Chapter 6

Relevant issues and methodological keypoints emerging from the data collected 

6.1 - Introduction

I have decided to concentrate my analysis on two relevant issues emerging from the data I have collected: language skills practised and improved during the lessons observed and type of interaction occurring (teacher/students, student/student).

After each issue, the most relevant methodological keypoints related to it will be expanded with the help of some literature, in order to find authoritative support for my observations and conclusions.

I have always been aware of the fact that the findings of a research carried out by teachers like me, working in their own working environment, in touch with their own students, involved in the research process as an acting protagonist, may as a result be biased by the desire to have the initial hypotheses confirmed. I perfectly know also that a research in the education field is valid and helpful to other teachers, only if the conclusions of the researcher are honest and coherent with respect to hypotheses and data collected. For these reasons it is important to compare one’s own conclusions with what has already been developed and studied, both from a practical and theoretical point of view.

6.2 - Issue 1: Language skills practiced and improved during the lessons observed

From the answers the students have given in their questionnaires they seem aware they have practised all of the four language skills in their English lessons in the multimedia lab. To the question ‘Have you spoken in English during the lesson?’  practically all of them have answered ‘Yes, I have’. As to the other question, ‘With whom?’,  most of them say ‘With the teacher’,  only a small number say ‘With my friends’.  The whole class agree they have written something in English during the lesson, ‘my letter’, ‘the letter to my efriend’, ‘some messages for the forum’, ‘the answers of the Maths problem’, ‘the reasoning of the problem’ (see the documents presenting some of the written work produced, letters and messages posted in the forum, in Appendices 8 and 7, p. 157 and p. 150). However, after the Maths/English classes in which they have resolved equations and word problems interactively (see the webpages in appendix.. and appendix…., p. … and p. …) they say they have only written ‘the address of the Website’ and this is true as in those lessons they have mainly read and ticked alternative choices, but in the following lessons in the classroom they have written the problems or the equations again in their copybooks and resolved them without the help of the hints and the alternatives given. When they are asked ‘Have you listened to anyone speaking in English? If you have, have you listened to your teacher, your friends, a cassette, a video?’, half the class answer they have only listened to the teacher speaking in English, the other half say they have listened also to their friends. Some explanations for this discrepancy might be the following: only a few pairs have used English while exchanging ideas autonomously in their collaborative work and, above all, many students think the only sources of spoken English worth their attention are the officially recognised ones, that is the teacher, the cassettes or videos from which they can hear native speakers talking, their friends not representing models or speakers they can learn something from. Finally they all agree they have read something in English , ‘the letter of my friend’, ‘the messages on the forum’, ‘the problem’, ‘the webpages. In conclusion they are all sure they have practised all of the four skills, even if :

a)      speaking is almost entirely practised with the teacher

b)      most of the listening practice derives from listening to the teacher

c)      in the lessons in which they have exclusively used online resources presenting interactive activities writing has not been involved. 

The observations about speaking and listening are confirmed also by the tapescripts of the lessons, in which it appears evident that the exchanges in English are almost exclusively between students and teacher, or at least the exchanges I have been able to record. From my commentaries of the lesson of the 24^th April: ‘It is difficult to reproduce all the exchanges in the class …among the students as they are simultaneous.’; and on the 27^th March : ‘As usual they ask me in English but most of the exchanges when they discuss in pairs are in Italian!!!!’, finally on the 23^rd April:  ‘I will not be able to reproduce the scripts of the exchanges occurring among the students as I should have used as many recorders as the pairs in the class; what I can say is that the students now are working and talking about what they are doing.’

Another important point is related to how they perceive the English lessons carried out by using ICT, I mean the extent to which they are aware they are improving their language skills and competencies.

When the students are asked ‘What have you done in your English class in the multimedia lab today?’ their answers are related mainly to the tasks they have performed and to the technical operations they have executed in order to do the tasks, not to the language structures, both new or old, they have used and practised in order to process and show the task completed. This is confirmed also by the answers given by the Maths teacher and assistant who say the activities done by students in the lab have consisted of ‘Solving problems in English’ and that many students have asked them questions of Maths, while only a few have asked ‘questions to better understand English texts’. What I can say is that in the two lessons of Maths and English also the questions they have asked me have been about the problems and their possible solutions, the only language questions have concerned the meaning of words necessary to the comprehension of the problems and the steps of the solution process. I can conclude that the students have perceived the lessons more as Mathematics lessons than language lessons.

I think this is one of the most positive sides of using ICT in English teaching because when students use language to communicate and to make real products, and not to merely execute language exercises, they are concentrated in the content and in the process they follow to produce the final work, independently of the language they are using.  They do not perceive the activities as language activities even when the content of the lesson is the language grammar itself, like in the lesson of the 19^th of March (see tapescript in Appendix 3, p. 98) during which their task was typing their letters and correcting the underlined mistakes. Here are some of the students’ answers to the question ‘What have you done in your English class in the multimedia lab today?’:

‘I have written and corrected the letter’

‘I have written my letter to send it to my efriend’

‘I have corrected the letter and I have written it again with Word’

‘I have copied my letter with a wordprocessor’

‘I have written the letter again with Word’

‘We have re-written the letters with the computer so we can send them corrected to our correspondents’

‘I have re-written my letter and saved it’

‘We have used the computer to write letters"

Less than one half  have used words like “correct” and “correction” that can be put in relation to grammar accuracy, even if the language lesson’s specific aim was improving correctness. They have observed, analysed and discussed the mistakes, then they have devised a solution and asked me for help. This has been the most demanding task, as typing and producing Word documents was not a novelty at all, since they all know how to create a Word document. The evidence of this is in most of the answers to the question ‘Have you learned anything new in the use of the computer, today?’, to which they have  answered ‘No’. On the contrary, if we analyse the exchanges between teacher and students the language structures that have been introduced or reinforced are many.

These are some exchanges occurred while the students were typing their letters and correcting the mistakes underlined:

S[1]: Why this is a mistake?

T: Why is that a mistake? Well, yes, don’t you see? It’s plural……

S: Oh,  yes..... the “s”! 

In this exchange a student asks me why he has made a mistake. The question form he produces is not correct, as it usually happens, so I repeat his question in the proper form in order to let him have an implicit grammar input in what explicitly sounds like a feedback about my comprehension of his question. So, the exchange, like in many similar ones, involves grammar twice: implicitly – question form, and explicitly – plural.

S: Teacher, where is the mistake?

T: Let me see, yes... Are you sure you need “at” if you want to express a movement . How do you say? “I go...” (I mime the movement towards a place)

S: to...

T: Right, this is the mistake

S: Teacher

T: Yes

S: Here, “At the 5 o’clock”, Where is the mistake?

T: Oh, this is Italian not English. You don’t use the article in English to express the time. How do you say “Ci vediamo alle 2”? Say it in English.

S: See you.......at 2

T: Yes at 2, no article. I told you, when you write first say it and then write it, when you write you tend to translate from Italian, when you speak your English is better 

In these two exchanges I suggest the students to exploit other instruments they possess to resolve written language problems, in particular sounds and gestures. I have always noticed that in written language they make grammar mistakes they never make while speaking, as in speaking there is the help of the words’ sound and the gestures or the situations they always associate with them. So, when the students are invited to associate sounds or movements with the expressions they have to produce, they immediately realise what the mistake is.

S: Excuse me, teacher.

T: Yes

S: Why is it a mistake?

T: Oh, it’s very easy, I don’t need to tell you why. Discuss it with your friend. 

In this case I have decided not to give suggestions to make them discover the mistake because it was quite evident and also because the other student composing the pair was a very good one and he could try to help his friend understand it.

S: Teacher

S: Here there is a mistake, why?

T: Here?

S: Yes

T: There is only a problem of spelling, check in the dictionary or you can check the spelling with Word. You select the word and press the right button of the mouse, ok? Have you set the English language before starting the document?

S: No

T: Do it now. Select what you have written, go to “Strumenti”. Then to “Lingua”, “Imposta lingua” and choose English. Ok, now you can check the spelling of your words.

S: Teacher I write rabit, “coniglio”,  and  is a mistake....

T: How did you write it? Can you spell it?

S: R _ a_ b _ i _t

T: Oh, yes, it’s wrong, double b, rabbit has got double b

T: Hey Everybody... Use the dictionary and control the spelling of the words, you make a lot of spelling mistakes..... Set the English language if you want to check the spelling with Word

S: Come si fa?

T: How? Please M., can you come here for a moment and show your friends how to set the English language in Word? 

Most of this type of lessons in the multimedia lab are unpredictable. The only certainty is the task the students have to fulfil. In this part of the lesson, for example, I have to explain to some students how to use the spelling check of the wordprocessor they are using. It is not a planned stage of the lesson but it has become part of it because it is a specific requirement connected to the task. It represents a double implicit learning of language skills and IT skills, not inserted in a pre-established lesson or syllabus layout, but immediately introduced as a response to the students’ needs.

S: Teacher

T: Well, let me see. Yes when I write this symbol, there is something missing, discuss with your friend how you can complete this sentence

S: Teacher, and here?

T: Oh, here there is too much. In English you say “ask me”, “answer me”, “give me”, OK?

S: OK, yes,  no “to”

S: Professoressa, però....

T: In English please

T: yes, what do you want to ask me?

S: what’s the spelling of “about”?

T: It’s a_b_o_u_t

S : Thank you 

Interrogative forms, plurals, the use of the articles, spelling, prepositions, vocabulary, and a lot of other grammar items revised or introduced, but at the end of the lesson when they have been asked ‘What have you done today in your English class in the multimedia lab?’, the students do not answer they have learned English, and they have.

The answers to the same question on the 2^nd of April (see the tapescript in Appendix…, p. …) are totally concerned with the tasks, nobody has mentioned the language, here are some examples:

‘I have completed my letter’

‘Letter writing’

‘I have written two messages on the forum’

‘I have written the problem of Mathematics’

‘I have written the document on the four mathematical  operations’

‘I have written the page with the definitions’

‘I have written the exercise with the translation from Mathematics to English’

6.3 - Methodological key points related to issue 1

Task-based activities

Situated learning, task-based activities, problem-based tasks, project-based learning, learning by doing, interaction are some over-used expressions, all connected to a constructivistic type of  learning environment, that should be re-defined and re-considered as it can turn out for keywords that, for being over-used, end up with losing their original meaning and assume different meanings according to the convenience of  those who use them, like a blanket that everyone can pull towards one side or another, depending on the situation and the position in which they are.    

In 1990, that is after the revolution represented by the communicative approach in language teaching, Scarcella, Andersen, and Krashen wrote:

… surprising is the fact that many foreign language teachers still see their job as training students to jump through linguistic hoops in the form of a succession of texbook exercises and oral drills, where the only criterion of acceptability is grammatical and phonological accuracy, and the most optimistic outcome linguistic competence.  (Scarcella, Andersen, Krashen 1990,  p 305).  

Now, more than 10 years later, things have surely changed, but many teachers are convinced they are inside a communicative framework only because they use modern texbooks or teaching aids and technology, but the philosophy behind their work remains traditional, that is to say they still view the language as a sequence of forms to be taught according to a well planned programme and what the learners are expected to do is to correctly handle them. Their students will perceive the foreign language accordingly, as a sum of artificial parts studied in the classroom in order to do exercises and school work and so obtain good marks. 

On the contrary, as Nunan states:

...any classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. (Nunan 1993, p 59). 

A task-based activity’s aim is to make the students communicate by using the foreign language in order to produce a piece of work individually or in group, so that the use of the foreign language is viewed as instrumental by the learners because it is contextualised inside the problem to be resolved, the work to be created, or the content to be analysed and learned, just as it happens when they use their own mother tongue. In this way the students will consider the language not as the sum of many parts, something artificial that is to be studied at school, but as a whole system that conveys meaning, ideas, values, in a word culture, which they can enter as parts of the system itself for understanding and creating messages: a part of their life that they are using now at school to resolve problems related to their present interests, but that they can use also in the external world  to perform anything that they are interested in or that they will need.

Language forms have to be learned of course, as a mastery of grammar rules represents the only way to make messages comprehensible to the people who share a given code. However, inside such a vision of language learning this aspect is presented to the students as necessary to fulfil the communicative tasks, not as a task in itself. Often learning grammar, and all the activities connected to it such as exercises and drills, are perceived by the students as boring and repetitive school-like work, not communicative at all, not connected to the idea of the language as a real aspect of life, and the risk is that the students lose their motivation and language awareness.

For this reason grammar shoud be seen by the students as strictly connected to and as a function of the task, the content, the problem, or the project they are to accomplish, that is the final aim of the learning process, and that represents their real interest. As Schank affirms in his book published online:

A better way to motivate students to learn dull material is to give them the opportunity to achieve some goal that satisfies two conditions: One, that students have had a real interest in the goal, and two, that the uninteresting information is "intrinsically" related to the goal; in order to achieve the goal, one sometimes must use the uninteresting information. Having the goal and the facts occupy the same turf helps a great deal. Not only does it make the facts seem less trivial, it allows students to properly index those facts. They learn them in a context in which they can later use. (Schank 2002)

Tasks are strictly and explicitly connected to a content of interest, and implicitly connected to the language needed to carry them out. They create the natural weaving between action and thinking in real life situations, and between motivation and learning in the school environment:

One way to ensure that language learning occurs in a meaningful context and that language processing goes beyond the level of the isolated sentence is to develop instructional models where language and content are closely interwined.” (Omaggio Hadley 2001, p 164)

Language learning and acquisition at school

The incredibly huge range of Internet resources and the opportunities offered by the multimedia communication[2] are the most effective supports that today learners and teachers can find to fulfil communicative tasks both in terms of information distribution and exchange and in terms of interpersonal communication among remote places and people. And this is especially true when the foreign language classes are attended in the formal environment of a school situated in one’s own mother country, that is to say in the situation where I work.

In his famous distinction between “acquisition” and “learning” Krashen says: 

Acquisition is a subconscious process that is identical to the process used in first language acquisition in all important ways. While acquisition is taking place, the acquirer is not always aware of it, and he or she is not usually aware of its results. Acquisition produces what Chomsky (1965) calls “tacit competence”, or a “feel” for language. Learning is conscious knowledge, or ‘knowing about’ language. In everyday language, when we talk about ‘grammar’ or ‘rules’, we are referring to learning, not acquisition...Acquisition now appears to play a far more central role than learning in second language performance .... Our conscious rules perform only one function: they act as an editor, or Monitor. While we are speaking or writing, we can stop, scan the output of our acquired system, and make corrections, using the rules we have learned. (Krashen 1989, p 8) 

Acquisition is related to the language “feel”, to the instinctive perception of what words are used for, to the desire of taking part in communicative acts because we have an interest in them;  learning is related to the control upon how we handle and use words, to a voluntary action of monitoring and checking what we produce from the formal point of view. Learning is a conscious process, acquisition is an unconscious process, and, always according to Krashen: 

… subconscious acquisition appears to be far more important.” (Krashen 1981, p 1), in fact “Research evidence strongly suggests that Monitor use is very limited, that all fluency and nearly all accuracy in second language performance … is a result of what we have acquired, not what we have learned. (Krashen 1989, p 8) 

School is traditionally linked to the idea of language learning, to teachers splitting the knowledge into tiny, digestible parts to facilitate their students’ control over the materials they are expected to master. Language acquisition is primarily linked to the natural process of acquiring one’s mother tongue or a second language in the natural, informal setting of the country where this language is spoken.

Is it possible to promote language acquisition in the formal setting of a school environment?

I think I can affirm that it is, when teachers and students in their classroom re-create and maintain the features of the environment where acquisition occurs, that is to say when teachers and students form a learning community, better if, with the help of ICT, enlarged to subjects of other countries and different nature with respect to school, such as other classes, experts, museums, associations, newspapers, etc.. A community that works around contents of interest and, in order to fulfil tasks or resolve problems, uses the foreign language. 

So, school promotes learning and can promote acquisition: 

… informal environments, when they promote real language use (communication), are conducive to acquisition, while the formal environment has the potential for encouraging both acquisition and learning. (Krashen 1981, p 6) 

How?

There are several ways in which a classroom can promote language acquisition. Intake is available via meaningful and communicative activities supplied by the teacher… (Krashen 1981, p 116)  

The goal is to supply:

 … input so that students progress in language acquisition, so that they understand “real” language to at least some extent, and by making the student conversationally competent, that is, by giving the student tools to manage conversations despite a less than perfect competence in the second language. (Krashen 1982, p 60)  

According to Krashen language acquisition comes from a continuous exposure to ‘comprehensible input’, and the principal function of the language teacher is  ‘…is to help make input comprehensible…’ (Krashen 1982, p 65). The strategies a teacher can use to make input comprehensible are many. Simplification is the first solution that one immediately thinks of, especially in classes where the proficiency level is low, but it is the one I always try to avoid, as the risk is to expose the students to material that only apparently is authentic. Other ways, the ones I prefer and that I have experimented with in these last years, are:

·        the exploitation of the students’ previous knowledge – both of the specific contents treated and of the world in general - mainly acquired through their mother tongue;

·        the work of the teacher who can figure out the possible difficulties the learners can encounter, both related to language and to content, and who can devise appropriate activities to introduce the items that may represent  problems for the learners’ comprehension so that, by interacting with the teacher and peers, they can be discussed and their possible solutions negotiated;

·        the use of appropriate tools/resources (dictionaries, glossaries, books, etc.) to help students to deal with the content involved in the learning and carry out the task as autonomously as possible.

To conclude with the words of Krashen:

… we acquire … by understanding messages or by obtaining comprehensible input… this is done with the aid of extralinguistic context, knowledge of the world, and our previous linguistic competence.’  (Krashen  1989, p 9)   

There are two possible ways of accomplishing this [comprehension]. The most obvious, and probably most frequently used technique, is simplification of the language … Some research bears … it is not encouraging… On the other hand, substantial research shows that providing background information can help a great deal in making input comprehensible. (Krashen 1989, p 28)

6. 4 - Issue 2:  Class interaction

a) Students/teacher interaction

As I have already said before the students have interacted a lot with me, and almost always in English. These are the main features of this interaction:

-         the students have mainly asked questions and I have mainly answered their questions

-         in the beginning of each lesson in the lab the students’ questions have concerned the computers and the operations to start and manage hardware and software; my questions have had the purpose to get a feedback from them about their knowledge of the task they had to fulfil, which had been previously established

-         in the rest of the lessons the students’ questions have been related to the different contents dealt with in their products (letters, messages, Maths pages, Webpages) and the language needed to express them, especially new words.

The first feature is very important: the students make a lot of questions (interrogative forms) and, so doing, they reproduce the natural situation of a real learning environment, in which the learner asks because he/she wants to learn and the teacher answers because he/she knows what the learner does not, or the real situation of a foreign English speaker who is in an English speaking country where he/she needs English to ask for information, instructions, directions, explanations and less often to answer. Just the opposite of what usually happens in the non-natural, non-real “traditional” school environment where the teacher asks questions and the students give answers the teacher already knows.

What type of questions do the students ask?

At the beginning of each lesson, the students’ questions are about ICT, or better, about the technical operations they need in that very precise moment, i.e. contextualised technical questions not containing the explicit purpose of learning how to use computers, but representing a necessary bridge towards the task’s fulfilment: the computer is thought of as a means to express their communicative products, like English. Technological skills are not felt as a direct target of their work, nevertheless they are the object of many questions because many are the technical problems they have to cope with if the objective is to send mails, write documents to post and publish on the school Website, take part in a forum, do interactive activities on a Website.

The questions about language are mainly questions about new vocabulary, as the students needs words both to comprehend and to produce. When the foreign language is used for interacting in real communicative activities involving comprehension and production the students’ attention is focused on the language aspects having relevant semantic value, that is keywords necessary to understand the messages contained in the texts or in the teacher’s  speech and keywords to express ideas and opinions in their letters/messages/documents.

Here some extracts from the lesson tapescripts of the 22^nd April, 24^th April and 27^th March:

S: Excuse me teacher...

T: Yes?

S: What’s the English for entrambi?

T: Both... B_o_t_h, ok?

S: teacher , what’s the English for dittatore?

T: Dictator, like....terminator... d_i_c_t_a_t_o_r

S: Teacher, what’s the English for competere?

T: It’s to compete, c_o_m_p_e_t_e 

These exchanges about lexis seem like items of a pattern drill because the three students ask me for the Italian translation of some words by using the same structure (what’s the English for....?). This might be the process: the first student has asked the question and the rest of the class have listened to him and deduced by my quick answer the question was right, so they have reused it again and again according to their needs. Probably some of them already needed these pieces of information before, but they were silent because they did not know how to ask and their friend’s intervention has suggested a model to be exploited. We can say, in this case, that they have listened to and learned from peers[3], even if in their questionnaires, as I have said before, only a few students have answered they have listened to their friends speaking. The first possible explanation of this contradiction is the one I have already mentioned, that is to say the traditional way of considering learning at school elicited by the students from the behaviour of most of their teachers, according to which you can learn only from official sources – teachers, books, materials, and aids introduced by the teachers, that are omniscient and have the precise task to know and handle everything. Another possible explanation is in that learning from peers is not taken into consideration, because when it happens (and it naturally happens) it is often thought of like copying, something similar to a cunning trick used to cheat the teacher, not as a process of collaboration and exchange of knowledge in the whole group, including teacher and students. However, the collaborative climate and the perception of the roles of the components of the class-group cannot be taught, they can be felt in the way the teacher behaves, in the school activities carried out, and in what the students are expected to do.  I think these exchanges, and many others too, show they have perceived that, but at the moment they have had to explicitly say who has spoken in the class, that is to say the sources from which they have received stimuli through oral inputs, learned, or revised something, friends are seldom mentioned.

T: Listen to me, please… These are the instructions for the lesson of today…listen carefully because I won’t repeat…today we’ll use another Website . I’m going to write the address on my computer and you’ll see it on the screen. This new Website is about word problems. What does “word problem” mean in Italian?

S: Problema

T: Not only…

SS: …con le parole

T: Yes!!! A problem expressed with words. You have to read and comprehend it, then follow the steps, the operations that the Website suggests…So you have to read and understand…and do what the instructions on the page tell you. If you don’t know some words you can use the online dictionary or ask me for help. What is the address of the online dictionary?

SS: vu- vu-vu …

T: vu vu vu is Italian…

SS :w-w-w dot…

T: Yes, that’s right, and then?

SS: …wordreference dot com

T: Right. So, first of all you open wordreference.com, and you’ll have your dictionary, if you don’t understand some instructions you can find the words on the dictionary…… and now let’s  open the new Website of Mathematics … Now I’m going to write it here… and then you can do the exercises… 

In this piece of interaction the teacher has the predominant role, of course, as it is the beginning of the lesson, the stage of the instructions. After that the students start working autonomously.

S: Excuse me, teacher! What is the meaning of “even”?

T: Attention please everybody. One moment, One moment, can you listen to me one moment? “Even” and “odd”. Do you know what are the even numbers and the odd numbers?

SS: ... ...

T: They are new words… and they are necessary to resolve one of the problems…So, the numbers can be even or odd . I give you some examples: two is even and one is odd, three is odd and four is even

SS: Numeri pari

SS: Pari e dispari

T: Yes, even is pari, odd is dispari, remember them…even and odd 

From time to time I invite them all to concentrate on an item introduced by a student, when I consider the question is relevant for all in order to better understand the activities they are doing, in this case to understand one of the problems they have to resolve.

S: Teacher!

T: Yes

S: it is OK?

T: What?

S: equation.... the definition of equation

T: But we didn’t write the definition of equation in class..

S: Yes, but the teacher of Maths say....we must write the definition of equation

T: Oh, she told you to add the definition of equation

S: Yes

T: Let me see....Yes, yes, you write it is an equality.... Where have you found this word?

S: In wordreference...the dictionary

T: Good 

The Maths teacher has suggested the pair of students who are creating the document with the definitions of the Mathematics terms we have previously done in class should complete the list (operation, expression, variable) by defining the term “equation”. They already know what an equation is in Italian, of course, now they have to do it in English. They call me only to check the sentence they have produced from the language point of view. 

Finally the students ask a lot of questions about the topic they are dealing with, of course.

From my personal reflections of the 10^th of April:

The questions are only about mathematics, only a few times about English, I have the impression that after the starting explanation of the activity and the Website, they have forgotten they are using a resource in English. They ask indifferently me or the Maths teacher about the problems they encounter in resolving the equations. The questions are exclusively about the equations, about calculations, signs, in a word about Mathematics, not about English. I think this is positive because they are using English in its natural role, that is conveying meaning, messages about a content. The content is the focus, the language is the means by which they discover the content. Indirectly they are handling a lot of English, when they read quickly to find how to start a new set of equations, when they click on the score link, when they read the hints to find out where they have made the mistakes.

This is confirmed also by the Maths teacher and assistant who answer ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have the students asked questions about Mathematics?’, and ‘Only a few times’ to the question ‘Have the students asked questions about English?’

The questions I ask them, especially at the beginning of each lesson, are mainly aimed at checking their awareness of their task, or the point of the process they are have arrived at.

Here is the tapescript of the beginning of the lesson of the 23^rd April:

T: First of all, let’s repeat quickly your tasks... F. and M., what are you doing?

S: We doing ....a copy of the letters...and a ...in one file

T: In one file, yes...Which letters?

S: The letters of...the class

T: The letters of the class, yes and then we’ll send them to...

S: to....efriends

T: Yes to our efriends!

T: And you? What are you two doing?

S: We write letter

T: Do you have to write your letters or messages on the forum?

S: Letters

T: The letters to your American efriends?

S: Yes I copy my letters for American efriends

T: J., what are you doing?

S: I ... use the file where I ... there is my message

T: Are you going to enter the forum?

S: Yes

T: Do you remember the address of the forum?

S: Yes

T: What is it?

S: www.eslcafe.com/discussion

T: Very good... F. and D., what are you doing?

S: we ... doing.. a message

T: a message for the forum?

S: yes

………………………………………………………………………………………

 T: Ok... M. and L. what are you two doing?

S: We work to the forum and we...write...letters

T: What do you do if you have a new message.....

S: we copy and....

T:  ... and PASTE it

S: in Word....

T: Yes, in your Word file... Have you got a Word file with the old messages?

S: Yes...

T: M. and A., what are you two doing?

S: We must write a message for the forum

………………………………………………………………………………………

T: What are you doing?

S: We are writing a message

T: If you have new messages...

S: Yes, I copy and...

T: and?

S: ...paste in the file of Word

T: Yes, right! You select, copy and paste the new messages in your file

T: S. and S., what are you doing?

S: We......

T: We...?

S: ... do the forum...

T: What are you doing on the forum?

S: I discuss...with... my friends

T: Yes, you are discussing with your friends on the forum

T: If you have new messages...

S: We save my messages

T: Well, you save ...you don’t really save... What do you do?

S: Ah yes, I paste...

T: Yes you copy and paste the messages in the file you have in your personal folder...OK? 

These exchanges represent a sort of survey I do to see whether they have clear in mind what the task of each pair is, and also to recall to myself what each student is going to do. It may seem an ordinary organisational stage on one hand, it is communicative interaction on the other hand as each exchange is based on real information gap, as I know the different tasks of the day but I do not know which one each pair has to do. 

In conclusion: the oral interaction between students and teacher/s during the lessons in the multimedia lab is continuous, even if the students do not produce very long arguments in English, mainly questions or answers. This depends on the language competence level they have, that, as I have already said, is only elementary. This interaction is made up of exchanges directly concerning the content, while the exchanges about the means to handle the content (ICT and English) are direct and explicit only on the language surface, while the deep indirect purpose (most of the times) is content again.

As a result of these lessons, the interaction between students and their “virtual” partners occurring through the online resources used during the lessons (forum, email, websites) consists of more complex production in written form always implying the use of English (see examples of documents produced in Appendices 6, 7,

8,  p. 141, p. 150, and p. 157). Writing allows students to be more reflexive and systematic in building their communications that represent at the same time the output of a step of the communication process and the input of the next one.

b) Student/student interaction

In the reflections I wrote during the lesson of the 23^rd of April I say, about the students working in pairs: ‘I can understand some words in English and some words (more) in Italian. There’s a sort of background “noise” composed of all these exchanges, but not an unpleasant noise... from time to time they ask me for help, in English’., and on the 27^th March : ‘As usual they ask me in English but most of the exchanges when they discuss in pairs are in Italian!!!!’, So, in the interaction occurring when the students discuss autonomously in their pair or group work, the relevant negative feature is the usual one: they use a lot of Italian. This is negative, of course, if we consider the potential language improvement that might derive from working and collaborating with peers, but, on the other hand ‘They tend more to use Italian when they speak to one another, because they are considering it a lesson of Mathematics, but most of them use English, or are “forced” to do it by me,  when they are talking to me.’ (personal reflections, 10^th of April). The aim is the task and the task is directly linked to the content, not to the language. In the Maths/English lessons the students feel the solution of the algebra problem as the primary need, and only secondarily the language required to perform it. So, while working alone, when the presence of the English teacher is not so close, the language constraint is forgotten and they use the vehicle most natural to them in order to exchange ideas on how to resolve all the problems and produce results. We could say this is the price we have to pay if we want to keep the motivation level high and the activities always meaningful and really communicative. The use of Italian in some parts of the lesson appears a choice that paradoxically has a positive side: it is the proof that the students perceive the context as an involving one to such an extent that they are eager to find the solution as quickly as possible and choose the quickest and most natural way. It is assumed that the role of the English teacher, though a native speaker of Italian in my case, is that of an expert in the foreign language, who has the task to make them think it is as natural to do all – or at least most – of the process by using another language, just like “millions of boys and girls  are naturally doing in this very precise moment in other countries of the world”, as I often tell my students.

Anyway it must never be forgotten we are speaking of Italian students living in Italy, who use English at school only three hours a week for 9 months a year in an environment where the language to learn and to live in is their native one. The use of English at school will always be perceived as artificial, fruit of a previous agreement with the teacher of English, whose sight represents in their eyes and minds a sort of switch that turns on the English they know. And not always, because they perfectly know the English teacher is Italian and they share with him/her an entire world of cultural values and interpersonal feelings that are made explicit in English only in class, very seldom when they meet in the corridors of the school, in the streets of the town or during school trips.

This is obviously got over when the same students are immersed in the environment of the foreign country whose language they study, and attend an international course. The teachers are native speakers and are not supposed to know the students’ language, the class mates are native speakers of other languages so, in this case, the use of English is felt as a necessary act, even if not natural to them. For the three years that I have been taking students with me to England in the summer, I have noted in most of them change in their consideration of the English language, and foreign languages in general. Beyond the fact they tremendously improve their language competence, they acquire the awareness that all those strange sounds and intonations, all those difficult words and expressions – verbs, prepositions, idioms, etc. – are no more only a school subject to study but the everyday life means of communication of the people of another country. I mean that by seeing people naturally using English to perform the ordinary activities of everyday life they start considering using it more natural and normal. Most of them stop being shy and start running risks in expressing ideas and needs by using all the English they can, also when they come back to school in Italy.

However not all of my students have the possibility to study abroad, even if for a short period.

Another help to find a solution to the problem of creating a favourable and, as much as possible, a natural environment for the student/student interaction in the foreign language class once again can be provided by the potentials of the online communication. I am referring to experiences in which the real class is enlarged to become a bigger community made up of teachers and students in presence plus teachers and students at a distance, such as learning circles and partnerships in which collaborative projects with foreign partners are carried out by groups or pairs of students from different countries. They are given tasks to complete by using the means of communication they have in common, English, in this case, from the point of view of the language, the Internet from the point of view of the learning environment. I have experienced collaborative projects with schools of many foreign countries, from simple ones consisting only of exchanging emails or taking part in a forum, like in the class observed in this case study, or more demanding ones consisting of producing pieces of work about a novel read and analysed together or comparing national institutions. I think the international framework in which they are set and the continuous feedback coming from unknown foreign partners produce a change in the students’ perception of the foreign language similar to the one described for the students who go to study abroad, even if this change is gradual and not so suddenly provoked by the direct contact with the people and the place where they live.

6.5 - Methodological key points related to issue 2

Interaction in the classroom

Classroom interaction seems to be the basic element inside the scenario depicted so far, even if often the students’ utterances are short, incomplete, incorrect, mixed with Italian words, however always deriving from a real need to ask for explanations or giving suggestions in order to accomplish the tasks they have been given. Interaction that is immediately caused by real information gap, necessity to communicate, intentionality, unpredictability of the situation to face and handle. 

The classroom is not a place where the teacher just carries out predetermined routines, but rather a place where various elements interact. These elements are the students and the teacher, including their educational and social backgrounds, experience, knowledge and expectations. (Tsui 1995, p 22)

 Interaction among all the participants in the lessons observed – students, teachers, email and forum partners - appears to be a relevant and continuous feature of the activities carried out in the multimedia lab.

Interaction means: verbal expression of problems and difficulties proposed to the community in order to resolve them and go ahead; contributing to the overall knowledge growth, both individual and collective, both linguistic and related to the content, by expressing one’s own opinions, ideas, findings, doubts; comprehending and producing language utterances in order to communicate notions and information, but also feelings and moods; devising and discussing strategies, either individually or with partners, in order to resolve problems and fulfil tasks. Interaction positively affects all the components of the language learning process, in that it inevitably results in language skills improvement, content knowledge enrichment, metalanguage acquisition, cognitive skills development, metacognitive skills awareness and enhancement, relational skills reinforcement, affective components strengthening in terms of motivation and involvement.  

 Several theories postulate a relationship between language acquisition and output during the interaction process … between language acquisition and input … and between language acquisition and negotiation of meaning… Some interaction studies also indicate that negotiation with a teacher in the classroom is valuable for language acquisition”[4] (Gonzalez-Lloret  2003) 

Maybe the picture may seem too enthusiastic and optimistic, but experience has taught me that only in this kind of scenario each student can achieve his/her maximum results in terms of language awareness and acquisition, obviously depending also on personal attitude, character, and history.

As a matter of fact, this is the only framework in which comprehensible input can be presented, analysed, discussed, understood, in a word negotiated in the formal environment of the class.

Although one should avoid making the sweeping generalization that there is a simple equation between talking and learning, and should not force students to participate when they are not ready, one cannot deny that participation is very important in language learning. This is because, when students respond to the teacher’s or their fellow students’ questions, raise queries and give comments, they are actively involved in the negotiation of comprehensible input, which is essential to language acquisition. And when students produce the target language and try to make themselves understood, they are in fact testing out the hypotheses they are forming about the language. (Tsui 1995, p 81) 

Interaction can only occur when there is the necessity of communicating something, because, using the words of Wilga Rivers:

Students achieve facility in using a language when their attention is focused on conveying and receiving authentic messages (that is, messages that contain information of interest to speaker and listener in a situation of importance to both). This is interaction. (Rivers 1987, p 4)  

Classroom interaction deriving from a shared interest for a content to develop, and the related  tasks/problems to accomplish/resolve are closely interconnected features of an effective language learning environment.

No matter how this will be carried out:

“The interaction may be quiet; it may be noisy; it may be alert and dynamic; it may take place in large groups, small groups, or pairs;... but it will be there, with students deeply involved in tasks and activities that draw on their creativity and stimulate that of the teacher.” (Rivers 1987, p 10)  

No matter what the students’ language mastery level is:

Even at an elementary stage they learn, in this way, to exploit the elasticity of the language, to make the little they know go a long way. The brain is dynamic, constantly interrelating what we have learned with what we are learning ... (Rivers 1987, p 5)  

As I have said before, more than once, a learning environment with these features is based on a well profiled idea of language and also on the precise belief that language teaching consists of presenting the L2 (the foreign language learned in the school context) to the students as an opportunity to expand one’s own cultural horizon and to enrich one’s own overall knowledge, not as a set of frozen chunks to handle in order to compose a pre-determined jigsaw.

Inside this vision, what will happen in class can’t all be predicted and pre-planned before, as  

 … teachers’ willingness to pick up cues from students, and make on-the-spot decision to modify their plans is an important element in classroom interaction. (Tsui 1995, p 5)  

This makes lessons more involving and motivating as they are always at the service of the needs the students express, and the interests they show.  The teacher knows that, inside this framework, risk taking is inevitable and that his/her role has assumed the function of guide, tutor, sometimes mediator, sometimes learner among learners, some other times even learner from his/her learners.

In this setting language can be used for communicating and the principal and most demanding task of the teacher is now that of making the school setting more and more natural to the eyes of the learners, so that they acquire confidence and take part in the interaction. There are many factors that prevent students from participating in the classroom interaction. Tsui underlines the most relevant ones: ‘..students’ lack of confidence in their language proficiency….’ (Tsui 1995, p 84), students’ fear of ‘…making mistakes and being laughed at by their peers.’ (Tsui 1995, p 83); he notices even that ‘…some learners who are very competent in the target language and who know that they are better than their peers may be reluctant to participate in class because they do not want to stand out from the rest of the class…’ (Tsui 1995, p 90).

As a matter of fact, in this methodological framework the affective component is the core question. Learners must be put at their ease and feel confident inside the learning environment created. Teachers must focus their work on the empowerment of students’ intrinsic motivation, the one based on the relationships among the people involved in the process (teachers and students) and between them and the environment where the process takes place. Krashen writes:   

The Affective Filter hypothesis claims that comprehensible input, although necessary, is not sufficient for second language acquisition… a high filter, one that prevents input from reaching the LAD[5], is caused by low motivation, high student anxiety, and low student self-esteem. (Krashen 1989, p 10)  

Nunan underlines that self-confidence, and consequently motivation, can be increased by the students’ successful use of the language in communicative exchanges since the earlier stages of the learning process, better if all this occurs in cooperative learning situations: 

If people’s perceptions and feelings of competence are enhanced, their intrinsic motivation will be increased. Language learners need positive experiences of what (and how much, in fact, even at the elementary stages) they can do with their language communicatively. Such feelings of success will increase their self-confidence. In an important sense it can thus be argued that competence develops through confidence. (Nunan 1992, p 23)  

In cooperative learning situations learners work together to accomplish shared goals. … since all group members now share a common goal, they are motivated to work together for mutual benefit in order to maximize their own and each other’s learning. This creates a positive interdependence among the learners: they perceive that they can reach their goals best when the others in the same learning group also do as well as possible. (Nunan 1992, p 34)  

In conclusion, the key of the “game” seems to lie in the students’ motivation to take part in it, which is deeply linked to the interaction that has to develop in order to accomplish the tasks,  resolve the problems or carry out the projects, individually, or, better, collaboratively. Only students’ motivation, involvement, engagement can defeat anxiety, shame, lack of confidence or self-esteem. Platt and Brooks, in an article published in the journal Language Learning, distinguish two types of engagement in the language classes “language-related engagement and task-related engagement”. This is what they write about the first type: 

Evidence for language-related engagement is noted in individual learners’ speech activity, in which  they repeat to themselves or respond vicariously to others’ questions and statements about ‘pieces of linguistic data’. For example, verb endings, grammatical particles, or lexical items that are of current concern or interest are selected by the individual learner. (Platt and Brooks 2000, p 372) 

When the lessons are based on tasks, the students’ perception of the aim of their work immediately changes and the second type of engagement becomes the fuel of the learning process: 

… the nature of problem-solving tasks highlights a very different kind of engagement, namely, with the task procedures themselves where focus on linguistic form seems less central to the successful completion of the task.

Task engagement can be found in the discourse when learners display through either private or social speech their own structuring of the task, say, to establish goals as they feel necessary to move from mere compliance with the task itself to actual engagement with it. (Platt and Brooks 2000, p 373) 

During their observations of the behaviour of some students they have found results very similar to the ones I have pointed out in mine. After discussing the communicative exchanges occurred between two English students learning Spanish as a foreign language in accomplishing a Jigsaw task, the two authors say:           

We acknowledge that both Brandy and Darryl used a mixture of English and Spanish to accomplish this task. Nonetheless, the sporadic use of their native language, we argue, enabled them to remain focused in the task and continue on to task completion. (Platt and Brooks 2000, p 390) 

The foreign language and their mother tongue share the role of vehicle to reach the real objective, that is task-related and implies communication, as we can deduce from this passage: 

The kind of understanding that emerged from these interactions is arguably a kind of strategic competence inasmuch as they came to understand that their new tool, Spanish, can be used to solve complex communication problems. (Platt and Brooks 2000, p 391) 

In the end, they conclude with this short, but significant sentence:           

The portal to the ZPD[6] is task engagement. (Platt and Brooks 2000, p 391) 

The Zone of Proximal Development, according to the contructivists, is the cognitive situation in which development occurs thanks to a dialectical process which involves problem-solving, negotiation, and mediation experiences carried out with others, who, at that moment,  know more than you with respect to a given item, such as parents, teachers, but also more capable peers.

To facilitate the implementation of these dialectical exchanges should be the main task of the teachers, who will try to create a supportive learning context and a social environment in which the students may feel more and more confident and motivated.

As a conclusion, I can say that, in this view, multimedia tools, ICT as a whole, and the Internet in particular, can be seen as powerful facilitators of EFL teaching based on interaction deriving from communicative task-based activities and projects in the school setting, as they give a strong contribution to make communication authentic and global, which means always involving because covering all types of content deriving from personal needs and interests, and never boring because unpredictable and self-directed.

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