Teacher and learner perceptions of adult foreign language learners’ engagement with consciousness-raising tasks in four languages

Abstract

At some UK universities, non-credit bearing courses for the general public are offered in a wide range of languages, often taught by hourly paid staff. Ensuring similar, high quality learning experiences and learning outcomes across languages can be a challenge. This study inquired into the viability and value of a consciousness-raising approach, i.e. whether teachers would be able and likely to implement it, and whether students would engage with such tasks and find them useful. The study included students and teachers engaged in the learning/teaching of Arabic, French, Italian, and Spanish. Following some input about Language Awareness pedagogic principles, and with some mentoring by the researchers, the teachers designed their own consciousness raising grammar tasks with accompanying communicative output opportunities and implemented them in their classes. To respond to our research questions, this paper draws on semi-structured interviews with teachers and students. The tasks, which combined a form and meaning focus, presented rich affordances for learner engagement with language and were enjoyed by the majority of students. The teachers struggled to correctly estimate task difficulty and time needed but felt that the approach had contributed to improving their teaching and that they were likely to use it in the future.

Keywords:

• Consciousness-raising
• adult learners
• engagement
• task design

Acknowledgements

We are also indebted to the participating teachers and students at Languages@Leicester, from whom we learnt a lot in the course of the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 EWL is a more specific kind of task engagement. A group of learners may start a task by getting themselves organized, distributing roles, and making sure that they understand the instructions. This would constitute task engagement but not EWL. EWL starts once the learners begin analysing and discussing the language in the task (Svalberg, 2018).

2 The learners’ task interactions were observed and audio-recorded but, due to space constraints, the interaction data will not be further drawn on in this paper.

3 Given the slight time delay and the indirect nature of the stimulus, the term ‘stimulated reconstruction’ may better describe this method than the conventional ‘stimulated recall’ (Lyle, 2003).

4 For the idea to use superscript, we are indebted to Philp and Duchesne (2016, p. 64), discussion of Baralt et al. (2016).

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by a grant from Leicester Learning Institute’s Teaching Enhancement Project Fund (October 2017).

Notes on contributors

Agneta M.-L. Svalberg

Agneta M.-L. Svalberg lectures and supervises on Masters and Doctoral programmes in Applied Linguistic & TESOL at the University of Leicester. She has a particular interest in the learning and teaching of grammar.

Jim Askham

Jim Askham is a Lecturer on the MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL/MA TESOL programmes at the School of Arts, University of Leicester. His current research interests are in the areas of second language teacher education and language awareness.