Chapter 11

CW11.1 MAAL interviews MAMD

Here is a rather grumpy and impatient MAAL (Me as Applied Linguist) interviewing MAMD (Me as Materials Designer).

MAAL:	I’d like to know first of all, MAMD, why you decided to use a structural syllabus for your book. Why not a notional/functional or some other type?
MAMD:	I thought about this for a very long time and in the end decided that for a beginners’ book it was important for the learners to be introduced to the grammar of the language in a systematic way. That means dealing with a different sentence pattern in each lesson or ‘unit’. And that means a structural syllabus.
MAAL:	Does that mean you ignored notions and functions?
MAMD:	Not at all. But I didn’t use them as my main ‘organizing principle’, my ‘unit of organization’.
MAAL:	Explain.
MAMD:	Well, in each unit of the book the main focus is on a group of sentence patterns. For example, in Unit 15 sentence patterns associated with the simple present tense are covered …
MAAL:	[yawning] Yes, yes. I understand that.
MAMD:	… but in the course of the unit, the functions of asking for and giving information are touched on, often using the simple present tense.
MAAL:	So the main focus is on a grammar point, but notions and functions are borne in mind in your choice of language to put in the unit.
MAMD:	Precisely.
MAAL:	OK. Now tell us what the first stage was in designing the syllabus for your course.
MAMD:	My course was to be a complete one, covering three years of teaching in three books. So most of the grammar of English was to be covered over the period. First of all, then, I wanted a list of all the important structures of English. Several books exist to help you with this. One very useful one is English Grammatical Structure (Alexander et al. 1975). This is a comprehensive list of English sentence patterns. The book was specially written with the purpose of helping syllabus designers.
MAAL:	Once you had your list of structures, what did you then do?
MAMD:	The next decision was to divide them into ‘years’, deciding which structures to teach in Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3.
MAAL:	And how did you decide this?
MAMD:	Well, I suppose that my main criterion, at the beginning at least, was to think about simplicity – teaching the simple structures before the more complicated ones.
MAAL:	What some people call a ‘simplicity criterion’.
MAMD:	Exactly. Of course, it’s difficult to apply this criterion in a strict way, and sometimes it’s impossible to say whether one structure is more difficult than another. But it’s a good starting point. Another criterion …
MAAL:	You don’t have to explain all the criteria, MAMD. We’ll be discussing this later in the chapter. Let’s move on. You have a list of structures assigned to Year 1, 2 or 3. What comes next?
MAMD:	Of course a structure divides into many sentence patterns, so you have to make a list of the patterns associated with your structures and decide in which order to teach them.
MAAL:	Is that difficult?
MAMD:	I’m afraid it is. Think about some of the main patterns associated with a tense – the simple present, for example. First of all, there’s the basic form …
MAAL:	[looking at his watch] Yes, yes. We can put these into a box; you don’t have to go through them all, thank you very much …
MAMD:	Now you may think it’s sensible to teach the ‘basic’ form first of all, and the contents page of Now for English shows that I do this. But what that page doesn’t show is that I introduce the receptive use of the question form in the same unit, so that the teacher can ask questions. The learner has to produce the ‘basic’ form but just understand the question form.
MAAL:	Perhaps you should explain what you mean by the word ‘receptive’.
MAMD:	It means the learners should be able to understand but not necessarily produce the form. As you know, reading and listening are the receptive skills and speaking and writing the productive ones. In my first unit on the simple present, I have the class look at a jungle scene. The teacher asks questions like Where do monkeys live? and the pupils reply Monkeys live in the trees. So at this point the learners have to understand the question form and produce the ‘basic’ form.
MAAL:	Monkeys and jungles, eh? Sounds like gripping stuff!
MAMD:	Well, children are interested in monkeys and jungles, you know. Another issue at this stage is what is called ‘pacing’. This is ensuring that there is some kind of balance through the book, in terms of what is introduced. Each of my books has 30 units, and these are divided into five ‘sections’ each with six units. The sixth unit of each section is a revision one, so each section has five units of new material and one of revision. I’ve tried to ‘pace’ the course so that no more than one major structure is introduced into each section. Usually the major structure will be a new tense. Then around this structure I spread the minor ones out – a sort of padding to fill the materials out.
MAAL:	Can you give an example?
MAMD:	Yes. In units 13 to 18 of Book 1, I introduce the simple present tense. But if you look at the contents page, you’ll see that some other, more ‘minor’ structures are spread through these units: some and any, for example.
MAAL:	Yes. I see. Well thank you, MAMD. That was … er … very interesting.
MAMD:	But I haven’t finished yet! There’s much more to say.
MAAL:	I’m sure there is. But we have to move on, I’m afraid.

CW11.2 The components of ‘situation’

Here is more information about the three components of ‘situation’ in the Council of Europe’s framework.

Settings

There are two types of setting:

Geographical: which country the user wants to use the target language in. Some learners will want to use the target language in the country where it is an L1; others will want to use it in a country where it is an FL. The country of use may have important implications in our decision about what language items to teach.
Place: for example, at the airport, in the hotel, in the office.

Topics

What does the user want to talk about? We may find that a learner’s needs are closely related to particular topic areas, such as leisure activities or business matters. Topics can be important in the selection of notions and functions, and they are clearly crucial in deciding what vocabulary to teach. Look back at the contents page of Now for English in Box 11.1. In which column do topics and lexical areas appear?

Roles

The most important of these are the social roles. Examples are stranger to stranger, customer to shopkeeper, doctor to patient. The social-role relationships learners are likely to find themselves in will affect the language it is most useful to teach.

In fact, this is only a partial picture of the Council’s needs analysis model, which includes other components not mentioned here.

CW11.3 Necessities, lacks and wants

Hutchinson and Waters describe their needs analysis model in their 1987 book on English for Specific Purposes – ESP. As we see in 11.3.2, this is the area with which needs analysis is most associated. They use the word necessities to describe what we have so far been discussing – items related to the ‘demands of the target situation’. But, they say, the analysis of necessities is not useful unless accompanied by an indication of what the learner already knows. So they have a second category, called lacks. You could say that mathematically lacks are necessities minus what the learner already knows. They are that part of the target requirements which are not yet in the learner’s competence – the part that needs teaching.

Hutchinson and Waters’ third category is wants. They note that how a person perceives what they require out of an FL course may have little to do with the analysis provided by an ‘objective’ TSA. An example they give is the case of a German engineer named Karl Jensen. Munby’s CNP or the Council of Europe’s TSA would, Hutchinson and Waters argue, identify reading academic texts in English as a major need of Karl’s. But this is not how he himself sees it. Though he only rarely uses English to talk face to face with engineering colleagues, he is very conscious of the fact that when he does so his poor spoken English lets him down. In that situation, his pride is very much ‘on the line’. So his own personal ‘wants analysis’ (as opposed to an applied linguist’s ‘needs analysis’) places speaking English at the top of the list.

CW11.4 LAP or LOP?

There are many ways of classifying the different areas within LSP (and each area has its own acronym, of course). A major division is between EAP and EOP. English for Academic Purposes is concerned with English for studying. Students who are going to an English-speaking country to study an academic subject through the medium of English (remember Lilian Rivera in section 1.2) often take an EAP course. But there are other EAP situations – for example in countries where English, though not the main language for communication, is used in colleges for teaching purposes. English for Occupational Purposes is English for the workplace.

Here are some descriptions of LSP lessons. Do you think they are LAP or LOP?

The teacher is role playing an air traffic controller, and one of the students is a pilot about to land their plane.
The teacher is showing the class how to construct a paragraph in a coherent way.
The students are learning how to take notes on a lecture given in the FL.
The learners are practising contributing orally to seminar discussion.
A learner is pretending to be a doctor explaining to a patient what is wrong with them.
The students are learning how to try to reach a business agreement over a telephone line.

If you want to get a feel of what is involved in LAP and LOP, take one of the six lessons above and think about what language points might be covered. Assume that the ‘L’ involved is your own native ‘L’ – that it, the students are learning your native language as an FL.

CW11.5 Analysing genres

Swales’ (1990) genre analysis uses two types of unit, which he calls moves and steps:

Move 1: Establishing a territory
Step 1	Claiming centrality
	and/or
Step 2	Making topic generalization(s)
	and/or
Step 3	Reviewing items of previous research

Move 2: Establishing a niche
Step 1A	Counter-claiming
	or
Step IB	Indicating a gap
	or
Step 1C	Question-raising
	or
Step ID	Continuing a tradition

Move 3: Occupying the niche
Step 1A	Outlining purposes
	or
Step IB	Announcing present research
Step 2	Announcing principal findings
Step 3	Indicating research article structure

Here is an activity which involves using Swales’ analysis:

Below is the abstract of a paper (Borg 2001) which appeared in an applied linguistics journal. Although Swales’ model is developed for introductions rather than abstracts, some (but not all) of the moves and steps he identifies are found in this abstract. Try to spot them.

Forms of reflective writing such as diaries and journals are widely acknowledged as important tools in promoting both the development and the understanding of teachers. However, little attention has been awarded to the role these forms of writing can play in the development and understanding of researchers. In this paper I draw on my own experience of keeping a research journal during a study of language teaching to illustrate the significant contribution journal writing can make to deepening researchers’ understanding of all facets of the research processes. I also argue that such journals can provide other researchers with illuminating insight into the research process. Given these benefits to both writers and readers of research journals, I claim that the issue of reflective writing by researchers in language teaching merits much more discussion that it has been awarded to date.

Now imagine you are an EAP teacher with a class of learners about to become postgraduate students in various subjects. They all need to learn how to write academic articles. How might Swales’ analysis be useful to you, and to them? How on earth can you teach the structure of written genres? A big topic this, which could occupy many hours of thought; perhaps even a few minutes would be worthwhile.

CW11.6 Getting to know the T-Level

The T-Level specification (van Ek 1975) consists of a series of lists. We have dealt with the most important of these, which are:

Topics
Settings
Roles
Activities
Functions
Notions
Form (exponents)

Below are some items of the sort found in the T-Level. Put these under the categories above; there are two for each category. You can do this by matching numbers and letters – e.g. if you think ‘hobbies’ is a notional category, you would write 5F. (The answers are below.)

(1)        booking a hotel room over the phone
(2)        airport
(3)        questions using wh- words (when, where, why, etc.)
(4)        quantity
(5)        hobbies
(6)        friend to friend
(7)        duration (length of time)
(8)        language institute
(9)        apologizing
(10)      types of accommodation
(11)      private person to official
(12)      should/ought to
(13)      expressing gratitude
(14)      understanding announcements via public address systems (e.g. in an airport)

For each category (A) to (G), think of two more examples that you might expect to appear in the common core of the Threshold Level.

Answers

The matchings are: A–5, 10; B–2, 8; C–6, 11; D–1, 14; E–9, 13; F–4, 7; G–3, 12

CW11.7 A multidimensional syllabus

Here is part of what Swan and Walter (1990) call the ‘map’ of their Book 2. It covers the first five units of the course and gives an example of a multidimensional syllabus at work. You will recognize most of the item types listed in the first row.

	Grammar	Phonology	Functions	Topics and notions
Unit	Students learn or revise these grammar points	Students work on these aspects of pronunciation	Students learn how to …	Students learn to talk about …
1 to 6	Be, can and have got; simple present and present progressive; comparison of adjectives; frequency adverbs and adverbials; word order (position of adverbs); structures with question-word as subject and object; linking words and expressions.	Polite intonation; strong, weak and contracted pronunciations; decoding rapid speech; /iː/ and /i/; pronunciations of the letter i.	Greet; introduce; begin conversations with strangers; keep conversations going; agree and disagree; describe people and things; compare; ask for and give personal information; exchange opinions; construct continuous spoken and written text; ask about English.	Ability; change; habits and routines; events happening at the time of speaking; personal details; personality traits; frequency; parts and shapes; food; prices; economic and political development.
7 to 12	Have got; do as pro-verb; can; could; had better; will/’ll in offers and agreement; shall in offers; should; would; simple past and past progressive; irregular verbs; infinitives with and without to; comparison of adjectives; comparative structures; quantifiers; possessive pronouns; when- and while-clauses; so/neither do I etc.; ellipsis in speech.	Perceiving and pronouncing final consonants; pronunciations of –ed; decoding rapid speech; rhythm and stress; /ei/ and /e/; spellings of /ei/; pronunciations of the letter a; other spelling/pronunciation correspondences.	Ask for things; ask for things when they don’t know the words; use appropriate language in shops; react to information; express sympathy; make and reply to requests, offers and suggestions; agree and refuse to do things; borrow; lend; describe and compare people and things; ask about and express wishes; narrate; report; ask for clarification; manage conversation.	Time and place; quantity; things happening at the same time and in sequence; physical appearance; physical characteristics; differences and similarities; possession; routines; people’s past lives; wishes; obligation; accidents; misfortune; speed and weight; shopping; clothes.
13 to 18	Can and be able; may; must; will; used to; present perfect simple and progressive; present perfect and simple past; present perfect and present; non-progressive be, know and have in present perfect; ever and just with present perfect; since and for; quantifiers.	Linking; pronunciations of the letter e in stressed and unstressed prefixes; /ə/ in unstressed syllables; voiced and unvoiced th (/ð/ and /θ/).	Give news; ask and talk about experience; make appointments; bargain; borrow and lend; ask for and give directions; make enquires; make applications; thank; persuade; give polite refusals; telephone; ask about English; distinguish formal and informal language; use appropriate language in various common situations.	Ability; certainty and possibility; change; duration; quantity; sufficiency; excess; lack; experience; recent events; finished habits; economic and political development; travel; weather; prices; traffic; holidays; work; interviews; food and drink; places; personality.
19 to 24	May; be able; should; have (got) to; will; would; present progressive; future reference (will, going to and present progressive); reported statements and questions; infinitive after adjective; if-clauses (open and hypothetical); If I were you …; when-clauses; if and when; punctuation of complex sentences; verbs with advert particles; time prepositions; end-position of prepositions; verb + object + infinitive; demonstratives.	Decoding rapid speech; signalling a question by intonation; linking; stress and rhythm; developing fluency and confidence; consonant clusters; conversational pronunciation of going to, want to and got to; /əυ/; ‘dark I’; /i/; /зː/, /eə/ and /iə/; spellings of /зː/.	Advise; agree and disagree; persuade; show interest; make appointments; telephone; describe people; express feelings about people; discuss; predict; invite; make suggestions; make offers; agree to do things; report; give opinions.	Ability; arrangements; certainty, probability and possibility; conditions; feelings and emotions; remembering and forgetting; time relations; the future; plans; obligation; hope; quantity; intentions; likes and dislikes; personal and professional relationships; orientation in space; present/future events; geographic features; weather.
25 to 30	Can; could; do as pro-verb; might; must; should; present simple and progressive passive; past simple passive; reported statements and questions; say and tell; present and past participles; irregular verbs; reflexive/emphatic pronouns; each other; somebody else; relative pronouns and clauses; compound adjectives; zero article in generalizations; quantifiers (both and neither); word order (position of both, end-position of prepositions).	Decoding rapid speech; stress and rhythm; linking; initial clusters beginning with /s/; perceiving /ə/; /ei/; /h/; /θ/; /i/; pronunciations of the letter u.	Describe, compare and contrast people and things; describe processes; define; agree and disagree; ask for and give information; exchange opinions; express doubt and certainty; generalize; report; write a simple narrative; ask about English.	Materials and products; manufacturing and other processes; causes and origins; historical events; agents; certainty, probability and possibility; doubt; truth and lies; similarities and differences; ability; actions directed towards oneself; reciprocal action; self and others; present and past time relations; obligation; household chores.

CW11.8 Moodle: The real benefit of the virtual

What, in May 2007, had 25,281 registered websites, with 10,405,167 users following 1,023,914 educational courses? According to Wikipedia, the answer is Moodle (http://moodle.org). This is what is known as a ‘course management programme’ or a ‘virtual learning environment’ – a powerful web-based e-learning resource which can help support teaching at both school and tertiary education levels. As the Wikipedia statistics show, these so-called platforms are nowadays very widely used. Another similar computer management programme is Blackboard (www.blackboard.com).

To catch just a glimpse of how web-based e-learning is being used, we can take a quick look inside one of the most prestigious universities in the Middle East – Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Oman. As in many modern universities, lecturers in all subject areas use Moodle to support their teaching. If you log on to their website (www.squ.edu.om), you will see that they have a flourishing Language Centre which offers an impressive array of EAP and ESP courses – English being the language of instruction for many academic subjects. Among the areas the Language Centre covers are agriculture, arts, law, science, economics, education, engineering and medicine. Using Moodle on these programmes enables teacher-to-student and student-to-student communication to take place wherever the teacher and students are located, as long as they have a computer with internet connection in front of them. The teacher can put information about their course on the site, as well as any course material they want to make available to all – vocabulary lists, for example, or reading passages. They can monitor students’ work as they communicate with each other and can even test them online, using various types of test items including multiple-choice questions (you will come across these again in 14.3.1). An advantage of this sort of testing is that students can be given more or less instant feedback on their performance. Students can ‘talk’ to each other in chat rooms or enter into structured forum discussions related to academic topics – with the teacher joining in as and when they want. It is also very easy for teachers using Moodle to look at student grades and set assignments and workshop tasks.

But how much do we know about the real value of computer-based language instruction? One lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at SQU (Ali Al-Bulushi) undertook research which focused around a concept we came across in section 5.3 – NfM. As you will recall from that discussion, some applied linguists believe that NfM is useful for language acquisition. But does NfM only occur in face-to-face interaction? What happens if learners are communicating not with their mouths but with their fingers via computer keyboards through Moodle? Can NfM occur then? If so, which kinds of computer-based tasks are likely to lead to more or less NfM? Al-Bulushi (2010) discusses such issues.