Resource centre - Ideas and techniques - Vocabulary
Do you get frustrated when your students don't grasp a new grammar point or vocabulary straight away? Julio Foppoli suggests a solution.
For those of us working exclusively with authentic materials or even for those
teachers who use them to complement their classes, spiral second language
teaching plays a key role in their students’ learning process.
What is spiral teaching?
As you may very well know, when dealing with authentic materials, any single
piece of material will display several patterns and structures that the student
may not know at that time. However, as teachers we need to make choices so as
what to systematize and teach at any given moment and what not to. In other
words, although there may be lots of items that the student will need to learn,
it is impossible to study each and every one during the course of just one
lesson, or else you will have to present the student with dozens of new rules,
patterns and structures that may literally overwhelm and cause him or her a
great deal of frustration.
How could we go about this?
Spiral teaching provides the answer. This is a name I made up to describe a very
effective approach I have been using to tackle these types of materials. As I
mentioned in previous articles, “meaning” is the key. Forget grammar and
patterns when you introduce a new topic. Have your students focus on
understanding meaning, starting from the gist and once they have a pretty good
idea of the general meaning, go deeper into more specific comprehension and once
this has been achieved, focus on detailed comprehension.
After contextual meaning is absolutely clear for the student, you can focus on
detailed vocabulary and grammar. During your lesson, you should always focus on
one main item at a time. If the need arises, you may just mention or briefly
explain any other pattern that may be necessary to understand the main point.
However, do NOT go deeper into this, just mention it and explain that you will
get back to this later. Put in a different way, a lesson should have a main
focus and maybe several patterns that are just mentioned but not dealt with in
detail.
What is the use of this?
That is a very good question. After all, you may ask, the student may not be
able to produce those patterns that were introduced incidentally. And that is
absolutely true! Nevertheless, you should think of those patterns as little
seeds that you are planting until the time comes for you to systematize them
more formally, one at a time of course.
That is to say, in one class you may mention it in an informal way, the very
same structure may appear two classes later and you may mention it incidentally
as well, and you can go on like this until the time comes for you to formally
present it. When this moment finally comes, you will notice that it will be much
easier both for you to present it, and much simpler for the student to
understand it. After all, it will not be the first time s/he’s been exposed to
this structure. There have been prior contacts with this pattern, so the student
may have a pretty good idea of its uses IN CONTEXT. We cannot underestimate this
important element. The student has been presented with the structure in context.
This is by far much more valuable and productive than just coming to class and
saying: “today we are going to learn this pattern.” Unlike in this latter
example, the student has already needed to guess its meaning and uses, has seen
it working in real life, has been told about it, and now, it is the time when
s/he will study it formally.
Of course, while we present this specific item in a systematic way, we may also
be introducing other new structures that the students may come across
incidentally. Again, we will focus on our main target and we will just mention
the other structures that may arise, limiting our explanations as much as
possible, just to enable the student to grasp its meaning in context. By doing
this, we will be planting new seeds that in no time will germinate.
The main advantage of authentic materials is that in any single article, report,
segment of a video, etc. you will find most, if not all, the structures of the
language laid out in front of you. By working systematically with these
materials, you can always “plant seeds” and equally important, you can use them
to review and refer back to what you have already seen and presented formally.
This is absolutely essential with authentic materials, not only do you need to
plant little seeds but when the time comes and they blossom you have to water
them on a regular basis. This is spiral teaching at work. Not only should you
mention items casually and teach them at a later time, but you should also need
to provide students with ample opportunities to interact and use them naturally
and refer back to them when they fail to use them appropriately. Spiral teaching
requires a LOT of recycling. This results in language acquisition. What they see
formally in class today, has been already mentioned and will also be mentioned
in the future time and again, but NOT as part of a grammar drilling or something
similar but actually in the course of real communication.
Will students get it right at once? No way. They may make lots of mistakes, even
after you have taught the item formally. Trial and error is VERY important. That
is part of the first-language acquisition process and it should not be
disregarded in second-language acquisition. It is through trial and error that
students become really aware of the workings of the language, of what works and
what doesn’t. And by making mistakes they can rule out what is not correct. For
example, a learner of English may say “goed” instead of “went” to refer to the
past of the verb “to go.”
This may drive a teacher crazy but only if the teacher fails to recognize that
this student is making awesome progress, in spite of the obvious error. The
student clearly shows that his/her internal grammar, a subconscious process, has
internalized that in order to form the past in most verbs you ad “–ed” to the
infinitive form (i.e want – wanted, need --- needed) However, the verb “go” does
NOT fit into this pattern.
After several exposures of this kind, the very same student will start to use
the new form, simply because it will have been internalized through exposure and
interaction IN CONTEXT. It goes without saying that without someone to interact
with you cannot tell what is right or wrong and consequently, your progress will
be limited to just repeating a few words and phrases. That is why so many
self-study courses on CD fail time and again, but that is another story that we
may tackle in a future article...
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What do you think of this article? Add a comment »
An excellent article!! I am
100% with you and now have a name for something I have been doing for some time
- and it works.
I can see the benefit of
what you are mentioning. It does seem to relate very closely to "top down" and
"bottom up" approaches when teachers deal with the receptive skils. But do, yes
do, put what you are teaching into context. That is for sure.
I strongly agree with you.
Your approach resembles ESP in the sense that teachers should introduce one or
two structures per text, at the utmost, but then mention something else which
will be dealt with in a future class. Many thanks for your article.
Very very good!!! I've been
teaching English for 2 years only, and I have to admit that sometimes it's
difficult for me to do this. Especially in private classes! How can we work with
this in a private class without a book? And most of the time students are
anxious, and they NEED the rules, they really want us to explain all the grammar
points and it's difficult for them to understand this! Thank you.
What???? Isn't this what
any teacher who really teaches does? I must have missed something. This article
is inane.
Really Anonymous?! What
kind of TEFL world do you live in where all teachers apply this?
Great article. Thanks for
the help.
I greatly appreciate the
information. I'm all for it and will definitely keep that in mind every time I
devise my lesson plans.
A very well received
article. It should seem obvious to any ESL teacher to be patently true. Now all
I have to do is convince my Chinese collegues of this important aspect of
teaching ESL to produce speakers (isn't that the purpose of language?) instead
of "parrots".
Spiraling is a term that is
all ready used in the education field. I was introduced to it in graduate
school.
I think spiraling, in that situation, was applied to assessment techniques where
poor results on a test would send the student back to redo a certain lesson
(usually for computer lessons).
These tests would sometimes have items applying to previous units studied. The
idea was not to forget about information that was taught in the past.
Broaching the same material multiple times seems to me to be a necessary and
obvious way of teaching a language. There are multiple levels of meaning ranging
from simple to complex.
Here in Thailand the level of student ability ranges greatly within one class.
That means you can be engaging different students in different swirls of the
spiral at one time.
For one student it may be an introduction to the word and for another it could
be an application example. Another student might be having his third or fourth
shot at the word and the meaning and application may crystallize."
Very helpful. Cheers.
I do agree with the
article. The only way to learn is through meaningful activities. I keep on
recycling every class and It DOES work.
Totally agree with this
concept. I reminds me of Bruner's 'Spiral curriculum' model of learning which
describes how we all revisit concepts and structures in an outwardly expanding
circular model. When learners note that 'they have done it before' they probably
have done to some degree but they are likely to acquire more on subsequent
engagements with a topic or structure.
The part about overgeneralisation with the '-ed' regular past ending also ties
in with Lightbrown and Spada's comments that according to the natural order
hypothesis, native English speakers (and by implication second language
learners) tend to learn the irregular past endings first before getting to grips
with regularity patterns. Sometimes what appears on the surface to be a backward
step can be evidence that the learner is reaching a different level of
understanding by attempting to apply something new.
A good article -I'm going to carry on recycling and re-visiting only more so!
Definitely this is a great
article, I totally agree with you. I have already used this technique before in
a rudimentary way maybe but to be honest I didn't take into account the whole
process and all the advantages we can get from it.
I agree with the article,
I've started using this technique since and it works!
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