Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 2; April 1999

INTERLINGUAL TRAINING AND TECHNOLOGY

Peter Wilberg, Language Engineering Services

Page 2 of 3

The use of Interlingual Keys can teach even elementary or pre-intermediate students to handle complex structures that would ordinarily only be taught at upper intermediate or advanced levels. It is of course particularly appropriate for one-to-one teaching or class teaching in a monolingual environment (e.g. in-house teaching for companies). In teaching adults foreign languages for business or special purposes the starting point of the interlingual approach is the analysis of the target language lexis and structures which the learner needs. "Target language" here means a specific commercial, technical or professional interlanguage or intralanguage. The latter can be identified by an audit of texts and documentation related to the learner's vocational language needs - their job and function, company or organisation, profession or industry. As much information as possible should be elicited from the learner, but a benchmark is also needed by which to judge the technical-professional appropriacy of the interlanguage used by the learner to give this information. This benchmark can be provided letting learners describe their work also in their own native language - creating authentic oral texts which the bilingual teacher can translate with the help of documentary resources belonging to the same technical-professional domain. Alternatively. it may only be necessary for the teacher to reformulate the learner's interlanguage in order to generate texts containing benchmark structures.

What follows is an example of an oral text elicited from a learner in a one-to-one teaching situation and showing the benchmark structures needed by the learner (still only an elementary level German speaker of English) in his work. The text as a whole was created by both reformulation of the learner's interlanguage, and by translation of sentences spoken or written by the learner in German.

English Benchmark (en)

German Benchmark (de)

Learner's Interlanguage (en /de)

By comparing the learner's interlanguage with the benchmark sentences the teacher can identify the

Interlingual Keys most relevant to this learner's needs:

prepositional phrase (de) <> preposition + present participle (en) (in developing...)

Object before Verb (de) <> Verb before Object (en) (...created a record structure...)

OVAux (de) <> AuxVO (en) (couldn't be used)

"aus diesem Grund" (de) <> "for this reason" (en)

The teacher created classroom structure drills and lessons on Interlingual Trainer for this learner, based on these and several other Interlingual Keys, using lexis drawn from authentic oral and written texts, and employing Interlingual Graphics as an additional teaching aid. After 18 hours of one-to-one combined with CALL the learner was able to build new sentences in the target language containing the benchmark lexis and structures.

In general these can based on one or more Interlingual Keys, such as

modal + Verb + "werden" (de) <> modal passive with "be" (en)

könnte vebessert werden (de) <> could be improved (en)

The keys can be exploited for target language training in four main ways:

1. Retranslation exercises in the classroom

With English as the target language, for example, the teacher writes up on the board or orally dictates an English sentence containing the (en) structure. The learner, however, is asked to orally translate and then write down only the equivalent German sentence. Having done so (and after the translation has been checked for accuracy by the teacher) they are then asked to retranslate the German back into English (after wiping the latter from the board of course!). This exercise is particularly useful for assessing the learner's interlanguage ie. their current ability to use the target language structure.

2. Computer assisted learning in the classroom

Teacher and learner use the search facility in Interlingual Trainer to find examples of "werden" in context with one or more modal verbs in a relevant German source text or corpus of texts. The programs parallel concordancer can then display in turn each sentence or paragraph containing the (de) structure, along with the matching English Text segment. From this a number of benchmark sentences are obtained in English and German. Learners can be asked to identify the matching (en) structure in the English text segments, write them down and then translate the German sentences containing them, with the help of these (en) equivalents.

3. Structure and transformation drills

Alternatively, an example of the Interlingual Key can be dictated or written on the board, and used as the basis of a drill in which the teacher changes one or more content words and/or progressively transforms or elaborates the structure - introducing more keys through the use of negative and interrogative structures, the construction of main or subordinate clauses etc.)

Examples:

kann verbessert werden / muss verändert werden / kann nicht benutzt werden / Wenn es benutzt werden kann, ...

With each example of the German structure, the learner is (a) asked for the English equivalent (b) can be asked to create an entire German sentence around the structure and then translate this sentence.

4. Computer assisted self-study and revision

The source text can be printed documentation or learner generated texts. The latter can be turned into benchmark texts either by reformulation of input provided by the learner in the L1 or translation from input provided by the learner in L1.

The teacher's first task, of course, is to decide which Keys are most important for the learner - for these will shape the teaching objectives and provide the criteria for assessing the learner's progress. Needs analysis of this sort can be conducted through one or more of the following processes - ideally all three.

1. Shadowing learners in their professional lingual environment, listening to their use of both the native and target language in this environment, and comparing their linguistic and communicative performance in each.
2. Studying company documentation relevant to the learners job in both native and target language versions.
3. Classroom elicitation of learner input in both languages - allowing the teacher to audit learners' native and target language discourse and compare the two. This skill of the teacher here lies in eliciting in as natural and unforced a way as possible the type of language that the learner is called upon to produce in their professional environment (e.g. by giving presentations to the teacher, writing reports or showing the teacher recent e-mails or voice-mails).

Individualised needs analysis in a one-to-one teaching situation is essentially an ongoing process - every time the learner produces in the target language this will give insight into their current interlanguage on the one hand, and, on the other hand provide important clues to the benchmark language which they still lack.

Benchmark language includes not only structures but lexis. Or rather, it consists of already grammaticalised lexis, for even a simple lexical collocation such as "learn a language" takes the form of a grammatical structure: a Verb-Object sequence in English and an Object-Verb sequence in German ("eine Sprache lernen"). The interlingual teaching of key structures such as VO should be firmly based on the collocations, colligations, compounds, and constructions formed from lexical keywords most relevant to the learner's communicative needs. It is a common myth, however, that learners of English for business or special purposes "know" their specialist professional terminology they need already, and do not need further teaching in this respect. But although a learner working in the domain of English for information technology, for example, may well know that "store" collocates with "data", they may well be unable to produce properly structured English verb phrases from these words, let alone differentiate and produce such noun-phrase units as "the stored data", "the data stored in the file", "data storage", "storing data", "the data to be stored" etc. As a result it means very little to say that the learner "knows" the words "store" and "data" already. The individual words may be known, but that does not mean that the learner is able to actively deploy the terms created from these words, for these terms consist of grammaticalised multi-word structures.

There are three ways of grouping the benchmark lexis to be learned:

1. through the collocational field of a particular lexical keyword such as data

Example: to store / save / process / analyse / display / access / print ...(the) data

2. through a key structure such as -ed participle + noun

Example: stored data / corrupted files / customised solutions / unsolved problems etc.

3. by embedding a particular keyword and its collocations in a key structure:

Example:

the stored data / the processed data / the printed data / the analysed data etc.

Both Interlingual teaching methods and interlingual technology can be used to gather and group lexis in these ways. Thus the teacher can ask the native German-speaking learner to brainstorm as many German verbs as possible that go with the German word "Problem" (ein Problem lösen, ein Problem erklären, ein Problem erkennen etc.). This then provides a benchmark for assessing the learner's English - seeing how many of these collocations the learner can gloss and deploy in English. The set of keyword collocations can then be used to drill one or more structures linked to the Interlingual Keys. Alternatively, teacher and learner can use Interlingual Trainer to search for collocations and collocational structures in a text or textual corpus, entering either a keyword such as "data" as the search word, or a marker such as "-ed" to search for key structures such as "participle + noun". Finally, Interlingual Builder can be used to create computer language exercises which focus on particular keywords and the key structures in which they are embedded.