Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 8; December 1999

Page 1 of 1

In September I started teaching a group of students who had taken an FCE course in our school last year, passed the exam (some with grade A) and have now joined my advanced group . It is the nicest bunch I have ever had the good fortune to work with: co-operative, keen, motivated. Still, after each lesson, I left the classroom feeling, not to put too fine point on it, slightly disappointed. They were fluent, fairly accurate already, but my assumption and objective had been to focus on lexical grammar and to widen their range of vocabulary, which they hardly seemed to respond to. Another test on the contrast between Present Perfect Simple and Continuous? Yes, this is important! A new word, a colloquial expression, another idiom, a phrasal verb – yeah, we can check them out....out of curiosity. And they never used them.

The major reason for my students' „misbehaviour" seems obvious: they played it safe. Students rely on the vocabulary and structures they are familiar with, so for example, they will say 'friendly' not 'amiable' or 'boring' instead of 'tedious' .They have good reasons, too: they have been practising words like 'friendly' or 'boring' for years, having come across them dozens of times since their first encounter with English. And as for those new, possibly sophisticated words, they just crop up in a reading or listening. Students prefer to use 'old' words not because they aren't adventurous or mean to the teacher, but they simply experience difficulty with 'new' words for a number of reasons.

I asked my class to randomly select some expressions, which either I marked as incorrect/problematic in their writing and speaking or they found difficult. My students came up with the following list:

1. I have a big request ( in transactional letters)
2. ... and once more: congratulation (in writing)
3. hit the roof
4. it sticks out a mile
5. squally
6. we'll have to treat them not in a nice way
7. to inch somewhere
8. ...or something like that, something connected with (in speaking)

We discussed all the entries from the list trying to pin-point the source of difficulty and assess how the students felt about it.

1. The students concluded that they used 1,2,6 because they rely too heavily on their mother tongue. All these expressions are direct translations from Polish, of which they were initially unaware of.



2. Sometimes the similarity between L1 and L2 is the root of all evil as in 4. My students were inevitably tempted to say' it sticks out on a mile" as they would in Polish. They learnt the expression, but never used it afterwards as they were not confident whether the 'on' belonged there or not.



3. In contrast to the above, any lack of resemblance between L1 and L2 causes problems as well. The students say they could not remember phrases like 7 because they do not ring a bell and they cannot form any associations in their memory.



4. False associations can be a problem as when my students heard the expression 3, they immediately thought it meant 'something nice' like elated, overjoyed, but as their intuition turned out to be wrong, they decided to punish the expression by banning it from their idiolect.



5. Overusing a word is no good, either. My students use 5 (not altogetherly a top 10 frequency word) whenever they fancy it as they took to it instantly because it sounds "kinda nice".



6. Finally phrases from point 8 were admitted by the students to be a cover –up for the fact that they did not know many phrases they needed and wanted to use. That only went to show that my originally feeble plea that the group needed to learn more vocabulary became fairly valid in my students' eyes.

The conclusions of our discussion served as a good prompt for the students to raise their self-awareness as advanced students of English and to look at their linguistic efforts from a healthy perspective. So far, they have been friendlier to the idea of more lexical variety, especially now that a lot of what they said was on an emotional level: 'it sounds nice', 'it sounds strange', 'I don't like it'.

I resolved to challenge both sides: the students and myself. I can accelerate their progress by giving them sufficient practice using authentic materials. I also put forward a claim (a fairly pompous one, I admit, but it seems to be working with a lot of students) that my group should decide whether they want to be:

If they oscillate towards the latter, they should make sure they monitor their own progress and be a catalyst of this progress by complying with the following checklist in speaking and writing:

• is there a good context to use any of the words I've learnt lately?
• have I used synonyms for all the words I tend to overuse (like: good, interesting, nice, etc.?)
• have I checked if all the new words I used collocate with the others in my text?
• have I used a new idiom or a phrasal verb?
• have I complied with the requirements of the text in terms of style and register?