Promoting
fluency and accuracy through planning, telling, transcribing
and noticing by Scott Shelton
-3
Experimenting
In
my proposed experiment, I plan to take into the classroom
the ideas of the monologue, planning time, focus on form
through both peer and teacher feedback and take it one step
further in the feedback stage. Asking the students to record,
transcribe and analyze each other's speech and reflect on
how it could be improved upon through discussion and negotiation.
As a group of four learners listen intensively to a classmate's
story, transcribe and suggest areas for improvement, I hope
to not only raise awareness of language form and lexical
appropriacy, but also place the emphasis on learners doing
the noticing themselves, thus encouraging learner autonomy.
The ideas here draw from an article written by Tony Lynch
(2001) in which he states:
Collaborative
transcribing and editing can encourage learners to focus
on form in their output in a relatively natural way.
This
particular form of transcribing appears to offer a productive
route to noticing, in which learners are encouraged to externalize
their thoughts about the formal correctness and semantic
precision of their own input.
It
is also suggested in this article that transcribing in itself
is a valuable learning tool which draws on a long tradition
of dictation and recently, dictogloss. Dictogloss is a process
in which learners partially transcribe what they hear then
later re-write the original text by using collective grammatical
and schematical knowledge. Lynch (2001) cites recent research
evidence that learners can benefit form transcribing whether
it be in the form of dictogloss (Swain and Lapkin 1998)
or of interviews with native-speaker informants. In his
experiment, he suggests taking this idea further and having
students transcribe themselves.
This
is something I would like to try as well, but due to the
limited resources available, I have devised instead a learner-centered
'peer' approach that will allow the class to work in two
groups, on the speech of one of the members of the other
group. I hope that this will prove equally as instructive
for the students involved as if they were transcribing themselves.
In fact, I think that errors will be easier to detect and
it will be less difficult for the person being scrutinized
if this is done by a different group. Like Lynch, I have
questions that I hope to have answered in the process of
the experiment.
•
Will the students be resistant to first of all being asked
to repeat the task with another partner, and second to being
recorded?
• Will they be cooperative in sharing one tape player
as they work together to transcribe their classmate's speech?
• Will they all be motivated to be involved in both
the process of transcribing and noticing?
• How much will they notice in the way of language
errors and how much will they over correct?
• In which areas will they notice the most (lexis,
grammar, phonology, and so on)?
• What sort of amendments will they make; only corrections
of errors, or improvements and refinements of what they
think the speaker wanted to say?
• And finally, how much would they want to depend on
the teacher and how much would I have to step in?
Conclusion
It
appears obvious from recent research and experimentation
that allowing planning time before speaking tasks and repeating
the task benefits the learner in both developing his or
her language system and can also encourage the use of more
sophisticated, complex and accurate language. It also encourages
practical real world strategies and skills, as planning
is something we often do as native speakers. However, it
is also clear that to gain full benefit from such an approach
to developing speaking and language skills, attention needs
to be given to form in the way of feedback and analysis
if the learner is to learn from his or her mistakes. Focus
on form through noticing activities may prevent fossilization
and encourage a move towards improving not only fluency,
but accuracy, appropriacy and complexity of language use
and interlanguage development.
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