considered difficult for students to understand. However, in this way they failed to
provide students with an appropriate model of language as this is used in real life and,
opposite to what they had stated in the questionnaire concerning the optimal
classroom (see appendix IV, p. 121, table 48), what they did was to create a
linguistically artificial environment very different to what students will face in real
life. It should be stressed that one of the teachers observed, Mrs. M., in an attempt to
teach students the present perfect tense, spent a period of ten minutes forming all her
utterances in that tense and asking from students to reply in the same manner.
In order for teachers to provide input which facilitates acquisition, Tough
(1997: 225) stresses that they should use deliberately strategies that parents generally
use quite intuitively when speaking to small children. Such strategies involve, among
others, the use of ‘simple codes’ (see the discussion of ‘Input Hypothesis’ in section
1.2.2.2) and a reformulation of students’ ill-formed utterances putting emphasis on the
meaning rather than on the form of utterances.
3.1.3.2 Types of activities observed
According to West (2000: Unit 2: 26), activities can be characterized as
‘controlled’, when the students’ output is restricted by the teacher or the teaching
material, or ‘communicative’, when they involve the transmission of new information
from one interlocutor to the other.
The classroom observations revealed that teachers made extensive use of the
activities contained in the teaching material most of which, however, are such that
exercise complete control over both the content and the form of the students’ output.
Thus most of the times students were asked either to answer comprehension questions
or display questions of the type Long and Sato (1983) refer to as ‘Are you a student?’
and to fill-in gaps with verbs or prepositions. However, both Brock (1986), and Long
et. al. (1984) stress that teachers can improve considerably in relation to such
practices, provided that they get appropriate training.
Finally, in the very few cases where students were asked to work together in
pairs, the activities did not provide chances for real interaction (for an example of
such an activity see appendix VIII, p. 139), as they did not involve features such as
the ones referred in either Johnson (1982), or Nation (1989) described above (see p.
59).
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