IATEFL Issues 145 - Affect and the cost of correctness

The IATEFL Newsletter has recently published a series of articles on the benefits and costs of teaching grammar. Insofar as those articles are about the pursuit of NS-like correctness for its own sake, many of the ideas in them apply equally to the teaching of "correctness" in other aspects of language as well.

Costs of correctness and incorrectness

All parties seem to agree that language students should attain sufficient control of grammar and other points of linguistic form so that they can communicate with native speakers and with other users of the language. But between that degree of grammatical control and 100% perfectly native control lies a broad optional range of "minor" points: when to say I lived here for ten years and when to say I have lived here for ten years, for example. Conformity within this "optional" range leads not so much to increased ability to communicate as to widened opportunities to communicate and to have one’s messages taken seriously by those in power. Opposition to the teaching of optional points of linguistic form to FL or SL students is often based on objections, not so much against correctness per se, as against what are seen to be its prohibitive costs:

The social cost of optional correctness

Insistence on linguistic form can be viewed as just one further instance of - and affirmation of - a relationship of unequal classroom power, in pursuit of goals that are acceptable to those with greater political power. The assumptions here seem to be (1) that anyone who has a power advantage over anyone else will use it exploitatively and destructively; and (2) that readiness to draw on one's own inner resources, to make effective choices about how to use those resources, and finally to live with the outcomes of one's choices - in short, readiness to take and to use power - are either enhanced or crushed by what happens during language study.

The practical cost of optional correctness

(1) Critics charge that when linguistic form is emphasized, the learner at first attains greater and greater linguistic correctness about less and less content, finally becoming able to speak with almost perfect correctness about almost nothing.

(2) Then after the course ends, the learner forgets more and more of the correctness that had been attained, finally becoming able to say nothing, and unable say even that very well. The learner, like hungry Esau in the Biblical story, gives up a lasting blessing (acquisition leading to long-term, though imperfect, facility) in exchange for a plateful of delicious-smelling stew (i.e., short-run accurate learning, resulting in grammatical correctness that is not very useful). Such a learner is even worse off than Esau, in fact, for to many learners the grammatical stew had never smelled all that good in the first place.

The emotional cost of optional correctness

As presented in too many courses, optional correctness comes at the cost of certain amount of boredom (doing repetitively something that one can do but that doesn’t seem to help much), together with - for many learners - more or less frustration (trying to do something that might help, but that one just can't get the hang of).

Inside the learner: sources of correct and incorrect forms
The social costs of imposing or, for that matter, of withholding features of optional correctness lie outside the scope of this article. But once we have determined which degree and which specific optionalfeatures of the language we want to convey, how can we convey them most efficiently? Let's take a simplified look at some of the inner sources of learner performance.

1. In the brain, new experiences get analyzed and reacted to in terms of combinations of things that have been found together in the past.
2. These "things" include the "five senses," but also time, purpose, emotion, and others. They include both the verbal and the nonverbal sides of experience. They are of many sizes and many degrees of abstraction.
3. Future language performance (coming up with appropriate pairings of words and situations) draws on these combinations of things that have occurred together in the past.
4. The configurations of the "things" that make up memories are organized around purposes, and around the emotions that arise as purposes are or are not met. That is, they are centered on "affect"
5. A verbal item (word, structure, point of pronunciation) from an experience that includes deeper and wider purposes will be more readily and more fully available for future performance months or years later, than an item from an experience that has included only shallower, smaller-scale purposes. Say that such an item is "in Permanent Memory" (PM). BUT: It's hard to predict or control just which parts of this kind of experience will or will not actually get into PM; AND arranging and conducting these deeper, more complex learning experiences requires expertise, hard work, imagination, and time.
6. On the other hand, just about any selected verbal item (word, structure, point of pronunciation) can be put into an activity that requires relatively little expertise, hard work, imagination, or time, and in this way it can be made more available for language performance needs in the near future. It's "in Holding Memory" (HM). BUT: The availability of material in HM is short-lived. One is reminded of Krashen's emphasis on how certain types of study activity lead to long-lasting "acquisition," while other types lead only to short-lived "learning."

We see in (5) and (6) that HM and PM have complementary strengths and weaknesses. An affective point of view helps us combine activities so as to allow each kind of memory to partially compensate for the shortcomings of the other. The details will vary according to course design. Here are two general examples:

In the traditional ordering of activities, where mechanical activity is followed (we hope!) by meaningful activity followed (we hope!) by communicative activities, I suggest that every point presented mechanically should be followed soon by at least one communicative activity, remembering that "communicativeness" varies from perfunctory to profound - from inane to interesting to involving."

In more contemporary ordering of activities, students encounter unedited or "i + 1" language in an interesting activity such as a shared task right at the very beginning of a unit. I suggest that some parts of any such activity be followed by improvised simple mechanical activities, highlighting sharply-detailed points of optional correctness; and that each such mechanical activity should be followed soon by a further small communicative activity. The sequence of language points to be covered in an affectively-oriented lesson is not plannable in advance, but is driven by events. It will not be neat, orpredictable, or easily comparable with sequences covered during the same time period by other classes. It should however be relatively cost-effective.