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In the Swedish syllabus documents for the teaching of English and modern languages, literature has a given place from the earliest stages. This is, however, an area that some teachers spend more time on than others. In this module we have tapped into the expertise of our colleagues to look more closely at this topic.

Reading

Katherina Dodou, from Dalarna University and Joakim Sigvardson, from Stockholm University, have helped us identify a rich selection of freely available, open-access reading, with a focus on primary English and the legitimation of literature in the national syllabus for English.

• Alter, G. (2018). Integrating postcolonial culture(s) into primary English language teaching. CLELE Journal 6(1), 22–44. https://clelejournal.org/category/issues/volume-6-issue-1-may-2018. This article addresses the potential of a handful of picture-books to expand intercultural learning. In so doing, it addresses the topic of cultural learning and intercultural communicative competence, as well as text selection and evaluation. Alter’s piece also touches upon primary ELT textbooks.
• Bakken, A. S. (2017). Notions of EFL reading in Norwegian curricula, 1939–2013. Acta Didactica Norge, 11(2), Art. 1. https://doi.org/10.5617/adno.4474
• Birketveit, A., Rimmereide, H. E., Bader, M., & Fisher, L. (2018). Extensive reading in primary school EFL. Acta Didactica Norge 12(2),1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/adno.5643. This article is based on action research and it shows the feasibility of extensive reading projects in Scandinavian primary school ELT. It also investigates pupil attitudes to reading literature and indicates positive influences on pupil motivation of reading literature in such a project.
• Dodou, K. (2022). How Swedish curricula legitimise the engagement with literature in English.Nordic Journal of English Studies 20(2), 129–159. http://du.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1604287/FULLTEXT01.pdf  
• Drew, I. (2021). Promoting EFL literacy through shared and individual classroom reading experiences of literature. Utbildning & Lärande 15(2): 167–184. https://du.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1571202/FULLTEXT01.pdf. Drew argues for the significance of shared and individual reading experiences of literature in primary and lower secondary ELT, based on a review of a number of empirical studies on reading projects. One of his main points is that L1 instructional methods, such as Readers Theatre, work in Scandinavian L2 teaching. 
• Ellis, G., & Mourão, S. (2021). Demystifying the read-aloud. English Teaching Professional 136 (September). https://research.unl.pt/ws/portalfiles/portal/33701140/Ellis_Moura_o_2021_ETP.pdf. This is not strictly speaking a research article, but it is accessible and it summarises Ellis and Mourão’s take on the read-aloud. A lecture that goes through more of the research behind this piece, and which is quite enjoyable, too, is available here: https://icepell.eu
• Sigvardson, J. (2022). Den kroppsliga läsningen: Fenomenologi och litteraturdidaktik. Educare 3, 30–61. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-201573 In Swedish!

Interview

The interview in this module features Katherina Dodou and our colleague Joakim Sigvardson. We have included both of their work in the reading for this module.

Discussion questions

1. Some teachers include a lot of literature in their teaching, and others avoid literature as much as they can. Why is this, and does it matter for the teaching of English and other foreign languages?
2. In the core content for English 6 in the Swedish school system (usually given in the second year of upper secondary school, with 17–18-year-old students), two literary genres are specified and singled out, namely poetry and drama. Reflect on this and think about the teaching challenges that may lie behind these genres being explicitly mentioned. How does this affect the course?
3. Why do you think that the words stories [berättelser] and fiction [fiktion] are used instead of literature [skönlitteratur] in the syllabus for years 4–6 in the Swedish school system (10–12-year-olds)? How does the choice of words affect our understanding of the core content in this case?

Resources

Katherina Dodou kindly made a list of a few resources that teachers might find helpful when it comes to finding further research on literature in ELT and tips for appropriate literary works and activities.

• www.ju.se/ldn The Literature Education Network, LitEd, is for researchers and teachers inside and outside Sweden who are interested in the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of literature across language subjects and educational settings. LitEd disseminates information about current research, conferences and symposia, it organises biannual conferences and produces publications. Membership is free of charge. LitEd is also on Facebook www.facebook.com/Litteraturdidaktik/.
• https://clelejournal.org The Children’s Literature in English Language Education Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal based in Norway which specialises in literature education and English, particularly on children’s and young adult literature. It regularly publishes research articles on literature in primary school English language teaching.
• https://icepell.eu The Intercultural Citizenship Education through Picturebooks in Early English Language Learning (ICEPELL) is an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project. It provides a useful framework for understanding and implementing intercultural citizenship education in English as a foreign language lessons with children aged 5 to 12 years using picturebooks. Among other outcomes, the project has produced a series of teaching packs to support teachers’ use of picturebooks to develop intercultural citizenship in early language learning. 
• www.pepelt21.com/ Picturebooks in European Primary English Language Teaching (PEPELT) is an online resource for primary school teachers. It provides teachers with practical ideas, tips and useful information about picturebooks and their use in primary English language teaching. PEPELT is also on www.facebook.com/PEPELT21

Language learning is successful when learners are able to use the target language to actually get things done. Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is one way to bring this authentic use of the target language into the classroom, by setting up learners with something to accomplish in that language. This may involve a strong interpretation of communicative language teaching, where any kind of grammatical explanations are given only when needed or asked for, or it can be part of a weaker interpretation of communicative language teaching, where the task is the third leg of the more traditional Present-practise-produce (PPP) approach where a structure is presented by the teacher, then practised, before the learners are set to carry out a task that will require them to produce language where they use the new structure.

Reading

Much has been written about the theory and practice of TBLT, and we are delighted to be able to show you a very recent book by Rosemary Erlam and Constanza Tolosa that is entirely open access, as well as some work about young beginners by one of the names most associated with TBLT, Rod Ellis. Interestingly, all three of these researchers are based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Erlam, R., & Tolosa, C. (2022). Pedagogical realities of implementing task-based language teaching. John Benjamins.

Ellis, R. (2020). Task-based language teaching for beginner-level young learners. Language Teaching for Young Learners 2(1), 4-27.

Interview

We managed to catch up with Constanza Tolosa and Rosemary Erlam (authors of the open-access book linked above) during their international travel and recorded these interviews. Our colleague Per Snoder joins Tore in the conversation. The first interview is with Constanza and the second with Rosemary.

Discussion questions

1. What are your own experiences of using tasks in language teaching?
2. What would you say are the main challenges with using task-based language teaching?
3. Talking about a focus on form(s) in more general terms, at what points in a teaching cycle do you normally bring in an explicit focus on language (vocabulary, morphology, syntax, pronunciation)?
4. The strong version of TBLT advocates that teaching should be planned with the task itself as a focus, rather than what grammar and vocabulary the students would need. What are your views on this?

For learners of Modern Languages, it is often a challenge to find real people to talk to in the target language. Students do not naturally find themselves in a situation where they need to use the target language to communicate. Study abroad, or language exchanges have always been a way to make this kind of meeting happen. Unfortunately, while international travel is marvellous in many ways, it is not always a good idea for our students for economic, social, environmental or practical reasons.

That’s where internationalisation at home comes in. This might involve identifying and interacting with the few speakers of the target language who are around (like the polyglot Tim Doner featured in this video from 2013 when he was a teenager in New York).

Finding people to talk to in the target language

Not everywhere is as cosmopolitan as New York City, however, and sometimes there are advantages to seeing out people who are similar to our students, but who live in a place where the target language is widely used. There are ways to do this within the limitations of school timetables, finance, and environmental impact, with the help of digital tools.

Telecollaboration

During the pandemic (still ongoing in August 2022) we have all become accustomed to meeting online. While this can be quite tiresome when it involves people you work closely with, it does open up possibilities for including people outside the school in our language teaching. Various forms of telecollaboration have been a possibility since the 1990s when the Internet first came into schools, and language teachers were among the first to see the possibilities of this kind of internationalisation at home. The European Union has supported various kinds of digital and physical exchanges for students at all levels, including eTwinning which offers a platform and concept for telecollaboration with teachers and students in other parts of Europe.

Reading

Akdemir, A. S. (2017). eTwinning in Language Learning: The Perspectives of Successful Teachers. Journal of Education and Practice, 8(10), 182–190. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1139836.pdf

Vilà Vendrell, M. (2022). How eTwinning projects enhance children’s motivation on English Language Learning. http://dspace.uvic.cat/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10854/7005/trealu_a2021_vila_marina_etwinning_projects.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Interview

We have talked to Emelie Hahn who teaches German at Gränby school in Uppsala. Emelie is the 2020 winner of Guldäpplet, and an eTwinning ambassador. ETwinning is supported by the EU, and offers a platform and concept for telecollaboration with teachers and students in other parts of Europe.

 

Discussion questions

1. What are your own experiences when it comes to various forms of internationalisation in language teaching?
2. Based on your own experiences, the interview with Emelie Hahn, and the readings for this module, what would you say are the major benefits and challenges of e-twinning and telecollaboration?
3. What aspects of language teaching  (organizational, pedagogical) would you see as being most impacted by e-twinning and telecollaboration?
4. What aspects of language learning (proficiency, fluency, accuracy) and cultural competence would you see as benefitting most from e-twinning and telecollaboration?

Live conversation

We will meet to discuss eTwinning and other kinds of internationalisation at home for language teaching at 16–17 (Swedish time) on Thursday 15 September. Join us if you can! Otherwise you can leave a comment at the very bottom of this page, or in our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/languageeducationcircle.

Alexandra was a guest in Stockholm on 24 May for our Higher Seminar in Language Education at the Department of Teaching and Learning at Stockholm University, speaking on Implicit and explicit knowledge development among young EFL learners. She has allowed us to share a video of that presentation here. On this page we have a transcript of Alexandra’s seminar:

Alexandra Schurz: implicit and explicit knowledge development among young EFL learners

[00:00:00] Okay. Hello everybody. And welcome to my presentation. My name is Alexander Schwartz and I’m a PhD student at the university of Vienna. And first of all, thank you very much for welcoming me for having me here at the university of Stockholm or a Stockholm university, actually. Right. I’m very happy to be here and to have the opportunity to share one aspect of my PhD thesis.

[00:00:27] So the topic of my presentation is implicit and explicit knowledge development among young EFL learners. And in this presentation, I’m first going to draw your attention to my research interest and to why I think my topic is of relevance. And then this will bring me to the methods that I applied.

[00:00:46] And finally I’ll spend most of the time talking about the findings and implications.

[00:00:51] So little in the field of second language acquisition has been as controversial as the role of grammar in instruction. And I also [00:01:00] noticed this at different conference presentations, when people in the audience asked me, well, why do you focus on grammar? Why don’t you focus on any other language area?

[00:01:12] So we do know that grammar knowledge does form part of communicative competence. And it does so, especially if we conceptualize grammar knowledge in terms of implicit or automatized knowledge. And this brings me to a key distinction that I make in my dissertation, the one of explicit and implicit knowledge, explicit knowledge entails

[00:01:36] awareness of grammatical structures, which is not the case in implicit knowledge and implicit knowledge is basically intuitive knowledge we also primarily draw on in our first language, which means that it’s accessed rapidly and easily. Whereas on the other hand, explicit knowledge is accessed slowly and effortfully, unless it has been [00:02:00] automatized.

[00:02:01] And this has been referred to as automatized knowledge which therefore also entails the learners awareness of grammatical structures. And it’s accessed rapidly like implicit knowledge and. It follows that implicit and automatized knowledge. They are functionally equivalent and they’re both equally desirable in language teaching and learning and applying a, or adopting a, an applied pedagogic perspective, which I’m doing in my thesis.

[00:02:33] I refer to the combination of those two constructs as automatized, implicit knowledge.

[00:02:41] Now, what do we know about how. Implicit explicit and automatized knowledge is being constructed. The research has been mainly laboratory based and the research showed that explicit or any conditions seem to be more conducive to learning, but those studies [00:03:00] mostly implemented outcome measures only in terms of how that tapped into explicit knowledge and few studies integrated outcome measures, tapping into automatized or implicit knowledge, which is of course problematic.

[00:03:13] And at the same time in laboratory settings, implicit learning conditions can not be as extensive as they might be in real life. So I then wondered at the beginning of my PhD, what is the impact of learners spare time use of English? So if we conceptualize this as an implicit learning condition, what is the impact of automatized on automatized and implicit knowledge?

[00:03:40] So I draw on Pia Sundqvist’s term extramural English, which is the English learners come in contact with, or are involved in outside the walls of the classroom.

[00:03:52] And there has been some research on grammar acquisition through extramural English, but it’s limited, but still we [00:04:00] do know that grammar learning through extramural, English is possible, especially if exposure is expensive. And if grammatical features occur frequently in the input and likely also if grammatical features are salient in the input, however, there has to my knowledge not been any research done on

[00:04:21] the effect of extra mural English on implicit and automatized knowledge. So this is what my research aim is, my research agenda. So what is the impact of extramural English, and of instruction on learning as automatized, implicit and explicit knowledge. And so once again, why is this important?

[00:04:40] Well if extramural English provides, a learning environment that is enjoyable and pressure-free and if grammar can be learned in this way, then we should, of course exploit it and research and, and investigate this in research. [00:05:00] So I selected two research questions for this presentation. The first one being, how do tests of automatized implicit and explicit knowledge performed by Austrian and Swedish, lower secondary EFL learners load in a factor analysis.

[00:05:16] And if you’re not so familiar with factor analysis, the the statistical method, I’m going to explain it in some more detail later on. And then the other research question is what is the role of extra mural English and instruction in automatized implicit and explicit knowledge of those learners.

[00:05:39] And this brings me to the research context. So as you’ve seen based on those two research questions, I compared Austrian and Swedish learners. Now, why is that? Why did I choose those two environments or countries? Well, they differ according to a number of aspects. Most importantly [00:06:00] Austria is a so-called dubbing country.

[00:06:02] So foreign-language media is mostly dubbed, whereas in Sweden it’s, as you probably know, mostly subtitled. And so based on the data that I also gathered for my PhD, but this is not the focus in this presentation, learners at the age of 13 to 14 years, use English. On a weekly basis for about 17 hours, based on the median in Austria, compared to 27 hours in Sweden. And this comprises activities such as listening to music, listening to other audio, watching audio visuals, reading, speaking, writing, and gaming.

[00:06:45] When it comes to ELTS English language, teaching in lower secondary the type of instruction appears to be more explicit and more systematic in Austria than in Sweden. In Sweden instruction appears to be more implicit, fluency [00:07:00] based and incidental. And now why is that? Well, this actually seems to be linked to the school system.

[00:07:06] So in Austria, the school system is more selective. So, after four years of primary school in Austria students either go to middle school or to academic high school. And academic high school is selective and admission depends on primary school grades. And there is also more grade retention according to OACD data than in then in Swedish lower secondary school. In Sweden, there’s a comprehensive school system up to year nine and less grade retention (students repeating a school year) than in Austria.

[00:07:46] And now to sum this up, Austria therefore seems to be more explicit learning conditions. And Sweden appears to provide more implicit learning conditions which makes the comparison [00:08:00] quite [hard]. All right. So to give you an overview of the test instruments that I used in my PhD: first of all, a student questionnaire that contained questions on the learners’ extra-mural English use and on the type of instruction that they received. that I also included a teacher questionnaire and interview

[00:08:22] with the items on the type of instruction and also inquiring into learners’ extra mural English use and what extent this seems to impact learners’ acquisition and grammar and learning in particular. And then when it comes to the grammar tests of automatized implicit and explicit knowledge, the test of automatized implicit knowledge, basically what brings them together is that they all impose a time constraint on learners.

[00:08:47] So, the tests are performed under a time constraint conditions, which should elicit or tap into learn as automatized, linguistic knowledge which is however, not the case in the explicit [00:09:00] knowledge tests. So there learners are not under time pressure. I’m going to talk about those different grammar tests in a bit more detail later on, but for now this is to provide an overview.

[00:09:13] And this brings me to data collection. So I collected data with those different instruments in 2019. I started data collection in Sweden in November, 2019. And I was collecting data for about three or four months until COVID hit us. I was planning on collecting even more data, but yeah, I I’m happy that I could do most of the data collection before

[00:09:40] COVID so in total, I have 213 participants that I could take into account in my study but I will talk about that later. So the school types types that I, that are part of my study are middle schools and academic high schools in Austria. So [00:10:00] two schools from each school type and four comprehensive schools in Sweden, and the number of students is comparable in each of the two countries,

[00:10:08] so about 100 in each country. The age is also comparable: 14 years in Austria, but students were a bit younger in Sweden, 13.6 years, based on the mean. And I also ask the learners, current English teachers in questionnaires and in interviews about the type of instruction, as I said earlier. So six teachers in Austria and nine teachers in Sweden.

[00:10:37] All right. And now as I said I would talk a bit more about some of the tests, instruments, and mainly the ones that are of interest to the research questions that I’ve read out to you earlier on. So first of all the student questionnaire and the items on extra mural English, that’s have a look at that.

[00:10:59] So this [00:11:00] is based, the questionnaire is based on Andreas Bengtsson’s PhD, that is forthcoming. And basically there are eight main, extra mural English categories. So speaking, listening, gaming, writing, reading, singing, watching, and listening to music. Those are the main categories. And for each of those EE activities, I ask learners, first of all, to what extent they actually use those activities in English on a regular basis.

[00:11:30] So do you use it not at all or, or regularly or very frequently. So these items were based on five point Likert scales. The next step was sent to ask them, well, if you regularly use this activity in your spare time and use English while doing so, when did you start engaging in this activity?

[00:11:52] So I asked them about the starting age, and finally I asked them about the weekly hours and minutes that they dedicated to the given activity. [00:12:00] And here I referred to the previous week. So how much time did you spend on this activity last week? In this outer circle, you can also see subcategories, which were also part of the questionnaire, but those are not of interest to this presentation.

[00:12:18] And I actually did not really do any further analysis based on the sub categories because I had too few participants for those different sub categories. Alright, now let’s turn to the grammar tests and in order to do so, it’s quite important to know which grammatical structures were in those tests. So I selected these grammatical structures.

[00:12:45] And the selection of the structures was based on the problematicity of the structures for the two target groups. Also I wanted to make sure that these are features that frequently occur in a formal language use. [00:13:00] Those are features that are also easily integrated into tests, so practicality should be given and so on.

[00:13:09] So there were a number of features that I took into account and number of factors, our selection criteria. So the first test is the oral narrative test and this is a measure of automatized implicit knowledge. For this test, I designed two short videos. And in each video the structures reoccurred repeatedly, so students would watch this video or each of the videos twice. And then the third time they would watch the video, but the sound was turned off, so that they would only see the the visuals. Yeah. And they themselves had to tell the story and this should elicit the target features. So I can show you an extract from one of the videos. Let’s see the sound works.

[00:13:53] The story of Alice and Luke. 10 years ago, [00:14:00] Alice lived by herself in a small apartment in New York.

[00:14:04] One evening, she walked over to the bar next door. She started talking to Luke who asked her out for drinks. Alice was totally interested in him. That is how their story began, but they did not have the same interests.

[00:14:24] Okay. And it continues like this. I hope that in the recording, I think, and people in zoom were able to hear it.

[00:14:31] In the room was probably a bit harder. But at least you saw the visuals. So here you could see that here, for instance, I tried to elicit negated did, so it did not have the same interests. This is what I tried to elicit by means of those additional and texts, cues, and visual cues. Okay. So this was the oral narrative test.

[00:14:53] The oral narrative test was then transcribed. So this was a performance of one student. [00:15:00] And so I had up to 120 codes per person, and this was a lot of work yeah. Coding those different instances for correct and incorrect productions of the different target structures for all those obligatory occasions.

[00:15:22] The other test of automatized implicit knowledge was the elicited imitation test. Basically students were presented with a number of, I think, 40 in total 40 items, some of them were grammatical, others ungrammatical. And for each item, they first listened to it. Then they had to respond to a comprehension question in order to have them focus on meaning.

[00:15:45] And then in the end, students were asked to repeat, the sentence and to say it in correct English. And this was voice recorded. And here students were under time pressure. So they only had I think, seven seconds to reproduce the sentence. To give you an [00:16:00] example of present progressive of a grammatical item: Right now, my classmates are waiting for the next break.

[00:16:10] Right now, my classmates are waiting for the next break and this one:

[00:16:16] I wonder where Tom is. Oh, he sits by the lake. I wonder where Tom is. Oh, he sits by the lake. So this is an ungrammatical item. It should be he is sitting by the lake and this is what students were supposed to say then, and this was recorded.

[00:16:33] Okay. So this was the elicited imitation test. And so for those two measures, those two oral measures where students actually had to speak and where this and where their performance is voice recorded, I took out students in pairs from their ongoing classes, and I was in a separate room with them because I had to watch over them to check whether everything worked out and whether they [00:17:00] understood what was going on and so on. So I did this in pairs with the students and the rooms really differed, so they, range from group rooms to a school kitchen, a room for a mediation. And then this was the smallest room, kind of like where we’re in the room with the IT person where students sat opposite each other performing two different tests, which is classroom-based research and where you just have to adapt and go with, the conditions. Okay, so this is now the last test of automatized implicit knowledge, a timed grammaticallity judgment test. Here students did not have to speak. This was merely a receptive test, split into two parts a written and an oral timed grammaticality judgment test. In the written test,

[00:17:56] they had to listen a sentence at a time and then [00:18:00] make very quick grammaticality judgment to indicate whether this item is grammatical or not. Same thing for the oral tests, but here students listen to the items: Did you enjoy your last summer break? Did you enjoy your last summer break? Okay. And so I administered this test on SoSci surveys,

[00:18:22] so online, and students did this on their computer and their reaction time was measured in milliseconds. And yeah, this was used as well for the evaluation. You can ask me if you have any questions, I’m not going to go into even more details for now. Okay. And now let’s move on to the explicit measures.

[00:18:44] And remember here, students were not under time pressure. So students had like a fair amount of time to perform those tests. The untimed grammaticality judgment test is a test where students had to make grammatic judgements as well. And in [00:19:00] addition, if they rated or indicated the sentence is incorrect. ungrammatical,

[00:19:05] then they also had to provide the correct form. And this was then rated as correct, if students were also able to actually provide the correct foem. In the metalinguistic knowledge test, students, for instance, in this first part had to underline examples of different grammatical structures and the grammatical structures were indicated based on meta language.

[00:19:32] So for instance, for present progressive they had to underline our line. Yes. And then the second part was a single choice. Section. So for each sentence, which was always incorrect or ungrammatical students had to select the grammatical rule that best explained the era. And this test was very difficult for Swedish [00:20:00] student.

[00:20:03] Okay, so let’s turn fully turn to the findings and before doing so I would like to once again, have a look at the research questions, research question one as a reminder. So that was how did test of implicit and explicit knowledge performed by Austrian and Swedish lower secondary learners load in a factor analysis.

[00:20:22] Now, what is a factor analysis? Well, in the factor analysis, we can learn about the structure of different variables so we can see or check whether different variables, in my case, different grammar tests, tap into different constructs, or if they all load in one factor and only measure one type of grammar knowledge.

[00:20:45] So. This is why I use factor analysis. And this was especially important because those different grammar tests they have previously to my knowledge, only been used with adult learners and with learners in a more traditional, EFL settings, so where [00:21:00] implicit learning conditions were not as dominant as it is the case in Sweden, which makes this an important study. So the hypothesis was then as based on previous research, that I would find two factors of automatized implicit and explicit knowledge. Okay. So first of all, descriptives you don’t, you’re not supposed to know by heart now what those acronyms refer to. It’s important to know that the first four measures referred to automatized implicit knowledge, or at least they were intended to tap into automatized implicit knowledge, and the maximum score was 100% or one. And interestingly, the true group scored equally high or low on the measures of automatized implicit knowledge, right? This is where we can see here for the first four measures, but then when it comes to [00:22:00] the other two measures of explicit knowledge, the groups differ quite clearly. And it’s very likely, or, yeah, it’s very likely that for the Austrian group, the Austrian group seems to have more explicit knowledge because of the more explicit type of instruction. But let’s have a look now at the factor analysis. So I computed a factor analysis separately for each sample for each country.

[00:22:28] And now let’s have a look at the, visual first. So this is Austria. The best factor solution based on a number of parameters. So the best factor solution for Austria was indeed a two factor solution as expected. So nothing surprising here. I got the two factors for automatized implicit and explicit knowledge as expected.

[00:22:53] However, for the Swedish sample, I only got one factor. So the best factor solution was [00:23:00] one factor, all tests loaded on the same factor. Okay. So that was very surprising. wait, I am, and So it seems to be the case in Sweden that the learners performed or tried to perform all tests based on automatized implicit knowledge.

[00:23:22] So, the untimed grammaticality judgment test. Which is of course possible because if you have automatized knowledge, then you can, of course, use it to perform an untimed test. And in the Swedish sample, those two measures of explicit knowledge were also less strongly related than was the case in Austria.

[00:23:45] And we can compare this to Muñoz & Cadierno, who performed these two tests, these two explicit measures, on a Danish student sample and on a Spanish student samples, Spain being more similar to [00:24:00] Austria in terms of its more traditional EFL setting and Denmark being more similar to Sweden. And they also found that

[00:24:07] measures of explicit knowledge were less strongly related in the Danish sample than in the Spanish sample, which points towards the untimed grammaticality judgement test tapping into automatized implicit knowledge in the Danish and in the Swedish sample.

[00:24:28] Okay, now let’s turn to the other research questions. So what is the role of instruction and extra mural English in learners’ automatized implicit and explicit knowledge. Hypotheses were that first of all, explicit knowledge is predicted by explicit instructions while we know that from previous research.

[00:24:48] And the second hypothesis was that automatized implicit knowledge can be predicted by extensive, extra mural English, but also by instruction that integrates communicative [00:25:00] practice.

[00:25:05] So let’s have a look at learners’ use of extra mural English before turning to the models that I computed for this research question. So if you remember, when talking about the research context, I already said that there SI there was more XML English in Sweden. And this contained all those variables here, all those different types of activities, but here we can have a look at those different activities separately.

[00:25:32] And we can see that yes, in Sweden, there seems to be more extra mural English use, but also the difference is most striking in terms of watching and gaming. Yeah. Likely because, well, we have the subtitling practices in Sweden and when it comes to gaming the speech community’s just larger, if you can say that in, in Austria, because German is spoken by more [00:26:00] people, whereas in Sweden, students would necessarily have to interact maybe to some extent with speakers of other languages on the internet.

[00:26:09] yes. Okay. And now, to assess the impact of extra English on those different types of. knowledge, I ran linear mixed models in R, in the statistical software R studio, the dependent variables were the six test scores and the independent variables were extra mural English country and some control variables such as gender, age, dyslexia, and socioeconomic status.

[00:26:39] Okay. First finding a weekly hours of extra mural English. So the total use of extra mural English, but excluding music because I hypothesised that music probably does not have a significant impact on, learners’ grammar knowledge because it’s done rather passively, engaged in rather passively.

[00:26:59] So this [00:27:00] total score of weekly hours of extra mural English had a significant impact in the Swedish sample on the measures of automatized implicit knowledge. So on the measures that in the Swedish sample seem to tap into automatized implicit knowledge. However, in the Austrian sample, I did not find a significant impact of extra mural English, which is interesting.

[00:27:23] We can see that here in the visual. So Sweden in orange, where we can always find or see a more positive development or relationship between extra mural English, the hours of extra mural English and the grammar test score. Whereas in Austria, the relationship is more neutral or even negative.

[00:27:48] Okay. Let’s continue. Let’s now have a look at individual extra mural English activities, remember, like reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, or [00:28:00] watching gaming, singing. And so here, the viewing and gaming seemed to have the most consistent, positive effect on learner’s automatized implicit knowledge, but again, only in Sweden.

[00:28:14] So in Austria, again, I could not find any significant positive relationships between learners extra mural English use and grammar knowledge. So viewing and gaming seem to be very effective, according to my data. On the other hand, singing and listening to music appear to be the least effective. And then all the other activities are reading, writing, speaking where somewhere in between. It’s of course likely that my models could most easily detect that positive effect of viewing and gaming, because those were also the activities that are most common.

[00:28:53] So this has to be considered when interpreting the models. yeah, [00:29:00] Again, the visuals, I mean, nothing surprising just to show you once again, that in Sweden, the development or the lines are positive and in Austria, the blue line neutral or negative, and the same for gaming.

[00:29:19] Okay. All right. So I already told you that viewing and gaming emerged as the most positive having the most positive effect on learners’ grammar knowledge. Possible explanations, all those multimodal activities, so they’re going to have this visual support, and in addition, language, reception and production, like in gaming, when there is also interaction with co gamers happens under a time constraint conditions, which is of course what my measures of automatized implicit knowledge also like yeah, they also impose a time constraint on learners.

[00:29:56] But as I said, viewing and gaming are also those extra [00:30:00] mural English activities that seem, or that occurred most frequently in the samples, which might be also why the models were able to detect significant findings here, but not for other activities that are less common. Or less extensively engaged in. And in order to dig deeper, let’s have a look at teacher interview data because yeah, this is quite revelatory.

[00:30:32] So all six Swedish teachers believe that extra mural English aids grammar acquisition and they were quite precise in a way, or they were they seemed to have quite a nuanced understanding of to what extent grammar is being acquired extramurally. So they said it’s possible at least for certain features and up to a certain point, for instance, the Swedish teacher that I called [00:31:00] Sara claimed or suggested grammar acquition through extra mural English can work to a certain level.

[00:31:07] And then one could start learning the rules. Like, why should I say this and why not that? But I think you can learn it quite well. Like for example, with irregular verbs. And so teachers in a way seemed to rely on learners’ implicit encounters with grammatical structures in their spare time. And explicit instruction comes somewhat later compared to the Austrian setting.

[00:31:34] So Karin also in Sweden said letting them, so the students speak and when they have reached a certain language level, this is when grammar becomes interesting, because this is when they realize that there has to be a rule. So the teachers seem to kind of wait until students appear to be a bit more receptive to explicit instruction.

[00:31:57] What about Austria then? So [00:32:00] why couldn’t I find a significant impact of extra mural English? Let’s have a look at interview data. So the Austrian middle school teachers saw extra mural English as rather ineffective for grammar learning and for language learning in general, Lucas. So the teacher, the thing is some of the students do use English in their spare time, but solely for video gaming on the internet via TeamSpeak.

[00:32:24] But mostly it is those students who are rather weak. And although they do tell me that they have used English in this video time, they also say that they didn’t understand the others, co-players or co-gamers and that the others didn’t understand them. So does that mean it doesn’t really help them? Of course not.

[00:32:42] Because when you work on TeamSpeak with other gamers, that’s, it’s about very fast reactions not only in playing, but also in speaking. And for that, they’re not experienced enough with the language. And at first, when looking at the data, I was a bit like, well, maybe the teachers [00:33:00] just don’t see the benefits in the learners’ development, but it is very likely that since in the Austrian samples, students only very recently started engaging in those different activities in their spare time that they were not experienced enough using the language in such a context. Whereas in the Swedish sample, there I found the average starting age to be nine or 10 years. In Austria it was more like 12 or 13.

[00:33:30] For those learners who do use English back. And so. The problem, so to say, in the Austrian sample could be the higher starting age of actual English. So perhaps if I went back to those to those schools and tested the students again, perhaps in the Austrian sample, those effects would be more visible now or not because learners started engaging in those activities after the critical period.

[00:33:57] So at a time when perhaps they [00:34:00] are not able to learn grammar implicitly to the same extent as they have been previously, or they would have been previously.

[00:34:13] Okay. And then also in the Austrian sample where actual English is less extensive. I mean, less extensive, yes, but also it’s still on the rise. So we have to see both sides. So if so if extra mural English is less extensive, its effect on grammar can not be as strong, but also the effect on grammar cannot be detected as easily by the statistical models, which has to be considered as well.

[00:34:40] Because in the Austrian interview data, especially when talking to academic high school teachers it did emerge that individual learners who use extra mural English extensively that they do seem to learn grammar this way. So Julia the teacher said about one student that the student [00:35:00] writes in English in such a way, you know, structures that we haven’t learned, but that she just it’s just so native-like, so there are individual learners in the Austrian sample who do seem to acquire learner, grammar extra murally.

[00:35:18] And so to wrap this up, Not yet fully. We’re not at the conclusion yet, but still to wrap the findings up, yeah. preliminarily, in Sweden, extra mural English and instruction seem to go hand in hand and both seem to share the teaching load or so, whereas in Austria, learning happens primarily in the classroom. To date.

[00:35:48] I mean, this is of course shifting slowly because extra mural English is growing, but learning still takes place primarily in the classroom. And so interestingly, I also asked [00:36:00] students in the questionnaire, to what extent they believe that they learn grammar through extra mural English and through instruction.

[00:36:07] So let’s have a look. So what did I actually ask them? So I asked them. What do you think, or to what extent do you think you learn intuitive or you develop intuitive grammar, so feel, through extra mural English? To what extent do you feel like you developed “rule-based” knowledge through extra mural English?

[00:36:26] To what extent do you feel like you give out rule-based intuitive knowledge through instruction and rule-based knowledge through. And this was a Likert scale ranging from one: I don’t agree at all, to five: I fully agree. And so first of all, one has to say that yes, both learning groups seem to perceive both extra mural English, and instruction as helping them with grammar.

[00:36:52] Right. Because we’re up here, they agree. But there was still a significant difference between the two groups in terms [00:37:00] of their perceived effect on instruction, on grammar knowledge. So Swedish learners perceive it as less beneficial, still beneficial, but significantly less beneficial than Austrians. And what is also pretty interesting is that descriptively, we can see that in Austria extra mural English seems somewhat less important in the eyes of students than instruction and vice versa for Swedish learners.

[00:37:31] And then based on my findings, I also derived theory I tried to do so. So if you’re familiar with Robert DeKeyser’s skill acquisition theory, this is basically the part of my model here, starting with explicit knowledge and automatised knowledge. So in Robert DeKeyser’s skill acquisition theory, he explains or illustrates how explicit knowledge,

[00:37:59] so in a [00:38:00] typical EFL context, explicit knowledge is constructed first. And then this is automatized through practice. So this is what would be typical for a lower extra mural English context. But if we consider a context like Sweden, and many other subtitling countries, it’s likely that for the average learner, implicit knowledge is constructed first, even before they are taught English, even before they receive English instruction.

[00:38:31] And only then can this be supplemented by explicit instruction or by noticing features in extra mural English. And then this is automatized through both instruction or extra mural English. So I try to elaborate Robert DeKeyser’s model so that he can also account for a high EE context. And now we arrived at the conclusion.

[00:38:57] So extra mural English may predict [00:39:00] automatized implicit knowledge, especially if it is extensive and starts early, especially if it is multimodal, and if prior knowledge. Or prior extra mural English experience is given.

[00:39:16] And in terms of instruction, what was very striking and, interesting. And comforting to some extent, there is no one size fits all approach. So in high EE countries, extra mural English and instruction seem to share the teaching load. And more implicit and incidental grammar instruction apparently is, I call it possible, because we know through previous research, that explicit instruction is conducive to, to grammar knowledge.

[00:39:51] And if a language is learned primarily in the classroom then there needs to be some explicit instruction. But in [00:40:00] Sweden, if like for the average learner, there is extensive extra mural English, and so there can be more implicit incidental grammar instruction. In a lower extra mural English country, most learning happens in the classroom and explicit instruction in lower secondary school still seems to be necessary. But,

[00:40:21] since extra mural English is rising, this may allow for more incidental and more implicit instruction. And this is important, especially, I think in terms of learners’ motivation also because if learners increasingly use extra mural English at home, which is of course authentic language use that is enjoyable,

[00:40:42] to some extent it has been shown in research that students also expect this also from teaching or from the instructed environment . And so if the, if the focus then is too much on grammar, then this can be very demotivating.[00:41:00]

[00:41:01] There are of course, a number of limitations of this study. So testing in the school context is, implies many confounding variables, especially since I try to compare two countries. There were also many cultural differences that I noticed only when conducting the study, that probably impacted the results. Such as in Austria,

[00:41:26] every, like in each time it was almost the entire class being part of the study. Whereas in Sweden, it was very few students per class who were a part of the study. And then there were perhaps they as, didn’t take the testing as seriously. This is just my anecdotal evidence of course.

[00:41:45] But yeah, the atmosphere was somewhat different then. The samples very likely are not representative of the two countries, the ecological validity of the tests is [00:42:00] questionable, and reverse causality cannot be ruled out. So perhaps the statistical models, to some extent also showed that the students who already have good grammar knowledge are maybe then also more likely to engage in extra mural English rather than

[00:42:18] grammar knowledge being the outcome of extra mural English. Okay. All right. So thanks a lot for your attention. Here are my references and I’m very happy to take any questions. Thank you.

Reading

Martina Kopf’s 2016 thesis from the University of Auckland, Fostering peer interactions in online learning environments: The potential of videoconferencing for interactional abilities of foreign language learners in New Zealand secondary schools and Vera Leier’s thesis “just facebook me” A study of the use of Facebook in a German language course at a tertiary institution in New Zealand from the same year at the University of Canterbury, investigated what happened when German learners in New Zealand were asked to use digital tools to create opportunities for interaction with German speakers elsewhere.

Interview

We had the pleasure of interviewing Emelie Hahn, who is a German teacher at Gränbyskolan in Uppsala and a winner of the Guldäpplet (Golden Apple) award for teachers in 2020 “for her dedicated work to develop students’ language and cultural competence as well as digital competence“.

Every language teacher programme teaches students to design lessons and larger units of teaching. But what does the research actually tell us about planning for teaching? Experienced teachers do not always have much in the way of a written plan for a lesson, but ideally, their continuous monitoring of the learning going on in their language class allows them to offer just what their pupils need at any particular time.

In this module, we will be considering some aspects of language lesson preparation, from Helena Wallberg’s thoughts on Lesson design (see our interview below) to Universal design for learning and individual differentiation, to Paul Nation’s insights on changing his mind about what language teaching is.

Primarily a language teacher needs to be a planner who makes sure that the learners are
focusing on what needs to be learned, and have opportunities to learn across the four
strands (teaching makes up only a proportion of one of these strands).

Nation (2015, p. 36)

Reading

Andersson, H. (2021). Varierad undervisning i gymnasieskolan – Skolverket

Barak Rosenshein’s Principles of Instruction

CAST (nda). About Universal Design for Learning

Courey, S. J., Tappe, P., Siker, J., & LePage, P. (2013). Improved lesson planning with universal design for learning (UDL). Teacher education and special education, 36(1), 7-27.

Gibbs, K., & Beamish, W. (2021). Conversations with Australian teachers and school leaders about using differentiated instruction in a mainstream secondary school. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 46(7), 97–113.

Hersi, A. A., & Bal, I. A. (2021). Planning for differentiation: Understanding Maryland teachers’ desired and actual use of differentiated Instruction. Educational Planning, 28(1), 55–71.

Nation, P. (2015). Changing my mind about the role of the teacher in language teaching. Contact (TESL Ontario), 41(3), 36-37.

Further reading if you have access to a university library (Come and take a course with us!)

Griful-Freixenet, J., Struyven, K., Vantieghem, W., & Gheyssens, E. (2020). Exploring the interrelationship between universal design for learning (UDL) and differentiated instruction (DI): A systematic review. Educational Research Review, 29, 100306.

Nation, I. S. P. & Macalister, J. (2020). Language curriculum design. (2 ed.) Routledge.

Tomlinson, C.A. (2014). The differentiated classroom, (2nd ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

and one to consider buying if you read Swedish

Wallberg, H.(2019) Lektionsdesign. Gothia Kompetens

Interview

We had the privilege of talking to Helena Wallberg, author of the book Lektionsdesign [Lesson design]. Helena is often asked to talk to groups of teachers, and as a language teacher and special education teacher, she has a lot to say about language teaching.

Here are some suggested discussion topics to think about with your colleagues or with us and anyone who joins us for our live conversation on 19 May (see below!)

1. What do you think are some of the major language learning challenges where teaching should be differentiated?
2. How do you differentiate language teaching? What are your own experiences and recommendations when it comes to differentiating language teaching?
3. Inclusive/Accessible education needs to take into account that we are all different as learners. In what ways could Universal Design for Learning be helpful when planning language lessons?

Join us on Thursday 19 May at 16:00 to 17:00 (Swedish time) for a live conversation on Zoom about planning language teaching. No need to register for the live conversations, just turn up to the usual Zoom link.

Mail circle.did@su.se if you don’t have it.

Are you using published course books (including textbook, workbook, and teacher’s guide) in your language courses? Or are you compiling your own material based on various sources? The use of professionally produced and published course books and learning materials has been a point of debate for many years. We found an interesting contribution to this discussion in Steve Smith’s blog: Language Teacher Toolkit. 

There are of course arguments both for and against the use of course books. Teachers sometimes report that although a course book gives structure to a language course it sometimes fails to cater for specific needs, it offers limited variation in terms of activities and tasks, and a notion that the course book needs to be covered in its entirety can cause undue stress. At the same time, a course book offers structure and progression in terms of content (topics and themes) and language features (vocabulary and grammar). The texts have been carefully selected to match a certain proficiency level, and the activities are designed to help the pupils engage with the material. Not least, for a novice teacher, a course book will provide a stable base for planning. 

To find out a bit more about the all the considerations that go into the production of professionally developed course books we had an interesting conversation with Charlotte Rosen Svensson, an experienced teaching materials developer at Studentlitteratur. 

Reading

This time we have a couple of recent articles that resonate with some of the points brought up in our interview with an English textbook developer in Sweden (see below).

Firiady, M. (2018). Communicative language teaching through speaking activities designed in a textbook. LLT Journal, 21(1), 104-113.

Huang, P. (2019). Textbook interaction: A study of the language and cultural contextualisation of English learning textbooks. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 21, 87-99.

And as an extra treat, take a look at this do-it-yourself textbook from the amazing Paul Nation’s resource pages: What you need to know to learn a foreign language (English)

Interview

Our interview in this module looks at language teaching textbooks from the inside, from the perspective of a Swedish textbook publisher. Charlotte Rosen Svensson is a textbook developer with Studentlitteratur.

 

Questions to discuss

1. If you’re using published textbooks, to what extent do the texts and activities meet the needs of the classes you teach?
2. If you’re using your own material or compile material from various sources, what are some of the design/planning challenges you encounter, and how do you solve them?
3. Text selection is a central issue in any language course. What are your thoughts on this and the need to reflect the many areas and contexts in which the target language is used?
4. What are your thoughts on vocabulary lists of various kinds (lists by chapter, glossed words in the margin of the text, alphabetical word lists, etc)? How do you use word lists in textbooks, and/or how do you deal with vocabulary issues in texts that you select yourself?

[00:00:00] Hello everybody. This is Tore and Una for the CIRCLE project. Today we’re talking to Averil Coxhead from New Zealand, professor in applied linguistics at the Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. It’s a great pleasure to have you here, Averil. Perhaps you could introduce yourself a bit and tell us about why you came to be interested in vocabulary and vocabulary lists, which is today’s time.

[00:00:41] Okay, so Kia ora tatou. Good morning, everybody, from Aotearoa New Zealand. My name is Averil Coxhead. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak with you today. It’s great to get an opportunity to speak with teachers and I have a very fond place for Scandinavia and Sweden [00:01:00] and my heart, which you might not know. So it’s a place that I’ve visited quite often.

[00:01:04] And I’ve been doing more and more research within the Scandinavian context, which has been an Nordic context, which has been important to me recently. So I’d like to talk a little bit about that sort of research maybe a bit later on. So I’m a Kiwi. You can hear that in my accent. I grew up in a very small town in Aotearoa New Zealand, the first foreign language or local language that I learned is Te reo Māori.

[00:01:31] And I learned that as a primary school student, through the use of song and poem and a wonderfully warm teacher who I still remember today. So my first meeting of another language apart from English was a very warm and important one for me. And I then moved into learning French as a foreign language at school.

[00:01:52] And that was a completely different experience. That was a lot more regimented. There was a lot more grammatical work going on. I was very lucky to go [00:02:00] as an exchange student to Tahiti for six weeks, which from a New Zealand context is our backyard. And that opened my eyes to language being used in an everyday context to the kinds of language that I had learned

[00:02:14] in my high school and how useful some of it was and how useful some of it really wasn’t. So I found that there were some gaps in terms of my language knowledge. I then, as most Kiwis do, I went traveling or lucky Kiwis do. I went traveling and I traveled in a lot of places in Asia, for example. And then I finally did some teacher training in the UK and then went to live in Eastern Europe.

[00:02:39] So I have had several immersion situations where I have learned a language from nothing. Hungarian is one of those and what I found myself doing, at that point, as an adult learning Hungarian was vocabulary work because grammar never sang for me as somebody who is interested in language. So [00:03:00] I worked on it, but it was the vocabulary that I felt I needed.

[00:03:03] I needed the words for banana. I needed the words for cabbage. I needed all of that and I needed to be able to greet people. I needed to be able to say goodbye to them. And it wasn’t searching for the endings of verbs that worried me. It was the content words that I really needed. I then came home to New Zealand, which was a joy,

[00:03:21] and continues to be. And I went and did a post-graduate diploma at Victoria University of Wellington. And that’s where I found researchers such as Professor John Read, who’s now based at Auckland University, Professor Paul Nation, Emeritus Professor at Victoria University of Wellington. And these people were talking about things that really resonated with me as a teacher.

[00:03:42] When I went to, I was in John Read’s class on testing, read anything by John Read is the first thing I want to say. He’s enormously valuable as a researcher and experienced as a teacher. And he was talking about the University Word List and he said just very quietly, [00:04:00] somebody needs to update that research because it was done a long time ago and it just needs work.

[00:04:06] And I sat there thinking, I think I could do something like. Like I’m interested in words. I think, you know, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And I went and saw Paul Nation and said, you know, G’day, I’m Averil. I’d like to update the University Word List from 1984. He said, read these things.

[00:04:28] I said, okay. So I took those things away and thought a little bit more about what that project might be. And I went to see a mentor of mine, a man called Jim Dickey, who was a wonderful reader scholar in my school at the time. And he looked at me and he said, I think you should do research because you know what works, but you don’t know why.

[00:04:51] So I took that as a challenge and thought, okay. So that’s how I ended up working on the Academic Word List and that involves [00:05:00] sort of understanding a little bit more about what kinds of vocabulary I was looking for, why I was looking for that kind of work and I was also teaching English for academic purposes. So for me, there was a real need behind the research that I was doing, because I could see that I had students who needed help with the vocabulary.

[00:05:18] And I was working in a space where I needed to know what words were useful for the students. And why. And then I’m looking at a tool like making a word list and saying, well, what value does that have for me as a teacher? So I never expected the Academic Word List to become something that was quite so well known.

[00:05:41] One of the first things I did with it was put it online. So I’ve had a website and I was helped by one of my colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington. I went to her one day and said, look, I think this would be good as a website. She said, yeah, she was enormously helpful with doing that work. So it became something that was [00:06:00] readily available.

[00:06:00] And I think that’s one of the reasons why it got picked up so quickly. Another thing is that talented corpus scholars and computer scientists have also picked up on the Academic Word List so you can do things now with the word list that you never used to be able to do. So for example, through the Compleat Lexical Tutor, you can do an analysis of a text using the Academic Word List.

[00:06:24] You can do the same thing using AntConc, Laurence Anthony’s website. And these kinds of tools, what they can do is allow anybody to upload a text and take a look and see what Academic Word List words are there, how often they occur, what collocations or what multi-word unit patterns they’re involved in.

[00:06:42] So I think that sort of toolmaking and the first one was Sandra Hayward, who was at Nottingham university. I think those kinds of tools in that development of the Word List, which was really nothing to do with me has also been enormously valuable. So it means that you can look, I’ve seen a new tool where it takes each [00:07:00] of the sub-lists of the Academic Word List..

[00:07:01] So sub-list 1 has the most frequent word families, sub-list 2 next most frequent. And that’s really important because what that does, now is give us an idea out of any text, what’s the proportion of words that come from sub-list 1, for example. So that’s an innovation as well. And I think that’s on the Compleat Lexical Tutor website.

[00:07:20] So I think a long answer to your question, but I came to looking at vocabulary because of several key influences really, but part of it is about me and who I am as a teacher. I remember teaching one of my stepping in, you know, a colleague gets sick, so you teach their class. And I was teaching for one of my colleagues, Jonathan Newton, another person, I highly value in my field as a researcher, but also as a friend and I taught his class for two days and he stepped into the class on the Monday and came to see me and said, what did you do to my class?

[00:07:50] What do you mean, what did I do to your class? He said, they want to know all about the vocabulary and the text, and they want to know how they can approach these words as learning. And what’s the most important and what’s going… so [00:08:00] clearly the fire in me was something that ignited his class as well. So I think that what I learned a lot about through the master’s project is the importance of frequency of vocabulary.

[00:08:11] That’s really key and word lists can really help with that. So I’ve been doing work recently on technical vocabulary and trades education. So what words does a carpenter who’s in training need to know, plumbing, automotive engineering and the other one fabrication. And it’s a real contrast. If you take a technical word list, for example, the plumbing word list that we’ve developed or the fabrication word list.

[00:08:40] If you organize those word lists, according to alphabet, it’s very different to if you organize those word lists according to frequency. So for example, in automotive technology, the most important word may well be “check”, to check the engine, to [00:09:00] check the apparatus. But if you do it by alphabet, you get all the words that start with A, and then all the words that start with B.

[00:09:06] And really, that doesn’t tell us as much, give as much information as a word list, which has organized by frequency. So, the Academic Word List, I arranged in several ways. One, I put it by sub-list by frequency and you can also find it by sub-list and then by frequency in each of those sub-list. So it tells you not that the most frequent word is the one that starts with A, but actually potentially the most frequent word is one that starts with F or G for example.

[00:09:36] So I think that that’s really important to get your head around frequency. As a key player in vocabulary, not all words are frequent. Some words are much more frequent than others. So we know that with frequency, the most frequent words do the most work. So in English we have 50 words in English that do 50% of the work.

[00:09:55] Right. And then the law of return drops and drops and drops and drops. [00:10:00] So in recent research, I’ve been looking for example, with MA students at the vocabulary of textbooks. And we looked for example, in China and in Indonesia at vocabulary and textbooks. And what we’ve been finding there is that there are high-frequency vocabulary is not as, is there.

[00:10:22] And it’s something that everybody needs to learn. The first 2–3000 words of English, everybody needs that. Right. But what we found is that the textbooks often contain a lot of very low frequency words. So words that don’t occur very often. So you get, for example, in the Chinese textbook study, which was published as Yang and Coxhead 2020, in the RELC journal. What we found in that study was that in a reading about snakes, and this is for learners who are kind of low, intermediate, intermediate level learners.

[00:10:55] You get words like “viperine”. Well, as a learner, do you [00:11:00] ever need that word? I’m a first language speaker of English. I’ve just said that word to you, but I’ve never really needed that. It’s a bit of a worry to me, you know, because of course students, then if they don’t understand about frequency or they haven’t really thought about it before, what they’re thinking is I’m reading this to prepare for an exam.

[00:11:20] So therefore, probably I need to learn all of these words, but actually they don’t at all. So one of the things that Paul Nation often says in his 2013 book Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, and he has another edition coming out soon, by the way. But he’ll say, you know, that learners need to understand that frequency plays a big role and that not all words are worth learning.

[00:11:44] Right. So they need strategies in order to deal with those words to, first of all, understand what are the good principles for selecting vocabulary to learn? And I think we need to share that with our learners. Because they need to make decisions outside of the classroom as much as [00:12:00] inside of the classroom with us.

[00:12:01] So I think it’s really important that we understand that vocabulary, it has high frequency, mid frequency and low frequency, for example, and that those high-frequency vocabulary items, they occur in all texts and they cover most of the vocabulary in any text. So most texts that you give students, probably actually the first thousand words of English might cover between 80 to 85% of the words in that text.

[00:12:28] Now, if you’ve got students who are studying English for medical purposes, it’s a different picture. So what we find when we analyze those texts, and I’m thinking about an article or a chapter in a book by Kero and Coxhead from, I don’t know, 2017, I think, or 18 looking at medical vocabulary.

[00:12:47] High-frequency vocabulary covers much less of a medical textbook, around 65%. Why? Because there’s a whole lot of low frequency words, which are technical. They might be [00:13:00] Latin, Greek in origin, for example. And that, that vocabulary covers more of a proportion of those of those texts and mid-frequency vocabulary does too.

[00:13:09] So it depends on the kind of text that you’re working with, but we know that the best return for learning is going to be high frequency vocabulary. And that’s not just recognition. That’s also use, which is another major area of work that we need to be thinking about in our teaching and learning. I’m just going to go on folks! I’ve done some work in the New Zealand context and interviewing teachers,

[00:13:33] it’s something that I’m working on at the moment. I want to find out much more about what teachers understand about vocabulary and how they’re approaching it. Because I think that teachers are often pushing areas that research hasn’t caught up with yet. So I really want to find out more about what’s happening with teachers and what they’re thinking about and why they’re approaching things in those ways. Because they’re the ones who are dealing mostly with the students.

[00:13:55] I think it’s really important. And what I found out that, it was quite a small [00:14:00] scale study interviewing teachers within the New Zealand context who are working in secondary schools. And what I found is that the only main difference between any of these teachers in New Zealand schools, was that the ones who had more teaching experience were a little bit older and had spent more time in the classroom that as English as a second language teachers, what they did with their students that was different from the less experienced colleagues, was they made sure that students had plenty of opportunities to use these words either in speaking or in writing or preferably both.

[00:14:38] So I think that it’s really important to think about that point to say, what Nation calls creative use or generative use. So how many opportunities do students actually have to use words? And I don’t mean that they’ve just had an encounter with that word, it’s completely new to them, now you want them to write a sentence.

[00:14:56] I think we need to be careful about those kinds of activities, [00:15:00] but plenty of opportunities for for using words in context, plenty of opportunities for encountering the words, for thinking about them, using them in writing, preparing. To speak by writing first, we know that you’re more likely to use words if you plan first to use them, for example.

[00:15:18] So I think we have to think as teachers about what kinds of opportunities learners are getting. And not only what kinds of words we’re asking them to focus on and why, but then what do we want them to do with it? Because it’s not enough to just say here’s a word. Good. Carry on. Memory doesn’t work like that.

[00:15:36] You can remember the phone number of when you were a small child. Why? Because you learned it. It’s part of your heart, it’s part of your soul. And you used to use it all of the time. I learned it. I learned our phone number because I accidentally telephone called the local police instead of home.

[00:15:53] So, you know, you only do that once. Can I speak to your mother? Sure. Mum, it’s the police. This [00:16:00] isn’t good. So I think what I’m getting to is that there are a whole lot of principles and ideas that teachers may well be putting into practice and beliefs that they have. And what we need to be doing with the research is underpinning, making sure that what the teachers are doing and what the research is showing to be the most effective, actually connect in some way.

[00:16:19] And I think word list research is an area where often teachers say, I don’t know about word lists or, I know about them, but I don’t use them because I don’t know what to do, or I think they’re a bit useless or, you know, but, but they actually have a lot to offer.

[00:16:34] Since we are mainly in the Swedish context,

[00:16:37] I’m going to use that as a sort of stepping stone, perhaps. Language studies and language teaching used to be pretty much more controlled if we go back 30, 40 years in time. There were, much stricter guidelines as to what grammatical structures, were supposed to be covered when and so on and also word [00:17:00] lists.

[00:17:00] And in 1967, a book was published in Swedish, in Sweden called 10 words for 10 years of English vaguely suggesting that you learn 1000 words per year, somehow. There was a shorter version of that book called 8,000 words for eight years of English by a practicing teacher it was published in 1967.

[00:17:27] Now those kinds of lists are long gone, and what we now see is a much looser approach to that. Also in teacher education, we get questions from our language teacher students: what words should I teach? How should I know if they should know these words and what can I do?

[00:17:54] And one of the underlying questions there is, can I trust the textbook? You know, the [00:18:00] kind of vocabulary that sometimes pops up in textbooks. Words can be highly interesting because they are sort of in a context and you need to know them there and then to understand the text, but is it a word that the learners should learn eventually?

[00:18:18] So yes. If you could talk a bit more about how teachers can use these lists, such as, the Academic Word List or General Service List and so on. And perhaps if you could also say something about what do we mean by the Academic English Vocabulary Word List? What is academic about it? We’re just using, what kind of words are we looking for there?

[00:18:47] Questions that often comes up when we’re talking about English for academic purposes or academic vocabulary is what is academic vocabulary. And I think there are a couple of key points to think about here. One is that [00:19:00] academic vocabulary usually gets broken into two main areas. So you get English for general academic purposes.

[00:19:07] So that’s the vocabulary that occurs across subject areas. Doesn’t matter if you’re studying biology, chemistry, history, political relations, linguistics. Whatever. These words are going to turn up. So this was where I was focused. That’s the vocabulary I focused on when I was doing my research into the Academic Word List.

[00:19:28] Then you get English for specific academic purposes and that’s really, you know, what about biology? What about chemistry? Linguistics, what are the words that come up in those areas? So that’s very specialized and technical vocabulary and I’ve been doing a bit more work in that area recently, too, because I think that there are …medical vocabulary, for example, English, for general academic vocabulary, English for specific academic vocabulary.

[00:19:51] Right? So that’s, that’s the first thing one is occurring across the subject areas, that’s the general purposes and that’s words like “furthermore”, “ongoing”, you [00:20:00] know, and those kinds of words really don’t have much content to them. So these are the words that tend to be a little bit like the glue in the text. Then your specialized vocabulary, they’re much more content based and very closely connected to the subject area. And some of the work that I’ve been doing recently has been looking at that, those specialized words. And one of the reasons why I’ve been looking more at specialized vocabulary is that we’ve realized more recently that actually the proportion of those words in text is much higher than we initially thought.

[00:20:35] Now I need to go back to the English for general academic purposes work that I did with the Academic Word List. Just to talk about that a little bit, because there’s a key concept there that I think really needs to be talked about. I’ve talked about high-frequency vocabulary, right? As being the first, second, third thousand words of English.

[00:20:51] Now the most reliable word list of high-frequency general English is Paul [00:21:00] Nation’s, word lists, which were made from the British National and Contemporary Corpus of American English. So that’s, they’re called the BNZ COCA lists. And if you want to know about the research, that shows why they’re the best lists you can look at work by Yen Dang who’s at the University of Leeds in the UK, and she’s done some work with Stuart Webb and I, looking at evaluation of high-frequency word lists. So there’s that. Now, when I looked at the Academic Word List and was trying to develop this word list, I needed principles to select items. And one of the key ideas that I had at the time was that if you are a student who’s coming to study in New Zealand at a university, then probably you already know the first 2000 words of English.

[00:21:46] So I’m not going to look within the first 2000 words of English. I’m going to assume that you have that knowledge. Remember that at that time, because this is over 20 years ago, we were thinking that this [00:22:00] layer of academic vocabulary is going to be outside the first 2000 words of English. In which case I use the General Service List, it was the only one available at the time that was strong enough to do the work that I was doing. So thinking, first of all, that students would know that vocabulary. And that second of all, that the vocabulary we’re looking at was outside of that first 2000 words. Now we now know of course that high-frequency vocabulary can also be academic.

[00:22:27] So if we’ve made a change within the field and understood that there are words which are high frequency that are also academic in nature. So that’s why Dee Gardener, may he rest in peace, and Mark Davies developed the Academic Vocabulary List where they started from scratch and said, actually, potentially you could have words, which are high-frequency words that are academic.

[00:22:50] So let’s start with a very level playing field when it comes to the selection of vocabulary. So if you’re interested in their Academic Vocabulary List, they have a really wonderful [00:23:00] website, academicvocabulary.info. And I think they’ve got a new one called Just the Word www.just-the-word.com, but I’m not completely sure about that.

[00:23:06] You’d need to check. These are fabulous resources because they allow teachers to search for words in large corpora. I’ve got a student at the moment who’s looking at the vocabulary of CoVid for example. Looking at Governmental communication around, CoVid, looking at the proportion of technical vocabulary in those texts as well as multi-word units.

[00:23:27] So one way to do that work is to gather a local corpus of people speaking. There’s one of the dogs, sorry. Gathering a local corpus of people speaking and then comparing it against a larger corpus, which you can do because of work by people like Mike Davies. So you could be taking a look at newer academic general Academic Word List, such as the Academic Vocabulary List.

[00:23:51] And we’ve also got a new Academic Spoken Word List, which is also Yen Dang, Stuart Webb. So we’ve got the [00:24:00] the new Academic Vocabulary List, which was from 2014. Then you’ve also got the spoken Academic Word List, which is Yen Dang’s work with Stuart Webb and I. And that’s available through her website as well.

[00:24:12] So that’s targeting the vocabulary of academic spoken English. The reason why I’m talking about that spoken word list is it actually contains a large amount of high-frequency vocabulary. So you’ve got that crossover thing going on with those words. The second thing that’s important to say about that high-frequency vocabulary is that unfortunately we’re finding in testing studies that learners often don’t know the first couple of thousand words of English or that they have gaps in their knowledge. That’s important because high-frequency vocabulary is really important.

[00:24:44] We know that it covers a lot of the vocabulary in any text. We also know that learners often think that these words are easy and that they know them, but actually when you test them in some way, they’re not as easy as we think. Now, one of the studies [00:25:00] that Paul Nation and I did, and this was one of my favorite pieces of research, but it’s kind of buried a little bit. But it was looking at what happens when you test a group of learners all at once versus sitting alongside learners and testing them one-on-one. Okay. The reason why we did this research and it was in New Zealand secondary schools. And I think any researcher at any time should step inside a school and just see what teachers do every day, because it is extraordinary. So, what happened with that research was that Paul Nation had an MA student who wasn’t me, who was teaching in a local secondary school. And he gave the Vocabulary Levels Test, which had a second thousand, third thousand, fifth thousand and tenth thousand and Academic Word List levels. He gave that test to a group of students in his high school. And what he found is that the first language speakers of English didn’t score very well on that test.

[00:25:55] And Paul thought, that’s a bit strange, right? Because first language [00:26:00] speakers should actually score quite well on that test. So what Paul did is he arranged to visit the school and he sat individually with students and he just encouraged them. So if they were slowing down or there’s something happening, he’d just say, keep going now you’re doing well.

[00:26:14] Or if they, if he wanted them to say a word like “paradigm” or whatever it is. And he would provide the word in spoken form and they’d go, ah, and then away they went. They doubled their scores. Now either they doubled the scores because they had the chance to repeat the test, but they had no idea that that was going to happen to them that day.

[00:26:34] Maybe they doubled their scores because Paul Nation is a nice man to sit next to maybe they doubled their scores because they were concentrating or engaged in the testing process. So we then took that little study and then we said, okay. So what happens when we go into a much bigger population and we get people to sit the Vocabulary Size Test, which gives you a measure of how many words learners know.

[00:26:57] So that’s a total score, not a level score. [00:27:00] And we got them to sit in groups and individually, and either you did it individually first, then in a group, or you did it in a group and then you did it individually. And for individually, we had students sitting with researchers that we had trained and their job was to sit and provide encouragement and just keep people focused, keep people moving on, moving through the test.

[00:27:23] Now, one thing we find with this test is that it often gets to a point when you’re doing the tests, especially up the 20,000 level, that actually you’re reaching the limits of your vocabulary knowledge. So people can find it quite challenging from a personal perspective. And normally the people who step up to take a vocabulary science test think that they’ve got a good vocabulary size, right?

[00:27:42] So you’re dealing with a couple of different elements in this research. If we were in a class right now, and I was talking to you about this research, I would ask you to stop and have a chat to the person next to you. What do you think would be the result of that research, where you’re taking people when you’re getting them to set a test [00:28:00] individually, and then they’re sitting a different version of the same test, which is a comparable version, they’re going to do it in groups. What are the results we’re going to see? So what we found was that if you’re in the top quarter, so you’re the top students in terms of the scores, it didn’t matter. Group, individual doesn’t matter to you. Next group down, there was a difference, but it wasn’t statistically significant.

[00:28:22] So in other words, you’re going to do okay as well. The third quarter, more of a difference. You did better on the individual than the group, but again, nothing that really raises big flags. The group that really showed a big difference between sitting the test individually and sitting tests in the group was the lowest quarter.

[00:28:42] So the weakest test takers. Now, what does that mean? We do most of our testing in New Zealand in groups. I can’t think of any time where I have sat a test individually as a student. And certainly not really, ever given a test,, apart from when students really [00:29:00] needed a bit of extra support, as a teacher, in which case they just came to my office or we meet somewhere and they would do the test with me, or they might be special- needs student who needs a reader- writer or somebody who just needs that extra support.

[00:29:12] So, if you are teaching a class of students and you’ve got people who are really struggling and you’re going to give them a test of vocabulary size, or vocabulary levels, for example, using the Updated Vocabulary Levels Test from Stuart Webb, which tests the first 5,000 words of English, test them individually

[00:29:31] if you think they’re going to struggle. Now, I’m not saying, you’re not going to test the whole group individually. I think you really need to be saying as a teacher, these guys, if I just sit with them and encourage them and keep them on task, this is going to show, give a better representation of the vocabulary knowledge that they have.

[00:29:47] So I think this kind of research, it’s not easy. It’s not easy to do. It’s not easy for schools to organize students. It’s not easy to fit this into a busy [00:30:00] working day within a school, but actually it speaks to the kinds of things that we might think about as teachers. You might already give tests one-on-one to students because you’ve understood as a teacher that actually there’s an issue for them, or there’s something that they need as extra support.

[00:30:16] Now, my question is, as a vocabulary researcher, do you test vocabulary knowledge at all in Sweden? I know the Norwegian context testing is not seen as something that is done and certainly vocabulary is not something that plays a major role in language teaching in the Norwegian context, or even in the Danish context from what I can see. I might be wrong about that.

[00:30:40] But if we’re thinking that vocabulary is something which is enormously important, everybody needs it, why are we not finding out much more about the vocabulary knowledge that our students have? If you gave students the Updated Vocabulary Levels Test, which tests the first 5,000 levels of the most frequent words in English, based on Paul [00:31:00] Nation’s work, what results are you going to get?

[00:31:02] So you might find for example, that your students have a really strong knowledge of the first 5,000 words of English. That would be fantastic. You might find that some students have got holes in their vocabulary that you could drive a truck through, in which case that’s a problem. So we can be using word lists in a way to develop tests that are useful for us, for students and for teachers.

[00:31:26] We can be using word list to take a look at the kinds of texts that we’re using in our class to see whether or not we’re actually presenting texts that might be high interest, but have a whole lot of vocabulary that our learners really don’t need. So we’re actually making a point of selection here to say, if I run this through a vocabulary profiler, and I find that there’s a lot of low frequency words like “viperine”, you’ve got a job to do as a teacher. Either you say, I’m going to keep this vocabulary in there, raise the awareness of my learners to say: these words, you’re not going to need, but we could work on a strategy [00:32:00] whereby you take a look at their word and you try and guess the meaning of that word without trying to learn it, so guessing meaning from context strategy, or you could replace that word with another word that’s going to be more useful and word lists can help you with that. So they can be identifying words that are academic. They can be identifying words that are technical and they can be saying, look, how often do these words occur?

[00:32:24] So another way of looking at that text might be to say, this word occurs. I think it’s really important. Actually, I’m going to adapt the text so it occurs several times rather than just once, because we know that repetition helps with vocabulary learning, right? So you could be taking the text and just seeding or putting in more of these words, repeating them to help the learners to say, okay, so this word’s important.

[00:32:49] I’m saying it’s important because it’s here a couple of times for a start, so you could repeat it. We could say this word is not important. I’m going to take it out. Put another word in there. You could also be adapting texts so that you [00:33:00] highlight words that are the ones that you want your learners to notice.

[00:33:04] And that’s important too, because highlighting draws attention to words. And we know that attention is one of those elements of educational psychology. Through educational psychology, we know that highlighting words means that draws attention. And that means that learners will focus on those words more.

[00:33:20] Right? So there are all kinds of tricks and tips for vocabulary teaching, which is not: today, we’re going to teach five words. It’s not about that at all. It’s saying, what kinds of words am I presenting to my students? How much reading are they doing? How much listening are they doing? Under what sort of conditions? How am I highlighting that vocabulary? Is this vocabulary really needed for my students? Do they need it tomorrow as much as they need it today to understand this text? Now, one thing I haven’t talked about so much is multi-word units. So we’re doing more and more research looking at multi-word units.

[00:33:58] So those are words that occur [00:34:00] commonly occur together. And it’s not just random that they occur together. These words statistically belong. They have a strong connection, right? So one of the things one of my PhD students is working on is the development of a test of academic collocations because these are collocations such as “wide range” would be a good example.

[00:34:22] So “wide range” they belong together. So what she’s been looking at is developing a test of recognition and then a test of recall of these academic collocations and the collocations come from the Academic Collocations List. And if you’re interested in that list, there’s a wonderful website called the EAP foundation website.

[00:34:42] And what that website does is it takes existing word lists, gives a bit of background and detail on these word lists. Then it’s got general academic purposes lists. It’s got secondary school vocabulary lists that have been created by Clarence Green and [00:35:00] his colleague James Lambert, for example, in the Singaporean context, and using UK textbooks as well.

[00:35:08] Those two researchers have also produced secondary school phrase lists in, for example, history science, maths. So the EAP foundation website has got those word lists there. And what you can do is upload your texts and it will highlight the items in your texts that come from various lists.

[00:35:25] Right? So that’s a really great tool. And again, you can print out your text with those items highlighted, which means it draws attention to those items there too. But it can also tell you the proportion of multi-word units, for example, in the texts. Now, what we know about academic collocations is that, well, what we know about multi-word units is there are many of them in English, and that up to 30–50% of any texts might contain multi-word units. But one of the issues is they don’t tend to get [00:36:00] repeated as often as single words, they don’t have that high frequency that single words can have, but learners need them because they’re really important for fluency and reading. They’re really important for fluency. And speaking, for example, they help our writing.

[00:36:14] If you use more multi-word units in writing, you get higher scores. So we don’t just think about vocabulary as single words, but also what are the commonly used words that go with them. So there are lots of tools available for teachers to be looking at multi-word units as well. And we’ve got a paper under review at the moment, which looks at the impact of an intervention where a teacher was raising learners’ awareness in Vietnam of multi-word units, training learners to recognize them because that’s important, right? You might not think of something as being a multi-word unit. So it’s helpful for learners to figure out, help figure out and test their wings about what is a multi-word unit.

[00:36:55] As part of that program in Vietnam, that teacher had access [00:37:00] to corpora. We’re using the Davies and Gardner Academic Vocab website with the Corpus of Contemporary American English. It’s very easy to find. She trained learners to use that program so that they could search for multi-word units and take a look at them in context.

[00:37:19] She also had multi-word units in dictionaries. So helping learners look for dictionaries use as well. So the first thing that she was doing in that program was training the learners to know what a multi-word unit possibly looks like, and then to make decisions about whether they want to use them or not. And what we found in that study was that the learners who got trained up and using and looking at multi-word units, their awareness really grew, but also they started to use these words in their own writing without any prompting from the teacher at all.

[00:37:49] So, because they grew in confidence and these activities where they’re looking and focusing on multi-word units, they actually then started to use them later on in writing that wasn’t [00:38:00] really related to what they’d been doing earlier in class. So that’s good news. What does that mean? That means that a teacher does not have to stand there and say today’s 10 words are these. The teacher can say, I’m going to train you to be better at strategy use, to decide what words you want to use? What words do you want to learn? Why you want to learn them, how they speak to you and then providing opportunities for use later on and for feedback as well.

[00:38:27] So word lists can be useful for guiding what kind of vocabulary you could be looking at according to frequency, they can be useful for analyzing the texts that you’ve got to try and find out what vocabulary is in them and what vocabulary isn’t.

[00:38:46] And if you’ve got vocabulary in it which is low frequency and not useful, replace it. Word lists can help you with that. They can help identify multi-word units as well to try and see what’s in here and what gets repeated. And that [00:39:00] means that you can start looking across your area. If you’ve got all your texts available electronically, then you could be saying, what am I doing at the start of the year?

[00:39:08] What am I doing in the middle of the year? Does this vocabulary come back round again? If it does, that’s great. If it doesn’t, we’ve got a problem because we forget quickly. When it comes to vocabulary, it really needs to speak to us. Learners need plenty of opportunity to use it. Now I want to talk a little bit about Nation’s Four Strands as well.

[00:39:27] And I don’t know if you’ve covered this before. Is it something that you’ve read about?

[00:39:31] Very much so! I would say the whole CIRCLE project is based on the Four Strands.

[00:39:35] Right? Fantastic. So I won’t cover the Four Strands so much, but one of the things that I get questioned a lot about is how can teachers teach the Academic Word List? Now what Paul Nation would say is that’s not a good question to ask.

[00:39:49] A good question to ask is what are the opportunities I can provide my learners? How can I plan for academic vocabulary in my classroom? So one of the first things is to think about it. And to [00:40:00] plan for it and say, well, what’s the vocabulary my learners need? Now we found in a Norwegian project with Kimberly Skjelde, she tested the academic vocabulary, knowledge of learners in I think their junior high school students. I get a bit confused with the system there. And what she found is that actually learners had some knowledge of general academic vocabulary in English, but there were gaps. Then they didn’t really display as much mastery as we would have thought, because you’re talking about a population of students who are quite immersed in English in a way, right?

[00:40:34] So they’ve got a lot of everyday English, but academic vocabulary is not vocabulary of the everyday. Some of it will be in terms of being high-frequency vocabulary, but it might be used in a different, the vocabulary might be used in a different way in the school context. I did a study looking at New Zealand secondary school students and asking about specialized vocabulary, for example, in biology or chemistry.

[00:40:58] And these teachers, you [00:41:00] could see them, they were quite frustrated because, they said that the technical vocabulary of their subject area, actually first language speakers need this as much as second language speakers need it. And this vocabulary really only occurs in school. So you don’t often talk about respiration, for example, outside the school context, it’s not a kind of normal thing that people do.

[00:41:20] You tend to do this work in school. So as teachers, they were saying, you know, Oh, I try several ways to work on the technical vocabulary of my field with my students. But the difficulty is words that have an everyday meaning in English, but a specific meaning in my field. And they found that really difficult, because we know from work like David Corson, may he rest in peace,

[00:41:43] the Australian researcher who was based in Canada for many years, two things. One is that this academic language is very much bounded by the context that it’s in, but also that if people don’t get exposure to that language outside of the classroom, it tends [00:42:00] not to stick so much. And that our default is high-frequency vocabulary.

[00:42:04] We will go back to using high-frequency vocabulary because we’re comfortable with that vocabulary. So one of the stretchers can be how to work with students to say, look, I know you think, you know this word, but here’s a new context for this word. And what’s the learning from our earlier knowledge of this word that can help us with understanding this word in this new context.

[00:42:27] So what the teachers were doing was they were using a variety of strategies. They were using word parts. So words like photosynthesis, they were breaking those words down. These are highly experienced secondary school teachers. So they knew about word parts. They knew that that would help their learners. They would also do a lot of restriction: we’re going to use this word and we’re only going to use it in the technical way in this classroom.

[00:42:52] So I’m going to restrict the usage and I will correct my students. I’ll set up the opportunities for them to use these words. And I will [00:43:00] correct my students when they don’t quite get it right. I’ll make sure that peers correct them when they don’t quite get that right. But you could sense the frustration that students would say, well, look, I already know what respiration means.

[00:43:11] And the chemistry teacher would say. No, you don’t. Not in my context, you don’t, and it’s a real problem and it’s not just for second language speakers. It’s for first language speakers as well. And I think that in that Norwegian research, I think what we’re seeing is that learners think they know this word, these words, but if we test them, is the problem that they’re being tested?

[00:43:35] They’re not used to that, or is the problem that actually we are finding some gaps in their knowledge. And I think that anything that we do with testing, where we’re finding gaps in knowledge, we need to actually talk with the students about this, to say, there’s that wonderful quote, nobody’s a native speaker of academic English.

[00:43:51] So this is something everybody needs to be thinking about. And there are word lists of middle school, for example, maths [00:44:00] chemistry, social sciences, history. They are the middle school vocabulary lists, and they’re available on the EAP foundation website. And I worked with Jen Greene to develop those lists, for example.

[00:44:09] So there are word lists out there that can target your learners and you could be doing something very simpleat the start of it. If you’re a content teacher, you could be doing something simple with word lists to say, here’s, sub-list one of the Academic Word List. You tick the words that. Or, you tick the words that you’re confident you can use because that’s something else to think about as well.

[00:44:29] Most learners, when you do that, they give you an honest response to that. And then you can say, well, okay, if you know these things, then where are the gaps for you? What is it that we could be working on usefully for your vocabulary? The other thing about use is giving feedback and if your students are writing and you find that they’re using the first thousand words of English only, then there’s a challenge for them as to say, you actually know a lot more than you’re using here.

[00:44:54] And we know that our receptive knowledge is much bigger all the time than our productive knowledge. So pushing the [00:45:00] production is really important too. The last thing I want to say about multi-word units, as we did some work with Frank Boers, who’s now at Western University in Canada. He was with us for a few years, which was great.

[00:45:11] Looking at common activities from textbooks to do with vocabulary and multi-word units. So what we did there is we had these common activities, like fill in the gaps or odd man out, crossing out which ones are wrong, things like that. And looking to see what happens when you get people to fill in one gap of a multi-word unit.

[00:45:34] So there might be two items that are a multi-word unit, but we’re only going to have one gap. So you fill in one word of the two, compared to putting in the whole multi-word unit. Does that make sense? So, it was holistic, the whole thing versus analytical. We found two main things, and this is a little bit of scary time in terms of being a teacher and looking at research. [00:46:00] So what we found is, first of all, those activities were not very good for retention of vocabulary knowledge. They really don’t do a great job in terms of providing a memory trace. We also found that learners who got something right in the pretesting after they went through our intervention study sometimes got things wrong afterwards.

[00:46:23] So in the process of doing that work, they started to misassociate things and they learned the wrong thing. So we scrambled them. And that makes me feel a bit sick. And then the last thing, the last thing was that when we got them to focus on the whole unit, it was better for vocabulary retention of those units.

[00:46:47] Right? So those analytical ones where you’re just filling in one word of two, stop doing that for a start. So if you’re going to keep going with these activities, you need to be looking at the whole multi-word unit. Okay. So, [00:47:00] those kinds of activities, where you’re getting people to fill in gaps and do things, I think that they lack the richness that learners need in order to grow their vocabulary knowledge and grow their vocabulary confidence. So research that I’ve done looking at vocabulary use, a lot of it is confidence. That they actually are taking a risk and if learners are taking a risk when they’re trying to use these vocabulary items, they’re more likely to take a risk if they’re in a secure environment, if they know that their attempts to use vocabulary are going to be respected and not the victim of a drive-by shooting, you know, not lots and lots of red on the page. So it can take a lot of confidence for people to actually start using vocabulary that they’re not that confident with.

[00:47:44] The other thing I wanted to say now there’s a researcher in the USA called Joe Barcroft. And Joe was looking at what happens when learners get presented with a new word, and then they have to write a sentence. That’s often what teachers do they say? Here’s a word,now then write a sentence. What he found is that learners [00:48:00] split their attention when they have to do that.

[00:48:04] And if they’re focusing on the meaning, they don’t remember the form. And if they’re focusing on the form, they don’t remember the meaning. So when we’re asking learners to do that, it’s the equivalent of sending a text while you’re driving. Your brain doesn’t then encode well. You don’t get a good, strong memory trace.

[00:48:20] So I think that when it comes to vocabulary, I think there’s a whole lot of us out there doing research on vocabulary. And I think that there’s a lot more to be done and it’s not all about word lists, but word lists are a key part to try and understand a lot more about what vocabulary is in the language that we’re presenting to students.

[00:48:40] And they’re a way to analyze the texts that we’ve got. There are more multi-word unit word lists out there too, but they can be quite tricky to develop. You had a question for me about some of the work that I’m doing at the moment. I’ve been doing a lot more work on languages other than English and vocabulary.

[00:48:59] And this is something that [00:49:00] I think is really important. And I’m thinking about scholars like Dr Anne Sofie Jakobsen who’s in Denmark, and she has done work on Danish and Danish academic vocabulary, and general vocabulary in Danish, which connects through to scholars in Iceland, who also have been looking about the learning of Danish as a second language.

[00:49:20] I’ve been looking at what happens when you take a word list, like a technical word list from our work in trades education. And if you’re interested in trades education, we’ve written a book about this through Routledge called English for vocational purposes, by the way. So a couple of things about that work: one is that a colleague, Kiko (Falakiko Tu’amoheloa) has translated those word lists into Tongan using experts in the trades and using his considerable skills. And I suspect some of his family members considerable skills as well. And we found out some really useful things when we did that translation work. So one is that when you get a scholar like me and you put [00:50:00] me into a whole new context, I lack skills that other people have.

[00:50:04] So I really enjoyed learning much more about what it means to be a scholar working in bilingual circumstances. We found that the technical vocabulary in plumbing, for example, that Tongan shares high-frequency technical vocabulary with English. So that’s good news because what that means is that the students who are studying in Tongan have these words already and they know them in Tongan, and then they have an equivalent in English.

[00:50:32] That’s great. So that means that those learners have a really strong start. Right. But the low frequency, technical words, they generally don’t have those words in Tongan. So we had to do a couple of things. One was to really have translations of what these things actually are. So the translations ended up being quite long because you have to really describe them.

[00:50:58] Another thing we found is that sometimes [00:51:00] there are multiple words in English that are technical, like check diagnose and test. We use all of those and in Tongan they use one word to do those things. So that has an implication for learning. Right. So learners are thinking, well, it’s just this word.

[00:51:15] But actually English has several. So that means that I need to recognize those words when they get used. And I have to look at the collocations or multi-word units around them to see what kinds of things get checked. What kinds of things get diagnosed? What kinds of things get tested? You know what I mean?

[00:51:35] So we also found that there were words that had been “Tonganised”. So they got taken from English and put into Tongan. So what that means is that the sound may have changed a bit because we use a sound in English which doesn’t exist in Tongan. So they’ve changed it. What that means is that if these learners are going from Tonga, coming into the New Zealand context, for example, we need to recognize they already know a lot [00:52:00] and they’re not struggling with content knowledge of this field. They’re highly knowledgeable. They know a lot more than somebody who’s just been working in the New Zealand context and is starting their studies. Right. But they might not know the low-frequency technical vocabulary, and that’s where we need to be targeting the work. And through word list, that’s where we find out those things. Okay. I’ve been doing more work on traditional Chinese medicine with one of my PhD students. There’s a lot, there’s really a lot. And I think that there’s a lot to be done in Sweden, in schools and in universities to try and find out much more about what happens with vocabulary in those contexts and what teachers and learners are struggling with and what they’re championing.

[00:52:43]

[00:52:43] There are so many, there are so many things in vocabulary that speak to teaching and then can have such an impact on learners. That’s the thing. If I had known about frequency when I was learning, I mean, I know it now, so, you know, I’m [00:53:00] picking up in my language thing. I know what I need to do in order to really take charge of my vocabulary. I want to give you a very simple teaching activity that I used to use when I was teaching English for academic purposes, if that’s okay. What I used to do in my class, and I saw them every day, oh no, four days a week for 12 weeks. And what I used to do was take a shoebox, and I always had lots of vocabulary on the board at the end of a class. And we’d go through and say “in the box or not in the box” and select, you know, it’s going in the box, why it’s not going in the box, why not?

[00:53:38] And then the students would choose the words that they wanted to put into the box. Everybody would make word cards and work cards are important because with a word card, you can’t see the back. So you have to use your brain, right. To remember things. So it’s not monkey see, monkey do, like textbooks, not textbooks, vocabulary lists in a book.

[00:53:58] So students would make their own [00:54:00] cards and you could see that they put a lot of care and effort into it because what they were doing was, was developing a resource for everybody in the room. Right. So the words would go onto the cards and there’d be a definition in English on the back or a common collocation or whatever it was about that word that everybody really thought was important for their learning.

[00:54:21] Usually after 10 weeks, I would have 800, 900 words in that box. That’s a substantial amount of vocabulary. What I found after a couple of weeks is I would say, what about this word then? And students would say, no, it’s in the box. Or they would say, oh yeah, we’ve got that one in the box, but that’s the new word family member or no, there’s a collocation here.

[00:54:42] And they use that language with me. So in the end, you’d end up with this enormous resource. And in class, you’ve always got some students who finish early or. So you can develop activities using those word cards, you know, so getting them to test each other, for example, when, if you’ve ever done students testing each other, they’re much harder on [00:55:00] each other than a teacher Ever is.

[00:55:02] They did writing activities, they did sorting activities. They did all kinds of stuff with those words. And every so often I’d go into class early just to see how everybody’s doing, say good morning, do that stuff. And usually there’d be a group of people and they’d be just going through the cards, passing them around having a bit of a chat, doing that sort of stuff.

[00:55:20] So they had regular repetition of that vocabulary and those students grew, their vocabulary grew over that time because they had something very simple, very targeted. Now I know that that strategy was really useful, because usually somebody would steal all of the cards out of the box on the last day of class.

[00:55:39] So you’d go into the class and the whole class would sit there, going somebody stole, you know, you see them look at each other. It’s like, who? Did you take all the cards out of the box? Who did that? And I mean, that means that people think that this is, this is a great enough resource that they’ll actually go to those kinds of lengths.

[00:55:55] Now, something simple, like that means that that vocabulary is given attention. [00:56:00] The learners buy into it. Everybody knows what it’s for. Everybody knows the principles of why we’re doing what we’re doing. And they know that this is something. It’s going to be helpful for everybody. And so it’s like, like a common, you share the responsibility really, and you share that learning and testing of each other and working with those words.

[00:56:22] Now, I don’t currently teach in English for academic purposes class, but if I was going to do that again, any class, I would immediately start that one more time. It’s so simple, so simple and so valuable. Beautiful activity!. That’s a wonderful gift I think to the teachers who are listening to this, to have that, to take away with them from this talk.

[00:56:47] I’ve kind of covered most of it. I think that I’ve done a lot more research since I did the Academic Word List for a start.

[00:56:59] So [00:57:00] one of the dangers of word lists for example, is monkey see, monkey do learning. So we don’t want that. We need these words to be appearing in context, and to be part of rich instruction. Another danger is that people start at A and go to B and go to C. Life doesn’t work like that, vocabulary doesn’t work like that.

[00:57:16] Well, thank you so much for talking to us, Averil. Wonderful.

Here is a translated transcript in English of the interview with teachers Rusalina Ehnvall and Ewa-Katharina Baedecke which you can find on the CIRCLE page Teachers talking about teaching grammar.

TN: Tore Nilsson; UC: Una Cunningham; EB: Ewa Baedecke; RE: Rusalina Ehnvall

TN: CIRCLE’s previous recordings have basically always included conversations with researchers, either doctoral researchers or doctoral students. We thought when we go one more lap with this CIRCLE project, that we also want to include teacher voices. We are very happy that Ewa Baedecke from Lidingö and Rusalina Ehnvall from Linköping are with us today. Ewa, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you teach, and Rusalina will do the same thing.

EB: My name is Ewa Baedecke and I now work at Hersby Gymnasium, where I have German and Swedish

RE: I teach English at Birgittaskolan in Linköping. This is a secondary school with three study preparation and two vocational preparation programs. There is a high proportion of students with multilingual background. It varies from year to year. The average is 50 percent. There has been a lot of social development that has changed our view of language learning. When I took my master’s degree in linguistics in the 90s, there was a completely different view of what language learning means, what the role of grammar is in language teaching. And I think it was sometime in the 2010s when I saw that there has been some change in the students, that they work in different ways. That maybe the grammar skills have changed. That reading comprehension has changed. And I had to go back to the school bench. My then principal at Birgittaskolan sent me and a colleague to analyze learning in linguistic contexts and then all of a sudden, a whole new world opened up for me. I understood that things have happened, not only in the school world, but also in the research world. Because I read then about discourse analysis, for example, and conversation analysis, which have become very important tools in exploring what is happening in the classroom. I think there is even more interest for that, to develop teaching that corresponds to societal changes. And here I mean the multilingual classroom, which has become increasingly common. Here I also mean digitalisation. It has also changed language learning and the conditions for it.

UC: You both have worked for a long time as language teachers, and have a lot of experience and have been involved when the wind blows in different directions. How do you see the role of grammar in language teaching? Has it changed? Has it become less important or more important? I see a difference between how English teachers think about grammar in language teaching and how teachers of modern languages think. Have thought about that?

EB: When you are going to learn a modern language, it is important to have these tools and not everyone really has it the same today. I became a teacher in 1983, quite a long time ago, and since then there have been some reforms and the school has been municipalized. And we no longer have directions about exactly what to go through each semester. And as a student said the other day to me: Grammar is actually a necessary evil. Otherwise, it is difficult to write a full sentence if you do not hear the language much. As a Swedish teacher I see that in order for them continuing studying languages at higher levels, which we would like in modern languages in high school, it would be desirable for them to revise basic Swedish grammar in the first year of upper secondary school, not as now in the second year. And you can see this in Swedish texts as well, that students have no sense of grammar, for subjects and objects. And I think sometimes it is important to try to interest them in this and not give up abstract thinking. It is not easy for them when there is so much else, as you mentioned, Rusalina. Today everything is the push of a button away, and it should go quickly, and even vocabulary learning is hard work. Everyone needs grammar to be able to go further and develop their language. We started discussing whether it was possible to find a common platform and not get the students to drop out and give up. We have students who come (from lower secondary ) with top grades in Spanish, French and German but can’t really put the sentences together But they also read and write less in their own mother tongue. English teachers sometimes say that they can almost express themselves better in English than in Swedish. I don’t know if that’s true

TN: What do you say, Rusalina, about the role and language proficiency of grammar?

RE: I think grammar here that you, Ewa, are talking about is at the centre of being able to talk about the language, being able to have grammar as an analytical tool, to be able to see things in the language, see the structures. And then we have grammar as some kind of expression of language skill and correctness, so that it gets right. I think we need to use a little more of the thinking that teachers of modern languages have because that’s right, we have a situation where a lot of students learn English outside of school. Then it’s harder to motivate them to a more explicitly structured teaching of grammar that leads to the development of the language and skills. It is needed for some students who have a little more difficulty with English,  but it is true that there are very many students who do not see a sense in grammar teaching as a means of developing a meta-language, the meta-linguistic awareness that Ewa mentioned. This is increasingly important the further you get in your language studies. Then you really need to get control of the language to adapt speech and text to the situation.  And then all of a sudden in upper secondary school it becomes an obstacle that you have not learned this, that you do not have the meta-language, which Ewa brings up. And then there is a difference between learning English in Sweden and learning modern languages in Sweden. It comes a little later, where implicit language learning doesn’t work as well as explicit. But learning English in upper secondary school requires more explicit tools and explicit teaching of language structures. I think both traditions need to be met.

EB: A speaker of German, French or Spanish should be able to understand a text that the students write. But still I hear my English colleagues tell me that students cannot use third person singular in the highest level of English 7,  yet they sometimes think that they are better than they really are at expressing themselves, at least in writing. When it comes to German, then I can say that there the students come a lot further. I have been responsible for the German language diploma since 1997 (it is like the Cambridge Certificate), where you can see that the Germans have also now become more lenient in this test. It does not have to be perfect grammatically. You should include certain structures and you should be able to write, argue and make yourself understood.

When I have teacher students, they often look for guidance on what to go through semester by semester. When you become a teacher it needs to be quite hands-on. We have fantastic aids that some colleagues of mine put out to explain to students what they need to know. My teacher students are looking for something that tells them where students should be when they come to upper secondary school to continue studying the language they began in lower secondary school. They have such incredibly different prior knowledge, so to motivate them to continue and to choose the next language course is not completely unproblematic.

RE: I agree with you It’s a very difficult balancing act between staying motivated, working on tasks that feel meaningful and at the same time sticking to certain requirements for the language form. It’s definitely a challenge

TN: I think about what we’re talking about here is an attempt at a specification of language proficiency levels: What does it mean to be at this level? What does it mean to do this? And I think about how CEFR, the common European framework of reference for languages, how it is operationalized in a number of such “can do claims” If you look at our course and subject syllabi, they are not very specific. Is there a gap here? Ewa, you said that the teacher students want lists of different grammatical structures to go through. I sometimes show teacher students the documents that we used in the 1970s when I was at school. When I myself became a teacher these were still being referred to. It was very clearly specified what needed to be covered, and it was very clear also in terms of word knowledge. Of course, when we teach something, it does not mean that learning takes place. Ewa, you said that students in English 7 still make mistakes on third person -s in English—Yes, our university students do too. And we know that from other types of research,  that it is such a lightweight morpheme that means very little, but that is grammatically important and it becomes automated very late, and it does not matter how much teaching they get. They know the rule, but it does not work in practice. Now this question may be a little provocative here: do you as teachers have too much freedom of movement in what you do?

RE: I would say yes to a certain extent, because there are schools that do not have any teaching materials, for example. If you come out to such a school and you have your first class, although you may have been with your supervisor for three periods, I think it may mean that you want to meet everyone’s needs. Every student also has different conditions and needs help in different ways in different schools depending on whether there are support hours or if there are resources at home.

EB: When I ask, they can say that we did all this in seventh, eighth, ninth grade, but when we sit one by one and go through it, there may be gaps Like you said, Tore, they’re there, but they’re not really present. I don’t know if we’re sloppy with the language generally a little more today. The main thing is making themselves understood, the focus is on communication.

UC: I want to ask you, Ewa, if you think that your view of explicit language skills and grammar skills is influenced by the fact that you are also a Swedish teacher. As a German teacher, is your view of explicit language skills and meta-language affected?

EB: Yes, I think it is yes, absolutely.

UC: If you compare with colleagues who teach English or modern languages and who are not also Swedish teachers, do they see the role of explicit language skills differently?

EB: I think teachers who have Swedish and history or Swedish and religion and so do not view grammar as a tool until they are struck by the fact that students can’t distinguish between they and them, [de, dem], and he and him [han, honom] and such things. On the other hand, I can say that what I have noticed in my future teachers who have been on a school placement with me is that earlier, ten years ago, I had teachers who did not want to teach grammar at all. I have had teacher students who have said that they do not really see the point of teaching grammar and here of course their own teaching is affected. These things are affected by trends in the current school debate. The view of grammar teaching varies between language teachers. And if those who have another subject in their qualification or in their teacher education may be more focused on subject knowledge than the language form. I have felt a great need for collaboration and cooperation with the university to further develop my teaching.

RE: This large proportion of multilingual students means that we can no longer use grammar books written in Swedish to explain English. You may be able to use other grammar books that have examples in English, to explain a particular language phenomenon, but it is not easy when you are not really used to drawing conclusions about the form and content of the language.

UC: A little more inductive grammar teaching, perhaps?

RE: Exactly. I think it’s definitely a disadvantage when we teach grammar in multilingual classrooms, and we avoid translation exercises that may be aimed at specific linguistic structures. There is a lot to do, because there is this awareness that Ewa raised in the beginning, language as a tool for thinking and for expression. I see a need for such a development.

UC: Can you imagine translation exercises working against multiple languages at the same time? Looking at an English expression?

RE: You can translate from Swedish to English, and that will support everyone’s development really. But then it’s important to have a very clear picture of what I want to achieve with these translations. Is it any text or directed at particular problems, such as passive constructions.

The formal distinction between foreign and second language teaching is not obvious anymore in the English classroom. We have students who come into contact with English only in school and not outside. The groups have become more heterogeneous. And that of course affects the teaching structure. Teaching for whom? How far are we going to get? And some students may not have studied English for as many years since they came to Sweden during their schooling. Translation exercises have a very positive effect on both the target language (in my classrooms it is usually English), but they also benefit students’ development in Swedish.

UC: The other languages that students have in their multilingual repertoire, isn’t there value in, for example, looking at an English passive construction and asking students to think about how to express themselves in other languages, to convey the same meaning? Because they often have more than just Swedish.

RE: We have had very interesting discussions with, for example, English 6 and 7, talking about passive constructions and there we have brought in a critical aspect. What are we hiding through the use of a passive construction? It is quite exciting that a critical aspect of grammar can be linked to the communicative function of language. After all, language is a means of power and manipulation, and passive constructions are very interesting to follow how they are used by politicians, for example, who has done what? What is said in a newspaper article?

UC: As with Boris Johnson: ‘Mistakes have been made’

TN: I think this is a exciting discussion. Both grammar and translation have been viewed with suspicion for a number of years, since the entry of communicative language teaching. Then we threw out grammar and the grammar-translation method like cold bathwater. But didn’t understand what went out with the water, all the babies who went out with it. So what should we do? Should we teach a 12-year-old grammar, for the sake of grammar itself? Perhaps we can question and think about that or do students have to be able to parse sentences? What I remember myself from upper primary was that I could learn it mechanically, but I didn’t understand anything. But what if we instead look at the functions of language? Take a text in German with only active sentences and ask the students to transfer everything to passive. What happens besides the linguistic transformations? What is lost by doing this? Students can discuss this. Then we are really looking at what happens with the language. It can also be a way to challenge the students, as you mentioned, Rusalina, challenge those students who think they know a lot of English in English 7, for example, by scrutinising Boris Johnson’s speeches or anything else. Look what you’re hiding, what are you foregrounding? What do these words mean? Because we have the vocabulary that plays a role in the structures all the time.

EB: We are a little too afraid of this explicit grammar talk. It has to be done with a meaning-focus. And then I just want to comment on translations that Rusalina and Tore were discussing—I actually thought that it was boring and flat and no grammar. But the students ask for it. We do a lot of free writing, journalling every week and so on. It would be so good if we all translated the same text, then we can go through the same language problems with words that were difficult to find. I thought about digging out my old translation exercises—they might come back. I want to stress the importance of an exploratory conversation about grammar in the classroom. It is incredibly valuable to give students the opportunity to talk about grammar. Because a lot of people shy away from communicating in a new language because they feel limited by the resources of the language. You can’t express everything in the same way in different languages. For example, the present continuous form in English. That doesn’t really exist in German or in the Slavic languages. There we have a completely different tool to use to express the same meaning.  These conversations are incredibly valuable when you are learning a third, fourth, or fifth language. That there is no word-by-word correspondence. This helps students then to use their own linguistic resources and to learn to live with this:  Okay, okay.  In German, I can’t express myself in the way that I can in, for example, English or Swedish. Learning to live with this uncertainty and inadequacy is really a very big challenge when the goal is to learn a new language. Exploratory conversation about grammatical phenomena has great potential!

TN: Thank you so much for this inspiring and rich conversation! Thank you Ewa and thank you Rusalina!

The interview is in Swedish, and the video is subtitled in Swedish. We have prepared a transcript in English for those who don’t understand Swedish.

You might like to organise your own live conversation with your colleagues about grammar teaching as part of the Language-focused teaching strand in Paul Nation’s Four Strands model. You could discuss some of the topics taken up by Ewa Baedecke and Rusalina Ehnvall in the video above:

• whether translation activities might serve a purpose in language-focused learning;
• working with language-focused learning in linguistically diverse classes;
• whether it would be helpful to have more guidance on what structures and vocabulary to cover in different language courses;
• the role for language learning of grammatical awareness in the learners’ first language.