Lingua Frankly

2012-02-20T16:50:00.000Z

From the mouths of bits - curiosities of machine translation

Google Translate is undeniably one of the most useful tools most of us will ever see, yet to the vast majority of people, it is a joke.

The principles behind Google Translate go completely against what we expect of language. Our first instinct is to believe that Google used a big set of rules and tables, like in those dusty old Latin books on a shelf at the back of the university library.

But Google Translate is something very different. It is based statistical translation techniques. What that means is that no-one has programmed it with any rules at all, instead feeding it with gigabyte after gigabyte of text in the target language, from which it identifies patterns of words that go together, and words that don't. It also gets some directly translated texts to compare translations, but much less than you might expect.

Occasionally, this statistical approach throws up some very odd results.

For example, on How-To-Learn-Any-Language someone recently gave the example of a Finnish band who sing some of their songs in English and some of them in Finnish. When he translated a piece of Finnish with the song title Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan in it, it spat out the Siren, which is another of their song, but one they sing in English. The correspondent on HTLAL blames that on human correction, but that is highly unlikely. Instead, Google's algorithm will have correctly identified the first song title as Finnish and the second as English, even when in a document in the other language, and therefore it won't add the Finnish song's title to the English database or the English song's title to the Finnish database. And because both co-occur with the band name, the software ends up associating them.

In fact, if you look at the bands list of singles, you'll find that Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan was released directly before the Siren, so it could be that the Google algorithm is actively looking for a translation directly after an embedded foreign word. So if I talk about the clàrsach (Gaelic harp) or about an t-Eilean Sgitheanach (the Isle of Skye), you get the picture. And it's quite right that Google Translate should do that, it just so happens that while it means that it makes less mistakes, the mistakes it does make are mistakes that look particularly weird to us.

2012-02-19T22:04:00.000Z

In order to teach, you must understand

I was talking to several of my fellow students before Christmas about the courses on offer at SMO, Scotland's only college offering degrees through the medium of Gaelic, and in particular the lost opportunity to teach languages efficiently to a completely bilingual student body -- an opportunity that no other higher education institution in the country has.

The only foreign language course currently offered is a single 15-point module in Irish, and this isn't offered until 3rd year. Now one person said that it had been raised before, and it had been asked why Welsh never found its way onto the syllabus. Apparently the college feels it isn't similar enough to Gaelic to be worth doing. OK, there aren't many cognates between the two languages and those that there are aren't exactly transparent, but similarity can go much deeper than mere transparency. In fact, from an academic point of view, it's the less visible similarities that inform most.

I've been trying to improve my Welsh recently, and while doing so I've been looking for academically interesting issues, and one I found was in the adjectives.

In Gaelic, the most common adjective ending is -ACH. In Welsh, adjectives usually end in a vowel followed by G. Different? Not as much as you'd think. CH in Gaelic is a C modified by a process called "lenition" in all the literature. Lenition is the weakening of a consonant. There's a process of lenition in Welsh too, although it's called the "soft mutation" in Welsh learning literature. Guess what C becomes under soft mutation...? Yup, it's G. So even though the end result looks markedly different, on a process level, it's identical.

Teaching in this way (in either direction) may make the new language seem a little less arbitrary. But more than that, it also takes a single case that covers many examples and encourages an intuitive sense of equivalences across the languages, because it teaches you to accept unconsciously that Welsh G is often Gaelic CH and vice-versa. Thinking in terms of lenition as a process may also help students cope with examples that are lenited in one language and not the other. It opens up a framework of possibilities, and if we are open to more possibilities, we're more likely to understand new and unknown language.

But in order to do this, the teacher must understand the material at a far deeper level than they're intending to teach. You cannot simply spend your career one lesson ahead of your students in the textbook, because you have to know more about the subject than the textbook teaches.

The teacher needs to know a fair bit about the history and science that explains the development the language, even if he isn't going to talk about history or linguistic processes in class.

To give another example, it helps to know that the O->UE and E->IE changes in Spanish (eg poder->puedo, tener->tiene) are to do with Latin long and short vowels. Now I'm not sure, but I believe the words that undergo this change had short vowels in Latin, and the ones that never change had long vowels in Latin, but it might be the other way round. I don't need to know for sure, because I'm not going to teach this in class. But I understand the mechanism, which at the very least means I won't waste time looking for a non-existent pattern in the Spanish. ( Or more correctly, I've stopped looking for a non-existant pattern in the Spanish, because until I was told about Latin, everyone told me "it's irregular" and I didn't believe it could be.)

Also, while many books will present this as a feature of irregular verbs, I now know that it's no such thing -- in reality it's a fairly regular and productive phonetic feature. If you look at morphemes that can occur in multiple positions this same change occurs, and it happens for nouns, adjectives and adverbs as well as verbs.

The nouns "puerta" and "portal" share a root, and the latter retains the monophthong O simply because it's not in the stressed syllable.
An accountant (contable) works with accounts (cuentas) and again we see the change in action.

If we teach the vowel change as an irregular verb feature, the student won't necessarily be able to make the link between puerto and portal, or contable and cuenta -- the student won't have an understanding that imitates the intuition of the native speaker. One morpheme will end up being considered as two, and the learner will find it more difficult to learn vocabulary or to devine the meaning of new vocabulary on first encounter.

Knowing the background allows us to identify the important distinctions that we need to present to our students, and that's a very good thing.

As a teacher, I am aware that always-O and unstressed-O-stressed-UE are different phonemes which share certain allophones. This knowledge isn't explicitly required by my students (I'm a language teacher, not a linguistics professor) but it certainly must be known by them implicitly if they are to have a natural understanding of the language.

How can we do this?

The obvious place to start would be with a couple of common verbs. Poder and tener are very frequent, very useful, and a traditional place to start.

We have to make it clear what phoneme the student is using, and the O and E phonemes are never unambiguous in an unstressed position, so when we teach new vocabulary, we should pick a word that places the O or E in the stressed position -- so we teach "cuenta" before "contable". We make comment on the fact that cuent/contable share a morpheme (but we don't need the word "morpheme", because everyone's happy with the word "root") and that therefore it follows the same rule as verbs -- it's diphthongised in the tonic syllable and a monophthong elsewhere (although we can follow Michel Thomas's lead and replace the technical talk with the idea that the vowels "break under stress").

But plainly and simply, the student must have an implicit understanding of what's happening, or everything becomes arbitrary and meaningless, hence difficult to learn.

2012-02-14T19:00:00.000Z

Meaningful vs rote: traps

Despite everything I've said so far, the term "meaningful" is quite dangerous in language.

Because, after all, from a certain point of view, all languages is arbitrary - That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet - but from another point of view, all language is meaningful.

So we need to recognise that the term "meaningful" has to relate to the relationship between the material and the learner and is not some inherent property of the material.

One of the biggest "meaningful" traps is the idea of word-pairs. The most common word-pair would have to be the antonym (opposites).

So we teach "beautiful - ugly; tall - short; big - small".

The idea is that by linking the words, we're utilising the meaningful relationships between the words. Ignoring the potential for confusion (discussed previously), teaching by antonyms fails to exploit the learners own meaningful framework.

If you have never encountered beautiful before, then it cannot help you learn the meaning of ugly. So in the end, you're learning two things that are arbitrary to the learner -- you're teaching them by rote. That the data is meaningful is irrelevant, because it is not meaningful to the learner.

Better then to teach one and then the other. Previously learned vocabulary is part of the learner's framework that can be used to allow later meaningful learning.

2012-02-09T21:50:00.000Z

Meaningful vs Rote: a worked example

I've been discussing meaningful and rote learning recently, and Thrissel made this comment to one of my earlier posts:

A layman's question: one of the first things I learnt when beginning with Gaelic was that the n in an changes to m before b, f, m, p. Was it rote learning (because I wasn't told why these particular four) or meaningful learning (because it constituted a rule)?

I told him that this is rote learning, because he's simply learned a list of letters and a mechanical rule. But there is a more meaningful way to learn this, which makes it an excellent example to work through to demonstrate my point. I'll use a bit of linguistics terminology, but I'll try to make sure that I make the meanings clear as I go. Remember, though, that just because I'm using it here, doesn't mean I'm advocating its use in the classroom.

To make a rule meaningful, there has to be structure round about it that makes automatic sense to the learner. Logic's good, but logic neither guarantees nor is necessary for something to be meaningful. (In fact, my Dad used to quote one of his lecturers all the time: people don't think logically, they think psychologically.)

The key to making it meaningful is tying it into a network of easily-understood relationships. (And sometimes the thing that's easy to remember isn't altogether logical.)

In order to work out a meaningful teaching strategy, you need to analyse the material to be taught.

In this case we have a fairly simple rule:

"An" becomes "am" before words starting with B, F, M or P.

(The complication is that "an" is actually several different words, but we'll skip over that for now.)

What are the special properties of these four letters?

B, F, M and P are labial consonants, ie. they are pronounced using the lips. In fact hey are the only labial consonants in Gaelic.

M and N are nasal consonants, and are very closely related, as they're nasal consonants. It's not particularly easy to switch from N to a labial consonant, so the N steals the labial quality of the following consonant and becomes an M.

The technical rule:
The unstressed clitic forms "an" become "am" before a labial consonant.
So we have a full linguistic description of what's going on. If you say that this isn't "meaningful", you're right -- only a trained linguist would be able to make use of this information. It's the teacher's job to turn this technical knowledge into something meaningful -- but the teacher needs to understand this technical rule before he can teach it.

The next thing is to look for something similar that the student already knows.

Let's have a look at how N behaves in English.

The prefix in- is used for negatives. We know these are negative and we know they're N.
Admissable - Inadmissable
Tractable - Intractable
We know this.

But what happens when we want to add it to a word starting with B, M or P?
Balance - Imbalance
Material - Immaterial
Possible - Impossible

This doesn't just happen with negatives. The opposite of ex- is also in-
External - Internal
...which also changes to M:
Explicit - Implicit.
So the students now know that N changed to M before B, M and P. You can now explain that it's because these consonants are pronounced with the lips (or you can get the students to notice that for themselves). Now the Gaelic rule is no longer strange and arbitrary, but quite familiar and comfortable.

(It might also pay to point out that while you might see words that appear to break this rule in the written form, they tend to follow it in pronunciation -- eg input.)

This only leaves F as a troublesome case, but seeing as your students are now aware of the notion of a labial consonant (although you've never used the word "labial") you can just point out that while B, M and P use both lips (ie they are bilabial), F uses one lip and your teeth (called labio-dental). As it's only using one lip it's a borderline case. Some languages bundle it with B, M and P, others with the rest of the consonants. Gaelic's one of the former. Shrug and move on. It makes sense, and it doesn't pay to think about it.

Yes, there is an element of "smoke and mirrors" here. But some people have a tendency to overthink things and start to question things that don't need questioning. Write it down as a formal rule and people will analyse and question it. If instead you present it quickly as natural, if you don't encourage thinking, people will accept this, and that's good.
Now that may seem a much longer way than "an becomes am before B, F, P or M", but taking five minutes to make sure people understand it means you're not going to spend as much time revising it later. Less haste, more speed.

However, you can do more than make this one rule meaningful -- you can also prepare the student to learn later parts of the language meaningfully.

The concept of N taking on a labial quality is analogous to several other changes in the language -- the student needs to be aware that sounds affect each other. For example, in a phrase like an comhnaidh, the C starts to sound like an English G, because the voiced nature of the N affects the C. The O becomes a nasal vowel, due to the influence of MH. In many dialects, the C has an effect on the preceding N, too. Just like how English ink is pronounced like ingk because of the effect of the NK combination, and how engage is often pronounced eng-gage rather than en-gage, the N picks up an "ng" quality -- an becomes ang.

As this sound "spreading" is an important and productive feature of the language, bringing it in early makes it all easier later on.

Also, you can help your students understand related sounds better. In my example, B, M and P were presented separately from F, echoing the distinction between the bilabials and the labio-dental. We can go one step further, and rearrange BMP to something else. I would advise putting B and P together because they're both plosives, ie they have a "pop" involved (thing explosion). Now we have a choice: do we stick B and M next to each other? Both are voiced, so it would make sense. Now we have MBP or PBM, rather than the alphabetical BMP. We're building associations that can be built on later, and we're subtely drawing attention to something the student really already knows, at a fundamental level. Which brings us to the core point of meaningful learning: it must be built on what the student already knows.

2012-02-05T19:00:00.001Z

Rote vs Meaningful

Last time I wrote about the confusion of "Rote and meaningful" learning with "discovery and reception" learning.

This perhaps isn't as big a problem in language learning as it is in other forms of learning, as it would appear to be accepted in language-learning circles that all information learned is equal. For example, if I learn the conjugations of a verb, then regardless of how I have done so, I have learnt it. But it is the contention of David Ausubel that this is not the case -- if I learn something by rote, I learn it without structure or association, and if I learn it meaningfully, I know it by structure.
To quote Educational Psychology: a Cognitive Approach,

Rote learning occurs ... if the learner lacks the relevant prior knowledge necessary for making the learning task potentially meaningful, and also (regardless of how much potential meaning the task has) if the learner adopts a set merely to internalize it in an arbitrary, verbatim fashion (that is, as an arbitrary series of words). (2nd Ed, p 27)

The part I've put in bold here is the bit that most language teachers don't seem to appreciate. There is a belief that somehow the inherent meaningfulness of language will shine through and all the rote-learned material will spontaneously become a single meaningful whole. But core to Ausubel's core argument is that meaningful and rote learning are not merely superficial different methods, but that the internal modelling of learned knowledge relies on how it is learned.

So if a learner memorises yo estoy, tu estás, el está, nosotros estamos, vosotros estáis, ustedes están without having any previous exposure to Spanish verbs, each item will be more or less independent and unitary -- the inherently meaningful information (the regular and partially regular inflectional suffixes) cannot be noticed by a learner who has no previous concept or understanding of them. Even once the learner is taught the rules of Spanish conjugation, the original representation of the rote memorised conjugations will remain intact -- it will not spontaneously decompose into morphemes.

A strong learner will eventually generalise this away and learn the verb meaningfully, but this will not take the form of "adjusting" the learned language, but of relearning it in a meaningful way.
What rote learning gives the learner is therefore not true learning, but the possibility of memorising the learning material which he can then teach himself at a later date. By this token, phrase-based learning could be justified as providing a "corpus" (Wikipedia) which the learner can subsequently learn from.

Such a "memorise first, learn later" approach can only really be justified if the memorisation stage takes significantly less time than the learning step, as a means of getting more learning out of a limited amount of tutor time. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in a recent post entitled Who am I?, it takes a very long time to learn very short phrases, and it seems far more efficient to learn meaningfully from the outset.

Besides of which, "memorise first, learn later" assumes that all students are equally capable of teaching themselves, which is not true. In my first foreign language, I made plenty of mistakes in trying to move from memorisation to learning, and from conscious to unconscious competence: mistakes that I now know how to avoid repeating in my subsequent languages. How did I overcome these hurdles in the first place? I was looking for them. But nobody told me to look for them, so many people don't ever realise that they're there -- they instead justify their failure with phrases like "I'm no good at languages".

So to me, it makes no sense to have a student ever say anything if they don't understand it completely, ground-up. The meaning of the sentence is irrelevant if they don't understand the vocabulary and construction of the sentence.

2012-01-30T15:34:00.000Z

Meaningful vs rote, discovery vs reception

Ausubel takes great pains to point out that many teachers believe all discovery learning is inherently meaningful, and that all reception learning is inherently rote.

I wrote once before about the nonsensical "discovery learning" we were asked to do in science at high school: boiling a beaker to determine the boiling point of water. This was an absolute waste of time, and it was pure rote learning -- we determined that it was less than a hundred degrees, then the teacher told is it was 100 degrees. But this is rote -- although we allegedly "discovered" the knowledge, the simple act of setting up the apparatus did not provide a meaningful framework in which to understand the data. The act of boiling did not reveal anything new.

However, reception learning gives us a very memorable framework.

How do you measure heat? What is your standard? Well, we all know what ice feels like. We all boil water. So we already know about that. Which is why some Swedish guy decided that it would make sense to use the boiling point and freezing point of water as the reference points on a scale. Now, you should know before it comes to boiling that water freezes at zero -- now we know that it's no accident. But what about boiling? Well, how do divide up a metre? Correct. 100 Centimeters. So water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. (He could have made it 1000, but that would have been confusing as his name starts with C, and millimetres start with M. OK, so he probably wasn't vain enough to think this way, but as we associate C with hundreds, it's a meaningful association, even if accidental.)

So now we have two useful points of reference, and all within a meaningful and useful framework. Heck, you could even throw in Celsius's first name (Anders) if you wanted to, and you could talk about body temperature too, and all this would be taught and learned in less than the time it takes to boil a beaker of water on a bunsen burner.

No demonstration is needed, because the student has all the concepts required - I don't need to see boiling water to understand the concept of "boiling", nor do I need to see a block of ice to understand the concept of "freezing".
OK, so I've wandered off the language track a bit with that, but I think it's an important point to make, because it shows that a known abstract concept can be meaningful.

The concept of zero is evoked by talking about ice. The concept of that temperature is evoked by that word "ice". The word itself evokes the concept better than any demonstration. As language teachers, we can use that... as long as we don't fear the "translation bogeyman"....

2012-01-24T11:53:00.000Z

The nature of electronic communications

Electronic communication has changed human interaction in some very obvious ways - email seems to take the best of mail and phone calls and merge them into one, for example. However, with the increased ease in communication, we're communicating a lot more, both in terms of number of messages passed and the patterns of these messages. In times gone by (before I entered the workforce), your main source of message from outside your team was the office post trolley.

Once or twice a day, your messages would be delivered, and you would dedicate a chunk of time to prioritising, reading and replying. But now those messages appear in your inboxes throughout the day, interrupting what we're doing and making us feel guilty if we don't reply immediately.

The result is that we train ourselves to deal with communication quickly, and we devote little concentration to each individual message.

In the corporate world, there's a working rule: if you need the answer to a question, make it the only question in an email. All the evidence shows that people read emails up until the first actionable point and deal with that -- your first question should always get answered, but your second probably won't. We still talk about the positivity/negativity sandwich -- that old idea of putting the negative feedback between two positive things, so that it doesn't demoralise or antagonise the recipient unnecesarily.

But the observations from email are clear: the first part of the message is the only thing the recipient is guaranteed to read, so we have to go straight to the negative.

The problem here, though, is the terminology. In a performance review, "positive" is good and "negative" is bad. That's fine. But outside of a formally structured environment, "positive" really means "agreement" and "negative" means "disagreement".

If you look at web forums, you'll find that you can categorise many of them into two categories: "friendly" and "robust debate". Even if the forum in particular can't be categorised this way, the users will be split across the two camps.

One of the characteristics of the "friendly" camp is the positive/negative sandwich. Everyone prides themselves on supporting people, even when they disagree with them. But look a little closer and you'll see that everyone starts missing the disagreements, because they're hidden in the middle of the message. With everyone discussing why they agree, there's no scope to resolve the disagreements -- the disagreements aren't even recognised. The two or more parties leave the discussion with exactly the same views as they entered it.

The "robust debate" camp eschews the politesse and goes straight to the disagreements. You get genuine debate and you come out of it changed -- even if your personal opinion remains the same, you have a much clearer idea of the questions involved. It's really only once you have these questions in your head that you can start to notice that sometimes your wrong.

And that's why I'll always be in the "robust debate" camp. There's been plenty of debates which I've left convinced I'm right, but months or even years later, it has dawned on me that I'm wrong. Knowledge isn't just about what you believe to be true, you need to know about what you believe to be false, or you will never be able to honestly evaluate your beliefs.

So if I seem short with you on your blog or forum, it's not an attack on you or anyone else, it's because I want to expand my knowledge. It shows I've got a genuine interest in what you're trying to say.

And if I'm nice to you online, feel free to feel patronised.

2012-01-18T15:57:00.000Z

New Year's Resolution

Looking back at the last couple of years, I've realised how little language I've learnt. Other than Catalan (which I basically learned by piecing things together from languages I already knew) I've really kind of stagnated.

The reason for this is that I allowed myself to be extremely critical, and I've not been able to be satisfied with any materials. My goal was to stop myself ignoring the flaws of most courses, and start noticing them so that I could avoid making the same mistakes myself as a teacher.

Well, as I'm on holiday in Wales, I figured I should get my head down, stop moaning, and just learn some Welsh, even if the materials I've got aren't really very good. And bouyed up by that, I also started trying to brute-force my way through Basque. And so far, it seems to be working. I'm getting through the material, and I'm learning stuff.

So I'm going to try to keep in mind everything I learned over several years of being hyper-critical, but I'm not going to let it discourage me from what I'm doing here and now.

In 2012 I will learn more languages.

In a fortnight's time, I'll be back at the college and studying Irish as an elective module. I could take it easy and blag my way through the course -- I'm enough of a language geek to do that. But instead I'm going to take it seriously, and I'm not only going to pass, I'm going to get a good mark, and I'm going to be able to really speak the language by the end of the semester. This means I'm going to have to start watching TG4 again, too.

A fair amount of my TV viewing in 2011 was Spanish TV online. (Some of it was actually quite good!) I'm going to divert some of that time to Catalan TV, and I'm going to watch it fairly intensively. I'll start by watching the first few episodes of a series or two closely, stopping and picking up my dictionary if I'm unsure of words, with the goal of being able to understand the later episodes without any problems or pauses.

Obviously I'm going to continue working on my Scottish Gaelic (as it's the main focus of my current studies) and I think I'll spend a bit more time with French internet radio too (all the French TV stations are pretty much closed to internet access overseas, so it has to be radio).

I'm also going to start working on my (currently very basic) German, seeing as there's a German conversation group at the college.

So the priorities for the first half of 2012 are (in order):

Improve my grammatical accuracy in Scottish Gaelic.
Learn Irish to a reasonable conversational level.
Improve my Catalan, because I currently feel fraudulent speaking it.
Maintain French and Spanish through internet TV, radio and news sites.
Maintain some momentum with Welsh and Basque, if I can do so without affecting my studies.

Of course, none of those can be allowed to become an excuse for not doing any exercise -- I got a bit lazy last year, but mens sana in corpore sano as they say, or a healthy mind in a healthy body for anyone who thinks the use of Latin is more than a little pretentious. I ran a race at the weekend, and I felt fantastic afterwards. My thinking became so much clearer.

An hour spent outside without learning anything won't be "wasted", because it will improve the quality and efficiency of my learning.

2012-01-18T08:57:00.000Z

I've just been banned from one of my favourite websites -- hooray! This means I'll waste far less time on the internet and be able to devote more time to learning.

Thank you, admins!

2012-01-15T13:13:00.000Z

The importance of context

So I've been living on an island for a while, and my contact with languages has been limited. I spend most of my time speaking Gaelic and English, and sometimes a few words of Polish (phrasebook stuff -- I keep promising myself I'll learn the language properly, but I haven't yet). I do still try to keep up with Spanish TV, and I sometimes listen to some French radio.

But I came back to the Lowlands for Christmas feeling pretty rusty in several languages. The Spanish seemed to come back OK, but when I tried to speak to a Valencian guy, Pau, I just couldn't spit out the Catalan -- it just wouldn't work.

So anyway, I happened to be over in Edinburgh yesterday, and as it happened there was a meeting of the Catalan "Casal" to welcome the new committee, so I stuck around and went to it, dreading the act of trying to speak Catalan, but when I got there, it was really no problem. OK, so a couple of times I threw in an accidental word of Spanish or French, and sometimes I ran out of Catalan, but for the most part I was OK. People were speaking to me at a natural pace and I was following it.

The problem I had speaking to Pau was a matter of habit, of association. I've spoken to him in Catalan on several occassions, but mostly I speak to him in Spanish or English. Pau was not associated with a Catalan "context". But the members of the Casal are explicitly and inextricably tied to Catalan in my head. I've not met many of them previously, and I've not met any of them often, but when I'm there, I'm there in order to speak Catalan, and my brain's happy with that.

Up until someone asks me about daily life up on Skye, when even the simplest words start to get confused -- I couldn't even say "to go" in Catalan while thinking about the college, because the context held such a strong association with Gaelic.

This isn't my first experience of the context-sensitivity of language.

I started learning Spanish and Gaelic more-or-less simultaneously, and I did find it very difficult to talk about the Highlands and Islands in Spanish, and I found it difficult talking about my holidays in Spain in Gaelic. Every time I thought about the Highlands, I thought of Gaelic, and every time I thought about Spain, I thought about Spanish.

The only way round this was to practice. I can now talk about Spain in Gaelic, and the islands in Spanish. Victory!

But let's go back to Pau.

The association of person with language is very strong -- it's very difficult to change the habitual language of conversation with any particular individual. So sometimes you have to make a firm choice to speak a particular language with a particular person, or you'll find yourself speaking another one.

This is also the reason most people find it difficult to learn their husband/wife/partner's language -- they have an established relationship associated with a particular language.

2012-01-10T19:00:00.001Z

What do you know?

If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: The most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.

This quote was taken from a book by David P. Ausubel, one of the most influential figures in educational psychology. It was used in his book Educational Psychology: a cognitive view, where it came directly after the dedication, and before the preface. It is the first thing the reader will see in the book, and this is by design, because this is the most important principle that every reader should have in mind while reading the book.

To many, this may seem trivially obvious, and something that every teacher does. After all, you couldn't teach someone to do ski jumping if they haven't learnt to ski downhill already. But there's actually more to it than that, and the subtlety isn't in the words used in the quote, it's also about the words that he left out: words such as "subject". This is crucial. If he had set "what the learner already knows about the subject", then it would include the possibility of a student in a state of zero knowledge, but as it stands it assumes that there is no-one who enters the classroom without a considerable amount of pre-learned knowledge.

The error made by many teachers is to attempt to compartmentalise knowledge, and the subsequent belief that such "zero states" exist, and this is particularly prevalent in the language classroom.

But we all have different levels of knowledge.

A Spanish person knows what definite and indefinite articles are, although his native concept doesn't quite match the usage in English. A Polish person has no concept of articles whatsoever. These are very easy indeed to ascertain, yet we still don't tend to teach them according to these. The profession has in general bought into the myth of a "Universal order of acquisition" and the myth that there's "no such thing as native language interference", and there are hundreds of language courses on the market that pay absolutely no heed to the learner's native language. In fact, Cambridge themselves produce a series of books on "common errors" from their exams, all completely in English and all sold worldwide with no attempt to tailor the teaching to the specific problems that speakers of certain languages have.

What's to blame here is the obsessive fear of "translation" in the industry. Avoiding translation has become associated with avoiding any sort of acknowledgement of the existence of the native language. We are expected to turn it off -- all that knowledge, and we're not supposed to use it.

But we do use it. As I've no doubt said here on many occassions, when we are taught "hello, my name is ... , how are you?" in any beginner's class, we are learning concepts that only exist in language, so we are going back to our native language. We do it in the classroom; we rely on it in the classroom. But we pretend we're not doing it, which prevents us developing more advanced strategies based on the principle of native language as "what we know". We limit ourselves through the lie. Once we, as an industry, accept the truth, we can start to improve.

2012-01-05T19:00:00.000Z

Start small, or start big?

So, you're moving to a bilingual area, are you? So which language do you want to learn first? Well, in most cases, one of the languages will be clearly dominant. In the regions of Spain, that means Spanish. In France, French. In Italy, Italian. So it would make sense to learn the dominant one first, right?

...maybe, but just think about it for a moment. The other day, I was talking about the dangers of falling into the "good enough" trap. When it comes to bilingual areas, the same trap exists, because the dominant language will always be "good enough", making the effort required to learn the minority language seem not worth the bother. And if you're having to live, you're always going to end up falling back on the dominant language in order to make yourself understood, meaning you're not going to get the opportunities to practice the minority language if you already know the majority one.

So if you're genuine about learning the local language, it's probably best not to learn the dominant language beforehand. You'll succeed better if your minority language is stronger, so that you only resort to the dominant language when the minority language is unavailable.

2011-12-30T13:12:00.000Z

Who am I? Who am I? WHO AM I?

So as I said a while ago, I've recently started trying to work on my Welsh again. I did a beginners' course last year, and I never really felt I'd got any real competence in the language (despite getting a pass in the course), and so I figured it was time to do it properly.

Now when I dug out the books (as I said), I just found myself really frustrated (and I've tried two more sets of course materials since the previous post).

So I got myself onto iTunes U to see if they had any useful materials and found a podcast Dialogues for Welsh Learners from the University of Glamorgan.

Well I've just fired up the playlist. I listened to the introduction; fine. I listened to the first "episode": Pwy dych chi? (= Who are you?) The podcast was 5:39 long (including the usual timewastery) and was literally devoted to the question "Who are you?" and it's response "I am ...?" Please note that this is not aimed at teaching the question, only at practising what you should already have learnt during your course.

Surely, surely, there is something wrong if these 5 words are so difficult that it takes this long. And what is wrong? It's my favourite phrase of 2011: disordered state. The question and answer are trivially easy in terms of the language itself -- it's one of the most basic structures imaginable. And yet people find it, as a phrase, difficult enough to merit 5 minutes of dedicated practice as well as untold teaching time in the class itself.

Doesn't this show just how inefficient phrase-based learning really is?

2011-12-29T16:11:00.000Z

Counterintuitive, perhaps, but sometimes it's easier to start with the harder material...

In general, whenever we teach or learn something new, we start with the easy stuff then build on to the more difficult stuff. But this isn't always a good idea, because sometimes the easy stuff causes us to be stuck in a "good enough" situation.

When I started learning the harmonica, I learned to play with a "pucker technique", ie I covered the wholes with my lips. The alternative technique of "tongue blocking" (self descriptive, really), was just "too" difficult for me as a learner. So for a long, long time, the pucker was "good enough" and tongue blocking was too difficult for not enough reward. It limited my technique for a good number of years, and now that I can do it, I wish I'd learnt it years ago.

The same block of effort vs reward happens in all spheres of learning. If you learn something easy, but of limited utility, it's far too easy to just continue along doing the same old thing, and it's far too difficult to learn something new, so you stagnate. Harmonicas, singing, swimming, skiing, mathematics, computer programming; there's always the temptation to just hack about with what you've got rather than learn a new and appropriate technique.

This problem, unsurprisingly, rears its ugly head all too often in language learning, but with language it has an altogether insidious form: the "like your native language" form. If you've got a choice of forms, one is going to be more like your native language than the other, and this is therefore easier to learn. Obviously, this form is going to be "good enough", and the immediate reward to the learner for learning the more difficult form (ie different from the native language) isn't enough to justify the effort. However, in the long term, the learner who seeks mastery is going to need that form in order to understand language encountered in the real world.

The problem gets worse, though, when you're talking about dialectal forms.

Here's an example. Continuous tenses in the Celtic languages traditionally use a noun as the head verbal element (known as the verbal noun or verb-noun). I am at creation [of] blog post, as it were. Because it's a noun, the concept of a "direct object" is quite alien, and instead genitives are used to tie the "object" to the verbal noun. In the case of object pronouns, they use possessives. I am at its creation instead of *~~I am at creation [of] it~~. Note that the object therefore switches sides from after to before the verbal noun.

Now in Welsh, the verbal noun has become identical to the verb root, and is losing its identity as a noun. This has led to a duplication of the object pronoun, once as a possessive, once as a plain pronoun -- effectively I am in its creation [of] it. This really isn't a stable state, as very few languages would tolerate this sort of redundancy, and the likely end-state is that the possessive gets lost, and the more English-like form (I am in creation [of] it) will win out. In fact, there are many speakers who already talk this way.

But for the learner, learning this newer form at the beginning is a false efficiency. There are plenty of places where the old form is still current, so unless the learner knows for certain that they'll be spending their time in an area with the newer form, they're going to need the conservative form anyway. To a learner who knows the conservative form, adapting to the newer form is trivially easy, but for someone who knows only the newer form, the conservative form is really quite difficult to grasp.

So teaching simple forms early risks restricting the learner's long-term potential. So while you want to make life simple for yourself or you students, make sure you're not doing them or yourself a disservice.

2011-12-26T11:16:00.001Z

Creoles - the same story once again

So I was directed this morning to a news story on the BBC about the translation of the Bible to Jamaican Patois. It's a move that's long overdue -- whatever you think about religion, you have to accept that the place of worship is vitally important in the survival of language wherever a large percentage of the population are religious. The lack of a Bible translation and the use of the dominant language in religious services have been cited in the decline of many languages, including Scottish Gaelic.

It has been welcomed by some:

Several women rise to testify, in patois, to what it means to hear the Bible in their mother tongue.

"It's almost as if you are seeing it," says a woman, referring to the moment when Jesus is tempted by the Devil.

"In the blink of an eye, you get the whole notion. It's as though you are watching a movie… it brings excitement to the word of God."

Unfortunately, not everyone is so happy.

But some traditionalist Christians say the patois Bible dilutes the word of God, and insist that creole is no substitute for English.

You know what? There was a time when people would insist that English is no substitute for Latin. And even that was bigotted, because the Latin Bible was just another translation of the Greek, and it wasn't even that accurate!
What we have here is proof, if proof were needed, that a great many objections to minority language are a simple case of resistance to change.

Creole in primary education

The article doesn't restrict itself to the Bible, but follows on to a topic that is a matter of active debate in most creole-speaking countries: the place of Creole in the primary sector.

The story is always the same: the "big" language is of major economic importance, and therefore should be the focus of education. As a political statement, it's appealling, and it doesn't take much thought to agree with it. Which is just as well, because it doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny.

One thing that has been fairly well proven across the world is that kids do better in school if they are given "initial literacy" (their first experience of reading and writing) in their own language. On the other hand, gaining their initial literacy in a new language actually hampers their ability to pick up the language accurately.
Worse, in some creole-speaking countries, the teachers are really only creole-speakers themselves. Education in Haiti, for example, is very heavily orientated towards French, but the teachers really don't speak the language properly. What you end up with is kids who aren't competent in either their own language or the "important" language.

All the figures show that the best thing to do is to start school in the kids' own language (and the teachers'!), and that the new language is best introduced in a spoken form, and by a native speaker.

Which isn't quite the same as what we do in Scotland with Gaelic-medium education, sadly....

2011-12-15T17:56:00.000Z

I love learning languages... but I hate language learning

Ok, so yesterday I had my last exam of the semester, so I decided to take a break from Gaelic and start working on my Welsh. I never really did much study before, but trying to catch as much as I could by watching the Welsh-language soap opera Pobol Y Cwm regularly has helped some of it stick (but not all, by a long shot).

So I went to the college library, and started reading Asterix ym myddin Cesar, the Welsh translation of Asterix the Legionary. Oooooh... it's tough going.

So rather than attempt to struggle through it in the library with a dictionary, I decided to check it out and take it back to my room to go over it seriously with a grammar book. I was the first person ever to do so -- which isn't surprising given that there isn't even a Welsh course here...

So I took my copy of Teach Yourself Welsh Grammar off my bookshelf, and started reading... then stopped. You see, while I love learning languages, the vast majority of language learning material is excruciatingly bad. I know that this book isn't a language course, but it is aimed at learners. So when the first chapter after the pronunciation guide starts by individually listing 31 different circumstances in which the soft mutation occurs, it immediately loses its audience. There's no structure -- just a list. In several of these circumstances, LL ard RH are immune to mutation. Did they group these together? They're numbers 1, 5, 6, 18 and 28. There's no implication that these are in any way related, meaning the learner risks trying to learn 5 exceptions instead of one group.

I'm trying to extract enough information to teach myself, but I'm overwhelmed by information -- I have to try to read and understand it all in order to identify the patterns and salient points. It's tiring, frustrating, and to a great extent insulting.

Yes, insulting. Because at one level, the mere existence of the book is a claim by the author that this is good enough for the learner. And if the book is good enough for the learner, then it must be me that is the problem.

I'm lucky -- I feel insulted. Many, many people genuinely believe that they're at fault -- that they're "stupid" or "not good at languages". And they think that I'm good at languages. Well believe me, I'm not. Even despite spending countless hours in this sort of book, I still can't make head nor tail of some of them. If anything I'm worse at languages than the average, and I've only got where I am today because I refuse to believe I'm incapable.

The hardest part for me in learning any new language is getting started, because in general there's just too much information thrown at you in an unstructured and poorly thought out way.

So for those of you starting out and discouraged by your materials, remember: you're not the only one.

2011-11-24T16:56:00.000Z

The Myth of Groupwork
Today's blog post was inspired by me walking out of a class for what may be the first time in my life. (I probably ran out of a few classes as part of childhood tantrums, but that doesn't count.)

Now I've always felt a lot of groupwork is a waste of time, because you could complete the task much quicker on your own. But then I would say that, wouldn't I, because I always did well at school. Theory has it that groupwork is an opportunity for the weaker students to learn off the stronger ones.

OK, so in this particular class, I've found myself being "the one who knows stuff" in pairs a few times, so I've sat as scribe and asked the other person for all the answers, and only offered anything myself when the other person wasn't sure or when I disagreed with them. But today we were working in threes, not pairs, and for once in my life I was no longer the brainbox/swot/smart-alec because it was something I've never learned properly. But the group scribe (not me) was writing away, filling in the "easy" ones, including quite a few I wasn't sure about. Her and the other guy were discussing answers, and I wasn't really able to chip in, as I didn't really know how to explain what I was trying to say, or how to word a question if I had any doubts. So I muttered a few swear words, put down my pen, and left the room.

Why wasn't I learning off the stronger students? Quite simply because there is a difference between a good student and a good teacher: it is a teacher's job to ask questions that they already know the answer to. Students, on the other hand, ask questions that they don't know the answer to.

What exactly was going through my classmate's head is hard to say for sure, but there's two likely explanations.

She was acting in a goal-orientated way. She had a quiz in front of her and the goal was to get all the answers, like in a pub quiz.
She categorised the questions as "hard" and "easy" based on her own perception of difficulty, and only asked our opinion on the "hard" ones, assuming that we weren't interested in the "easy" ones.

As I say, I can't say which of these (if either) was her motivation. However, I can say that these two situations are quite possible, and indeed likely, in any classroom.

Both of these approaches introduce problems.

In a pub quiz, everyone answers questions on topics they're confident about. People who aren't into sports might pop outside for a fag during the sports round, for example. Unfortunately only answering questions on what you already know doesn't lead to learning.
The "easy" questions are the ones we expect the weakest members of the group to answer, and we hope that by listening to the strong students answer the "hard" ones, they'll learn from them. However, if the scribe is a strong student (and they're the ones most likely to volunteer), then the easy questions may never be asked, so the weak students never get any opportunity to do anything. And as weak students are usually shy about their weaknesses, they're not going to butt in.

Now of course neither of these two situations is inevitable, but there are very few students who are genuinely aware of what is expected of them in groupwork -- I am only aware of it because of my own situation as a teacher.

Although I don't have any statistics to say how often these two situations arise, I can state categorically that current groupwork practices leave open the possibility that these situations arise, and it's a possibility that the teacher has little control over or visibility of.

Perhaps the teacher is also blinded by a task-orientated mindset. When we see that the task is completed and the students have the correct answers, how often do we ask ourselves how they reached those answers? Can we ever truly know? I think not.

And that is why I called this post "the myth of groupwork". I am not saying there's no such thing as groupwork, but that groupwork is something we take on faith, uncritical of the facts or evidence.

As teachers we cannot directly control our students' thoughts, but we must take steps to reduce the possibilities for them to complete tasks in pedagogically pointless ways. Current groupwork practice opens up too many "wrong paths", and that needs to change.

2011-11-22T10:52:00.000Z

Link drop: how technology is changing language

A very well-written article with a lot of material from David Crystal about the effects technology is having on language and literacy at: http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2011/11/21/from-lolcat-to-textspeak-how-technology-is-shaping-our-language-39747927/print/

2011-11-17T12:34:00.000Z

A dull echo of bad practice in teaching...

There are many things in language teaching theory that are hotly debated, but there are some things that are universally accepted. In theory. In practice, they can be forgotten about. I'm currently working through the Michel Thomas Polish Foundation course and one of these springs to mind:

The echo effect

The echo effect is quite simple: the last thing you hear stays in your mind longest. The theory around this varies as our understanding of the human brain improves, and some people talk about "echoic memory", others about "feedback loops", others still "working memory". But whatever the theoretical models people come up with, they all seek to model the same universally agreed observation: the last thing you hear stays in your mind longest.
The echo effect in practice

So that's the theory, but how does this work in practice? The canonical example would be the listening exam. A sentence or passage presented in a listening paper will be followed by silence -- all instructions come before the passage so that the internal echo is the actual material, not the instructions. After all, if the instructions are clear, the student should understand and internalise them easily.

Failure to follow through to the classroom

However, you will find that some teachers don't consciously consider the echo effect in their day-to-day teaching. Instead, they try to follow a natural order for language. The reason this example is based on an MT course is that it's the nearest most lay people get to being able to observe a language class.

Let's look at a couple of quotes from Jolanta Cecula's MT course:

"I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand what you are saying"... talking to a man? (CD3 Track 2)
Notice here that the background information, "talking to a man" comes after the sentence to be translated. This means that "talking to a man" is in echoic memory, rather than "I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand what you are saying". This makes the task harder in a way that is of benefit to the learner.

Two tracks later, we get this:
"Can you help him", meaning to him, asking a woman? (CD3 Track 5)

Here we have two pieces of background information coming after the material that should really be in echoic memory. The learner then has to expend effort on recalling the prompt, distracting from the task of producing the desired target language.

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work(ing memory) we go...

But the problem of prompt wording goes beyond the simple echo effect, and into bigger questions of language processing. On a few occassions, the course has prompts of the form:

So what would "" be? / So "" would be...?

Here we make life harder for working memory by interrupting the simple prompt with the phrase for translation. Processing the interrupted clause further distracts our working memory from the target translation, and makes the task unnecessarily difficult.

What I strive to do in class is to make sure the students know what is expected of them with the minimum of prompting. In the case of teaching-by-translation, MT-style, I would start a session with some explicit prompting, but quickly move to just giving them the target phrase with no other prompting.

Let them concentrate on the language, not on the classroom

2011-11-14T16:56:00.000Z

An example of language change: Genealogy.

Genealogy has always been moderately popular as a hobby, but in recent years it has become all the rage, thanks to TV programmes like the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? which shows celebrities and public figures tracing their family trees (and often crossing continents in the process).

Now, I had always thought the word was geneology, but the BBC and various websites disabused me of this notion. But just the other day, one of the other students here mentioned that her dad was working on the family tree... and she said "geneology".

Let's have a look at the etymology of the word.

According to Etymonline, genealogy comes from the Greek "genea" (generation, descent), + "logia", (to speak about). So originally -logy was about lecturers, and over time was generalised to experts, and hence knowledge.

Unfortunately, the English-speaking brain doesn't understand declension of nouns, so it sees the first morpheme as "gene", not "genea", and expects the "alogy" bit to be a single morpheme. As most "-logy" words are "ologies" (biology, radiology, geology etc), we have generalised all -logies to -ologies. (Even though Etymonline has the suffix entry as "-logy".)

Don't believe me? Consider this famous advert from the 1980s:

If the English-speaking brain recognised the original morpheme boundary, would they have scripted it as "ology"? And would we have understood as easily? The popularity of the advert (it was a widely-used pop-culture reference for years after it stopped showing) suggests it's natural English.

Given all that, I can only conclude that the word is, to all intents and purposes "geneology", and that attempts to preserve the A are misguided.

Let English be English and let Greek be Greek.

2011-11-09T18:21:00.000Z

Overgeneralising and undergeneralising in general...

In English, we have two ways to talk about nouns in a general sense. In normal speech, we say things like cats are vicious little creatures -- i.e. we use an indefinite plural. In some very formal prose, you'll see instead the cat is a vicious little creature --i.e. a definite singular.

The existence of the second is probably just a case of "translationese" -- it arises in lots of translations of Latin works, and I believe it is used that way in most of the modern Romance languages (French, Italian etc). Unfortunately this isn't easy for me to verify, as I have no idea whatsoever what to look for in the index of my grammar books.

Bizarrely, this fundamental (and straightforward) element of language seems to have been overlooked in the classical grammar models, so there is no common label for it (hence me not being able to look it up!). This means it is often overlooked in teaching, too. Many beginners' courses pass it by, and even when it comes up, you're not likely to get more than a little box-out mentioning it. It's not really "taught" in the same way as other grammar points. I suppose the reason for this goes back to the very basics of the structuralist view of grammar, which values form over meaning, and too often simply gives a few short sentences explaining usage after drilling form.

But we've been moving away from structuralism for quite some time now. The in-general/universal has been marooned by the incoming tide, as functional and communicative approaches have picked up on the link between form and meaning in the noun and article for specifical and truly indefinite cases, but they've not integrated the general/universal with it.

This underemphasis of the general/universal is particularly noticeable in Gaelic. It's not a subject I've seen come up often at all. I read it in one book and one book only, and I don't believe I've ever heard it discussed ever in classes. According to the book (well, my memory of it -- the book's 100 miles away), the general/universal in Gaelic is the definite singular. (The cat is a vicious little creature, the lion is a noble beast etc.) And yet....

When you study the genitive in Gaelic, it may be pointed out to you that while "describer nouns" in English always stay singular even when representing a plural concept (for example "biscuit" in "biscuit tin", "tooth" in "toothbrush"), this isn't the case in Gaelic genitives, which have both singular and plural forms.

So I was giving a talk in a classroom debate, and I mentioned "teenage pregnancy" which I rendered as "leatromach nan deugairean" -- "pregnancy [of] the teenagers". Genitive, plural. After the class, I started asking myself if that was right, thinking of the general/universal rule. Now I'm too confused and I'll just have to ask one of my teachers to try to clarify....

2011-11-04T19:00:00.000Z

Choose your terminology carefully

People often get confused with all these fancy words in language learning and teaching. I discussed my basic views on terminology before, but I want to look at one of the big problems that poor thought over terminology can cause: false dichotomies caused by false opposites.

For example, in the use of reading or listening, we often talk about intensive and extensive input.

Extensive input means reading or listening to a lot.
Intensive input is reading or listening closely and carefully, perhaps going back over material to get a lot of detail.

These things are not opposites, and on a conscious, intellectual level, most people recognise this. Of course, they're not completely compatible either, because it's hard to read a lot if you're reading it slowly and carefully.

But once you stop thinking very carefully, most people start talking about the two things as though they were truly opposite. Why? Because whoever chose the terminology wanted two names that looked like a set, but inadvertantly made them look like opposites.

(Of course, this is just an extreme example of the problem of counterintuitive grammatical terminology, such as "regular" in the earlier article).

2011-10-31T18:36:00.000Z

When teaching grammar, stick with the uncontroversial stuff...

I was in a grammar class for my Gaelic course today, and we were looking at noun declensions. For one set of questions, we were using the word fàinne (ring). Unfortunately, this word is masculine in some dialects and feminine in others. The question stated that the word was masculine, but my partner for the exercise (a native speaker) has used it all her life as a feminine word. She declined it perfectly correctly in each case -- as a feminine word. The explicit instruction to decline it as masculine was ignored because she already has 100% intuitive command of the word.

Correct completion of the task therefore required that she stop dealing with the words as "language" and start thinking of them as some kind of mechanical logic puzzle.

The problem with the task is that it became counter-intuitive. When teaching grammar, we need to employ as much pre-existing knowledge as possible. Grammar teaching for natives has to start with forms they know, because you are not actually teaching "grammar", you are teaching "grammar awareness", and that simply means making them consciously aware of things they already know intuitively.

So you have to pick the most uncontroversial examples, the most universal and unchanging.

Work with your students, not against them.

2011-10-30T09:51:00.000Z

Think before you teach

Every culture has its own set of persistent myths that are passed down the generations. I'm not talking about gods and monsters, though, I'm talking about myths about language. Myths are like optical illusions -- once you know what you're looking at, it's obvious to you, and you can't imagine how you missed it.

As teachers, we should be wary about passing on linguistic folklore uncritically. We should look at everything we've been told about our languages in detail to see whether it holds up to scrutiny, and if it doesn't, we shouldn't teach it.

I'd like to give you an example from the teaching of Scottish Gaelic.

If a course teaches noun cases explicitly, it will state that the "second noun" is always in the genitive. It will then go on to add the acception that if another noun follows it, it isn't in the genitive, so that in a long and complex noun-phrase, only the final noun is in the genitive.

So it is self-evident that "the second noun takes the genitive" is an incorrect rule. The actual rule is "the last noun in a noun phrase takes the genitive". Once you see this, it is obvious, but the "second noun" rule is now so all-pervasive that I'm currently hearing it in grammar classes aimed at fluent speakers in their second year of university study.

The myth is being passed on to a new generation.

2011-10-27T12:34:00.000+01:00

Learning a related language without trying...?

So, you know French and Spanish and want to learn Catalan? English and German and want to learn Dutch? Polish and Russian, and Ukranian? It should be dead easy, right? All you need to do is start reading and you'll get it.

Possibly, but it's still worth picking up a book and doing a bit of study.

Eliminate the negatives:
If you just start reading (and/or listening), you will develop a reasonable passive understanding, but there's a couple of ways this limits you. Passive understanding does not require you to process all the language in front of you (you can gain complete comprehension without complete perception) so you are never forced to develop an accurate internal model of the language.

This can be very limiting, because in the future, if you decide to learn to speak the language then you're faced with a massive "frustration barrier" -- a lot of people find that being able to understand lots but not answer is a very unpleasant situation. It seems more discouraging to me at times than simply having low skills all round.

Accentuate the positives:
Besides, the most important thing stage of learning a related language is the very basics. How so? Well this is about the nature of regular and irregular language forms (as I've been talking a bit about recently).

Irregular forms are almost always the most common forms. So in English "child, children" vs "adolescent, adolescents"; "give, gave" vs "donate, donated".

Interestingly enough, it's those most common words that are least stable. The English word "will" (I will go, etc) developed from a word meaning "to want" (compare Modern German will and the Modern English noun will -- eg strength of will, willpower), whereas "want" originally meant "to lack" (they found him wanting, ie inadequate).

The same effects can be seen in other language families -- while the Italian and French words for "to have" come from the Latin "avere", the Spanish word for to have (I have a car etc) is derived for the Latin word to hold -- "tenere". But when we get to a rarer word like "cultivate", we have an almost identical word: cultiver(FR), coltivare (IT), cultivar(ES).

So when a Spanish person says they can "understand" Italian or Catalan without ever having studied it, they genuinely believe that they can, because they can understand what they think are the "difficult" words, but are in reality the easy words.

The mistake most people in this situation make is to skip the beginners' material and jump straight to the advanced. But it's the beginners' material that teaches most of the things you really need to learn.

A little bit of time dedicated to the basics (conjugations, pronouns, declensions) at the start will accelarate you through to 90% understanding very quickly.

2011-10-21T18:07:00.000+01:00

How irregular!
I often say that the problem most people have with grammar isn't the grammar itself, but how it's described (I even wrote a post about this a couple of months ago). The Romans came up with quite a sophisticated way to describe grammar, and it was so successful that we still use it to this day. However, what a lot of grammarians still haven't twigged is that what meant a lot to Romans means absolutely nothing to your average inhabitant of 21st century Earth.
One of the words that would be completely straightforward to a Roman is regular, and of course the converse irregular. People familiar with grammatical terminology tend to think it should be easy for an English speaker too, because the root of the word is so common in English: reign, rule, regulations. A "regular" form is one that follows the rules. Simple.
Except it's not, because we don't use the word regular to mean a rule-follower in any other situation. Outside of language circles, it means to do something with a predictable frequency or schedule. So what - it's a different thing, so there's no need for confusion, right? Wrong, and this is a subtlety that's easy to miss, even though it goes to the very heart of irregular forms.
The majority of words in any language are regular -- the vast majority follow the rules. The irregular ones, the ones that break the rules, are in a minority. Which words are irregular? Well, it's always the common ones: to be, to have, to go; child/children etc. This is uncontroversial - it's a well-known statistic. That there are a few uncommon irregular forms (eg ox/oxen) doesn't break the rule, because these are forms that were common relatively recently (oxen were still in use 100 years ago, because not everyone could afford a new-fangled "tractor") and are being lost anyway (when did you last call talk about an "ox"?).
So here we have a rather nasty piece of cognitive dissonance - the forms that are most regular in terms of frequency of occurrence are the ones we call irregular, and the ones that are least regular by frequency of occurrence are called regular.
A word that is supposed to help us understand actually ends up confusing us further, and we're not even sure why we're confused. Not good.
This problem isn't limited to English, though, as the equivalent word in the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish etc) tends to have a similar meaning to the English.
The failure to understand the concept of regular has profound consequences in the teaching of forms, particularly when it comes to verbs.
How irregular?

The first thing that people forget is that regularity is not a yes/no question. While the majority of verbs are completely regular, some "irregular" verbs are only slightly irregular.

For example, the conditional and future simple of a Spanish verb are formed by adding a suffix to the infinitive. There are no verbs in the language that are irregular in terms of the suffixes. There are a handful of verbs that don't use the infinitive, instead forming a "future stem" by dropping the vowel from the infinitive ending. But then, is this even an irregularity? The process we're looking at here has a name -- syncope -- and it occurs in other languages. You can argue, then, that these future forms aren't irregular, because they do indeed follow a rule. After all, the 3 major verb groups in Spanish (-ar, -ir, -er) all follow different rules, yet we still refer to "regular" verbs in each "conjugation". So if we make a category of "vowel-dropping verbs", suddenly we find that we've defined the Spanish future as having no irregular verbs whatsoever. At the very least, I would argue that the verbs that undergo syncope are only slightly irregular.

But maybe it's unfair of me to talk about the future stem, because as a rule Spanish stems are far more stable than their counterpoints in Italian and French. In all three languages, the conjugation of "to go" is built on three different Latin roots -- ire, andare, vadare -- making it the single most irregular verb in the language (whereas the most irregular verb in English is be/is/was). But with other irregular verbs, Spanish picks a stem for a tense and runs with it. So while the present tense of "to have" in French and Italian is bisyllabic in the 1st and 2nd plural forms but monosyllabic in the singular forms, both words in Spanish ("tener", lexical verb; "haber", auxiliary verb) stay consistent across all persons, even though these are irregular verbs.

But all in all, we can see that some verbs are more irregular than others.

Introducing...

But if there is a scale of irregularity, what is the extreme of this scale? I'd like to introduce a new term to describe it. I call it...

...Contraregular

There are words out there that completely ignore the rules (eg go -> went), but there are others that go completely against the rules.

For example, nouns ending in -o in Spanish and Italian are masculine, as a rule (rule -- Latin regula -- regular). Yet "mano" (hand) is feminine. It goes completely contrary to the rule, hence "contraregular".

Why is this important?

This goes back to the fundamental nature of irregular forms that I mentioned earlier: they only occur in frequent words or structures. And in fact, the most common items are generally the most irregular.

And what is it that we tend to teach first? That's right, the most frequent words and structures. Hence the most irregular -- including the contraregular.

So in Spanish, you might learn the following within the first hour:
Good morning - Buenos días
Good afternoon/evening - Buenas tardes
Good night - Buenas noches

These are all contraregular -- -es normally marks masculine plural, but tarde and noche are feminine nouns, so the adjectives are marked in feminine plural. -as normally marks the feminine plural, but día is actually masculine, so the adjective is marked in masculine plural.

This isn't that big a deal if you just tell someone about it, but in many classes, you don't -- the student is expected to infer the grammar from examples. If your students are first exposed to counter-examples, to exceptions, how can they generalise? The irregular forms become a blockage, and the students are forced to learn each example as if there were no rules whatsoever.

But even if we do explain, should we be teaching this before we've covered the basics of regular adjectives? I see no reason why we should. There is no proven pedagogical advantage to being able to parrot a few fixed phrases before learning to use the grammar productively. As a practical matter, such greetings may seem immediately useful, but there is no genuine value in being able to say "good morning" when you are otherwise incapable of saying anything in the language. Besides, within a few hours in the classroom, you should be able to get your students to the point where they can construct such phrases themselves with a little bit of guidance.

2011-10-18T15:17:00.001+01:00

An unfunny joke

An Englishman, a German, an American and a guy from Barra walk into a bar. "Tha Gàidhlig cho cudromach," says the Englishman [Gaelic is so important]. "Tha Gàidhlig cho sònraichte," says the German [special]. "Tha Gàidhlig cho breagha," says the American. "I'm going for a slash," says the Barrach.

Not funny at all, I'm sure you'll agree, but you might not fully appreciate just how unfunny it truly is. In order to understand it, though, you need to know that the Barrach is a native-speaking Gael. So why did he speak in English?

It's something linguists like to call "divergence". We use language to indicate social distance from, and proximity to, others. When we speak like someone, we show variously agreement, respect or even affection. I find my accent when speaking any foreign language varies depending on who I'm talking to, as I try to match them (particularly if it's someone I fancy).

The Barrach in the "joke" isn't rejecting Gaelic, then, but is indicating that he doesn't associate himself with the three foreigners.

What we have here is the core paradox of the current Gaelic revival. While everyone says that the goal is for Gaelic to be considered normal in all contexts, the act of attempting to achieve this is actually making Gaelic into a far more self-conscious choice. Gaelic is at risk of developing a sort of "personality" based on the feelings of the loudest advocates of the language, and therefore people who do not identify with this personality will therefore find themselves subconsciously pushing away from the language.

Well, I say "at risk", but I actually think that this is already the case in many parts of Scotland. While not a statistically significant portion of the population, there is a reasonable number of native Gaels in Edinburgh. Yet when there is a Gaelic-related event put on, it's often mostly the learners that turn up. The natives will happily sit and talk to each other in their own language, but Gaelic in a public setting seems to be overly politicised for most to identify with. (The association of Gaelic with nationalism has no real basis in fact - Gaelic is a language and is spoken by people of every political allegiance.)

The problem is that the domain of the well-meaning learner is stretching further and encroaching into the few remaining Gaelic heartlands. Adult learners are gaining ever-increasing air-time on television and radio, as well as positions at all levels of Gaelic education. Even several prominant members of the Scottish Government's Gaelic language agency are adult learners. People are even being encouraged to learn Gaelic in order to teach in Gaelic medium schools, despite it being self-evident that the education available is insufficient to bring anyone close to a near-native model.

It is now often said that Gaelic's future is in the hands of the learners. This is true, but it does not mean what it is supposed to mean. We as learners cannot save Gaelic, but we do have the power to kill it within a generation.

If we want Gaelic to continue, then we must be humble. We must accept that:

we are not "Gaelic speakers", and we never will be;
the books we study do not, in fact, contain "correct" Gaelic, but someone else's guess about what Gaelic is - the natives are the only real model worth following;
Gaelic is not "ours" or "our heritage" - it belongs to the Gaels;
and the most difficult of all: we shouldn't put ourselves forward as representatives of the language, either in a professional or amateur capacity.

In fact, I think it would be far more healthy if no-one even defined themselves as a "Gaelic learner", but instead as a "language learner". Gaelic is a language, just like any other. Learning another language or two will not only help you see this, but it will also actually improve your Gaelic.

2011-10-13T19:27:00.000+01:00

The effects of Michel Thomas in the wider teaching world

It seems like every other post I mention the excellent lecture by Wilfried Decoo On the mortality of language learning methods. So I suppose it's not a surprise to see me bring it up again.

One of Decoo's central points was :

A new method draws its originality and its force from a concept that is stressed above all others. Usually it is an easy to understand concept that speaks to the imagination.

As more and more people bring out products inspired to some degree by Michel Thomas's work and the mist starts to clear, we're starting to see what concepts have been taken from MT to drive the next batch of teaching styles.

There's quite a few floating about now, but as I'm now a professional teacher, I don't feel comfortable discussing them by name.

The general notion that we're getting from all of them suggests that the soundbite for the next generation is something along the lines of:

Learn to form sentences, instead of parroting phrases.

This is a good start. I agree with it 100%. However, once we reduce the whole teaching philosophy to an eight-word phrase, we're in danger of slipping further away from Thomas again.

If you think about it, it's a very broad and vague phrase. It's very easy indeed for anyone to rebrnd their materials to demonstrate how they fulfill this criterion without actually changing anything.

By definition, any tables-and-rules grammar course can claim straight off that it's all about sentence building. But we know that the strict table-based methods are pretty ineffective.

And the phrase-based courses will reassert that they only use the phrases to show you how to form sentences. Changing je voudrais acheter un croissant to je voudrais acheter un stilo is, at least superficially, a form of sentence building.

What I predict happening is that there will be a few more of these "upstart" entries into the market, but that within a few years, all the major publishers will be looking to knock the wind out of their sales by taking the rhetoric of this new movement and applying it to the latest iteration of their material. What we'll be left with won't be much different from what we've had over the last 100 years, but with luck, it will be slightly better.

2011-10-07T11:36:00.000+01:00

I'm back!

Yesterday I finally put an end to my study with the Open University, so I've got a bit more time to think and write about stuff.

I've also just started a full-time university course in Gaelic, and will be supporting myself by teaching various bits and bobs of other languages while I'm here, so it's a good opportunity to look at the classroom from both ends simultaneously.

I've got a lot of stuff sitting in the drafts folder, and a few of them tie neatly into some of my thoughts about the course here, so I should be able to keep the blog regular for a while.

2011-08-24T15:25:00.000+01:00

Mother tongue is mother's milk

I was reading an article on the role of Haitian Creole in the Haitian education system on the BBC news website, and it saddened me a little to see the same old debate that I've seen a thousand times before, and with to see from the comments that people still don't understand it.

The article proposes nothing radical. The proposal is to teach Haitian children to read and write in their own language. In academic terminology, this is "mother tongue initial literacy", and it has been proven time and again to be one of the most effective strategies.

In many, many countries, the establishment has imposed the dominant official language on the education system. Generally the speakers of local or minority languages do badly at school. Traditionally, this was dismissed by claiming that whichever groups was inferior -- remember that not that long ago, many serious scientists tried to define taxonomies of human "races" showing the "deficiencies" of anyone who wasn't in their own demographic. Heck, people in my part of the world used to think having dark skin made someone an animal, and a comodity to be traded for a handful of shiny metal discs!

Thankfully, most intelligent people now accept that intelligence is universal. The apparent differences in intelligence between dark-skinned Africans and light-skinned Europeans are down to the level of development of the education system.

Yet people are still willing to believe that people are in a particular social class because of their intelligence, and are willing to put down failures in education to being "working class". This is inconsistence, because if hereditary differences in intelligence are such a big factor in academic success, surely we have to believe that race is a factor...?

Please listen to the experts!

It's widely established in academic circles that the language of the classroom is a critical factor in success. Being criticised for being "wrong" inhibits children's expressiveness and willingness to contribute. If children don't engage with the class, they don't learn. It's as simple as that.

But people just aren't willing to accept the expert opinion. One of the main flaws of democracy is that experts are outnumbered by ill-informed individuals. As soon as you suggest accepting "how people speak" as a classroom model of language, you're greeted with howls of protest.

If you're talking anout regional varieties of a language, you're accused of "dumbing down", and the other person will rarely see the snobbery inherent in calling someone else's way of speech "dumb". They won't accept that the suggestion comes from rigorous studies, but tell you you're just being a wishy-washy liberal.

The argument is slightly different when you're talking about teaching in a completely different language, although again you're accused of being a wishy-washy liberal. We're asked to believe that eaching someone in their own language is robbing them of the opportunity to learn another, more useful language. By that token, all schools in the world should be teaching English.

But it's not a question of either/or! You can teach both!

Mother tongue as gateway language

I mentioned "initial literacy" earlier. When you learn to read in your native language, you use all your knowledge of the spoken language to help you decode the symbols on the page. Children can often "self-correct" when reading, thanks to their knowledge of sentence structure. The principles of reading can be generalised across languages, so learning to read another language later is actually fairly easy.

But imagine that your first encounter with writing is in a language you don't speak yet. You have no concept of how the words tie together and you're trying to sound out stuff off the page. In the case of Haiti, this is a right pain -- in Haitian, like most creoles, verbs don't conjugate for person (consider a Jamaican Creole speaker saying "me go", "he go", "they go"), whereas in French they do. Worse! - in French several conjugations are written differently but pronounced the same, and the ending -ent for verbs is silent while the ending -ent for adjectives (eg different) is pronounced.

Initial literacy in a foreign language is very, very hard, and a student will probably never master it. People do better at the foreign language if the task complexity is reduced and they're not trying to learn two distinct skills at the same time. The answer is...

The bilingual school

As I said earlier, it's not a question of either/or. The best model of education, according to the experts, is a truly bilingual school. Give initial literacy in the mother tongue, while teaching the new language in the spoken mode. After three years of literacy schooling in one language, you can very quickly teach children literacy in any and all other languages that they speak. It's an established pattern, and as far as I can see, that's pretty much what's being proposed in Haiti.

But I went to an international school, and I'm fluent in [insert language here]

One or two of the comments on the BBC site were of the form above. But the International Schools are far from the norm. On the whole they are expensive elitist schools that pay a lot of money to get well-qualified and very capable native-speakers to travel half-way around the world to teach in them.

This is very different from the situation in Haiti where the teachers themselves are likely to be underpaid native creole-speakers teaching in non-native French. Believe me, this rarely results in fluency. 4 years ago, I was teaching English to teenagers who had been learning English all their school lives from Spanish speakers. Their English was, well, extremely foreign. In fact, you could even describe it as a Spanish-English creole...

Language revitalisation in primary schooling

Of course, Haiti is a place where the local language is strong. What happens where the language is weaker?

This is where I shake my head in disgust. There is a growing demand in minority language communities for immersive education, even where the minority language is not spoken in the home. The only way Scottish Gaelic is offered in primary schools is with the first three years exclusively through the medium of Gaelic, which means for most children, initial literacy is in a non-native language. Ask what's wrong with the internationally-recognised bilingual model, and you'll be told it's not suitable for an endangered language (everyone likes to feel different, after all).

People are also quick to point out that the Scottish model is based on the most popular option in the Basque Country in Spain. But I'd like to point out that the model is popular with the parents, and parents are not experts.

In particular, it's impossible to have a debate with most parents about the effectiveness of the teaching their own children received, because they're already personally invested in the idea that they've given their children the best education possible, and they are averse to even considering that they may have been wrong. You can't use examples of their own children's faults, or they're going to take personal offence, and if you take examples from elsewhere (eg a TV documentary on a Gaelic school) you'll just be told that bad Gaelic's better than no Gaelic at all.

Except that the bilingual model offers the opportunity to learn better Gaelic -- many of the mistakes that kids make in Gaelic-medium classes are caused because the effort of initial literacy distracts them from grammatical accuracy.

But sadly, in education, decisions are made by parents, and most parents really have no idea what education is all about....

2011-08-19T09:45:00.000+01:00

Use of liguistic terminology

(I've been busy this week and didn't have time to finish the promised article on phonology, so here's something that's been sitting in my drafts folder for a while. It's quite relevant now as I've been using a fair bit of jargon of late.)
I've taken a bit of flak on a number of forums for my use of linguistics jargon (particularly when I get it wrong!), so I want to clarify something here: I use jargon to describe what concepts are to be taught (and sometimes how to teach them), but I do not advocate use of jargon itself with beginners, unless they are students of linguistics anyway.

The international standardisation on Latin terminology is quite useful in that I'm now able to discuss linguistics in several different languages. It really impresses people that I can teach them grammar in their own language, but it's little more than a parlour trick. A few regular sound changes and the appropriate suffix and your subjunctive is subjonctif or subjuntivo. It doesn't generally get any harder than the Italians and Germans who call in a congiuntivo and Konjunktiv respectively.

Having studied a lot of grammar, I'm not only comfortable with plain conjunctions, but also with coordinating vs subordinating conjunctions so the terminology is useful to me. (Subordinating conjunctions, see?)

The labels we give language aren't always meaning to the new learner, so don't really help. But in the original Greek and Latin, they were designed specifically to help. Take, for example, Latin's dative case. "Dative" is a Latin adjective (oh look, adjective, another meaningless term!) derived from the word for "giving", and describes one of the fundamental uses of the case: indirect object as recipient or beneficiary.

"Accusative", on the other hand, comes from Greek, where it originally could mean either "for something caused" or "for the accused" (at least according to wikipedia). The Romans picked one translation, and really chose the less useful one, "for the accused", which misleads people even to this day. The accusitive is most commonly used for the direct object, and most "speaking" words use an indirect object for the person you're speaking to, yet the word "accusative" seems to suggest it's to do with speaking.

But not all languages use the Latin system. Basque is a highly inflected language, and their cases are simply named by inflecting the word "who?" Basque can do this very neatly due to it's nature, and while it isn't as neat in English, you could still name cases similarly. Have a look at these and tell me that they are descriptive mnemonic labels:

who-did | who-done-to | where-to | where-from | who-to | who-from

True, such a description could become quite long or complex for certain languages, but it's still better than trying to remember things by such meaningless terms as alative and ablative (two words which are very easily confused -- they fit all three of my categories of confusion: similar form, similar usage, and frequent co-occurrence.

The same goes for sounds. If you want to talk about a "bilabial unvoiced aspirated plosive", just say P. If you trying to get a student to pronounce a "bilabial unvoiced unaspirated plosive", you just need to get the student to pronounce an "unaspirated P". However, you don't need the word "unaspirated", but you do need the concept of aspiration. Call it the "puffiness" of a sound, call it the "breathiness"... what you call it isn't important as long as you teach the difference. If you want, you can even call it "aspiration", but there's no point introducing the term until after the student is relatively comfortable with the concept. In fact, it is probably counter-productive to introduce the term "aspiration" too early, because it means something completely unrelated in colloquial English (related to goals and ambition). Hearing a word automatically evokes its meaning, so the old meaning will interfere with learning the new concept.

So if I use terminology in this blog, it isn't my personal seal of approval on its use -- it's a concession to its current use in expert circles. I don't think it's of practical use for beginners.

A concession to reality

On the other hand, if your students are going to be going out into the big wide world without you and are going to be relying on reference books to continue, then yes, they're going to need the terminology. So teach it. But look again at what I wrote about "aspiration", because again you really need to teach the concept before the word. A word is a label for a meaningful "thing", whether a physical item, a phenomenon or just an abstract concept. How are we supposed to learn words if we don't yet know what that "thing" is? A word learned without meaning goes against the whole idea of language. It's a disordered state, and once the student is in a disordered state, the teacher has lost control.

A massive change of opinion

Isn't it interesting how quickly you can change your own opinion by reasoning something through? In the course of writing this post my own view of linguistic terminology has gone from "vehemently against" to "neutral-to-slightly-for". I was always against it as I felt it was meaningless to the learner, but in talking about teaching the term after the concept, I realised that taught that way, it isn't meaningless at all. I'd still prefer a more intuitive terminology, but maybe the old stuff isn't as big a problem as I thought....

2011-08-14T11:10:00.000+01:00

Phonology -- whats and hows part II

Last time, I wrote about phonology and the necessity of physically training the tongue to produce new sounds. However, as I pointed out, not all new phonemes require new physical skills. Can we pick these up just by listening? I think not, and I'd be happy to tell you how.

Meaningful sounds

The problem that I'm always trying to stress is that the brain is only interested in meaningful input -- if something has no meaning, the brain isn't interested.

This leads to some striking (and often unexpected) results. The BBC documentary Horizon showed this with colours in the programme Do You See What I See? (UK only). In the program, you see several Himba tribespeople trying to pick out different colours on a computer screen. The show two tests -- one with a very slightly different green, which is difficult for the viewer and fairly easy for the Himba, and one with an obviously different colour... well, obvious to us, but not to the Himba.

The distinctions that the Himba find easy are ones that they have names for, and the distinctions we find easy are the ones we have names for. It would appear that the act of naming something focuses the consciousness on it, so if you tell me that a French P has a puffy sound, I'm more likely to notice it, because I know what I'm looking for.

Consider the old face/vase optical illusion: the first time you look at it, you see either the faces or the vase, and your brain fixates on that single image. If someone else tells you about the other picture, you struggle to see it at first, because your brain already sees something meaningful in the image. But once your brain finally sees the second image, you can change your mental focus between the two meaningful images at will.

But that example doesn't say much about subjectivity and objectivity, because the two objects are fairly arbitrary. A better example would be one where you can predict what the viewer will see based on simple demographic information. Maybe adults vs children, like this painting, where adults immediately see a particular image and children see a different one. (View the picture, and then read the explanation on the page. I saw the second picture without reading the explanation, but only because I could understand the French label on the bottle....)

So what is meaningful to us is normally a matter of past experience and expectation. When it comes to meaningful sounds, past experience and expectation all comes from the languages we already speak. So it would follow that we need to consciously draw the student's attention to the differences, or they're just not likely to notice them.

What do we need to draw their attention to?

The phoneme is not the minimal unit of sound

The phoneme is often mistakenly considered the atomic unit of pronunciation in a language, but most languages build their phonemes out of a series of distinctions, in a fairly systematic manner.

In English, for example, we have voicing of consonants as a distinction, and it occurs pretty much wherever it can. Voicing is the difference between P & B (at the front of the mouth), T & D (in the middle) and C/K & G (at the back). We also have nasalisation, which takes those three pairs and gives us the sounds M, N and NG. It's a stable and systematic structure.

There are other languages (EG Gaelic) where the distinction between P & B is not one of voicing, but aspiration. The same distinction carries through for P&B and T&D. In fact, it's hard to find any language that has a voicing distinction on one of those pairs, but makes a distinction in aspiration -- in general, the same distinction carries through.

Polish gives a great example of how regular these consonant distinctions can be.

In the diagram above, you can see a clear structure uniting 12 sounds in 3 distinctions (two 2-way distinctions, one 3-way distinction). It's almost entirely systematic -- this cannot happen by accident, so we must assume that the native speaker's internal model of language acts on the level of these distinctions.

For this reason, I believe that it is not enough to draw the learner's attention to an individual phoneme, but that we must teach them the individual distinctions.

This doesn't have to be done in a dry "linguistics" way, though.

Teach once, then repeat

When teaching a phonemic distinction like voicing or aspiration, you don't need to start with the idea in the abstract. Instead, you can start by teaching the pronunciation of one letter, then its contrast (eg P first, then B). In teaching the contrast, you pick a word that describes it ("puffiness" or "breathiness" is more meaningful than "aspiration") or you just describe it. Then when you move onto the next pair (T,D), you can refer back to the first pair, because it's the same difference. And once you get to the final pair (K,G), it'll be very easy to do.

Of course, this means that you have to restrict the number of phonemes to start off with, but there are many people who are theoretically in favour of gradually introducing phonemes -- it's just the order of material that messes them up.

Teaching one thing at a time

Most teachers like to start with seemingly useful words and phrases. Hello, how are you, goodbye -- that sort of thing. This takes away the teacher's control over the phonemes -- teachers don't choose them, they just use whichever ones pop up.

Worse, quite a lot of teachers will introduce numbers early on, and in many languages you'll have encountered half of the phonemes of the language by the time you reach ten. (This probably isn't an accident -- ambiguity in numbers would be a problem, so they naturally evolve to be fairly different.)

One commercial course points out this problem, and suggests that the way round it is to teach numbers one at a time, in a way which supports a progressive increase in the number of phonemes. The example they used was 10 and 100 in Spanish: diez and cien. These two words share all but one phoneme (C before I or E is pronounced the same as Z in Spanish), so if you teach one then the other, you're only introducing one phoneme the second time round.
(I think I remember which course this was, but the blurb on the website no longer mentions this, so I'm not going to link to it.)

And after all, why should we teach numbers in numerical order in a second language? When teaching children numbers in their first language, we're teaching both the concepts and the words, but in a second language you're only teaching the words, because they've already got the appropriate concepts to peg them to. We can now selectively use any of those pegs we want to, in any order we want to.

Putting it together

So if we teach a couple of consonants well, and then we introduce new consonants one by one, we can use the earlier consonants as an anchor to show repeated distinctions. It doesn't matter whether the student can consciously remember what those distinctions were -- a native speaker normally wouldn't have a clue. What matters is that the model the student uses automatically for pronunciation implicitly respects the consistent rules of the language.

This will not happen if the student is left to listen, because one misheard phoneme can threaten the integrity of the entire structure -- pull any one of the sounds out of my neat little Polish diagram and dump it somewhere else and the whole thing will collapse.

Next time

Previously I spoke about sounds as new muscle movements, today I spoke about simply the meaning of sounds. Next time, I'd like to demonstrate how almost all new sounds really are new physical movements anyway.

2011-08-10T12:41:00.000+01:00

Phonology -- whats and hows

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the importance of phonology, trying to demonstrate why it should be consciously dealt with in the teaching/learning process, but I took the decision not to include any comments on how to teach it in that article. Basically, I didn't want to give anyone any grounds to reject my argument out-of-hand. In this post, I'd like to cover how I believe it should be taught, but remember that this, the how, doesn't affect my argument on the importance, the why. Reject my methods if you want, but please don't reject phonology as an area of study.

So, what did I establish in the previous post?

Incorrect pronunciation of an individual phoneme leads to problems in pronouncing clusters with that phoneme.
Problems in pronouncing certain sequences of phonemes lead to grammatical errors.
That vocabulary is harder to learn when you're not familiar with the rules of pronunciation in a language.
That not understanding target language phoneme boundaries makes it hard to understand native speakers.
That sounds that the learner drops in speech are often matched by a dropping of the corresponding letters in writing.

These are things that I have observed and do not see as particularly controversial. And yet, my conclusion that pronunciation requires active instruction is rejected by many teachers. Accent, they say, will take care of itself. And accent, they say, is a personal thing. But we're not talking about accent. Accent is something that is layered on top of phonology. Phonology is like the basic letter forms in writing, accent is more like individual differences in handwriting. At school we are taught initially to get the basic forms right, and over the years we develop our own personal "hand".

Can we learn pronunciation from listening?

Some even argue that we learn pronunciation from hearing (and they sometimes add "just like children"). However, as I tried to demonstrate in my recent post receptive skills as a reflective act, there is good reason to believe that we understand language by comparison to our own internal model of the language. In the follow-up post, I gave a concrete example of mishearing a word on Italian radio, and how my flawed internal model was good enough to understand the message without perceiving every sound.

OK, so that's anecdotal and doesn't prove a general case, but ask yourself this: how many different accents can you understand in your own language? And how many of those accents can you speak in?

So you can see that simple exposure hasn't given you extra accents. As I said above, accent is not phonology. But our brains have learned to ignore accental differences (to an extent) to enable us to understand the widest possible number of people around us. So if our brain assumes a different phonology is just a different accent, it throws away all the information you're supposed to be learning from.

So I really don't believe it's possible to learn from "just listening", no matter how much you do.

Motherese and exaggeration

Here's the outcome of an interesting study (YouTube video). It turns out that when we teach kids to speak, we don't expect them to learn from natural speech, but we exaggerate our phonemes, effectively making them "more real than real" or "whiter than white". And if you think about it, isn't this what we do when speaking to foreigners or people with a very different accent from ours?

The point is that we have to make the differences clear and noticeable, so that one phoneme doesn't blend into another.

I would suggest that this points towards the right answer in language teaching to adults: if even children (who have no preconceptions of what a phoneme is) need extra emphasis to understand the difference between similar phonemes, then us adults (who are biased towards our native language's phonology) really could do with a bit of help. The brain has to be told that this new information is useful, or it will throw it all away.

Exaggeration of pronunciation appears to help the listener notice the differences.

Learning pronunciation through pronouncing

However, we learn to dance by dancing, and we learn to drive by driving. In both cases we can pick up a few hints and tips from watching, but we need a heck of a lot of practice. Why shouldn't this be the case with language?

People are very quick to tell me that language is different from every other skill. That is a valid opinion, but it is still only an opinion - no-one has ever presented anything to me that demonstrates it to be true, or even likely. Right now, it's just a theory... and it's one I do not believe.

To me, pronunciation is a muscle skill. Let's consider some of the extremes sounds that don't occur in English.

Take retroflex consonants. Retro - backwards; flex - bend. In retroflex consonants, your tongue bends backwards, and the tip goes behind the alveolar ridge. This type of sound doesn't occur in English, so a monolingual English-speaker will probably never produce this sound in his life. If you ask such a person to put their tongue into that position, they won't be able to -- their tongue just can't bend that way.

But then your average person couldn't do yoga postures on a first attempt either -- the yoga teacher will lead them through some simple postures and exercises to encourage the muscles to stretch and strengthen appropriately until they are capable of performing the required movements.

The brain doesn't prepare the muscles just because you've seen the movements; the body prepares the muscles once you've started doing the movements. Your brain similarly cannot train the tongue as it's just another muscle, after all -- only the body can do that.

So clearly, there are certain sounds that must be taught consciously, or the learner won't physically be able to say it. But obviously there are also sounds that the learner is physically capable of saying, but isn't in the habit of saying.

This post is starting to get a bit on the long side, so I'll come back to the question of this second category of sounds next time.

How I learned to pronounce retroflex consonants

I had a notion to learn a few words in various Indian languages a few years ago when I was working in IT support. Our front-line helpdesk was in India and I wanted to try to build a better rapport with my coworkers.

One of the sources I used stated quite plainly that while languages like French and Spanish let you get away with "close enough" pronunciation (not entirely true...) with Hindi, you would simply not be understood if you spoke in an English-speaker's accent. It described the retroflex articulation and what I did was to start doing a regime of "tongue stretches" -- as I walked to and from work, I would tap my tongue continually off the roof of my mouth, and move it slowly backwards and forwards, to create a sort of silent T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t or D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Every day I could reach slightly further back, and in about a week and a half I was able to produce a convincingly Hindi-like retroflex for all of the various consonants (except R, cos that's really quite complicated). I was curious about how far I could go, and within another few days I'd got to the point where I could touch the tip of my tongue to my soft palate.

So certain sounds need to be learned physically, and it's something that can be done. Next time, I'll start looking at sounds that are more a matter of habit, and showing that the boundary between "habit" and "ability" isn't always that clear.

2011-08-04T10:43:00.000+01:00

The wolf in the forest

"Be careful in the forest -- there are wolves in there."

"Nonsense. I go through the forest every day and I have never been attacked."

As fallacies go, this one's pretty clear. Something does not have to occur to everyone every time in order to be a danger. Knowing that there's a wolf in the forest, the second traveller should alter his behaviour to minimise the risk. Carry a weapon, sleep next to a fire, the usual stuff.

When it comes to language learning, though, people do tend to take the attitude of the second traveller. Point out any of the potential pitfalls in a language learning strategy, and the other person will usually accuse you of talking out of your hat, and point out that he learned OK that way, or that some of his students did.

But just as one man emerging safe and sound from the forest doesn't disprove the presence of wolves, the success of one or two language learners doesn't demonstrate a lack of potential pitfalls in the methodology they employed.

People tend to have a hard time accepting this, though. I point out a pitfall, and they declare it isn't a problem. "And I'm living proof." When I try to point out the fallacy, I'm often accused of disrespecting their experience. No no no. I respect and acknowledge their experience, but my point is that there is more in the world than one man can experience. Our capacity for reason allows us to go beyond our experience, and we should take full advantage of that. We should not limit ourselves to our own experience, and we certainly shouldn't limit others to it either. We need to reconcile our experiences with the knowledge of others, and thereby remove the pitfalls and reduce the risks before giving advice to others.

Please.

2011-07-31T22:19:00.000+01:00

Common Errors: further evidence for the prosecution

I argued in two previous posts (here and here)that the so-called "common error" of should of, could of etc is actually a change in the grammar of English and today I came upon some very good supporting evidence.

And yet companies are constantly being sued over patents which are so broad or trivial they should've never been granted in the first place. [ Slashdot ]

There we have verb verb adverb(time) past-participle. The adverb is after two verbs... that can't be right. I mean, I will never do, I would never do, etc.

And if you have a look at Jane Austen's Emma on Project Gutenberg, you'll find that "have never" only occurs in the present perfect, and that when using other compound tenses, "never" goes between the first auxiliary and have.

If we can say I would've never known, then surely would've is now a single word in the internal model of a great many native speakers...?

2011-07-29T15:28:00.000+01:00

The importance of phonology

OK, so I promised this a while ago, and I've let myself get distracted by a few other points in the interim, but I'll try to draw them in and show how they are related to the teaching of phonology in general.

In my posts 4 skills safe and 3 skills safe, I argued that the division of language teaching into the traditional 4 skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening was trivial, superficial and of very little pedagogic value. Instead, I suggested that we should look at individual skills of syntax, morphology and phonology, and that we could add orthography as an additional, more abstract skill (Lev Vygotsky described reading and writing as "second-order abstractions").

Phonology often gets very little attention in the classroom, as it is seen as a sub-skill of speaking, and speaking's "difficult". But phonology is fundamental to many languages.

If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at my posts In language, there's no such thing as a common error, and Common errors: My mistake! In the first post I described a particular common error in written English (might of instead of might have, could of instead of could have etc) and in the second I expanded on the mechanisms that cause this "error", with the aim of showing that this wasn't an "error", but in fact a change in grammar, analogous to changes that have occurred in other languages. What I didn't focus on there, but which is extremely relevant here, is that this change in grammar is pronunciation-led -- ie the phonology of English has caused this change in grammar. The prosody of English has led to 've being always weak, and it has lost the link to the related strong form have.

And of course the change in the Romance languages that I mentioned in the second post is also led by phonological patterns. If you look at any language whatsoever, many grammatical rules have arisen from mere matters of pronunciation.

The archetypal example is the English indefinite article -- a/an. You may well be aware that like most other Indo-European languages in western Europe, this evolved out of the same root as the number one. But the modern number one is a strong form and has a diphthong. A/an is a clitic and always weak, so split off (completely analogous to 've and have). This weak word /ən/ then lost its [n] before consonants, simply because it's easier to say that way, and retained it before vowels again because it's easier to say like that. (And if you'll indulge a slight digression, that brings us back to would've etc, because you'll often hear woulda before a consonant and would've before a vowel.)

If you look at the Celtic languages, one of the trickiest parts of the grammar is the idea of initial vowel mutations. Lenition in Modern Irish is a bit inconsistent (probably due to the relatively large number of school-taught speakers against native speakers), but the three mutations in Welsh are fairly systematic, with mutated forms usually only differing from the radical in one "dimension" of pronunciation.

These sorts of rules become very arbitrary and complex when described purely in terms of grammar, whereas when considered physically, they make a lot more sense.

Let's go back to a/an and take a closer look. We all know the rule: a before a consonant, an before a vowel, right? Wrong! It's actually: a before a consonant phoneme, an before a vowel phoneme. To see the difference between the two, fill in the following blanks with a or an:

I want __ biscuit.
I need __ explanation.
He is __ honest man.
I have __ university degree.

Now it's not a difficult task for a native speaker, because you wouldn't normally have to think about it: honest may start with the letter H, but you know intuitively that you don't pronounce it, so you write an without thinking. Similary, university may start with the letter U, but you know intuitively that it starts with a y-glide sound (like "yoo", not "oo"), so you write a.

I have seen quite a few English learners write "an university" or "a honest man" because they are either trying to work from a grammatical rule in isolation from pronunciation, or because they simply pronounce these words wrong. In the case of honest, the problem is compounded if the student can't pronounce H, because if he follows the rule correctly on paper, he undermines the phonological basis for the true rule.

It follows, then, that we cannot teach grammar without considering phonology. (And anyone who has succeeded in understanding the French liaison rules can tell you categorically that this is true.)

But how does phonology affect us in other ways?

Phonology and the ease of vocabulary learning

It may seem trivial, but for his PhD thesis, an Australian teacher of Russian demonstrated that it is easier to learn foreign words that are possible in your native language than ones that aren't. EG the word brobling with first-syllable stress is easy, brobling with second-syllable stress is a bit harder, grtarstlbing with lots of consonant clusters that can't occur in English is very difficult. He then took a massive leap of logic that I'll examine later in greater depth.

This corresponds with what a lot of teachers believe, but few teachers have the time or patience to implement: that it's easier to teach phonemes one at a time and reuse them in different words. Again I'll come back to that when I start discussing techniques.

For now, though, I'll simply suggest that it's easier to learn words that are made out of familiar "blocks" than ones that aren't. It follows from this that good teaching of phonetics (whatever that means) is a prerequisite to vocabulary learning.

Phonotactics: the "crisps" problem

My high school had an exchange programme running with a school in France. Teenagers are naturally curious beasts, and when my big brother and sister first went on one of these exchanges, the class discovered how funny it was to get the French people to say crisps (UK English for what the French and Americans call chips). Very few of the French kids could actually pronounce it, because they were using French phonemes with a northern accent (the school was near Lille). The French P is unaspirated (unlike English) and the French S is quite slender and hissy. As a combination of sounds, French SPS is difficult, nearly impossible -- the P either gets lost in the hiss or one of the Ses gets cut short. The English combination is physically much easier.

Similar problems occur in other places. Spanish people find wants quite difficult to say, because Spanish T is not compatible with Spanish N or S due to the method of articulation. NTS in Spanish needs the tip of the tongue to be in two different places at once -- the alveolar ridge for N and S and the gumline for T.

The problem is that many books will tell us that T, D, B, P etc are sufficiently similar in English and Spanish, French or whatever that we can use them equivalently, but this is only true for each phoneme in isolation. Once we start trying to combine them, the differences start to accumulate.

Which brings us back to:

Grammar again - and how writing suffers for it

If you cannot pronounce the inflectional affixes in a language, your grammar suffers. Many, many Spanish learners of English drop their -s and -ed suffixes because of the problems of incompatible sounds. They replace it's with is. These mistakes filter through from their pronunciation into their internal model of grammar and eventually into their writing. But it's easy to ignore this, because most of the time they correct their own writing mistakes with their declarative knowledge, and on the few occassions where they don't correct it, the teacher simply tells them the rule again, but never attacks the root cause of the problem: if they learned to pronounce English [t] and [d] phonemes, most of the difficult sound combinations would become much, much easier, their internal model of the grammar would be built up to incorporate these non-syllabic morphemes (and there are no non-syllabic morphemes in Spanish as far as I know, so it's a totally new concept to them) and they would write natural based on their procedural knowledge of the grammar..

And finally...
Allophones and comprehension

Apparently there are certain accents that are considered "hard" in some languages. Now I'm not implying that there is no such thing as a hard accent, but I do believe that most of the difficulties stem from the teaching, not from the language.

In Spain, the accent of Madrid is considered quite difficult to understand. The reason for this is that the madrileño accent tends to lenite (weaken or soften) its non-intervocalic consonants. The classic is the weaking of D to /ð/ (roughly equivalent to TH of then). There is little physical similarity between the English D and ð as is clear from their technical descriptions: /d/ - voiced alveolar plosive; /ð/ - voiced dental fricative. But the Spanish /d/ is a voiced dental plosive, which the description shows is quite similar to /ð/. Basically, the soft D in Madrid is basically an incomplete hard D -- the tongue doesn't quite go far enough to touch the teeth and stop the sound, but instead it hisses slightly.

Now, if understanding language is a reflective act (as I claim here and here) then we understand sounds by considering what shape our mouths would be in if we were to make the sound we hear (something suggested by the concept of mirror neurons). The soft and hard Ds in Spanish are not "soundalike" allophones at all, but they have a similar shape, which is different from the English D. To me it seems clear that physically learning the Spanish hard D shape would result in better comprehension of the similarly shaped soft D in a way that simple hearing it won't accomplish.

Conclusion

All in all, it seems to me that phonology is an intrinsic component of language, and that the system of a language falls apart when phonology is not given the proper support throughout the learning process.

As for how to teach phonology, I have my own views, but I'm currently reading up on some alternative opinions so as to give a more balanced write-up of the options available.

2011-07-26T18:52:00.000+01:00

Common Errors: my mistake!

Hmmm... I should maybe reread my posts more before publishing, because in another article I said "we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it" and then forgot to describe the process in any detail.

Because even though the solution I proposed was to legitimise the writing of contractions, this is not the internal process causing the change. If the average speaker's internal model saw 've as a contraction of have, then no-one would make the 'mistake' of using of instead.

Put it this way: the "error" only occurs when have is used as a second auxiliary -- no-one would say *I of done it in place of I've done it/I have done it, for example.

So it would appear that here we have ceased to think of 've as an verb at all, let alone an infinitive. At best it is a clitic that modifies the first auxiliary to make it part of the perfect construction, but in fact it would appear to me to be in reality a new suffix, because I cannot see any situation where you could syntactically separate 've from the first auxiliary.

What we see here is English gaining a new fusional feature, and while English has displayed a tendency to become more isolating over the centuries, it isn't unknown for a language to pick up new fusional elements even when the general tendencies is towards isolation.

Consider, Latin vs the Western Romance language family.

Latin was a highly fusional language, and relied on very few periphrastic constructions. However, the future was a periphrastic form, consisting of the verb in the infinitive followed by the present indicative of to have -- so I will do was literally formed as to-do I-have.

Most members of the Western Romance family has lost a lot of the fusional features of Latin, but at the same time, the future has mutated into an inflected tense, with suffixes derived from (and in some cases identical to) the present tense of to have added to a future root that is almost identical to the infinitive.

Note that the creation of these new suffixes didn't alter the present tense of to have in any other constructions, even though in the early stages of this change, grammarians would most likely have declared that it was "obvious" that they were the same thing, and lamented the "common error" of people saying nous le ferons instead of the previous nous le faire avons. But today, the latter looks so unnatural that it would not be understood except by a scholar.

This is analogous to what I believe is happening in English. One particular usage of the verb to have is becoming replaced with a suffix derived from, but not identical to, a form of the verb. However much the status quo appears more logical, the frequency of occurrence of the "of" error (Google "would of", "could of" etc, and you get millions upon millions of hits) tells us that people's brains just don't work that way.

You cannot rewrite how people pick up their native language. People seem to pick up 've as a suffix, not an infinitive, so it's time to stop resisting. While it would be natural for a suffix to be incorporated into the word without the apostrophe, that would be a step too far for most pedants, and even besides that would be a fairly radical change that would take a bit of getting used to.

So I advocate using the contraction notation for now, but recognising that it has now ceased to be a contraction in the mind of the native speaker.

2011-07-24T12:27:00.000+01:00

Another example of language as a reflective act

On Thursday I was maybe even more unfocused than usual, thanks to a very sore hand, but I hope I made a clear enough point.

I tried to show that when we recieve language, our perception is affected by what we expect to hear. Unfortunately I only had examples from the written mode, because it's impossible to see into someone else's head and hear their perception of spoken language.

Well, chance has smiled upon me and given me a spoken example just in the nick of time. I've often regretted not getting good at Italian -- it's a language I feel like I should know already, but it's so difficult for me to use it at full speed. I decided recently that I should dedicate a bit more time to it.

And so it happened that this morning I was listening to an Italian radio station on-line, and not understanding hellish much of it, but catching the odd word. One word I heard was obviamente... but there's no such word in Italian! The guy on the radio had actually said ovviamente, and on a pure physical sound level that is what I heard, but my immediate subconscious reaction was to here the more familiar BV consonant cluster -- ovviamente is Italian for obviously, after all.

This presumably worked so smoothly because of Italian's consonant gemination -- consonants written double are lengthened. This doesn't happen in English, so it makes no automatic sense to my brain. It also meant that there was time in the word for the B that my brain felt was missing.

My brain altered the received input to give perceived input that matched my internal model, so I have to work on improving the internal model rather then simply receiving more input.

2011-07-23T20:55:00.000+01:00

In language, there's no such thing as a common error

This is a statement mired in controversy. It wasn't me that first said it, but I agree with it... with one caveat: we're talking about native language.

For many, many years, grammarians and school teachers would hound us for saying things wrong. As a child, I was constantly "corrected" by my mother for asking for permission with Can I...? instead of Please may I...? or for saying if I was you... in place of if I were you....

So when I studied English at university it was very heartening to find that modern linguistics considers everything that is said by a sizable chunk of the population as acceptable language. And of course this includes both Can I...? and if I was you....

What triggered this post was seeing an article on the Register about a grammatical error in a BBC headline: Phone-hacking: the other news you might of missed.

This is one of those "errors" that's now common enough and consistent enough that we may have to stop calling it an error.

When I suggest this, people often recoil in horror. "But it's the perfect tense," they cry, "logically it must be have." (And yes - I know that perfect is an aspect, not a tense, but pointing that out at this point would seem like cheap point-scoring so I generally let it lie.) But since when was language logical? You must and You have to are logically equivalent in some usage, but when you negate them you get two very different things: you mustn't and you don't have to.

The thing is, logic aside, we have empirical evidence that shows people's brains don't see it as have -- the errors themselves stand as proof of an emerging norm. Rather than fretting about the logic of have=perfect, we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it.

This does not mean that we have to accept might of, could of etc. No, because there is an existing mechanism that rids us of this problem: contractions.

Contractions are mostly hated by our schoolroom English teachers, but they are gaining growing acceptance. We're allowed can't now, where my primary school teacher insisted on cannot, and even I'm where my teacher insisted on I am. Yet we're still told off by teachers and editors if we try to use could've or coulda, should've or shoulda, might've or mighta. But these are what we say. Our habits of speaking have gradually reduced the auxiliary have to something more of a fusional element, a suffix, than a word. It is only when a writer is expected to write "in full words" that might've becomes might of, so why not simply accept might've? It would eliminate both the error and the controversy, and would say several pedants a few more grey hairs....

2011-07-21T14:20:00.000+01:00

Receptive skills as a reflective act

I'm not feeling my usual self this week. I've got an infection under a fingernail, so it's a bit sore to type, which makes it hard to concentrate. It's leading to silly mistakes in everything I do, so I'm going to avoid the complex topic I'd planned to write about this week (phonology) and stick to something a bit less involved.

A couple of weeks ago, in my post 4 skills safe, I suggested that the comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that we understand by considering what would cause us to say the sentence we've just heard or read.

Now, I mentioned mirror neuron theory, and my Dad said to me at the weekend "you'd better have a better explanation than that." My Dad taught in a high school up until retiring, and one constant throughout his career was that new teaching fashions would always be justified by the latest idea from psychology, but that it was all theory, no practice.

Now I can't offer anything in the way of empirical research, only anecdote. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes that I offer will be universal enough that other teachers will see the same phenomena occurring in their own students.

Let's just briefly revisit what I said last time (minus the bit about mirror neurons):

People often finish each other's sentences. To do so they must be actively constructing the utterance as they go.
People often mistakenly say that they've said something, when actually it was someone else who said it, and they only heard it. So we identify very closely with sentences we hear (and agree with), suggesting a very close link between the mental process behind listening and that of speaking.
There exists a (fairly harmless) neurological disorder which causes someone's lip to tremble when they're being spoken to, and they often echo the last word of your sentences (often suffixed with "uh-huh" for assent). For these people merely listening activates the physical speech organs.

OK, so now let's move to anecdote.

Last night, I was at a language exchange (Spanish and English). I was talking to a young woman called Cristina who I've spoken to on several occasions. At one point she was concentrating so hard on what I was saying (in English) that she actually started mouthing the words. Not the trembling lip of the neurological condition I mentioned before, she was literally mouthing the words. It was a conscious act.

Now let's contrast this with reading, because I think reading aloud offers the best indication of language as reflection.

The first time I really noticed this was with a student in San Sebastian back in 2007. Most of his peers read robotically when asked to read aloud -- What - I - Mean - Is - That -They - Would - Pronounce - Each - Word - Dist - inc - tly - And - Careful - ly. This guy was different. He spoke with natural flow and good intonation... but he didn't read what was on the page. Specifically, he got his prepositions wrong. Not wrong in a random way, though -- he simply substituted the preposition he would use for the word on the page.

Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone -- studies of native language reading have established that most prepositions (and in fact many function words) aren't actually "read" by fluent readers. Instead, the brain simply notices a "small word" and works it out from the context.

I've since seen multiple variations on this theme -- I had one student who kept reading "attitude" as the Spanish "actitud" with the English stress pattern imposed on it ("áctitud" or "acteetood", more or less), and one who adds an S to "sort of thing", to match the pluralisation of the Spanish phrase "tipo de cosas".

But this is reading, and as I said last week, that's not a core language skill (incidentally, since then I've found that Lev Vygotsky described speaking and reading as "second-order abstractions" -- I wish I'd had that quote when I wrote the post). However, it does demonstrate how much preconceptions can affect our perceptions.

So will this hold in the spoken mode?

First, consider that language generally has a high degree of redundancy. Even if a noise obscures part of a sentence, you often still manage to understand the sentence. If you compare "attitude" with "áctitud", in my accent there are three perceptible differences: English has the C, the schwa in the middle syllable (possibly i-schwa), and the Y-glide in the final syllable. In many accents (mostly American), there isn't even a Y-glide, so there's only two differences. There is no other word that similar, so the "filter of perception" will probably let it through without really caring about the differences.

The same goes for the "sort of things". If a Spanish person understands me when I say "sort of thing", I cannot take it as granted that he perceived it without an erroneous final S. His brain may simply have assumed it is missing. This is a particular issue for Spanish, as in some dialects, a final -S may be dropped completely*, so it would be very easy for a Spanish speaker to percieve the word "thing" as "things" if context suggested this.

What are the consequences for the teacher or learner?

Assuming this is true (and I accept that many readers will believe otherwise), the consequences are pretty profound. If our perception of received input is altered to match our existing internal model of language, then no amount of input alone will lead to perfection in a language. The internal model can only be rebuilt by some directed process.

The success of some students in "silent period"-style environments doesn't disprove this - such a student may well have succeeded through an active analysis of the input, rather than simply through the sheer volume of input.

* This is less common than many Spanish speakers think. Most "dropped Ses" are in fact [s] phonemes realised by an aspirant allophone (/h/) or a hiatus. And here again the filter of perception comes into play -- there is no [h] phoneme in Spanish, so even some native speakers don't seem to notice the /h/ sound in something like "rastos" (=rahhtohh) and appear unable to distinguish it from "rato"

2011-07-15T18:00:00.012+01:00

False Etymologies and Prescriptivism
Q: When is an error not an error?

A: When it's a fixed phrase.

My mother has a bit of a tendency towards linguistic prescriptivism: in her mind, some things are wrong and some things are right. Like most of us, she can find sufficient justication.

One of her pet hates is the phrase "moment in time". To her, this is very wrong, because it's tautologous. What other type of moment can there be, after all?

Well, I just happened to read Prisoner of Zenda this year, as I thought it was on the reading list for the Cambridge exam First Certificate of English which several of my current students were intending to take. (Special thanks to About.com for having an out-of-date and undated list of books....)

The first chapter ends as follows:

"Colour in a man," said I, "is a matter of no more moment than that!"—and I gave her something of no value.

"God send the kitchen door be shut!" said she.

"Amen!" said I, and left her.

In fact, however, as I now know, colour is sometimes of considerable moment to a man.

Clearly, "moment" here is nothing to do with time. I figure that this sense of "moment" must be the root of the word "momentous", meaning very important. Even though this sense of the word is now dead in common speech, "moment in time" has survived as a fixed phrase, so it is difficult to justify it as "wrong". (See also "moment of inertia" in physics.)

Another thing my mother objects to quite strongly is the word "bloody", and the history of this one is quite fascinating. Somebody somewhere along the line basically decided that the word was offensive (well, it has to be, doesn't it? Common people use it!) and then looked for why it was offensive. From there came the bizarre myth that it was swearing in the name of Mary, Jesus's mother in the High Christian traditions, and anyone who subscribes to a high church religion would consider that a very bad thing indeed, because Mary typifies virtue and purity. The trouble is, there is no attested process by which "by Our Lady" would mutuate into "bloody". And even more damning -- I'm told that other Germanic languages use (or used to, at the very least) cognates exactly like we use "bloody": both as a descriptive adjective (that shirt is very bloody) and as an intensifier (that bloody shirt is bloody awful).

Quite often, these days you'll hear UK English speakers decrying "Americanisms" creeping into the language on this side of the Atlantic, but very often when you look at the historical records and listen to old recordings you'll discover that these so-called Americanisms have been alive and well in the UK for centuries. Many of them are actually Scotticisms, borrowed into English in the US by Scots-speaking immigrant communities. Many others are simply dialectal variation within England. And a surprising number of them are in fact the most common form in use in the UK.

Denouncing another native speaker's language as "wrong" is very dangerous, because if you're the one who is wrong, you leave yourself looking like a prat. And no-one wants to look like a prat.

2011-07-14T21:11:00.000+01:00

3 Skills Safe

Last week, I discussed the traditional "4 skills" of language teaching: speaking, listening, reading and writing. I presented a different set of four skills: syntax, morphology, phonology and orthography. I then set about showing why the skill of syntax demonstrates the problems caused by the traditional model, and then went into a quite extreme theory expanding on this. This time, I'm going to focus on orthography and phonology.

Actually, I lied first time round. I said:

two of the skills are common to both the spoken and the written mode.

In fact, as far as I'm aware, three of the skills are common to both the spoken and written mode.

Centuries ago, people couldn't read quietly. According to QI and my good friend the internet, there is a historical record of the first man known to be able to read without moving his lips: Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397AD). Nowadays, it's not a particularly notable skill -- in fact, we use the idea of not being able to read without moving your lips as a way of insulting someone's intelligence. Most people today would swear that when they read, their brains are silent. Neurolinguists suggest otherwise.

Modern brain scanners are incredibly sensitive machines that can detect activity in any part of the brain, and last I'd heard, no-one had been found whose auditory functions weren't activated by reading -- ie. all reading seems to be translated into sound in order to be understood, whether we're aware of it or not.

And that is why this post is called 3 Skills Safe: because language is composed of 3 core skills: syntax, morphology and phonology. Orthography is something we're all born with the ability to learn, but in some weird way it appears to be an adjunct to language, something we add on top.

But what about sign language? I hear you cry. Very few people consider sign language as a form of writing, but rather as a form of speaking. Many respected language scientists now believe that the first human language was a gestural (sign) language, not a spoken language. In fact, the work of V S Ramachandran suggests that even spoken language is gestural in nature, and sound is merely the medium of transmission for that gesture. As a theory, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It all revolves around the so-called "mirror neuron" -- a mechanism in the brain that takes observations and turns them into experience. So we hear a sound and our brain understands it by recreating mentally how and why we ourselves would have produced that sound. This would explain the crossover between speaking and listening that I highlighted last week and it has some very profound consequences for the teaching of phonology, which I'll spend more time on soon.

But if phonology is about shape, why use a term derived from the Greek for sound? Well, simply put, it's the established term. Perhaps someone will make a new name for it in the future, but right now we're stuck with the words people use. But phonology is not restricted to the spoken medium, and interestingly enough, "orthography" is similarly not restricted to its usual visual medium. There is Braille, of course, but more interesting than that is the audio channel.

Though massively outdated now, telegraphy revolutionised global communication. The vital components in this global engine were the telegraphers, who relayed messages via Morse code. While they were working mostly through the medium of sound, the code was still denoting letters, not phonemes. An expert coder would have no problem even with the phonetic irregularities of English, such as the famous "rough, cough, bough, through" example. We can only conclude that they must have been "reading" through their ears.

Reading and writing therefore cannot be considered independent of speaking and listening. They are not separate "skills" but something that is built on top of spoken skills. Which means that before you start teaching reading and writing, you must ensure you have something to build on!

What happens if you don't?

Well, the learner builds on something else -- either an arbitrary pattern or on their first language. Case in point: many English speakers have problems with the "3 Es" of French: E, É, È. You will hear even some advanced students asking "Does this E have an accent? Which one?" But this is a regular feature of French: each refers to a distinct sound. By starting from the written form and almost invariably picking the "e" of English "pet", the learner has not built a proper representation of French phonemes and they've all merged into one. With only one sound behind all three forms of E, the choice of accent seems arbitrary and is difficult to remember. But to someone who has learnt from phonology, the correct accent is a matter of second nature.

Note that I said "someone who has learnt from phonology", not "someone who has learned by listening", because the two are not the same. People can also fail to notice phonemic differences when listening -- phonology must be taught explicitly. The irony is that after everything I've said, in some languages (Spanish, but not Chinese, for example) orthography can actually be a useful tool in teaching phonology... but that path is rather convoluted so we'll avoid going down it today and leave it for another time.

An anecdote from personal experience

I've held the above beliefs for a good few years now, but it wasn't until I started trying out LiveMocha's Polish course that the reality hit home.

My Polish is pretty basic, but I do know how the orthography works. I understand the non-palatised/alveolar-palatal/retroflex distinction in the main consonants, I know how it's written and I know how to pronounce it. And yet...

LiveMocha's speaking practice exercises ask you to read out a script. And I kept making silly mistakes. For example, I kept pronouncing C as /k/, rather than the correct /ts/. I put the stress in the 3rd-to-last syllable sometimes, or the last syllable sometimes. Why? Well although I "know" the rules of Polish sound, I'm not really comfortable with them yet. Reading pushed me beyond my level of ability, and I fell back on the systems of other languages.

Conclusion and consequences

I suggested previously that an apparent better ability in the written mode than in the spoken mode was a sign that the learner was using inappropriate and untransferrable strategies in the written mode, which means that the common learner situation of having a higher ability in the written mode than the spoken mode is actually a disordered state and consequently leads to long-term difficulties.

Today, I've tried to give another reason why this is such a disordered state, by showing that the written mode isn't pure language, but rather a layer of abstraction added on top of the language, and you can't build on a foundation that hasn't been laid yet.

Now let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone should be better at listening than at reading (this is something I plan to discuss in my next article, on phonology), but simply that a beginner has an urgent need to develop performance in the spoken mode. I'm not even saying that all new vocabulary should be presented in the spoken mode. No, if the vocabulary is built on phonemes that the student knows and has rehearsed sufficiently, and the orthography is regular enough, it's not a problem. But introducing new phonemes in the written mode is just mental. The student will learn to read them, but he will have to construct his own phonology underneath that orthography, and that will almost certainly be wrong.

2011-07-12T19:00:00.002+01:00

A somewhat left-field theory on the discrepancy between learner performance in the written and spoken modes

In the post 4 skills safe, I argued that writing could be carried out using declarative memory, but that procedural memory was required during speech, but there may still be more to it than that, and I have a theory. Feel free to tell me I'm crazy - it doesn't deny what I said about declarative vs procedural memory in the first place.

I have been told when you are reading, your eye scans each word on average three times. This is because the written sentence is missing many important cues we would have in the spoken form, and it needs information from the context to reconstruct the full meaning. And this is in your own language, so what must it be like in a foreign language you're not fluent in yet? Your eyes dart backwards and forwards across the page as you try to decode the meaning, and in the end, without realising it, you develop the habit of reading in the wrong order. You could be faced with a French sentence like:

Je le lui ai dit

and your brain might decide to jiggle the order round until it's reading the same as English:

*~~Je ai dit lui le~~

Why would the brain do that? Because it already knows English, so it's easier that way. The thing is, you won't necessarily be consciously aware you're doing it, and the only way to ever find out that you are might be to head to your local uni's language science department for an eye-tracking study.

Well actually, maybe not, because if you're reading in the wrong order, you're probably going to... (drum roll please)... try to speak in the wrong order, because you end up creating a procedural knowledge of grammar based on your reading style. And guess what? Yup, lots of learners do indeed try to speak in the wrong order.

So what appears superficially to be a good "reading skill" is actually flawed reading, bad reading, disordered reading. We celebrate a student's success in reading as motivation when they're not doing well in speaking, but in isolating and rewarding reading as a single "skill", we may actually be encouraging and reinforcing the very behaviour that is limiting their spoken fluency.

That can't be right, though, because they're still writing in the correct order!

Well yes, but the brain is subtle, and writing is a very slow activity compared to speaking or signing, so it has a hell of a lot more time and freedom. The thing is that whatever language you're writing in, native or foreign, your brain is likely to be several words ahead of your hand. This is where it gets twisted. In theory, the brain has enough time to recall the words in the wrong order and then shuffle them about spacially to write them down. As a skill, this would be good enough and fast enough for writing, but would not transfer into speaking; it may even prejudice against proper speaking. By isolating and rewarding writing as a single "skill", we may again be encouraging and reinforcing a problematic behaviour. I may be wrong, but without testing it, is this a risk we want to take?

And this time we can't even use eye-tracking software to detect the problem, because everything goes on inside the brain.

Except that there is one very subtle clue that comes along a little down the road: some people's grammar is great in a short sentences, but even simple grammar is beyond them when the sentence grows in length and complexity. Traditional thinking puts this down as simply being "a difficult sentence", but really, it's just a combination of language points* that we have already taught and tested to our satisfaction. If the students know the rules, why do they fail to combine them.

What if what we're really seeing is the writer running out of working memory or time? If learners do indeed recall the structure out-of-order and reconstruct it on the fly, then it stands to reason that they will quite quickly fill up their working memory once they have to hold something in it while constructing a complex phrase, or even an embedded clause.

I think a good example is the difference in how German and English handle defining clauses (and you'll have to forgive me if this isn't quite right as I've not learned German properly yet. Corrections gratefully received.)

I would like to buy the book you like.
Ich möchte das Buch kaufen, das Sie mögen.

Here we have a slight crossover as "the book" and "to buy" switch places. But (as I understand it) it's actually that book in German, and the that is repeated after "to buy". This means that "the book you like" is split up, and if you're trying to hold the whole structure in working memory, you'll be taxing your memory.

And it gets worse as you add in more information, as German lets you insert things in a multitude of ways that I'm personally not comfortable with yet. And if its "the book you told me about yesterday", it gets even messier...
And thus the "out-of-order recall" strategy that was initally the simplest strategy for the brain to follow becomes unworkable and a barrier to further learning.

Consequences for teaching

Now first of all, I'll stress that it's just a theory and so any change of teaching practices should balance "what if he's right" with "what if he's wrong". Furthermore, I'm not claiming that this is an inevitable consequence of certain teaching methods, but that certain teaching methods open the possibily that a student develops these flawed strategies.

What I want, therefore, is for teachers to work to reduce the possibility for students to develop suboptimal or counter-productive strategies. I suggest this can be done by adopting two simple principles:

Students should be made to produce spoken language of equal or greater complexity to their written language from the beginning. This way the student is forced to adopt a strategy suited to spoken language.
Language should be integrated with previously-taught language points early and often.

This second principle I cannot stress enough. I was once made to teach children from a book in which each unit consisted of two 1-hour lessons. The first lesson taught a verb structure in the positive declarative (=statement) form, and the second lesson introduced the negative declarative and the positive interrogative (=question) forms. But the structures taught included such things as "I used to ", and the negative and interrogative forms taught were fully regular ("I didn't use to..." & "Did you use to...?") so could have been dealt with from the word go. Neither lesson integrated with the present tense or the past simple to produce sentences such as "I used to play football, but I don't anymore" or "I used to play tennis but I stopped a year ago". These are sentences that any learner at that level should be able to produce, yet we often delay them, and students are left without the confidence or competence required to use these straightforward conversational devices.

Footnote: Why did I come up with this crackpot theory?

When I started doing written grammar drills in Spanish, I found myself frequently missing the object pronoun then writing it in afterwards (object pronouns appear before the verb in Spanish, like in French). I got better at doing this, until I was thinking a few words ahead of my pen by a word or two. So I was still thinking of the verb before I had thought of the pronoun, and in the end I made a conscious effort to stop doing this and I refuse to put pen to paper for as long as my brain tried to put the verb first.

That's a sample size of one, so doesn't really prove anything. But it does give a plausible mechanism for observed data, and one of my big problems with much of the writing on language that I've read is that in general, mechanisms are rather vague and hand-wavy. Empirical data is all well and good, but all too often what is recorded is merely the tasks given to the students and the end result -- the process followed by the student is rarely tracked.

If anyone knows of an eyetracking experiment that has explored this, I'd be interested to know. And if anyone fancies studying it as a masters thesis, let me know how you get on!

* "Language point" is a catch-all term for vocabulary items, fixed phrases, grammatical rules, etc.

2011-07-08T09:12:00.000+01:00

4 skills safe.

It is common in language circles to talk about the "4 skills" of language learning: speaking, listening, reading and writing. These skills can be categorised as receptive vs productive and spoken mode vs written mode, and you often get this represented in a neat little diagram like this:

This looks very tidy and regular, and there's nothing we like better in language than tidyness and regularity. But yet language is never tidy, and language is very rarely truly regular, so we must suspect that there's something wrong with this diagram.

Really, this analysis of language is superficial to the point of uselessness. These 4 things are not skills at all, but the basic categories of language use, each category requiring multiple skills. The actual skills of language are far more subtle and far more fundamental, and there is a massive amount of shared skill between these activities than is apparent when we elevate these mere "activities" to the status of "skill".

Where does this idea of "skills" come from?

It is obvious and undeniable that some students find it easier to speak, and others find it easier to write. I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of students find reading easier than listening in a foreign language.

There is a great temptation therefore to say that what people find difficult is a "difficult skill" and leave it at that, but that is to shortchange the student, because these high level "skills" distract us from drilling down and finding the underlying core skills, and identifying which of them is the root of the problem. What gets measured gets managed, to quote a business-speak proverb, and when we identify the problem as simply "listening", we really don't get much of a clue how to fix it.

Try to suggest a spoken-only class and most teachers will throw up their hands and declare that we simply must teach all 4 skills, or we are doing our students a disservice. But are we? What if focussing on these 4 skills independently is one of the reasons many people have difficulties with language?

What are the real skills of language?

I would suggest the broadest useful four skills we have are syntax, morphology, phonology and orthography.

Syntax: how we build sentences out of words.
Morphology: how we build words out of roots and affixes.
Phonology: the sound system of language.
Orthography: the form the language takes on paper.

Note that there is nothing in my four skills that makes a distinction between productive and receptive skills, and that two of the skills are common to both the spoken and the written mode.

In this article, I'm going to talk in general terms about the division of skills in the traditional model, and will use morphology to demonstrate why I think the traditional model is dangerously flawed. I'll come back to phonology and orthography in a follow-up article. But I haven't really got a lot to say about morphology, to be honest....

Commonality between spoken and written modes

With a few exceptions due to register and conservative schooling, the spoken and written modes of any language are based on the same syntax and morphology. This is pretty obvious, and really goes without saying. But if we carry this forward and ask ourselves why a student's accuracy in speaking is so often worse than in writing, we're in a hole. How can someone know syntax to write, but not know it to speak?

It's a question that is actually pretty easy to answer. The answer is that they don't know syntax. It's that simple.

But wait, how can they produce grammatically correct target language if they don't know syntax? Well, maybe it's not really "that simple".

At a superficial level, we have the difference between declarative and procedural knowledge. Someone can consciously know the rules without having internalised them to the point where they become automatic. On a simple level, reading and writing can be carried out using declarative knowledge, because time is not a factor. Speaking and listening, on the other hand, rely on procedural knowledge, because time and speed are critical factors. Modern language teaching philosophy disfavours declarative knowledge, and many teachers often claim to teach directly to procedural knowledge, and yet students still perform better in writing than in speaking (ignoring issues of pronunciation).

Productive vs receptive skills

As I said, my new four skills don't make a distinction between productive and receptive skills. Why? Because I believe that comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that I understand language by imagining what would have made me say the same thing.

This is not as outlandish as it may sound. One of the most important current theories in neuroscience is what is called mirror neuron theory (Wikipedia) which says that we understand a lot about each other through reconstructing their experiences.

Even stepping outside of that, there is still plenty of evidence for language as a reflective act:

People often finish each other's sentences. To do so they must be actively constructing the utterance as they go.
People often mistakenly say that they've said something, when actually it was someone else who said it, and they only heard it. So we identify very closely with sentences we hear (and agree with), suggesting a very close link between the mental process behind listening and that of speaking.
There exists a (fairly harmless) neurological disorder which causes someone's lip to tremble when they're being spoken to, and they often echo the last word of your sentences (often suffixed with "uh-huh" for assent). For these people merely listening activates the physical speech organs.

So as far as I'm concerned, attempting to produce an distinction between the two is asking for trouble.

Conclusion and consequences

Treating reading, writing, speaking and listening as 4 skills encourages people to develop strategies specific to these 4 areas, but students attempt to generalise these strategies across skills, and they don't transfer.

It is the teacher or course designer's job to make sure that the learner develops core strategies that are appropriate for and generalisable across all four areas. What gets measured gets managed, and we can never objectively measure a student's comprehension of a piece of language. Even in writing, the student's thought process is obscured by the relatively slow pace of production.

It is therefore only in speaking that we genuinely know that a student is following the correct process, and it is only through monitoring spoken output that we can diagnose and correct faults. As a classroom teacher or even a self-teacher, this is the only way to monitor progress accurately and confidently.

2011-07-04T16:53:00.001+01:00

Translation: an unjustified scapegoat

I couldn't count the number of times that I've heard a teacher respond to an error by saying "that's because you're translating! You need to think in the language!" This is all well and goo... no, there's nothing good about it. I found it particularly frustrating when I found myself incapable of saying something specific in Gaelic, and my "friend" refused to let me simply say it in English. I then said it wrong and he then let loose with the old "because you're translating" line (except in Gaelic, just for variety).

Well no, the problem wasn't that I "was translating", it was that I had never learned how to say it. I hadn't learned it, I couldn't say it -- simple as that.

Translation has become something of a bogeyman. If you make an error caused by native-language-interference, the witchfinder in front of you will cry "translation!" and insist you must "learn to think in the language". Except that quite often these days, the witchfinder will be someone who doesn't actually speak your language and therefore blames translation when the converse is actually true.

My favourite example is the English and Spanish conditional constructions. Spanish-speakers regularly get the English wrong, and teachers are wont to issue the usual battlecry of "think in English!" followed by a lecture on "2nd and 3rd conditionals" in abstract grammatical terms. But in fact, Spanish conditionals translate almost verbatim into their English equivalents, so if the Spanish folk were simply encouraged to translate, they'd master the English forms in about half-an-hour.

I found a quote on-line the other day:

"Disillusionment regarding the relevance and usefulness of learning theory for educational practice has been responsible, in part, for the emergence of the theories of teaching that are avowedly independent of the theories of learning."

Ausubel, David. Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View, 1968

1968, but this still seems to hold today. When we discuss learning, there's one word that is perhaps more important than any other: generalisation. Sadly, there's very little discussion of this in teaching literature. Our job is to teach, your job is to learn, so generalisation is dismissed as the student's responsibility.

The problems that are often blamed on translation are better blamed on generalisation.

Native-language interference is inappropriate generalisation of known patterns (the fact that they are in the native language is incidental).

On top of that, generalisation even accounts for errors such as the conditionals where native-language interference should provide correct results. How so? Well, many intermediate and advanced learners have a tendency to try to construct any new target language structure out of known language structures -- ie they assume the language they have been taught is the whole language and try to generalise the known structures to cover any new case, and they fail to innovate.

For a specific example of generalisation gone wrong regardless of medium, I have to go back a good few years to my first experience of the language classroom: high-school French.

We started off with phrases, albeit with translation. It was all "what is your name?" "I am 12 years old" "I'm fine, and you?"

Now our teacher told us that "j'ai" was "I have" and that it only meant "I am" when discussing ages, but several of the class got themselves in a right guddle over this. Some would say "j'ai" instead of "je", and some would say "j'ai" instead of "je suis". And then they would try using "je suis" instead of "j'ai".

The problem here wasn't translation, because we weren't building up from grammar rules -- we were substituting words in fixed phrases in the hopes of learning "by induction from examples".

So the problem needs to be described in terms of generalisation. Regardless of what the teacher said, certain pupils automatically generalised telling their age to "I am". A change of medium of instruction couldn't have altered that.

So what could have changed that?
I think the main problem was that this was our first encounter of the verb "to have". Quite quickly we moved onto how many brothers and sisters we had, but by this point the confusion had set in.

Ausubel proposed something called progressive differentiation. Under this framework you teach a core, high-level overview of a concept, and then refine all the particulars and special variations after. The core use of "avoir" in French is possession of a physical thing. If that had been taught and thoroughly learned before a specialist idiomatic form was encountered, inappropriate generalisation would have been impossible.

This is how Michel Thomas does it. In his French, Spanish and Italian courses, you play around with "I have it", "I don't have it", "I don't have it but I want it" etc before coming anywhere near idiomatic constructions such as "to have hunger" for "be hungry". It is thus impossible to generalise "to have" incorrectly as "to be". Yes, you can generalise incorrectly the other way, and talk about being hungry (and then get a bollocking off your teacher for translating) but this is a far smaller error. Not only that, this is an error of "not having learned yet", rather than an error of "learning wrong".

So please, don't simply shout down translation indiscriminately -- it's not the nasty beast you think it is.

2011-07-01T16:00:00.000+01:00

The Problem with Podcasts Part II

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problems with language learning podcasts. I said the problem was that they modelled themselves on the form of radio programmes, and I stand by that, but I've been listening to a few podcasts since and I think there's another problem podcasts suffer, and it's maybe even more fundamental to the problem.

Podcasts are in a very awkward position when it comes to monetising their business, because their core product in fact doubles up as their primary marketing tool.

Basically, the main podcast is almost always free, and the podcasters make their money out of various add-ons: transcripts, grammar notes, flashcards, games etc. That means that the core podcast has to continually remind the listener to go to the website.

Compare this with Pimsleur or Michel Thomas -- these courses do not need to constantly remind you what you're listening to. Any announcements on these courses are merely as a sort of index ("advanced Spanish with Michel Thomas recording 2") or for copyright purposes. Why so? Because you've already bought it -- there's no need for the publisher to go chasing you for cash.

But with the podcasts, buying it doesn't stop you hearing the marketing, becuase even if you're a premium user, you get the same podcast: jingles, banter, visit-our-website messages and all.

So the problem with podcasts is a business model that goes counter to all good sense: the product actually has to be made worse in order to sell it.

And another problem with (some) podcasts

Now, not all podcasts fall into this trap, but there are several major podcasts who have made an interesting decision: subscribe and get full access to the back catalogue. This really skews the sense of value. JapanesePod101.com, for example, has been going for several years, and during May I downloaded seven thousand nine hundred and eighty three files covering approximately two thousand individual podcasts along with their supplementary materials on a trial offer that cost next to nothing ($1 IIRC). Every subsequent month I would have had to pay the full subscription price, and I would have got less than twenty podcasts for that, and those 20 podcasts are over several different levels, so I'm not going to be able to use more than about 5 of them in that month.

Basically, there really is no need for anyone to subscribe for longer than a month or two, because the 17 continuous days of audio and video you get for that really isn't improved on by an extra hour or two.

This also splashes back with a secondary effect for the producers, Innovative Language Learning, because they are constantly increasing the range of --Pod101.com languages, in order to cash in on their brand. But having got 17.2 days of podcasts for $1, where am I going to see the value in subscribing to something like PolishPod101.com, which only offers so far about 4-5 hours of phrases for absolute beginners (in 3 to 11 minute chunks, replete with the annoying jingles and banter I complained about last time) and 10 episodes of an advanced audio blog, none of which is over 5 minutes long. There's nothing in the beginner or intermediate levels, and the advanced level hasn't had a new episode since September. Basically, all they're offering right now is a talking phrasebook that gives you half a dozen phrase per week (if that!) and wants you to pay $10 a month for the priviledge. This is not good value.

There is no link between cost and volume of material. There is no guarantee of receiving any new material. In fact, when you sign up for the "Free lifetime account", they immediately give you an "once in a lifetime" special offer on the full subscription price without giving you any opportunity to see exactly what content you're paying for. You have to buy it "sight unseen". You don't know how little they're offering. You don't know whether they offer anything at your level, and they expect you to pay. I'm sure in their heads the low level of content is justified by the low number of subscribers, but come on guys, your subscribers aren't a collective -- they're individuals, and your responsibility is to each one individually. Don't treat them like sh*t, or it reflects on you. It's up to the company to invest in the product. Don't sell it until you've made it.

2011-06-25T17:16:00.000+01:00

The road to wealth: don't speak English
I've just read an interesting article on the Register (a news site for IT and science geeks). The article mostly talks about the governance of the internet internationally, so regular readers won't be particularly interested, but here's an interesting thought:

But the internet doesn't work like that: a country that puts in internet infrastructure is more likely to see money pouring out as local ISPs have to pay peering partners to deliver content from Europe and America to their customers.

We put this point to Dr Touré, who pointed out how wrong we were: "Forget Europe, it's America that takes the money ... the content comes from America".

So while the international community is clamouring to learn English to improve international trade, English is becoming a money-sink for everyone outside the US as we continue to spend our money on American content, money which doesn't come back out.

Interesting thought.

2011-06-25T10:55:00.001+01:00

Not Learning From Mistakes

I've been talking a fair bit recently. First I pointed out that the emotional power of correction of mistakes is often overstated on the basis of a few exceptional cases, and then I pointed out that in the classroom it's underemployed for fear of embarrassment.

Not being corrected

But here's another perspective on the whole thing: some mistakes just don't get corrected. There's several reasons for this:

The other person doesn't want to be rude, so continues to nod politely rather than cause potential embarrassment by commenting.
The other person doesn't understand you and says so, but can't correct you because he doesn't know what you're trying to say.
The other person understands you, so doesn't see the need to mention the error.
The mistake is noticed and mentioned but not corrected, because the other person suffers what is known as "language blindness".

Each of these is troublesome in different ways.

The first couple you can do nothing about, but it's really frustrating if your conversation grinds to a halt after five minutes when you discover that neither of you has a clue what the other is talking about.

From the third, it is tempting to conclude that if an error doesn't stop the other person understanding, it's an acceptable error (a widely held belief among communicative approach teachers). But in general this isn't true, because it ignores the fact that what is unambiguous in one context may be very ambiguous in another. For example, many learners of English have problems pronouncing the past suffix -ed (except in -ted, -ded) and drop it. In the sentence I walked there but it was closed, losing the "ed" doesn't make the tense ambiguous (I walk there but it was close), because "was" clearly marks the tense, but if you only say I walked there and it comes out as I walk there, suddenly it's very ambiguous indeed. The problem gets worse as phrases, clauses and sentences get more and more complicated as you proceed through the language, and as error builds on top of error, language gets less and less accurate. One of the main ideas in the communicative approach is that you can "get by" with flawed language and that accuracy will take care of itself later on, but by saving up mistakes for later, they militate against improvement, which is a shame for the students....

And finally, language blindness. This is when you know what is being said or what you want to say, but you can't find the words or the structure. In translation it happens when the structure you're translating from blocks you from seeing the appropriate target structure, and it's something that you can't think your way out of, because the material you're working from seems only to get stronger when you think about it. In the situation of conversational corrections, you've understood what the other people are trying to say, but when you try to correct it all you can hear is what they said, and in the end you cannot give them any hints as to what they said wrong.
Incorrect "correction"

And even if you do get corrected, how do you know the correction is correct?
Take a sentence like *~~I am going walking yesterday~~. There are two likely intended sentences: I was going walking yesterday and I am going walking tomorrow. Now with this sentence, most correctors would offer both options. However, in general, listening is a subconscious act, so when listening to someone speak we hear only one thing. If the corrector misunderstands the error, he will obviously give an incorrect form in response.

Also, you have to remember that very few people genuinely know how they speak - most of us only know how we were told we should speak, and I have heard native speakers "correcting" foreigners for using a (descriptively, statistically) correct grammatical form by providing an outdated (prescriptive) school-book form that they themselves don't use. Or when pressed for a translation, they give something that is almost correct, but it subtley inappropriate.

All in all, correction during conversation is more than a little hit-and-miss.

While I feel that the idea of fossilised errors is a gross exaggeration, it's still better to get started on the right form as soon as possible to build up good habits.

If you rely on conversational corrections to teach you correct grammar, conversations will become a drag. Maybe not for you (if enjoy the process of puzzling through), but most people don't have the patience to put up with it for long and you'll find yourself going through conversational partners very quickly indeed. This is fine if you live in an area with lots of speakers of your target language, because you can always just hang about in a bar until another speaker comes along, but if you're trying to maintain a friendship (or even a romantic relationship), the language will soon start to be a barrier to communication.

Overall, it's just much quicker and more efficient to learn in a structured way where one thing leads to (and supports) another, rather than having a scattergun approach of learning whatever comes up even if it is in no way linked to what you already know.

And it is best to get your teaching from an informed speaker of the language - that is to say someone who not only speaks the language, but has studied it and is consciously aware of the subtleties of grammar and usage, of connotations and register differences. (And yes, that means that sometimes a non-native speaker can be a better teacher than a native.)

2011-06-20T21:13:00.000+01:00

Teaching from mistakes

I find it curious that despite the claims that we learn best from our mistakes, many teachers are reluctant to take advantage of this in teaching.

Well, not reluctant, I suppose, but it's more a matter of wanting things both ways.

In your standard EFL class, we don't typically correct spontaneous errors on the spot (and there are certainly many circumstances where correction would break the flow of the conversation), instead giving "delayed feedback" -- a short period at the end of the class where several of the "big" mistakes of the day are put up on the whiteboard and discussed and corrected as a class.

One of the reasons for this is to avoid drawing attention to the invidual or causing any embarrassment. However, this means it's too late. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the student doesn't have the same emotional tie to the sentence and any correction is purely academic. What makes this into a particularly fruitless endeavour is that most of the time they know the correct answer in theory, but they just fail to apply the correct rule in practice, so the error isn't addressed properly.
But if we look at the various confusions I mentioned last time -- married vs tired, embarrassed vs pregnant, having a cold vs having constipation -- we see that correction is at its most effective when it connects on a very vivid, immediate, emotional level.

I'm not saying we should go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate learners, but that we shouldn't be afraid to take advantage of the humour or absurdity of an error in making the correction more memorable.

For example, I know one fellow Gaelic learner who hasn't really grasped the correct use of possessives, and is wont to say things like "tha mi cat agam a' dol dhan bheat", which means pretty much "I am one of my cats on my way to the vet". Now, you can correct her with "tha an cat agam" and she might repeat it, but 10 seconds later, she'll be saying it wrong again. So why not just tell her she's called herself a cat?

Ok, so you have to build up a certain rapport with the other party to make sure you're doing it in a good natured way, and they feel you're laughing with each other rather than laughing at the other person.

But delayed feedback is almost always too late: a mistake can only lose its power to embarrass when it no longer feels like that particular student's mistake, and if it's not that student's mistake then it's just another restatement of the rule.

Hang on a minute... let's get this straight. Delayed feedback isn't correction at all?!? Not on a personal level. On a technicality, yes, it is correction, but on an emotional, personal level, it's not. Or at least not always.

So either correct in time to make a difference, or else find a way to teach that avoids errors in the first place. (And that's not necessarily as hard as it sounds.)

2011-06-16T11:44:00.000+01:00

Learning from mistakes...?

I've heard it said many times that the best way to learn a language is to make mistakes and be corrected, because this correction somehow "personalises" the learning. But to me, this is a logical absurdity.

Here's an example from my personal experience. In Spanish, there is a special word hay that is equivalent to the English there is. You therefore do not translate there is verbatim (which would give you *~~allí está~~). In Spanish, they also have a word "demás" which is used for other(s), meaning the rest of a group (not other as in different).

Now I often mistranslate the others (the rest of the guys) as *~~los otros~~, but I never mistranslate there is as *~~allí está~~. This means I can say hay correctly despite never being corrected and I keep getting los demás wrong despite fairly frequent correction, and conceptually one is no more difficult than the other.

This is only one example, but in general when someone corrects my Spanish, it's for one of a closed set of mistakes that I make all the time. Being corrected seems to have absolutely no direct effect on my errors.

The only effect is when I subsequently choose to work consciously to eradicate that mistake. Or perhaps more accurately, when I consciously work to learn the correct form, because more often than not, an error isn't the result of learning something wrong, but actually an indication that you haven't learnt it at all. I get hay right because I learned it early on, I get los demás wrong because I never really learned it, and even now I'm only "aware of existence" -- I still don't feel I've learned it.

This isn't to say that errors and correction are valueless, not at all. Corrections have no special ability to make language stick, but they at least indicate a gap in your knowledge and they often give you a starting point for filling that gap, so you certainly should listen to and take note of any corrections you're given. What you shouldn't do is ascribe magic powers to corrections and believe that they are a substitute for other ways of learning -- this will only slow down your progress while making conversations in your target language far less enjoyable for both parties.

Why is this idea so persistent?

There is a small set of mistakes that people only make once. For example, when a Spanish learner tries to say she's tired (cansada) but instead says he's married (casada), it is an instantly memorable situation and unlikely to happen again. Of course it's a situation that's quite embarrassing, which might be compounded if she now mistakenly says she's pregnant (embarazada). And she'll never do that again. Similarly a Spanish speaker suffering a cold is unlikely to forget that being constipated is not the same as having a bunged-up nose (constipado in Spanish).

So these mistakes certainly do lead to better recall of the correct form, but this is not because of how correction works as a generally applicable learning strategy, but rather a consequence of the vocabulary in question. Saying translación (an archaic variation of translación - movement/transfer)instead of traducción (translation) doesn't have the same comedic value (and in fact isn't likely to obscure the meaning in context) so doesn't have the same potential to stick.

Most often it is these extreme cases, these outliers, that are used to convince us of the efficacy of the technique, but don't be fooled: learning the correct form from the word go is far more effective than making it up as you go along and picking up a catalogue of corrections.

2011-06-11T18:11:00.000+01:00

Link drop: English Next by David Graddol

In 2006 the British Council released a book called English Next by leading academic David Graddol, discussing the future of English as a global language. You can download it free as PDF from the British Council website, and I'll be putting it on my little ebook reader for a leisurely read at a later date.

I'm not sure I'll agree with it, though. While I agree that the English used in business meetings the world over isn't quite the language I speak, it's still not standardised, and it's pretty hard to imagine it ever becoming standardised with such a disparate discourse community. Popular culture will probably still mostly be filtered through one of the major native-speaking populations (mostly Hollywood), and we're always going to need some model to teach to...

2011-06-11T13:22:00.001+01:00

Good news! Fossilised errors don't exist!

It has been claimed that errors that are made frequently enough "fossilise" -- that is to say that they "harden" and become difficult to fix. This, I feel, is overstating the case. It's certainly easier to learn something correct to begin with than to have to "unlearn" it later in order to learn the correct form, but even then, it may be less of a big deal than people think.

The evidence

I learned French at high school from first year, and took direct entry into 3rd-year Italian as an additional language when I got the chance. I learned Italian quicker than French. Years later, I picked up Spanish, and learned it quicker than Italian. More recently still, I picked up Catalan... at lightning speed.

Well, that's to be expected, right? They are closely related languages after all.

But wait... if they are really similar, then one could describe one language in terms of another language and a set of differences. And if you think about it, an "error" is no different from a "difference" in cognitive terms -- the only distinction is that an error is a difference that isn't shared with a whole linguistic group.

So if fossilised errors really were such a big thing, wouldn't it have been harder for me to learn Spanish after Italian, rather than easier?

And this even holds as we get to languages increasingly distant from each other, because all we're doing is increasing the number of differences, which fossilised error theory claims would make things difficult.

Taken to its logical conclusion, fossilised error theory would make adult language learning an impossible task, because every language point we learn can be considered at attempt to overcome a fossilised language pattern -- ie the equivalent language point in the native language.

The paradox propounded by promoters of fossilised errors

The idea of a fossilised error is used as a warning against attempting to say things you don't know how to. This is pretty logical. But the idea of fossilised errors is particularly popular among the learn-by-listening crowd. Take the site Antimoon, and what they call "myths" about language learning:
Myth #2: "The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it"
Myth #3: "It is OK to make mistakes"
Myth #4: "As a beginner, you're bound to make a lot of mistakes"
Basically, they reckon that if you make lots of mistakes, they will fossilise and you will learn badly. So you should listen to and read lots of examples so that you know it well before you attempt to say it.

But that's an inconsistent argument. How can it be that we learn mistakes by speaking and learn correct language by listening? Internally, the brain treats "correct language" and "errors" in the same way -- they're both just language forms.

So if it's the speaking that teaches us our errors, surely it's also the speaking that teaches us our correct language too? I mean if speaking does fossilise language, surely it's to our advantage to use that to fossilise good language?

Conclusion

It's certainly a good idea to learn things properly from the word go, because it's easier. Languages are internally more consistent, logical and systematic than many people give them credit for, and the real danger is that errors may distort the overall picture of the language, but they are never fatal and incurable.

It's better to avoid errors, but don't start distinguishing between "fresh" and "fossilised" errors and only attack the "fresh" ones. Do not give up, because... well, it's just lazy. If you start using "fossilisation" as an excuse, you'll find yourself making excuses for all your errors and you'll never really get as good at the language as you would like.

2011-06-05T11:49:00.000+01:00

Why I chose to study grammar

No matter what language you're learning, and no matter how complicated its grammar seems to you, one thing holds true for any human language you might study:

There is hardly any grammar.

How so? Go into a bookshop or library and compare the size of the biggest grammar book with the biggest dictionary. And don't forget that big dictionaries are printed on thinner paperstock than grammar books.

Juan Kattan Ibarra's Modern Spanish Grammar has 472 pages, and is pretty comprehensive.
Collins' unabriged Spanish dictionary has a whopping 2208 pages, in a smaller typeface than the grammar book and with a printed area approximately equal to two pages of the grammar book, and formatted to reduce white space to an absolute minimum. In terms of raw text, a comprehensive dictionary is about 20 times as big as a good grammar book.

On top of that, each grammar point in a grammar book needs a couple of pages of explanation and multiple examples, where a word gets a couple of inches in each half of the dictionary.

Really, there's loads of words in any language, and hardly any grammar.

So why not get the grammar early on? It's quick and it is universally useful. Very few people can pass a single day without using the majority of the verb tenses and noun cases available in their native language.

Vocabulary is a different matter. When did I last say "robot"? I can't remember. "Lamb"? Roughly four weeks ago. "House"? About 2 weeks ago.

So if I study vocabulary, I not only have an almost never-ending task (the dictionary I mentioned above has 315,000 references), but I also find myself unable to remember words because I don't use them enough.
But if I study grammar, I can cover all the basics really quickly, and those basics can be used every single time I have a conversation, and they will stick.

The best part, though, is that once you know grammar, learning words is easier, because you can use them and understand them in various natural contexts, because grammar can change both the form and meaning of words.

Right now, I'm mapping out the grammar of Polish in order to teach it to myself and a friend, and when I'm done, I expect to know less than 50 words. But I can learn more words later.

2011-05-29T17:28:00.001+01:00

Mechanics' Meaningful Music

It is often claimed that an adult cannot learn the sound system of a new language. This claim is followed by the caveat that some adults do, but these adults are dismissed as exceptional, and non-typical. Certainly, they are exceptions, because most people don't, but there's a big difference between "don't" and "can't".

A sound system is composed of phonemes, which are often defined as minimal units of meaning in sound. Every human is capable of producing a whole range of sounds, regardless of their language, and to process every single detail of the sound produced would simply be too much for the brain, so we bundle the sounds up together, and even though the sounds of the T in "try" and "butter" may be slightly different (or completely different, depending on your accent), we still recognise them as being the same thing.

As a general strategy, this works. The adult human meets lots of people with slightly different accents, but the phonemes are all roughly the same, so the detail of the differences is irrelevant.

As a language learner, though, this starts to pose problems. Our brains believe that only certain sounds are meaningful, and therefore discard any information they believe to be irrelevant. If you have a language with two phonemes equivalent to one in your language, you will not believe the distinction is meaningful. Just take a look at Japanese, where they have one phoneme equivalent to the English L and R. Many Japanese learners of English cannot hear the difference between "law" and "raw" or "appear" and "appeal" without active concentration.

Most people get stuck in this rut their whole lives, and this is used as evidence that you can never learn the sound system. But if we step outside the world of language, we might just find reason to be more optimistic.

It's amazing what an experienced mechanic can determine about a car or other machine just by listening to it. Sounds that to you or me would just be squeaks and squeals are to him a full description of the workings and faults of the engine.

Mechanics develops this skill over time through a mixture of direct instruction and experiential learning. The engines they work on give constant feedback that develops into a meaningful structure -- if a given whine co-occurs with a drop in revs, the two become associated and the sound takes on meaning.

But by this reasoning, surely language itself should give a meaningful framework to sounds?

Unfortunately, it would appear not, and it isn't actually that hard to see why.

Language has evolved to have a certain amount of redundancy, a certain level of "fault tolerance". It is very difficult indeed to find any complete sentences that function as minimal pairs (ie that differ by one phoneme only), particularly within the restricted language set that most beginners are faced with.

Going back to my earlier examples, "law" is a noun, "raw" is an adjective. There will always be enough information in the context to tell the two apart. "Appeal" and "appear" are both verbs, but the usages are distinct.

Essentially, I believe that the average learner is never really forced to build a meaningful framework for these differences. The end result is that they get deeper and deeper into the language, building more and more coping mechanisms that a native speaker would never rely on. The model of the language they build is wrong, and while they can understand most things they hear, the person they are speaking to often cannot understand them because, as I said, the native speaker doesn't employ the same strategies as the learner.

What is needed is for the teacher to force a meaningful framework, and the only way I can see that happening is through early teaching of pronunciation. If a learner has to pronounce the difference between ż and ź in Polish, and is corrected when using the wrong one, his brain will know there's a meaningful difference.

It may not be fashionable, but some negative feedback is definitely necessary....

2011-05-27T19:00:00.020+01:00

Learning is fun

In every sphere of teaching, there is a tendency to try to "make learning fun". This is done through games and the selection of "relevant" or "interesting" material.

I have always been of the opinion that most of the games presented in classes are a distraction from learning rather than an aid to learning, and that most of the attempts to make subjects relevant or interesting tend to obscure the point being taught. In maths and physics at high school, I used to get given all sorts of contrived scenarios that boiled down to a pretty simple calculation, and many of my classmates would be puzzled by what the question was asking. The "relevance" that was supposed to be helping motivate us became a hindrance. And yet the teachers saw the difficulty as a good thing because in the real world, we wouldn't just be given a sum. Well in the real world, we'd have a lot more variables to deal with. Personally, I couldn't see any benefit.

I have always been of the opinion that one of the most mentally enjoyable things on the planet is learning. "You would say that," people tell me, "because you're good at it. Other people are different."

But to answer that is to miss my point, because learning is pure mental stimulation, and mental stimulation is (to simplify horribly) the basis of enjoyment. I argue that there is no-one who doesn't enjoy learning. "But what about the people who don't do well in school? They don't enjoy it!" But if learning is a universal pleasure, this is looking at things the wrong way round: underachievers don't fail to learn because they're not enjoying themselves, they fail to enjoy themselves because they're not learning!

On a recent trip to a charity shop, I was lucky enough to stumble across the book Towards a Theory of Instruction by Jerome S Bruner. In the first chapter of the book, published in 1966 but based on earler papers and lectures, he says:

We discovered one point of especial value for my own future inquiry. There is a sharp distinction that must be made between behavior that copes with the requirements of a problem and behavior that is designed to defend against entry into the problem.

He says that the nature of the poor performance of the children he was studying...

was not so much a distortion as it was the result of their working on a different set of problems from those the school had set for them.

He then goes on to point out that

Once our blocked children were able to bear the problems as set -- when we were able to give them a chance for conflict-free coping -- their performance was quite like that of other children

Essentially, he tells us that kids' learning problems seem to be pretty much absolute and digital -- you've either learned or you haven't, which would suggest that changing the way the problem is stated isn't going to make any positive difference to the underperforming students, because they still won't use the appropriate strategy.

But Bruner's legacy is the idea of "discovery learning": that people don't need to be taught things, and that they learn better by discovering things for themselves. It's an idea that has been horribly distorted and misrepresented over the years. Certainly every description of this that I have ever read takes a much harder line than Bruner himself, and even Bruner's own studies on this were within a very confined field.

In the book, Bruner deals mostly with elementary maths, ostensibly because of the clarity of expression and the fact that all readers will be familiar with the basic arithmetic under study. Using cubes to work out areas and volumes is fairly standard, but often the full potential is ignored -- Bruner's studies went on to explore recombinations, and then eventually on to elementary calculus, all at an early primary level. Bruner was surprised and impressed by how little explicit instruction the children needed, and the additional concepts they explored without being asked.

But the physical constraints here were leading, and they also meant feedback was immediate. When high schools try to employ discovery learning we get into dubious practices such as "discovering the boiling point of water". You stick a thermometer in a beaker of water and put it over a bunsen burner. When it boils, you read it off.

But wait... at what point is water officially "boiling"? I'm in my 30s, and even though I'm a competent cook, I still couldn't identify with confidence the actual point at which a pan is "on the boil". So as a teenager I was staring at this beaker, trying to decide when it was right, and scribbling down several numbers. At the end of the "experiment", we all gave our numbers, and we were all wrong. What exactly did we discover? The teacher had to tell us that it was 100. Yes, that's right, we were using Celsius, the temperature scale defined by the boiling and freezing point of water. This exercise was pretty ridiculous....

So far, so irrelevant to the language learner. Well, that's all background.

The idea of discovery learning has infected the language profession too. But language is pure abstraction -- there is no physical reality to count or measure or explore. The notion of "correct" language is so vague that it is exceptionally difficult to stumble upon by accident. And whereas most physical experiments can be reattempted without prejudicing the results, every reformulation in language gives the listener a partial understanding. Three or four attempts to speak make not result in a single correct sentence, but the other person may well know what you mean by the end of it. You never need to discover the correct answer.

But as I said, most modern advocates of discovery learning are far more hard-line than Bruner. In Toward a Theory of Instruction, Bruner didn't use the term very much at all. Instead, Bruner focused on learning as a process of increasing abstraction, starting at enactive (physically carrying it out), moving through iconic (typified by diagrams) and finally becoming symbolic (including linguistic descriptions of the problem). To Bruner, the point of physical learning seems to have been the idea that it is required to form the understanding of the concept. On the simplest level, you can't really learn the word "biscuit" if you've no concept of baked goods.

This ties neatly to the work of one of Bruner's contemporaries: David Ausubel. Ausubel proposed something called an "advance organiser". According to Ausubel, the main thing was to prime the student to receive new information, and much of that was about showing why something wasn't new at all.

My dad taught chemistry, and he was big on advance organisers.

But an advance organiser doesn't have to be physical, like discovery learners think -- it can be conceptual. He taught the wave equation (velocity = frequency * wavelength) by analogy to a factory conveyor belt. Each item on the belt was a wavefront, and the gap was a wavelength. Most kids want to have frequency increase when wavelength increases, but the analogy makes it clear why this can't happen. Needless to say, he didn't have physical access to a baked bean cannery to carry this out in, so he did it on the blackboard. Under Bruner's structure, it is therefore iconic, and he's skipped the enactive phase entirely.

So what does this mean for the language learner?

Well, a suitable advance organiser can bypass the "enactive" discovery stage if we already have a suitable analogy at another level of abstraction. The physical reality of a conveyor belt is so easily understood that my father only needed to evoke the idea -- the "advance organiser" for the wave equation. With language, we can go one step further -- we already have an advance organiser in the symbolic domain: ie our native equivalent.

Let's look at an example. In EFL we tend to talk about 1st, 2nd and 3rd conditionals and teach them by example.
1st: I will do it if you tell me to.
2nd: I would do it if you told me to.
3rd: I would have done it if you had told me to.

Many teachers avoid translation, as they see at as a dangerous thing. But what if we stop saying "translation" and start saying "by analogy to your native language"...?

Michel Thomas teaches the conditionals in his Spanish course, and he does it entirely by analogy to English. Even the 3rd conditional, often considered hopelessly difficult and very advanced, becomes simplicity itself, because the structure in both languages is almost 100% equivalent.

Another device he uses is when teaching "to wait". In the Romance languages, this doesn't take the "for" of the English "waiting for" someone. So he takes the word "await" and uses it as an advance organiser, saying that in French, Spanish and Italian, you "await" someone. But he still says "wait for" too, because he is evoking both the meaning and the form.

One of the most striking things about Thomas's courses is how little of the material in them is specific to any situation or context. Thomas taught only the most general and reusable language, and by playing with the structures, he gave his students an incredible level of control over the language. When he demonstrated his techniques in an English high school for a TV documentary (The Language Master), one of the regular teaching staff had this to say:

The revelation is that it's the learning process itself that motivates these kids, the mastery of the stucture, the mastery of part of the language is the thing that keeps them going, keeps them enthusiastic. And we lose sight of that in the way we teach. ... We think we capture their interest by finding them interesting materials that are supposedly related to their interests outside in the world generally, and maybe we miss the point. And I think he's probably onto something very important here.

Which leads us back to where we started: learning is fun.

What triggered this post was actually getting a link to an article on computer games (of all things!) in the Guardian several weeks ago. To quote:

our growing love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations.

Central to it all is a simple theory – that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer – through systems and puzzles. Five years ago, Raph Koster, the designer of seminal multiplayer fantasy games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies wrote a fascinating book called A Theory of Fun for Game Design, in which he put forward the irresistibly catchy tenet that "with games, learning is the drug".

Games can sell themselves on superficial features like graphics, soundtracks and clever media campaigns, but in the long run, the fun in any game derives from the fact that learning stimulates the brain.

So while the experts in fun are telling us that it's the learning that matters, the experts in learning are trying to look elsewhere for fun....

2011-05-20T16:48:00.000+01:00

"Say what sounds right."

Bad advice has an annoying habit of sounding like good advice, and this little phrase really is something of a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's definitely appealling when someone points out that that's what we do in our own language.

I wouldn't argue that my end-goal isn't to be able to simply say what sounds right, but I just can't see how that end-goal affects my learning path: nothing will never "sound right" until I've learnt it, so how can I learn by what "sounds right"?

The consequences of this are not insubstantial, because if I've not learned it yet, what's going to sound right to me? What sounds right is something that I have learned, but this will be out of context.

Take for example the verb "start" in English.
You can "start something".
You can "start doing something".
You can "start with something".
You can "start by doing something".

If you learn only two of these, then only those two will "sound right".

Saying "what sounds right" traps you into what you know and stops you expanding your language. What you need to do is stop and think, and use the appropriate form, even if it isn't familiar enough to "sound right" yet.

Here's another example.

French has a feature called "liaison" -- certain final consonants are silent but reappear when followed by a vowel, but only if the two words are tied together syntactically.

In the word "vous", the S is normal silent, but in the phrase "vous allez" (you go), it has a /z/ sound.
Now, the past participle of to go is "allé", which is pronounced identically to "allez", so when you ask "êtes-vous allé" (have you gone), if you go by what "sounds right", you might pronounce that /z/. But in this question "vous" and "allé" are not syntactically bound together and liaison should not occur.

The idea of "what sounds right" reaches a very messy conclusion in Scottish Gaelic. A single syllable consisting of a schwa before a noun can be one of three things: "the", "his" or "her". "his" always causes initial lenition (soft mutation of the first consonant) of the following noun, "her" never does. As "the", this form can occur before masculine and feminine nouns in certain cases, and causes initial lenition, and only with certain letters.

Many teachers suggest that you learn noun gender by "what sounds right", by agreement with the article, but your ear will be exposed to the various case-inflected forms and possessives, so what sounds right might not be "the boy" at all, but "her boy" or "his boy".

2011-05-13T19:47:00.001+01:00

The problem with podcasts

I'll get to the point quickly. The problem with (language learning) podcasts is quite simply that they are modelled on radio.

Podcasting started with a bunch of early technology adopters who wanted to play at being a DJ. They produced programs (semi-)regularly playing music, talking about minority interests etc. They built a successful little community, and everyone suddenly wanted to hang out with the cool kids.

The language profession has always looked for ways to employ new media to produce new ways of delivering classes, and suddenly they had something new. Or so they thought.

I'll indulge myself with a bit of repetition: the problem with (language learning) podcasts is quite simply that they are modelled on radio. Radio -- that's nothing new. Language learning hasn't been popular on the radio since people called it "the wireless". They found it didn't work very well, but moved onto TV. However, there haven't been many major TV language projects since the 80s (except in the field of English teaching). Again, it didn't really work.

Why?

Because radio and TV are effectively the same thing, under the hood.

They are casual media. You tune in, you tune out, as and when you like. Programs have to be clever to avoid this: soaps are popular with producers because they retain their audiences through extended story arcs. A more profound effect is that professional musicians are losing favour in TV prime-time to amateurs -- because a talent show has winners and losers, and with a knock-out format you come back to root for your favourite, even if you don't like the other guys.

Dedication to a single program, to tune in week after week, isn't easy, which is why most TV shows fail. Which shouldn't be a problem for a language course, because people doing it are going to dedicate the time to it, right?

But holding your viewers isn't worth anything if you can't pick up new ones. About 10 years ago there was a sci-fi series called Farscape. It was very well written, and as a book it would have been an outstanding success. But the problem was that it kept building on itself, so it was difficult for new viewers to understand, or for people to come back to viewing it after a break. Though the series had a strong following, the few viewers it did lose were never replaced, and it got cancelled before it reached the final series.

And this is the problem for the language program on TV or radio: by its very nature it cannot build an audience: you have to watch from the start.

So why is this a problem for podcasts? After all, we can download old podcasts -- we're not just restricted to this week's....

True, but once the program has been written as though it were a weekly radio program, there's a certain cognitive dissonance with playing catchup.

Every podcast has its jingles, it's little chatty banter, and all too often they end with "see you next week" or something of that ilk. I for one find it unpleasant to listen to that when I'm doing an episode every day. In fact, I find a lot of the banter irritating if I'm only listening to one episode a week. The banter is part of the radio style, it's not alway there for pedagogical reasons.

So I have to ask myself: why write a language course modelled on radio programs, when instead you could write a language course modelled on language courses? It's not like there's a dearth of materials out there to model yourself on: Linguaphone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas and several other successful products exist on the market, and among them, some have survived a notably long time, unlike the short-lived fad for radio programmes.

Most of these don't have jingles (unlike the irritating audio accompanying many school textbooks), none of them are interspersed with chatty banter and very few have inane encouragement (phrases like "keep it up, you're really doing well" in a patronising voice really wind me up). Lessons usually start with a lesson number and a title, and nothing else. You may be given advice on the recommended frequency of use, but it's not rammed down your throat by someone gushing "see you next week! Cheeeeriooooo!"

So please, people; write language lessons, not radio programs

2011-05-13T19:00:00.000+01:00

Gatekrashen

One of the most popular figures in language methodology is a certain Stephen Krashen. People love him. People quote him. People even refer to what he does as "research", but Krashen himself has been involved in very little research, and most of the papers he writes cite papers which refer to other papers. And many of the papers he cites were written by him.

Krashen's view of teaching is massively oversimplistic, and unfortunately that appeals to people.

I've had a pop at Krashen in the past (in the latter part of my post Expository vs Naturalistic language), and I'm not the only one.

The journalist Jill Stewart got stuck into him over a dozen years ago about bilingual education in her Los Angeles Times article Krashen Burn. In it, she attacked his views on the education of Spanish speakers in the USA as being not only contrary to the evidence from teaching practice, but also diametrically opposed to the principles he professes for adult second language acquisition, even though he suggests adults should learn "like children".

In fact, Krashen's theories are so all-pervasive that Timothy Mason, when working as an English teacher trainer in the Université de Versailles St Quentin, dedicated most of a semester-long degree-level course to deconstructing Krashen's claims and rebutting them with references to real research and other academic opinions. And he's now put the lectures on-line for all to enjoy.

As I said, Krashen's theories are popular because their apparent simplicity appeals to both the teacher and the learner. But more insidiously, Krashen claims there is really no such thing as "learning" a language, saying instead that you "acquire" it. Now logically, if there's no such thing as "learning", then there can be no such thing as "teaching". This is particularly appealing for the teacher, because if there's no such thing as "teaching", there is no such thing as "bad teaching"; instead, we have the idea that the teacher gives the student the opportunity to acquire the language, and can't really be blamed if the student doesn't take it.

(Actually, can we still call the language learner a "student"...? Or even a "language learner"...? If there is no learning, there is no study, so surely the appropriate word is "acquirer"? This may seem like a simple game of semantics, but my understanding of the word "student" is someone who actually works at learning. By continuing to use the term "student", Krashen's followers risk unconsciously passing all the blame for failed learning to the students.)

I understand all this, yet I am still baffled as to how the gaping flaws in Krashen's reason are still so hard to point out to people.

Krashen says we don't learn by production, we learn by listening and understanding. Yet it is self-evident that this simply isn't enough in the real world. Think of any immigrants you know. All over the UK we have had wave after wave of immigration, particularly since the second world war. There are loads of people who have lived here since the 70s who still haven't "acquired" English to a native-like level, with continued native-language interference.

As Timothy Mason points out, choosing not to correct mistakes "may be seen as a perfectly rational judgement on the part of the learner, who decides that any further investment in perfecting his grasp of the L2 will not pay sufficient dividends in added communicative and social power."

But it's more than this. Certain errors cost more to fix at a later date than others. I addressed one of these a few weeks ago: the falling together of phonemes.

Using the same example as in my previous post, we can predict that a French beginner of English will have difficulty distinguishing T from unvoiced TH, and D from voiced TH. We can intervene and make them see the distinction, but only through production. There is simply too much redundancy in language to be able to force the student to need to discriminate. Word pairs such as "this" and "diss" differ so much in usage that discriminating the phonemes is very rarely going to be required to comprehend the sentence.

And as I said in the earlier post, my French friend can pronounce all the phonemes of English (with a bit of an accent) and he can even hear them when he listens for them, but they are missing from his model of the language, and in order to learn to pronounce every word correctly, he would have to relearn all his vocabulary. He can function perfectly well in English, so learning correctly would certainly not pay "sufficient dividends" compared to the time he would have to invest, so it is "perfectly rational" that he doesn't.

The same goes for many people's grammar. Little errors like missing the word "to" from "need to" rarely confuse anyone, and so there is no impetus for correction.

Current thinking is that it is sufficient to focus on survival language and "getting the message across" without any concern for accuracy. Accuracy, they tell us, is an advanced skill for advanced students, and isn't worth the effort for most people, who just want to have a nice holiday.

But accuracy must be an early focus or it will never be achieved. Grammatical and phonological accuracy is cheap and easy to start with, and gets more difficult and expensive the later it's left.

So we have to teach, and we have to teach accuracy, or the student will never achieve it.

2011-05-10T06:51:00.000+01:00

I've always been a bit concerned about learning other people's mistakes, but this never fully explained why I always feel a bit funny about talking to other learners.

Well, I think I've worked it out.

Last night, I was listening to a German woman talking Italian, and because I didn't have the Italian accent as a cue (she has a strong German accent), my brain didn't switch into Italian mode properly, and it felt like I was listening to Spanish-with-errors instead.

Interesting.

2011-05-06T19:04:00.001+01:00

Repeating to learn or learning to repeat?

Repetitio est mater studiorum, it has been said, or repetition is the mother of learning to put it in a way even I would understand.

I was on a train last week and dozed off. As I woke up, I had a simple phrase stuck in my head: "repeating to learn or learning to repeat?" It's a crystallisation of something that I've been thinking about for a while.

When I look at wordlists, I see the danger that you associate the words in them with the list rather than with the intended item. (When I was in high school, I couldn't remember the names of any berries in French without recalling "strawberry = fraise" first and then continuing down the list from there -- everything above strawberry in the list I was given was a full-sized "fruit", so I must have mentally subdivided the list into two...)

When I look at recorded drills, I see the danger that repeated drilling of the same order leads to the same sort of "learning the list" as with wordlists.

But on top of this, there's something slightly different and slightly more insidious.

All too often, the tasks we set as teachers or that we are set as learners can be carried out without engaging in meaning or true language, which I term as working mechanically. The result is that we can produce a correct utterance without actually meaning it. In the immediate term, this gives an illusion of learning. What I'd never really thought about was how learning tasks build on this mechanical ability.

In terms of language learning, these mechanical skills are a dead end because they rarely lead to fluency, so I didn't think you could build on them. But then I started noticing how there is a certain skill to carrying out the mechanical tasks, so the tasks can become slightly more complicated, and the student learns to perform such tasks quicker and quicker. In the long term, then, the illusion of progress is maintained, even as the student's linguistic competence improves very little.

So there's two things here: learning of scripts instead of learning language, and learning mechanical skills vs learning linguistic skills. While it is important to remain conscious of the distinction, you can sum up both the erroneous strategies as "learning to repeat".

So teachers, when you set a task that focuses on repetition, ask yourself this: are your students repeating to learn, or merely learning to repeat?

2011-04-30T12:23:00.000+01:00

Real and unreal

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You could paraphrase this and say that the road to bad teaching is paved with good intentions.

A couple of my students have a bee in their bonnet about something they refer to as "real listening". I'd never heard the term before they said it, but I was familiar with the concept: the use of genuine telephone recordings, street noise etc to make listening exercises harder and more lifelike.

The goal is admirable and easy to understand. It certainly appeals to the conscientious teacher, even if the students hate it.

But if you look below the surface, it maybe isn't that good an idea. First of all, in real conversation, any noise or telephone-line interference may be natural, but you will always have recourse to those magic words: "sorry, I didn't quite catch that".

But looking at street noise, we've got to start considering how the human brain and ears work.

In a real-life situation, we can filter out street noise quite effectively. This is not a linguistic skill, it's a much more basic neurological thing. We have two ears. Behind those ears is a sophisticated audio-processing mechanism that compares the input from each, and by comparing differences in timing and volume in the perceived sound, it can take the two one-dimensional signals received by the ear and produce a remarkably accurate three-dimensional image.

It is in producing that image that we naturally (and effortlessly) identify individual sounds. Listening to a recording does not give us the cues that we need to split out the relevant sounds, so it's a much, much harder thing than most of us will need to in our day-to-day lives.

Before anyone says it: yes, a native can listen to a tape with background noise and make out the speech. It may seem only slightly more difficult than doing it face-to-face, but anything that is slightly more difficult for a native is exponentially more difficult for the learner. And it's not something that you can or should force a learner to do -- the native speaker achieves it based on a firm, broad knowledge of the language. This allows the native speaker to fill in the gaps. But it is not a specific skill -- it's an enhancement to the general ability to listen and to infer missing information from the rest of the utterance.

If so-called "real listening" was something we expected people to start on only after they had the phonology and grammar down pat, that would be fine, but I see it as degrading the quality of input for anyone before that.

2011-04-16T17:29:00.001+01:00

The Myth of the Quick Learner

It is often claimed that some people are quick learners, and some people are slow learners, and that's that. In many ways this is just a euphemistic way of saying that some people are "clever" and some people are "stupid".

Well, as someone accused of being a "quick learner" or a "good learner" or being "good at" whatever subject we are discussing, I'd like to refute that.

I am not a quick learner.
Learning is about incorporating new information with existing knowledge.
It follows, then, that learning is easier the more knowledge you have to build on.

Here's my learner-life-story in a condensed form.

My parents were both teachers. My mother chose to be a stay-at-home mum.

As a child, my mum had me playing games that involved counting before I went to school.
She taught me to play simple tunes on the piano.
She taught me to read a little.
She taught me to read the clock.
On top of this, she spoke a very "standard" English, whereas the local way of speaking was a mixture of Scots and English.

So when I went to school, I looked "clever", I looked like a "quick learner", I was "good at":

Arithmetic
The recorder (a horrible little instrument, but cheap and accessible for a learner of music)
Reading
Telling the time
English

I was not a quick learner, I just had a huge headstart. My headstart meant I had less to learn at each step. Even when I reached high school, I was still ahead of the pack.

Think about that for a moment: I had less to learn.

How can I be a "quick learner" if I'm doing less than the people around me?

Logically, it's absurd to say that.

In reality, all that happened was that I was given adequate time to learn the material given to me, based on my previous experience. Many of my classmates weren't given that chance -- they were presented with ever more new information without giving the previous information time or opportunity to be integrated with the old information.

The result is a spiral of passing tests without ever really mastering any information, and it is not the pupil's fault.

It's not really the teacher's fault either, because the teacher doesn't have any control over the students' knowledge before they come into the room, but any good teacher will tell you that it's the student's knowledge that counts, not intelligence.

Even a good teacher will still struggle with this in practice, because it is very different to account for deficiencies in prior learning for the low attainers without boring the high attainers.

So there's no easy answers, but until the myth of the "slow learner" is well and truly scotched, the debate will always be dragged backwards and true progress won't be achieved.

2011-04-11T19:00:00.001+01:00

The importance and unimportance of accent

Accent is essentially unimportant. It's the final coat of paint that makes our language pretty or ugly, shiny or dull. It is something that the beginning learner really doesn't need to think about.

Unfortunately, this is something that is frequently overinterpreted, because many people don't appreciate the fact that accent is only one part of pronunciation.

Every language has it's own phonology -- it has a set of possible sounds and possible combinations of sounds, and it has a set of distinctions between sounds. Though we do not need to learn a good accent from day one, we certainly need to learn the sound system of a language.

The most common consequence of conflating the sound system with accent is the idea that the "closest sound" from your native language is "good enough". Open up almost any beginner's book and it'll start with a list of sounds described along the lines of "like the a in cat", "like t in English". But this is rarely true.

Still, some languages will let you get away with this to some extent, but when you hit a more complicated language, it all crumbles.

Any book on Hindi will tell you that "closest sounds" just won't cut it, and that with that approach you will never be understood. This is because Hindi has more sounds than most other languages. In fact, there are 8 sounds that are approximately similar to T and D, so using an English T and D, or a French one, or a German one, would leave you completely unable to distinguish certain words, and unable to make yourself understood.

Worse, because you treat 4 different sounds as one, you will never learn to hear the difference either -- your brain only distinguishes sounds that mean something. The later you attempt to fix it, the harder it will be, because you will have to relearn all the vocabulary in order to learn the difference.

I've experienced this personally with Spanish. In Spanish C is pronounced like Z, when the C is followed by I or E. In some areas, these in turn sound like S, but in other areas, they don't. I started learning Spanish from a course that didn't make a distinction between S and Z, but as I progressed I spent more of my time with people who make the distinction than those who don't.

As a result, I started trying to speak like them. However, my brain was trained to see the two things as one, so I was prone to making mistakes such as pronouncing the word "especial" as "ezpesial". My errors were arbitrary, but not random -- they were consistent and there was a clear pattern. My brain was still seeing the two as equivalent, but was trying to explain it in terms of the other sounds in the word. Thankfully this was still pretty early, so I caught it and fixed it.

Other people are not so lucky. A local French teacher (from France) can pronounce all the sounds of English. But he couldn't before he came here. The result is that he has already learned all the words with the wrong sounds. The classic example is TH -- it's always T or D when he speaks. He's learnt the words now, so there's no going back.

Now, that's something that we call "falling together" (ah, a nice, self-descriptive term for once), but phonemes can also split apart.

Consider that Japanese doesn't make a distinction between liquids L and R. As an English speaker learning Japanese, I would likely hear these as different phonemes (meaningful units of sounds) instead of simply different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme ("allophones").

This splitting apart on its own isn't a big problem -- it doesn't lose information the same way falling together does. However, the two can very easily co-occur, and at that point they make a bad situation worse.

Take for example "CH" in German. It has two allophones -- a hard one (ach) similar to the sound in Scottish "loch", and a softer palatised one (ich) that takes on a quality similar to the English SH. But there's another phoneme that sounds even more like the English SH, one that's usually written SCH. And it gets worse, because in certain combinations of consonants, S starts to sound the same.
If we're not careful, the learner may end up splitting their Ss and their CHs, and putting half of each in the same box as SCH. The result is a map of the sound system which looks nothing like the native speakers view of things.

Accent is what we put on top of the sound system to give it colour and personality. You cannot develop a good accent based on an incorrect map of the sound system. Pronunciation has to be taught from the start in such a way as to encourage a consistent and correct sound system.

Accent can wait until later, but pronunciation must taught in some form right from the start.

2011-04-08T18:39:00.000+01:00

Speed reading's great - unless you want to learn a language.

Every now and then, I read someone on the internet quoting the remarkable reading speed of trained speed readers, and then asking whether this would help a language learner.

In principle, it sounds like a good idea. After all, if you can read four times faster, you can read four times as much, right? It seems like you can therefore expose yourself to more foreign language in a shorter time.

Unfortunately, the mechanics of speed reading -- and indeed reading in general -- do not allow this.

When we read, we take advantage of known, familiar patterns in the input. This means that we don't actually need to process everything that is printed in order to understand it. Tak# th{s sent#nce, f*r ex*m*pl*. As a reader, your knowledge of English is probably enough to fill in the gaps. We do this all the time. If we didn't, reading speeds wouldn't improve so dramatically just through frequent reading, but they do. Basically, our brains get in the habit of knowing the bits they need to read. "The book is ## the table": the eye knows those two ## shapes are "on" as there's nothing else they could be. "The book is ##### the table": well, that's just got to be under. So the brain recognises the rough shape and/or size and matches it with the known patterns -- it knows what it must be without actually reading it.

Speed-reading training isn't anything special. Although some speed-reading schools will tell you to do this, that or the other, in the end, all speed-reading classes do is encourage you to take this natural process to its logical conclusion.

So where does this leave the language learner?
Nowhere.

When we're learning a new language, we do not have deep knowledge of the language we are studying, so our brain cannot take the shortcuts required for speed-reading. Any assumptions it makes will come from outside the target language, and therefore will result in errors.

So, nice thought, but no.

2011-03-31T13:58:00.000+01:00

Can we trust quotes on language products?

I've said before that you can't really trust anyone when it comes to language learning. In the last couple of days I've had my nose in a few books that have nice little quotes on the back saying how invaluable to the learner.

There are two problems in general, depending on whether the quote is from a learner or a subject matter expert.

With learners, the problem is quite simply that we often overestimate our own abilities. So is it really effective, or is it just a flawed perception on the user's side?

With experts, the problem is slightly different. On the simplest level, the expert can see when all the information is there, but can't honestly say whether it explains it well enough. Any reviewing expert has the same problem as the author: being an expert, he is blind to the difficulties in certain concepts. A book can make fairly large leaps in logic, but because the expert knows what's in the "gap", he understands what the author means, and doesn't notice the hole in the information.

A particular problem here is the use of jargon. I have one Gaelic grammar book that is widely praised as suitable for learners, yet is riddled with imperfect passive dependent forms, based on a very brief outline of grammatical terminology at the start of the book. I don't have a linguistics degree, but I'm better informed than most Gaelic learners, and I still find the book very heavy going indeed.

But at a deeper level, this is a very dangerous situation. An expert knows the information he's looking for, and a book that lets the expert find the information quickly and unambiguously looks the most "correct" to the expert. But the learner needs a more subtly structured, integrative approach. A great teacher will tie all the concepts together as they appear, and to an expert this looks messy -- the information is spread out throughout the book. So an expert isn't just blind to the gaps in an overly technical resource, in a learner-friendly work he is blinded to the presence of the information by the very things the learner needs.

This is why my favourite resources take a lot of flak from "educated" quarters -- the teaching hides the information it's teaching from casual view, but reveals it to the learner as and when appropriate.

2011-03-13T13:42:00.000Z

United we stand, divided we fall: Multiple minorities

Anyone living in Scotland will be familiar with the big noise made in the media over Gaelic. Mostly it's just about how a minority is getting money (incidentally, the figures aren't really that high), bolstered by the claim that it was "never spoken here". Every now and then we see that argument reinforced with "what about Scots"?

The claim "never spoken here" is untrue in most places, as most parts of Scotland had Gaelic at some point in history, and a lot of it still had some even only 200 years ago. But this is an irrelevancy, and people get there blood up picking over the semantics of never. In the final analysis, history is less important than the present: if people don't identify with a language now, then it simply isn't their language. Sadly a core minority of Gaelic activists do not accept this and get people's backs up by effectively telling their fellow countrymen that they aren't true Scots.

Some people who support Scots call Gaelic an incomer language from Ireland. Some people who support Gaelic call Scots an incomer language from England. Well so what? Every language came from somewhere else to start off with. (And incidentally, Scots came from overseas, not from England. Common thought still says Gaelic came via Ireland, but it came from Iberia before that, and somewhere else before that.) The simple fact of the matter is that both are present in Scotland today, and both are part of lineages that have been spoken in parts of what is now Scotland for well over a millennium. In my book, that makes them both "Scottish languages".

In arguments such as these, people often reach back and invoke the names of legendary historic Scots. A recent blog post claims Wallace and Robert the Bruce as Gaelic speakers. "Wallace" is an Anglo-Saxon name for a speaker of Brythonic (related to the modern "Welsh"). So maybe he spoke Gaelic, but he mostly likely was at least bilingual.

Robert de Brus was from the Norman nobility, and though to have been brought up in the Scots-speaking southeast, or in the northeast of England where even now the everday speech is more like Scots than Standard English. His mother was a Gael. Why did a Norman lord marry a Gaelic countess? This romanticised in legend as some great romance, but in truth the most likely explanation is that the de Brus line had been claiming the throne since the death of Alexander, and Bruce's grandfather (after being denied the crown in favour of Baliol) realised that he needed to get the Gaelic clan chieftains on-side if one of his descendants was ever to be crowned king. So he married his son to a Gael. When the young Robert the Bruce courted the chiefs and lairds, he would have been able to address each and every one of them in their own language, and as one of them.

In his blog post at Tocasaid, Mac an t-Srònaich seems to suggest Scots is a massive conspiracy to divide the people of Scotland by separating them from their true language. This couldn't be further from the truth. Scotland has always been divided and has always resisted the imposition of a shared identity from one of its groups. Scotland was at its best when a few visionary leaders were willing to stand up and bridge that divide and develop a common purpose that still respected individual identity. This is the model we should be following.

Come on now people let's get on the ball and work together.

2011-03-12T19:52:00.000Z

The death of the word

I've been thinking about writing a post under this title for a while, but every time I think about it, it changes. I figured I'd just publish and be damned, and if I change my mind later, I'll post again.

Right now there's a bit of a spat going through the courts been Apple and Microsoft. There always is, but this one's a bit special. Apple have claimed "App Store" as a trademark, Microsoft say it's a generic term. Apple say it must be a trademark as they invented it, Microsoft say it must be a generic term because it's modelled on the generic pattern for shops in US English -- hardware store, liquor store, general store -- with the generic term app simply stating the type of shop/store it is. ("App" is short for "application" -- ie any piece of computer software that serves a useful purpose, rather than being a game.) Microsoft also point to several examples of the term being used generically in the press.

What's going on here is that no-one wants to create new words any more. If you make a new word, others can use it; and if they can use the same word, they can compete for your customers. It's much easier to make a new name, trademark it, and stifle the competition.

Imagine you're going for a meal. Do you order a burger for yourself and a kids meal for the children? No, you get a "Big Mac" and they get a "Happy Meal". You buy these from a place marked "McDonald's". Not "McDonald's Restaurant", not "McDonald's Burger Bar", just "McDonald's". McDonald's don't want to use words, because they want to trap you into coming back -- you can't ask for the same thing anywhere else.

If you go to any gym now, all the workouts have TM or R after them. Salsacise and Zoomba are just keepfit with Latin American music, RPM and Spinning are just exercise bike workouts. But put a trademarked name on them instead of a generic one, and suddenly they seem unique, and your audience is locked in.

Consider also the BlackBerry, the only serious mobile email device prior to the arrival of the iPhone. There were other systems that could do the job -- Nokia and Microsoft were selling them. But why did the BlackBerry take off the way it did? Because it was first to market and they did not coin a word. It was BlackBerry. It was not a "BlackBerry(TM) mobile emailer", it was a BlackBerry. When people talked to each other about it, the only word was BlackBerry. Talk about Windows Mobile or Nokia and you'd get asked "so it's a BlackBerry then?" And what then? How do you explain the concept of doing the same thing as a BlackBerry but not being a BlackBerry?

2011-03-05T20:46:00.000Z

Community of slaves? LiveMocha's new business model charges for free labour.

LiveMocha started out on shaky ground -- free courses with free help through the power of Web 2.0 and social networking. The scope for monetarisation was always limited, and initially they seemed to expect to make their money through targeted advertising. For what? Well, the only known factor about their audience was that they wanted to learn specific languages. Unfortunately, the sort of people who look for free online language courses aren't generally that interested in paying for commercial language books.

The second side to LM's monetarisation was their so-called "premium packages". These premium packages basically consisted of the same material in an off-line format for MP3 players and iPhones. Considering the low quality of the LiveMocha material, it wasn't a brilliant deal.

However, "free" is a great price, and LiveMocha's strength wasn't in the quality of the material, but in the availability of the chat facilities and corrections from native speakers, so they built up a large user base and had to monetarise it one way or another, and from that came their tie-up with Harper Collins to launch their
"Active" language course range. When they launched it, they took down the existing free courses for English, French, German, Italian and Spanish -- easily the most requested five languages on the site.

Ok, so they have a right to stop doing stuff free, but the problem is they're still expecting their customers to do their marking for them. I logged into LiveMocha for the first time in months and suddenly I'm getting requests to mark material that others are paying to do... but I'm to mark it for free. I don't have access to this sort of task for the languages I'm learning, either.

I'm not impressed. The price they charge is quite high (and you pay per month, not once per course, which I find interesting) yet they expect people to work for free, not even for any sort of credits (or at least, not yet.)

To me that's abuse of the community, and a quick way to kill any goodwill they may have accumulated up to now.

2011-02-25T19:36:00.000Z

Don't fight against your own brain

Simple fact: it's your brain that does your learning for you. It knows more than you'll ever know about how to learn. So when you're trying to learn something and it just isn't sticking, don't fight against your brain -- you're brain's telling you you're doing it wrong.

So how do you get your brain to accept new information? The new information has to be meaningful, first of all. If it doesn't mean anything to your brain, your brain doesn't want to know.

Unless you need to learn certain specific words, the best thing to do is to start anticipating what you're going to want to say. Lots of courses try to do that for us, but they can only anticipate what we're going to want to say at some point. Only you can determine what you're going to want to say now.

To use a fairly obvious example: holidays.
If you're going on holiday, you're going to tell people about it. It's not a matter of showing off, either: you have to explain to people that you're not going to be around for a week or two. Once you say that you're going on holiday, people are naturally going to ask you about it. So before you tell anyone you're going on holiday, you can have a good guess as to what you're going to need to know to answer their questions: the name of the place, the type of accommodation, words such as "beach" or "mountain", "package tour", "ferry", "aeroplane" and so on. This is stuff you know you're going to be asked about, and it's stuff that you're probably thinking about lots already anyway. This is the sort of stuff your brain wants to know.

But even if you don't think you're going to get enough practice, remember that most people aren't personally invested in other people's holidays, so they don't tend to remember the details. This means that when you're back and they ask about your holidays, you get to repeat a lot of what you said before, as well as going into further detail.

I go to weekly conversation groups for several languages where I speak to different people each week, so I find that my holidays are a topic of conversation for two or three weeks before going and two or three weeks after coming back. Talk about the same topic for over a month and a lot of it sticks

Even better is when your holiday destination is where the language you're learning is spoken, not only because the vocabulary will be relevant to you when you're out there, but also because every time you meet someone from that country they'll ask you if you've been, and your answer will revolve around this same holiday. My last holiday was in November, and part of it was spent in Barcelona. It's nearly March, but I've spoken about that holiday at least once every two weeks since, because every time I speak to a new person in Catalan, they ask me if I've ever been there.

Does the topic of holidays seem limiting? At first glance, yes. You look at language books and holidays are all about flights and passports and beaches. But when you're on holiday, you've not stopped living. Life carries on. You still eat and sleep. Sometimes you're woken by people coming back to the hotel drunk in the middle of the night. Or maybe you have a noisy couple just down the corridor. All these little slices of everyday life become stories when you come back from holiday.

Stories from my last holiday include talking about trying to find an internet café through the medium of Catalan; turning up at my hostel only to find it's in the middle of the red-light district; a sleazy Italian trying to pick me up on a secluded beach; a flight cancelled for snow; overnight trains and speed restrictions.

I come back wanting to talk about these things. But in talking about these exceptional events, I don't just need words specific to the individual context, but I often find I need more mundane, everyday language that I just didn't know before.

Listening to your brain
Most of us, as language learners, develop an ability to avoid holes in our knowledge. You don't know how to say you're going to do something? You just say that you will do it instead. We become adept at spotting these potholes and swerving to another way of saying it. The better we get at this, the less we notice it, and this becomes a problem, because at that moment, the brain is telling us exactly what it wants to learn. If you want to say it, it's because the brain wants to know it. So when your brain says it wants something, take note of it, whether on paper or mentally.

Learn to listen when your brain asks for language, and you'll find that it's always asking for new words, and it will keep you busy for a long, long time.

2011-02-25T19:00:00.002Z

Music, maestro!

Having discussed films and videos, I thought it would make sense to talk about music next.

Can music help you learn? Certainly, but again, in a limited way.

At all stages of learning, a song or two can help you increase your vocabulary. But whenever I start learning a language, I find myself blinding mimicking streams of sound and never really getting much out of it. The best thing you can get out of songs as a beginner is the rhythm of the language.

BUT...

In order for a song to teach you the rhythm of the language, it has to be in that rhythm, and as you'll know from your own language, some types of music take liberties with the rhythm. In particular, this is a problem when a foreign genre is brought in. Listen to English-language "Latin" music from people like Gloria Estefan and Ricky Martin: the rhythm seems very rigid and mechanical, because it's a Spanish-language rhythm, not an English one. So if you go into a foreign language music shop looking for the type of music you normally listen to in your own language, you'll be selling yourself short.

How about as an advanced learner?
Well, as I said last week, I find films and TV more useful in learning to understand things that I have already learned to some extent elsewhere. The same goes for songs. When I should know most of a song, then I can train myself to hear the words. It may not be very "iPod generation", but I still like albums. With an album in a foreign language, I start by listening a few times. Once I've got a favourite song, I learn it with help from Mr Google and the many lyrics sites on-line.
Having learned to sing it, I can hear the words clearly when I listen to it again.

But that isn't the end of it, because learning to hear the words of one song seems to teach me to understand not only the song, but the singer, and as a result, I start to hear more of the words in the other songs. After a while, I'll learn a second song from the album, then possibly even a third. By this point, most of what the singer says is pretty clear to me. (Obviously there's other words I don't know.)

However, the biggest limit to the usefulness of songs is "poetic license" -- every songwriter will play around with language to make it fit the tune, so a song isn't a good model of a language. For example, in the chorus of the French song La Lettre, Renan Luce ends one line with "jeu" (or, later, "enjeu") and then reuses that as the word "je" for the start of the next line. It's not "good" French, but it's clever songwriting (and it's a good song).

Don't be fooled into thinking that you can make a whole education out of songs. Don't even think of songs as too much a part of your "learning", but as a way to fill time between study sessions.

2011-02-18T20:35:00.000Z

Link: A Brief History of OK

The BBC online magazine pages have a short article about one of the most common words in the world. It's certainly a fascinating word, and it's really interesting to hear how often it comes up in the Scandinavian crime dramas that BBC4 always seem to be showing...!

2011-02-18T20:18:00.002Z

Watching films as language study...

Well, I've been a little bit too technical and theoretical of late, so let's go for something more practical for a change.

A lot of people love the idea that you can learn a language just by watching films (such as Keith Lucas, discussed last week). You can't. Well, maybe there's one or two linguistic supermen out there who can, but for most of us, it won't work.

Can we get anything out of films? Of course.
Can we get a lot out of films? Hard to say.

First of all, if you're an absolute beginner, you're not going to understand anything watching the film without subtitles, and all proponents of target-language-only learning say that it's in understanding that we learn.

But unfortunately, once you start reading subtitles, you stop listening. The brain, so I'm told, has only got one "language channel", and if you load it through the eyes, the brain tunes out the words hitting your ear so as not to mix up the two streams. I'm sure you've tried talking to someone while reading or writing and found that you've written down a word from your conversation or suddenly said a word you've just read.

So once you start tuning out the sounds, your not going to learn much.

I first bought a DVD player in the January sales in 2005, with the express purpose of learning from foreign films. My plan was quite typical: watch them with English subtitles, then later watch them again with the subtitles off. Well, I never really did that -- I just kept buying and watching them with the subtitles on. Not brilliant for my language skills, but now I've got one of the best DVD collections of anyone I know. (Well, I know some people who have better collections, but at least mine's all originals!!)

However, after about a year, I started to notice little things at the start and end of sentences. Little things like "you know...", "I see..." etc. You know, little things that just seeped through before I started or after I finished reading the subtitles. But I'm still only using one language channel. People who can hold a conversation while reading a book aren't really doing two things at once, they're simply switching backwards and forwards between two tasks very rapidly, and this is what I started doing. As a kid, I could never hold a conversation while reading, so it's not an innate talent on my part. (My big sister always used to be able to do it. I always assumed she was faking it or lying.)

Over the intervening years, I've been able to pick up more and more, but it seems to me that in a way I'm "primed" by the subtitles -- I'm anticipating how that would translate and what I hear is then matched against my expectations.

But really, the way to improve when you're good is to go without English subtitles (or whatever your native language is). The first step to achieving that is to get material with target language subtitles. The subtitles never match what is said on screen, so it's limited, but it does help you get tricky words.

Just now, I've been watching a French series Un Village Français. I tried watching it without the subtitles, but a few words slipped by me. The first time I watched with subtitles on, I saw the word "scierie" and I realised it had to be "sawmill" ("scie" is "saw", and I knew the guy owns a sawmill from watching it before). I'd watched two whole serieses without subtitles and never realised what this word was. I hadn't even noticed that the word existed. Two minutes with subtitles on, and I doubt I'll ever forget it.

But so far, so vague.
How did I start being able to listen while reading? It's hard for me to say, as I wasn't really thinking about it at the time, but I believe it was when I started echoing my favourite actors to try and get the rhythm of the languages. You can't do that without listening (obviously) and at first this got in the way of reading the subtitles and I ended up using the pause button a lot. But having done that, it seems like my brain started realising that it had to listen and eventually I got there.

I only really noticed I was doing it when I went to see a French film and one of the characters was bemoaning the fact that kids today don't watch French cinema. The subtitles talked about "rubbish from far away", the voice said "American crap".

But even after years, my "listening while reading" is still very limited. It leaves me with a question I can't answer. Do I get more out of watching with subtitles and hearing less of the speech or do I get more out of watching without subtitles and hearing more, even if I understand less? It's impossible for me to measure this, and in the end the choice is made for me by circumstance, because if I have subtitles, I watch with subtitles. If I don't, I watch without.

TV vs film for learners

But on a different tack, it's worth noting that watching serieses is far better for your language skills than watching films. A film is relatively short, so there's little recycling of dialogue. Each new film has potentially new accents and ways of speaking, but a 90 minute film finishes just as you're starting to get accustomed to the actors.

TV serieses, on the other had, offer several hours of dialogue written by the same scriptwriters, delivered by the same actors in the same accents, and covering the same topics. The vocabulary and turn of phrase is repeated in throughout the length of the series, naturally reviewing and revising your learning. I've been following a particular series in Spanish for about two and a half years now, and I personally feel it has been immensely helpful to me. Of course I've learnt a lot from other sources during the same time, but this has really aided my listening comprehension.

I already mentioned Un Village Français - I bought a two-series boxed set for around the cost of two full-priced feature films, and that's 10 hours of drama with 3 hours of historical documentary as bonus features for the price of 3 hours of film. As I progressed through the series, I really did feel like I "tuned in" to the accents - there were things in the first few episodes that I should have understood (in terms of grammar and vocabulary, they were withing my boundaries) but that I didn't (because my ear wasn't picking up the detail of what the actors were saying).

So how do you make films and TV part of your learning strategy?

In the beginning, I don't think you really can. At that stage, don't consider it "learning time", consider it "TV time". Get used to the whole idea of subtitled foreign cinema with subtitles in your native language. If you start to hear a word or two, great. If you don't then it's no loss as this isn't "learning time".

I only really started getting serious with Spanish TV in the run up to my exams. I'd studied a lot, I'd learnt a lot, but it still felt really disjoint. I considered TV viewing as a type of revision -- I was hearing stuff I already knew, but used in many different ways. I got used to the speed of natural speech in various accents, but I don't think I could have done that if I didn't already have a solid foundation in the grammar, because it reduced the amount of unknown material in the language. In the end I picked up a couple of structural points too, and some good vocabulary, but mostly I mostly found that it took the language I knew in an academic context and made it more real and alive.

(And in the spirit of taking nobody's word for it and what I said in the follow-up, I'd like to point out that I can say definitively that I learned the Spanish construction "volver a hacer" from the Spanish series Águila Roja. The fact that I can give a specific example suggests to me that I didn't learn much in this way. Unfortunately, if you don't think about it, you can be misled into believing that remembering an example is proof of the effectiveness of a method.)

One thing I think would work well is to use a DVD player or computer video player that you can slow down. I'd like to start watching foreign serieses with the first few episodes slowed by about 10 or 15% while I get used to the characters and their ways of speaking, then speed it up to normal speed for the rest of the series. Unfortunately most of my serieses to date have been on-line without speed control, but I'll give it a go later in the year when I order in some French TV, and possibly Italian too.

2011-02-13T21:09:00.002Z

Take nobody's word for it: a case study

So last week I gave a few reasons why you shouldn't pay too much attention to other people's advice. Of course, you do have to pay some attention to other people's advice, so you have to evaluate the soundness of that advice.

A few weeks ago I was alerted to a perfect example of bad advice via a post on the How To Learn Any Language forums.

What makes this such a good example is the fact that the guy giving the advice has kept a blog, which allows us to critically evaluate what he says.

Keith Lucas believes you can learn a language just by watching TV. This flies in the face of a lot of opinion, experience and most theoretical models of human language.

A month ago, Keith completed a 2000 hour "silent period" of Chinese. That is to say that over the course of 2 years, he has watched 2000 hours of Chinese TV without looking up any grammar or vocabulary. He will only now start to speak the language.

Keith's inspiration is the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) method. ALG is in essence a variation on the Direct and Natural methods of the late 19th century, which suggests that we can only learn a language through that language itself. I was talking about "one all-important concept" last week, or in Decoo's words "a concept that is stressed above all others" -- this is ALG's all-important concept. Decoo says that this concept has to appeal to the imagination, and this certainly does appeal to the imagination.

The earliest post I can find on his blog referring to ALG is from October 2008, but it doesn't tell us how he discovered ALG and the exact nature of his experience with it. He then went on to talk very enthusiastically about the principles of ALG in several more posts over the course of that month.

Then we get the leap of logic. That very same month, inspired by ALG, he decided that he would try to replicate the ALG classes by watching internet TV. Of course while the principle of ALG is learn a language through itself, in practice, ALG uses a structured course to introduce grammar and vocabulary in a controlled manner. As such, simply watching TV doesn't approximate the ALG method at all. Well, for the beginner at least. A well-experienced ALG teacher has said that TV is only a replacement for ALG when you can understand 55-70% of the language to start off with. To quote the article exactly: "If you are a complete beginner, it won’t work. The TV would just become more noise."

There is more to a method than the all-important concept!

Anyhow, so why does Keith seem to have succeeded? Is he lying? Is the rest of the world wrong? What?

Well, the clues are scattered around his blog. On the day he started his simulated ALG he said: "I'm no longer going to try". "No longer", he says. OK...

Then it gets interesting:
"As I have already learned a little bit of the language, I hear many of the words that I have learned. I am experiencing first-hand the crippling effect of my learning. Whenever I hear something familiar, the meaning just won't come. I have to associate it with the English and then I understand the meaning. There is some kind of barrier."
The implication in here is that the previous learning is a hindrance, rather than a help.

Keith seems to be denying the usefulness of his previous study, and it's a pretty common thing to do. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a review for course X, Y or Z that says "I learned more in 5 days with course X than in 5 years of school/evening classes/whatever".

It is impossible to go back and start from zero with a blank slate. Everything you've studied previously has some effect, and it seems to me that most immersive courses and methods are most successful for false beginners. In general, it seems to me that most courses are incomplete, and immersion fills in the gaps, filling in the need for meaningful practice that a lot of non-immersive courses fail to provide.

People will tend to ascribe their success to one thing, but in reality, their success is the cumulative effect of everything they've done.

But, in fact, Keith actually knows this himself. In 2009 he wrote about how to write a language method, and in that post he says that on the internet "you can find many examples of what people are doing or what they think they did when they successfully learned a language". Notice that "what they think they did" -- the tacit implication is that (as I said last week) we don't always know what we're doing. But despite knowing this, despite knowing that people are never fully aware of their own actions and ways of working, he keeps slipping into making definitive statements about how things work and about what he does. And to be fair, so do I, which is what the title of last week's post was all about! Being aware of common human failings does not make us immune to them.

So a general request: when giving advice on learning, don't only tell people the stuff you think worked. Tell them everything you did, and tell them which bits you think worked and which bits you think didn't work, but tell them that you can't be sure that you're right. Then they can evaluate the whole thing critically and decide what they want to do for themselves.

2011-02-04T19:00:00.001Z

Take nobody's word for it - not even mine.

The world is a difficult place for a language learner. With so much advice out there, how do you know which to take? Unfortunately, you can't take anyone's advice without a pinch of salt. The usual response to this is to use your "common sense" or your "critical faculties", but neither of those is going to get us very far.

Before getting into the meat of the question, I'd like to quote Marcel Pagnol:
<<Telle est la faiblesse de notre raison : elle ne sert le plus souvent qu'à justifier nos croyances.>>
(Such is the weakness of our reason: most often it serves only to justify our beliefs.)

Pagnol wrote this in his autobiography La gloire de mon père, in reference to the rigorous debates between anti-clerical schoolmasters and the clergy, something of an everyday occurrence in post-revolutionary France. Both sides were well educated and well read, and both could set forth a good argument, but for the most part their arguments were always built on selective evidence.

This is a problem that bedevils research even to this day. In writing a paper, many researchers will quote research that supports their view, and will only cite research that disagrees with it when they can counter the point raised.

It the field of language learning, this is a particularly vexing problem. People on a regular basis go back and cite sources from the 60s and 70s, completely ignoring decades of research that run counter to it. Here our critical faculties as individuals fail us: it is not that we cannot be critical, but we are not presented with all the relevant information. Even if it was, we would be incapable of processing all the relevant information due to the sheer volume of research carried out.

We can be "blinded by science".

So much for critical reasoning. What about common sense?

Well, if it really was a question of "common sense", you wouldn't even need to ask, right? Common sense is just another word for a person's beliefs. At one time the existence of gods was common sense, and today the argument for or against gods boils down to the same thing -- all sides consider their view "common sense" and "logical".

Nope, common sense is no good, and reasoning can trick you, so you have to be careful.

Regular readers will know that my favourite piece on language is Wilfried Decoo's lecture On the mortality of language learning methods. One of the key points of Decoo's argument is that most methods have a broad basis of similarity, and differ in the inclusion or exclusion of one or two particular features, or even just in declaring that one particular feature is made more prominent.

In short, for all their arguing, most methods are incredibly similar. For example, Assimil claims that you doesn't teach rules, and that you learn by "natural assimilation", yet more of a typical Assimil book is dedicated to grammatical explanations than dialogues. On the other hand, any grammar-heavy course may say that the rules are the important bit, but most use lots of examples. Even the proponents of grammar-free "natural" learning produce courses with a structured introduction to grammatical features.

Problem 1: One all-important concept

Decoo says, "A new method draws its originality and its force from a concept that is stressed above all others. Usually it is an easy to understand concept that speaks to the imagination." Traditionally, this could be disregarded simply as marketing, and not directly harmful to the student. However, the internet has changed that, and these claims are becoming downright dangerous.

Why?

Well, people are going out and trying to recreate these methods for themselves, not based on the content of the methods, but on these stated principles. So while Krashen advises lots of listening, he offers a structured lesson. Yet a self-teacher can't produce a structured lesson, and listening to poorly selected material won't get you anywhere.

Problem 2: Nobody really knows what they're doing

As a general rule, when we're involved in doing something, we're not normally aware of exactly what it is we're doing. For example, can you describe how you walk? How you ride a bike? Probably only very superficially. So how are we to trust someone's claims about how they learn languages.

Aside from this general observation, we've got another problem -- the human brain can make insignificant things seem very significant indeed.

For example, if you live in a big city, you'll walk past thousands of people in a week. Yet run into one old schoolmate, and you'll comment on how unlikely it is, or how it's a small world. Statistically, that one friend is insignificant, but psychologically, that friend is more significant than every stranger in your town.

This phenomenon inhibits our individual ability to evaluate the effectiveness of our learning techniques. If you learn 3 things from a given technique and forget 300, by definition you only remember the things you learned. The 3 things become used as proof that you learned effectively from that technique.

In fact, I find that if I can remember a few specific examples that I learned in a particular way, it usually means quite the opposite: if a technique is effective, I rarely remember specific examples of things I learned with it. If I remember one or two examples, they're often the only things I learned well using that technique. So quite unhelpfully, the things that stick in my mind are actually the least helpful techniques. (I previously wrote about a similar phenomenon: the unspoken value of student feedback.) (This is part of something called recall bias, and it is one of the reasons very little science relies on survey responses these days.)

As a consequence, I'm generally sceptical when someone advises something as what they do, because, quite simply, how do they know?

2011-01-30T14:40:00.002Z

Review: Lidl's "United Office" 6-language pocket translator

So a few weeks ago, Lidl's weekly specials in my area were "office supplies". As a somewhat obsessive language learner, an electronic dictionary for 7 quid was something not to be missed.

Of course, I knew it would be rubbish.
And of course, I was right.

The first thing I noticed when I opened it up was the quick reference guide under the lid. This I recognised from a pocket dictionary that someone had in my high school. And it's been a good 15 years since I moved on from that place, so I knew straight off that we were looking at first generation technology. This technology appears to have been widely licensed as a "white label" system from a Far Eastern company, and I've seen a couple of devices with different physical layouts, but obviously the same underlying tech.

The dictionary
Well, the first function that any electronic dictionary needs to have is the dictionary itself, so we'll look at that first.
As might be expected from its 13-character, single-line screen, this "pocket translator" certainly isn't a translator, and even the term "dictionary" is stretching things a little. It's more of a "glossary" than anything else.
The dictionary contains no explanations whatsoever, just a series of one-to-one mappings of equivalent words across languages. It's as though it were a single big table of 6 languages by however many words.

But some words don't map cleanly down to one translation, so while there's one "affirm" in English, there's three entries for "affirmer" in French: "affirmer (1)", "affirmer (2)", "affirmer (3)". Affirmer (2) gives us the English "assert", and "affirmer (3) gives us the English "aver", a word that even I would have trouble understanding and I'm pretty good at English, what with speaking it my entire life...!

Well that "aver" is in there for a reason, suggesting that the equivalent German, Spanish, Italian or Dutch must be of some use

And therein lies the problem. If there is a meaningful distinction in one language, that distinction becomes part of the table, and the dictionary compilers had to find something to fill the row for every language. In a dictionary where you know the native language of the reader, it is accepted to give out the odd rare word or two in the reader's language as it won't be misleading. But when you don't know, the end result may be that the reader learns to speak in a way that is not well understood by natives of his target language.

The phrasebook
The phrasebook functionality follows the same table-based style. It has the usual stuff -- good morning, how are you, where is ...?
However, there's no way to search it other than to start at the start and run down the list.
So the content's OK, but the delivery stinks.

Games
I like Hangman, but if you're not going to give me any clues, I'm left in the dark. A 5-letter French word? There's quite a few of those...
The Anagrams are a bit better, but the whole things too random for me to bother attempting to use.

The calculator
The numbers are all over the "QWERTY" line of text, with the operators on the line below. It wouldn't have been difficult to mimic the layout of a standard calculator by splitting the numbers across rows. That would have made the calculator much more easy to use for anyone with a calculator already.

The verdict
It's rubbish. But then again, I knew that and I bought it anyway, because it's cheap rubbish. It's smaller and lighter than a single Langenscheidt "Universal" dictionary (the truly pocket-sized dictionaries from Langenscheidt), so at £7 I can hardly complain. I'll probably take it round Europe several times, and I'll probably never use it. In that sense, it's a bit like the warning triangle in the back of the car -- it's a just-in-case thing. For that, it'll do.

Update, 29/07/2011
Still haven't used it. I wonder if I'll actually need it before the battery goes flat. (CR2032, non-rechargeable.)

Update, 07/01/2012
I hadn't used it and I was moving out of a flat. I figured I'd never ever use it, so I binned it.
By the time I need anything like that, I'll probably have got myself a smartphone or something anyway.

2011-01-21T19:00:00.005Z

The internal dialogue.

A lot of successful language learners talk about having an "internal dialogue" or "internal monologue", where they're constantly practising their languages in their head, whether by providing a running commentary or imagining talking to peopl. (This is slightly different from the "din in the head".)

I've always done something like that, even before I started learning languages. It was part of a general tendency to overanalyse everything, and while I'm getting rid of that tendency, I have found the continuing internal monologue and/or dialogue quite useful in learning languages.

But I have found it increasingly difficult to employ consciously, as I keep finding that my internal monologue/dialogue keeps switching on in a different language from what I intended.

Of all people, it was Wikileaks' Julian Assange who gave me an insight into what's going on here. I read an article on him on the New Yorker's website several weeks ago -- here's the relevant passage:

He lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face. “Your inner voice quiets down,” he told me. “Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz19urdzmfO

And there's my problem -- if I have no anticipation of needing a particular language, my brain won't pick the right one. When I was going to Barcelona for a holiday, my brain went into overdrive, rehearsing everything in Catalan, because I knew it would be useful.

In fact, a lot of my ability in Spanish can be credited to a lovely Spanish woman I had a massive crush on. I looked forward to seeing her and I anticipated conversations, and my brain was always rehearsing new language as I was picking it up with the goal of impressing her. I even picked up a bit of her accent and ways of speaking.

The upshot

If you want to learn a language, you've got to practise it, and the internal mono/dialogue is a very efficient way of doing that - in fact it's hard to learn without some kind of subconscious practice. So in order to learn, you've got to keep your brain anticipating a need for the language.

Many courses aim to do this by having imaginable situations - at the airport, in the restaurant, etc - but these don't really work for me. Why not? Because while I can imagine the situation, I don't anticipate a need for language. I already know that airport staff in all major international terminals havea good level of English. In most cities I've visited, the menu's written in two or three languages, including English, and the bill comes with numerals, so I don't need to know the numbers to know how much things cost. (In fact, when I moved to Spain, I didn't know my numbers and relied on the display on the till when I went to the supermarket!)

So when you're trying to learn, you need to have something in your future to anticipate -- whether it's a holiday in the language, a lovers' tryst or simply just telling a language exchange partner about the film you saw last week. Your brain will practise once it knows it needs to.

But going back to these situations, actually, it's far easier to anticipate universals. Things like "I don't know" and "I want to..." come up all the time. In your native language you say these things several times a day. how often do you present your passport? How often do you buy spaghetti carbonara? If you provide your internal dialogue with the language it can anticipate for everyday use, it can rehearse that language every day.

2011-01-14T19:00:00.001Z

The question of identity and language.

One of my New Year's resolutions was to get away from a particular language forum. I've been spending too much time arguing various things there, and sometimes I do make a bit of a fool of myself. So I'm off for a bit to cool off, although I'll be popping back in for a couple of particular topics only.

Anyhow, I thought I'd take the opportunity to firm up my thoughts on a particular topic that we'd been discussing in December - the importance of accent to the learner.

The first angle I'd like to cover this from is the idea that your accent is part of your identity, the "face" of your voice, as it were.

Accent: your voice's face?

OK, so as I said, many people see their accent as a major outward component of their identity. Personally, I cannot accept that, as it would basically make me two faced. When I was a child, I spoke with a Scots accent (in fact, I spoke a language that was neither Scots or English, but a little of both), but I learned through the education system to speak with a more SSE (Scottish English) accent. Eventually, through university friends and work, I adjusted myself to an even more Englicised[*] way of speaking. Now my accent, grammar and vocabulary all vary across this spectrum depending on who I'm speaking to.

( [*] Yes, I made up this word. However, "anglicised" doesn't cut it in this situation as Scots and English are both Anglo-Saxon tongues. Only one of them is from "England", though. )

Does this make me an attention-whore? Not really. This is a completely natural part of language, and we all do it to an extent. Linguists call it convergence. The idea is that when we want to show social closeness to others, we talk in a way more like them. On the other hand, if we want to show social distance, we talk less like them.

Studying this concept several years ago led me to an interesting philosophical standpoint:

True identity is relative.

On first reading, that may seem a little insane, so let me explain.

Consider the difference in social etiquette in Spain and Scotland.
In Scotland, when you're introduced to someone, you'll probably give them a little wave, or if you're very bold, you might go as far as a timid handshake. Only on very rare occasions will you kiss or hug them - maybe they're a brother's fiancée or something. In Spain, on the other hand, guys will immediately go for a firm handshake if they're in range, and a guy and a girl or two girls will almost invariably kiss.

If you define "reservedness" as part of a "Scottish identity" and "forwardness" as part of a "Spanish identity", then you are suggesting that a guy from the UK who goes to Spain and starts merrily kissing the chicas has lost his identity, but I don't feel this is the case.

When I'm in Spanish company, I tend to act the same way as they do, but I don't feel that my identity is threatened. In fact, I feel that I am projecting the same self-image as I do when surrounded by my friends in Edinburgh.

If I was to continue to act in a "Scottish" way while with Spanish people, I would seem completely antisocial, but that's not my identity. In order to seem equally sociable in Spanish-speaking company as I do in a Scottish country pub, I have to act differently.

Similarly, if a Spanish guy comes to Scotland and continues to act in a "Spanish" way with Scottish people, he will seem excessively outgoing, possibly to the point of being creepy. He too has to modify his behaviour to seem as reserved to us as he does to people in his own country.

Essentially, socially conditioned behaviours are not our identity; they're not even "markers" of our identity; they are simply a means of transmission of identity. Some of the worst excesses of racism and xenophobia can be traced to the tendency to view behaviours as fixed markers of identity. Anyone who acts differently is shunned. Even homophobia is rooted in the same idea -- if you behave differently, you're "them", not "us".

And language is nothing if not a socially conditioned behaviour.

So this takes us back to the idea of linguistic convergence. We do not speak like people in order to "be like them", but to show that "we like them". Ever wonder why some foreign people don't want to talk to you? They're not being snobbish -- they think you're being snobbish, because you're diverging from them. Maintaining a heavy foreign accent isn't "keeping your own identity", but distancing yourself from the other party -- rejecting their identity, in effect.

In fact, I find myself converging when I speak to Spanish speakers from different regions. The most notable example was when I was chatting up a Venezuelan (or was she Columbian) and my accent changed massively. Yes, when you fancy someone, you converge very heavily towards their accent.

I'm sure I'll get a couple of responses starting "ah, but what about...", so I'll try to pre-empt the biggest one.

"What about regional accents? Do people from London have problems with people from Glasgow?" No, because convergence does take place. People from London and people from Glasgow find it difficult to understand each other, and they do modify their speech to help each other along. There's give and take, but with a heavy-accented foreigner, the native is forced to do all the converging. There's no reciprocation, so it becomes an imposition.

Native speakers do try to accommodate to non-native learners, but really, the lion's share of the effort has to come from the learner, he is the one that is demonstrably further from the social norm, and the native will normally only converge towards a neutral way of speaking, like a newsreader or teacher's professional accent.

Because, in the end accent is linked to their identity... for a native speaker. When you ask someone to change their accent, you are actually asking them to modify their identity.

Your native accent is not part of your second-language identity. You have to construct that identity for yourself. Using your first-language accent in your second language presents an identity of being an outsider and being indifferent to the speakers of your host language. Show them you want to get on with them and they'll want to talk to you.

2011-01-07T19:00:00.002Z

The myth of the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Generation

I've been on YouTube a bit today doing a bit of research into future articles, and on one video I watched, Steve Kaufmann commented on the idea that has been doing the rounds that attention spans are shorter than ever. I grew up in the "MTV Generation", allegedly, and the "SMS and Twitter Generation" is apparently even worse than mine. Let's combine the two into the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Generation -- the ADHG.

This is belief pervades much of modern thinking. For at least a dozen years, TV companies have been trying behind the scenes to devise ways of writing bite-sized TV programs for the ADHG. The conversation has switched from ideas of "webisodes" (the BBC experimented with this for two Flash-animated Doctor Who stories at the turn of the century, for example) to talk of TV programs for the mobile phone.

But this is nonsense. Cinemas may no longer show 4 hour epics, but aside from that, run lengths in most media have stayed stable.

A great example is the Star Trek series, simply because it has been running so long.

Looking at the details on Wikipedia and IMDB, you can see that in 1966 the original stories with Captain Kirk ran at 50 minutes each. The Next Generation, 1987-1994, was 45 minutes long, but this was mostly down to the increase in advert breaks, and the effective time taken to watch an episode would have remained the same. Deep Space Nine from 1993-1999 was exactly the same, as was Voyager (1995-2001) and finally Enterprise (2001-2005) was a mere minute shorter, which again we can put down to increasing advertising time. So over half a century, no more than 6 minutes of storytelling time has been lost, and the viewers are sat in front of the goggle-box for the same amount of time as before.

Now, what came out of the "webisode" model? Aside from the Doctor Who serieses already mentioned, the big one would be Sanctuary done with full CG sets. There were initially 8 episodes at 15-20 minutes each... but eventually they switched to a 42 minute television format, because that was more popular. So where's the evidence for reduced attention spans?

OK, yes, there's now 8 minutes less story time than a 1966 major drama, but that 8 minutes is 8 minutes more advertising -- that's 18 minutes of advertising to 42 minutes of viewing. Almost a third of your time in front of the TV is not following the story. To me that suggests a longer attention span, not a shorter one, but hey....

Anyway, this is a language blog, right? and Kaufmann was talking about how this mythological short attention span leads to daft ideas like 140-character Twitter messages for language learning.

Indeed, there is a massive amount of material out there for the ADHG. Radio Lingua's Coffee Break series, for example, consists of "podcast" courses of 80 lessons of 15-20 minutes. Of course, there's a lot of wasted time due to the faux-radio culture of podcasts. There's an announcement, followed by a theme song followed by a "welcome to the show", a short jingle, and finally the lesson starts after a full minute and a half (10% into the recording). And of course each episode ends with a goodbye, a jingle, and then an advert for the site (just in case you got it somewhere else). If quarter of an hour is too much for you, the same site offers a One Minute series. The invasiveness of the jingles, welcome, goodbye and site advert at the end is even worse, as each one-minute lesson is wrapped up in an MP3 of 3 minutes or thereabouts.

With so little time, something has to give. The One Minute series suffers from an acute lack of revision. As far as I'm concerned, if there's no revision, there's no teaching. What you're left with is a phrasebook, not a course. Coffee Break does retread some ground, but they do fall into the old trap of telling you to relisten to old lessons instead of programming in sufficient revision in future lessons. (Older LP, cassette or CD-based courses had to balance the cost of the additional recording media with the value of programmed revision, but a podcast class has no such excuse!)

And it's not just audio media that suffer for this perceived lack of attentiveness -- books are changed by the same philosophy. Everything's broken down and segmented into semi-self-contained units and sub-units, which means not exploiting connections. I was working with high-school kids using a book that introduced any new structure in the positive and worked on that, then in the negative and worked on that, then in the interrogative... But you know what? The rules for forming negatives and interrogatives in English are almost entirely regular, so these shouldn't need to be taught individually for every new strucure. But we have to keep things short -- it's the ADHG, don't you know.

But here comes the non-sequitur. At the same time as lamenting the lack of attention spans in "kids today", the course books exacerbate the problem. In the process of trying to make the material relevant to kids, they ignore the appropriacy of the format. Kids love magazines, right? So let's make our books more like magazines! Long before I took my sabbatical as a teacher, I'd read about this. Magazines are designed as much not to be read as to be read. You flick backwards and forwards, you glance at pictures, you read little lists of facts that distract you from the main article -- everything you don't want in a classroom.

Many school books actually undermine the learners' attention spans. So maybe the ADHG isn't a myth, but rather a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2010-12-31T19:00:00.002Z

Stone Soup (a folk tale)

A long time ago, there was a war between two kingdoms. When the war was over, the surviving soldiers were all sent home.

Now, the soldiers had been given meagre rations, and many ran out of food on their way home and had to resort to hunting in the woods or begging, and many died of hunger before making it home.

There was a group of three soldiers heading home to the same town, and they had run out of food, when they came upon a village. They knocked at every door in the village, but at every one they were told that there was no food.

With no other option, they went to the inn.

"Innkeeper," said the first soldier, "we have no food and have been walking for days."

"If you have money," said the innkeeper, "then I have plenty of food for you."

"Good sir," said the second soldier, "our army was defeated, and our wages taken as spoils of war, so we have no money."

"In that case," replied the innkeeper, "I can be of no help to you."

"But perhaps you still can," said the third soldier, "If you cannot offer us food, perhaps you would be so kind as to let us use one of your cauldrons today."

The innkeeper was perplexed. If they had no food, why would they want a cauldron? But he had a cauldron that he would not need that day, so he so no reason to object. "Alright," he said, and led them to the store where his spare cauldron was.

The three soldiers carried the cauldron out into the village square and began building a fire underneath it. The innkeeper, still perplexed, looked on as the soldiers drew water from the well to fill the cauldron. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Ah," said the first soldier, "we are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!" cried the innkeeper, "why I have never heard such nonsense. You cannot make soup from a stone!"

The soldier smiled, but said nothing. He took a small bag from his backpack, and opened it. Inside were several stones. He took each one in turn, examined it closely, and sniffed it. Eventually he chose three and dropped them in the pot. "Ah," he said, "these will make a good soup."

The innkeeper was stunned, and went back to his inn.

Shortly afterwards, another villager appeared. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Ah," said the second soldier, "we are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!" cried the villager, "why I have never heard such nonsense. You cannot make soup from a stone!"

"Ah no," said the soldier, "that is where you are wrong." He took a spoonful of the soup and tasted it. "Yes, it's coming along quite nicely now."

The villager was intrigued, and wanted to try the soup, but he didn't say anything.

"But there's something missing," the soldier continued, "maybe a little salt and pepper."

The villager jumped in at this point. "I have some salt and pepper at home. I'll give you some in exchange for a bowl of your soup."

The soldiers looked at each other for a while, then eventually agreed. The villager ran off to fetch the salt and pepper, and the soldiers added it to the pot.

Another villager arrived. "What are they doing?" he asked the first villager.

"Ah," said the other, "they are making stone soup."

"Stone soup! Why I have never heard such nonsense. You cannot make soup from a stone!"

"Ah, well," said the first, "I'll tell you when I've tried it. I swapped a little bit of salt and pepper for a whole bowl!"

One of the soldiers took a spoonful of the soup and tasted it. "It's coming along quite nicely now. But there's something missing," the soldier said, "maybe a bit of carrot."

The second villager jumped in at this point. "I have some carrots at home. I'll give you some in exchange for a bowl of your soup."

The soldiers looked at each other for a while, then eventually agreed. The villager ran off to fetch the carrots, and the soldiers added them to the pot.

One by one more villagers arrived, and one by one they swapped something in exchange for a bowl of the miraculous stone soup: potatoes, barley, cabbage, celery, turnips, beans.... As the ingredients were added, the smell of the soup got better and better, until all the villagers wanted to try it, and swapped something for a bowl. But eventually the cauldron was full, but only half of the villagers had given anything.

"Ah," said the first soldier, "it is ready. But you know what? I always like a bit of cheese in my stone soup."

"You're right," said the second soldier, "it is ready. But you know what? I always like a bit of salami in my stone soup."

"You're both right," said the third soldier, "it is ready. But you know what? I always like a bit of bread to soak up every last little bit of my stone soup."

Hearing this, the remaining villagers ran home, each returning with a lump of cheese, a salami or a loaf of bread to exchange for his own bowl of this incredible stone soup.

In the end, everyone in the village -- including the soldiers -- got a bowl of stone soup, with a lump of cheese and a slice of salami in it, and with a hunk of bread to soak up every last bit, and no-one was hungry.

THE END.

It's an old story that one, and it comes in various forms. Some are about beggars rather than soldiers. Some have one instead of three. Some have only one victim of the con, others say that this happened in every village. Some paint the story as a lesson in cooperation, others just leave it as a pure and simple confidence trick.

But the moral of the story for the language learner is a little different. To go back to one of my favourite pieces on language learning, Wilfried Decoo's On the mortality of language learning methods, Decoo points out that:

A new method draws its originality and its force from a concept that is stressed above all others. Usually it is an easy to understand concept that speaks to the imagination.

...

Typical is that such a single idea, which only represents a component, becomes the focal point as if being the total method. This publicity-rhetoric gives the impression of total reform, while often all that happens is a shift in accentuation, or the viewing from a different angle, because many common components remain included in each method.

In essence, Decoo's point is that a soup can be named after any of its ingredients, and many methods use the same ingredients, but simply name the method after a different ingredient. A soup made of chicken, bacon, sweetcorn and potato can be called "chicken soup", "chicken and sweetcorn soup", "chicken and bacon soup", "potato and bacon" or any other combination. It could even be something not directly related to any of the ingredients -- "townsville soup" or "Lord Such-and-such broth".

It is immediately obvious when you discuss language-learning with anyone that they start out with a single "most important" ingredient for their language soup. But as the conversation continues, you will slowly find the other ingredients added to the pot.

The justifications for all these (essential) ingredients as "unimportant" don't tend to vary too much. The two killers are:

"I do this, but everybody's different." It's hard to declare that your method works without it if you've only tried it with it. How can you know it's nonessential?
"Its importance is overemphasised by everyone else." This is no excuse. You cannot assume that someone reading your advice has read all the material that overemphasises whatever point you're discussing. Advice needs to be balanced in and of itself - you can't rely on external sources that the other party may or may not have read to provide the balance for you.

Now, I think Decoo has been a little too generous. He assumes that the key idea in a method is a genuine ingredient in the language soup.

Me, I think that it's all too often the case that the core idea pushed is little more than the stone in your stone soup. Learning like a child is the biggest such stone.

What is "learning like a child"?

So let's cook a pot of "learning like a child" soup.

Recipe 1:

First step, a teacher walks into the room and greets you (good morning, good afternoon, good evening).

Silence.

Teacher greets you again and cups his hand to his ear to indicate he's waiting for you to say something.

Class repeats the greeting.

Teacher congratulates the class (very good)

Teacher introduces himself.

He asks someone what his/her is name, then prompts the student with the needed answer structure, and congratulates the student afterwards.

This is repeated through the class. If anyone gets it wrong, the teacher talks them through saying it right.

Recipe 2:

You shove the CDROM in the drive.

A picture comes up on-screen and a voice says "a boy". This is reinforced by the written word onscreen.

Another picture comes up and a voice says "a girl". This is also reinforced by the written word onscreen.

"Man" and "woman" are added in.

Then four pictures come up and one of "man", "woman", "boy", "girl" is said. You click the corresponding picture.

But none of this matches the natural learning path of an infant.

How does a child really learn?

Infants sits listening for ages (from before birth) in order to work out what sounds have any meaning. They know the whole phonetic makeup of a language before they even say their first words.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." in a different order. After all, you can't ask an adult to spend 2 years listening to the language for every waking hour before starting to learn.

Infants cannot repeat. They can only say something if they have learned the elements that the sentence is made up of. Yet adults can repeat complex foreign phrases like "¿como te llamas?" (literally "what do you call yourself?") within minutes of starting.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." taking advantage of the differences in the adult brain and the child brain.

Infants produce utterances that they believe are grammatical, based on an incomplete knowledge of grammar. It is only over the course of several years that the knowledge is filled in. In adult classes, we start off with the perfect grammar of those repeated sentences, and hopefully never say "me want choklit!" So kids start with a fuzzy version of the full picture and slowly fill in the detail, whereas adults start with a detailed fragment of the full picture and add in further detailed fragments without a view of the whole picture.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." avoiding the entire process of developing an internal model of grammar.

When the teacher comes in and says "good morning", we know what he means from our experience of social language in our mother tongue. The same goes for "what is your name", "how do you do" and all those other social pleasantries. And after being greeted with "good morning" and praised with "very good!", speakers of most languages are going to be able to tell you what "good" means in their language. Kids simply don't learn that way!

When a teacher cups his hand to his ear, he gives us a known linguistic signal that he is waiting to hear something. An infant wouldn't understand that!

And even if the infant did understand that, he or she would still not be able to repeat the full sentence. Their brains just don't work that way.

The only thing that immersive techniques generally have in common with children's learning is the oral medium, which is a pretty flimsy link.

"Learning like a child" is nothing more than a stone in your language learning soup.

As it's almost the New Year, there's only one more thing to say:
Lang may yer lum reek.

2010-12-29T16:44:00.000Z

The annual Gaelic short film competition, FilmG, has just put all entries online for public viewing and voting.

As in previous years, there's a mixture of very amateur and highly polished pieces, but the thing that stands out is the role of language in the competition. I've watched half a dozen so far, and two of them have actively incorporated the problems of bilingualism in Scotland to some extent, whereas the others have decided to treat Gaelic as an everyday language, to the point where in one a man is given a leaflet in Gaelic on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow -- that just isn't going to happen. This is one of the big dilemmas facing anyone working in a minority language.

To the minority language speaker, there are parts of life that just happen in another language. Any attempt to treat the minority language as normal in the media risks feeling unnatural, but anything that feels natural puts the minority language on the back foot. So what can you do? Tough one.

The other thing that jumps out is that (like in previous years) there is a mixture of films with and without subtitles. This makes voting hard for me personally. The activist in me wants to reward those who eschew English entirely, but then I enjoy the shorts with subtitles more, because I understand them better. And what about the sci-fi starting with a screen-crawler entirely in English? Should that even have been allowed?

All in all, I would hope that for next year they make an official policy on on-screen writing, because right now I feel that there's a lack of clarity for the filmmakers.