Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 1; January 03

A Diglot-Weave Experience with EFL University Students

Carol J. Bradley, Florence, Italy

University students in a zero- or low-level course of English as a Foreign Language face a stressful, large-scale learning task that is made more complex for those who must also read English for Special Purposes (ESP). From my teaching position at the Linguistic Center of the University of Florence (Italy), I have observed such students struggling to pass the intermediate-level language exam of grammar and reading comprehension.

Clearly, these students need to reach a plateau of acceptable reading competency quickly. But, at best, they are only capable of skimming a text, recognizing a word here and there, and, on the basis of that meagre information, making a wild guess abut the general topic of the article. Certainly they cannot really" read nor be expected to use typical reading skills -- scanning and reading for details -- as that presumes a basic knowledge of grammatical structures and lexical items. Thus, the situation requires inventiveness and openness from both students and teacher. In other words, if it is impossible for learners to approach a text through the language being learned, where can they begin their EFL reading experience?

"Using Italian judiciously in the English classroom" proclaimed the title of a conference-workshop held by Mario Rinvolucri in Florence. The title aroused my interest, but my full attention was captured by his workshop description which read "teachers need exercises that use both languages in ways that skillfully move the students away from their mother tongue." In short, while attempting to meet my learners' reading needs, I had experimented with hybrid English-Italian texts, and I was curious to see if my interests were similar to Mario's. And indeed they were: provide beginning EFL learners with an adult text and allow these learners to access the new language through the framework of their native language. Mario referred to his oral, two-language story-telling method as a kind of "sandwich" method, I had learned to call my written, two (di) language (glot) hybrid text a "diglot-weave."

In fact, my discovery of the diglot-weave goes back to the mid-1990s and was connected with my search for reading approaches that would help beginning learners bridge the reading comprehension gap between their language and English. In my mind three criteria were particularly important: 1) provide comprehensible input, 2) lower the affective filters, as defined by Stephen Krashen in 1978 and reproposed in Second Language Acquisition And Second Language Learning (Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1981, pp. 101-103), and 3) provide a text that would permit a two-pronged interactive reading environment, both discrete bottom-up decoding and global top-down prediction. An article by Robert W. Blair, "Innovative Approaches" in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (Marianne Celce-Murcia, Ed., Newbury. 1991, pp. 22-45) set me on the path and led me first to play with diglot-weave texts in a reading course for biology students and, in the following year, to attempt to measure development and reading achievement by treating one of my classes as an experimental group and a second class of the same level as the control group.

The idea of interweaving texts has been around for some time. In "Diglot-Weave Input,"Blair (1991, pp. 29-30) provides a succinct history of code switching and its pedagogical application as used by Robbins Burling in 1968 nd Robert Lentulay in 1976. Whereas Burling used the technique to provide syntactical and lexical bridges by gradually weaving French into English texts, Lentulay introduced children to a second language (Russian and Spanish) through oral stories into which he cleverly wove lexical items from the other language. Based on the Lentulay model, Blair produces his own innovative use of the technique in a sample English-Spanish story, "A Cuento About a Smashed Ventana" which centers on "some naughty muchachos -- some muchachos y some muchachas" (Blair, p. 30). Despite these interesting examples, diglot-weaves seem not to have attracted much attention, although there are occasional references in the literature for some Master studies, for example, Phyllis Gunderson, "The Effect of a Video Diglot-Weave Method in Introducing Beginning Languages" (August 1993, Linguistics Department, Brigham Young University). And, at a pragmatic level, diglot-weaves are being used by those who recognize its merits: Blair in his Power-Glide Foreign Language courses publicized on the internet, Yale in its Chinese course series, and Mario Rinvolucri, who brings them to life in his workshops.

My diglot-weave experience developed out of the writings by Robbins Burling, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and linguistics, University of Michigan, (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rburling/Hompage.html). His hybrid text experiments were first published in an article of 1968, "Some Outlandish Proposals For the Teaching of Foreign Languages," Language Learning, Vol XVIII, Nos. 1 & 2, continued in 1978, "An Introductory Course In Reading French," Language Learning, Vol 28, No. 1, and culminated in his book of 1982, Sounding Right (Newbury House, NY). In the first article, Burling, who focuses on reading rather than oral production, contests conventional teaching methods which hold that " "native and foreign languages are immiscible systems." In a four-step program, he outlines a systematic intermixture of language systems: Step one provides a "word for word translation" similar to those used by linguists for "interlinear translation" with an emphasis on the assimilation of syntax; Step two aims to increase the students " familiarity with grammatical markers" -- aspect marker, relative prefix or the like;"

Step three introduces the "smaller class of morphemes" as pronouns, conjunctions, and tense markers;
Step four assumes that students have acquired a basic understanding of "essential grammar" and therefore are ready to enter the vocabulary learning phase. In his 1978 article, Burling refined his method by developing a systematic grammar sequence. One example for gender and number in his 1978 article reads as follows:

Le weather was so warm, so clear!
One heard les blackbirds to whistle a la edge du forest, and in le meadow [of] Rippert behind la sawmill, les Prussians who did l' exercise.

Despite this focus on grammar, Burling's method is not a grammar-based translation approach; he wrote that to gain a "firm control of a language [a person] simply must acquire some of it through unconscious acquisitional processes" (Burling, 1982, p. 8).

While Burling had no misgivings about the pedagogical soundness of his comprehension-based approach (CBA), which he justified with numerous arguments, he did feel that the mixed-text might offend some purists. As irrelevant as that might seem, I, too, was uncertain how my students might react to such strange texts. Nonetheless, I felt that the risk had to be met. My zero- and low-level learners' needs were clear cut: a test of grammar and reading comprehension after a preparation time of only seventy-eight lesson hours. Burling's CBA approach offered a solution: a way to focus on reading skills within the context of adult level ESP (Biology) reading materials.

Looking back on my written diglot-weave experience, I drew two conclusions: the "look" of the text was unimportant, but making those texts had been very time-consuming. Keeping up with two lessons per week kept me busy, not only locating usable material for the following lessons but also trying to adapt Burling's general plan to the needs of my biology texts which included maintaining a reasonable balance between the two languages, whether I began with an Italian text and inserted English or whether I worked in the opposite direction. However, the students reacted well to the exercises and when questioned said that they enjoyed them and found them useful. For example, my first diglot lesson was entitled "Microscope." To aid comprehension, a simple drawing of a microscope was used in conjunction with the Italian-English text. In part the weave read:

Strumento atto to give immagini ingrandite of oggetti molto piccoli. The tipo piu comune is the optical microscope, nel quale l'esame of the object viene fatto in luce visibile.... Optical microscope - Il nome semplice microscope indica talora the lens for magnification,....The composto microscope is, invece, a piu complesso instrument; it is composto of two gruppi of lenses: the objective and eye-piece.

This reading exercise and others were followed by simple comprehension exercises as:

Rispondi True (Vero) oppure False alle domande seguenti:
1. A microscope magnifies objects. _______
2. The compound microscope has two sets of lenses. ________
or:
7. The names of the two sets of lenses are (scrive le resposte): ________ and ________:

In other exercises I asked for feedback or attempted to direct the student's attention to specific English syntactical features:

Ora rispondi to the following questions. Scrivi un X solo in uno spazio indicato ( ).
1. Mi e piaciuto l'esercizio diglot: Yes ( ), No ( )
2. Nella sintassi inglese l'aggettivo appare: before the noun ( ),
after the noun ( ).

At the end of this first exercise, I asked the students to underline the English words that they had not understood and to write these and other "essential" words that they wanted to remember in their own little dictionary. In addition, follow up exercises, cloze and multiple choice, were used to check comprehension and focus attention on general and scientific English vocabulary that had appeared in the diglot-weave.

During the course, the experimental group worked through twenty-one sets of diglot-weave exercises. As stated above, my intention was to compare my experimental group's reading comprehension capabilities to a control group; for this reason, both groups were assigned the same textbook which provided reading comprehension and grammatical exercises. Thus, my experimental group's information about English grammar and reading techniques was not limited solely to diglot-weave exercises. Clearly, extraneous variables as time, a twenty-six week course, and a non-random based selection of participants worked against my goal of achieving a valid conclusion. But, my study was not a laboratory experiment: it was a classroom experiment where limitations must be accepted and where a student's needs take priority. Nevertheless, in the final, in-class Test of Reading Comprehension (general vocabulary, syntactic similarities, paragraph reading, sentence sequences, and specific vocabulary), the experimental group scored higher than the control group. Furthermore, my experimental group (biology students ) also did well on their intermediate-level English exam. All eighteen course participants took the test: three did not succeed, two were borderline, thirteen passed.

Unfortunately, this special ESP course was not continued, so my diglot-weave exercises were no longer usable. Nonetheless, the satisfaction of a successful experience remained. The students were motivated by the diglot-weave texts and I learned that innovative teaching procedures are stimulated by rethinking past teaching approaches.

Carol J. Bradley
via dei Bardi 46
50125 Firenze
Italy

cjbradley_21@yahoo.com