SLA Podcast: Tea with BVP

[Bakunin]

From their website:
Tea with BVP is a weekly call-in show that discusses topics related to second language learning, teaching, and acquisition. It was launched in October 2015 in an effort to accelerate the dissemination of research-supported knowledge and practices that are relevant to language teachers and practitioners.

It’s available as a podcast on iTunes (where I listen to it). The host, Bill VanPatten, a professor of second language acquisition, approaches the topic in a light-hearted fashion with a bit of entertainment thrown in but the discussions do have substance. He’s a proponent of the ‘communicative approach’ or ‘communicative classroom’ which emphasises comprehensible input and real communication (which is supposed to be receptive at first, not ‘speak from day one’) as the basis for language acquisition.

He’s against the explicit teaching of grammar and vocabulary, against textbooks, against artificial drills with no real communicative purpose etc. If taken seriously - and I think they should -, these ideas are clearly a challenge to self-learners who tend to rely on textbook study and vocabulary and grammar drills.

Does anybody here listen to the podcast and has a view on how this applies to self-learners?

http://www.teawithbvp.com

[aokoye]

I've been listening to Tea with BVP for a few months and I like it. I don't agree with everything Van Patten says and I think he can be a bit full of himself at times but in general I like the podcast. That said he's not terribly dogmatic and I also like his co-hosts. His podcast isn't really geared towards learners specifically but rather people in the field of SLA or at the very least interested in it. It also seems that he wants to be relevant to language teachers (he lamented about the fact that some language teaching undergrad and grad programs are totally separate from linguistics programs in one of the episodes - I share this lamentation).

[Bakunin]

To be honest, I find the podcast challenging, in a good way… The principles BVP advocates are certainly at odds with popular learning strategies for self-learners. He throws out textbooks, grammar instruction, language analysis, word lists and any kind of drill, it’s kind of exciting! The talk show is definitively geared towards language teachers, not learners. Nevertheless the underlying principles should apply to us self-learners as well, don’t you think? Or maybe we dedicated self-learners are so hyper-motivated that we see purpose in even the dullest drill like ploughing through 10’000 sentences in Anki?

[Cainntear]

The communicative approach/communicative language teaching is roughly the same age as me, so there's nothing new in that.

But the communicative approach is something that really cannot exist outside of a classroom, as it requires organised activities and multiple participants. If the theory underpinning CLT was true, self-directed learners wouldn't exist, therefore CLT is at best a gross exaggeration.

[aokoye]

But the communicative approach is something that really cannot exist outside of a classroom, as it requires organised activities and multiple participants. If the theory underpinning CLT was true, self-directed learners wouldn't exist, therefore CLT is at best a gross exaggeration.

Yeah but so is n+1...

The communicative approach isn't terribly useful outside of the classroom but having read one of Van Patten's books it's clear he doesn't think that it's the only way people learn second languages.

[Bakunin]

Interesting points, Cainntear and aokoye… and thanks for making me realise that I really don’t know much about the communicative approach What I take from the talk show with BVP are some general principles. Maybe I’ve been picking and choosing, but I’m hearing the following: comprehensible input and a focus on real communication aid the acquisition of language (if communicative skills are the goal), whereas learning about the language doesn’t. Real communication seems to include receptive activities like listening and reading books as long as there is some purpose other than ‘language study’; this could, for instance, be reading a book to enjoy the story. I don’t think this contradicts the idea of self-directed learners.

I’m also wondering about something else. We ‘self-directed learners’ are a special bunch of people. We are hyper-motivated to study languages and put in a lot of time on a very regular basis. In addition to getting good at the language, we often enjoy learning about language as well. For people like us, maybe anything goes since we’re anyway putting in the hours and cycle through all kinds of activities (on our own and with native speakers). For people less in love with language(s), the choice between a textbook and getting real communication (again, including receptive activities) may be much more important.

[Adrianslont]

In a fit of enthusiasm I downloaded a bunch of these - I had some driving and housework to do and I liked the look of the topics. And I took a course in SLA years ago. And I hang out on this forum. However, I almost didn't get to the end of the first one - the ratio of content to prattle was not good. I enjoyed it when Bill actually talked about SLA but that wasn't often. It was a bit like an audio version of the the "For Dummies" books - lots of folksy messing around between actual content.

I thought I should try a second episode to see if I had got a bad one first up and it was somewhat better - there was more content, but there was still a lot of stuffing around - putting a chipmunk sound effect on the voices irritated me no end. Jesus.

Hoping I am not alone.
Mr Grumpy

[Bakunin]

In a fit of enthusiasm I downloaded a bunch of these - I had some driving and housework to do and I liked the look of the topics. And I took a course in SLA years ago. And I hang out on this forum. However, I almost didn't get to the end of the first one - the ratio of content to prattle was not good. I enjoyed it when Bill actually talked about SLA but that wasn't often. It was a bit like an audio version of the the "For Dummies" books - lots of folksy messing around between actual content.

I thought I should try a second episode to see if I had got a bad one first up and it was somewhat better - there was more content, but there was still a lot of stuffing around - putting a chipmunk sound effect on the voices irritated me no end. Jesus.

Hoping I am not alone.
Mr Grumpy

You're not alone, the ratio of content to prattle is terrible. I can always count it as listening practice in one of my L2s, but native speakers of English don't have that privilege. Having said this, I find the bits and pieces of content quite interesting, and I enjoy looking at language learning from a teacher's perspective for a change.

[Cainntear]

What I take from the talk show with BVP are some general principles. Maybe I’ve been picking and choosing, but I’m hearing the following: comprehensible input and a focus on real communication aid the acquisition of language (if communicative skills are the goal), whereas learning about the language doesn’t. Real communication seems to include receptive activities like listening and reading books as long as there is some purpose other than ‘language study’; this could, for instance, be reading a book to enjoy the story. I don’t think this contradicts the idea of self-directed learners.

I think this is something of a false dichotomy.

The thing about language is that it consists of two things: form and meaning. Both of these must be attended to in learning, or the language cannot be learned.

Describing grammar study as "learning about the language" is doing it a disservice. Yes, many technical grammar-based courses are dry and focus almost exclusively on form, with no real discussion of meaning -- but that is a problem with the teaching, not an inherent problem with the concept of "grammar". Quite the opposite, in fact. Regardless of anything Chomsky says on the matter, there is a lot in grammar that contributes both to direct and indirect meaning.

The strength of the communicative approach is that by embedding everything in context, you make sure that things is some element of meaning in everything. However, It seems to me that this is a very superficial sense of meaning, and many layers of subtlety and nuance are lost.

Similarly, structure is often handled in a very superficial way.

Consider "I would like a ...". In a monolingual, communicative classroom, this takes the function of asking for something.
But what we have here is a statement in the conditional mood. It becomes a polite request through a grammatical process called indirection. Indirection is very common as a language feature, and most western European languages do it.

Here's another example of indirection:
Give me that.
Please give me that.
Can you give me that?
Could you give me that?

Each version is less direct than the previous, making the sentence more polite. But when we teach an indirect form in a communicative classroom, we make a choice as teacher which single form to teach. We choose "I'd like" over "I want" or "give me", because we want our students to seem polite when they're speaking to foreigners, but we're not actually teaching them to deliberately be polite. So both the structure and the meaning of the underlying language is obscured.