The Cognitive approach

emphasising awareness of rules

The Cognitive Approach

Awareness of the rules

Cognitive theory assumes that responses are the result not only of conditioning and repetition but also of insight and intentional patterning.

Insight can be directed towards (a) the concepts underlying language, as represented by traditional grammar, or towards (b) language as an operation, understood in terms of sets of communicative functions.

A variety of activities practised in new situations allows learners to assimilate what they have already learnt or partly learnt. At the same time, new situations may reveal that existing language resources are inadequate. Learners then need to modify or extend those resources — a process of accommodation. This creates continuing awareness of what still needs to be learnt, provides a continuing supply of learning goals and can help to maintain motivation.

Cognitive theory therefore acknowledges the important role of mistakes. An interesting example can be found in Julian Dakin's The Language Laboratory and Language Learning (Longman, 1973), particularly his Novish lesson, in which he deliberately sets traps for learners.

Dakin argues:

Equally important to the principles underlying the use of meaningful drills, and also relevant to the role of mistakes in cognitive theory, is the association of mentalism with notionalism.

How much cognitive theory do English language teachers need to know?

Teachers do not necessarily need an extensive theoretical knowledge of cognitive psychology. An understanding of its practical implications can be developed through appropriate teacher-training activities.

An appreciation of cognitive theory can also be gained by reviewing the history of language teaching, particularly the changes in attitude during the 1970s, when meaningful drills were increasingly advocated and the shortcomings of meaningless drills were highlighted.

Although drilling and rote learning attracted increasing criticism during the second half of the twentieth century, two principles remain important:

The recognition and productive use of patterns will therefore always be an important part of language learning. Teachers adopting a cognitive approach will try to ensure that the pattern practice contained in their exercises is meaningful.

The Cognitive Approach and Meaningful Drills

1A. Know your pattern practice exercise types

The ability to use a range of pattern-practice exercises remains an important part of the language teacher's toolkit.

  1. Substitution drills require the learner to substitute the word supplied in the next prompt for an element of the previous response. The prompt, together with the preceding response, provides the stimulus for the next response, while the sequence of responses establishes the pattern. Such drills can be useful when the teacher sees a need to isolate and practise the mechanical production of sentences in order to improve learners' command of structure or pronunciation.
  2. Mutation drills require systematic changes to the form of words supplied in the prompt before the substitution is made. They can therefore be useful for practising inflections of verbs and nouns, agreement between constituents such as subject and verb, adjective and noun, and case endings.
  3. Transformation drills can incorporate the changes found in substitution and mutation drills, but may also require changes in word order, the addition or deletion of grammatical constituents, or alternation between grammatical forms. They can be used to practise changes from affirmative to negative, active to passive, and changes of mood from indicative to interrogative, imperative or subjunctive. They can also practise changes from simple to compound or complex sentences and can be used in word-derivation activities.
  4. Application relationships are relationships of reference prompted by pictures, sound effects or knowledge of the world.
  5. Collocation relationships involve relationships between vocabulary items within a sentence. They can be prompted by cue words or complete sentences. The relationship is essentially verbal, and successful responses depend on knowledge of lexical interdependencies.
  6. Implication relationships exist between sentences. Learners may be prompted by a complete sentence and required to substitute a synonym, hyponym, antonym, converse term or consequence for an element of the original sentence.
  7. Consequence, hyponymy and antonym drills can exploit relationships between statements. For example:

S: This is a wonderful book.
R: Good, I'd like to read it.

S: This is a fantastic record.
R: Good, I'd like to hear it.

S: Felicity is a very nice girl.
R: Good, I'd like to meet her.

Synonymy drills provide further opportunities for practising relationships between words and expressions with similar meanings.

1B. Know the difference between "meaningful" and "meaningless" drills

Sample question: What are the principal drawbacks of mechanical or controlled drills, and how can they be overcome?

As a method of language practice, drills become difficult to justify when the language being practised is effectively meaningless.

Meaningless drills

Lack of context results partly from the behaviourist principle of focusing primarily on form. The one-step-at-a-time approach attempts to prevent mistakes by controlling the learning process. Although this may work in a tightly controlled environment, the benefits of structural learning may not be transferred successfully to real situations. Drills designed to prevent mistakes tend to present only positive examples of what can be done, without exposing learners to negative or contrasting examples.

The meaning conveyed by an utterance such as I'm not going depends on the function of the sentence as a whole and on the larger context in which it occurs. A sentence does more than communicate information: it performs a role in relation both to previous utterances and to the interactive process involving the participants.

Without this wider context, drills run the risk of encouraging over-generalisation. They may even create mistakes rather than correct them. The absence of an element of choice undermines the semantic and grammatical dimensions of communicative function from which conceptual meaning is derived, and may therefore inhibit learning.

When the only changes made in a drill are vocabulary items controlled by prompts, while the underlying structural pattern remains invariant, the structure might just as well be represented by meaningless sounds such as TUM and TE. [Julian Dakin, 1973]

Meaningful drills

In order to qualify as "meaningful", a drill should provide:

1C. Recognise the potential for practising patterns

There are several arguments in favour of retaining drills as part of the language teacher's repertoire.

  1. Their track record and variety of exercise types.

    There have been many successful courses which have depended heavily on drills. An early example was the Minimal Language Acquisition Programme, associated with Charles Fries and Robert Lado.

    A later example was Streamline Departures by Bernard Hartley and Peter Viney (1978), a UK English coursebook with a remarkably long shelf life. The original method recommended in the Teacher's Book made extensive use of several of the drill types described above.

  2. The role of repetition.

    Repetition is a principle shared by both behaviourist and cognitive theories of learning. Whatever one's theoretical preference, most teachers would find a place for repetition for the purposes of practice and consolidation, together with comparison and differentiation through minimal pairs or paired grammatical forms.

  3. The possibility of moving from isolated sentences to connected speech.

    Depending on their nature and scope, drills may either:

    • elicit a sequence of unrelated sentences from the learner; or
    • build up something which begins to resemble connected spoken prose.

    Provided that the aims are clearly defined and monotony, artificiality and inefficiency are avoided, drills can make a useful contribution to language learning through their many possible applications.

1D. Recognise the most suitable applications of drills at different levels of language proficiency

  1. Drills are particularly likely to be useful at elementary level, or during the practice phase of a lesson when it is desirable to limit the learning goal.
  2. At intermediate level, drills can provide useful opportunities for practice, revision and checking learning.
  3. At advanced level, drills can be used to diagnose and correct particular difficulties.

Drills can be used with the whole class or on an individual basis. In the modern age of apps capable of delivering text, audio and picture cues on a mobile phone, there is greater scope than ever for providing pattern practice through self-access learning.

The limitations of drills are therefore balanced by considerable possibilities. Publishers have arguably been slow to exploit these possibilities fully in the twenty-first century.

2. Understand the conceptual problems involved in learning a new language

Teacher-training programmes often attempt to place trainees in situations resembling those experienced by people learning a completely new language. This can be done if the trainer knows a language which is unfamiliar to all the trainees.

I was once given the task of learning to read and write using the Arabic alphabet, including the way in which different handwritten letters join together. This kind of task provides an opportunity to explore some of the conceptual problems involved in learning a new language.

Perhaps the most effective teacher-development activity for promoting awareness of the cognitive challenge posed by an unfamiliar language is Julian Dakin's "Novish — An experiment in language learning", in the second chapter of The Language Laboratory and Language Learning. The Novish material was also reproduced in The Edinburgh Course of Applied Linguistics, a four-volume publication.

Julian Dakin's ingenious use of drills in introducing us to Novish

Please note: the headings in blue below deserve particular consideration from anyone setting out to teach a language. The bullet points refer to the visual material in Chapter 2 of Julian Dakin's book. You may need to have the book open while following the examples and arguments presented here.

A practical demonstration of language learning supported by cognitive theory: a problem-solving approach

Dakin's introduction to Novish in The Language Laboratory and Language Learning (Longman, 1973, Chapter 2) is hardly a programme designed simply to produce "the minimum number of mistakes consonant with, and conducive to, learning new rules". Indeed, Dakin openly admits that he deliberately sets out to trap the learner.

The Novish structures contain conceptual difficulties and perform basic functions such as identification and verification of class.

A behaviourist approach could not realistically avoid the "sademane" / "sadegru" distinction simply through careful selection and grading of examples.

Dakin instead forces learners into situations in which they must solve problems. Their mistakes often result from a lack of conceptual awareness and from failure to recognise important semantic criteria. Although the conversion of a rule into a speaking habit may be a slower and more conscious process for second-language learners, it is encouraging to note that Novish children make the same mistakes.

How important is it to understand the underlying rule at each stage?

The importance of semantic and conceptual awareness as a structurally based basic-language programme unfolds

At this stage, we may think that we understand what is being verified, just as we think we understand what is being asked. However, we are already on dangerous ground. From this point onwards, awareness of the distinction Novish speakers make between things that grow and things that do not grow becomes increasingly important.

Whether it is justifiable for a teacher to lead students into a trap and then mystify them with "Ye sadegru opl" is a question in its own right.

At what stage should a teacher make learners aware of the rules rather than trying to trap them?

Clearly, the distinction involved is important, and any mystification should not be prolonged beyond the point at which learners recognise that they have encountered something new which they need to understand.

To depend on "mim-mem" techniques to teach such a distinction unconsciously is clearly inadequate. It is widely recognised that learning language purely through imitation and repetition is uneconomical. If every new speech pattern had to be learnt through imitation, the task would be endless.

The catalogue of things which "grow" and "don't grow" is enormous. The structure under consideration is also fundamental and appears capable of generating further examples by analogy. Consequently, in Frames 9-12 the underlying rule needs to be recognised.

The dangers of over-generalising when forming new rules

Novish Frames 13 and 14 initially seem analogous to concepts with which we are familiar. "Nu sadegru poi, sadestil tavl!" might appear to mean "No, it isn't a boy, it's a table."

We do not initially realise that the first phrase actually indicates that the table "doesn't grow like a boy". We cannot establish a sound basis for further analogy until we encounter Frames 15 and 16.

The words "Ye" and "Nu" are applied essentially to class likenesses and differences rather than to the precise definition of what an object or person is or is not.

This could lead to considerable misunderstanding in situations where an English speaker might use or interpret "Ye" as indicating a particular identity, while a Novish speaker understands it as indicating membership of a particular group.

Q: Ki ku sademane?
A: Ye sadegru ku, sadegru Margaret!

Can language learning proceed without conceptual awareness and knowledge of culture?

Students should be given opportunities to understand and share the concepts underlying their target language. To deny learners access to concepts for which they are ready is to overlook what Chomsky recognised as the "creative aspect" of language use.

Such denial may discourage learners from creating new language by analogy, weaken their spirit of enquiry and isolate them from an understanding of the utterances which represent their achievements.

Classroom techniques: practical problems in cognitive learning and teaching

  1. Could a particular class understand rules as complex as those involved in Dakin's Novish programme? If not, what should the teacher do?
  2. To what extent can the teacher organise examples so that learners can infer the "rule" from them without explicit explanation?
  3. How can the teacher be sure that a class, or an individual learner, has actually inferred the rule correctly?

Parallels between Dakin's rules for Novish and the rules which elementary learners of English need to know

Not all the rules encountered in elementary English classes are as complex as those of Novish. Many features of English are sufficiently straightforward to be worked out from examples and may therefore not require explicit formulation as "rules".

There are nevertheless some areas which appear to require explanation, such as the distinction between mass and unit nouns and the contrast between the Present Perfect and the Past.

Did all behaviourists imagine that language learning could proceed without formulations of rules?

Sophisticated behaviourists such as Fries, in Language Learning, did not suppose that the mind was simply a mechanism for forming habits. Fries argued that, because the human mind is highly sophisticated and subtle, it is capable of inferring underlying rules when the examples provided are carefully selected.

Fries believed that the best way of enabling learners to infer underlying rules was through practice, particularly pattern-drill practice, supported where appropriate by judicious explanation. His own introduction to English Pattern Practices is worth reading in this context.

Bibliography

Some of the best "meaningful drills" ever published

A comprehensive series of mainly "meaningful" drills

These materials, published in the UK by Oxford University Press in the 1980s, were widely used over a period of almost twenty years.