counterbalance in the immersion classroom

Counterbalance in the Immersion Classroom

Dissemination of learning from CARLA 2012Presenter: Roy Lyster, Ph.D.

Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University

Montreal, QC

Adapted from Roy Lyster: Counterbalanced Instruction in the Immersion Classroom: Presented at CARLA Summer Institute, August 2012, Minneapolis, MN

Teaching in a DLI classroom is like…

• because…



Content Objective

Language Objective

Students are scaffolded to ensure their participation

and appropriation

of new content

Students are pushed towards

accuracy and beyond use of interlanguage

forms.

Dr. Roy Lyster • Roy Lyster's research examines content-based second

language instruction and the effects of instructional interventions—such as teacher scaffolding and corrective feedback—designed to counterbalance form-focused and content-based approaches. His research interests also include collaboration among language teachers for integrated language learning and biliteracy development. He was co-president then president of the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics from 2004 to 2008 and serves on the Advisory Committee of Studies in Second Language Acquisition and The Canadian Modern Language Review and on the Editorial Board of The Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education. He is author of Learning and Teaching Languages Through Content: A Counterbalanced Approach, published by Benjamins in 2007.


Main Topic:

• To address the challenges inherent in teaching languages through content, this institute is designed to familiarize immersion teachers with a counterbalanced approach that integrates content-based and form-focused instruction as complementary ways of promoting continued second language growth in the immersion classroom. (Meeting the Challenges of Immersion

Education: Counterbalanced Instruction in the Immersion Classroom, CARLA, U. of Minnesota.)


Explicit v. Implicit


Explicit v. Implicit (Deyser, 2003; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Schmidt, 1994)

Teaching Learning

Explicit Learners are given rules or asked to attend to particular forms

Learners are aware of what is being learned

Implicit Learners are neither given rules nor asked to attend to forms

Learners are unaware of what is being learned

Adapted from Roy Lyster: Counterbalanced Instruction in the Immersion Classroom: Presented at CARLA Summer Institute, August 2012, Minneapolis,

MN

Possible shortcomings

• Immersion education was initially based on the premise that:– Students learn language primarily through rich exposure to

massive amount of comprehensible input via subject-matter instruction

– therefore, language per se does not need to be taught

• Yet student can bypass much of the grammar while still understanding the content– “We can understand discourse without precise syntactic

and morphological knowledge” (Swain, 1988)Adapted from Roy Lyster: Counterbalanced Instruction in the Immersion Classroom:

Presented at CARLA Summer Institute, August 2012, Minneapolis, MN

Sponge Theory

• Works when truly immersed in language and culture

• School discourse cannot truly recreate this environment

• Question…have you evermet a bilingual sponge?


Teacher Talk

• Tends to be too much• Tends to lack linguistic complexity and

diversity– “Functionally restricted input” (Swain 1985, 1988)– Restricted in the range of forms and functions it

contains


Example

T: Europe didn’t have sugar cane. Why didn’t they have sugar cane?

S: It’s too coldT: It’s too cold…S: The climate is not good.


Restricted input

• Verbs used by teachers:

– 75% in the present/imperative– 15% in the past– 3% in the conditional


Immediate future in the past?

• What do you think? How do you think these plantations… are going… to change…life in the Antilles?

• These people are going to sell their sugar, rum, molasses, brown sugar.

• They are going to make money.• With the money, they are going to buy clothes,

furniture, horses, carriages…all they want and they are going to bring them back to the Antilles.


So which one is it?

• Immersion education must contain both

• There must exist a counterbalance of explicit and implicit teaching and learning of language


Explicit teaching and learning

• …asks learners to attend to language• …involves being aware of learning• …fits well with school-based educational

objectives promoting:– Inductive learning experiences– Meta-cognitive strategies that lead students to

become autonomous lifelong learners


Forms Language

• Forms of a language deal with the internal grammatical structure of words. The relationship between boy and boys, for example, and the relationship (irregular) between man and men would be forms of a language.


Functions of Language• A language function refers to the purpose for which speech or writing is

being used.

In speech these include:• giving instructions• introducing ourselves• making requests

In academic writing we use a range of specific functions in order to communicate ideas clearly.

These include:• describing processes• comparing or contrasting things or ideas, and• • classifying objects or ideas (Pozzi, D.C. 2004)


Table Talk

• In what ways are your students learning the forms and functions of the target language?

• In what ways are you explicitly teaching the forms and functions of language in your daily instruction?


Counterbalanced Instruction

• Gives language and content objectives equal and complementary status

• Integrates content instruction and form-focused instruction


Content Objectives

Language Objectives

3 Key areas of curriculum

1. Instructional input2. Student production3. Classroom interaction


Form-focused Instruction

draws learners’ attention to problematic L2 forms that are misused or avoided and often go unnoticed.

• Not memorization of forms outside of context• Delivered during content-based or meaning-

oriented tasks through two approaches:– Proactive approach:• Noticing, awareness, and practice activities

– Reactive approach:• Corrective feedback


Selecting features to be taught(Harley, 1993)

Some features need to be taught Other features can be learned incidentally

•Those influenced by L1, especially if the similarity is misleading

•Irregular or infrequent features and those lacking salience

•Features with little communicative value

•Grammatical patterns congruent with the L1

•High-frequency vocabulary items

•Phonologically salient features


Noticing, Awareness, Practice

• Receptive to Productive• Content provides context• Gradual Release• Promote accuracy


Noticing Activities

• Designed to help students to notice L2 features contrived to appear more salient in oral and written input.– Enhanced written input

• Color coding• Italics• Bold• CAPS

– Enhanced oral input• Increased frequency• Intonational stress


Awareness activities

• Students need to do more than just notice enhanced forms in the input

• They need to engage in metalinguistic reflection or analysis:– Rule-discovery (inductive) tasks– Opportunities to compare language patterns,

including L1-L2 contrasts– Metalinguistic information


Drawing attention to possessive determiners (White, 1998)

Once upon a time, there was a king. He had a beautiful you daughter. For her birthday, he have her a golden ball that she played with every day. The king and his daughter lived near a dark forest. One day, the princess threw her golden ball in the air… The girl looked around, and she saw a frog. He was in the well, his head sticking out of the water…


Who does the underlined word refer to?

1. For her birthday, he had given her a golden ball.

2. The princess lived with him near a dark forest.

3. She played with her golden ball.

4. She dropped her golden ball in the well.

5. He was in the well, sticking his head out of the water.

Practice Activity

• As a group, brainstorm a couple of ideas for oral practice as an extension of the noticing and awareness activities.


Grade-Alike Task

• Identify a problematic linguistic feature or grammatical subsystem that is challenging for L2 learners.

• To provide a meaningful context into which you will integrate a focus on your chosen language feature(s), select a topic or theme related to a subject-matter discipline.

• Justify (if possible) how the language and content are connected.


Classroom Interaction

• Teacher-student interaction plays a pivotal role in promoting continued L2 growth as teachers scaffold the interaction with:

– Effective questioning– Corrective feedback


Questions

• Fewer questions eliciting facts (which tend to result in minimal responses)

• More questions about students’ beliefs and opinions that require them to explain, define, or provide rationale


IRF Exchanges (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975)

• The most typical teaching exchange consist of a three-part sequence:1. Teacher’s initiating (I) move

“What’s the capital city of Spain?”

2. Student’s responding (R) move“Madrid?”

3. Teacher’s follow-up (F) move“That’s right!”


IRF Exchanges

• From teacher to studentT: How did you come to school today?S: I came by bus.T: Yes, that’s right!


•Now imagine this:S: How did YOU come to school today?T: I came by car.S: Yes, that’s right!

IRF Exchanges

• Criticism:– Teacher-centered transmission model of teaching– Engages students only minimally and maintaining

unequal power relationships between teachers and students

• Still predominant because they help teachers to: – Monitor students’ understanding– Initiate discussion


Follow-up

• Can be more important than initial question if they (Nassaji & Wells, 2000) :

– Avoid judgment – Request justification or counter-arguments

• Effective follow-up questions (Echevarria & Graves, 1998) :– What do you mean by that?– Why do you think that?– How do you know?– What makes you think that?– Tell me more about that.– Why might that be?


Table Talk

• How can Bloom’s Taxonomy serve as a resource for follow-up moves?


Corrective Feedback (CF)

• “responses to learner utterances containing an error” (Ellis 2006)

• also a “complex phenomenon with several functions” (Chaudron, 1988)


Corrective Feedback

• Research has revealed a clear tendency for learners to express a preference for receiving CF over having their errors ignored.

• The extent to which learners want to be corrected is generally higher than that of teachers’ wish to do so.


Types of Corrective Feedback (Lyster and Ranta, 1997)

• Reformulations– Reformulate learners’ non-target output

1. Explicit correction2. Recasts

• Prompts– Push learners to self-repair without providing the

correct form:1. Clarification requests2. Metalinguistic clues3. Elicitation4. Repetition of error


1. Explicit Correction

• The teacher supplies the correct form and clearly indicates that what the student had said was incorrect.

Example:S: We cut the straws into six different thicknesses

and attach the straws with tape.T: Henry, excuse me, I want you to use the word

length. You cut the straws into different lengths. Not thicknesses.


2. Recasts

• The teacher implicitly reformulates the student’s utterance, minus the error

Example:S: Yo me gusta jugar.T: A mí me gusta jugar.

S1: Why you don’t like Marc?T: Why don’t you like Marc?S2: I don’t know I just don’t like him.


3. Clarification requests

• The teacher pretends that the message has not been understood:

Example:S: Yo soy seis años.T: ¿Cómo? No te entendí.


4. Metalinguistic Clues

• Without providing the correct form, the teacher provides comments, information, or questions about the form of the student’s utterance.

Example:S: Nouvelle Ecosse…T: Oh, but that’s in French.

S: We found out that the south and the south don’t like to stick togetherT: Now let’s start using our scientific language


5. Elicitation

• The teacher elicits correct forms by asking questions like “What’s a better way of saying that?”

Example:S: El niño fue al bathroom.T: ¿Cómo se dice eso en Español?

S: Pásame esa cosa.T: ¿Hay otra palabra mejor que “cosa” para describir lo que quieres?


6. Repetition of error

• The teacher repeats the student’s error, adding intonational stress.

Example:S: ¿El…el mano?T: ¿El mano?

S: Yo tienes hambre.T: ¿Yo tienes hambre?


Recasts v. prompts

• Shoot for a balance of both types of CF• Both have their place• Recasts are much more frequently used (Lyster

and Mori, 2006)

• Dr. Lyster promotes a more extensive and intentional use of prompts


Pedagogical perspectivesRecasts

• Pedagogically expeditious• Help to move lessons

forward• Well suited to

communicative classroom discourse– Don’t interrupt

communication– Deep students’ attention

focused on meaning– Learners participate in

interaction beyond current abilities


Prompts• Promote automization and control over already-internalized forms•Provide opportunities for pushed output•Well suited to instructional discourse• Resemble a “clueing”

or “withholding” phenomenon• Don’t signal errors as

embarrassing

When it is best to use…

Recasts• Content is new to

students• Error is beyond

student’s abilities• Context allows

student to notice the focus on language

• Error is phonological


Prompts• students in control of content•Students already familiar with the form•Error is caused by “binary distinction” (ser/estar, his/her)•Error is recurrent

Counterbalanced options for interactional feedback


Recasts negotiate

meaning while confirming the

content of student

utterances.

Prompts negotiate form

while providing

opportunities for

contextualized practice.

Team Task

• Identify the CF type• Respond to discussion questions as group


Thank you!


counterbalance in the immersion classroom

Documents

counterbalanced instruction

carla summer institute

language instruction

immersion teachers

journal of immersion

dli classroom

counterbalanced approach

formfocused instruction