Conscious Learning and the EFL Teaching in Algeria: The Case of Middle Schools

Abstract

My aim through this research paper is concerned with the problematic of Conscious learning. My first experiment as a teacher of English in the Algerian middle schools started in 1990. I felt “constrained” at the beginning of my career in the early 1990s when our local board inspectors did not allow us to teach grammatical and lexical rules in a deductive way. Teaching deductively means to make our pupils aware of what they are learning. A concept I will engage in later in this present thesis. It was, therefore, a “sin” to proceed by explicit explanation of the grammatical structures to the learners. We were asked to convey communicative goals. An implicit way of learning which inhibited our learners from mastering the linguistic concepts of English. Hence, I personally was not in favour of these constraints. To this extent, our learners (and I took the case of middle school ones) lack the knowledge of the language. I mean how to identify gender, number, noun, adverb, and almost tenses. I consider this mental effort as “Conscious learning”. My question is : Can Consciousness enhance acquisition ? Indeed, this search into the nature of consciousness was known as the mind-body problem, heavy with its ponderous philosophical solutions. This problem has been at the very centre of the thinking of the twentieth century. Thus, I wish to study the effect of consciousness on the learning of English as a second language, which I will develop later in chapters three and four. Because humans express their conscious states using language, I am tempting to equate between language acquisition and consciousness. There are, however, speechless humans (infants and children with severe forms of autism), to whom consciousness is attributed despite language lost or not yet acquired. Thus, some applied linguists have tackled conscious learning of a foreign language. I will later suggest two eminent ones, Krashen and Schmidt. The study will include the practical side that my present research paper is based on. To this end, my thesis design starts from a theoretical survey to end by practical side. Thus, I organize my field of research in four parts: In the first chapter, I begin by introducing the etymological description of the word ‘consciousness’. This succinct view is followed by the presentation of theoretical definitions of the concepts related to English as Foreign Language learning. These concepts concern language and language acquisition, learning features, about acquisition and Second Language Acquisition, what is it meant by interlanguage, the input, intake, output, memory, analysis, structuring, re-structuring and finally noticing. This is a summary of the main features of the area of ELT (English Language Teaching). They are intended to be as accessible as possible to the reader. This theoretical survey is then, challenging. Then, I move to a deep survey of the practical side (approaches and methods). The link is later engaged towards the Conscious Learning. The concept of Noticing. So far, the applied linguists’ views are mentioned. I mean Krashen, Schmidt and Ellis’ concepts of conscious learning. A practical essay is then, developed in order to find an answer to the question: Can conscious learning enhance learning? I will end by the references, an index and a glossary.