Vicki Hollett

Welcome to part two of my scrapping the lists journey (intro here, part one here.) My question here is what about ditching lists of phrases if we’re teaching unplugged, dogme style?

Functional phrase lists look tempting if we want a materials-lite lesson – after all a list is less dense than a text. And students want something to take home, don’t they? But myself, I’ve sworn off functions lists, unless they come with context. It goes back to my previous dilemma:

In the past I’ve dished out lists of functional phrases and told my students to use them. But they don’t, or worse, I find myself wincing because they do use them, but inappropriately.

So I’d rather give students worksheets to take home based on what they’ve said – so there’s context built in.

Like a lot of business English teachers, I spend a lot of class time listening to students talking, making notes, and then trying to draw their attention to other ways they might have said things. I used to work with a great teacher called Rick Baldwin who wrote worksheets on the fly, based on what his students were saying. He’d run to the photocopier at the end of class, and then dish them out to the students for homework that he’d review the next day. We were intrigued and got him to run a workshop to show us what he was up to. I thought it was pretty cool. Over the years I’ve modified his ideas, but they still lie at the heart of how I generally work today. (Thank you, Rick)

So the worksheets are based on the students output. Years ago they were largely about pronunciation, grammar and lexis but over time they’ve become peppered with more discourse related questions along the lines of “Can-you-say-what-you-said-better?” and “Here-are-some-ways-I-might-have-said-it”. And a lot gets repeated across classes. For example, my students often use performative verbs more than native speakers, so I’ll often find myself scheduling some explicit teaching about how native speakers use them – just so they know.

There’s an exception to do with pragmaticky things though. If a student says something a bit weird in social terms, or maybe aggressive, or perhaps politically incorrect (remember I’m teaching in ‘merica now, where folks tend to more sensitive to that) I try to jump in. So I’ll interrupt the flow and ask what went on – on the spot.

And sometimes I wish I hadn’t. But if you leave it till later, a weird phenomena can strike – collective class amnesia. It’s hard for everyone to recall. And I can’t blame them for feigning a bad memory. It’s easy to accept your classmates will make grammar or vocabulary errors, but if they say something socially awkward, it could signal a personality problem.

And often it isn’t a personality thing so much as a cultural thing. But it’s interesting because I suspect we could wipe the floor with our students for dropping third person ‘s’s and their classmates wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But challenge someone about breaking a social rule and it gets tricky. Personally, I try to adopt an on-the-spot and factual approach when I challenge, like it’s a cultural information issue – whether it is or isn’t.

I think I may be blessed with a curious non native speaker advantage working in the US. I get the feeling that I’m allowed to talk about the social customs and rules that I see going on around me like I’m a foreigner with my students, and I suspect my students are more forthcoming as a result. For example, I can’t remember many students telling me that they thought Brits were arrogant or standoffish when I was working in the UK, though quite possibly they did. But since I’ve come here, I’ve had some students confiding that they find Americans superficial. I certainly don’t think American’s are superficial but I can see how it might appear that way if you’re not familiar with how different politeness styles operate. And once things are out on the table, I can present my take on things and hopefully we can make better sense of what’s happening to us here. I think this might be a secret advantage that all non-native speaker teachers share that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Sometimes it’s – wow – priceless.

But there are some dilemmas for Business English teachers here. To learn new language students need to be exposed to new language – which means via listening or reading. I need present context briefly. All ideas welcome. I know I’m still a long way from having all the answers to all this.

You might also want to check out my posts on:

How about some nice
Scrapping the lists
Some list alternatives 1

And for more on pragmatics and sociolinguistics, check out my Learning to speak ‘merican blog which explores how meanings get conveyed (or not) in greater depth, along with issues like politeness and directness.

Here’s an example of the kinds of functional phrase lists I used to teach with and write:

But for some years now, I’ve been tearing them up and hunting new alternatives. Why? Well, they just don’t seem logical to me.

It’s not so much what’s in the lists that bothers me. I think we can fix a lot of  that these days with good corpora. But even with high frequency phrases from well suited corpora, I still have a problem with the lists. I just don’t like the way the phrases are extracted from their context. 

Now if it’s grammar we’re teaching, I can sort of see how it’s a different matter. Isolating phrases might help if we want students to look at a structure and see how we can manipuate it. But when when we’re teaching speech acts like agreeing, disagreeing, greeting, requesting, inviting, etc, we need to be imparting usage information.

Think of all the times you’ve dished out lists like the ones above and told your students to use them in a role play. And then think of all the times you’ve winced when you’ve heard them use them inappropriately.

I can’t see a way to solve that problem if we extract phrases from context. Something pretty fundamental about conversation is it’s co-constructed. You can’t have one on your own, unless you’re like my ‘merican dentist. Maybe you remember him? Here’s a story about him that I blogged sometime back:

My dentist works in a tall building at 15^th and Market in Philly. He got in the elevator one day and there was another passenger already inside. They didn’t know one another, but they made eye contact and acknowledged each other.

As he hit his floor button she said ‘I can’t believe it’s still raining’.

‘Yes, it’s terrible’, he said. ‘Really bad’.

‘When’s it going to stop?’ she said.

‘Well, the forecast’s not looking too good’

‘So, is it going to affect your plans?’

‘Yeah,  we were thinking of going to the shore this weekend, but I don’t expect we will now.’

After a few more turns he arrived at his floor and stepped out. As he left, he noticed his fellow passenger was wearing a cell phone earpiece. She had been talking to someone else but he had been answering all her questions.

We’ve got 3 sets of adjacency pairs here, where someone says something that demands a response from someone else. Adjacency pairs are the building blocks of conversation. If I say ‘How are you?’, then you have to say ‘I’m fine thanks’. And you can deviate a bit, and say ‘Not too bad’, ‘Could be better’ or even ‘None of your business’. But there are limits to how far you can deviate without me thinking you’re a bit weird. And if you don’t answer – well,  that will mean something too.

So I reckon there have to be better ways to illustrate how speech acts work. For me, it’s out with the lists and in with adjacency pairs and longer tracts that can demo how conversations develop over time. And I hope I’ll find more ways as I carry down this path, and maybe some of you are trying to do something similar?

So any thoughts anyone? Am I throwing a baby out with some bath water? And if not, any good ideas on how to bury those lists?

You might also want to check out my posts on:
How about some nice
Some list alternatives 1
Some list alternatives 2

And for more on pragmatics and sociolinguistics, check out my Learning to speak ‘merican blog which explores how meanings get conveyed (or not) in greater depth, along with issues like politeness and directness.

Image by Ilco

IATEFL conference 2010

A lot of my students seem to think we make suggestions by saying, ‘I suggest…’ Similarly with proposals and recommendations, they seem to think ‘I propose…’ or ‘I recommend…’ is what we say. They’re perfectly logical. The only problem is of course, we’re not.

In practice we generally use those verbs to ‘talk about’ suggestions, rather than actually make them. So in speech data they seem to show up in contexts where we want to be explicit. We might use them to clarify something:

Are you suggesting that…?

Or to signal something we’re going talk about:

We’d like to propose a different solution…

Or we might use them to report what someone else has said.

They recommended we change the plans.

They often seem to crop up in conflict situations where somebody is trying to be precise and formally go on-record about what’s being said. But when we’re involved in friendly collaboration, more tentative expressions like ‘How about…? or ‘What if we…?’ or ‘Why don’t we..?’ are more likely to pop out of our mouths. (Pretending like other people have a choice when they don’t really seems to be a feature of anglo English.)

The phrases ‘I disagree’ and ‘I don’t agree’ are similar and they rarely come up in native speaker workplace conversation. My students, on the other hand, say them a lot, along with that another famous line: ‘I am not agree’. That one we react to because it’s ‘ungrammatical’. The rules are much clearer for written sentence grammar.

Getting that grammar wrong means someone doesn’t know the language. So if someone says ‘I am not agree’ we understand their English is dodgy and make allowances. The potential for relationship damage is limited. It’s when they get the social rules wrong that things get tricky. We think they might have ‘a difficult personality’ and they go on probation while we try to figure them out.

We seem to say ‘I disagree’ when we want to be explicit, perhaps to clarify when there’s a misunderstanding:

No, no. You don’t understand what I said. I disagree with that idea.

Or to report what someone else has said.

Toby doesn’t agree with us.

By way of contrast, we seem to accomplish agreement pretty easily with a quick ‘Good’, ‘Right’, ‘Yeah’ or whatever. There’s no potential for relationship damage there. It’s the disagreements that challenge us. So at the start of turns we might hesitate, (Errr… well…) claim partial agreement (Yes, but…), ask questions (How much will that cost?) or change the subject and suggest something completely different instead (So does anyone feel like a cup of coffee?)

If I were learning English, I think I’d want to be perceived as a decent and likeable sort of person and relational stuff like this would be pretty important. So how about it?  Is it time to rethink how we teach functions like these?

For some practical ideas on how to do this, see my posts on:
Scrapping the lists
Some list alternatives 1
Some list alternatives 2

And for more on pragmatics and sociolinguistics, check out my Learning to speak ‘merican blog which explores how meanings get conveyed (or not) in greater depth, along with issues like politeness and directness.