The tyranny of topic-teaching

 This post is inspired by a brief exchange I had on BlueSky with Carmen. The exchange looked like this:

I was a fairly late arrival into languages teaching, and have been teaching ‘only’ 14 years, having spent the first 18 or so of my career doing all sorts of things to stoically ignore my calling to the classroom. (But that’s a story for another day.) The point of even telling you this is to remark on the fact that in my own secondary education, topics were simply not a thing until A level; and even then I only remember doing ‘topics’ in French, where I did a non-literature course. My German A level based on literature was still not structured through topics. 

Yet something changed between when I stepped out of the classroom in 1989 and when I stepped back in in 2011, and that thing was the dominance of topics-based pedagogy. And it now seems so utterly entrenched that even with the new GCSE and some discussion against moving away from the ‘silos’ that a topic-based approach creates, we are still very firmly - VERY firmly - within a topics mindset. 

I’m going to spend a little time in this post talking about why this might be a problem in general terms, then, because this is really a blog about listening, discuss how the problems relate specifically to that skill; then I’ll attempt to unpick what (if anything) we might be able to do about it. 

What are lexical sets?

I have already mentioned ‘lexical sets’ within the context of ‘topic-based teaching’, so let me begin by setting out what this means. Imagine we are teaching a languages-lesson, or series of lessons. Very likely, an overarching scheme of work will relate to a topic - indeed very recently I heard of an applicant for a job being asked to ‘teach a year 7 lesson on the theme of sports’. Utterly typical. So what does that teacher do? Think of all the different sports vocabulary: a long list of nouns, no doubt (tennis, weightlifting, swimming, golf etc), possibly a couple of verbs (I like, I do, I play, I don’t like), and a short list of adjectives to allow the learner to give opinions about these sports. The long list of nouns relating to sports would be a ‘sports’ lexical set. The list of adjectives might be an ‘opinions’ lexical set, possibly with subsets for positive and negative opinions. So that’s what a lexical set is: a list of words that are all related somehow in meaning. 

And while it seems to make logical sense to have six major topics in the school year: my family / school / my town / my hobbies / holidays etc, actually the research evidence suggests that it’s counterproductive (i’ll give a list of references at the end if you’re interested). Why? Because by learning these groups of words together, the learner recognises ‘this is a sports word’ (or a town word, or a holidays word, or even a time phrase), but not specifically WHICH sports word it might be. And then what happens is that the processing takes longer and the learner is more likely to suffer from interference with the other other words within the lexical set. 

If we’re talking about both processing meaning and interference from other words within the set, we can see that the issues with lexical sets might be a problem for students both producing (writing and speaking) and receiving (reading and listening) language. But let’s now have a think about why a lexical set approach to teaching might be particularly problematic for listening. 

Lexical sets in listening

Firstly, there are occasions when two words in a lexical set sound similar, although a reader might be able to distinguish them easily. For example, in my research, students struggled with the word ‘portable’ which sometimes ended up being understood as ‘tablet’ rather than ‘mobile phone. This is because the words get ‘squished together’ in the stream of speech and students can’t easily hear the gaps between words. Although I don’t have the evidence for it, my gut feeling is that this misunderstanding wouldn’t happen in reading. Another confusion was between Portugal and ‘Pays de Galles’ (Wales).

Secondly, there are occasions where one word in a lexical set sounds like the English translation of another word in the same set. The best example I have of that is the number of times students in my research translated ‘frère’ (brother) as ‘friend’. Again, I think it’s very unlikely that this would have happened in reading, although I don’t have any evidence for that - but what it illustrates is how complex the listening process is and how interference can come from a really wide range of different places. 

Thirdly, lexical sets also interact with the type of word they might be. In linguistics we often differentiate between ‘content words’ (dog cat mouse) and ‘function words’ (and, but, or) - and function words are harder to define in our own language, but also often harder to understand or translate because you often can’t infer meaning in quite the same way. Yet there’s a lexical set that seems to have come up in every single textbook I’ve ever worked from, and that is the one of time phrases. This one is clearly difficult due to processing speed and interference (some of my year 11s still get tripped up between dernier and prochain, and just last week some of my year 10s were confusing nächst and letzt!), but given the additional demands of ‘live’ processing when you’re listening, it’s going to be EVEN harder. 

What on earth are the implications for the classroom?

I really, really want this blog to be constructive and helpful; to offer useful tips and tricks, to improve pedagogical practice, and to open up broader conversations about language teaching. This is a really tough one, as topic-based teaching is so entrenched within our curricula, and the washback from the exams is enormous.

However…

1. It really helps to be aware of the fact that lexical sets pose a potential trap for learners, to acknowledge that.

2. Look at what The Nice Man says about the overlap between topics, which offers a very feasible vehicle to transcend the hegemony of topic-tyranny. I’m not going to go into it here other than to offer a very quick TLDR, which would be to implore your students over and over to note which words they are seeing could apply to other topics.

3. Challenge the powers that be. When you next happen to run into someone who writes a textbook, or sets an exam, ask them why on earth do we do it like this when we know it makes it harder?

I don’t know whether topic-tyranny is a fact of life for languages teaching the world over, or whether it’s just a fact of life when learning. After all, why would I want to learn how to say ‘apple’ without saying ‘orange’ or ‘banana’? What’s the point is saying that the weather is sunny without also learning ‘it’s raining’? But it is always worth questioning these things, and wondering whether the status-quo has to be that way.  

References

Baxter, P., Bekkering, H., Dijkstra, T., Droop, M., van den Hurk, M., & Leoné, F. (2022). Constrasting orthographically similar words facilitates adult second language vocabulary learning. Learning and Instruction, 80, 1–20.

Erten, I. H., & Tekin, M. (2008). Effects on vocabulary acquisition of presenting new words in semantic sets versus semantically unrelated sets. System, 36, 407–422.

Finkbeiner, M., & Nicol, J. (2003). Semantic category effects in second language word learning. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 369–383.

Nakata, T., & Suzuki, Y. (2019). Effects of massing and spacing on the learning of semantically related and unrelated words. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41, 287–311.

Nation, P. (2000). Learning vocabulary in lexical sets: dangers and guidelines. TESOL Journal, 1–6.

Nation, P. (2021). Thoughts on word families. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43, 969–972.

Tagashira, K., Kida, S., & Hoshino, Y. (2010). Hot or gelid? The influence of L1 translation familiarity on the interference effects in foreign language vocabulary training. Sytem, 38(412–421).

Wilcox, A., & Medina, A. (2013). Effects of semantic and phonological clustering on L2 vocabulary acquisition among novice learners. System, 41, 1056–1069.