I like to keep my finger on the pulse of popular culture, which is what led me to watch the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny last weekend. It’s a classic of the legal comedy genre, involving Joe Pesci’s Italian American lawyer defending two young relatives in a rural court. It’s a well-plotted funny film, but the teacher in me was drawn to one scene in particular.
The court case revolves around the murder of a convenience store worker. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, the accused are innocent but react with perplexity during questioning. ‘I shot the clerk?’ Ralph Macchio’s character says, confused because he has only just learnt the clerk is dead. Shortly after, the same detective that had performed the questioning reads out the transcript – but now the question mark at the end of the statement has disappeared and what he reads is a confession: ‘I shot the clerk’. My immediate reaction was that my students would love this. It’s a great example of the difference between a spoken text and a written text.
Spoken texts are usually spontaneous creations – the idea comes first and the language emerges at the moment of speaking. Certainly, as we can see in the later stages of My Cousin Vinny where Vinny moves towards his eventual triumph, a lot of planning does come into some speech acts; but what we might call natural speech is certainly not thought out ahead of time. This is one reason why we don’t tend to pump our speech too full of information – we can’t hold that much in our heads without memorising it all beforehand, and our interlocutors would never be able to digest it all as we deliver it; and if our interlocutor asks us to repeat ourselves, while we might be able to convey back some of the information they wanted, it is highly unlikely we would do so in exactly the same words.
Written texts do not work in the same way, and they are certainly not spontaneous creations. They require planning and editing – first the idea is developed, and then the idea and the language we use in its expression are revised and refined. A written report, such as that produced by the coroner in a murder trial, can be information dense because the reader can return to each piece of information as often as they like. The language of the written text will not, then, be the same as the language of the spoken text. As we see in My Cousin Vinny, tone of voice and intonation are crucial elements in spoken texts, whereas in written texts everything but the words themselves is stripped away – making an incredulous exclamation appear like a confession of guilt.
For years now I’ve been telling my students that languages must be learnt twice.
First you learn the language receptively, so that you can recognise words and expressions either when you are listening or when you are reading. Then you learn the language productively, so that you can speak or write. This has always made sense to me, and it has explained the problems that students have using new language; they only learn to recognise the language, not to use it – just as Vinny recognises the layout of the court at the start of the film but is as yet unable to navigate its procedures. The difference is most stark when I listen to my C2-level students: they can understand texts at that level and will score well in the test, but when they speak they tend to do so at between B2 and C1 level. Why the disparity? And how should I treat it? It is for this reason, spurred by the experience of watching My Cousin Vinny, that I am beginning to think that the division of skills between receptive and productive doesn’t quite work and, even worse, might be counterproductive.
There is still a clear difference in my mind between the receptive and productive sides of language, but I want to change how I pair things up in my teaching. In the past I would happily think in terms of listening and reading on one side, and speaking and writing on the other. But how compelling is the logic upon which this division rests?
When we listen, we need to pay attention to features of pronunciation. We can tell a question from a statement by listening to the rising or falling pitch of the speaker, and we can further tell a question from a rhetorical question in the same way. We can monitor for agreement or disagreement by paying attention to the way in which words are delivered, more than just by the words themselves. For example, in this brief exchange, is Speaker B agreeing or disagreeing with Speaker A?
A: It’s a lovely day today.
B: Yes.
At first glance, the answer is obvious: Speaker B agrees. But if we hear an elongated or unenthusiastic ‘yes’, we might doubt the degree of agreement. We might even expect Speaker B to follow up with the notorious ‘but’ that marks disagreement.
My example is not particularly authentic. In spoken discourse, a word is not required to mark either agreement or disagreement; Speaker B could equally respond with ‘Hmm’ – in which case the meaning would depend on the quality of the sound that was produced. In a written text, such as a novel, the writer would need to feed the reader with information a listener would be able to infer, and the writer might do this through a speech tag, such as he demurred or he grunted.
The skill of listening centres on the ability to match the language we hear to the meaning suggested by how that language is delivered. A student who has had little practice listening to (relatively) authentic exchanges between speakers will find listening tasks in class to be very difficult, because they may not understand the crucial differences between spoken and written texts. Such students might also struggle to speak in a way that comes across as authentic.
When we speak, we must control the various aspects of pronunciation so that our interlocutor receives the meaning we intend. A failure to do so will lead to a breakdown in communication – of exactly the kind that we witness in My Cousin Vinny. Speaking as though we were reading from a script deprives our interlocutor of valuable information – information that we take for granted in everyday interactions. A speaker who wants to communicate their true feelings about a subject must learn how to deliver their message through both the right choice of words and the right approach to pronunciation features.
It makes sense, therefore, to consider listening and speaking as two sides of the same coin, and for the same reason reading and writing should be brought together. Speaking is the productive complement of listening; writing is the productive complement of reading.
You are probably wondering what is so profound about anything I’ve said so far. It is not difficult to agree with the assertion that the skills should be divided in the way that I’m suggesting – in fact, many readers will have come to this article already of a like mind.
However, the consequences of holding this position are rarely evidenced in coursebooks, or, indeed, in our own lessons.
Let’s consider the nature of input and output. We often seek to provide our students with a model of good language, from which they can construct their own utterances. However, where we source that model often contradicts what I have discussed so far. How often do we open our coursebooks and find that a speaking activity has been preceded by a reading? Or that a writing task follows on from a listening? It doesn’t take me long to find an example.
One of the books I use most often in my teaching is Ready for Advanced (French & Norris, 2014). I have guided at least six years’ worth of students through this book on their way to sitting the C1 Advanced exam, and I find that it is a good preparatory tool. But it does often leave the teacher with a lot of work to do. Look at the very first unit. It opens with a practice of Part 2 of the Speaking paper, the individual long turn. There is a box titled ‘Useful language’ to help the students deliver their answers, but this isolated lexis is not exemplified and so the teacher must either hope that the students will figure out how to use the words ‘weepy’ and ‘anxious’ when they speak, or the teacher must provide a model themselves, which, because it is planned, risks not being terribly authentic as a piece of speaking.
This is followed by a reading task that introduces students to Part 5 of the Reading and Use of English paper, the multiple-choice reading. The reading task proper is bookended by two speaking tasks of a sort – first to generate interest in the text, and then to respond to the text. Generating interest is a staple of the EFL teacher’s life, certainly as regards receptive tasks such as this, but what is there in the reading itself that will help the students produce well-formulated answers in the response task that follows? The article that feeds into the multiple-choice task is a written text, which means it was planned and edited, and it contains the sort of language units that belong in written texts, such as sophisticated lexis and multi-clause sentences.
I would never dream of asking my students to produce spoken language resembling this model – because none of the article (quotes excepted) should be spoken. It should be written. Why, then, ask my students to respond to the text by speaking about it? The only justification is that doing the reading task will have made the class a quiet place for an extended period, and in EFL we fear the quiet and would like our students to make some noise – preferably in English – and so response activities like these are offered as a kind of fig leaf to the communicative community. But the students didn’t need to have read the article to be able to respond to it. In my experience, no student ever references the article itself when they complete this short speaking activity. Reading is reading and speaking is speaking, and never the twain shall meet.
Given this approach, is it any wonder that our students struggle with the four skills to such a degree? The speaking is launched into without a model – and a model is highly desirable for Part 2 of the Speaking paper, as few students come to class equipped with the discourse-management skills required for such sustained effort as speaking for a whole minute. By listening to a good model, the students’ attention could at least be drawn to useful techniques for managing extended discourse.
The reading is merely a test. The coursebook does nothing to help the students develop their reading skills. The teacher’s book (Rézmüves, 2014) that accompanies the coursebook offers a short paragraph by way of explanation for the answers to the multiple-choice task, but gives no guidance on how the students might be expected to derive such answers for themselves in the future. To know where the answers come from, the students must consider the text as a written text, not as a spoken one, and to respond to that written text through spoken channels misses the point.
The text itself contains much of value to the novice writer. Good examples of sentence formation abound. In spoken texts, the subject word ‘I’ predominates, as well it should – we tend to talk about ourselves. But in a written text, one which has been planned and edited, a greater variety of organisational patterns emerges. In the writing paper of the Cambridge exams, being able to use different organisational patterns with ease is assessed under the ‘Organisation’ criterion. Students whose attention is drawn to such organisational techniques are more likely to employ them in their own writing – especially given the opportunity to practice – than a student whose attention is directed elsewhere. A teacher who is sensitive to these concerns must therefore plan the bulk of what they need independently, without the assistance of either the coursebook or its teacher’s companion.
One of the key reasons I am writing this article, besides wanting to shoehorn in a reference to My Cousin Vinny, is that a lot of the time reading and listening are not used in lessons and coursebooks as a teaching resource, but as a testing resource (unless, as is common, the text is a method for grammar delivery and has no intrinsic value). We present a text and ask our students to answer questions about that text. Perhaps there will be a relatively simple gist task for them to complete first, but there will probably be a comprehension exercise as the main course, and then a speaking task as a kind of dessert, so that the students don’t entirely lose interest in the lesson.
This tends to be the case with most coursebooks that I can think of, and I think it explains why my students seem resolutely unable to improve in either their listening or their reading. I’m not actually teaching them anything. I’m just testing their skills; and between tests they are meant to somehow magically improve these receptive skills. They rarely do, however.
I am aware that the plural of anecdote is not evidence, but over the many years of my teaching career I have yet to see a student markedly improve their reading or listening test scores on an exam preparation course. They might get marginally better, but even by the end of a two-year programme, many students can only explain their answers through recourse to ‘feelings’ rather than direct explanation.
So what should a good lesson look like? What would the materials be like?
The best materials will consider that the receptive-productive partnership is only half the story. They will instead think of two pairs – listening and speaking, on the one hand, and reading and writing on the other.
For a skills lesson (as opposed to a systems lesson that builds knowledge of grammar and lexis), the receptive partner should be served first, followed by its productive counterpart: first listening, then speaking; first reading, then writing. However, and in contrast to the approach adopted by many coursebooks, the teacher should be expected to focus on the actual teaching of the receptive skills, in order that those skills can be transferred from receptive to productive, or from input to output.
For example, imagine a listening between two people deciding where to go for dinner one night. Presumably this would be presented in a unit on food, and it would still involve a gist and then detailed listening task. That’s fine – it leads into what comes next. That all-important next stage would be to identify the pronunciation features present in the dialogue. This could involve presenting the recording script and asking the students to mark the features of pronunciation that are used to denote agreement or disagreement. One speaker seems to draw out a particular word? Mark it on the script, and then explain why elongating the word ‘well’ opens the door to disagreement.
When they have explored the pronunciation features that make up this genre of spoken discourse, the students can be asked to make plans with each other for tonight’s dinner. They can be fed instructions such as: ‘Disagree with the first suggestion’ or ‘Mention specific dietary requirements’. Planning should be kept to a minimum since spoken interaction should be as spontaneous as possible, but the teacher should be on hand to offer as much feedback on the students’ performance as possible. And then the students should repeat the activity so that they can experiment with the teacher’s recommendations.
How about a lesson that revolves around a written text? The same approach could be adopted. I quite like Part 6 of the C1 Advanced Reading and Use of English paper, clunkily named the ‘cross text multiple-matching’ task. In this task, four writers present perspectives on the same source material – often a book or film – and the student’s task is to match which texts present similar opinions on some aspects of the book, and which present different opinions. These short texts are often well written, and once the task has been satisfactorily completed – along with a teaching stage to show the students how the task works – a follow-up would be easy to devise: the students would use the patterns they have noticed in the short texts to write their own, fifth text. They can even decide (from the suite of options presented in the original questions) which features of the book or film they wish to focus on in their miniature review.
Another video that I watched over the weekend was one of Scott Thornbury’s. He has been saying much the same things about language teaching for the past decade, and yet many of his complaints have gone unheeded – hence the apparent necessity of repeating himself. In this video, he speaks for a minute about the fact that most grammar in coursebooks is what we might call written grammar – in other words, it is the sort of grammar that is predominantly found in written texts. He offers the example of back-shifting in reported speech which, it is true, is something we tend to do in writing a lot more than when we speak. Coursebooks rarely tell us that back-shifting only matters – if it matters at all – in written texts, but that is partly because coursebooks so rarely differentiate between spoken and written texts in the first place. Perhaps the reason for this is that they lack a scheme to follow. Coursebook writers are usually halfway there – receptive tasks are generally followed by productive tasks, but I don’t think the choice of productive task is often appropriate. Pairing the skills as I have in this article might provide a scheme that coursebooks could follow – finally laying to rest one of Thornbury’s old bugbears in the process. If nothing else, it should at least prevent any students of mine from accidentally confessing to a murder – we aren’t all lucky enough to have a cousin like Vinny.
French, A. & Norris, R. (2014). Ready for Advanced Students’ Book. Macmillan Education.
Rézmüves, Z. (2014). Ready for Advanced Teacher’s Book. Macmillan Education.
Thornbury, S. (2022). What’s Wrong With the Grammar Syllabus? Available from https://youtu.be/V6H6QkjXmiE (Last accessed 15 May 2023).
Christopher Walker is a teacher and writer based in Bielsko-Biala in the south of Poland. He has been a teacher for fifteen years, and yet still finds new things to explore every day.
Email: closelyobserved@gmail.com