MIXING METHODOLOGIES IN ESL; PRACTICE MEETSTHEORY.

Doug Absalom, University of Newcastle.

Most language teachers recognise that the 'perfect' method of teaching 
 a second language  is yet to be discovered. Thus we tend to be fairly 
 flexible and eclectic in attempting to adapt our methodologies to the 
 requirements of our students, persevering with formats that seem to 
 produce good results and discarding those that don't. It has even been 
 claimed  that "No method has been shown to be significantly better than 
 any other method. In fact, a glance at textbooks and syllabuses being 
 produced now would tend to support this view of our uncertainty - the 
 new emphasis is on eclecticism." (Mann, 1992, p.51.)

The advent of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) techniques has 
 given rise to many questions  relating to ways in which the computer 
 can supplement, or perhaps  even replace, procedures that have already 
 been established in our methodologies. It has usually been expected 
 that the type of intrinsic motivation generated by the current interest 
 in computer technology could only be beneficial to any teaching 
 procedure. However, the following report of a research project 
 conducted by a colleague and I (ref. Xiao Xi and Doug Absalom, 1994.) 
 with a group of students learning English as a Second Language serves 
 to cast some doubt on the implicit faith that we tended to have in this 
 modern machinery.

The University of Newcastle English Language Centre (UNELC) has, since 
 its inception some six years ago, adopted an immersion program to teach 
 English as a Second Language to overseas students wishing to enter 
 courses at the University. For five hours per day, five days per week, 
 students attend classes in the target language and participate in 
 language activities designed to have them acquire the types of English 
 that they will need, to be able to successfully undertake their 
 projected University courses. Theme areas that are treated include 
 those relating to Technology, Ecology, Health and Australiana, as well 
 as a number of consciousness raising procedures about the target 
 language and the ways in which people learn languages. These procedures 
 are supplemented by excursions, development of research techniques, 
 essay and report writing skills, seminar presentation procedures and 
 computer awareness and usage programs. The last named procedure has, 
 until recently, been limited to voluntary (but very well attended) 
 classes of two to three hours duration which students get to attend 
 about once per month.

During the ten week period over the summer of 1993-4, it was decided 
 that we should make more extensive use of the potential offered by the 
 versatility of CALL techniques in an attempt to increase and diversify 
 our students' participation in target language procedures. Accordingly, 
 extra voluntary classes were scheduled on a daily basis, with each 
 student having the opportunity of attending one two-hour class per 
 week. Of the 108 students enrolled at the Centre at that time,  94 
 accepted the invitation to attend, and although attendance varied over 
 the next eight weeks, (there were no classes offered in the exam week 
 and the ninth week was cancelled due to the lecturer attending a 
 conference,) from 98% to a low of 64%, students on average received an 
 extra 10 hours of target language participation in a medium with which 
 they had previously had little experience. The process also opened up 
 the possibility of  further self-directed learning in the same medium, 
 and just under 50% of the participants reported that they took 
 advantage of this opportunity. This may well have added a further 
 estimated 10 hours of direct exposure to those students' activities.

The lesson procedures took the form of introducing students to the 
 e-mail facility of the University's computer network, and allowing, 
 initially, interchange to take place in the classroom before students 
 went on to the full use of the process by communicating in English to 
 users in other parts of the world. The students were also introduced to 
 a number of extra software programs, notably "Globe", that would allow 
 them to extend their research techniques, and several games that they 
 could play, either alone or in network, with the object of increasing 
 enjoyment and participation, particularly for those students who had 
 been characteristically hesitant to take part in the real or simulated 
 communication procedures in the immersion program. Other games and 
 participatory procedures included Hugo, Civilizations, Touch typing, 
 word-processing and a voice card that offered students a pictorial 
 representation of their utterances.

Our general observations had led us to expect that many of our students 
 would, on entrance to our course,  display better reading and writing 
 skills than would be apparent in the speaking and listening areas, this 
 probably being due largely to writing-centred methods and materials 
 that they had been exposed to in their previous language learning 
 procedures. Thus it was believed that the "e-pal" process, which made 
 use of these writing skills to facilitate a communicative interchange 
 in something approaching a "real time" situation, would provide an 
 admirable 'half-way' stage in students' transitions into facility in 
 spontaneous oral interaction. Confidence gained from success in 
 computerised communication, which is comparatively free of the type of 
 interpersonal tension often present in a normal conversation, would 
 presumably have a beneficial effect on students in their transfer to 
 the real life situation.

The e-mail process, for the purposes to which we wished to apply it, 
 was seen to have the following advantages:-
i. Ease of access; computer terminals in the networked laboratory were 
 readily available during the summer vacation when most of the usual 
 student population was absent from the campus.
ii. Ease of operation; once a student had been registered and could log 
 in to the network, he/she had only to type in the category "mail" and 
 use such comands as 'send', 'read' and 'reply'.
iii. Efficiency; after the message is typed, the student has only to 
 press the Z key  to direct the message to its destination.
iv. Economy; electronic mail is cheaper and more time effective than 
 written mail, especially for overseas communication.
v. Echo-stimulation; once a student receives a message, it is almost 
 instinctive to want to reply immediately, either out of politeness or 
 else through having something to communicate about the topic being 
 discussed. The automatic nature of the 'reply' command helps to 
 facilitate this process, and the novel experience of communicating so 
 directly with someone in another country adds motivation to the 
 student's need to respond.
 
The project was embarked upon with enthusiasm. Not only did it appear 
 to conform completely  with the Centre's language Immersion policy, 
 with instruction in a specific content area (i.e. computer operation, 
 rules and uses of games and facility in operating e-mail) being totally 
 in the target language, but also it appeared to achieve Lian's (1987) 
 aim of the three A's - awareness, autonomy and achievement in language 
 learning. By producing a printout of their interaction, students were 
 able to reflect on their "conversations" and become consciously aware 
 of the ways in which meaning transfer had occurred. With students 
 operating their own individual terminals, the power of their autonomy 
 and the ability to contribute at any time of their choice was a strong 
 motivating factor. Finally, the fact that they had actually 

 communicated with real people in other parts of the world, imparting 
 and receiving 'real world' information and advice, was seen as 
 providing an appropriate sense of achievement.

The sessions were lively, with students being adventurous in their 
 production of the target language. We believe that this sense of 
 adventure was enhanced by the students having the anonymity of the 
 computer screen protecting them from the social embarrassment that 
 their variant productions might bring in a face-to-face situation. In 
 fact, many students extended this anonymity, adopting false names and 
 creating persona which they role-played in internet until some other 
 class member guessed their real identity.

Not all of the process was seen as being just fun though; the 'Globe' 
 software in particular was used extensively to provide facts and 
 figures for student essays and seminars. Thus classes often had a 
 direct sense of academic purpose, particularly at about the time that 
 essays were due to be submitted. This was also important, we believed, 
 in terms of the process of students being able to transfer the language 
 skills acquired in the computer lab to the other areas of their course, 
 especially the examination.

Given all of these apparent advantages, we looked forward with optimism 
 to the examination results at the end of the 10-week period. Since 
 students had received an average of an extra ten hours instruction , 
 per medium of the target language, in a subject area that they enjoyed 
 and which was seen as being both motivating and useful, and also 
 directly related to the Technology theme discussed in the course 
 proper, we felt sure that there would be a substantial improvement in 
 examination marks, compared to previous groups that had not enjoyed 
 these advantages.

However, the final results were extremely disappointing with only 69 of 
 the cohort of 94 students reaching the required University entrance 
 level of an equivalent 6.5 IELTS band. This represented a pass rate of  
 73.4% compared to the established rate of just over  80% for the 
 previous five years. The variation of 7% was almost double the 
 established deviation over the five year period, yet the tests 
 themselves had remained substantially the same. In the interview 
 section of the exam, only a handful of the students (six were readily 
 identifiable) showed any marked improvement in their speaking 
 abilities. The 14 students who had not participated in the computer 
 classes did slightly better in the overall testing, 11 of these 
 passing, which represents a pass rate of 78.5%. However, since several 
 of these were quite accomplished students who already had advanced 
 computer skills, and possibly language and study skills as well, the 
 group may well have been atypical.

What sorts of explanation could we possibly offer for this negative 
 correlation? We were quite sure that the group at the outset showed no 
 notable deficiencies in relation to other groups over the previous five 
 years, and we were also confident that the examination standard had not 
 been lifted, since the aim of the Centre was to maintain parity with 
 standards established by the International English Language Testing 
 System. We distributed a hurriedly compiled questionnaire to students 
 and had discussions with the teachers who had conducted the 
 examinations, in an attempt to find some reasonable explanation for the 
 disappointing results.

One possiblity that occurred to us was that the type of language that 
 had been produced during the internet activities was less formal than 
 that normally used under written exam conditions, and a transfer of 

 such habits to the written component of the examination may have been 
 significant. Examples of the type of combination of spoken and written 
 forms found in the internet printouts included items like "I much like 
 you a lot" and "That place have a yuk feeling for me". However, the 
 examiners claimed not to have noted any strong tendency in that 
 direction (at least, no more than usual,) during their marking of the 
 written sections of the exam. A further possible explanation related to 
 the intrusion of "extraneous variables" into this particular course, 
 and it was indeed the case that there had been a major change in senior 
 management of the Centre four weeks into the ten week course. However, 
 this had been accomplished with a minimum of disruption to student 
 programmes and the outgoing director remained accessible to students 
 for the duration of the course. Thus, any effect of the change on 
 student attitudes and results was thought to be minimal. Another 
 possibility that occurred to us related to the amount of student time 
 that the computer classes had taken up. Is it possible that students 
 would have been spending that time more profitably in studying, or in 
 real life conversations instead of simulated ones? Experience had shown 
 us that this was not likely to be a strong possibility, since private 
 study has not been regarded as a time-efficient way of acquiring second 
 languages, and real life conversations among students outside class 
 time were more often in their native language rather than the target 
 language. Nevertheless, this variant use of time had to be kept in mind 
 as a possible contributor to our disappointing results.

The questionnaires were not as revealing as we had hoped, either. We 
 received only a 30% response, partially due to the hurried nature of 
 the distribution, and partially to the fact that it was a busy time of 
 the year with students needing to enrol in their new courses, attend 
 orientation lectures and acquire textbooks and course outlines. It is 
 probable that student disappointment may also have played a part in the 
 poor return. Later random questioning of some students also revealed a 
 very strong "compartmentalising" attitude, expressed as "We have 
 finished our Elicos course now. We will never forget you." This 
 particular viewpoint may well provide a clue for some basic 
 misunderstandings in our teaching procedures.

The questionnaires did provide some worthwhile feedback. All but one of 
 the repondents claimed to have enjoyed the computer classes very much, 
 and all, including the one who did not enjoy the procedure, insisted 
 that  the computer class should be made a part of the permanent 
 instruction section of the course. In reply to the question relating to 
 the usefulness of the classes, the majority of the respondents said 
 that "They were O.K." and in reply to the question relating to the area 
 of their language which they thought that the computer classes helped 
 most, none of the respondents nominated speaking. Most selected General 
 Knowledge as the area to be most improved while some nominated Grammar 
 and Sentence Organisation. Several respondents felt that the Internet 
 procedures, while being enjoyable, were not directly related to their 
 University work and so were a waste of time. 

So the overall response revealed a high level of enjoyment, but only a 
 mediocre amount of support for 'usefulness'; paradoxically, there was a 
 strong push to have the processes included in the compulsory sections 
 of the course. This led us to further consider the notion of 
 'compartmentalising' mentioned above and to also consider the process 
 of transferance required to have the activities in the computer 
 laboratory made applicable to the abilities displayed in the 
 examination room. As mentioned earlier, it was thought that the use of 
 the Globe software to assist in research for essays would go some way 
 towards facilitating this transfer, but apparently it was seen only as 
 a happy coincidence. Even the teaching of word-processing skills for 

 the purpose of writing essays seems to have been regarded as an 
 isolated skill that was not directly testable, and thus not fully 
 related to the serious business of passing the language exams. Thus 
 transfer of skill acquisition was not occurring.

Clearly, we don't have enough empirical evidence to claim that, 
 firstly, our extra procedures in the computer laboratory did 
 significantly improve students' communicative competence, and secondly 
 that this improvement failed to be transferred because of the strong 
 'compartmentalising' procedures that students went through in labelling 
 the CALL section as non-compulsory, and thus of limited usefulness in 
 their 'real' task of learning language. However, the strong push by the 
 questionnaire respondents to have CALL included in the compulsory 
 section of the course certainly suggests that such may be the case. I 
 have elsewhere (Absalom, 1994) indicated the major observed effects of 
 aspects of the affective domain on the quality of language learning, 
 and even though our immersion procedures at the English Language Centre 
 concentrate on enjoyment as a principal contributor to effective 
 language acquisition, it seems apparent that the compulsory nature of 
 those processes becomes more significant in categorising them in 
 students' minds as being related to exam performance.

A second example of an eclectic methodology observed during last year 
 concerned a Korean nursing student who had already achieved Masters 
 degree status in her home country and wished to enrol as a Doctoral 
 student in Australia. In accordance with University policy, she had to 
 pass the English exams at our Language Centre with an equivalent of an 
 IELTS band of 6.5. As well as participating in the Immersion procedures 
 conducted at the Centre, the student (let's call her Kim.) was 
 requested by her future supervisor to translate her Masters Degree 
 thesis from Korean to English. Since the subject matter was obviously 
 of considerable interest to the student, it was thought that at least 
 some of the principles of Immersion were being conformed to. As it 
 seems clear that some informal translation procedures almost inevitably 
 play a part in second language acquisition anyway, it was assumed that 
 a limited formal procedure in this area, stretched out over a period of 
 twenty weeks, would not interfere greatly with Kim's acquiring English 
 in the Immersion program.

However, the process proved to be a failure. Kim's language abilities 
 in her post- graduate work were seen to be inadequate, despite her 
 having reached the required level in her English exams. She was first 
 required to complete some more Masters degree work, and she then 
 dropped out of her course and returned to her own country. A 
 preliminary assessment of this particular student suggests that, as a 
 mature-age (she was 37), committed person with a good track record, 
 including some University study of French and German, she should have 
 been expected to make a far more successful attempt at her course than 
 was the case. Could our mixing of methodologies have been instrumental 
 in hampering her progress in University?

An investigation of the procedures that Kim went through in translating 
 her Masters Degree thesis highlights some particular problems. Firstly, 
 there was considerable difficulty in establishing an appropriate genre. 
 In her foreword, Kim's translation read "I thank from the bottom of my 
 heart Professor X: even if she was busy, she gave me consideration and 
 love" and a little later in the thesis she wrote "Some clinics have 
 close out; they have just shut up shop."  There was also a reference to 
 a Psychiatrist as a "shrink", and a number of other non-formal terms 
 were evident in the translation. Kim herself pointed out the difficulty 
 of translating 'special' vocabulary, and also said that sentences in 
 Korean were often too long to be put comfortably into English. She made 

 valiant attempts to formalise her vocabulary choice, but these too 
 sometimes suffered miscue as in "As Korean society has experienced a 
 rapid speed of industrialisation and urbanisation, more population have 
 left local towns to live in bigger cities and receive modernised 
 medical services." She had crossed out "people" and substituted 
 "population" since it seemed more formal to her. 

It became clear, with the length of sentence problem, that Kim was 
 having to constantly make a choice between including all of the 
 information contained in her thesis, or else just giving a general 
 "meaning" translation. That she chose the latter path was made obvious 
 when it eventuated that her thesis of 104 pages of Korean was reduced 
 to just over 40 pages of double space handwriting in English. An 
 example of this occurred when almost a full page of Korean was reduced 
 to a single sentence in an isolated paragraph: "Normal delivery might 
 be regarded not as an illness, thus providing opportunity to disregard 
 it in the current medical insurance benefit". Clearly the original 
 paragraph had dealt with social, political and economical concepts that 
 Kim found to be too difficult to try to communicate in her second 
 language.

It seems highly probable that, in this instance, the established 
 procedure of  an eclectic approach to methodology may have been 
 detrimental to the student's progress. While Immersion concentrated on 
 enjoyment and communicative competence, the translation procedure 
 required accuracy and detail. The methods adopted within the Language 
 Centre incorporated emotive responses in a spontaneous way, whereas the 
 environment of a thesis translation emphasized dispassionate formality. 
 It may be that the sheer volume of work encompassed by the two methods 
 became too much for the student; perhaps it may be argued that the 
 translation procedure alone may have been more appropriate for Kim's 
 lifestyle and directions. It seems apparent within this case study 
 that, through some one-to-one tutoring in the translation method by a 
 teacher who was also involved in the daily Immersion procedures, some 
 of the 'compartmentalisation' aspects may have been overcome, but it is 
 also clear, from the illustrations of genre variation shown above, that 
 our own daily language processes require categorisations of particular 
 types.

What these two instances of method mixing in language learning tend to 
 demonstrate is firstly a degree of support for the contention that "If 
 one moves on from one method, any method, to another, any other, it was 
 probably partly because the method before it was seen to be inadequate. 
 But unfortunately, learning a language is difficult, and all methods in 
 themselves are inadequate." (Mann, 1992, P. 51). Secondly, however, it 
 seems that even a combination of two or more methodologies, under the 
 currently popular "eclectic" approach, is likely to provide 
 shortcomings as well. While we may believe that a combination of 
 methods will allow one of the contributing formats to make up for 
 shortcomings in the other, we must be aware of possible functional 
 contradictions within these combinations. Unfortunately, as shown in 
 these two instances, our failure to realise the shortcomings has led to 
 very severe setbacks in the careers of a number of our students.

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References.

Absalom, D.J.  1994.  "Saturation, Immersion or Extraneous Variables" 
in Lee Ik-Hwan
(ed)  Linguistics in the Morning Calm 3,  Seoul, Hanshin Publishing Co.

Lian, A.P.  1987. "Awareness, Autonomy and Achievement." in Revue de 
Phonetique 
Applique, vol.82-84. p. 167-184.

Mann, Chris. 1992. "Universities and LOTE Proficiency" in ARAL, series 
S, No.9. p.49-
68.

Xiao Xi and Doug Absalom. 1994.  "Mixing Methods: Immersion and CALL" 
(to appear)
in AALIT,  Vol. 2, No.1. Dec. 1994.

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