Communicative approach and noticing

Dear Luiz,

I’ve read your post about knowing that and knowing how…I firmly believe it makes a big difference and most of advanced students present some inaccuracies in grammar deriving from the way they were exposed to the topic in their learning process. I have also done some research on Noticing and interface position. At a first glance, it seemed to me something really different, but as I saw some examples and tips on how to help students noticing, I realized it is very similar to the communicative approach. Am I right? I would like to hear your opinion.

Well, I think there may be a little difference for we have the explicit knowledge, where the problem lies..Students who have this type of knowledge seldom can communicate, on the other hand, stds with the implicit knowledge are believed to communicate more accurately. So, dont you think that the communicative approach makes use of “noticing” but without using the explicit knowledge? What’s the connection between the communicative approach and noticing?

Thiago, São Paulo.

Dear Thiago,

Thank you for your question. I’ll do my best to answer it as clearly as I possibly can, ok?

I find it hard to define what a communicative approach to language learning is. Over the past decades, it’s become a sort of one-size-fits-all umbrella term that mainstream ELT still tends to use for most anything. You see, in the late 80s, I was trained in the best possible communicative tradition, which, at the time, entailed engaging students in classroom activity that met criteria such as purpose, information gap and choice. So, way back then, a communicative methodology (in this post, I am using the terms approach and methodology interchangeably) meant, to a large extent, teaching language through communication.

A lot has happened since then. ELT has, for better and for worse, become more eclectic and embraced classroom activities which, in themselves, bear very little resemblance to anything remotely communicative. For example, gap-fill type activities, as I argued in a recent post, made a huge comeback in the late 80s and still reign supreme in mainstream ELT. Repetition and drilling, on the other hand, still (and I say still) haven’t made their way back into the profession.

One way or another, while such “non-communicative” activities may be at odds with an approach based on teaching language through communication (see first paragraph), they can be more easily accommodated by a methodology that claims to teach language for communication (as a terminal goal) rather than only through it.

The point that I’m making is that, [pullquote]depending on how you define “communicative”, many classroom activities can be “legitimized” on those grounds and that includes noticing.[/pullquote]

Noticing, at the risk of oversimplifying things, could be described as the modern equivalent of a teacher-led presentation. Look at how two different teachers might, for example, draw their students’ attention to used to:

Teacher 1 (presentation): “Ok, guys… Well, as I told you, I don’t smoke, remember? But in the past, I did. Yeah? So I used to smoke when I was single. I used to smoke when I was single. (T writes sentence on the board). I used to smoke, but I don’t anymore. So, after used to, do I use the past or the infinitive? Ok, good.”

Teacher 2 (noticing): “Ok, so… you’ve read about Britney’s childhood and discussed four comprehension questions… now we’re going to look at how she describes her school days. I’d like you to look at paragraphs 2 and 3 again and underline the sentences in which she talks about her favorite teacher and the bullies in her class…” (This phase is often followed by a set of “grammar discovery” questions to help students understand the rules etc.)

While these two techniques might differ in terms of how much “surrounding” language students are exposed to (noticing usually involves extracting bits of language from longer texts) and how much they’re potentially (and I say potentially) challenged as opposed to spoon-fed, neither can claim to be more or less “communicative” in itself. All we know is that both teachers (above) are beginning to lay the groundwork for something. This “something” can be a lesson aimed at helping students talk about past habits (with or without a realistic outcome) or a lesson aimed at increasing understanding of used to. Or both in different degrees.

So, the bottom line is: [pullquote]noticing is not synonymous with a communicative methodology[/pullquote]. It is a way to draw students’ attention to specific pieces of language. This means that noticing may or may not lend itself to “communicative goals” of a higher order. It depends.

Now, as to explicit knowledge, my question to you would be: how do you define explicit knowledge? There are different layers, for lack of a better word, of explicit knowledge. For example, does it necessarily involve metalanguage? If so, how technical (“the present perfect is formed by have followed by a past participle”) or semi-technical (“the present perfect needs have and the third column”) can this metalanguage be? If not, how much language awareness constitutes explicit knowledge and how do you measure it? Not an easy task. (Click here for an interesting article on explicit knowledge).

I wouldn’t necessarily agree with you that explicit knowledge seldom translates into efficient communication. I tend to believe that declarative knowledge (knowing that – regardless of whether this “that” involves metalanguage) can be converted into procedural knowledge (knowing how) through classroom intervention. But that’s another story.

I hope I was able to shed some light on your questions rather than confuse you, Thiago.

Um abraço,
Luiz.