A Study Of Teacher Intervention In Second Language Learning

At present the teaching of English in China is confronted with contradictory teaching beliefs and practices. Facilitated by multi-media devices, some English teachers maintain the "spoon-feeding" style of traditional teacher intervention in the form of rule explanation, pattern drills and error correction, which is built upon the structural view and the learning theory of behaviorism. Conversely, under the influence of newly-emerged constructivism, other English teachers try to break away from traditional notions of teacher intervention and heavily emphasize learner-centeredness in the classroom. It grants students so much freedom to do free talking that it is dubbed as "laissez-faire." Meanwhile, many researchers and teaching practitioners seem to take an "all-or-nothing" attitude towards traditional teacher intervention and a constructivist view of teacher intervention. They choose either to "spoon-feed" students or use a "laissez faire" style.In this paper, it is argued that how a teacher should intervene in a learner's language learning is constrained not only by learners'age, stage of learning, language level, but also by the hierarchy and complexity of language including phonemes, morphology, lexis, syntax and discourse. Therefore, it is important to specify the strengths and weaknesses of traditional teacher intervention and constructivist teacher intervention in second language learning. It is also important to identify the relationship between traditional teacher intervention and a constructivist view of teacher intervention.To begin with, discussions of viewpoints and controversies about traditional teacher intervention and a constructivist view of teacher intervention are made and the investigations of the effectiveness of traditional teacher intervention are conducted, consolidated by three experiments showing the differential effects of etymological instruction and explicit tense teaching, and of traditional teacher intervention and a constructivist view of teacher intervention in oral and written production. Based on the findings, a proposal to strike a balance between traditional teacher intervention and a constructivist view of teacher intervention is made so that their strengths can be optimized. In the two surveys, the limitations and contributions of traditional teacher intervention in second language development were identified regarding English levels of learners, receptive and productive skills. In the first survey, one hundred and seven non-English major postgraduates were required to make an evaluation of the effectiveness of traditional teacher intervention in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, reading, listening, writing and speaking in primary, high school, college and of their expected effectiveness of traditional teacher intervention in the graduate school.In the second survey, sixty-eight American college students who were beginning learners of Chinese, Thai and Spanish, made evaluation of ten teacher-fronted activities, namely vocabulary instruction, grammar instruction, culture-related instruction, reading instruction, listening instruction, grammatical exercises, translation exercises, oral exercises, writing exercises and error correction. The supplementary survey was conducted to show the universal nature of teacher intervention.In the first experiment, three classes under the condition of non-teacher intervention, teacher intervention as free discussion and teacher intervention as etymological instruction respectively were investigated in order to define the differential effects of the three approaches.In the second experiment, three classes under the condition of non-intervention, grammatical explanation and tense-marking exercise respectively were examined to identify the differential effect of each approach.The third experiment falls into two parts:an oral project and an essay writing task. It differs from the previous ones because the test is a more spontaneous monitor-free integrative performance rather than the monitored discrete-point performance. It aims to show the presence of hypothesized differential effects between traditional teacher intervention and a constructivist view of teacher intervention in facilitating learners'communicative competence.The major findings of the present research are summarized as follows:1) Traditional teacher intervention was confirmed as positive at elementary and intermediate level in receptive skill building such as grammar, vocabulary and reading development in primary, middle and high school. However, the traditional teacher's job seems to be rendered unsatisfactory in developing the advanced learners'productive skills.2) Etymological instruction in the traditional teacher intervention was discovered to facilitate reading and vocabulary building, but in a very limited way. Such instruction was found to enhance the association between the word's orthographic form and its meaning, but no statistical significance was noted in the awareness of the word's collocation and application. The groups supplied with the traditional grammatical explanation and tense marking exercises outperformed slightly the control group in monitored discrete-point test. However, there was only a minor advantage when students made a spontaneous speech.3) The experimental class under the constructivist view of teacher intervention showed a remarkable difference in oral presentation in terms of topic selection and presentations skills. Moreover, it revealed improvement in writing under the constructivist teacher intervention in terms of language complexity. It is worth noticing, however, that students'productive accuracy and discourse coherence remains a big problem.In summary, the study confirms that traditional teacher intervention enhances input processing and focuses on receptive skills, but it represses students'motivation of oral and written production. By contrast, constructivist teacher intervention encourages productivity, but it attaches little significance to language quality. The implication is that a teacher has to be aware that traditional teacher intervention and a constructivist view of teacher intervention have their respective strengths and weaknesses.Discarding an "all-or-nothing" attitude and adopting a well-balanced view towards traditional and constructivist teacher intervention should be a more reasonable choice. We can take in the facilitative ingredients in traditional teacher intervention such as error treatment, vocabulary building, reading aloud and learning by heart and the beneficial traits of a constructivist classroom such as individualism, diversification and engagement in oral activity. Meanwhile, it is important to remember that second language learning is an incremental ongoing process, in which the teachers are constantly challenged to enrich their own knowledge system and intellectual wisdom and to interact with students.