The Language Teacher
05 - 2002
Increasing Students' Awareness of their Roles
Phil Julien
Bunka Women&rsquos University
QUICK GUIDE
Key Words: Student awareness, discourse functions
Learner English Level: Intermediate to upper intermediate
Learner Maturity Level: High school and up
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Activity Time: 30-50 minutes over a span of 3 to 4 classes
Last year, I was teaching a course whose purpose was to develop communicative skills and habits through small group interaction. As the term went on, I noticed that instead of responding to the comments of other students, conversation was usually initiated by myself, responded to by a student, and followed up on by myself. Thus the pattern (T-L1-T-L2-T) developed. In an ideal situation, students would respond more directly to comments from one another, thus creating the following pattern (T-L1-L2-L3-T-L2). The purpose of this paper is to provide a number of ways to increase learner motivation and to raise learner awareness of their discourse roles.
Step 1
With the students seated in a circular fashion, have the students first draw a layout of the class members. Once the discussion begins, the students are to draw a line from the student who gives his/her opinion to the student who responds to the opinion, creating an "interaction chart." At the end of the discussion, have the students compare interaction charts with each other and your own.
Step 2
In an attempt to sensitize the learners to their roles in maintaining discourse, have the students brainstorm and create a list of functions that are performed by interlocutors during discourse. The final list will probably include functions such as proving information, agreeing or disagreeing with the previous speaker. For a more exhaustive list, see Nunan (1995).
Step 3
Using this list of activities, have the students monitor their own contributions and the contributions of one other student over a number of discussions. This is done by creating a check sheet of discourse functions and having the students place a check next to the function each time it is performed by himself and one other student. I recommend collecting and using this sheet a number of times so students can note their progress and become familiar with keeping their personal records.
Step 4
The next step is to design an information gap activity that facilitates student-to-student interaction in a group setting, allowing them to employ the discourse functions they have worked on during the previous classes. This time, the students aren&rsquot asked to monitor themselves; only the teacher is. For this task I used an information gap activity in which the students were broken up into small groups, asked to discuss a problem, then report back to the class about their decisions. With my class, we used the topic of abortion to spark discussion. Each group of three students was given information about the same four women who were seeking an abortion. In small groups, they were to rank them in order from the person who had the strongest reasons for having an abortion to the person with the weakest reasons. Although the groups thought they had identical information, their information varied slightly enough to spark agreement and disagreement from the other groups. At the end of the discussion, show the students the interaction chart from this discussion and compare it to one from an older discussion.
Conclusion
My students seemed to enjoy this series of activities because they were guided toward discovery of their roles. Instead of a simple information gap activity, the students were first asked to discover their roles in discourse. Once that was accomplished, they were able to use discourse management strategies in basic information gap style activities. Thus combining information gap activities with activities aimed at raising awareness, the students were able to better understand their roles in discourse.
References
Nunan David. 1995. Learning Matters. Hong Kong: The English Center, University of Hong Kong.
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