ELT in Brazil

As a birthday gift, I got myself Mike Long’s Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching as recommended by another author I’ve been following for some time now.

A couple of pages in, Mike states that most classroom activity in synthetic approaches to Language Teaching (LT) is either mechanical or meaningful — but rarely communicative.

Just to make sure we’re on the same page in terms of jargon here, a synthetic approach is one which breaks language down into pieces, be they grammar pieces, vocabulary, functions, notions, or a combination of these, then organizes them linearly and has the teacher deliver these pieces to learners sequentially. You’ll see this in all coursebooks and most LT materials out there. The alternative to synthetic approaches is analytic approaches — we’re not going into these in this post, though.

Back to the matter at hand: mechanical, meaningful, and communicative activities. This caught my attention because until yesterday — literally — I have considered meaningful to be a synonym for communicative (much to my disappointment with my younger self, since I try to be critical and specific about the words we use to describe methodology).

Long then recommended reading Paulston’s (1971) article The Sequencing of Structural Pattern Drills for a clear description of the three.

Mechanical practice, according to her, is one in which learners do not need to understand the meaning of the language they are manipulating. For instance, “Complete the paragraph below with the past simple form of the regular verbs in parentheses”. In this activity, learners don’t even need to read the paragraph, just pretty much attach -ed to the end of most verbs, and that’s it.

Meaningful practice, says Paulston, is one in which the answer requires understanding and carries meaning — though this answer is already known to the teacher and/or expected as _the_ correct answer. For example, display questions such as, “What color is your shirt?” “It’s red”. The teacher already knows the answer to the question and expects it from the learner. The learner has to understand the meaning of the question and reply accordingly.

Communicative practice, as you might’ve guessed by now, is one in which the answer cannot be predicted by the teacher or peer. The answer is not readily available to everyone. So, for example, when the teacher asks, “How many siblings do you have?”, this is considered communicative practice.

Now, returning to Long’s position, in which he says that most classroom practice revolves around mechanical and meaningful practice, but rarely communicative, I encourage you to look through the activities in a coursebook lesson or PPT slide pack you use and carry out quick research:

Percentage-wise, how does it perform in terms of mechanical, meaningful, and communicative practice?

Happy investigating!