“Four sets of cognitive strategies – applied to listening, speaking, writing, and reading – enable second language learners to understand and produce new language. These are: practicing, receiving and sending messages, analyzing and reasoning, and creating structures for input and output.” (Rebecca Oxford, 1990)

Students also employ the cognitive strategy receiving and sending messages by using the Question Cue Card, which they use as a questioning resource to quickly get the idea that has just been presented.

In all English Now! levels, students employ analyzing and reasoning strategies. For example, in phonemic awareness, they analyze minimal pairs of sounds contrastively according to how and where they are made in the mouth. While listening to an audio story, they use deductive reasoning to place picture cards in sequence. In writing, they analyze three writing samples that vary in sentence complexity, then transfer what they learned to their own writing.

Finally, students create structures for input and output. In English Now! C they learn how to take notes of an oral interview (input), summarize their notes (output), share their notes with the teacher and partners (output-input), and finally, write an expository essay using their notes, incorporating their partner’s and teacher’s input into their own writing. In English Now! D, they highlight important information (input), explain what they highlighted to partners (output), transfer this highlighted information to an outline (output), and write a five-paragraph persuasive essay (output).

Thus, the input-output-input-output process is strategic in nature, because the communicative goal is achieved through a structured process of assessment, planning, and execution, which, according to linguists like Bachman, comprise the elements of strategic competence (Bachman, 1990).

The examples listed above are just a few of several cognitive strategies used in English Now! Clearly, these strategies bring tremendous benefits to students, enabling them to self-direct their learning quickly, effectively, and enjoyably.

“Language learning strategies encourage overall self-direction for learners…Self-direction is essential to the active development of ability in a new language.” (Rebecca Oxford, 1990)

My next six emails will highlight language learning strategies used in English Now! that apply these six categories of strategies. Today we will focus on memory strategies.

Memory Strategies
Memory strategies have a highly specific function: helping students store and retrieve new information. According to Lord (1987) learners must employ memory strategies to learn new vocabulary because “Vocabulary is by far the most sizable and unmanageable component in the learning of any language … because of tens of thousands of words with different meanings.”

The most common memory strategy used in English Now! A/B is RASP (Repeat by All, by Some, then by one Person). RASP is powerful because it combines four sets of memory strategies: (a) creating mental linkages, (b) applying images and sounds, (c) reviewing well, and (d) employing actions.

In English Now! C, students use the Link Word Strategy, where they make visual links between the new word and a familiar one, where both links are meaningful to the learner. A key concept is placed at the center, and related words and concepts are linked to it by means of circles and lines.

Because of the expectation in English Now! to use language as the “speedway” to literacy, a significant number of memory strategies are employed. These help students learn large numbers of vocabulary words, phrases, and grammatical forms and remember them “on demand.” Students then use them to communicate and to demonstrate listening and reading comprehension.

“Research has shown that teachers who focus students’ attention on linguistic form during communicative interactions are more effective than those who never focus on form or who do so in decontextualized grammar lessons.“ (Spada and Lightbown, 1993)

Communicative Grammar Lesson Using Explicit Instruction
English Now! operationalizes the four-part framework proposed by Fotos (2001), which promotes acquisition through meaning-focused use of the form in communicative activities.

Step 1: Using an advance organizer (Ausebel, 1968), the teacher announces the objectives and links the new grammar lesson to what the students already know. She then presents the new grammar content using either a deductive or inductive approach. (pre-task phase)

Step 2: Students work in pairs or in groups to perform a structure-based communicative task which contains multiple uses of the structure. (task phase)

Step 3: The teacher reviews the target structures, commenting on her observations, correcting errors, and clarifying misunderstandings that she observed. (task phase)

Step 4: Students practice the structures, transferring what they learned to a different context or to a different language domain. Frequently, this is in the form of an “extension task” which is to be performed with peers or adults outside of the classroom. (post-task phase)

The “spiral” review of recently instructed material within increasingly broader contexts, has been found to be an important memory strategy for the successful development of explicit knowledge and an awareness of form-meaning relationships (see Cohen, 1998).

“The teacher who really teaches, that is, who really works with contents within the context of methodological exactitude, will deny as false the hypocritical formula, ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ Whoever is engaged in ‘right thinking’ knows only too well that words not given body (made flesh) have little or no value. Right thinking is right doing.“ (Paolo Freire)

De Carrico (2001) added that that new and important words and phrases be presented in contexts rich enough to provide clues to meaning and that students be given multiple exposures to them.

What is “rich and deep enough”? In English Now! A/B, it means introducing vocabulary using available realia, large colorful photographs of nouns and verbs, the same nouns and verbs cut out by students and stored in nifty little card boxes, and used in big books, student books, storybooks, and CD-ROMs. The verbs are contextualized through simulation and mime. Most important of all, the meanings of new and important words are explained, practiced, discussed, read, written, and used in conversation with peers and adults inside and outside the classroom, school, and home.

This “rich and deep word knowledge” principle is what prompted English Now! developers to design English Now! A/B such that vocabulary words in challenging texts are developed deeply through listening, speaking, writing, and reading. Before Lesson 1, the target storybook is likely to be only10% comprehensible to beginning English learners. By Lesson 13, when they encounter the text for the first time, they will have richly and deeply learned the meanings of 95% of the new and important words in the text.
 

Simple listening tasks … can cater to the ‘silent period,’ (Krashen, 1981) which characterizes the early stages of acquisition for some learners.

Validated by Ellis (2004), this manner of vocabulary introduction provides a non-threatening way of engaging beginning learners in a meaning-centered activity and, thereby, of developing proficiency that later on, can be used in production tasks.

In English Now! A/B, the production tasks follow the listening task when the students have sufficiently comprehended the target vocabulary. Thus, by the “Evaluation” step of the lesson, they will have “outputted the input” through speaking and writing.

Users of English Now! A/B have found that the immediate inclusion of writing and reading in a primarily listening and speaking task does not slow down the acquisition of vocabulary. On the contrary, vocabulary built up in this manner provides the “frontloading” necessary to comprehend the challenging reading text that is to come in just a few lessons.