Fake news and critical thinking in ELT

Since no single definition of critical thinking prevails (Dummett & Hughes, 2019: 2), discussions of the topic invariably begin with attempts to provide a definition. Lai (2011) offers an accessible summary of a range of possible meanings, but points out that, in educational contexts, its meaning is often rather vague and encompasses other concepts (such as higher order thinking skills) which also lack clarity. Paul Dummett and John Hughes (2019: 4) plump for ‘a mindset that involves thinking reflectively, rationally and reasonably’ – a definition which involves a vague noun (that could mean a fixed state of mind, a learned attitude, a disposition or a mood) and three highly subjective adverbs. I don’t think I could do any better. However, instead of looking for a definition, we can reach a sort of understanding by looking at examples of it. Dummett and Hughes’ book is extremely rich in practical examples, and the picture that emerges of critical thinking is complex and multifaceted.

As you might expect of a weasel word like ‘critical thinking’, there appears to be general agreement that it’s a ‘good thing’. Paul Dummett suggests that there are two common reasons for promoting the inclusion of critical thinking activities in the language classroom. The first of these is a desire to get students thinking for themselves. The second is the idea ‘that we live in an age of misinformation in which only the critically minded can avoid manipulation or slavish conformity’. Neither seems contentious at first glance, although he points out that ‘they tend to lead to a narrow application of critical thinking in ELT materials: that is to say, the analysis of texts and evaluation of the ideas expressed in them’. It’s the second of these rationales that I’d like to explore further.

Penny Ur (2020: 9) offers a more extended version of it:

The role of critical thinking in education has become more central in the 21^st century, simply because there is far more information readily available to today’s students than there was in previous centuries (mainly, but not only, online), and it is vital for them to be able to deal with such input wisely. They need to be able to distinguish between what is important and what is trivial, between truth and lies, between fact and opinion, between logical argument and specious propaganda […] Without such skills and awareness of the need to exercise them, they are liable to find themselves victims of commercial or political interests, their thinking manipulated by persuasion disguised as information.

In the same edited collection Olja Milosevic (2020:18) echoes Ur’s argument:

Critical thinking becomes even more important as communication increasingly moves online. Students find an overwhelming amount of information and need to be taught how to evaluate its relevance, accuracy and quality. If teachers do not teach students how to go beyond surface meaning, students cannot be expected to practise it.

In the passages I’ve quoted, these writers are referring to one particular kind of critical thinking. The ability to critically evaluate the reliability, accuracy, etc of a text is generally considered to be a part of what is usually called ‘media information literacy’. In these times of fake news, so the argument goes, it is vital for students to develop (with their teachers’ help) the necessary skills to spot fake news when they see it. The most prototypical critical thinking activity in ELT classrooms is probably one in which students analyse some fake news, such as the website about the Pacific Tree Octopus (which is the basis of a lesson in Dudeney et al., 2013: 198 – 203).

Before considering media information literacy in more detail, it’s worth noting in passing that a rationale for critical thinking activities is no rationale at all if it only concerns one aspect of critical thinking, since it has applied attributes of a part (media information literacy) to a bigger whole (critical thinking).

There is no shortage of good (free) material available for dealing with fake news in the ELT classroom. Examples include work by James Taylor, Chia Suan Chong and Tyson Seburn. Material of this kind may result in lively, interesting, cognitively challenging, communicative and, therefore, useful lessons. But how likely is it that material of this kind will develop learners’ media information literacy and, by extension therefore, their critical thinking skills? How likely is it that teaching material of this kind will help people identify (and reject) fake news? Is it possible that material of this kind is valuable despite its rationale, rather than because of it? In the spirit of rational, reflective and reasonable thinking, these are questions that seem to be worth exploring.

ELT classes and fake news

James Taylor has suggested that the English language classroom is ‘the perfect venue for [critical thinking] skills to be developed’. Although academic English courses necessarily involve elements of critical thinking, I’m not so sure that media information literacy (and, specifically, the identification of fake news) can be adequately addressed in general English classes. There are so many areas, besides those that are specifically language-focussed, competing for space in language classes (think of all those other 21^st century skills), that it is hard to see how sufficient time can be found for real development of this skill. It requires modelling, practice of the skill, feedback on the practice, and more practice (Mulnix, 2010): it needs time. Fake news activities in the language classroom would, of course, be of greater value if they were part of an integrated approach across the curriculum. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

Information literacy skills

Training materials for media information literacy usually involve a number of stages. These include things like fact-checking and triangulation of different sources, consideration of web address, analysis of images, other items on the site, source citation and so on. The problem, however, is that news-fakers have become so good at what they do. The tree octopus site is very crude in comparison to what can be produced nowadays by people who have learnt to profit from the online economy of misinformation. Facebook employs an army of algorithmic and human fact-checkers, but still struggles. The bottom line is that background knowledge is needed (this is as true for media information literacy as it is for critical thinking more generally) (Willingham, 2007). With news, the scope of domain knowledge is so vast that it is extremely hard to transfer one’s ability to critically evaluate one particular piece of news to another. We are all fooled from time to time.

Media information literacy interventions: research on effectiveness

With the onset of COVID-19, the ability to identify fake news has become, more than ever, a matter of life and death. There is little question that this ability correlates strongly with analytic thinking (see, for example, Stanley et al., 2020). What is much less clear is how we can go about promoting analytic thinking. Analytic thinking comes in different varieties, and another hot-off-the-press research study into susceptibility to COVID-19 fake news (Roozenbeek et al., 2020) has found that the ability to spot fake news may correlate more strongly with numerical literacy than with reasoning ability. In fact, the research team found that a lack of numerical literacy was the most consistent predictor of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19. Perhaps we are attempting to develop the wrong kind of analytic thinking?

In educational contexts, attempts to promote media information literacy typically seek to develop reasoning abilities, and the evidence for their effectiveness is mixed. First of all, it needs to be said that ‘little large-scale evidence exists on the effectiveness of promoting digital media literacy as a response to online misinformation’ (Guess et al., 2020). An early meta-analysis (Jeong et al., 2012) found that such interventions had a positive effect, when the interventions were long (not one-off), but impacted more on students’ knowledge than they did on their behaviour. More recently, Huguet et al (2019) were unable to draw ‘definitive conclusions from past research, such as what kinds of media literacy practices work and under what conditions’. And this year, a study by Guess et al (2020) did not generate sufficient evidence ‘to conclude that the [media information literacy] intervention changed real-world consumption of false news’. I am unaware of any robust research in this area in the context of ELT.

It’s all rather disappointing. Why are we not better at it? After all, teachers of media studies have been exploring pathways for many years now. One possible answer is this: Media information literacy, like critical thinking more generally, is a skill that is acquirable, but it can only be acquired if there is a disposition to do so. The ability to think critically and the disposition to do so are separate entities (Facione, 2000). Training learners to be more critical in their approach to media information may be so much pissing in the wind if the disposition to be sceptical is not there. Shaping dispositions is a much harder task than training skills.

Both of the research studies into susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation that I referred to earlier in this section underscore the significance of dispositions to analytic thinking. Roozenbeek et al (2020) found, in line with much previous research (for example, Jost et al. 2018), that political conservatism is associated with a slightly higher susceptibility to misinformation. Political views (on either side of the political spectrum) rarely change as a result of exposure to science or reasoned thinking. They also found that ‘self-identifying as a member of a minority predicts susceptibility to misinformation about the virus in all countries surveyed’ (except, interestingly, in the UK). Again, when issues of identity are at stake, emotional responses tend to trump rational ones.

Rational, reflective and reasonable thinking about media information literacy leads to an uncomfortable red-pill rabbit-hole. This is how Bulger and Davidson (2018) put it:

The extent to which media literacy can combat the problematic news environment is an open question. Is denying the existence of climate change a media literacy problem? Is believing that a presidential candidate was running a sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza shop a media literacy problem? Can media literacy combat the intentionally opaque systems of serving news on social media platforms? Or intentional campaigns of disinformation?

Teachers and fake news

The assumption that the critical thinking skills of young people can be developed through the intervention of their teachers is rarely problematized. It should be. A recent study of Spanish pre-service teachers (Fuertes-Prieto et al., 2020) showed that their ‘level of belief in pseudoscientific issues is comparable, or even higher in some cases to those of the general population’. There is no reason to believe that this changes after they have qualified. Teachers are probably no more likely to change their beliefs when presented with empirical evidence (Menz et al., 2020) than people from any other profession. Research has tended to focus on teachers’ lack of critical thinking in areas related to their work, but, things may be no different in the wider world. It is estimated that over a quarter of teachers in the US voted for the world’s greatest peddler of fake news in the 2016 presidential election.

It is also interesting to note that the sharing of fake news on social media is much more widespread among older people (including US teachers who have an average age of 42.4) than those under 30 (Bouygues, 2019).

Institutional contexts and fake news

Cory Doctorow has suggested that the fake news problem is not a problem of identifying what is true and what is fake, but a problem ‘about how we know whether something is true. We’re not disagreeing about facts, we’re disagreeing about epistemology’. In a post-modernist world of ‘Truth Decay’ (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018), where there is ‘a blurring of the line between opinion and fact’, epistemological authority is a rare commodity. Medicine, social sciences and applied linguistics are all currently experiencing a ‘replication crisis’ (Ioannidis, 2005) and we had a British education minister saying that ‘people of this country have had enough of experts’.

News reporting has always relied to some extent on trust in the reliability of the news source. The BBC or CNN might attempt to present themselves as more objective than, say, Fox News or InfoWars, but trust in all news outlets has collapsed globally in recent years. As Michael Shudson has written in the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘all news outlets write from a set of values, not simply from a disinterested effort at truth’. If a particular news channel manifestly shares different values from your own, it is easy to reject the veracity of the news it reports. Believers in COVID conspiracy theories often hold their views precisely because of their rejection of the epistemological authority of mainstream news and the WHO or governments who support lockdown measures.

The training of media information literacy in schools is difficult because, for many people in the US (and elsewhere), education is not dissimilar to mainstream media. They ‘are seen as the enemy — two institutions who are trying to have power over how people think. Two institutions that are trying to assert authority over epistemology’ (boyd, 2018). Schools have always been characterized by imbalances in power (between students and teachers / administrators), and this power dynamic is not conducive to open-minded enquiry. Children are often more aware of the power of their teachers than they are accepting of their epistemological authority. They are enjoined to be critical thinkers, but only about certain things and only up to a certain point. One way for children to redress the power imbalance is to reject the epistemological authority of their teachers. I think this may explain why a group of young children I observed recently coming out of a lesson devoted to environmental issues found such pleasure in joking about Greta ‘Thunfisch’.

Power relationships in schools are reflected and enacted in the interaction patterns between teachers and students. The most common of these is ‘initiation-response-feedback (IRF)’ and it is unlikely that this is particularly conducive to rational, reflective and reasonable thinking. At the same time, as Richard Paul, one of the early advocates of critical thinking in schools, noted, much learning activity is characterised by lower order thinking skills, especially memorization (Paul, 1992: 22). With this kind of backdrop, training in media information literacy is more likely to be effective if it goes beyond the inclusion of a few ‘fake news’ exercises: a transformation in the way that the teaching is done will also be needed. Benesch (1999) describes this as a more ‘dialogic’ approach and there is some evidence that a more dialogic approach can have a positive impact on students’ dispositions (e.g. Hajhosseiny, 2012).

I think that David Buckingham (2019a) captures the educational problem very neatly:

There’s a danger here of assuming that we are dealing with a rational process – or at least one that can, by some pedagogical means, be made rational. But from an educational perspective, we surely have to begin with the question of why people might believe apparently ‘fake’ news in the first place. Where we decide to place our trust is as much to do with fantasy, emotion and desire, as with rational calculation. All of us are inclined to believe what we want to believe.

Fake news: a problem or a symptom of a problem?

There has always been fake news. The big problem now is ‘the speed and ease of its dissemination, and it exists primarily because today’s digital capitalism makes it extremely profitable – look at Google and Facebook – to produce and circulate false but click-worthy narratives’ (Morosov, 2017). Fake news taps into and amplifies broader tendencies and divides in society: the problem is not straightforward and is unlikely to be easy to eradicate (Buckingham, 2019a: 3).

There is increasing discussion of media regulation and the recent banning by Facebook of Holocaust denial and QAnon is a recognition that some regulation cannot now be avoided. But strict regulations would threaten the ‘basic business model, and the enormous profitability’ of social media companies (Buckingham, 2009b) and there are real practical and ethical problems in working out exactly how regulation would happen. Governments do not know what to do.

Lacking any obvious alternative, media information literacy is often seen as the solution: can’t we ‘fact check and moderate our way out of this conundrum’ (boyd, 2018)? danah boyd’s stark response is, no, this will fail. It’s an inadequate solution to an oversimplified problem (Buckingham, 2019a).

Along with boyd and Buckingham, I’m not trying to argue that we drop media information literacy activities from educational (including ELT) programmes. Quite the opposite. But if we want our students to think reflectively, rationally and reasonably, I think we will need to start by doing the same.

References

Benesch, S. (1999). Thinking critically, thinking dialogically. TESOL Quarterly, 33: pp. 573 – 580

Bouygues, H. L. (2019). Fighting Fake News: Lessons From The Information Wars. Reboot Foundation https://reboot-foundation.org/fighting-fake-news/

boyd, d. (2018). You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You? Data and Society: Points https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2

Buckingham, D. (2019a). Teaching Media in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age: Fake News, Media Bias and the Challenge for Media Literacy Education. Cultura y Educación 31(2): pp. 1-19

Buckingham, D. (2019b). Rethinking digital literacy: Media education in the age of digital capitalism. https://ddbuckingham.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/media-education-in-digital-capitalism.pdf

Bulger, M. & Davidson, P. (2018). The Promises, Challenges and Futures of Media Literacy. Data and Society. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_Media_Literacy_2018.pdf

Doctorow, C. (2017). Three kinds of propaganda, and what to do about them. boingboing 25^th February 2017, https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact-che.html

Dudeney, G., Hockly, N. & Pegrum, M. (2013). Digital Literacies. Harlow: Pearson Education

Dummett, P. & Hughes, J. (2019). Critical Thinking in ELT. Boston: National Geographic Learning

Facione, P. A. (2000). The disposition toward critical thinking: Its character, measurement, and relation to critical thinking skill. Informal Logic, 20(1), 61–84.

Fuertes-Prieto, M.Á., Andrés-Sánchez, S., Corrochano-Fernández, D. et al. (2020). Pre-service Teachers’ False Beliefs in Superstitions and Pseudosciences in Relation to Science and Technology. Science & Education 29, 1235–1254 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00140-8

Guess, A. M., Lerner, M., Lyons, B., Montgomery, J. M., Nyhan, N., Reifler, J. & Sircar, N. (2020). A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jul 2020, 117 (27) 15536-15545; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1920498117

Hajhosseiny, M. (2012). The Effect of Dialogic Teaching on Students’ Critical Thinking Disposition. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 69: pp. 1358 – 1368

Huguet, A., Kavanagh, J., Baker, G. & Blumenthal, M. S. (2019). Exploring Media Literacy Education as a Tool for Mitigating Truth Decay. RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3050/RAND_RR3050.pdf

Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Medicine 2 (8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Jeong, S. H., Cho, H., & Hwang, Y. (2012). Media literacy interventions: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Communication, 62, pp. 454–472

Jones-Jang, S. M., Mortensen, T. & Liu, J. (2019). Does media literacy help identification of fake news? Information literacy helps, but other literacies don’t. American Behavioral Scientist, pp. 1 – 18, doi:10.1177/0002764219869406

Jost, J. T., van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C. & Hardin, C. D. (2018). Ideological asymmetries in conformity, desire for shared reality, and the spread of misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 23: pp/ 77-83. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.01.003

Kavanagh, J. & Rich, M. D. (2018). Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life. RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html

Lai, E.R. 2011. Critical Thinking: A Literature Review. Pearson. http://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/tmrs/CriticalThinkingReviewFINAL.pdf

Menz, C., Spinath, B. & Seifried, E. (2020). Misconceptions die hard: prevalence and reduction of wrong beliefs in topics from educational psychology among preservice teachers. European Journal of Psychology of Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-020-00474-5

Milosevic, O. (2020). Promoting critical thinking in the EFL classroom. In Mavridi, S. & Xerri, D. (Eds.) English for 21st Century Skills. Newbury, Berks.: Express Publishing. pp.17 – 22

Morozov, E. (2017). Moral panic over fake news hides the real enemy – the digital giants. The Guardian, 8 January 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/08/blaming-fake-news-not-the-answer-democracy-crisis

Mulnix, J.W. 2010. ‘Thinking critically about critical thinking’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2010

Paul, R. W. (1992). Critical thinking: What, why, and how? New Directions for Community Colleges, 77: pp. 3–24.

Roozenbeek, J., Schneider, C.R., Dryhurst, S., Kerr, J., Freeman, A. L. J., Recchia, G., van der Bles, A. M. & and van der Linden, S. (2020). Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world. Royal Society Open Science, 7 (10) https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201199

Stanley, M., Barr, N., Peters, K. & Seli, P. (2020). Analytic-thinking predicts hoax beliefs and helping behaviors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. PsyArxiv Preprints doi:10.31234/osf.io/m3vt

Ur, P. (2020). Critical Thinking. In Mavridi, S. & Xerri, D. (Eds.) English for 21st Century Skills. Newbury, Berks.: Express Publishing. pp.9 – 16

Willingham, D. T. (2007). Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? American Educator Summer 2007: pp. 8 – 19

Questions about pre-teaching vocabulary (PTV)

‘Pre-teaching’ (of vocabulary) is a widely-used piece of language teaching jargon, but it’s a strange expression. The ‘pre’ indicates that it’s something that comes before something else that is more important, what Chia Suan Chong calls ‘the main event’, which is usually some reading or listening work. The basic idea, it seems, is to lessen the vocabulary load of the subsequent activity. If the focus on vocabulary were the ‘main event’, we might refer to the next activity as ‘post-reading’ or ‘post-listening’ … but we never do.

The term is used in standard training manuals by both Jim Scrivener (2005: 230 – 233) and Jeremy Harmer (2012: 137) and, with a few caveats, the practice is recommended. Now read this from the ELT Nile Glossary:

For many years teachers were recommended to pre-teach vocabulary before working on texts. Nowadays though, some question this, suggesting that the contexts that teachers are able to set up for pre-teaching are rarely meaningful and that pre-teaching in fact prevents learners from developing the attack strategies they need for dealing with challenging texts.

Chia is one of those doing this questioning. She suggests that ‘we cut out pre-teaching altogether and go straight for the main event. After all, if it’s a receptive skills lesson, then shouldn’t the focus be on reading/listening skills and strategies? And most importantly, pre-teaching prevents learners’ from developing a tolerance of ambiguity – a skill that is vital in language learning.’ Scott Thornbury is another who has expressed doubts about the value of PTV, although he is more circumspect in his opinions. He has argued that working out the meaning of vocabulary from context is probably a better approach and that PTV inadequately prepares learners for the real world. If we have to pre-teach, he argues, get it out of the way ‘as quickly and efficiently as possible’ … or ‘try post-teaching instead’.

Both Chia and Scott touch on the alternatives, and guessing the meaning of unknown words from context is one of them. I’ve discussed this area in an earlier post. Not wanting to rehash the content of that post here, the simple summary is this: it’s complicated. We cannot, with any degree of certainty, say that guessing meaning from context leads to more gains in either reading / listening comprehension or vocabulary development than PTV or one of the other alternatives – encouraging / allowing monolingual or bilingual dictionary look up (see this post on the topic), providing a glossary (see this post) or doing post-text vocabulary work.

In attempting to move towards a better understanding, the first problem is that there is very little research into the relationship between PTV and improved reading / listening comprehension. What there is (e.g. Webb, 2009) suggests that pre-teaching can improve comprehension and speed up reading, but there are other things that a teacher can do (e.g. previous presentation of comprehension questions or the provision of pictorial support) that appear to lead to more gains in these areas (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021). It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. There is even less research looking at the relationship between PTV and vocabulary development. What there is (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021) suggests that pre-teaching leads to more vocabulary gains than when learners read without any support. But the reading-only condition is unlikely in most real-world learning contexts, where there is a teacher, dictionary or classmate who can be turned to. A more interesting contrast is perhaps between PTV and during-reading vocabulary instruction, which is a common approach in many classrooms. One study (File & Adams, 2010) looked at precisely this area and found little difference between the approaches in terms of vocabulary gains. The limited research does not provide us with any compelling reasons either for or against PTV.

Another problem is, as usual, that the research findings often imply more than was actually demonstrated. The abstract for the study by Pellicer-Sánchez et al (2021) states that pre‐reading instruction led to more vocabulary learning. But this needs to be considered in the light of the experimental details.

The study involved 87 L2 undergraduates and postgraduates studying at a British university. Their level of English was therefore very high, and we can’t really generalise to other learners at other levels in other conditions. The text that they read contained a number of pseudo-words and was 2,290 words long. The text itself, a narrative, was of no intrinsic interest, so the students reading it would treat it as an object of study and they would notice the pseudo-words, because their level of English was already high, and because they knew that the focus of the research was on ‘new words’. In other words, the students’ behaviour was probably not at all typical of a student in a ‘normal’ classroom. In addition, the pseudo-words were all Anglo-Saxon looking, and not therefore representative of the kinds of unknown items that students would encounter in authentic (or even pedagogical) texts (which would have a high proportion of words with Latin roots). I’m afraid I don’t think that the study tells us anything of value.

Perhaps research into an area like this, with so many variables that need to be controlled, is unlikely ever to provide teachers with clear answers to what appears to be a simple question: is PTV a good idea or not? However, I think we can get closer to something resembling useful advice if we take another tack. For this, I think two additional questions need to be asked. First, what is the intended main learning opportunity (note that I avoid the term ‘learning outcome’!) of the ‘main event’ – the reading or listening. Second, following on from the first question, what is the point of PTV, i.e. in what ways might it contribute to enriching the learning opportunities of the ‘main event’?

To answer the first question, I think it is useful to go back to a distinction made almost forty years ago in a paper by Tim Johns and Florence Davies (1983). They contrasted the Text as a Linguistic Object (TALO) with the Text as a Vehicle for Information (TAVI). The former (TALO) is something that language students study to learn language from in a direct way. It has typically been written or chosen to illustrate and to contextualise bits of grammar, and to provide opportunities for lexical ‘quarrying’. The latter (TAVI) is a text with intrinsic interest, read for information or pleasure, and therefore more appropriately selected by the learner, rather than the teacher. For an interesting discussion on TALO and TAVI, see this 2015 post from Geoff Jordan.

Johns and Davies wrote their article in pre-Headway days when texts in almost all coursebooks were unashamedly TALOs, and when what were called top-down reading skills (reading for gist / detail, etc.) were only just beginning to find their way into language teaching materials. TAVIs were separate, graded readers, for example. In some parts of the world, TALOs and TAVIs are still separate, often with one teacher dealing with the teaching of discrete items of language through TALOs, and another responsible for ‘skills development’ through TAVIs. But, increasingly, under the influence of British publishers and methodologists, attempts have been made to combine TALOs and TAVIs in a single package. The syllabus of most contemporary coursebooks, fundamentally driven by a discrete-item grammar plus vocabulary approach, also offer a ‘skills’ strand which requires texts to be intrinsically interesting, meaningful and relevant to today’s 21^st century learners. The texts are required to carry out two functions.

Recent years have seen an increasingly widespread questioning of this approach. Does the exploitation of reading and listening texts in coursebooks (mostly through comprehension questions) actually lead to gains in reading and listening skills? Is there anything more than testing of comprehension going on? Or do they simply provide practice in strategic approaches to reading / listening, strategies which could probably be transferred from L1? As a result of the work of scholars like William Grabe (reading) and John Field and Richard Cauldwell (listening), there is now little, if any, debate in the world of research about these questions. If we want to develop the reading / listening skills of our students, the approach of most coursebooks is not the way to go about it. For a start, the reading texts are usually too short and the listening texts too long.

Most texts that are found in most contemporary coursebooks are TALOs dressed up to look like TAVIs. Their fundamental purpose is to illustrate and contextualise language that has either been pre-taught or will be explored later. They are first and foremost vehicles for language, and only secondarily vehicles for information. They are written and presented in as interesting a way as possible in order to motivate learners to engage with the TALO. Sometimes, they succeed.

However, there are occasions (even in coursebooks) when texts are TAVIs – used for purely ‘skills’ purposes, language use as opposed to language study. Typically, they (reading or listening texts) are used as springboards for speaking and / or writing practice that follows. It’s the information in the text that matters most.

So, where does all this take us with PTV? Here is my attempt at a break-down of advice.

1 TALOs where the text contains a set of new lexical items which are a core focus of the lesson

If the text is basically a contextualized illustration of a set of lexical items (and, usually, a particular grammatical structure), there is a strong case for PTV. This is, of course, assuming that these items are of sufficiently high frequency to be suitable candidates for direct vocabulary instruction. If this is so, there is also a strong case to be made for the PTV to be what has been called ‘rich instruction’, which ‘involves (1) spending time on the word; (2) explicitly exploring several aspects of what is involved in knowing a word; and (3) involving learners in thoughtfully and actively processing the word’ (Nation, 2013: 117). In instances like this, PTV is something of a misnomer. It’s just plain teaching, and is likely to need as much, or more, time than exploration of the text (which may be viewed as further practice of / exposure to the lexis).

If the text is primarily intended as lexical input, there is also a good case to be made for making the target items it contains more salient by, for example, highlighting them or putting them in bold (Choi, 2017). At the same time, if ‘PTV’ is to lead to lexical gains, these are likely to be augmented by post-reading tasks which also focus explicitly on the target items (Sonbul & Schmitt, 2010).

2 TALOs which contain a set of lexical items that are necessary for comprehension of the text, but not a core focus of the lesson (e.g. because they are low-frequency)

PTV is often time-consuming, and necessarily so if the instruction is rich. If it is largely restricted to matching items to meanings (e.g. through translation), it is likely to have little impact on vocabulary development, and its short-term impact on comprehension appears to be limited. Research suggests that the use of a glossary is more efficient, since learners will only refer to it when they need to (whereas PTV is likely to devote some time to some items that are known to some learners, and this takes place before the knowledge is required … and may therefore be forgotten in the interim). Glossaries lead to better comprehension (Alessi & Dwyer, 2008).

3 TAVIs

I don’t have any principled objection to the occasional use of texts as TALOs, but it seems fairly clear that a healthy textual diet for language learners will contain substantially more TAVIs than TALOs, substantially more extensive reading than intensive reading of the kind found in most coursebooks. If we focused less often on direct instruction of grammar (a change of emphasis which is long overdue), there would be less need for TALOs, anyway. With TAVIs, there seems to be no good reason for PTV: glossaries or digital dictionary look-up will do just fine.

However, one alternative justification and use of PTV is offered by Scott Thornbury. He suggests identifying a relatively small number of keywords from a text that will be needed for global understanding. Some of them may be unknown to the learners, and for these, learners use dictionaries to check meaning. Then, looking at the list of key words learners predict what the text will be about. The rationale here is that if learners engage with these words before encountering them in the text, it ‘may be an effective way of activating a learner’s schema for the text, and this may help to support comprehension’ (Ballance, 2018). However, as Ballance notes, describing this kind of activity as PTV would be something of a misnomer: it is a useful addition to a teacher’s repertoire of schema-activation activities (which might be used with both TAVIs and TALOs).

In short …

The big question about PTV, then, is not one of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s about the point of the activity. Balance (2018) offers a good summary:

‘In sum, for teachers to use PTV effectively, it is essential that they clearly identify a rationale for including PTV within a lesson, select the words to be taught in conjunction with this rationale and also design the vocabulary learning or development exercise in a manner that is commensurate with this rationale. The rationale should be the determining factor in the design of a PTV component within a lesson, and different rationales for using PTV naturally lead to markedly different selections of vocabulary items to be studied and different exercise designs.’

REFERENCES

Alessi, S. & Dwyer, A. (2008). Vocabulary assistance before and during reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20 (2): pp. 246 – 263

Ballance, O. J. (2018). Strategies for pre-teaching vocabulary in context. In The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (pp. 1-7). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0732

Choi, S. (2017). Processing and learning of enhanced English collocations: An eye movement study. Language Teaching Research, 21, 403–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168816653271

File, K. A. & Adams, R. (2010). Should vocabulary instruction be integrated or isolated? TESOL Quarterly, 24, 222–249.

Harmer, J. (2012). Essential Teacher Knowledge. Harlow: Pearson

Johns, T. & Davies, F. (1983). Text as a vehicle for information: the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language. Reading in a Foreign Language, 1 (1): pp. 1 – 19

Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pellicer-Sánchez, A., Conklin, K. & Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, L. (2021). The effect of pre-reading instruction on vocabulary learning: An investigation of L1 and L2 readers’ eye movements. Language Learning, 0 (0), 0-0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lang.12430

Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning Teaching 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Macmillan

Sonbul, S. & Schmitt, N. (2010). Direct teaching of vocabulary after reading: is it worth the effort? ELT Journal 64 (3): pp.253 – 260

Webb, S. (2009). The effects of pre‐learning vocabulary on reading comprehension and writing. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 65 (3): pp. 441–470.