lol – probably exactly what happened.

I’m also very worried at the type of activities that are put into books as pre-teach nowadays. Activities such as match the words to the definitions – how can the students do this if they don’t know the words? Label a diagram with the words in the box – well, if they can label the diagram then ….

This really isn’t pre-teach it’s guesswork!

Adrian

Hmmm…so I put the text through a vocabulary profiler at Tom Cobb’s site: http://lextutor.ca/vp/bnl to find out that over 90% of the words in this discussion thread come from a pool of 2,709 most commonly used words in English. When I took out the proper nouns like Thornbury, Eldridge, etc. The text coverage rose to 93.5%. There were a few ‘low frequency’ words in general English that are high frequency words in an EFL classroom, like ‘vocabulary’ and ‘classroom’, so when I put these in as ‘known’ words, the text coverage rose to 94.3%. Looking over the rest of the ‘low frequency’ words, I noticed the phenomenon that Eldridge and Hancioglu refer to, that there are usually a few low-frequency (presumed unknown to the learner) words that occur frequently within any given text. By pre-teaching a few of these, in this case, ‘theology’, ‘lexical threshold’ (as a chunk), ‘scaffolding’, and making sure they knew the abbreviation ‘SLA’, the text coverage rose to 95.5%.

Now, that left me with a pool of ‘low frequency’ words for use in developing other reading strategies: “springboard cline fluency plausible dogme fad quest smacks elicit elaborate zone autonomous scaffolding profilers profile bedrock autonomy prescriptions realm vague bitchy mainstream belligerent ”

Of course, this is purely a look at the vocabulary profile, and doesn’t take into account other factors like readability, grammatical structures, cohesive devices, etc. But, if I had learned English as a foreign language, and I wanted to use this as an authentic text, then this sort of analysis would not have been in vain.

Finally, armed with this information, I might just create a WORDLE of the discussion thread: http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/957593/Preteaching_vocab

As a teacher, perhaps I could use this as an opportunity to explore the ‘frequency profile’ of the specific text with my students, and in this way deal with ‘pre-teaching’ on a flexible basis from my students reaction to the WORDLE, along a more ‘test-teach-test’ type of methodology.

The ‘theology’ comment is rather bitchy. If one doesn’t understand the basics of the product-teaching and process-teaching cline, then so be it.

Modern research into SLA would not support product teaching. In-class practices need to reflect what we know about SLA. It’s not theology. It’s the recognition that most mainstream EFL is based on nothing, but it continues to rot the system.

What we do in the classroom must be based on something justifiable, right? “Because that’s how I was trained, it’s how the course books are written, and it’s how all the other teachers I know work” just doesn’t cut it in my mind.

Sorry to seem so belligerent. But a TEFL blog with a post about methodology was a welcome relief, and I was keen to interact.

What seems to have been missed is that The 95% lexical threshold is not just a reading comfort zone, not at any rate according to the likes of Paul Nation and Tom Cobb – it’s the level of contextual understanding you need to have in order to be able to reliably infer meaning. So the kind of pre-teaching we recommended should in many cases actually help develop autonomous text processing skills by providing the necessary scaffolding.

Incidentally, the tools we used – such as the vocabulary profilers on Tom Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor (http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/)- are really very user-friendly – enough so that learners can be shown how to profile texts for themselves, and use frequency lists to help them develop the language awareness that in many ways is the bedrock of autonomy.

For the rest, methodology is ultimately a matter of ‘fitness for purpose’, and prescriptions of any type of what practitioners should or should not do with text seem to me to fall out of the realm of informed practice and into that of theology.

Nice discussion, and site by the way…

I don’t necessarily advocate reducing TTT. In fact, there are many instances when I talk a lot – storytelling, telling an anecdote etc but I always know why I am saying what I’m saying. This is why I’d stress quality of quantity.
Another thing worth thinking about is thinking time. As you point out, much of the talk that goes on is simply ‘noise’. Often teachers seem frightened by silence, but silence can actually be very productive.

I think the testing issue is very important. Of course there’s a time for testing (I’ve just been writing a diagnostic test today) but it does seem like many teaching materials are just a string of tests. Especially, as Adrian says in no. 6, with reading. To me a big problem with tests is that they narrow people’s objectives, from the IELTS candidate who only wants to know how to describe a graph and use linking words to the reader of a text in a coursebook who just needs to understand enough to answer some comprehension questions. What about the rest of the lovely language in the text?
As a CELTA trainer, sometimes I stop in mid-sentence while telling my trainees how to do something and think, “I’ve always said that, but is it really true?” I’ve stopped getting them to pre-teach for the reasons Adrian gives and it makes teaching practice SO much better (no more spending so long pre-teaching that there wasn’t time for the text!).
Interesting post, thanks very much.