consciousness raising techniques
Consciousness Raising Techniques | Jonathan Clifton | December 15th, 2000
Reply to Mary Lynn:
I did something on using consciousness-raising techniques to study grammar for my MET assignment. I found that it worked on the whole. Most of the students enjoyed it and said that they felt they retained the grammar better and they liked looking at "real English" and drawing their own hypothesis that was later checked by me. On the downside, I found that some of them were unable to articulate their ideas. In other words the metalanguage was just too complicated for them. Also, materials using CR techniques seem to be lacking which means more work for the teacher if you do your own.
I can recommend the following book; Grammar and the Language Teacher by Bygate et al 1994 (which is recommended in the MET module), and The Anti-grammar Grammar Book by Hall and Shepherd 1991, which is a resource book with CR activities. Some activities are better than others but on the whole it is OK.
Finally on an anecdotal side: A few years ago I had a student who had very good English. He could form the grammatical structures without problem but he often used them "wrongly". This good knowledge of structure combined with a poor knowledge of use I put down to the fact that in the past he had had a lot of translation exercises and sentence level reinforcement exercises but had never really seen how it all fits together. Maybe CR would have helped somebody like this but then that was in my pre-Aston days and I was at a loss of how to deal with this student. What I do know for sure is that more PPP didn't do the trick.
Best wishes to all
Jonathan Clifton
Editor's Note: Here is a link to an article Jonathan wrote in about using consciousness raising techniques in the classroom:
Using Authentic Business Transcripts in the ESL Classroom
The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. XI, No. 4, April 2005
Abstract
This article demonstrates how transcripts of authentic business interaction can be downloaded from the web and used for consciousness raising activities in the classroom. Such texts provide the teacher with an interesting supplement to the (largely) non-authentic materials found in mainstream course books.
Re: Consciousness Raising Techniques | Mary Lynn | December 16th, 2000
Dear Jonathan,
Thanks a lot for that. Sounds interesting, esp that they 'felt they retained the grammar better'. I'm not sure what you mean by 'consciousness-raising techniques'. It's one of those terms I've heard bandied about, but never been sure exactly what it means.
What kind of 'real English' materials were you using? I tend to use concordances a fair bit for looking at specific lexical/grammatical items of interest, but have found that this kind of analytical work is not everyone's cup of tea and I have to beware of overdoing it. (I probably need to find new ways of using them). I also occasionally use whole texts and would like to use audio/video recordings more for analytic purposes (rather than only comprehension), but haven't found the time to try it yet.
I'll have a look for the references you mentioned.
BEST WISHES OF THE SEASON TO ONE AND ALL
Mary Lynn
Re: Consciousness Raising Techniques | Jonathan | December 17th, 2000
Hi Mary Lynn,
Consciousness-raising is defined in my dictionary of language teaching and linguistics as "an approach to the teaching of grammar in which instruction is viewed as a way of raising the learners awareness of certain features of the language. this is thought to indirectly facilitate second language acquisition".
They refer readers to Rutherford 1987 "Second language Grammar: learning and Teaching" as the "classic text" on the subject. Basically the idea is to get the students to look at a text and draw their own conclusions about language use. Such hypotheses can then be checked out with the teacher later. This is also known as the "discovery technique" and "inductive learning". I imagine a lot of teachers do this already even if they have never heard of CR. You talked about using concordances and asking students to work out for themselves the patterns. For me this is CR.
The "real texts" I used were based on colleagues doing a task that I had asked the learners to do. For example, I got the learners to do a task, then played a cassette of NSs doing the task and then got the learners to analyze some aspects of the language. Sometimes, I've used newspapers etc in fact any source is potentially good.
I recommended the "Anti grammar grammar book" on my last email. This has some genuine texts in it but I feel that one of the downsides of this book is that some of the texts are not genuine and have been written especially to demonstrate a particular point of grammar and sometimes the context is lacking so that we can't really decide why a particular tense is employed. But to my knowledge it is the only resource book that concentrates on CR techniques. Though I notice that the more "standard text books" like headway have some CR activities in them now.
Hope this answers your question. Give it a try in some of your classes - happy teaching!
Best
Jonathan
P.S. I think you are right when you say that this is not everybody's cup of tea and that it must not be overdone.
Re: Consciousness Raising Techniques | Stephan Hegglin | December 17th, 2000
Dear Mary Lynn, Jonathan,
I have just started to use conscious-raising techniques and am irritated to realise that I have not tried it out earlier. I have read Jonathan's explanation with great interest. I'm currently working on the FND. 'Conscious-raising' is mentioned in Rod Ellis article (Foundation Articles / Unit 8).
Ellis, R 1993. Talking shop: Second language acquisition research: How does it help teachers? ELT Journal 47/1:1-11.
I have been enjoying the discussions on the list and would like to thank all of you who have contributed. I really would like to see all of you.
Happy Christmas or Eid - whichever you're celebrating or good holidays if you are not.
Stephan Hegglin
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