A Consciousness Raising Approach to the Teaching of Grammar

A Consciousness Raising Approach to the Teaching of Grammar

What is Consciousness Raising (CR)?

Consciousness Raising (CR) is an approach to language teaching. Teachers might use CR tasks as their main approach or only occasionally. To raise something to consciousness means to make someone aware of something. CR tasks are thus designed to raise the learners’ Language Awareness (LA) (Svalberg 2009, 2012). The immediate aim of CR tasks is to help learners notice something about the language that they might not notice on their own. They are typically asked to reflect on it, usually by talking to peers. CR tasks can help build their conscious knowledge and understanding (their LA) of how the language works, grammatically, socially, culturally. Below I will focus on CR to teach grammar.

An example of CR tasks is so called ‘discovery activities’ included in many text books, where the learners are asked to formulate a grammar rule based on some language examples. For example, a set of carefully written examples might lead learners to formulate a rule for when to use present perfect as opposed to simple present.

Discovery activities are typically very short and simple tasks. They are highly controlled, there is only one correct answer, and it is unlikely that the learners will get the answer wrong.

A. For each of the underlined verbs, decide if the form is Past Simple or Present Perfect. Write PS or PP under the verb.

1. Amina moved to England with her parents in 2007.

2. She has lived in England for six years now.

3. She has made a lot of friends.

4. I have known Amina since last year.

5. We became friends when I and my family moved to her street.

B. The form of the verb depends on whether it refers to a finished time in the past, or a time that is still continuing at the present. Decide what kind of time the expressions in the table refer to.

Finished Time / Time which continues at the present
In 2007
For six years
Since last year
When I and my family moved to her street

Sentence number 3 above does not mention any time. Do you think it refers to a finished time or a time that continues now?

C. Now complete the following rule:

Past Simple is used to talk about events at a ______

Present Perfect is used to talk about events at a ______

D. Now write some sentences about yourself or about a friend.

1. ______in 20……

2. ______years ago.

3. ______since______

4. ______when______

______

5. ______

______

CR tasks can, however, be much less controlled and more open ended. I will give some examples below. What they all have in common is that they involve learners noticing a target structure or function in a text (written or spoken) and drawing some kind of conclusions – not necessarily a rule - from what they have noticed. A good way to begin is to use texts which are already part of the syllabus. The students can use highlighters, for example, to pick out particular grammar features (e.g. “highlight the comparative adjectives”). This begins to train them to notice the relevant grammar in the input.

The purpose of CR in the teaching of grammar

The ultimate purpose of most language teaching is to help learners acquire the target language to a point where they can use it accurately, spontaneously and fluently. CR tasks cannot do that on their own. Depending on the context, the teacher might opt to combine CR tasks with meaning focused oral tasks or writing activities. Within such settings, CR grammar tasks have several purposes:

1. to direct learners’ attention to grammar features they might not notice on their own
2. to help learners make form – meaning connections
3. thereby, to help learners acquire conscious knowledge which they can use to understand input and monitor their own output
4. to make learners more autonomous by developing their analytical ability

(See also Rod Ellis “Making an Impact; Teaching Grammar Through Awareness-Raising” on this website.)

A natural tendency we all have is to focus on meaning before form. Learners will naturally notice content words first, but may not pay much attention to function words such as prepositions and conjunctions, and endings, for example for tense and number.

The following task does not lead to a rule of any kind. Its aim is simply to make the learners aware of the fact that only some words ending in –ed are past tense verbs. The purpose is to help them notice and process the use of past tense in input as a step in their learning to use it correctly themselves.

For each of the underlined words, decide if it is an adjective, a past tense verb, or an untensed verb. Put each word in the correct column.

My dad is very interested in old coins. He started collecting them when he was ten. When he got the detector, Dad believed he would find a huge treasure, but he detected mostly old, used nails.I have borrowed his metal detector to see if I can find some coins. …

AdjectivePast Tense Verb Untensed Verb

‘Interested’ and ‘used’ are adjectives, and ‘borrowed’ is an untensed verb (a past participle; the tense is on ‘have’). The fact that the same –ed forms can have different functions makes it difficult for learners to spot past tense verbs. This CR task provides training in doing just that.

Some grammatical structures are discontinuous and complex, which makes them even more difficult for learners to spot on their own. To understand, for example, how relative clauses are used the learner would need to notice at least that the relative clause modifies a preceding noun, that it usually begins with a relative pronoun and that the clause does not include a pronominal copy of the relative pronoun (in other words, ‘the book that changed my life’ but not *‘the book that it changed my life). To learn from examples in input, learners need noticing help.

The example below is a task which gets learners to identify clauses in authentic text. This involves first finding the verbs, as each clause is ‘built’ around a verb group. Then, the learners need to decide where each clause begins and ends. The following task was designed as part of a set for a research study in a Lebanese secondary school (Svalberg, 2005). The teachers across the year groups (year 7-9) were concerned about the students’ poor punctuation. The aim of getting students to recognize clauses was not directly to teach punctuation, but to give teachers and learners a common language to talk about punctuation. By the time the learners (year 7) did the following task they had already been taught what is meant by ‘verb group’ and they knew that a clause has a verb as its centre. (Only parts of the task is shown. The complete set of tasks and teachers notes are in Appendix A.)

TASK

• In the text, put a slash (/) between clauses.
• Discuss your solutions in your group.
• Try to think of reasons why your solution is the right one.

(To help you, the verbs have been underlined for you. Remember that there is one clause for each verb group!)

The Girl and the Little White Ghost

/When I was a little girl,/ we lived in a two-storey house./ ...

One night I had just gone to sleep when something woke me. I opened my eyes and went rigid with fear. In the darkness in front of me, a ghost was hovering in mid-air. It was not a very big ghost, but it looked exactly like a ghost out of a story book. It …

Now answer this question: How many clauses are there in the text?______

In the next task, the students were asked to find the ‘linkers’ (conjunctions) and to insert the clauses into a table with columns for linkers and clauses. The longest sentences was one with four clauses: // She just hugged me/ and said/ that I was a brave little girl/ because I didn't cry.//

The students enjoyed trying to solve the tasks in pairs. The teachers reported that they were quite competitive about getting the answers right. The complete text and set of tasks is in the appendix.(For reasons to do with the research design, all the tasks in the series were on the same text, but that is not necessarily to be recommended.)

Teacher explanation is sometimes a useful complement to CR Tasks and Communicative Tasks but there are good reasons to believe that teacher explanation on its own is not as effective as CR. CR requires learners to think about grammar, and to draw conclusions by themselves or with the help of their peers (in pair or group work). It involves active and interactive learning. Learners who are active are more likely to find lessons enjoyable and interesting, and the learning is more likely to be memorable. Time spent on CR can mean less time spent on re-teaching or revision later.

The best CR tasks in my view are ones that highlight that grammar conveys meaning. That is precisely why grammar matters. Often, language users have two or more grammatically accurate options. Learning a language is not just learning to avoid errors but, perhaps more importantly, learning to make choices that convey what you mean in the way you intended. Learners can be helped to discover what effects their choices have. (For a discussion of grammar as choice see Larsen-Freeman2009, on this website . )

Below is part of a task for adult advanced learners on aspect. The text used is a short story by Katherine Mansfield. The complete text is just under 400 words. It illustrates how aspect can be used to create a very vivid picture of a situation. The scene described has an almost cinematic quality.

Before the task, the students have learnt to distinguish aspect from tense and the following meanings and symbols have been adopted:

SimpleEvents as plain facts

Habits

(In the past) completed events

PerfectEvents with current relevance: experiences, results

(In the past) events before past

Progressive Ongoing events

Events existing as plans at the reference time

(‘Simple’ is treated as an aspect because, like perfect and progressive, it is a choice.)

The task is carried out in small groups.

In the following text, for each of the underlined verb groups decide what aspect it is. Mark the aspect by inserting the appropriate symbol under it. In your group, discuss 1/whether a different aspect would be grammatical, and if so 2/why the author has made this choice; what effect does the writer’s choice have?

And then, after six years, she saw him again. He was seated at one of those

little bamboo tables decorated with a Japanese vase of paper daffodils.

There was a tall plate of fruit in front of him, and very carefully, in a way she

recognized immediately as his 'special' way, he was peeling an orange.

He must have felt that shock of recognition in her for he looked up and met her

eyes. Incredible! He didn't know her! She smiled; he frowned. She came towards

him. He closed his eyes an instant, but opening them his face lit up as though he

had struck a match in a dark room.

Extract from A DILL PICKLE by Katherine Mansfield

A key to the task is provided in Appendix B.

There is plenty to discuss in this task. The students can go back to the meanings of the aspectual forms to explain why ‘she was seeing him again’ would have a different meaning, and how ‘he peeled an orange’, ‘he was looking up’, and ‘she was coming towards him’ would paint quite a different picture of the encounter. The students become aware of the aspectual choices available to them, and what effect they might have. Also interesting is ‘he must have felt’, where a perfect form is used without perfect meaning, to indicate a past event after an epistemic modal verb (i.e. a modal denoting probability).

CR tasks have the potential to make learners more autonomous by developing their analytical ability.

They can train learners to notice how language is used, even when they are not doing a CR task. Ideally, teachers hope that learners will ‘pick up’ language from the internet, television, music, films and other incidental target languageinput they may encounter. Such autonomous learning is more likely if CR tasks stimulate their interest in language and give them the tools to explore it. At the same time, the autonomous learner will come across use of language that does not conform to what they have been taught, e.g. verb-less sentences and sentences starting with ‘and’ or ‘but’, or common non-standard constructions such as ‘we were sat’. In a CR approach, discussion of such observations should be encouraged. It can help learners become aware of how language use varies depending on its purpose and context.

There are of course limits to what CR tasks can do. During a CR task, the learners typically talk about the target language. If they do it in the target language, the task doubles as a communicative activity but it does not necessarily provide the right opportunities to use the target grammar. To be effective, form-focused CR tasks need to be used in combination with communicative tasks where the main aim is to understand and convey meaning. The CR tasks help the learners build conscious knowledge about the language, which they can use to interpret input and monitor their own output. The communicative tasks provide meaningful opportunities to use the language so that what they have learnt consciously eventually becomes automatically available to them, in fluent, spontaneous use.

The following task gives the learners opportunity to use either past or present tense to talk about past events.

Morg was cross. She was more than cross, she was furious. She had been chosen to mind her little brother, again. Normally she quite liked him, as he stumbled after her on his short legs, babbling in a way that made her laugh, but today there was something much more exciting happening. The men were preparing to go on a hunt. There hadn't been a hunt for months. First there was too much rain and then there was too much work with the harvest. But now the wheat was in and the grain was all stored in pits. The Druid was here, bringing blessings from the gods and medicines for the villagers. So the chief had decided that it was time. Outside the men were gathering and the Druid was chanting. Morg longed to be there. But Morg was not allowed to go. She wasn't even allowed to watch.

From ‘Morg’ by Clare Reddaway

(Accessed 19.04.13)

After a comprehension check, the students work in groups.First they read and discuss the story which is told in past tense. Then they experiment with telling it in present tense. Finally they practise telling their own stories. Here are the instructions:

a/ This is a story set in the past. That is why the verbs are in the past tense. But sometimes you can make a story feel more immediate and dramatic by telling it in the present tense, as if it was happening now. Try it. Put the story into the present tense.

b/ In your group, have one person read the story out loud in the past tense, and then have another person read the present tense version. The reader should try to bring the story alive for the listeners. Vote on which you preferred.

c/ Now underline the verb groups in the original text. (A verb group is a string of verbs that belong together. For example: Morg was cross…..She had been chosen to mind her little brother…)

d/ Circle the verbs that show past tense. (Hint: The tensed verbs are the ones you changed to present in the a/ task.) How many sentences are there without a tensed verb?

e/ Have you ever been angry or disappointed that you were not allowed to do something, or go somewhere? Or perhaps you have been surprised and delighted that you were allowed to do something you did not expect? Tell the group about it. Remember to explain why you were or were not allowed to do this or why it was unexpected.

Before you start telling the story, decide if you are going to use past tense, or present tense. You can also decide to tell an especially dramatic part of your story in present tense but use past tense for the rest.

The tasks above try to illustrate some of the ways in which CR tasks can be used to teach grammar. Whether a particular task is appropriate and useful will, naturally, depend on the students, their level and needs, and on the context. Teachers may prefer to design their ownCR tasks, based on their understanding of the purposes and principles discussed above. It is an advantage if the learners can see that the texts in the tasks are authentic and related to their interests or context. In my own experience, CR is an enjoyable and motivating approach for both the students and the teacher.