An observation on the order of teaching (from English)

As I recently said, I've been experimenting with Michel Thomas-like techniques in the classroom of late.

One of the crucial elements of Michel Thomas's teaching, seemingly forgotten by the teachers after him, is to address student errors in complicated sentences by reverting to simpler, related sentences and then rebuilding the complexity. The effectiveness of this technique is that it builds and reinforces the underlying structural concepts in his students' minds, as opposed to just giving answers that don't train any linkage between structures.

But it turns out that doing this mindfully also presents the teacher with a hell of a lot of information about what is difficult and easy for students, and hence what order things should be taught in.

With my current MT-style student, my first divergence from standard teaching order was to focus on auxiliary verb-based tenses before the simple past and present, and this did seem effective.

Yesterday, I was trying to revise and solidify the whole pattern of positive declarative vs negative declarative vs interrogative. Now in English, there is only one main pattern, which has three variations: "to be" vs simple aspect vs auxiliaries.

I was eliciting each form from her to build up a table like this:

To be	Simple aspect	auxiliary tenses
I'm here.	I like it.	I'll do it.
I'm not there.	I don't like it.	I won't do it.
Are you there?	Do you like it?	Will you do it?
I was here.	I liked it.	I can do it.
I wasn't there.	I didn't like it.	I can't do it.
Were you here?	Did you like it?	Can you do it?

Nothing spectacular. I've always taught "two verbs in the negative and the question, unless the verb is 'be'," and that's what I was trying to show. What was different was my student's errors: she tried to say "I can to do it" -- a mistake I thought I'd wiped out ages ago. At that point, I instinctively moved on to the negative, because subconsciously I remembered that she didn't make the mistake in the negative, because she knew the difference between "I don't like to"/"I don't want to" and "I can't"/"I won't".

What I realised (and scribbled down in about three places) was that even despite constantly revisiting these structures, the original emphasis on the present had created an erroneous link between the two structures, as they look very, very similar, but as that similarity doesn't carry through to the negative form, the negative unlinks the two.

The result is that in future I intend to start by teaching negatives and interrogatives before introducing the positive forms, in order to force the students' brains to store the auxiliary verbs and verbs like "want" and "like" as different things.

Let me anticipate the first criticism: "students will end up overusing do/did in the positive." I don't think so. Yes, they will initially want to use an auxiliary, but I'll teach them not to -- that's my job after all, isn't it? Besides, the standard order of teaching leads to plenty of predictable, oft-repeated errors: do you can...? I can to do... I want do.... Even if I introduce one error, I'll be eliminating several more.

Is language subconscious?

Is language subconscious?  It's a question I hadn't given much thought to -- I'd always pretty much taken it for granted that it was.

Well anyway, apparently it's been a pretty contentious topic in linguistics and psychology for a while now, but a group of scientists from Hebrew University have found compelling evidence that it is, indeed, subconscious.  (And not only "language" language, but even symbolic mathematical language to an extent).

Discussing this elsewhere called to mind a time when I was working on learning Scottish Gaelic with the aid of a piece of software.  It flashed the word "eye" up on the screen, and I couldn't translate it.  I had a complete block.  I knew the word.  I knew I knew the word.  But it wouldn't come.

It felt to me like my brain didn't believe it was "eye", and that it wasn't sure it wasn't "I", or "aye" (or possibly even "ay").

The way I see it, a conscious language skill should have allowed me to override this confusion through conscious attention to the written form, which is (in theory) unambiguous.  The fact that I couldn't force my way through to the correct meaning suggested that language is something you have less conscious control over than you think....

But fair enough, I've always felt that contextless words are very much a first step, and that for the most part you should be practising in context.  This experience kind of confirmed it for me.

But the publishing of the findings came at the perfect time for me, having just written the draft of my last blog post about translation, and the way I automatically translated frames of reference (eg using the first person when the software says "you are..." etc), because that's the source of my dilemma:

Translation is effective precisely because native language is understood subconsciously.  You understand and internalise the meaning effortlessly.  This means you know exactly what message you want to express in the target language.  There is no other means for a teacher, book or software package to indicate so clearly to a learner what do say.  Also, there is no other means to ensure that the teacher knows exactly what the student is trying to say (I've heard many teachers "correct" students errors by leading them to say something that is valid in the target language, but completely different in meaning to what they intended to say).

Translation is ineffective if and whenever the native language is not understood subconsciously.  Too many courses present contrived, meaningless examples.  Perhaps these aren't quite as nonsensical as the examples the researchers from Hebrew University used, but as long as they are unnatural, they will interfere with subconscious processing, leaving the learner to process them consciously -- it's not "translation" that's the real problem here, it's "word juggling".

And translation's weak spot is the one I mentioned in my last blog post: our subconscious deals with relative references automatically.  When you say the word "I" to me, I understand the concept of you, the person speaking.  So dealing with first and second person pronouns is a perilous task.  In order to do it correctly, the student has to stop using their subconscious processing, and language starts to become a conscious process... which is when translation stops working as a language learning technique.

This leads me to a conclusion that I really didn't expect, and that I'm not yet fully convinced of:
the optimal mixture of native-language instruction and target-language instruction in the classroom isn't a simple function of how advanced the students are, it goes right down to the level of "I" vs "he".

Wow.

Everyone understands grammar.

I've often heard it said that grammar is difficult or that normal people don't understand grammar.  Some teachers believe that grammar would be useful in the language classroom, but only if the students came in understanding grammar in the first place -- they don't want to waste time teaching theoretical grammar before they can start teaching the target language.
And these are good arguments but for one small detail:
everyone understands grammar.
It has been observed that in cloze tests (passages of texts with blanked out words) native speakers will have a notion of the word-class of the correct answer before they know what the specific word is.
Take these three simple examples:

1. I like ____.
2. I want a ____ one.
3. Don't ____ me.

It's impossible to know what the original word was that the author intended, but at the same time, it's pretty obvious that number 1 is a noun, number 2 an adjective and 3 a verb.  If you were to put these sentences in front of any literate English speaker, they could give you any number of possible words for each example that fit the categories.

So they have an internal concept of word-classes, even if they don't have an explicit awareness of it.  This means that there's very little work for the teacher to do -- all you've got to do is point out what they already know.
Michel Thomas tried to do this a different way, and it's a way that tends to draw a lot of flak.  On his recorded courses, you can hear him say that he doesn't like the traditional definition of "person, place or thing", and then he gives a couple of examples of abstract nouns, which he says aren't really things.  He then goes on to introduce his prefered rule -- a noun is anything you can use "the" before -- and a couple of examples, using both abstract and concrete nouns.

It is quite trivial to prove that his rule is wrong -- "the white house"; adjective after "the"; wrong.  "John"; most proper nouns don't take "the"; wrong.  And yet for all it's inaccuracy, this "rule" seems to work better than most.  Why?  Because Thomas isn't trying to teach a new concept -- he is merely trying to evoke the concept that the learner already has.  In fact, he is doing exactly the opposite of defining, and I would argue that he is doing so on purpose -- if you already know about the concept, thinking too much will override your instinctual understanding, so thinking should be avoided.

What Thomas did was quite subtle.  He took the traditional (correct) rule, but said he didn't like it, freeing the student from feeling inadequate for not understanding it.  He then presented the case that causes consistent real problems for students, the abstract noun.  All he basically said in informational terms was "these are nouns too", but he worded it in such a way as to say "it's not your fault if these don't make sense in the old rule", swatting away any confusion and guilt or inadequacy.  His final comment, about "the", is valueless out of context -- it is factually incorrect, but he uses it to reinforce the concepts already clarified by the old rule and the abstract examples.  He ties them into one bundle.  The student never writes down the rule, the student never memorises the rule, in fact, regardless of what he says, he has not given a rule.  All he does is evoke the learner's internal concept of nouns and label it with the word noun.  I'm pretty confident that the average student coming out of a face-to-face class with Thomas would have forgotten he'd even said it, but they'd be able to label nouns pretty acccurately if asked to.

It took Thomas a few minutes to teach "noun", "verb" and "adjective" that way, less time than it takes me to explain what he did.

Any concept that exists in the student's native language has the potential to be taught in a similar way.

The secret is not to take too long, and not to get hung up on the technicalities.  All you need to do is evoke the concept and stick a label on it.

And if you think about it, that's what we do as teachers every day -- it's called "vocabulary".

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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. 

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.