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Appropriation Activities in Speaking This is the third in a four-part series about
the stages of teaching speaking. The first video gave a brief overview of the three stages
and looked at whether to teach them top-down or bottom-up. The second video looked at awareness-raising
activities.
This video will explore appropriation activities.
Look at appropriation activities on a continuum. It appears between the teacher-regulated awareness
stage and the learner-regulated autonomy stage. So at times the activities will look similar
to awareness-raising ones and at other times they will seem similar to autonomous ones.
In fact, in my opinion, too many teachers mistake some of the communicative appropriation
activities as being autonomous, with the result being that they stop too soon, without the
language lesson truly having become automated for the learner.
Scott Thornbury, in his book, “How to Teach Speaking,” refers to the appropriation stage
as “practiced control.” He differentiates this from controlled practice by noting that
the purpose of the “control” is different in the two. In controlled practice, learners
seldom get beyond drill and repeat because the setting is so contrived. The goal of practiced
control, on the other hand, is to assist the learner in gaining self-control of the language.
Practice is the scaffolding bridging the gap between awareness and autonomy.
I suppose there are two tricks to scaffolding. One is offering enough help so that the learner
does not feel lost or frustrated in the lesson. The other is gradually reducing the amount
of scaffolding provided over a semester. Those of you who have heard me teach before know
that I believe strongly that instructors should be using different teaching strategies at
the end of the semester than they were at the beginning. I feel that one way language
instructors fail their students is when they teach exactly the same way all throughout
the semester; they fail to gradually remove scaffolding and support that was needed in
the beginning, but should not be needed by the end.
Early appropriation activities should spend time on repetition and memorization. This
whole concept has such a bad reputation in language learning that many instructors avoid
it completely, but research has proven the benefit of some repetition in the classroom
without overdoing it. Probably the biggest benefit of repetition exercises is the ability
for learners to articulate whole phrases and sentences. This allows the tongue, throat
and mouth muscles to create what is called “muscle memory,” which is just one more
step on the path of automaticity.
Later appropriation activities should involve communicative tasks. In other words, the goal
of the task should be focused on communicating and not on the grammar or function of the
words. Research clearly shows that a significant amount of language can be appropriated by
the learner when her attention is focused on accomplishing something specific, like
finding out what a classmate did over the weekend. These types of activities may offer
a short preparation period, but need to occur in real-time in order to not allow enough
time for students to think about each language chunk before it is articulated. Instructors
can use time limits and authentic tasks to draw learners’ attention away from the formation
of language and onto the use of it.
In summary, appropriation activities are on a continuum between awareness-raising and
autonomy. Instructors should recognize this continuum by providing appropriate levels
of assistance, called scaffolding. Scaffolding should be removed as the learners progress
in their skills. Repetition and memorization exercises assist with automaticity and creating
correct muscle memory. And, communicative tasks allow the learner to move attention
away from the formation of language and focus on using the language.
The last video in this series will consider criteria for autonomous activities.