Principles of second language acquisition (SLA) relevant to the development of materials

Language teaching
 Teaching can be direct (in that it transmits information overtly to the learners) or it
can be indirect (in that it helps learners to discover things for themselves).
 It can also be pre-emptive (in that it aims to prevent problems), facilitative (in that it
aims to help the learners do something), responsive (in that it responds to a need for
language when it occurs) or remedial in that it aims to remedy problems.

Language learning
 Language learning can be explicit or it can be implicit
 Language learning can also be of declarative knowledge or of procedural knowledge

 Many scholars take the position that communicative competence is primarily

achieved as a result of implicit, procedural learning.
 But they also acknowledge that explicit learning of both declarative and procedural
knowledge is of value in helping learners to pay attention to salient features of
language input and in helping them to participate in planned discourse.
 Consequently, many view the main objectives of materials development as the
provision of the meaningful experience of language in use and of opportunities to
reflect on this experience.

Principles of second language acquisition relevant to the development of materials for the
teaching of languages:

Materials should achieve impact

- Materials can achieve impact through:
a. novelty (e.g. unusual topics, illustrations and activities);
b. variety (e.g. breaking up the monotony of a unit routine with an unexpected
activity; using many different text-types taken from many different types of
sources; using a number of different instructor voices on a CD);
c. attractive presentation (e.g. use of attractive colours; lots of white space; use
of photographs):
d. appealing content (e.g. topics of interest to the target learners; topics which
offer the possibility of learning something new; engaging stories; universal
themes; local references);
e. achievable challenge (e.g. tasks which challenge the learners to think).
- One obvious point is that impact is variable.
- What achieves impact with a class in A might not achieve the same impact with a
class in B.
- And what achieves impact with ten learners in a class might not achieve impact with
the other five. …..

Materials should help learners to feel at ease

- Research has shown... the effects of various forms of anxiety on acquisition: the less
anxious the learner, the better language acquisition proceeds. Similarly, relaxed and
 comfortable students apparently can learn more in shorter periods of time. (Dulay,
Burt and Krashen 1982) …..
- Materials can help learners to feel at ease in a number of ways. For example, that
most learners:
a. feel more comfortable with written materials with lots of white space than
they do with materials in which lots of different activities are crammed
together on the same page;
b. are more at ease with texts and illustrations that they can relate to their own
culture than they are with those which appear to them to be culturally alien;
c. are more relaxed with materials which are obviously trying to help them to
learn than they are with materials which are always testing them.
- Feeling at ease can also be achieved through a ‘voice’ which is relaxed and
supportive, through content and activities which encourage the personal
participation of the learners, through materials which relate the world of the book to
the world of the learner and through the absence of activities which could threaten
self-esteem and cause humiliation.

Materials should help learners to develop confidence

- Relaxed and self-confident learners learn faster (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982).
- Most materials developers recognize the need to help learners to develop
confidence, but many of them attempt to do so through a process of simplification.
- They try to help the learners to feel successful by asking them to use simple
language to accomplish easy tasks such as completing substitution tables, writing
simple sentences and filling in the blanks in dialogues.
- This approach is welcomed by many teachers and learners. But in my experience it
often only succeeds in diminishing the learners.
- They become aware that the process is being simplified for them and that what they
are doing bears little resemblance to actual language use.
- They also become aware that they are not really using their brains and that their
apparent success is an illusion.
- And this awareness can even lead to a reduction in confidence.
- The value of engaging the learners’ minds and utilizing their existing skills seems to
be becoming increasingly realized in countries that have decided to produce their
own materials through textbook projects rather than to rely on global course books,
which seem to underestimate the abilities of their learners.

What is being taught should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful

- In ESP (English for specific purposes) materials it is relatively easy to convince the
learners that the teaching points are relevant and useful by relating them to known
learner interests and to ‘real-life’ tasks, which the learners need or might need to
perform in the target language.
- In general English materials this is obviously more difficult; but it can be achieved by
narrowing the target readership and/or by researching what the target learners are
interested in and what they really want to learn the language for.
- An interesting example of such research was a questionnaire in Namibia which
revealed that two of the most important reasons for secondary school students
wanting to learn English were so they would be able to write love letters in English
 and so that they would be able to write letters of complaint for villagers to the village
headman and from the village headman to local authorities.
- Perception of relevance and utility can also be achieved by relating teaching points
to interesting and challenging classroom tasks and by presenting them in ways which
could facilitate the achievement of the task outcomes desired by the learners.
- The ‘new’ learning points are not relevant and useful because they will help the
learners to achieve long-term academic or career objectives, but because they could
help the learners to achieve short-term task objectives now.
- But it can be much more valuable in creating relevance and utility for the teaching
point; and it can be achieved by, for example, referring learners to ‘help pages’
before and/or after doing sub-tasks or by getting learners to make decisions about
strategies they will use in a task and then referring them to ‘help pages’.
- So, for example, learners could be asked to choose from (or add to) a list of project
tasks and then to decide on strategies for achieving their project targets.
- Those learner who decide to research local documents could be referred to a section
in the book which provides advice on scanning, whereas those learners who decide
to use questionnaires could be referred to a section which deals with writing
questions.

Materials should require and facilitate learner self-investment

- Many researchers have written about the value of learning activities that require the
learners to make discoveries for themselves.
- For example, Rutherford and Sharwood-Smith (1988) assert that the role of the
classroom and of teaching materials is to aid the learner to make efficient use of the
resources in order to facilitate self-discovery.
- Similar views are expressed by Bolitho and Tomlinson (1995); Bolitho et al. (2003),
Tomlinson (1994a, 2007) and Wright and Bolitho (1993). ………
- Other ways of achieving learner investment are involving the learners in mini-
projects, involving them in finding supplementary materials for particular units in a
book and giving them responsibility for making decisions about which texts to use
and how to use them.

Learners must be ready to acquire the points being taught

- Certain structures are acquired only when learners are mentally ready for them.
(Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982)
- Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann (1981) have put forward the Mutlidimensional
Model in which learners must have achieved readiness in order to learn
developmental feat (i.e. those constrained by develoing speech-processing
mechanisms –e.g. word order) but can make themselves ready at any time to learn
variational features (i.e those which are free –e.g. the copula ‘be’).
- Pienemann (1985) claims that instruction can facilitate natural language acquisition
processes if it coincides with learner readiness, and can lead to increased speed and
frequency of rule application and to application of rules in a wider range of linguistic
contexts.
- He also claims that premature instruction can be harmful because it can lead to the
production of erroneous forms, to substitution by less complex forms and to
avoidance.
 - Pienemann’s theories have been criticised for the narrowness of their research and
application (restricted mainly to syntax, according to Cook 1996), but I am sure most
teachers would recognise the negative effects of premature instruction as reported
by Pienemann.
- Krashen (1985) argues the need for roughly tuned input, which is comprehensible
because it features what the learners are already familiar with, but which also
contains the potential for acquiring other elements of the input which each learner
might or might not be ready to learn (what Krashen refers to as i + 1 in which i
represents what has already been learned and 1 represents what is available for
learning).
- According to Krashen, each learner will only learn from the new input what he or she
is ready to learn.
- Readiness can be achieved by materials which create situations requiring the use of
variational features not previously taught, by materials which ensure that the
learners have gained sufficient mastery over the developmental features of the
previous stage before teaching a new one, and by materials which roughly tune the
input so that it contains some features which are slightly above each learner’s
current state of proficiency.
- As Kennedy 1973:76 stated that it is important to remember that the learner is
always in charge and that ‘in the final analysis we can never completely control what
the learner does, for HE selects and organizes, whatever the input’

Materials should expose the learners to language in authentic use

- Krashen (1985) makes the strong claim that comprehensible input in the target
language is both necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of that language
provided that learners are ‘affectively disposed to “let in” the input they
comprehend’ (Ellis 1994: 273).
- Few researchers would agree with such a strong claim that exposure to authentic use
of the target language is necessary but not sufficient for the acquisition of that
language.
- It is necessary in that learners need experience of how the language is typically used,
but it is not sufficient because they also need to notice how it is used and to use it
for communicative purposes themselves.
- Materials can provide exposure to authentic input through the advice they give, the
instructions for their activities and the spoken and written texts they include.
- They can also stimulate exposure to authentic input through the activities they
suggest (e.g. interviewing the teacher, doing a project in the local community,
listening to the radio, etc.).
- In order to facilitate acquisition, the input must be comprehensible (i.e.
understandable enough to achieve the purpose for responding to it).
- This means that there is no point in using long extracts from newspapers with
beginners, but it does not mean that beginners cannot be exposed to authentic
input.
- They can follow instructions intended to elicit physical responses, they can listen to
dramatic renditions of stories, they can listen to songs, they can fill in forms. ……

The learners’ attention should be drawn to linguistic features of the input

 - There seems to be an agreement amongst many researchers that helping learners to
pay attention to linguistic features of authentic input can help them to eventually
acquire some of those features.
- However, it is important to understand that this claim does not represent a back-to-
grammar movement. It is different from previous grammar teaching approaches in a
number of ways.
- In the first place the attention paid to the language can be either conscious or
subconscious.
- For example, the learners might be paying conscious attention to working out the
attitude of one of the characters in a story, but might be paying subconscious
attention to the second conditionals which the character uses.
- Or they might be paying conscious attention to the second conditionals, having been
asked to locate them and to make a generalization about their function in the story.
- The important thing is that the learners become aware of a gap between a particular
feature of their interlanguage (i.e. how they currently understand or use it) and the
equivalent feature in the target language.
- Such noticing of the gap between output and input can act as an ‘acquisition
facilitator’ (Seliger 1979).
- It does not do so by immediately changing the learner’s internalized grammar but by
alerting the learner to subsequent instances of the same feature in future input.
- So there is no immediate change in the learners’ proficiency (as seems to be aimed
at by such grammar teaching approaches as the convention Presentation-Practice-
Production approach). There is, however, an increased likelihood of eventual
acquisition provided that the learners receive future relevant input.
- White (1990) argues that there are some features of the L2 which learners need to
be focused on because the deceptively apparent similarities with L1 features make it
impossible for the learners to otherwise notice certain points of mismatch between
their interlanguage and the target language.
- And Schmidt (1992) puts forward a powerful argument for approaches which help
learners to note the gap between their use of specific features of English and the
way these features are used by native speakers.
- Inviting learners to compare their use of, say, indirect speech with the way it is used
in a transcript of a native speaker conversation would be one such approach and
quite easily be built into course book materials.

Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to
achieve communicative purposes
- Such attempts can enable the learners to ‘check’ the effectiveness of their internal
hypotheses, especially if the activities stimulate them into ‘pushed output’ (Swain
1985) which is slightly above their current proficiency.
- They also help the learners to automatise their existing procedural knowledge (i.e.
their knowledge of how the language is used) and to develop strategic competence
(Canale and Swain 1980).
- In addition, communicative interaction can provide opportunities for picking up
language from the new input generated, as well as opportunities for learner output
to become and informative source of input (Sharwood-Smith 1981).
 - Ideally teaching materials should provide opportunities for such interaction in a
variety of discourse modes ranging from planned to unplanned (Ellis 1990:191).
- Interaction can be achieved through, for example:
post-listening and post-reading activities which require the learners to use
information from the text to achieve a communicative purpose (e.g. deciding what
television programs to watch, discussing who to vote for, writing a review of a book
or film); formal instruction given in the target language either on the language itself
or on another subject

Materials should take into account that the positive effects of instruction are usually
delayed
- Research into the acquisition of language shows that it is a gradual rather than an
instantaneous process and that this is equally true for instructed as well as informal
acquisition.
- Acquisition results from the gradual and dynamic process of internal generalization
rather than from instant adjustments to the learner’s internal grammar.
- It follows that learners cannot be expected to learn a new feature and be able to use
it effectively in the same lesson.
- They might be able to rehearse the feature, to retrieve it from short-term memory or
to produce it when prompted by the teacher or the materials.
- But this does not mean that learning has already taken place. I am sure most of you
are familiar with the situation in which learners get a new feature correct in the
lesson in which it is taught but then get it wrong the following week.
- This is partly because they have not yet had enough time, instruction and exposure
for learning to have taken place.
- The inevitable delayed effect of instruction suggests that no textbook can really
succeed if it teaches features of the language one at a time and expects the learners
to be able to use them straightaway.
- But this incremental approach is popular with many publishers, writers, teachers and
learners as it can provide a reassuring illusion of system, simplicity and progress.
- Therefore, adaptation of existing approaches rather than replacement with radical
new ones is the strategy most likely to succeed.
- So, for example, the conventional textbook approach of PPP (Presentation-Practice-
Production) could be used to promote durable learning if the objective of the
Production phase was seen as reinforcement rather than correct production and if
this was followed in subsequent units by more exposure and more presentation
relating to the same feature.
- Or the Production phase could be postponed to another unit which is placed after
further exposure, instruction and practice have been provided.
- Or the initial Production phase could be used to provide output which would enable
the learners to notice the mismatch between what they are doing and what
proficient speakers typically do.

Materials should take into account that learners differ in learning styles
- Different learners have different preferred learning styles. So, for example, those
learners with a preference for studial learning are much more likely to gain from
explicit grammar teaching than those who prefer experiential learning.
 - And those who prefer experiential learning are more likely to gain from reading a
story with a predominant grammatical feature (e.g. reported speech) than they are
from being taught that feature explicitly.
- Styles of learning which need to be catered for in language-learning materials
include:
a. visual (e.g. learners prefer to see the language written down);
b. auditory (e.g. learners prefer to hear the language).
c. Kinaesthetic (e.g. learners prefer to do something physical, such as following
instructions for a game);
d. studial (e.g. learners like to pay conscious attention to the linguistic features
of the language and want to be correct);
e. experiential (e.g. learners like to use the language and are more concerned
with communication than with correctness);
f. analytic (e.g. learners prefer to focus on discrete bits of the language and to
learn them one by one);
g. global (e.g. learners are happy to respond to whole chunks of language at a
time and to pick up from them whatever language they can);
h. dependent (e.g. learners prefer to learn from a teacher and from a book);
i. independent (e.g. learners are happy to learn from their own experience of
the language and to use autonomous learning strategies).
- A learner’s preference for a particular learning style is variable and depends, for
example, on what is being learned, where it is being learned, whom it is being
learned with and what it is being learned for.
- For example, I am happy to be experiential, global and kinesthetic when learning
Japanese out of interest with a group of relaxed adult learners and with a teacher
who does not keep correcting me. But I am more likely to be analytic and visual
when learning French for examination purposes in a class of competitive students
and with a teacher who keeps on correcting me.

Materials should take into account that learners differ in affective attitudes
- The learner’s motives, emotions, and attitudes screen what is presented in the
language classroom... This affective screening is highly individual and results in
differrent rates and results. (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982).
- One obvious implication for the materials developer is ‘to diversify language
instruction as much as possible based upon the variety of cognitive styles’ (Larsen-
Freeman and Long 1991) and the variety of affective attitudes likely to be found
amongst typical class of learners. Ways of doing this include:
a. providing choices of different types of text;
b. providing choices of different types of activities;
c. providing optional extras for the more positive and motivated learners:
d. providing variety;
e. including units in which the value of learning English is a topic for discussion;
f. including units in which the value of learning English is a topic for discussion;

Materials should permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction

- Communication situations in which students are permitted to remain silent or
respond in their first language may be the most effective approach for the early
 phases of language instruction. This approach approximates what language learners
of all ages have been observed to do naturally, and it appears to be more effective
than forcing full two-way communication from the very beginning of L2 acquisition.
(1982:25-6)
- The important point is that the materials should not force premature speaking in the
target language and they should not force silence either. Ways of giving learners the
possibility of not speaking until they are ready include:
a. starting the course with a Total Physical Response (TPR) approach in which
the learners respond physically to oral instructions from a teacher or CD.
b. starting with a a listening comprehension approach in which the learners
listen to stories in the target language, which are made accessible through
the use of sound effects, visual aids and dramatic movement by the teacher;
c. permitting the learners to respond to target language questions by using
their first language or through drawings and gestures.
- A possible extension of the principle of permitting silence is to introduce most new
language points (regardless of the learners’ level) through activities which initially
require comprehension but not production.
- This is an approach which I call TPR Plus and which we used on the PKG Project in
Indonesian secondary schools.
- It usually involved introducing new vocabulary or structures through stories which
the learners responded to by drawing and/or using their first language, and through
activities in which the whole class mimed stories by following oral instructions from
the teacher (see Barnard 2007; Tomlinson 1990, 1994b).

Materials should maximize learning potential by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic and

emotional involvement which stimulates both right- and left-brain activities
- A narrowly focused series of activities which require very little cognitive processing
(e.g. mechanical drills; rule learning; simple transformation activities) usually leads
to shallow and ephemeral learning unless linked to other activities which stimulate
mental and affective processing
- However, a varied series of activities making, for example, analytic, creative,
evaluative and rehearsal demands on processing capacity can lead to deeper and
more durable learning.
- In order for this deeper learning to be facilitated, it is very important that the
content of the materials is not trivial or banal and that it stimulates thoughts and
feelings in the learners.
- It is also important that the activities are not too simple and that they cannot be too
easily achieved without the learners making use of their previous experience and
their brains.
- The maximization of the brain’s learning potential is a fundamental principle of
Lozanov’s Suggestopedia, in which he ‘enables the learner to receive the
information through different cerebral processes and in different states of
consciousness so that it is stored in many different parts of the brain, maximizing
recall’ (Hooper Hansen 1992).

Materials should not rely too much on controlled practice

 - It is interesting that there seems to be very little research which indicates that
controlled practice activities are valuable.
- Sharwood-Smith (1981) does say that ‘it is clear and uncontroversial to say that most
spontaneous performance is attained by dint of practice’, but he provides no
evidence to support this very strong claim.
- Also Bialystok (1988) says that automaticity is achieved through practice but
provides no evidence to support her claim.
- In the absence of any compelling evidence most researchers seem to agree with Ellis,
who says that ‘controlled practice appears to have little long term effect on the
accuracy with which new structures are performed’ (Ellis 1990:192) and ‘has little
effect on fluency’ (Ellis and Rathbone 1987).
- Yet controlled grammar practice activities still feature significantly in popular course
books and are considered to be useful by many teachers and by many learners.
- This is specially true of dialogue practice, which has been popular in many
methodologies for the last 30 years without there being any substantial research
evidence to support it (see Tomlinson 1995).
- In a recent analysis of new low-level course books I found that nine out of ten of
them contained many more opportunities for controlled practice than they did for
language use.

Materials should provide opportunities for outcome feedback

- Feedback which is focused first on the effectiveness of the outcome rather than just
on the accuracy of the output can lead to output becoming a profitable source of
input.
- Or in other words, if the language that the learner produces is evaluated in relation
to the purpose for which it is used, that language can become a powerful and
informative source of information about language use.
- Thus a learner who fails to achieve a particular communicative purpose (e.g.
borrowing something, instructing someone how to play a game, persuading
someone to do something) is more likely to gain from feedback on the effectiveness
of their use of language than a learner whose language is corrected without
reference to any non-linguistic outcome.
a. including activities which involve the learners in discussing their attitudes
and feelings about the course and the materials;
b. researching and catering for the diverse interests of the identified target
learners;
c. being aware of the cultural sensitivities of the target learners;
d. giving general and specific advice in the teacher’s book on how to respond to
negative learners (e.g. not forcing reluctant individuals to take part in group
work).