Thunk 4 - another bit

Date: Tue, 05 Oct 1999 15:45:09 +0200

From: Timothy Mason Organization: Home To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum

If some are dubious about the whole idea of the Monitor, others believe that Stephen Krashen has underestimated the importance of this function in the language-learning process, and the extent to which it helps speakers construct accurate sequences. Self-report studies of 'good-learners' suggest that those people who monitor both their own production and that of other learners make more progress and make it more quickly than do those who do not. Good learners are more likely to report that they focus on form, that they are interested in grammatical accuracy, and that they both try to correct their own utterances, and wish to be corrected by others, than do poor learners.

This is interesting. However, it has to be said that there are at least two criticisms to be made of such studies, and that, taken together, they make it difficult to rely on the results as a firm pointer to classroom action. First, the fact that someone reports carrying out a particular routine or task in the pursuit of a given goal does not guarantee that the routine or task is efficacious. It may be that the reports are inaccurate : we may both believe and say that we have done things that we have not done - a perennial problem in the social sciences. What is more, the fact that A precedes B does not mean that A has a necessary causal relationship to B : among some African peoples, it is firmly believed that if you do not teach a baby to sit up, he will never be able to do so. All babies are taught to sit, and, of course, all - or almost all - succeed. (This also works the other way round : if someone dies, then it is certain that a witch must have carried out a cursing ceremony. Similarly, if I have learned Japanese, this proves that I must have paid close conscious attention to the grammar).

In our schools, learners are continually exhorted to learn the grammar and to pay attention to form, and are assured that this will bring them success. It is not, therefore, surprising, to discover that those who succeed believe that it is because they have followed the receipt provided by their masters. Which brings us to the second criticism of the 'good-learner' studies. The experimental subjects were identified as such by their teachers or by school-certification. This means that they were chosen according to their ability to pass school exams and to favourably impress their professors. Now, it is, we are forced to admit, at least possible that teachers and examiners are favourably impressed by skills and capacities which have little to do with the communicative mastery of the grammar of a foreign language. What enables a student to make good scores on paper and pencil tests, or to impress the teacher with his or her level of participation - the apparently inactive and silent student *may* be processing and acquiring just as much as the active and talkative one - may not help that much when you need to use the language in real-life.

So it may be that the 'good-learner' studies are simply recording the characteristics which impress educators rather than those which make for efficient FL acquisition. It should be noted that these criticisms do not mean that monitoring is of no use in language acquisition. What they mean is that the evidence from the 'good-learner' studies cannot be taken as sufficient proof that it is so. Any more than can the collective beliefs of teachers, however loudly proclaimed in however many e-mail messages to this or any other list. (Common-sense is self-replicating and self-validating).

Regards

Timothy Mason

IUFM de Versailles

tmason@timothyjpmason.com

Now go to the last Thunk