Biting the bullet: getting the best out of speaking practice in languages tutorials

Biting the bullet: getting the best out of speaking practice in languages tutorials Helga Adams and Margaret Nicolson The Open University h.l.adams@open.ac.uk

Focus of enquiry • Case studies of 6 beginners students of French, German, Spanish. • Under what conditions do students feel best enabled to exploit speaking practice opportunities, progressing their skills in the language and shaping their identity as successful language learners? • Tutorial attendance/ communication of tutorial content, tasks rationale and tasks management/pair and group work/physical response tasks/personal information/opting out or adapting tasks

Educational context (1) • Distance learning • Independent study with support of personal tutor • Infrequent face to face tutorials, largely for the purpose of speaking practice. Not compulsory • Changing population

Educational context (2) Diversity Students background: age, educational and social background, cultural and ethnic provenance, disability, competence and confidence levels. Equal opportunities’ and ‘meeting your needs’ policies Student expectations/ new hierarchies of needs Older pedagogic models losing relevance Need for greater methodological discrimination

Research influences (1) • Pennycook: critical moments • Holliday et al(2004) Language shock; Hall (1995) acculturation • MacIntyre and Gardner(1994) Horwitz and Young(1991), Daly(1991) anxiety and communication apprehension • Hall (1990),Blommaert (2005) identity moveable and context dependent • Bhaba’s third space(1990) ‘which should allow for individuals to redefine themselves in relation to the new, other meanings they encounter’(Fougere, 2003:13) • Stratton (2005): Pre-understandings • Van Lier(2008:163) agency:‘[Is not] something that learners possess[but is] situated in a particular context’ • Pellegrino (2005:2) social and psychological factors can inhibit spontaneous use of the second language

Research influences(2)Paying critical attention to practice • Commitment to continual critical evaluation in practice (Blommaert, 2005) • Rejection of too rigid a belief in the application of a particular methodology (Howard,1996) • Kumaravadivelu (2003, 2006) post-method pedagogy-stresses teacher autonomy and principled pragmatism rather than the theory of pedagogy • Need for alignment between pedagogy and socio-cultural influences(Guangwei, 2002) • Developing a ‘practioner theory which is concerned with judgement andunderstanding’(Usher and Bryant, 1987)

Tutorial attendance(1) • Opportunity for spontaneous speaking practice • Rona:I needed the oral experience… I knew that I was weak on hearing comprehension and speaking • Hugh: You can learn a lot in just a short amount of time. It gives you the experience….of speaking with other people. It helped me with confidence. • Janet: The motivation was the practice, the speaking. • Don: I have not missed any. I value them. Just the desire to actually nail it… • Rosemary:…..the experience was such that I didn’t want to repeat it…I didn’t feel comfortable and that put me off to be honest. Yeah, I mean I had always gone to tutorials with my other OU courses and you know I always enjoyed them. I thought it was something I particularly wanted to do , that face to face tutorial, but when I went, ‘cos I hadn’t been to the first couple, I felt it was a small band of united people so I didn’t feel particularly welcomed…. • Ian:I appear normal to most people…but I do have great difficulty negotiating tight places with obstacles like desks and people to deal with. I did almost come a cropper once when my left leg got trapped under my right when turning…

Tutorial attendance (2) • Acculturation • familarity with format and practices • familiarity with people(including the teacher)-> sense ofsecurity Pellegrino, 2005) • Critical moments for Rosemary and Ian • For a sense of validation and safety to be fostered, students have to feel welcome (Pellegrino, 2005) • Ian unable to exert agency

Communication of tutorial content, task rationale and execution (1) • Janet: ‘Yes definitely .. .it is to make you prepare more and you will know what to expect when you go into that tutorial what language you would expect to know, especially the topics you would want to learn. Then it will give you a chance before you went along.’ • Rona:’ I think in retrospect it is very important .. I am not a person who easily thinks on her feet . I am quite good if I can prepare things. I am always thinking , oh, if I had had the chance to think about that … whereas you know in the tutorial I hadn’t been given the opportunity • Ian: ‘The tutor sent you an e-mail ..so you had a fair idea of what you were going into… I think it made you less frightened’ • Preparing oneself for interaction with other speakers in order to improve one’s prediction of success in interaction……[elevates] one’s internal sense of security (Pellegrino, 2005)

Communication of tutorial content, task rationale and execution (2) • Ian: ‘we got the e-mail listing what was going to take place…. but then you find you are playing sort of, as I say, games and things, that involve getting up, moving around and a lot of activity , and then some of these activities are actually very very taxing if you are still very vague about what you are doing, like learning a language, in fact I found it quite a shock.. I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t realise it was going to be like that.’……………all the information you could get beforehand would be very useful actually… you’d be forearmed and at least get to the stage where you could actually cope with that. • Hugh:if we were doing group work I would think, oh, this would help me with my confidence, this with speaking to others…. It might be important for someone who is not aware of those things.’ • Rosemary: ‘I don’t think it was very important… [I was] aware of how people are taught nowadays ‘

Pair and group work (1) • Mixed competence and confidence levels/behavioural factors • Ian: ‘If someone you are paired with is exceptionally good that can be embarrassing that they are doing all the work and you are doing nothing, and at other times you may be paired with someone who is really much worse…you are sitting there, or you’ve got the answer or the person says something in French and you don’t know what they have said….there are lots of issues around that’ • Rosemary:…’the girl I was sitting next to was very quiet and shy so we just sort of muttered a few things and then we just didn’t do anything. In the second grouping…the person I was talking to was a lot more fluent and tended to jump in when I was trying to think of a word and I felt like saying Stop doing that…some people just seem to be in the spotlight all the time and I’m not being allowed to… • Rona: ‘it is a tremendous effort…I can see the theory behind it but I’m not sure you always got the results that you wanted….’

Pair and group work (2) • Preparation • Preparing work at home • Working on vocabulary and structures in class before more open ended group/pair tasks -> building confidence • Encouragement to say: I haven’t done this yet or I am no good at this sort of thing ‘in order to lower [others] expectations of the learner’s performance thus reducing the risk of condemnation for inadequate peformance (Pellegrino, 2005)

Physical movements in tasks • Getting up, moving around, catching objects, circulating or miming. • Challenges • Eye and hand co-ordination • Motor difficulties • Shyness/embarrassment (acting and moving about in front of other people)

Personal information • Rosemary: I tend to make things up, things I need to learn. So If I am a bit rusty on family members I’ll make up that I’ve got about fifteen brothers and sisters to get my practice. I’ll describe another town other than mine to make me think more about language I need to be using, so I don’t use my proper antecedents as it were. It’s just something I have developed myself….I like to stretch my vocabulary , my language, and secondly I don’t really like giving out a lot of personal information to people I don’t know… • Hugh: ‘You can’t really say ‘my wife and I’ ….but I feel that you can’t really be honest about [reality]. • Janet: They were saying ‘I wasn’t really happy about doing that, giving the information out I felt uncomfortable’. I could have cringed. I felt really uncomfortable for them.

Opting out and adapting tasks • Ian: it would have been wonderful if someone had said you don’t have to do this, you can do it in a different way …….If it was said in French at the time, maybe I didn’t notice. • Rosemary: it would give you the confidence of trying something cos if somebody says ‘have a go’ and you find that perhaps you can do something different… that would give you confidence • Don: If people feel pressured too much then…if they feel they are not coping, or not allowed the flexibility to deal with the course in their own way, then I suppose if it’s to the extreme level they may may actually opt out altogether. • Rona: I was just pleased if I could get through it • Hugh: We didn’t have to do anything…. we didn’t feel comfortable with doing, so for instance, if we were asked to speak in front of the whole tutorial we would have been fine if we had said ‘look, I don’t feel confident with that’ and then the tutor would come and give us help with this personally • Janet: would students feel worse for attending if they had attention draw drawn to their special needs?

Main findings • Benefits of research interview: the listener ‘may offer the participant a mechanism for reflection, greater self-awareness, finding a voice….andventing repressed emotions (Colbourne and Sque, 2005) • Reflection enabled students to come to a more in-depth understanding of the options available to them • Identity issues: Individual student identity, teaching group identity, teacher identity. • Agency • Realisation of the third space? critical moments, problems of integration, anxiety, discomfort

Implications for teacher development • Post method pedagogy: ‘must be sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching a particular group of students pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular institutional context embedded in a particular socio-cultural milieu’ Kumaravadivelu(2006) • ….helping [teachers] to develop the knowledge and skills, attitude and autonomy necessary to construct their own context-sensitive theory of practice (ibid) • Development of personal theories’ by interpreting and applying professional theories in practical situations while they are on the job’ (Pennycook )

Biting the bullet: getting the best out of speaking practice in languages tutorials