with them and so on. There is no doubt about that and I am not under the delusion that being a good linguist automatically makes you a good teacher. However, if you got all of these things under control, if you are good at all of this, you will be an even better teacher if you are a good linguist. To make linguistics really useful, however, a change of perspective is needed, where “linguistics in the context of TEFL training should be regarded less as content area than as linguistics as a skill area a skill area” (Edge 1988: 11). That is what this book is about. It is supposed to help you become the best teacher you could possibly be by showing the many areas in which your linguistic expertise can help you become more confident and more proficient as a teacher of English as a foreign language. Any of these areas are like compartments in a toolkit and each compartment provides you with tools and material to make you an even more skilful foreign language teacher.Linguisticsas skill area
The fact that the book was written with linguistics as a skill area in mind means that it does not aim at a comprehensive description of a given content area. Instead if focuses on those aspects of a given content area that will be relevant for future teachers. For example, the book devotes two chapters to phonetic and phonological questions. However, it is not meant to be an introduction to phonetics and phonology. Aspects like acoustic and auditory phonetics, the cardinal vowels or syllable structure, for instance, will be ignored in favour of other aspects that I think are more relevant for the EFL classroom.
This does not mean that I regard this publication as some kind of watered-down introduction to linguistics. Quite the contrary: if you want to use your linguistic knowledge as a skillset you need to have a profound and thorough understanding of linguistics. The scenarios that you encounter as a teacher are so varied that no one can prepare you for all the possible situations you might be facing. However, you will be prepared if you have understood the relevant parts of linguistics to such an extent that you can apply your linguistic expertise in any situation that you are confronted with. Linguistics, this way, can become something of a superpower. Or in the words of a teacher of English:
As a student, I underestimated the relevance of grammar in EFL-teaching, now, after years of practice, I see linguistics as the centre of lessons, especially when teaching pronunciation, grammar and usage; but now I see what a vital part it is, but it must of course be a vehicle to teach the contents of cultural and literary studies; understanding and producing texts is only possible with a sound knowledge of the English language. (Kreyer & Güldenring 2016: 282)Linguisticsopinions on
1.2An overview
We will start off in the next chapter by taking a look at interlanguage and error analysis. In particular, we will find out that the English that your students speak is based on a language system of its own (the interlanguage) and that errors can be very helpful in telling you what your students do not yet know, and, and this may come as a bit of a surprise, often they can tell you what your students do already know. This will then create the background on the basis of which we will explore six different areas of linguistics that I think are especially relevant for you as (future) teachers. The first of these concerns the sounds of English and German. Chapter 3 will focus on sounds in isolation. After a short introduction into how sounds are produced we will compare the sound inventories of English and German and we will mostly focus on English sounds that can be expected to be difficult for German learners of English, e.g. the th-sounds. Chapter 4 is about how sounds might change when we use them together with other sounds while speaking. A big problem for German learners of English, for example, is the so-called ‘Auslautverhärtung’ or final devoicing, which is a regular process in German but not in English. German learners might, therefore, pronounce bag like back, which, of course, makes a difference. The second large area, words and beyond, looks at words and larger lexical units. We will first explore the mental lexicon. It is best conceived of as a huuuuuge cobweb with tens or even hundreds of thousands of nodes and connections. What these nodes are and how they can be connected is what chapter 5 will be about. Chapter 6 moves beyond the word level and focuses on larger lexical patterns, exploring why it’s okay to speak of a strong tea but not of a powerful tea and explaining why it is good to think big, to go beyond the level of words when you think about vocabulary. A lot of what we explore in the words-and-beyond section of this book is related to a branch of linguistics that studies language by looking at massive amounts of authentic texts, so-called corpora (singular corpus). Corpus linguistics has furthered our understanding of the true nature of language tremendously and recent decades have seen many attempts of putting corpora and corpus-based research to use in the classroom. Accordingly, another major part of this book focuses on the corpus in the classroom. Chapter 7 will first introduce some basics of corpora and corpus-design and explore the theory of practical corpus analysis. That is, it gives you an understanding of how data are stored in a corpus and it helps you understand what you do when you do a corpus query. Chapter 8 provides a more practical introduction to corpus analysis but, similarly to chapter 7, it tries to be as general as possible. So, instead of focusing on one platform or tool only, chapter 8 wants to provide you with a general corpus-tool proficiency which you can, then, apply to any piece of software or interface. This chapter will also explore ways in which corpora can be used in the classroom. In the third part we will move on to texts. We will first discuss, in chapter 9, what it is that makes a text a text and what it is that makes a text a good text. We will also explore ways of analysing and describing the structure of texts. On the basis of this general understanding of text quality we can then zoom in on texts and the relevance of sentence structure (chapter 10). In particular, we will look at principles of text processing and we will explore the options that the English language provides to produce sentences that follow these principles. Chapter 11 will look at the relevance of the situation when it comes to text production. Things to keep in mind, for instance, include whether a text appears as a tweet or as a book, whether it is supposed to be listened to or read, whether you are speaking to a friend or one of your professors, whether you are talking to laypeople or experts etc. Of all of these important situation-related factors, we will be looking at two very important areas, namely the distinction between spoken and written English and questions of politeness. The book concludes with two chapters on the power of language. The inclusion of this topic might seem a bit strange. After all, it is not directly related to teaching the English language and it does not usually figure prominently as a topic in the curricula (although it can be an optional topic in some federal states). I have included this topic because I think it becomes more and more relevant in our modern society. Teachers should know about how language can be used to manipulate, so that they can inform their students whenever it is possible. Chapter 12 focuses on the recipient and on those aspects of language processing that make humans vulnerable to manipulation through language. We will find out, for instance, that humans are not as rational as they like to think they are. Chapter 13 sheds light on the many ways in which the producer can shape their message to exploit the vulnerability of the recipient. Consider, for instance, the different effects that a headline like Increasing teaching-related complaints about university teaching from snowflake students! has in comparison to the more neutral Increasing teaching-related complaints about university teaching from students! Framing students as snowflakes, i.e. as persons that think they are special individuals but cannot stand even the slightest bit of pressure or opposition, puts their possibly very reasonable complaints into a certain light.
All in all, I hope that the contents I have chosen will be of some use for you, irrespective of whether you are a student, a student teacher or a teacher.
1.3How to use this book
When you go through the text please feel free to make use of it whichever way you think suits you best. Obviously, the six-parts structure of the book suggests to understand each part as some kind of information unit and you will get the most out of each part if you read all of the chapters of that part. Within each of the parts the first chapter prepares some of the grounds for the following chapter(s). It would, therefore, usually not make sense to read the final chapter of a major part without having read the previous one(s). Still, it might make sense for you to skip individual chapters if you are familiar with the content. At the beginning of this chapter you have already seen a section called ‘What this chapter is about’.
The name of this box should explain what it is about. Its primary purpose is to prepare you for the content that is presented in the individual chapters. Even though these sections are usually short, they will still activate relevant knowledge structures in your mind and help you to process the chapter’s content more easily and at a deeper level. In addition, it will support retention, i.e. you will remember more of what goes in.
You will find a box like the one above at the beginning of each chapter and it might help you to decide whether you want to read the chapter or not, although that is not its primary purpose. The respective box for chapter 7, for instance, informs you that chapter 7 provides “a general understanding of what a corpus is and of the kind of information that a corpus may contain in addition to the mere words that you can find in it.” If you are already well-versed in corpus design and basic query methods, there is probably not a lot more that chapter 7 can tell you, so, why not move on to chapter 8? Even within chapters, you might find content that you are familiar with. Feel free to skip it. If you are proficient in corpora and corpus use, for instance, section 8.4., which describes the use of corpora in the classroom, might be the only interesting aspect of the whole part of corpus linguistics and EFL.
Within each chapter you will also find boxes of the following kind.
These boxes provide you with additional information on a topic or with useful hints. You do not have to read these bits to follow the main text. They might be interesting for you but feel free to skip them. You can always come back to them later if you want to.
After having talked about what you might not want to read, let’s talk about how to read and, more specifically, about the activities that the book provides. They are titled ‘Before you read on …’.
… take a bit of time to consider the relevance of while-reading activities. The book will provide you with a lot of tasks within the actual text. I know from my own experience that as a reader you often do not feel particularly inclined to do these exercises. Please allow me to stress their importance: Of course, you can read the book without doing them, especially since the answers are given in the text but you will really be missing out, because you will process the content of the book a lot less deeply. Or, to put it in the words of one of my favourite memes: Das kannste schon so machen, aber dann isses halt k****! [Thanks to the publishers for leaving that in!].
At the end of each chapter you will find a summary of the content of the chapter as well as a few select suggestions for further reading.
2A toolkit and what’s in it
I’m going to use all my tools, my God-given ability, and make the best life I can with it.(LEBRON JAMES)
You’re going to use all your tools, all of your linguistic expertise, and be the best teacher you can be with it.(ROLF KREYER)
The present chapter explores how far we can take the linguistics-is-a-toolkit metaphor. From the most general perspective, tools are used to create and repair things. To do this you need to be able to construct, disassemble and analyse. Your linguistic expertise can be used in pretty much the same way. The ‘thing’ you want to construct is the foreign language competence of your students. With people learning a language, of course, this often involves wrong language use, i.e. errors. Errors can be very informative when it comes to language teaching. Obviously, they tell you what your students cannot yet do, but often a wrong construction also tells you what they can already do, what they already know. When it comes to repairing errors, you need to able to analyse what exactly is going on and to disassemble wrong language use. It is only then that you can isolate the exact problem, repair this issue and put it all back together.
Linguistics is many things. For me, primarily, it is a fascinating science that helps us to understand that which makes us human, i.e. the ability to use language. Linguistics can also be incredibly educational, for instance, when we look at public and political discourse and when we become aware of the power that language has to manipulate us. Through our understanding of this exploitation of language we can become more resilient towards the many language-based attempts to sway our opinion each and every day. When it comes to teaching a foreign language, linguistics, in my view, is like a toolkit (or skill areaLinguisticsas skill area). It is a huge box with lots of different things in it. At times it might appear a little chaotic: there are some tools in your toolkit that you are familiar with and you know exactly how to use them, with other tools you can imagine how they might be put to use, and, lastly, with many of the tools you have no idea what they might be good for and they are or seem useless to you.
Starting off with the useless tools tools that you do not know what to do with, even I, being a linguist, have to admit that not everything linguisticsLinguisticsas skill area covers will be useful for your future career as a teacher. For example, the intricacies of X’-theory and generative-transformational grammar are not the first things that come to mind when I think of language teaching. Similarly, multivariate analysis of corpus data might not be that helpful in the classroom. Still, a thorough understanding of syntax or concepts of corpus linguistics can be very useful for any teacher of English as a foreign language. More generally, I would contend that you can glean something useful from any linguistic area and I hope that, while reading this book, you will have that experience a lot.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have those useful tools tools that you feel very confident with, you know exactly what to do with them and you regard them as very useful. From my experience, phonetics and phonology is such an area of linguistics. It doesn’t take a lot to convince my students that knowledge about the articulation of sounds may come in handy if they want to improve their own students’ articulation. Still, it might sometimes be necessary to give some further instruction to enable future teachers to use the tool as skilfully as possible.
Between these two kinds of tools in a toolkit, you have a wide range of promising tools tools, let’s call them promising tools, of which you do not exactly know what they are good for. You can imagine situations in which they might be helpful, but you are not quite certain how to use them and if you did use them you would not feel confident in using these tools. For example, you might have some knowledge about collocations and you might agree that they are very important for language teaching but you do not really know how to apply your knowledge in the classroom.
The present book is about all of the above. It takes a look at those areas of linguistics that are obviously useful for you as a future teacher and wants to help you to get the most out of these areas and maybe even surprise you with some new ways of using a tool that you are familiar with. With regard to those linguistic areas that you do not feel quite confident about, the book will provide you with a thorough understanding of the subject matter and it will illustrate how your expertise can be brought to fruition in the classroom. Finally, even with those linguistic areas that do not really seem to have any connection to the enterprise of language teaching, the book will make suggestions as to how they can be put to use in everyday EFL contexts.
Generally, the book is not only about providing you with the necessary skills to deal with the situations that we discuss, but it also, and maybe most importantly, wants to encourage you to think about new uses for old tools other ways of making linguistics useful for the foreign language classroom. A good carpenter or a good mechanic can use their tools to address any kind of situation, even those that they have not been explicitly prepared for. Similarly, a good linguist will be well prepared for any kind of language teaching situation that they encounter. I hope that this book will provide you with a useful toolkit that you carry in your backpack and that will give you everything you need to confidently deal with any language teaching challenge that you might encounter.
2.1What tools are good for
There areLinguisticsas skill area four broad areas where you can put tools to use. You can use them to construct and create construct and create things. There is a lot you can do with a hammer, a couple of nails and some pieces of wood, for example. We can also use tools to disassemble disassemble things. A hammer, a crowbar or an axe will take you a long way in this respect. The typical toolkit would also contain tools that help you to analyse analyse things. Even such a basic thing as a folding rule, which you only use to measure length or thickness, is a means to analyse an object. A spirit level will tell you whether a table or a wall is slanted or not. Combining all of the three aspects above, tools are used to repair repair objects. You may notice that something is not quite right. You will then have to analyse the object to see where exactly the problem is, maybe you need to disassemble it to isolate the one part that doesn’t fit and either modify that part or construct a new one. In the end, you can put them back together.
To some extent all of this is also true for linguistics as a toolkit. The ‘object’ that you as a teacher construct or create is the competence of the foreign language in your pupils’ minds. It’s a very complicated structure and you need a lot of skill to build it. It helps if you are aware of the large variety of tools that linguistics has to offer to help your students construct this competence.
To give you one example. A teacher friend of mine once told me that it was only when he started working as a full-time teacher that he became aware of the usefulness of derivational morphology. This teacher started teaching his pupils the basics of derivational morphology since he thought it might be very useful for them to try and create words for themselves if they needed to express an idea or a concept but didn’t have a word for it. As I see it, this wonderful example shows two things. First, derivational morphology can be fruitfully integrated into a language teaching context even though I doubt that many teachers are aware of it. Secondly, having an awareness of the variety of all the tools that your linguistic toolkit has on offer, increases your creativity and versatility as a teacher. You may have heard the adage “to those that got a hammer, every problem is a nail”, meaning every tool suggests a particular way to look at the world and deal with it. The more tools you have, the better. For example, in my school days, teachers seemed to think that learning vocabulary primarily meant to learn by heart isolated pairs of words. Of course, this is part of expanding your vocabulary, but linguistics has a lot to offer to support and enrich that kind of learning. We will talk about this in more detail later but some discussion of it might be helpful here.
… try and remember how you were taught vocabulary in school. What did you have to focus on? What kinds of relations between words were made obvious to you (if any)? What kind of tips did your teachers give you when it came to learning new words?
PsycholinguisticsLinguisticsas skill area tells us that the mental lexicon, i.e. the representation of words in your mind, is not at all like the alphabetical lists that you have in dictionaries. The mental lexicon is like a giant cobweb, where each word is linked to a large number of other words on the basis of a fairly huge number of different linking relations. Vocabulary teaching and learning will be more successful if your pupils manage to create such a network with as many links as possible between individual words. One such source of links would be derivational morphology, for example, all the words that end in the suffix -ness. Another kind of link is that between collocations, i.e. words that typically co-occur. For example the two adjectives pretty and handsome mean more or less the same, but pretty would traditionally be used in the context of females whereas handsome would be used with males. What is more, we find that many words typically occur in particular larger structures, so-called prefabricated units. The noun assumption, for instance, would frequently be followed by a that-clause, as in the assumption that linguistics is useless for teachers of English. Another set of links comes from what linguistics calls structuralist semantics, where words are analysed with regard to synonyms (couch – sofa), opposites (hot – cold), wholes and their parts (body – arm), super- and subordinates (mammal – cat) and other relations. As a native speaker of your mother tongue you are aware of all of these relations and, consequently, your mental lexicon is a very dense cobweb of words. As a successful language teacher you will help your students build up such a cobweb for the English language.
As I said above, competence in any language is a highly complex construction that consists of many different parts, all of which have to be exactly of the right shape, be exactly in the right place and fit together with other parts seamlessly. Obviously, this is not an easy task and in the process of creating this language competence things will inevitably not fit the desired specifications and the construction will have to be repaired. In the language classroom you will know that something is not quite right when your students use the language incorrectly. This is another major area in which your expertise as a linguist will be extremely useful.
2.2The art of repairing
Repairing is a complex process that involves various steps. First of all, you have to notice that something is not the way it should be. Once you’ve done that you need to be able to analyse what is going on and you need to be able to identify the actual problem. It is only then that you can address this problem and repair the whole structure. This is true for any kind of craft just as much as it is true for language teaching. However, all analogies break down at some point, and it is at this point that our analogy is not quite accurate any more. Whenever you build something as a craftsperson all kinds of errors or mistakes are just that: errors or mistakes that need to be rectified. In a language teaching context and from a linguistic perspective errors are extremely helpful, as we will explore presently.
2.2.1Errors and why they are a good thing
A chapter on errors might be somewhat unexpected in a book of this kind, especially this early in the book. I’ve decided to put it here for two reasons. Firstly, errors will be a big part of your future daily life as a teacher. You need to be able to spot an error as soon as it occurs, you need to know what exactly went wrong and you need to know how to deal with it. All of this needs to happen really fast, in a matter of split seconds. Secondly, errors are usually considered to be something bad, something that is unwanted in the classroom. It seems to show failure both on part of you as the teacher (“I have not done a good job in explaining this to my students!”) and on the part of the students (“S/he still hasn’t learned this!”). However, errors are actually an extremely useful resource for you as a teacher as they provide you with highly relevant information as to the extent to which your student has learned the language, or not. Take a look at the wonderful example of an exchange between the mother and her child below (Corder 1981: 11):
(1)
M:
C:
M:
C:
M:
C:
M:
C:
Did Billy have his egg cut up for him at breakfast?
Yes, I showeds him.
You what?
I showed him.
You showed him?
I seed him.
Ah, you saw him.
Yes, I saw him.
The child’s utterances in the above example point at three problem areas. The first has to do with subject and verb concord and, actually, reveals two difficulties the child has. He or she makes use of the third person present tense singular -s, which is obviously not correct in this case, and the child has not yet learned that the simple past is not marked for concord. A second problem that becomes apparent concerns the lexicon, namely a confusion of the verbs to show and tosee. Finally, we see an unawareness of the irregular past tense form of the verb to see.
This example also illustrates nicely what can be achieved as a teacher if we deal with errorsErroras source of information in the right way. Had the mother merely corrected her child by saying “no, it’s I showed him” only one of the three problem areas would have shown. As Corder (1981: 11) says, “simple provision of the correct form may not always be the only, or indeed the most effective, form of correction […]. Making a learner try to discover the right form could often be more instructive to both learner and teacher.” Erroras source of information
Not only does Corder argue for a particular way of treating errors in the classroom, he also advocates a new view on errors. Errors are not some random deviation from a yet to achieve foreign language competence, but they themselves are based on rules, namely on the rules of the language system that the learner him- or herself has established so far on the basis of input encountered and teaching received. This language system is usually referred to as the learner’s ‘interlanguage’.
2.2.2InterlanguageInterlanguage
The idea of an interlanguage interlanguage was introduced into applied linguistics and second language acquisition research by Larry Selinker (1972). It helps us to better understand the process of language learning. A learner starts from his or her first language, either referred to as ‘native language’ (NL) or ‘mother tongue’ and wants to achieve some degree of proficiency in a second language, usually referred to as ‘target language’ (TL). Selinker drew our attention to what happens in between these two languages. He suggested that errors are not some haphazard amalgamation of native language and target language but are the consequence of a rule system that the learner of the target language has established from the input and the teaching that they have encountered so far. This rule system Selinker refers to as ‘interlanguage’. When it comes to language learning, then, we are not only dealing with two but with three language systems, namely native language, target language and, in between these two, interlanguage (see figure 1).
Interlanguage in the learner’s progression from his or her native language to the target language (adapted from James 1998: 3).
So, what’s the point, you might ask. What have we gained? One important advantage of looking at the language learning process in this way is a new perspective on what the learner cannot do but also on what the learner can do. Errors are not only a sign of failure, a deviation from a still to be achieved target norm, but they can also tell us a lot about what the learner has already learned. When, in example (1), the child says I seed him, this tells us that the child has already acquired the formation of the regular past tense, this piece of linguistic knowledge is part of the child’s interlanguage. What is not yet part of the interlanguage is that the verb to see has an irregular past tense form. If something similar happened in your classroom, you could learn from that that you have done a good job in teaching regular past tense formation and that your student has done a good job in learning it. What still remains to be done is to make the learner aware of the exceptions to that rule, as these are not yet included in his or her interlanguageInterlanguage system. All of this is extremely valuable information for you as a teacher.
… let’s take a look at the following two examples. The asterisk marks wrong forms, the question mark indicates that the status with regard to correctness is not clear.
(a)
This is completely *unlogical.
(b)
?No fucking way!
Try and find out what the use of the form unlogical in (a) tells us about the learner. What has he or she learned already? What about (b)? Is it wrong? Why, or why not? If yes, in which sense?
Example (a) is not what a native speaker of English would say and a form that we would like to get rid of at some point in time. Still, the form unlogical shows that the learner has already acquired some understanding of negation in English, namely that it can be done through negation prefixes and that one of these is the prefix un-. This example also illustrates the relevance and value of your linguistic expertise. If you have no idea of derivational morphology, i.e. the study of how we create new words from given words, your only option of dealing with this error is on a word basis resulting in feedback along the lines of “No, this is incorrect, you should say illogical.” Compare this to the much more helpful feedback that you are able to provide if your linguistic superpowers, as it were, kick in:
The word unlogical is not quite right. What you did well is that you used a prefix to express that something is not logical. However, you used the wrong prefix. While in German the prefix un- is the correct one with the word logisch, in English the adjective logical takes another prefix, namely il-. Maybe we should take a closer look at how we can use prefixes in English to express negation in the near future.
Example (b) is a little more complicated, as it is not quite obvious whether we are dealing with an error at all. After all, (b) is an English utterance that, used in the right context and the right circumstances would be an excellent response to, say, a question or a request. In other contexts, such as a classroom context, it would usually be frowned upon and, hence, a piece of unsuccessful language use. Again, the interlanguage system of the learner shows some degree of sophistication because it contains a highly useful and highly idiomatic formula. What the language system lacks, however, are rules about the contexts in which this utterance can be used and in which it cannot be used.
I hope that the above has helped to make clear that it makes sense for you as a future language teacher to keep the concept of interlanguage in mind. It helps you to take a wider perspective on errors. Errors are not merely a sign of failure. Rather, they can provide us with information about the current state of the interlanguage system that the learner has created in their mind. Not only do errors show you where the learner has not yet achieved native-speaker status, but oftentimes they can also show you what the learner has already learned.
In this section we have already talked a lot about errors assuming that we all share a similar idea of what an error actually is. However, as often when it comes to the scientific study of something, the situation is a little more complicated than that. This already became obvious in (b) from the task above. Is this an error? If not, why bother? If yes, what exactly is it that is not correct here? We will focus on this question in the next sectionInterlanguage.
2.2.3What is an errorErrordefinition of?
From a general perspective we can say that an error is something that happened even though it should not have happened. That is, we have an expectation of how something or someone should behave but the reality is different. In this broad sense, ‘error’ can be equated with ‘something is wrong’ or ‘something has gone wrong’ in comparison with some shared understanding of how things should be. If we apply this broad definition to the language learning context, it is easy to see what our expectation would usually be, namely utterances that are in line with the language system of the target language. If one of your students says something that violates the rules of the English language, as for example the child’s sentence I seed him, we would say this is an error. However, what would you do if your pupils said I seed him, uh saw him? The student in this case has corrected him- or herself, he or she obviously knows better. I assume that you can relate to that. At least I can. For instance, I am fully aware of the pronunciation of most words of the English language. What is more, I am even fully aware of the problems that German learners of English have with particular English sounds (as I will prove to you in chapters 3 and 4). Still, sometimes some mispronunciation slips in even though I know exactly what I should be doing. Similarly, if you think about yourself and your use of your native language you will notice that at times you produce a sentence which is not in line with the grammar of your mother tongue. Still, you are a fully competent speaker of your mother tongue.
Deviations of this kind are usually referred to as ‘mistakes are not errorsmistakes’Errorand mistake. They are phenomena of performance and they can and do happen to everyone from time to time. From a teacher’s perspective, these deviations are, in fact, irrelevant. Recall that your focus as a teacher is on the interlanguage of the learner. You want to know what their interlanguage system currently looks like and which steps you have to take to make this system more similar to that of the target language. The deviations that we are interested in are those deviations that stem from the language system of the interlanguage. They occur regularly and systematically in the output of the learner. They are phenomena not of performance but of competence. It is these deviations that we are interested in as language teachers, and these deviations are referred to as ‘errors’.
One final problem with our understanding of errors still remains, though. What exactly is a deviation deviation? How would we describe that which we would expect? When is an utterance error-free? When is it not? When we first think about these questions we will most likely think about the correct spelling of words for instance, the correct grammatical form or correct punctuation. However, as example (b) above has made clear, the picture is a little more complicated than that. This is because the competence of a native speaker goes far beyond that which is encoded in a dictionary or a grammar. You as a native speaker of your mother tongue know a lot more about how to use your mother tongue correctly and successfully. For instance, you know when swearing is appropriate and when it is not. You do know how you address friends, colleagues, or your superiors. You do know that some words are more suitable if you want to discuss a topic in an academic setting while you would choose other words if you talked about the same topic with your friends or family. If, then, as above we say that errors are a phenomenon of competence, the challenge is to identify what actually is included in this competence that we want to achieve.
You might recall from your introduction to linguistics that Noam Chomsky (1965) defines competence as the knowledge that the ideal speaker-listener has of their language. Paul Lennon, in his definition of errors picks up on this in an elegant way. He defines ‘error’ as
a linguistic form or combination of forms which in the same context and under similar conditions of production would, in all likelihood, not be produced by the speakers’ native speakers counterparts. (Lennon, 1991: 182)Errordefinition by P. Lennon
The beauty of this definitionErrordefinition of of ‘error’ lies in the fact that it takes a comprehensive perspective, not limiting itself to, say, orthographic or grammatical correctness but understanding appropriateness with regard to all the dimensions that the native speaker of a language is aware of. He focuses on three in particular. The first is the context of use context of use. Example (b), No fucking way!, might be an error, for instance if that was a student’s reaction to the teacher’s request to please open the window, or it might not be an error, e.g. if it was used among friends. It is a question of context and a native speaker would be well aware of the contexts that allow the use of such drastic language and those that do not, just like you know for your mother tongue. production circumstances The second dimension concerns the production circumstances. Consider the following text messaging exchange.
(2)
JP:
Why aren’t we all sitting together?
RH:
Dear Jake, This is the safety protocol. We are less conspicuous traveling as individuals. Sincerely, Raymond Holt
JP:
You don’t have to sign your name on texts.
RH:
Dear Jake, suggestion noted. Sincerely, Raymond Holt
RH:
Dear Jake, There’s a man sitting three rows behind me whom I saw at the library. Sincerely, Raymond Holt
JP:
What should we do?
RH:
Dear Jake, At the next stop, grab Kevin and hastily exit the bus. Got it? Sincerely, Raymond Holt
You may have guessed that example (2) is taken from the excellent TV series Brooklyn 99. The comic effect of this exchange between Captain Raymond Holt and Detective Jake Peralta resides in Holt’s language use. There is nothing wrong with his texts in the strict sense but the formal greeting and goodbye formulae are not suited for communication via text messaging, even more so since time might be a concern; after all, Peralta, Holt and Holt’s husband are being chased by a criminal who wants to see the husband dead.
Lennon introduces a third dimension when he takes into account the “native speaker counterpart native speaker counterpart” of the learner. This dimension points at person-related sociolinguistic aspects. The age of the speaker, for instance, comes into play here. We all have experienced the feeling of embarrassment when people use words and phrases that are not appropriate for their age. For example, while you will find it perfectly normal and acceptable to hear a 25 years old person say “das ist echt cringe” you might feel a hot wave of embarrassment if you heard me, 49 years of age at the time of writing this, use this wording. In Germany, 49 year old men do not use that word.
