On Recognition and Production in English Teaching　−Toward More Efficient Classroom Activities−

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奈良教育大学学術リポジトリNEAR

On Recognition and Production in English Teaching −Toward More Efficient Classroom Activities−

著者 YONEKURA Hiroshi, SATO Hideshi journal or

publication title

奈良教育大学紀要. 人文・社会科学

volume 32

number 1

page range 13‑22

year 1983‑11‑25

URL http://hdl.handle.net/10105/2280

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奈良教育大学紀要第32巻第1号(人文･社会)昭和と迫年

Blユ日. Nara Univ. Educ, Vo】.32, No.1 (cu一t. & soc.), 1983

On Recognition and Production in English Teaching

‑Toward More Efficient Classroom Activities‑

Hiroshi YONEKURA and Hideshi SATO

Department of English, Nara University of Education, Nara, Japan (Received April 30, 1983)

Summary

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways of improving the present English teaching situations in Japan from junior high to college level, which are far from meeting the expectations of the Japanese society that cries for upgrading quality of English teaching as a means of international communication.

We support the idea of reducing the amount of English language instruction as a whole, which would surely have some impact on quality. English language education in senior high and college should be made optional both de jure and de facto, but at the same time much more strict with regard to aims and levels so that the students of English could work for tangible results.

This paper also stresses the need of improving the students' listening ability which is the basis of four skills, pointing out the importance of keeping the balance between reading and speech instruction. We are against the theory of K. C. Diller who emphasizes the exclusive use of the foreign language in the classroom.

Finally we suggest some feasible methods and techniques in the classroom that will develop communicative competence of the students through creative activities.

0. The aim of this paper is to discuss and elucidate some aspects of English teaching in Japan related to classroom activities aiming at promoting the students productive ability on the basis of their receptive ability.

1.1. Despite the increasing demand for a working knowledge of English in all fields of Japanese society, the present English teaching situation in this country is such that our schools and colleges cannot meet the expectations of society at large, although there are quite a few enthusiastic teachers struggling to help their students achieve a harmonious development of the four linguistic skills that go to build a complete mastery of English, a vehicle for international communication. There are so many difficulties standing in our way, some of them surmountable through the efforts of individual teachers, and many others insurmountable because of many factors including the educational system and organization. Indeed we could parody the late Winston Churchill's famous words: Never in the study of the English language has so much effort been expended by so many with

so little result.

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14 Hiroshi YonekurA and Hideshi Sato

A great deal of discussion has taken place, and will continue to be made about how to promote efficiency in English teaching in this country. Harold Palmer, direct precursor

to the audio‑lingual theorists, aptly pointed out back in 1927 that ‖one of the main objects

of a language course is to enable students to produce foreign sentences in accordance with the usages particular to the language being studied."(1) However, Edgar Mayer severely criticized our English classes in action to the effect that the subject studied in

many high school and college English courses is not English buりapanese, since readings

are translated into Japanese, lectures and discussions are in Japanese; in short, English is for all practical purposes banned from the classroom, as surely as if we issued a decree:

"English is forbidden here."

The same critical tone can be seen in Kenneth S. MacDonald's address given at IRLT (Institute for Research in Language Teaching) Convention in October, 1979: HI like having a captive audience and an audience of Japanese university students is the most captive, for they rarely respond spontaneously or ask questions and I sometimes feel that they might not notice anything odd if I addressed them in French or if by accident I went into the wrong classroom and started to teach."

1.2. We presume that the large majority of students in Japan study English chiefly because English is required in the entrance examinations, definitely not for international communication. It is often pointed out that, under the present circumstances the students' proficiency in English is the lowest when they graduate from college. Ironically enough, it often happens that their ability is the highest at the beginning of the first semester of the first year when they are admitted to college after having been severely trained at senior high or prep schools. We may safely say that in order to achieve effective teaching in Japan the present system of college entrance examinations as well as teacher training system should be drastically reformed, if English is to be taught and learned as a means of interpersonal and international communication, as well as for cross‑cultural understanding.

On balance we are much in favor of the opinion of reducing the amount of English language instruction as a whole, which would surely have some impact on QUALITY.

We would like to see the study of English in senior high and colleges optional as is seen in most foreign countries, but at the same time much more strict with regard to aims and levels so that students who did elect to study English could expect and work

for tangible results.

No one can deny the fact that questions in college entrance examinations produce amazing effects upon the direction of English teaching in high schools, both senior and junior. This is partly because English is not taught as a second language but as a foreign language in Japan, where we do not usually get beyond the stage of progressive accumulation of linguistic knowledge, far from achieving spontaneous, meaningful language use, in a truly communicative situation‑that is, in a spontaneous transaction involving two or more other persons. The greatest challenge for us Japanese teachers of English is to get our students to a point where they are able to produce sentences on their own

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On Recognition and Production in English Teaching ¹⁵

according to the rules of grammar. In a few college entrance examinations listening comprehension or dictation test has been administered to those aspiring to major in English, but the number of such colleges is quite limited, so that the efforts of high school teachers are solely bent on making the students prepare for the examinations

questions that are limited to grammar, translation, and other tests requiring writing.

1.3. In Japanese schools practice in listening has so far been unduly overlooked with greater emphasis laid on reading, thus leading the students to fall into the habit of relying on the eye and not on the ear. We mentioned Hemphasis laid on reading." Can reading ability be fully developed without training the ear? A speech specialist remarks that Hthe processes of speaking and hearing are very intimately related, so much so that I have often said that we speak with our ears. We can listen without speaking, but cannot

speak without listening."1

Many linguists and language teachers echo the words of C.C. Fries who maintains:

This recognition of the difference between the productive and the receptive controls of language does not imply a mechanical separation of the materials into ̀practices

in producing for the sake of production only and ̀practices'in recognition for the sake of receiving only. As a matter of fact practice in production is one of the best

means of developing recognition.(3)

Fries's assumption quoted above is rather severely attacked by J. R. Nord, who asserts:

This assumption that ̀practice in production (speaking) is one of the best means of developing recognition (listening)'is not a 'matter of fact'...it is not a matter offact or data. Because it is such a generally accepted opinion without any basis or fact,

it needs to be seriously questioned‥‥ There are few people who recognize that

listening can be learned without speaking, that speaking is not necessary to learn how to comprehend the spoken word. … More importantly, there seems to be even

fewer people who recognize that the preoccupation with oral responses (speaking) in the initial phases of instruction is actually harmful to language learning.141

A series of experiments made by V. Postovsky and J. Asher and a few others seem to endorse Nord's rebuttal against Friess statement. Postovsky goes so far as to affirm that both behavioristic and cognitive approaches to language learning treat oral production as a primary skill, but there are reasons to believe that oral production is an end result of complex and mostly covert processes which constitute linguistic competence. Upon the basis of his experimental data he concludes that skill in production of speech output is the most complex skill to be acquired.151

We believe that practice in listening comprehension is the very basis of all phases of language learning. The integrated linguistic system should be first internalized on the

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16 Hiroshi Yonekura and Hideshi Sato

recognition level through the ear during the three years in Junior High School. Training in immediate reaction to oral stimuli will help the students develop their reading skill since practice in listening not only aims at grasping meaningful sounds correctly but helps to form the habit of making out the context of a given passage without translation in a very short period of time, thus developing the power of direct understanding of a printed page.

1.4. One of the fundamental problems facing English teachers in Japan will be to keep the balance between reading and speech instruction, since the majoてpart of communica･

tion is still carried on by means of the printed material, and reading skill will continue to remain the most important skill for the majority of Japanese students to achieve.

Unless we lay emphasis on the written language in intermediate and advanced stages, we cannot hope to make desired progress even in the spoken language. The following story indicates an example of the importance of exposing language learners to the written language.

Philip G. Hamerton tells about an Italian who came to France as a young man and learned his profession there. The Italian was naturalized later, married a French woman, had several children, pursued a very successful career in Paris, and became ultimately French Ambassador. His story goes this way:

His French was so perfect that it was quite impossible for anyone to detect the usual Italian accents. I used to count him as a remarkable and almost solitary instance of a man speaking two languages in their perfection, but I learned since then that his French had displaced his Italian, and so completely that he was quite unable to speak Italian correctly, and made use of French invariably when in Italy. The risk of this displacement is always greatest in cases where the native tongue is not kept up by means of literature. Byron and Shelley, or our contemporary Charles Lever, would run little risk of losing English by continental residence, but people not accustomed to reading and writing often forget the mother tongue in a few years, even when the foreign one which has displaced it is still in a state of imperfection.(6)

1.5. As in many other fields of science we are still in an age of uncertainty; in the field of the study of mechanism of language production relationships between language production and language recognition are not still clearly defined. However, no one can deny the fact that the acquisition of receptive ability should always precede that of productive ability since no one can produce what he cannot understand. Concerning the processes of comprehension and production Clark and Clark (1977) expound in the following way:

The process of comprehension requires that listeners take in an utterance, analyze it, construct an interpretation, and utilize what they have understood in the way the

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On Recognition and Production in English Teaching 17

speaker intended. In production, on the other hand, speakers have to come up with a way of conveying information to someone else. They must plan what they want to say, choose the right words and the appropriate speech act, and then produce their utterances. There is an asymmetry between these two processes even for adults.

People understand many words they never use themselves and they also understand people who speak quite different dialects of their language. In other words, people understand many things that they cannot produce, but they rarely produce anything they do not understand.<7)

From the standpoint of technical communication theory W. Weaver uses the terms

Hsources", Htransmitter", …channel", Hreceiver , Hdestination", Hmessage", and hnoise

He explains that when a person writes he codes internal neurophysiological messages into a language display which permits its transmission through a communication channel;

when a person reads he decodes incoming signals from a language display into internal neurophysiological messages. (8>

1.6. The great majority of English teachers in Japan have frequently been told that English should be taught in the order of listening, speaking, reading and writing. There is even a dogmatic statement that the students should never read anything which they have not already spoken, and that in the early stages you can read only what you are able to speak. We cannot agree with F. G. French when he affirms that reading is, for

the most part, only the recognition in printed symbols, of what we can already speak.19' M. Wests explanation is very convincing when he says,

There are many thousands of words in the Bible which we have never spoken and

never will speak, yet we read it‥‥ The truth of the matter is that after the initial

stage the teaching of reading and the teaching of speech tend to become, and should be, divorced. The two vocabularies are fundamentally different. A speaking vocabulary consists of items, sentence‑patterns, phrases, inflections, etc. Every change of form or meaning is a new item, and there is no inferable margin; whereas in reading the exact opposite is true. The main difficulty in reading is the enormous size of the vocabulary.<10)

As for the ordering of teaching four skills in the Japanese classroom we are convinced that we have little reason to believe that there is anything sacrosanct about the order;

listen, speak, read, and write in English teaching. Particularly this is the case when we are dealing with senior high students and adults who have learned to learn in certain ways. However, there is one thing that we should emphasize: listening comprehension should be the focal skill of language teaching in this country where English is taught and learned as a foreign language.

2.1. Weaver and Bickley's experiments with some differences in encoding messages

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in native language'111 are stimulating for us English teachers, because they carry important implications and have applications to the analysis of foreign language production. The experimental procedure was that two experimental and two control treatments were designed.

One experimental group was assigned the task of producing written stories. Two days later they were given cloze tests which were made by deleting every seventh word of their own stories. The second experimental group was assigned the task of reading the stories produced by the first experimental group mentioned above. Two days later they were given cloze tests covering the material they had read, and which was exactly the same cloze test that the producer of the story had completed. Among the findings the following discussion is particularly interesting to us.

1. The producer does not reproduce, exactly, his own prior production. He has a degree of uncertainty about what he has produced.

2. The fact that the producer does not reproduce his own production exactly indicates that the producer cannot communicate with himself precisely, at least not, when parts of his original encodings are destroyed.

So far we have not obtained any similar findings of experiments made to Japanese students of English. We feel we must do the same both in Japanese and in English in the near future, so that Weaver and Bickley's argument can be validated in the case of foreign language production.

2.2. Language recognition as is discussed by Akiko Ueda whose article is titled ls This a Surface Phenomenon? (1978) is one important aspect of language use. According to J. B. Carroll (1976) there has been very little concern in psycholinguistic research with the production of language. Practically all the research that has been done in experimental psycholinguistics has been done in recognition, just because in recognition it is easy to control the stimuli (words, sentences, paragraphs), but it is more difficult to control the stimulus conditions when we are studying language production. Carroll in his lecture for the Sixth JACET Summer Seminar in 1972 discussed R. C. Oldfield's experiment with word‑finding process of people in their native language by giving them picture‑naming tasks. This experiment is also quoted and discussed in depth by Clark and Clark (1977, p.471).

As native speakers we have all the right words stored in our memories and we can retrieve them from our memories. But Carroll states it is still unknown how this is done.

What Old field did, explains Carroll, was to assemble a series of pictures of various kinds of common objects, like cup, shoe, while some were less familiar objects like gyroscope and metronome. The pictures were shown, one by one, to mature speakers of English; the subjects were asked simply to name the pictured objects as rapidly as possible. The speed of naming each picture was measured in milliseconds. As one might expect, the common objects were named faster than the rarer ones. In stating the frequency of a word, Old field used a welトknown count of the frequencies of English words done by E.

L. Thorndike and I. Lorge. When taking the logarithm of the frequency of each word,

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On Recognition and Production in English Teaching 19

Old field found that this was highly related to the speed with which the pictures were named.

Oldfield was also able to show that the length of the words made little or no difference in the naming speeds. Carroll made similar experiments except that he used many more pictures than Old field did, in order to build up the reliability of the results, confirming that word frequency was related to speed of naming. However, it is worthy of note that there were certain interesting exceptions in his experiments; there were a number of

objects with low frequency names that were still named quite rapid王y. He infers that

word frequency itself is not the controlling variable, but rather the age at which the words had been learned, i.e., the age‑oトacquisition of the words. This finding may have some implication and application to foreign language teaching; the easiest words in a foreign language to learn and remember will be those corresponding to words in the native language that had been learned early in life. Those words would not always be words of high frequency, Carroll argues. He also suggests that the order in which new words are introduced in second‑language teaching would have something to do with the readiness of the students to learn and remember those words. In short, common words are produced quickly only becasue they are learned early in life.

In investigating the content words presented in five junior high school textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education in 1981, we found the most frequent words introduced in the initial lessons are mostly familiar words seen around our students, cap, hat, glass, dish, map, book, desk, chair, pen, bag, etc., in sharp contrast with some textbooks published in other countries. If Carroll's remark is valid, it might be wiser for us to introduce to our beginners of English as many familiar words as possible, not sticking to five or six new words in one page. Naming an object requires more than identifying it, and then selecting the right word. Nobody will doubt that the rarer the name, the longer it takes to produce, but the reason for it cannot be fully explained. Clark and Clark(1977) only infer that this may be because the pronunciation of rarer words is less accessible

and because their semantic procedures are more comp一ex.1121 It would be necessary to

do more research to confirm whether these assumptions would work both in our native language and in English language production.

2.3. Oral production in foreign language situation is one of the more difficult aspects, even more difficult than writing, in a sense, because the speaker is required to plan promptly what he wants to say, how to say it promptly in an actual situation, so that he may change the mental state of his listener or listeners.

Therefore, in his experiments Postovsky attempted to reduce complexty of the learning task by delaying oral practice to the beginners of Russian.<13) His approach, first from listening then to writing practice may be very effective to adults who might develop lathophobic aphasia, that is, unwillingness to speak for fear of making mistakes. We do not think, however, Postovsky s approach is practicable in the Japanese classroom situation with he students having far less motivation and fewer contact hours. Our students would

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be bored to death if they were forced to devote themselves only to listening to their teacher or the tapes for such a long period of time.

There should be more varieties of activities in the classroom: systematic exercises in articulation of sounds (both isolated and in combination) , spelling‑patterns, intonation‑

stress‑patterns, conventional conversation (question‑answering). ‑ those are necessary preliminaries to and preparation for reading aloud, or productive reading, which is the skill of production because it is the skill of conveying meaning by transforming written language into spoken language, supplying the language signals or the appropriate stress‑

intonation patterns that are not represented in the graphic materials. It is quite reasonable that Postovsky includes oral reading among the seven components of the speaking test score.

2.4. Among the language specialists in foreign countries there are some who claim that reading aloud is a necessary evil and suggest to us that we should do away with it quickly, favoring teaching the skill of silent reading as soon as possible since it is very useful to our pupils throughout their lives.(14) One of the reasons for negative opinions to the value of oral reading as a classroom procedure is that it tends to bring about what is called Hparrot reading." It is very important for a pupil to read aloud so that the hearers can understand him, but it is extremely difficult for beginners to read with accurate pronunciation and intonation, with the result that they cannot afford to grasp the meaning of what they are reading aloud. There丘)re, it sounds improper to us to give such directions as ̀̀Now, try to grasp the idea while reading loudly and clearly."

In order to avoid Hparrot reading" of the pupils we propose that practice in oral reading be started after they are through with comprehension work of the new material.

The following =Teaching Plan" follows the traditional pattern in Japanese schools, that is, reading exercise before comprehension, but the procedure should be reversed.

1. Presentation:

(1) Oral Introduction (2) Pronunciation Drill

(3) Reading (Tape Listening and Chorus Reading) (4) Explanation of structures, vocabulary, translation 2. Consolidation

(1) Chorus Reading (2) Tape Listening (3) Individual Reading

(4) Questions and Answers 3. Assignment of Homework

The reason for the teacher calling upon a pupil to read aloud in class is that he wants to see whether the pupil can vocalize the contents of the material to the degree that the rest of the class can comprehend him without looking at the printed pages. In this sense, oral reading may well be called a communication skill.

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On Recognition and Production in English Teaching ²¹

2.5. K. C. Diller, who favors the rationalist theory of language learning and the tightly organized direct methods of language teaching, emphasizes the importance of exclusive use of the foreign language in the classroom, which, he maintains, gives the maximum amount of practice in thinking and communicating in the foreign language. We are rather against his idea of banning the students'vernacular in formal school education. It seems very inefficient to entirely avoid the use of the students'mother tongue. We very much

doubt if his idea will be feasible in Japanese schools even if the teacher were competent

enough to have a perfect command of English. We only believe that foreign language

teachers should use the target language as much as possible, so that our students may get

used to the stream of speech. We are of the opinion that mim‑men and pattern practice

are very effective and even essential if they are practiced in an appropriate manner and at an appropriate time. We also believe that memory, even a rote memory, is a very important factor to successful language learning. Rote memory is usually defined as memorizing in which the tasks as seen by the learner requires no understanding but merely the reproduction of words or other symbols in the exact form in which they were presented. Psychologists, such as George Miller and Benton Underwood, view rote learning as more complex. They regard it as similar to concept formation. W. Weaver observes

that "such views reflect the idea that rote learning is more complex than previously thought." (15)

2.6. Even under such difficult circumstances as we are in, we can improve our teaching, changing the material provided by the textbook into realistic, living speech, so that our students may develop communicative competence through creative activities, such as retelling or rewriting a story in their own words, which task we give our students in L. L. classes every week, dramatization, summarization, improvising variations on a

memorized dialog, writing an autobiographical statement based on a model ‥. these

and other various activities will provide our students with chances for developing their potential productive ability in English. We as English teachers are destined to continue to struggle for many years to come, involving ourselves in a worthwhile task, which no

matter how difficult or incomplete, must bring East and West closer together as friends,

and as human beings.

Notes

(1) H. E. Palmer, Classroom Procedures and Devices, (Kaitakusha, 1927) p. 106.

(2) H. Fletcher, Speech and Hearing in Communication in Bell Laboratories Series, (D. Van Nostrand Company, 1953), p. 115.

(3) C. C. Fries, Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language, (The University of Michigan Press, 1945), p. 8.

(4) J. R. Nord, "The Importance of Listening," (Taishukan), The English Teachers'Magazine XXIX No. 10 (Dec. 1975), p. 34.

(5) V. A. Postovsky, …Effects of Delay in Oral Practice at the Beginning of Second Language Learning,

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"The Modern Language Journal LVIII No. 5‑6 (Sept.‑Oct. 1974) pp. 229‑239.

(6) P. G. Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, (Books for Libraries Press, first published 1873, Repr. 1972), pp. 117‑8.

(7) H. H. Clark and E. V. Clark, Psychology and Language, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., N. Y.

1977), p. 298.

(8) W. W. Weaver, Toward a Psychology of Reading and Language Selected Writings of Wendell W.

Weaver, edited by A. J. Kingston, (Tha University of Georgia Press, 1977) p. 130.

(9) F. G. French, Teaching English as an International Language (Oxford University Press, London, 1963),p.53.

M. West, Teaching English in Difficult Circumstances, (Longmans, 1960), p. 17.

Weaver, op. cit, pp. 128‑134.

㈹ Clark and Clark, op. cit, p. 482.

Postovsky, op. at, pp. 229‑239.

A. W. Fnsby, Teaching English, (Longmans, 1957), pp. 209‑210.

Weaver, op. cit., p. 176.

References

Allen & Campbell. Teaching English as a Second Language, A Book of Readings. McGraw‑Hill Inter‑

national Book Company, 1965, 1972.

Asher, James. "The Total Physical Response Approach to Second Language Learning," The Modern Language Journal. LIII, No. 1 (Jan. 1969), pp. 13‑23.

Billows, F. L. The Techniques of Language Teaching. London : Longmans, 1961.

Diller, K. C. Generative Grammar, Structural Linguistics and Language Teaching. Newbury House Publishers, 1971.

. …Some New Trends for Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching in the United

States" TESOL Quarterly. Vol. 9, No, 1 (March, 1975), pp. 65‑73.

Fries, C. C. Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1945.

Fnsby, A. W. Teaching English. Longmans, 1957.

Isso, T. and Shimizu, T. The Fukushima Plan of Teaching English in Schools of Middle Grade. IRLT,

1934.

Ota, Akira. "METHODS", English Education in Japan. ELEC Publications, Vol. X 1977 pp. 45‑55.

Palmer, H. E. The Principles of Language‑Study, The Oxford University Press, 1921, Repr. 1964.

Rivers, W. M. Teaching Foreign‑Language Skills. The University of Chicago Press, 1968. 2nd Edition 1981.

Ueda, Akiko. "Is This a Surface Phenomenon?", The Teaching of English in Japan. Eichosha, 1978 pp. 285‑297.

Weaver, W. W. Toward a Psychology of Reading and Language. The University of Georgia Press, 1977.

West, M. Teaching English in Difficult Circumstances. Longmans, 1960.