Banned

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....