Ellis R's articles

Ellis R is one of most famous thorists and researchers in the world, and was a fuclty in TUJ, i have not read many articles written by him. I remember now when i read his book (Ellis 2003) on TBL, i soon gave up reading it because of lots of terminology i could not understand. Though i did not plan to read his articles, i happend to encountered his two articles below.

Ellis,R.(1995). Appraising second language acquisition theory in relation to language pedagoy. In Cook, G. and Seidlhoffer, B (Eds.), Principles and practice in applied linguistics studies in honour of Henry Widdowson Oxford: Oxford University Press 73-106
Though he reviews UG theory from verious perspectives in this article, interesting point is about why UG theory is difficult to be applied toward teaching context. He explains about that in contrast with Widdowson's theory of grammar.

Ellis,R.(2005). Principles of instucted language learning. System 33 209-214
This article do not seem to be cited a lot, but his paper Prof. Nation passed out in his class cite this.
He suggest 10 principles for effective second language teaching based on current SLA thinking. We can use it as a guidance for teaching, and as a base on which we read the articles cited in this article. Though it covers wide range topics, it does not mean the content is shallow, because every line in passages seems to reflect on what he has thought on SLA and SL teaching in his life. The deeper we read it, the mode we can get from it (I'be not yet read it deep enough to get something though).

Importance of Output

Though I have heard "output hypothesis" (Swain, 1985), I could not have any chance to read her article. Laufer(1998) put emphasis on mental effort EFL learners bring to learn vocabulary citing Swain and Swain et al's articles, I have read her articles today.

Swain,M and Laptikin,S. (1995). Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: a step toward second language learning (Applied linguistics 16 372-91)
They discuss learners notice a "gap" from what they would like to explain and what they can express in their interlanguage, which result in modified output (stretched IL).Those process between the first output and the second output is part of the process of second language learning. They argues the deep mental process learned need to have in speaking and writing, and the the process is much more than just comprehension like in listening and reading. While from listening to speaking, for example, learners have to move from the stage of semantic processing for comprehension to the stage of syntactic processing for expressing themselves.

Swain, M (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning In Cook, G. and Seidlhoffer, B (Eds.), Principles and practice in applied linguistics studies in honour of Henry Widdowson Oxford: Oxford University Press 125-44
Though what it describes is basically the same as Swain and Laptkin (1995), she divide the function of output into three; noticing, hypothesis-testing, and metalinguistic function. Notice the "gap" and take a risk of uttering some "new" expressions to test whether or not it is appropriate and conprehensible for listeners. The former two occurred when learners interact with each other focusing on meaning. But the third one is when they focus on form, that is the content on which they talk is about the language itself. She argues all three functions of output contribute to second language acquisition.

What i was impressed about the two articles are output functions not only for improving fluency but also second language acquisition itself! To put differently, output have an effect on the development of interlangauge process, not just representing the existing knowledge learners have acquired until that time!

It is in line with Widdowson's argument; usage and use. He comments usage is important but as an aid for make communication natural. In his perspective, usage and use, or competence and performance (in Chomsky's word) cannot exist independently, but they are interconnected.

What is interesting is other articles by Talone,E. and Liu,G.(1995) In Cook, G. and Seidlhoffer, B (Eds.), Principles and practice in applied linguistics studies in honour of Henry Widdowson Oxford: Oxford University Press 107-124
Their longitudinal study of Chinese boy names "Bob" reveal intriguing insights about development of interlanguage deeply connected to social contexts. They ask a question, "Do the different interactional contexts simply give Bob different opportunities to show what he already knows? or Do the different interactional contexts cause Bob's competence to develop differently?" They found that the context where Bob used the items (i.e. SVO)for the first time in his life is the the context where he seems to acquire the items. And Bob gradually began to use the item in other contexts. What is interesting is the order of items they use is not the same as the order many SLA researchers agree upon. Thus they argues the flexibility of developmental sequences.

Why he use the new item is not only because of comprehensible input, but also comprehensible output(Swain, 1985) where learners notice the "gap" resulting in modified output to make the utterance comprehensible to interlocutors. They succeed in describing the actual context where acquiring occurs and interlanguage develops.

Moreover, they criticize the other SLA theorists who think contextual variation as just a parameter to change learners performance, think learners competence isolated from their performance. Tarone and Liu think the very context have an effect on the performance/competence and IL development, and argues that SLA theory should embrace contextual variation and the process of development of IL.

Relationships between TESOL and other field

I attended open hour of TUJ distinguied lecture on Statistics. His lecture was intriguing, but did not explain much about the Rasch model, new approach useful to assess learner's performance. I expected to hear something about Rasch model, or how we applied the insight into teaching and testing phase, but he did not explain about it. It was natural because it is just open hour to stimulate and motivate audience who were not so interested in testing.

Actually i thought it is good to attend after open hour if the lecture is suitable for me, but what he says was too broad. At the same time, what he write on his book is not so directly applicable to language testing. So i gave up staying after open hour, and decided to read some parts of his books by myself.

But i could not keep on my motivation to read throughout the book, because his example is not language education. Thanks to insight of Stats, TESOL field have evolved a lot, stats field itself are really deep and wide! I understood what i shoud aim is not deeping my knowledge itself, but gaining insight about how i incorporate these stats knowlege into my teaching and testing phase.
The famous professro at Kansai area says, we should investigate validity not reliability, as langauge teachers and testers. That is true, i think. I found out my limitation of deepen my insight about reliability during this book, and understand what i should do, examining validity.

But anyway, i found something about the relationships of TESOL and other field, for example, subject of english is related to subject of Japanese about what we should teach and help students learn, and subject of english is related to subject of math about how we should assess students cognitive level. The former is around validity, and the latter is around reliability. Well i know i cannot express what i want to say, but it is okay at least for now.


OK, there are four month left until i restart teaching! I have two things i want to do until then.

1. Preparation for Graduation test, to go over what i learnerd at TUJ, which is useful to increase my number of pockets containing variou methods, approaches, techniques and theories i would use after restart teaching.

2. There are two researches. i want to examine and write. After taking the graduation test, i will focus on writing the two papers based on the researches.

3. I attend one more class about vocabulary. it is useful as teacher and researcher, 'cause lexicon would be a core area from prepheral one for language learning field, i guess.