Book review: Key Questions in Language Teaching by Alessandro Benati

This is a brand new introduction to the findings of second language acquisition research and their implications for language teachers.

Alessandro Benati is a professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the American University of Sharjah, as well as a Visiting professor at the University of Portsmouth and University of York St. John.

He is known as an eminent scholar in his field, having worked in particular with American scholar Bill VanPatten.




What's in the book?

There are seven chapters covering roughly 200 pages. Chapters look at:

1. what we know about second language acquisition and the implications of this for teachers; 
2. how methodology has evolved over the years; 
3. the role of communication and interactive tasks; 
4. the role of listening and reading comprehension tasks; 
5. the role of grammar, vocabulary and corrective feedback; 
6. how research is carried out and, finally, an overall evaluation of the issues. 

Major issues in the field are discussed, e.g. the role of comprehensible input, intake, output, processability, learnability and transfer from L1 to L2.  Benati deals very clearly with the major debate about the very nature of how we learn - is it a case of Chomskyan Universal Grammar or do we acquire languages through non language-specific learning mechanisms? Although Benati explains both views, it's clear he is a Universal Grammar person who stresses the importance of natural, implicit, language-specific learning mechanisms.

The book does achieve its aim of providing an accessible, readable text for teachers, as well as students learning about second language acquisition theories and research. Overall, although it refers to a range of second language acquisition theories and mentions at one point that skill acquisition may be particularly relevant to beginners in a non-immersion, school setting, its bias is clearly towards the the communicative, task-based end of the spectrum, with a particular focus on Benati's research interest in Input Processing Theory. (The idea, crudely, that one key to acquisition is manipulating input to make it more processable and accelerate acquisition.)

I'd like to pick out a few issues in a bit more detail.

First, the editing of the volume could have been more thorough. I found examples of unnecessary repetition, including on more than one occasion, repetition of whole sentences within a couple of pages. In addition, the paragraphing seems somewhat random here and there, taking away a little from the general readability of the text.

At one point in Chapter Two Benati seems to suggest that grammar-translation was based on a theory of second language learning, when, to my knowledge, GT is unique in being based no particular theory or research.

In the same chapter, when describing the Direct Method I was surprised to see no reference to the work of teachers such as Harold Palmer and, more generally, the version of Direct Method which became prevalent and highly influential in the UK and elsewhere. This may have been owing to considerations of brevity, but perhaps Benati could have omitted the page on TPR (Total Physical Response) which is surely of marginal interest. He does cover in a little detail natural approaches and Communicative Language Teaching, along with CLIL (Content and language Integrated Learning) and TBLT (Task-Based Language Teaching).

1. Benati takes a pretty hard-line view on what constitutes output and communication. For him (as with VanPatten) so-called "pushed output", drill-style exercises are not output put at all. Furthermore, a "task" is very strictly defined and therefore not used in the usual; sense of the word (activity or exercises). VanPatten makes this distinction in his little teacher book While We're On the Topic. I find this unnecessarily doctrinaire. In addition, he claims that traditional classroom question-answer exchanges based on texts, pictures are not "communication" at all. In this context, he mentions what he calls "displayed questions" (e.g. Where is the book? It's on the table.) I think these are usually referred to as "display questions" actually.

Although such classroom practices may be contrived, I find it hard to accept they are not a form of communication in the general sense of the term. It's also quite possible that contrived exchanges provide acceptable comprehensible input and the opportunity to build spoken and listening skill. (This debate was very well worn in the 1970/80s.) This again displays an adherence to a slightly dogmatic view of teaching and learning.

Chapter Three on communicative tasks comes across, therefore, as a little too prescriptive for my taste, with an over-abundance of "Instructors should..." statements. The same applies to later chapters. However, the same chapter does provide some specific classroom activities such as information-gap tasks and problem-solving tasks which are useful for teachers. I would think many teachers would find this content the most useful for their everyday practice. Benati also attempts to deal with the often expressed criticism of TBLT that it doesn't work with near-beginners. He provides a few examples - though not enough to convince me that TBLT is the whole answer by any means in time-poor modern language classroom settings.

Chapter Four (Listening and Reading) focuses again on a communicative approach (rather than a process-based, micro-skills approach as advocated by scholar John Field, or Gianfranco Conti and me). Authentic resources are recommended, although Benati also emphasises the importance of simplified input. He is insistent that listening input should be embedded in genuine communicative exchanges, as opposed, for example, to exercises focusing on form or phonics. (I would suggest that the kind of comprehension approach he advocates may only take you so far with many students. So the chapter is much stronger on metacognitive strategies and Michael Rost-style top-down processing than the promotion of bottom-up skills. I wonder if this suits more able or experienced more than beginners.

Chapter Five, about grammar and corrective feedback,  provides a familiar reminder that textbook grammar rules have little to do with what goes on inside learners' brains. Those familiar with Bill VanPatten's work will need no reminding of the mantra that language is too large and complex to be taught explicitly. However, when Benati writes (more than once) that there is no mechanism in the brain to concert explicit knowledge into implicit, it's worth pointing out that not all scholars would agree.

In particular, he attacks the use of drills, whether they be more or less meaningful, and chooses to support input-based options for teaching grammar. These are called "Structured Input Tasks" and should follow some sensible principles (p.130): present things one at a time; keep meaning in focus; move from sentences to connected discourse; use oral and written input; have the learner do something with the input; keep the learners' processing strategies in mind.

In addition, he advocates input flooding, textual enhancement and consciousness-raising tasks. Traditional PPP is, by implication, rejected. Curiously, he devotes very little space at all to vocabulary teaching.

The book has a useful glossary of terms and a short index.

As is the case with all books for teachers written by academic scholars, the text is rich in theory and general recommendations, but is weaker on specific classroom suggestions, notably for beginners. The lesson ideas he provides tend to be for intermediate level students, more than beginners.That's unsurprising, but I found this to be less the case with the Nava and Pedrazzini book I read and reviewed a while ago and which, overall, I prefer as a more balanced teacher guide linking research to practice.

Can the book be recommended?

There is certainly plenty of good background knowledge about second language acquisition and methods, so the book does read like an introduction, although, you might argue, an introduction to communicative, input-focused, task-based teaching rather than language teaching in general. There is a genuine attempt to match research to practice. It is clearly written, but unnecessarily wordy and repetitive at times (owing to lack of careful editing, I think). There are good ideas for communicative tasks and useful recommendations for further reading.

You will have gathered that my main reservation is that the book borders a little too closely on a plea for one approach at the expense of other worthy methodologies which can also be supported by research, so it comes across as too selective for my own taste. In particular, there is virtually no reference to the findings of cognitive psychology, such as the functioning of memory, forgetting and spacing - these just don't seem to fit with Benati's view of acquisition. To be fair, Benati does at one point suggest that skill acquisition theory may be a good fit with beginners.

In general, the book may be more appealing to teachers of English as a Second Language working with intermediate and advanced level students than modern language teachers working in anglophone countries.

The book is published by Cambridge and costs around £25.