“WHAT’S TODAY’S DATE?”
AN EXAMPLE OF
FOUR STRANDS SIMULTANEITY WITHOUT INTERFERENCE
By Alfredo Arango
"I think you are correct about it being possible to develop
more than one aspect of knowledge at the same time.
Elgort's research on vocabulary showed that
both implicit and explicit knowledge of words
can occur from the same learning task."
Comments by Prof. Paul Nation after reading this article.
Curious about how my second language students’ brains process the information they learn, I found this intriguing question on The Guardian online: “Is it possible to think of two things at once? If so, how does the brain do it?” Some of the answers to this question were brilliant. Here are a couple of them.
“Early chamber music often has three or four instruments each playing, simultaneously, a different simple melody. You will find that you can actually follow all three of the separate melodies where there are only three, but as soon as a fourth instrument joins in, you can only follow one, and the rest becomes a single background accompaniment, showing that the brain can actually do three times more ‘melody following’ than you may have imagined.”
“There are now more than 3,000 professional simultaneous interpreters in the world, and they are all doing it routinely by listening to a speech and translating it at the same time. Precis writers and stenographers are in a similar position.”(1)
There have been serious studies about this topic. One of them, conducted at the French biomedical research agency INSERM in Paris, turned to functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures changes in brain activity. According to this study, reviewed in an article on Science magazine, “when the brain tries to do two things at once, it divides and conquers, dedicating one-half of our gray matter to each task.” The research found that “working on a single letter-matching task at a time activated both sides of the volunteers’ brains, setting off the anterior-to-posterior chain of command to get the job done. But as soon as the volunteers took on the second task, their brains split the labor: activity in the left side of the prefrontal cortex corresponded to one task while the right side took over the other task. Each side of the brain worked independently.” The article concludes that “the results suggest that the brain can’t efficiently juggle more than two tasks because it has only two hemispheres available for task management.”(2)
Then, it is clear that at least two different complex mental process can be performed by the brain simultaneously. So, my question is: When learning a new language using the four strand pedagogical approach, do students automatically process several strands simultaneously, even if the instructor tries to separate the strands and use them in a linear/consecutive manner?
Professor Paul Nation, the proponent of the mentioned teaching strategy, states: “…the most important planning that a teacher can do is to make sure that the course contains the four strands in roughly equal quantities. This does not mean that each lesson has to contain the four strands, but it does mean that over a reasonable period of time such as two weeks or a month, there is an equal balance of the four strands.”(3)
Before we continue, let’s mention that the four strands include learning trough listening and reading (meaning-focused input), learning through speaking and writing (meaning-focused output), learning through deliberate attention to language features such as grammar (language-focused learning), and learning making the best use of what is already known (fluency development.) It seems logical to most curriculum developers and instructors to think that applying these four modalities in a linear manner, one after the other, is the best way to implement these teaching-learning principles. Nevertheless, do students’ brains work in an excluding and linear manner?
An article on Brain World magazine describes the processes of learning and memorization in this way: “Theoretically, learning is the capability of modifying information already stored in memory based on new input or experiences.”(4) In other words, an input needs a certain output process to be effective in producing proper memorization. The brain retrieves what it is already stored in order to comprehend and archive the new stimulus. Then, this process of retrieving the old for acquiring the new is a good application of the ability that the brain has to do two different –in this case complementary– processes at the same time.
This double process of retrieving/acquiring makes me realize that every time the student retrieves the previous stored content in order to learn something new, those memories are reviewed and somehow improved. This reviewing generates two involuntary but wonderful results: new connection or deeper understanding; as well as higher speed in the management of that previous archived knowledge. This has a name: fluency.
So, now that we understand that new input facilitates fluency, we can get to the conclusion that in Nation’s world, fluency does not have to be conceived as a separate and final stage in a linear disconnected set of four stages. Even if fluency is not the purpose of a particular lesson that is dealing with meaning-focused input, the student is getting fluent in what he/she already knows.
I find that a particular activity I have done with my L2 level 1 students is a clear example of the kind of dynamic simultaneous input/fluency double process that happens in the student’s brain without interference. During the first few weeks at the beginning of the course, I ask students every day, in the target language, in my case Spanish: “¿Qué día es hoy?” (“What’s today’s day?”) Let’s say the class is from Monday to Friday, and it is Monday 9th in the month of August. The very first time I present this question, students struggle for a few seconds to understand its meaning, but the question is quickly understood as soon as they read the answer on the board, which includes information already known to them, such as the numbers and probably a cognate. So, when listening and reading the answer “Hoy es lunes 9 de agosto de 2019”, the students face the challenge of understanding eight words to get to the realization that in English they mean “Today is August 9, 2019”. The second day, the students listen and read the sentence “Hoy es martes 10 de agosto del 2019”. In this case, the students are learning only two new words: “martes” (“Tuesday”) and “diez” (“10”.) The other six words are already understood, but in most cases not memorized. The third day, half of the students are able to remember the structure and at least the six words that are repeating. They are getting fluent in providing the right answer. Again, they only need two new words to name the next day and the next date in order to produce their answer. The next two days, Thursday and Friday, the same happens. By the end of the week, students are completely fluent in understanding the question (listening fluency) and providing the right structure to answer it (speaking fluency,) only experiencing problems to remember the two words that were new each day and did not repeat during the following days. By the end of the second week, students are fluent in telling the date in a complete form. In other words, they are capable of managing 16 words to answer the question on any day of the week. For the next month, they only need to learn one new word: “septiembre” (“September,”) and so on for the rest of the year. The point here is that from day one or day two, these students started the process of being fluent in telling the date.
On the other hand, this simple activity of asking students every day “What’s today’s day?”, permits teaching the days of the week, the months and several numbers not in a confusing lexical set, but spacing new words within the context of everyday life.
Paul Nation has also written about the “dangers” of teaching new words in lexical sets, opposites, and synonyms together, because “research shows that learning related words at the same time makes learning them more difficult”.(5) This difficulty is described by Nation and other experts as “interference”. In most of the cases this interference is expressed by mistaking one word for another from the same set.
This means that learning the days of the week, or the months of the year, all of them in one session is a “dangerous” mistake. Nation states: "...course designers need to apply a criterion of normal use, meaning that words should occur in normal communication situations, not in contrived, language-focused activities".
Consequently, we can be confident that asking second language students
“What’s today’s day” is a simple and effective way to teach a lot of important/relevant content, while promoting simultaneity and avoiding interference.
References
(1) Quote about chamber music by Michael Hampson, Langley. Quote about simultaneous interpreters by Alfred Spirig, Geneva, Switzerland. The Guardian online.
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-4565,00.html
(2) Multitasking Splits the Brain, Gisela Telis, Science magazine online. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/04/multitasking-splits-brain
(3) Nation, Paul (2013) What Should Every EFL Teacher Know? Compass Publishing, 10
(4) Wesson, Kenneth (2018) Learning and Memory: How Do We Remember and Why Do We Often Forget?
https://brainworldmagazine.com/learning-memory-how-do-we-remember-and-why-do-we-often-forget/
(5) Nation, Paul (2000) Learning Vocabulary in Lexical Sets: Dangers and Guidelines. TESOL Journal, Summer, 6-10.
June 9, 2019
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Alfredo Arango is an educator, writer/editor, and translator, who has been teaching languages (Spanish and English) to children and adults, and developing curriculum, in the USA, for 20 years.
Photo by Brooke Lark
@brookelark