Dr. Leon James Report on "The Third Force in LanguageTeaching"

file3.htmlTEXTMSWDĄOÎř;^>řBNŞŞL Dr. Leon James Report on "The Third Force in LanguageTeaching" "The Third Force in Language Teaching"

By: Leon James, Ph.D.

University of Hawaii

1972

Pages: 31-60

In devising and managing these exercises, resist the temptation to getinvolved in the details of their operation. Instead, try to get the studentsinvolved in their execution. Trick them into it if they are slow to turn on tothem. Make them help you manage the whole thing. Be clever and on your toes.Take frequent breaks to allow you to retain concentration. Separate out thosewho are openly uncooperative. Make them watch from the sidelines. Do not removethem or scold them dyadically or in private. Make the class deal with them. Berighteous and steadfast and quick in openly recognizing your constant blunders(which aren't blunders, but you think so anyway). And in all of this stupendousactivity, heavy with happenings by the ten-seconds, conversationalinteraction takes place! Thus, all exercises will have beenfulfilled. Congratulations. You've gone through another day. Don't you feelsecretly you're lucky to be a teacher?!

(B.) Reading has to do with understanding. Understanding is organizedchunks of discourse: this part has to do with X and X is related to Y and Ycomes from Z but A is hooked up to it too... That sort of thing. So what thereader has to do is to make up a diagram of these chunks of ideas andarguments showing how they go together in his understanding of what he isreading. Beginners can trace newspapers, textbooks, storybooks, etc. reproducingspace and text collocations; later, they can work with a book index, tracingindentations which represent sub-categories of main entries and mark, copy, orannotate them, according to whatever they can already do, or imitate othersdoing it. Still later, they can diagram phrases, sentences, paragraphs,according to any notation system you can get them to adopt easily: geometricshapes, arrows, colors, pegs, cards, + and - signs, or whatever. More advancedstudents or older students will devise their own system, once they get the ideafrom you.

Memorizing text pays great dividends. Choose some for them; let themalso choose for each other and for themselves. Suggest it as homework, but don'tcheck up on it unless you're actually curious about someone's performance on it!

Encourage them to sniff at books, and to sniff them out from libraryshelves and bookstores. Let them fondle books, look into them and---if you canafford the luxury---let them mark the books up, draw in them, and whatever elsethey wish. Let them bring their own books and exchange them. Comics are fine,too, but we don't recommend supermarket shelf Walt Disney readers (and the like)because their presentation is always sex-role focused and counter-reactionaryto ideas of transactional engineering and individual liberty.

(C.) A useful way of studying writing is to make indices and copy text.This can be done as soon as the learner can trace recognizable characters andmanage spacing between words. Watch how quickly children and adults learnintuitively and spontaneously about spacing of text, orthography, word-units andidioms, function words, morpheme inflections, and punctuation! Later, indexingtext can take on added proportions: individuals test out the adequacy of their-index by seeing how others use it to find particular words, and later, titles,topics, themes, and still further, arguments and types of arguments.

Constructing a "topic domain fragment" consists of arrangingwords, titles, and texts into groups, classes, and sets; Roget'sThesaurus may be used for study and reproduction; library cards, Sear'sCatalogue and the Yellow Pages are further useful places to begin from.

Writing begins as a commentary on something. Beginners can write theirown words next to someone else's words; later, comments and signs next to textsof all sorts of shape and format; "I like this" or "I've seenthis before" or "I don't get this"; later, a comment or two onsome page or story; later, a story... But these details may change and surpriseyou: one child (or more) will write a story right off the bat, on day one, then,later, will write his words next to other people's words!

"Automatic writing" is a genuine phenomenon. It does notdepend on a special talent for spiritualism. We know nothing about spiritsdictating novels... but automatic writing we're referring to is quite simple todemonstrate: "Write down the first word that this makes you think of."It's an eliciting device for automatic writing; a more elaborated version wouldinvolve: "Imagine...[X], then what would you say or do? Write itdown!"; still further activities involve listening to music or watchingleaves move and writing down the spontaneous thoughts evoked by close inspectionof minute changes in patterns, rhythm, vibration. It's natural and engaging.Eventually (or maybe, at first!) the individual can receive dictations fromimaginary voices in their heads. Oh, what a supremely delightful discovery towitness when a person, child or adult, discovers that writing is as spontaneousas talking! Avoid assignments and composition exercises that suggest in any waythat writing is difficult or needs preparation or editing, etc. None of thosedramatizations are helpful.

(D.) Children have the hardest time sustaining an adult's steady gaze.When they talk, they continuously move their heads, look away, fidget, forgetthey're talking to you (or act like it). All that is natural. Now, what you haveto get them to do is to practice adult forms of maintaining contact duringinteractions. Here you must devise all sorts of activities that clearly andforcefully engage their focus of attention: insisting on sustaining line ofregard when "practicing"; don't try to maintain the rule under otherunmarked conditions; it will be distracting and intimidating; giving rapid fireverbal instructions is fun to do and watch; watch how eagerly they try to gofaster, beyond the reasonable competence of the performer; meanwhile: theypractice communicative contact and coordination. That's what counts!

(E.) All kids can scream, but few talk loud enough to be heard whencalled upon to perform in the language class. Rather than make superhumanefforts to catch what they're saying, make them practice talking abnormallyloud; avoid using the rule under unmarked conditions: it's intimidating; thenpractice whisper-talk (or words?); let them produce and imitate all sorts ofoutlandish noises and cries; but do not tolerate abnormal noise under unmarkedconditions: it's annoying.

A summary of the principal directions that should guidethe language teacher in devising activities in the classroom can be rendered inthe following terms:

To make use of these summary hints, read each pair of items using thisprocedure; imagine that the items on the left are pedagogical objectives to bepracticed: they are areas of discourse functioning; exercises you devise fortheir rehearsal and performance are inherently valuable; they are activities oflanguage use; merely doing them is their sole purpose; you can spend 100% ofyour time on it. The items on the right are familiar and reflect contemporarypractice in American public schools; practice of these items is not inherentlyvaluable; instead, they are believed to be instrumental in leading to betterknowledge and higher achievement in language use; or they may representpractices that have evolved in response to other things; At any rate, note thatthe items on the right can be recognized as the traditional instrumentalities ofthe linguistically based approaches to method in language teaching; while theitems on the left represent many of the components of the goal of theseinstrumentalities: namely "liberated expression" and the functionalcontrol of language use. The broken arrows represent the allegeddirectionality of applied linguistics; that is, for example, textbookdialogues (d), practice conversations (c), and artificial rules of classroomtalk (1), are linguistic instrumentalities for the attainment of naturaltranscripts (d), transactional exchanges (c), and natural coordination in talk(1), respectively. Similarly, selected vocabulary lists (k), words and phrases(b), and paraphrases of phrases (h), are artificial linguistic exercises topromote the attainment of conceptual topic domains organizing coherent discourse(k), topic nominals that condition the evocation of discourse units (b), andmaking comments or re-framing (assimilating) what has been read, chunk by chunk(h).

But the broken arrows are broken, and they apparently leave dormant muchof the literacy they promise. The more appropriate direction is given bythe unbroken arrows. That is, if the exercises and activities in the languageclassroom are those on the left, not only are they then inherently valuable, butthey in turn now serve as an instrumentality for promoting the attainment oflinguistic skills; thus, school language vocabulary (k), artificial timing (l;m;), skills in paraphrasing (h) and test taking (n; o;) are the needed skills ofthe school achiever, which are now promoted by exercises on building topicdomains (k) on maintaining natural coordination rhythms in talk (l; m;), and byinvolving students in the task of constructing ways of testing and showing whatthey know (n; o;).

Now we can understand the paradoxical actuality whereby languagelearning is a problem only in the language teaching classroom; everywhere else,people, children, immigrants, parrots, and chimpanzees seem to do it withoutlinguistics and its instrumentalities.

Are we ready to tell our legislators to discard their reliance onnational norms, and, for indices of accountability, to look instead at theprogram sheets and classroom productions of the activities generated therein bythe imaginative use of transactional engineering and discourse technology? Also,are we ready to tell our publishers and their representatives that now we haveturned to our own business and will be generating our own topic glossaries? Ifwe are ready, then let us do it.

  		THE    END

OUTLINE

1 . Teaching as Conversation

1.1. The medium in which formal education is transacted is theconversational mode.

1.2. To teach is to tell; to learn is to listen.

1.3. Talk is much more than communication.

1.4. To teach is to talk.

2 . The Transactional Model ofTalk

2.1. Conditions for transacting in talk.

2.2. Organizational structure.

2.3. Types of transactions in talk.

2.3.1. Gives Explanation

2.3.2. Gives Justification

2.3.3. Gives Elaboration

2.3.4. Dramatizes

2.4. Code book of the conversational ritual the rules of talk.

2.4.1. standing claim between conversationalists.

2.4.2. the background context or setting of a conversational episode.

2.4.2.1. transactional contextual features.

2.4.2.1.1. socio-logical

2.4.2.1.2. sub-cultural

2.4.1.3. emotional

2.4.2.1.4. informational

2.4.2.1.5. inferential

2.4.3. transactional code: competence and performance.

2.4.3.1. if-then rules

2.4.3.2. style of modulation, conversational style

2.4.3.3. sequencing rules

2.3.4. deletion rules

2.4.3.4.1. interstitial structure of utterances

2.4.3.4.2. conversational register

3. The Empirical Investigation of
the Transactional Code

3.1. Basis of empirical adequacy for "made-up" illustrations oftalk as data.

3.1.1. actual vs. constructed conversations

3.2. Conversational competence has three components:

3.2.1. judging the naturalness of sample conversations

3.2.2. constructing samples of conversations that appear natural

3.2.3. producing conversational utterances in an actual conversation

3.3. Transactional code: levels of realization

3.3.1. speech community's transactional dialect

3.3.2. dialect shared by conversational participants to a particularevent

3.3.3. individual's transactional competence: a variable on the taxonomicgrid of context of utterance

4. Engineering Authentic Transactions
in the Classroom

4.1. TE Workshops: Transactional Engineering Workshops.

4.2. Self-Analytic Objective Reporting ofOn-Going Authentic Transactions: SAOROGAT.

4.2.1. the authentic conversational dyad: five social witnesses or"participants"

4.2.2. instructional units defined in terms of boundaries marked bymoments of relief (indicating the completion of an experiential forwardlearning step)

4.2.3. the desocs unit: developmental sequence of theconceptual statement

4.2.3.1. logical/conceptual structure of topic: in teacher'sregister.

4.2.3.2. reporting transformation into pupil's register.

4.2.3.3. statement of behavioral objectives.

4.2.3.4. built-in feedback mechanism: TOTE-step after eachinstructional unit.

4.3. Types of learning

4.3.1. conceptual

4.3.2. experiential

4.3.3. instructional

5. Educational Psycholinguistics: Teaching as
Telling -- Learning as Listening

5.1. Educational Psycholinguistics investigates the teaching-learningprocess through a transactional analysis of the organization of conversationalinteraction.

5.1.1. when are explanations appropriate

5.1.2. when are justifications appropriate

5.1.3. When are elaborations appropriate

5.1.4. how are dramatizations appropriate

5.2. The teaching-learning process is a joint interactional functionof the teacher's reporting competence and the pupil's listening competence.

5.2.1. analysis of a written passage

5.2.1.1. textual behavior

5.2.1 2. critical reading

5.2.1.3. instructional reading

5.3. The ideal teacher is the perpetual student.

Paraphrasing: note that p. involves a desocs transformation. In general,textual reading and note learning involve transforms that retain the same levelof pedagogic ambiguities or the original. Higher level transforms retaindifferent levels of p.a. and add or eliminate to the original. (Also see section6)(p. 40, top)

6. Pedagogic Ambiguities and Levels of
Insight in the Instructional Register

6.1. How to tell effectively: Analysis of desocs.

6.1.1. the instructional theme

6.1.2. the main instructional topic

6.1.3. the transactional structure of the instructional statement

6.2. Pedagogic ambiguities of the instructional transactions proposed by the desocs: their number and generiticity determine the quality of thedesocs.

6.2.1. clarity of specific instructional goal: what do I have tolearn?

6.2.2. clarity of instructional operations: how do I learn that?

6.2.3. clarity of its experiential relevance: how is it personallyrelevant to me?

6.3. Pedagogic responsiveness of the desocs: how well it addressesitself to pedagogic ambiguities of particular Individual students

6.3.2. levels of insight

6.3.2.1. written medium

6.3.2.2. meditation or discourse thinking medium

6.3.2.2.1. nature of controlling desocs for personal constructs

6.3.2.2.2. their acquisition

6.4. How to listen effectively: goals for and strategies in learning.

6.4.1. an effective listening desocs has at least 6 components allwhich facilitate instructional learning.

6.4.1.1. Legitimizing transactions: direct and indirect

6.4.1.1.1. minimal

6.4.1.1.2. adequate

6.4.1.1.3. enthusiastic

6.4.1.2. Complying transactions

6.4.1.2.1. number and nature of simultaneous transactional requests andstrategies for complying.

6.4.1.3. - 6.4.1.5. Learning transactions at three levels.

6.4.1.6. Reporting transactions as a function of transactionalregister and practical transactional skill.

6.4.2. Listening sets or strategies four levels

6 4.2.1. rote learning level

6.4.2.2. experiential learning level

6.4.2.3. instructional level

6.4.2.4. transactional level

6.4.3. Illustrative analysis

7. Authenticity and the Teaching --
Learning Process

7.1. What is authenticity?

7.1.1. awareness of on-going transactions

7.2. Desocs for teaching "authenticity"

7.3. The Register of Objective Reporting

7.3.l. of on-going feelings

7.3.2. of on-going transactions

7.4. Corroboration

7.4.1. sensual validation

7.4.1.1. direct (empathy)

7.4.1.2. indirect (inference)

7.4.2. consensual validation

8. Disagreeing: An InauthenticTransaction

8.1. Fake disagreements (negative collusion)

8.2. Genuine disagreements are always inauthentic transactions

8.2.1. mislabeling of on-going transaction

8.2.2. objective reporting counteracts inauthenticity

8.3. Inauthentic teaching

9. Authentic Teaching

9.1. Authentic teaching transcends the basic manipulative aspect of theinstructional transaction.

9.1.1. Transacting the Authentic Teaching Contract

9.1.2. Transacting Objective Reporting

9.2. Antidotes to Disagreements: Repairing activities in the face of

9.2.1. Inadequacies in legitimizing transactions

9.2.1.1. in public transactional dialect

9.2.1.2. in private transactional register

9.2.2. Characteristics of adequate legitimizing

9.2.2.1. the non-victimizing register

9.3. Legitimizing in the instructional register of authenticteaching

9.3.1. Pupil requests for legitimization

9.3.1.1. request for topic switch

9.3.1.2. request for repairing transaction

9.3.1.3. request for acknowledgment of complaint

9.3.2. Teacher responses to pupil legitimization requests

9.4. The inauthentic vs. the authentic register

9.4.1. speaking impersonally: generalizing

9.4.2. the collective pronouns

9.4.3. time displacements

9.5. The Teacher Paradox

9.5.1. Inauthentic victimizing transactions

9.5.2. Authentic victimizing transactions

9.5.3. Authentic validating transactions

9.5.4. Inauthentic validating transactions