CPD Opportunities Autumn 2024

 IATEFL 2024

Danny Norrington-Davies (IH London)

Emergent language and task repetition with lower levels

Most of us will be familiar with Danny’s work through his conference presentations and his articles and books: Teaching Grammar: from Rules to Reasons. Pavilion Publishing 2016 and Working with emergent language (with Richard Chinn) Pavilion Publishing 2022 , so it was a pleasure to see him ‘live’ again.

With characteristic generosity, Danny has shared the slides for this talk on his blog  (also on the QR code in the picture above) and I have his permission to reproduce some of them here.

If you’re feeling equally generous, you can contribute to his Gofundme page in support of Abd, a student in Gaza and his family

This presentation is based on work done with a lower intermediate (B1) level group that Danny described as ‘not easy’, so we can all imagine what that means. Danny focused on his use of ‘Focused Tasks’ with this group, defined by Ellis, Li and Zhu (2019:38) thus:

 “Focused tasks are designed with a specific language item in mind in the hope that when the task is performed students will use – or attempt to use – that item” 

Nevertheless, however well-designed the task, it doesn’t mean that our students will actually use the target item – perhaps because they are not developmentally ready to use it or because they find perfectly adequate alternative ways to communicate their message.

Danny’s (and Richard’s) take on focused tasks is summarised in the slide below:

He suggests the following procedure

- Students perform task (no pre-task target language input)

- Feedback: reflect on how they did and suggest ways of filling in gaps in performance

- Examine reasons for using specific forms to complete the task (doesn’t have to be grammatical)

- Repeat ‘altered’ task later in the course to allow students to incorporate new input and ‘raise their game’.

Within this procedure, there is also space for ‘Dogme moments’, - and dealing with language that emerged organically from improvised tasks (based on what students actually want to talk about).

But, ....the best-laid (lesson) plans and all that. We can all empathise with this image from Danny’s presentation comparing the plan and the reality:

Danny next went on to share some of the tasks he’d done (and the language that emerged from them).

Task 1

In this task, students were introduced to Marlene Engelhorn, the 31-year old Austrian heiress who inherited €25 million in 2022 and decided to bring together 50 strangers, chosen to represent all walks of life in Austria, to help her decide how to spend it. 

Here is a sample of the board work after students completed the task, which provides a record of emergent language and an opportunity to look at the reasons why this language is used.

Task 2

For the next task (credit: Sensations English), Danny showed us the following picture and asked us to consider these questions:

- What do you think is happening in the picture? 

- What language could emerge from this task? 

- What language might be missing?

You might want to consider your own answers before looking at what happened in Danny's class

Here’s some language that emerged from the task:

(By the way, in case you’re wondering – it was a football match)

Danny observed the following points:

- The learners were able to complete the task by using ‘I think'.

- They had no real issues expressing certainty and doubt using ‘maybe’ and through effective intonation and gesture. 

- They also used ‘definitely’ and the present simple very effectively.

- ‘Could’, ‘might’ and ‘may’ emerged in both groups as alternative ways of speculating.

- ‘Can’t be’ emerged as a way to express doubt or disagreement but ‘must be’ never seemed to fit

Intrigued by the (lack of) use of ‘must be’, which is typically presented together in the group of modal verbs of speculation, Danny checked on concordancers and found these typical uses of the phrase ‘must be’, none of which would work in this context.

The logical follow-up task to this to have students discuss the question: Would you like to go?

Later in the course, Danny introduced another focused task which provided an opportunity to recycle the language that had emerged from the previous tasks.

Altered Task

Here’s the task. Again, as you look at it, you might want to consider what language you expect to emerge from the task:

Now compare with the board record of what emerged during this task (below). You can see how Danny’s board work reflects the previous tasks, e.g. the divisions

- I know

- I’m (not) sure

- I think

and some of the language (e.g. modal verbs of speculation) is repeated.

Danny points out that - at this stage - students were regularly using ‘might’  to express uncertainty, and it was easy to elicit the alternatives ‘could’ and ‘may’ during feedback. This left lots of space to explore interesting lexis and chunks:

In Danny’s school, students are given an opportunity to discuss their progress in tutorials, which allowed Danny to find out how students remembered the language that had emerged so far over the course (the reasons).

In this example, Gloria explains her reasons for using 'can't', which is certainly memorable!

Can’t is like a don’t rule, like cappuccino after dinner, but also a school rule, like can’t (points to nose piercing)

Conclusions

Three main points that we can take away from Danny’s presentation

1. Focused Tasks…

…help learners to notice the gap between their output and the subsequent input

…lead learners to look beyond current knowledge and create new knowledge – repairing or adding to mental models (see Swain, 2010)

2. Exploring reasons, rather than rules, after focused tasks

Summarised in the slide below:

3. Task repetition

…seems to help student develop speaking and language skills (e.g. Ahmadian, 2012)

…helps students notice gaps and emphasizes differences (and progress!) between tasks.

…later in course (altered) tasks recycle content but also leave space for creativity.

Danny’s final tips and recommendations:

References:

Ahmadian, M. (2012) Task repetition in ELT. ELTJ 66/3: 380-382

Chinn, R. & Norrington-Davies, D. (2023) Working with emergent language. Shoreham by Sea: Pavilion.

Ellis, R., Li, S & Zhu, Y. (2019) The effects of pre-task explicit instruction on the performance of a focused task. System. 80: 38-47

Norrington-Davies, D. (2016) Teaching grammar: from rules to reasons. Hove: Pavilion publishing

Swain, M. (2010) Languaging as a source of learning. In Batstone (ed) Sociocognitive perspectives on language use and language learning. Oxford: OUP