Innovation in language teacher education: fostering learner autonomy through phrasal awareness

June Eyckmans

Department of Applied Linguistics, Erasmus University College Brussels, Belgium

Pleinlaan 5, 1050 Brussel.
June.eyckmans@telenet.be

June Eyckmans is Lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Applied Linguistics Department of the Erasmus University College Brussels. She is also affiliated with the Université Libre de Bruxelles for her expertise in Language Assessment. Her research interests include foreign language acquisition (especially vocabulary acquisition), cognitive linguistic approaches to language learning. She coordinates the Centre for Foreign Language Acquisition (CEFLA), she publishes in national and international journals and she is referee for Language Learning, Language Testing, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Language Learning Journal and Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen.

Innovation in language teacher education: fostering learner autonomy through phrasal awareness

Calls for multilingual education and life-long learning within the European Union have brought about demands concerning language learning innovation and the development of new learning strategies. In view of future language educational policies in which teachers of many subjects may need to engage in language teaching, new models for successful language learning are being developed.

In this paper presentation the merits of a syntagmatic approach to language learning will be proposed with a view to enhancing learner autonomy and language learner’s idiomaticity. This relatively new lexical approach towards second/foreign language acquisition is geared towards the enhancement of learners’ phrasal awareness and draws heavily on language exposure through listening and reading activities. It is centered on the learner’s capacity to recycle the target language rather than generate it through grammatical rules. It coincides with the shift in perspective from defining second language learning as primarily involving top-down processing (learning grammar rules and applying them to concrete examples) to perceiving it as being driven by bottom-up processing skills (recognizing frequent word combinations from which more general patterns can be extracted). According to contemporary SLA researchers (Ellis 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2008) language learners continually analyse the distributional characteristics of the language input they receive throughout their life, which makes input frequency the key determinant of language acquisition. This ties in with usage-based theories which define the grammar of any particular language as a posteriori conceptualisation of the dynamic process of language development (Barlow, Kemmer, 2000; Bybee, Hopper, 2001; Bybee, 2006). Although many studies have shown the importance of learners’ command of phrase knowledge (even at an advanced level of language proficiency) in terms of overuse, underuse or misuse (Nesselhauf, 2005), the number of pedagogical proposals furthering a syntagmatic approach to language learning have been limited. 

Because of a lesser focus on form than in traditional language teaching, a syntagmatic approach to language learning lends itself well to the communicative and functional challenges of multilingual educational settings as it provides language learners and language teachers with the necessary new strategies in order to cope with language learning processes in situations in which language learning itself is subservient to the acquisition of a specific subject matter.

Keywords: teacher training; a lexical approach; learner autonomy.

Language teacher education today and tomorrow

It has been argued that the accelerating national and transnational flows and the linguistic hyper diversity that goes along with it will lead to a greater appreciation of partial language competences and a renewed form of content based language teaching (Kelly, 2010). Calls for multilingual education and life-long learning within the European Union will further new educational policies in which teachers of many subjects may need to engage in language teaching. However, teaching systems in Europe are still quite diverse and seem to resist the demands put forward by a globalised world and the reality of multilingual societies. Within Belgian language teaching education for example, future language teachers are still trained as “teachers of a particular language”. Language teacher education in Belgium has not yet moved away from content-neutral language teaching, as is advocated by the pluralist paradigm (Kelly, 2010) and this is the case in many European countries. 

In view of future language educational policies in which school teachers of many subjects might need to engage in language teaching as well, this article makes a plea for a syntagmatic approach to language learning. For a society where content-based language teaching is on the rise does not preclude foreign language teaching and/or research into the effectiveness of language teaching methods. If anything, the role of language teacher education yesterday, today and tomorrow should be to optimize classroom instruction within the available time constraints and to provide language learning strategies that will enable learners to benefit from lifelong learning opportunities.

In this article I will introduce the research that has been done in the Center of Foreign Language Acquisition (CEFLA) of the Erasmus University College Brussels into the effectiveness of foreign language teaching methods. The aim of the research enter is three-fold: (1) to carry out empirical research into the effectiveness of various teaching methods and report the results and the conclusions to the FLT community, (2) to organise thematic colloquia with the participation of reputed invited speakers and to offer workshops at schools, colleges or universities on invitation, (3) to develop innovative pedagogic materials that are in accord with validated teaching methodology and recent FLT research. 

I will zoom in on the activities of the center in furthering a syntagmatic and lexical language learning approach and I will argue that such an approach fits the bill of future content based language teaching as well as the current need for language teaching methodologies that enable a substantial language uptake within the limited number of class hours available while also benefiting learner autonomy.

A syntagmatic approach to language learning: how did we get there?

Although applied linguists nowadays agree that learning vocabulary should occupy a central place within language teaching pedagogy, the key role vocabulary plays in language learning has not always been reflected in the amount of attention that has been given to it by language teachers and researchers (Eyckmans, 2004). The main focus in classroom activities and second language acquisition research was on the acquisition of grammatical competence and – at best - the development of functional communication skills (Eyckmans, 2004). For although it can be argued that early communicative language teaching  made room for a greater emphasis on vocabulary because it emphasized the importance of so-called functional phrases (phrases of evident high frequency in spoken English such as “would you like to…”, etc.), it provided no structured approach to the learning and long-term remembering of new words. It took until the early 90’s for premeditated vocabulary instruction to move up to its current prominent position in second language acquisition and for language teaching approaches to start emphasizing the importance of a lexical approach to language learning. Cases in point are Lewis’ teacher training manuals that revolve around the adagio that language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar (Lewis, 1993; 1997) and scholars’ assertions that vocabulary needs to be systematically integrated into any language course curriculum (Meara, 1995; 2002; Schmitt, 2000; Nation, 1990; 2001).

The revaluation of the lexical dimension in language learning coincides with the shift in perspective from defining second language learning as primarily involving top-down processing (learning grammar rules and applying them to concrete examples) to perceiving it as being driven by  bottom-up processing skills (recognizing frequent word combinations from which more general patterns can be extracted). According to Ellis (2002a; 2002b; 2005) language learners continually analyse the distributional characteristics of the language input they receive throughout their life, which makes input frequency the key determinant of language acquisition. This ties in with usage-based theories which define the grammar of any particular language as a posteriori conceptualisation of the dynamic process of language development (Barlow, Kemmer, 2000; Bybee, Hopper, 2001; Bybee, 2006). Together with psycholinguists’ assertions that natural language is largely built up out of prefabricated multi-word combinations that make up the discourse structure of language (Sinclair 1991; Wray 2002), these modern views of language acquisition have replaced the generative linguistics’ perspective of the lexicon being separate from the grammar with an integrative conceptualisation of language in which patterns are inherent in language segments. 

In the next section I will shed light on the quintessential role that is assigned to prefabricated patterns in language acquisition. This will be followed by a strong petition for cognitive linguistics inspired phrase learning.

The importance of prefabricated patterns in language acquisition

The foregrounding of multi-word lexis is largely due to the rise of corpus linguistics. Studies of L1 discourse revealed overwhelming evidence of collocational tendencies that often defied generative grammatical explanation (Pawley, Syder, 1983; Foster, 2001; Howarth, 1998; Nattinger, DeCarrico, 1992; Schmidt, 2004; Wray, 2002). Adult native speakers’ phrase lexicon is estimated to consist of many thousands of chunks and estimates on the bases of written corpora have unveiled that half of all written English is made up of lexical phrases (Butler, 2005; Erman, Warren, 2000). Although most of this research  involves the English language, studies in Spanish (Corpas Pastor, 1996; Montoro del Arco, 2006; Ruiz Gurillo, 2001), in French (Gross, 1996; Mejri, 1997), and in German (Burger, 1998; Fleischer, 1997) are also surfacing. 
In view of the overwhelming corpus evidence that knowledge of one’s mother tongue consists very substantially of active and passive knowledge of chunks of language of a wide variety of sorts, applied linguists have come to recognize the quintessential role of prefabricated patterns in language acquisition (Ellis, 1996; Wray, 2002; Schmitt, 2004). In fact, psycholinguistic research has shown convincingly that communicative performance – which is characterized by real-time language processing - relies on this exemplar-based knowledge to a large extent (Ellis, 2002). Strings of words that are stored as single ready-made units are easily accessible and contribute to fluency in real-time situations because learners do not have to construct these language units word by word, they can be summoned from memory as prefabricated wholes. Because we use these chunks of language, we are capable of freeing up the necessary short memory capacity for planning and delivering a new stretch of speech.

The fact that a string of words is stored and retrieved as a single ready-made unit is the defining characteristic of a multiword combination in Wray’s well-known and much-cited definition of what she calls formulaic sequences (2002: 9). Sinclair used the term semi-preconstructed phrases and postulated that a substantial amount of language obeys the idiom principle (Sinclair, 1991:110), which restricts the co-occurrence of words for reasons beyond any grammar rules (in contrast to the open-choice principle where individual words occupy slots in particular syntactic structures). The number of terms used to refer to multiword units in the literature - Wray (2002) lists over 50 terms -  may be indicative of the diversity and scope of the phenomenon, which has also become known as phraseology. 

Petitioning phrase learning

If the fluent use of lexical phrases is an essential marker of native-like proficiency then it stands to reason that learners will need receptive and productive knowledge of a vast array of these phrases if they aspire to becoming fluent language users. Although many studies have shown the problematic nature of learners’ command of phrase knowledge (even at an advanced level of language proficiency) in terms of overuse, underuse or misuse (Nesselhauf, 2005), and despite learners dire need for help in coping with this learning burden, the number of pedagogical proposals furthering a syntagmatic approach to language learning have been limited. Willis (1990) and Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992) took pedagogical initiatives directed at the acquisition of an L2 multiword lexicon within immersion situations. In the field of instructed second language acquisition – in which the language learners’ exposure to the target language is largely confined to the classroom – a phrase-oriented pedagogy was proposed by Michael Lewis (1993, 1997, 2000). In his Lexical Approach Lewis promotes noticing activities that raise learners’ awareness of the syntagmatic dimension of natural language. He recommends large amounts of language exposure in the classroom and chunking activities that help the learners notice the prevalence of lexical phrases in authentic language material. The assumption is that learners will also engage in this strategy outside the classroom. Because the approach is directed at maximal language exposure it also caters for language teachers who need to rely on the use of authentic materials in order to compensate for their own non-native proficiency in the target language. At the same time it might prove useful for future language teachers, who might not be language acquisition experts but whose L1 will provide the learners with ample input opportunities to pick up the distributional characteristics of the target language in content-based teaching circumstances 

Although some authors on phraseology have emphasized the arbitrary nature of word combinations (Lewis, 1993; Woolard, 2000), a fair number of linguists, have demonstrated that pointing out the semantic and structural motivation of multiword units makes them more meaningful and therefore more memorable (Boers, et al., 2004; Boers & Lindstormberg, 2009; Walker, 2008). This is in line with cognitive linguistic views on language and language learning. Within cognitive linguistic theory language is seen as an integral part of general cognition and linguistic phenomena are taken to reflect general cognitive processes. Linguistic motivation is a key issue in cognitive linguistics and several studies have demonstrated the relevance and pedagogical effectiveness of presenting language as motivated by showing that a greater depth of processing of information leads to better retention rates and language learning results in general (Baker, 1998; Boers, 2000; Charteris-Black, 2000). Because teacher-stimulated phrase-noticing incentives might not suffice for learners to turn intake into uptake, we need explicit language focused instruction with a regard to establishing strong memory traces in the learners’ interlanguage lexicons. Fortunately, the number of chunks with non-arbitrary semantic and formal features that can be exploited to make these word strings memorable seems to be quite large. This means that sizeable proportions of newly encountered word combinations can be committed to memory through elaboration of the semantic or formal aspects of these word strings. 

Conclusions

In this chapter a plea was made for a relatively new and predominantly lexical approach to foreign language acquisition that is geared towards the enhancement of learners' syntagmatic awareness. It centers on learners' capacity to recycle the target language rather than generate it through grammatical rules. I have illustrated that successful language learning hinges upon the understanding and producing of large numbers of memorised phrases and that spontaneous language interaction is filled with them. 

Because of a lesser focus on form than in traditional language teaching, a syntagmatic approach to language learning lends itself well to the communicative and functional challenges of multilingual educational settings as it provides language learners and language teachers with the necessary new strategies in order to cope with language learning processes in situations in which language learning itself is subservient to the acquisition of a specific subject matter

Furthermore, such a syntagmatic approach to language learning seems to tie in nicely with current demands in foreign language teaching. It enhances idiomatic language use,  it fosters learner autonomy (and hence lifelong language learning) and it fits the bills of content-based language teaching as well as instructed foreign language learning

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