Tetiana Kravchuk, senior instructor

Elina Kyrychok, senior instructor

Sumy National Agrarian University

Chair of foreign languages

About a balanced activities approach in English

language teaching

( Про підхід сбалансованої діяльності в навчанні англійській мові )

In deciding how to approach the teaching and learning of English we can divide classroom activities into two broad categories: those that give students language input, and those which encourage them to produce language output. Whether acquisition or conscious learning is taking place there will be stages at which the student is receiving language - language is in some way being 'put into' the students (though they will decide whether or not they want to receive it). But exposing students to language input is not enough: we also need to provide opportunities for them to activate this knowledge, for it is only when students are producing language that they can select from the input they have received. Language production allows students to rehearse language use in classroom conditions whilst receiving feedback (from the teachers, from other students and from themselves) which allows them to adjust their perceptions of the language input they have received. This production of language, or language output, can be divided into two distinct sub-categories. In the first, practice, students are asked to use new items of language in different contexts. Activities are designed which promote the use of specific language or tasks. The aim is to give students a chance to rehearse language structures and functions so that they may focus on items that they wish to internalise more completely than before, whilst at the same time being engaged in meaningful and motivating activities. Practice output marks some kind of a half-way stage between input and communicative output. Communicative output, on the other hand, refers to activities in which students use language as a vehicle for communication because their main purpose is to complete some kind of communicative task. Because the task in a communicative activity is of paramount importance the language used to perform it takes, as it were, second place. It becomes an instrument of communication rather than being an end in itself. In most communicative activities the students will be using any and/or all the language that they know: they will be forced to access the language they have in their language store, and they will gradually develop strategies for communication that over-concentration on presentation and practice would almost certainly inhibit.

A further distinction has to be made, however, between two different kinds of input: roughly-tuned input and finely-tuned input. The former, is language which the students can more or less understand even though it is above their own productive level. The teacher is a major source of roughly tuned input, and so are the reading and listening texts which we provide for our students. At lower levels such material is likely to be roughly-tuned and so whilst we are training students in the skills necessary for reading and listening in English we are also exposing them to language, some of which may form part of their acquired language store. Finely-tuned input, on the other hand, is language which has been very precisely selected to be at exactly the students' level. For our purposes finely-tuned input can be taken to mean that language which we select for conscious learning and teaching. Such language is often the focus of the presentation of new language where repetition, teacher correction, discussion and/or discovery techniques are frequently used to promote the cognitive strategies.

During the presentation stage teachers tend to act as controllers, both selecting the language the students are to use and asking for the accurate reproduction of new language items. They will want to correct the mistakes they hear and see at this stage fairly rigorously - in marked contrast to the kind of correction that is generally offered in practice and communicative activities.

Even during a communicative activity a student's output and the degree of success that output achieves may provide valuable information about that language which is then internalised. Teacher correction during a practice activity may give the student more input information about the language in question.

Because of the focus on communicative activities and the concentration on language as a means of communication such an approach has been called the communicative approach. This is because its aims are overtly communicative and great emphasis is placed on training students to use language for communication.

Certainly the aim of all our teaching is to train students for communicative efficiency, but we have already seen components of the approach we are advocating here which are not in themselves communicative - for example finely-tuned input when presentation takes place, and practice activities And we have also suggested that concentration on communication only may not be in the best interests of the students. The importance of stages where there is an emphasis on tasks and the students' own personalities and responsibility for their own learning has to go together with more formal language work, and that is where the status of a 'communicative' approach is called into question. An approach that includes

controlled language work ( which is not at all communicative ) cannot really be given such a misleading name. And after all, most language teaching is designed to teach students to communicate, however the learning is organised. Rather than worry about these apparent contradictions, it is perhaps better to see the methodology in terms of the activities which we involve students in and to assemble a balanced programme of such activities.

A balanced activities approach sees the job of the teacher as that of ensuring that students get a variety of activities which foster acquisition and which foster learning. The programme will be planned on the basis of achieving a balance between the different categories of input and output where roughly-tuned input and communicative activities will tend to predominate over (but not by any means exclude) controlled language presentation and practice output. It is on this basis that we will effect part of our balance.

A balanced activities approach has a more human aspect, however, which is bound up with the concerns of intrinsic motivation . By presenting students with a variety of activities we can ensure their continuing interest and involvement in the language programme. Classes which continually have the same activities are not likely to sustain interest, particularly where the students have no extrinsic motivation and do not perceive any clear long-term goal. A programme that presents a variety of activities, on the other hand, is far more likely to continually engage the students' interest.

A final, but important, component of the balanced activities approach is the teacher's willingness to be both adaptable and flexible. Adaptability refers to the teacher's ability to adapt the programme (and the balance) on the basis of the different groups that are being taught. Motivational differences, should have a powerful influence on the teacher's use and choice of activities and materials. Flexibility, on the other hand, refers to the behaviour of teachers in class and their ability to be sensitive to the changing needs of the group as the lesson progresses. In simple terms it means that decisions taken before the lesson about what is going to happen are not in some way sacred. Good teachers must be prepared to adapt and alter their plans if this proves necessary.

The balanced activities approach, then, sees the methodology as being a balance between the components we wish to include in that approach, and it is an approach that sees the students' continuing interest and involvement in the learning process as being the necessary dominant factor in language teaching.