Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Scripts and schema theory in teaching
Patricia Carrell (1983) produced a set of recommendations for language teachers,
based on her own research and that of others. She points to the importance of
vocabulary, revealed in her experiments with tests outlined earlier. The L2 learner
needs to be supplied with the vocabulary that the native takes for granted. Carrell
also sees teaching as building up the learner’s background knowledge. Thus she
stresses pre-reading activities that build up background knowledge, partly through
providing learners with appropriate vocabulary through activities such as word asso-
ciation practice. The techniques she suggests develop processing strategies for the
text, such as flow-charting or diagramming activities. Materials should not only be
interesting, but also conceptually complete; a longer passage or an in-depth set of
passages on a single topic is better than short unconnected passages.
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Perhaps none of these ideas will be completely new to the practising teacher.
Reading materials have after all been stressing content and background for some
time. Pre-reading exercises are now standard. Com-municatively oriented reading
tasks meet many of her requirements. In the textbook True to Life (Collie and Slater,
1995), for example, pairs of students prepare for a reading passage on reflexology
by looking at diagrams of feet and by formulating questions about its history and
practice; they read the text and check whether they were asking the right ques-
tions; they discuss their views about it and then report them to the group. All the
desirable ingredients seem to be there, even if the balance and overall sequence are
slightly different.
The benefit for the teacher is an increased awareness of the difficulties that L2
learners face with texts. These are not just a product of the processing of the text
itself, but of the background information that natives automatically read into it. L2
learners have ‘cognitive deficits’ with reading that are not caused so much by lack of
language ability as by difficulties with processing information in a second language.
At advanced levels, L2 learners still cannot get as much out of a text as in their first
language, even if on paper they know all the grammar and vocabulary. Cambridge
University students tested by John Long and Edith Harding-Esch (1977), for exam-
ple, not only remembered less information from political speeches in French than
in English, but also added more false information. Furthermore, advanced L2 learn-
ers still read their second language much more slowly than they read their first
(Favreau and Segalowitz, 1982), particularly when they are changing from one over-
all writing system to another, as we saw in Chapter 5 (Haynes and Carr, 1990). The
problem with reading is not just the language, but the whole process of getting
meaning from texts.
The importance of background information through scripts and similar mental
structures is much wider than the area of reading. The processing of written texts is
distinctive in that the reader has to depend only on his or her own script. In speak-
ing, someone else is usually there to help or hinder by interacting with the speaker
in one way or another. As with pronunciation, reading involves important low-level
processes as well as high-level comprehension. The discussion here has not been
about the teaching of reading itself, that is, literacy, but about teaching L2 students
to read in a new language, which is a rather different issue. The literacy skills them-
selves become important either when the L2 learners cannot read in their own
language or when the writing system of their first language is very different, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 5.
A particular problem for L2 students occurs in the use of academic language.
Never mind the language problems, think of the schemas. Ruqaiya Hasan (1996)
pointed out that the crucial problem for the non-native student studying in an
English setting is what counts as knowledge: one culture may prize the views of
well-known authorities; another the views of the individual student. So the schema
for an essay may be a collection of quotations strung together in a fairly arbitrary
order; or it may be a personal argument built up from existing sources. The main
problem for the non-native speaker of English studying in England who has previ-
ously studied in other academic systems is the nature of the essay, not the gram-
matical structures, vocabulary, and so on. In my own experience this is true of
students coming from Greece, Iran and Hong Kong, to take a random sample.
An interesting approach to teaching schemas comes from the field of cross-cul-
tural psychology, which has developed a technique called cross-cultural training
(Cushner and Brislin, 1996). This presents the students with a key intercultural
problem, for which they are given alternative solutions; they decide which of
Listening and reading processes
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them is most likely and check this against interpretations supplied by native
speakers. For example, one case study features an American student in Germany
who is worried by her apparent rejection by German students; the most likely rea-
son is her lack of interest in politics. Another example is a foreign student in the
USA who cannot get women to go out with him; the correct explanation is that
he should ask them out via their women friends rather than directly, a surprising
custom to a non-American. This approach is a variety of focus on form in which
the students’ attention is directed to the specific cultural nature of the situation
rather than its grammar or functions.
Listening processes 125