I first entered the ELT profession in 2005. Like many people with a similar background to me, my entry point into teaching was a four-week course. On completing it, I secured my first job and braced myself for my first summer of teaching. I was nervous, naturally, but had two things to help me: the knowledge and experience from the four-week course and the coursebook which I’d been assigned by the school. Despite my apprehension, I thoroughly enjoyed my early experiences of teaching and soon enough it became my full-time job.
In those formative years of my career, I made extensive use of the techniques I’d learnt on my training course, and I also relied quite heavily on the coursebook. My assumption was that using the techniques in conjunction with the coursebook was effective and that my learners would benefit as a result. After all, the course was run by excellent trainers with years of experience, and the coursebooks were written by very capable authors and came from reputable publishers. Why would I question their value?
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, my trust in the techniques and coursebook had led me to develop certain assumptions about language learning and teaching. With hindsight, I think some of the main assumptions I was making were as follows:
1 A good idea is to split the language up into ‘bits’ and teach those bits one after the other.
After all, this is what the coursebooks tended to do. Unit 1 was present simple, Unit 2 was present continuous, Unit 3 was past simple regular, and so on. On the training course, trainees were also assigned different ‘bits’ of the language to teach in separate lessons.
2 I should set out to give (or elicit) explicit information and rules about how the language works.
Again, this seemed obvious to me because we were trained to do it on the course and the books were also full of this kind of information.
3 The learners will learn what I choose to teach them (so long as I teach it well and that they pay attention!).
Well, of course, I assumed this. If you’re going to teach an item of language, surely it’s so the learners will learn it!
Although these were my own assumptions, my hunch is that many other teachers make (or have made) similar ones.
I continued operating under the assumptions for some time, and doing so brought about what I perceived to be success in the classroom. Learners were using the structures I had taught them, grammar tests were being passed with flying colours – and everybody seemed to be having an excellent time. My commitment to this style of teaching was therefore reinforced.
Some years later, however, I started reading about second language acquisition (SLA) when studying for an MA. This is an academic field of study which is concerned with understanding how people actually learn second languages. Keen as always, I dived into the books and articles, but was quite taken aback by what I found in them. Indeed, so much of what I read seemed to directly contradict several of the assumptions that I’d been making about language teaching and learning up to that point. I was suddenly unsure about whether what I had been doing in the preceding years was helpful for my learners.
What I’d like to do in the remainder of this article is to outline some of the things I encountered in my reading of SLA which prompted me to reconsider my assumptions. My intention is not to dismiss the assumptions as wrong, but simply to look at them with a more critical eye – something I failed (or was unable) to do myself in my early years.
Ordered development
The first SLA finding that caused me to question my assumptions relates to ordered development. This concept suggests that learners tend to acquire certain language structures and features in a predictable sequence. For instance, when learning negation in English, learners typically progress through a set of stages, starting from simple negation (e.g. ‘No like this one’) to more complex forms (e.g. ‘I don’t like those.’) Similarly, morphemes are usually acquired in a set order, with the progressive –ing usually coming before past tense forms and well before the third person ‘s’. What I also found striking was the finding that this sequence is ‘largely impervious to outside influence such as instruction and explicit practice’ (Lichtman & VanPatten, 2021:294). In other words, no matter what we teach, learners still tend to follow this internal path. Teaching, so the research says, can speed up their progress, but not the order in which they acquire language features.
This is quite an uncontroversial finding in SLA, but it challenged my assumption that splitting the language up into bits and presenting them one after the other is a worthwhile practice. If we accept the idea that a learner is bound to follow their own developmental path, does it make sense to impose an external syllabus that bears little resemblance to their internal one? The idea of ordered development also calls into question my assumption that learners will learn what we teach, when we teach it. Indeed, if a learner is not developmentally ready for a particular structure, teaching it to them may be of limited value.
U-shaped behaviour
Another eye-opening discovery for me was that of U-shaped behaviour, which is the tendency of learners over time to initially get something right, then start getting it wrong, before eventually getting it right again. A common example is with irregular past tense verbs, where a learner might first say ‘ate’, later switch to the incorrect ‘eated’, and finally return to ‘ate’. If the learner’s accurate use of the feature is plotted on a graph over time, it resembles a ‘U’ shape, hence the term U-shaped behaviour. While teachers may get frustrated at this apparent regression and put it down to laziness or a lack of revision, many academics believe this pattern to actually be an indication that learners are developing a more complex mental representation of language, and that when getting things wrong, they are going through the process of restructuring their interlanguage.
Learning about U-shaped behaviour again made me question my assumption that teaching ‘one bit at a time’ is effective. The assumption underlying this assumption is that learning is linear, and that learners can acquire structures in one go, adding a new one to their repertoire with each lesson. What these research findings seem to suggest, however, is that acquisition does not appear to be linear, and that instead it seems to be more of an incremental and recursive process where learners sometimes move further away from the target language.
Explicit and implicit knowledge
Although the discovery of these findings had a significant impact on my thinking about language learning, perhaps the hardest-hitting SLA finding for me was that related to explicit and implicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is that which you know you have and can consciously articulate. For instance, readers of this publication are likely to have explicit knowledge of the fact that the present perfect tense is made up of the auxiliary have and the past participle. Implicit knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge which we have but are not consciously aware of and are not able to articulate. Ask an L1 English speaker whether it is correct to say ‘sorry for breaking the window’ or ‘sorry for break the window’, and they will confidently choose the first, but if pushed for an explanation will be unable to provide one.
We all know that we learn our first language implicitly, but I was surprised to read that a lot of SLA research suggests that much of our second language acquisition is also implicit, and that explicit knowledge may play a less central role in the development of communicative proficiency. Lichtman and VanPatten (2021:289), for example, state:
The complex and abstract mental representation of language is mainly built up through implicit learning processes as learners attempt to comprehend messages directed to them in the language. Explicit learning plays a more minor role in the language acquisition process, contributing to metalinguistic knowledge rather than mental representation of language.
– Lichtman and VanPatten (2021:289)
Going hand in hand with the importance of implicit learning is the immense value of providing learners with significant amounts of input, with input referring to the language the learner hears and sees (this is a highly simplified definition). Lichman and VanPatten (2021:28) again assert that ‘the principle data for the acquisition of language is found in the communicatively embedded comprehensible input that learners receive. Comprehension precedes production in the acquisition process.
Although research shows that explicit teaching can still be useful, the suggestion in the literature that implicit learning is the key driver of the acquisition process came as a surprise, and made me question my assumption that I should set out to explicitly teach information about the language. If implicit knowledge is as important as the studies suggest, I thought, perhaps I should be devoting most of my efforts to facilitating that, rather than going into the lesson with primary intention of supplying explicit knowledge.
I will leave it up to you to decide whether these research findings render my assumptions faulty or not. And while academic research should also be subjected to critical reflection rather than be blindly accepted, I do feel that certain, well-supported findings should be taken seriously, and that we owe it to ourselves and our learners to question the value of some of what we might be doing in class.
