For me the most valuable part of the Lyster presentation was the four step procedure for language awareness raising. In other words, he gave us a concrete classroom realization for our Precept Three and for Crabbe’s task category of “Learn about Language.” These are the steps:
- NOTICING: using guidance from such tools as typographical enhancement (e.g. bolding key words and phrases in a written text; his example was determiner + noun phrases in a written text from a unit on the history of Quebec), the students’ attention is drawn to a particular lexical, morphological, syntactic or discourse feature of the input in a subject matter unit.
- AWARENESS TASK: at this step, the students organize the data in some fashion to focus their awareness. In his example, the students complete a table:
|
Noun ending |
Example |
Masculine or Feminine? |
|
-ure |
La nourriture | F |
| -ment | Le defrichement |
M |
[Note: the gender of nouns is French is a challenge to L2 learners, who make frequent errors with determiners. While there are a number of exceptions, there are regularities – nouns ending in –ure are predicatably feminine, those with –ment are masculine. Please ask Kendall for more details.]
3. GUIDED PRACTICE: students turn declarative knowledge (being able to articulate the rule) into procedural knowledge by completing a task which requires them to put the rule or insight into practice. His chief example was a game in which students are given clues and come up with an answer which is a determiner + noun. So given the clue Settlers counted on this to provide building materials and make open spaces for agriculture, students would come up with “deforestation;” in French you have to provide the article, so “le defrichement.”
4. AUTONOMOUS PRACTICE: this is not the “autonomy” we have discussed in Precept Four. This is part of Precept Two and what Crabbe categorises as Output in a classroom setting. His examples including students making a timeline (to both reflect their mastery of the history content and to practice the past tense) and writing a short piece in response to a prompt like How do present day attitudes to deforestation differ from those of the early settlers in Quebec?
We shall refer back to this procedure later in the course when we are working with unit and lesson planning.
