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This is the first video in a four-part series about the stages of teaching speaking. This
first video will give a brief overview of the three stages and look at whether to teach
them top-down or bottom-up. The second video will look at awareness-raising activities.
The third video will consider appropriation activities. And, the fourth video will explore
criteria for autonomous activities.
Let's begin with a general overview of the stages for teaching speaking. In his textbook,
"How to Teach Speaking," Scott Thornbury uses the terms "awareness-raising," "appropriation,"
and "autonomy" to indicate three language learning stages.
Granted, these stages apply to writing, culture, and pretty much everything we teach in the
language classroom, but let's look at them specifically in terms of speaking.
Awareness-raising is based upon research that seems to indicate that learners only learn
what they "notice." Or learn best what they notice. So, "noticing" activities
are big in ESL and EFL classes. Awareness-raising activities typically involve assistance from
the instructor or other students.
Appropriation refers to the stage of learning where the student begins to "own" the
language. Where practice becomes something integrated into the individual's language
skills instead of just something the teacher wants him to use.
Autonomy is represented when the new language becomes automated or self-controlled.
Behaviorists, cognitivists, and sociocultural theorists -- all represent language learning
in terms of these three stages even though they each have different terminology for them
and slightly different understandings of them.
So, are these three stages taught in any specific order?
Bottom-up instruction would start with an awareness-raising activity or activities,
followed by appropriation activities, and end with autonomous activities. Bottom-up
means that the instructor emphasizes an individual aspect of the language and then builds lessons
and exercises on top of that.
The other method is called top-down instruction, or top-down processing. This is where the
teacher begins with an autonomous activity. And then either go down to the awareness stage,
then back up to appropriation and a revision of the autonomy. Or, they can go from the
autonomy to appropriation to awareness and then back again to autonomy.
Bottom-up instruction seems to meet some basic instinct or logic that wants to "build"
language by one piece of grammar added on to another piece of grammar. However, lots
of L1 and L2 research suggests that language is best learned through conversation. That
research, as well as the boredom of drill and repeat Audiolinguilism, birthed the Communicative
Language Teaching method.
There is currently a little backlash to Communicative Language Teaching for two reasons. One, most
instructors have failed to spend enough time correcting or repairing language errors. They
feel like it is communicative, so they have difficulty building in when to correct errors.
And, two, most instructors never made it all the way to the bottom when they started top-down.
In other words, they did not incorporate enough awareness activities where individual aspects
of language received focus.
Both top-down and bottom-up have been proven effective methods of instruction when done
correctly. My advice is this. When going from bottom to up, make sure you make it all the
way through the top autonomous stage. And when going top down, be sure to make it all
the way to the bottom awareness stage.
In the next video, I'll talk about some aspects of the awareness-raising stage.