18.1.2. Simplification of material

We have already seen that certain techniques and activities involving question and answer based on a text could be employed to limit the learners to passive understanding only or at the most to very limited production of the language. At this point we will try to attempt to suggest how a similar aim could be achieved by the simplification of material for presentation of a new structure. It seems that here there are two options open to the teacher.

18.1.2.1. An initial presentation lesson for understanding only

For weak learners the understanding of the form and meaning of a new structure will take more time to achieve than with more able learners. Thus, the presentation stage, instead of being the initial stage of a lesson, could well be the entire first lesson on a new structure. ‘At this step the children do not speak the present continuous form but only hear it and respond to it’ (Lee & Koullis, p. 81). This can be achieved by careful exploitation of the classroom situation and by very controlled questioning (similar to the graded question on the text that was outlined earlier) that will require short responses only as opposed to the full sentences containing the structure being taught. The procedure might look as follows. Start the lesson with drawing. Say, for instance, ‘Draw a house on the board, Peter’. As he does so, ask, ‘What is he drawing?’ and give the answer yourself, ‘A house’. Get other students to draw other things. There could be several children drawing at the same time. Ask, for example, ‘What is Lena drawing? What are Dima and Sasha drawing?’ Short answers such as ‘houses’ or ‘a fat man’ are appropriate, long answers are unnecessary here.

The teacher must now be careful not to undo the work so far done on the structure by transferring too quickly to an elicitation of sentences containing the structure. Gradual building up to this is vital for weak learners. The teacher needs to prepare a series of very carefully graded steps. The next stage would be to replace the main verb in the question by ‘doing’ and again limit the learners’ response to a short answer, which this time will be partial production of the structure. To do so, get a student to point to something, perhaps, to the door, and ask, ‘What is he doing?’ and first answer yourself, ‘He is pointing to the door’. It is suggested that weak learners could be limited to the response ‘pointing to the door’ at this stage as this does not involve full production of the form of the structure, where errors may occur (e.g. he/she confusion). In this way students are slowly guided towards full production of the structure. As the structure builds so will confidence in handling it. So with this mode of presentation over a number of lessons the weak learner is carefully led from a common lexical item that he knows – ‘a house’ to ‘drawing a house’ to ‘He is drawing a house’.

It is absolutely necessary that the teacher should use the visual element at this stage to consolidate the meaning that is so essential for weak learners. Physical activity in the classroom slows down the speed, at which examples are used, thus allowing time for further consolidation in the mind, as weak learners tend to think more slowly than more able ones. This classroom situation also allows the weak learner to word with a familiar environment, for which he probably has confident knowledge of the lexical set, as textbooks based on this approach recycle classroom vocabulary regularly: This is a pen. There is a pen on the desk. He is holding a pen’ etc.