When I arrived on Islay, I was introduced to a lot of people who told me they'd forgotten all their Gaelic. But by the time I left the island, several of these people would regularly speak to me almost exclusively in Gaelic.
It's tempting to call these sorts of people lazy (and I've heard many people do so), but I think there's a wee bit more to it than that.
They genuinely, genuinely believed that they couldn't speak Gaelic, because they genuinely found it difficult. Why is it difficult with other people but not with me? Because they learned to expect Gaelic from me, but they had learned to expect English from other peopled.
This expectation can be overcome, but it's a hell of an effort, and most just don't have the motivation to do it -- in fact, most people don't even know that that's what's going on. It's not their fault.
So how do you encourage people to overcome this inertia?
22 August 2012
19 August 2012
The weirdness of learning something you already "know"...
I've started looking at starting on Corsican a few times, but it's always seemed really difficult. Why? Because all the beginners' stuff looks too obvious to me to be worth looking at. If it's not like Italian, it's like Spanish or French. Everything I'd found was phrase-based, and I could understand most of them with no effort. My brain saw no reason for effort.
That's something I find quite interesting, because I've always argued that extrinsic motivation (motivation from outside the material/course) is not enough -- all teaching has to be intrinsically motivating.
Well, today I came across a slightly better site (for French speakers). The lessons there aren't brilliant, as they're just information and the exercises on the site aren't related to the lessons.
But the information's there, so I can juggle it about to suit myself.
Maybe it's time to dive back into the Python NLTK and write myself a wee bit of self-teaching software....
That's something I find quite interesting, because I've always argued that extrinsic motivation (motivation from outside the material/course) is not enough -- all teaching has to be intrinsically motivating.
Well, today I came across a slightly better site (for French speakers). The lessons there aren't brilliant, as they're just information and the exercises on the site aren't related to the lessons.
But the information's there, so I can juggle it about to suit myself.
Maybe it's time to dive back into the Python NLTK and write myself a wee bit of self-teaching software....
12 August 2012
Tattooing errors
I was travelling by bike yesterday and it was glorious weather, so lots of road cyclists were out. I was waiting for a ferry from Arran to Ardrossan in a swarm of cyclists. One had a tattoo on his leg which caught my attention, because I couldn't for the life of me think what could come before those last two words.
Now, those two words were French, and the guy sporting them wasn't, so I figured I'd probably found a good ol' tattoo translation error... oh yes indeed.
The full tattoo was the words "Iron Man", the Iron Man championship logo, and the sentence "la vie est plus queue respirer". Those of you who understand French will no doubt realise that what he wanted was something about life being "more than [just] breathing", but that what it says is "life is more tail to breathe".
A couple of years ago, I would have put this down to human transcription error, but I'm guessing this may be a modern take on that -- autocorrect.
Anyway, I'm not into tattoos, but if you're going to get one, for pity's sake get one in a language you understand... and that the tattooist can write in too.
Now, those two words were French, and the guy sporting them wasn't, so I figured I'd probably found a good ol' tattoo translation error... oh yes indeed.
The full tattoo was the words "Iron Man", the Iron Man championship logo, and the sentence "la vie est plus queue respirer". Those of you who understand French will no doubt realise that what he wanted was something about life being "more than [just] breathing", but that what it says is "life is more tail to breathe".
A couple of years ago, I would have put this down to human transcription error, but I'm guessing this may be a modern take on that -- autocorrect.
Anyway, I'm not into tattoos, but if you're going to get one, for pity's sake get one in a language you understand... and that the tattooist can write in too.
08 August 2012
More about how we know grammar
When I talked about this before, I used the simplest example possible -- noun, verb and adjective -- but I claimed it holds for any concept in the native language. I suppose I'd better back that up with a few more complicated examples.
For instance, the verb conjugations in English provide a hard and obvious distinction between countables and uncountables:
Here's your prompt
How many words are in this piece of text?
(And you have a paragraph or a page of text to hand.)
You could answer that as how many unique words or as the word processor does, recounting duplicates as often as they appear. Linguists call the first the number of "types" and the second the number of "tokens". The students understand the concepts, so just stick the labels on and be done.
Is "wants" a different word from "want"? And "wanted"?
The two concepts here are "word-forms" (you can say "wants" is a different word-form from "want" without claiming it's a different "word") and "lemmas" (the set of all variants of a single dictionary headword).
The English speaker already understands "want, wants, wanted" as a set -- we're just calling that set a "lemma". The English speaker already understands "cat, cats" as a set -- again, we're just slapping the label "lemma" on a known and understood concept.
Of course, you're all crying out that types, tokens, word-forms and lemmas are of no practical use in the language class, and you're probably right. It just so happens that I'm quite lazy, and rather than give dozens of examples of differing complexity, I wanted to skip from "simple" to "complex" in a single bound in order to demonstrate that even the most seemingly abstract linguistic ideas are readily available to the beginner. If the easiest questions can be addressed this way, and the most difficult ones can too, you can be confident that most things in between can be handled in the same manner.
The other very important thing to take out of the question "what is a word?" is that the human brain doesn't run on fixed rules. The human brain has a set of fuzzy rules that interact and make our own reality. We internally maintain innumerable unresolved paradoxes and contradictions, and yet the end result is still functional and useful. But each of these contradictions can be broken apart, and we only need one of them to teach a new concept -- one concept, "the word", gave us four distinct concepts: token, type, word-form and lemma.
So when we're taking a native-language concept and trying to use it to teach a slightly different target-language concept, we don't need to carry over the full thing -- keep the bits that work, ditch the things that don't. We don't need a full and precise rule -- the brain doesn't like them anyway.
For instance, the verb conjugations in English provide a hard and obvious distinction between countables and uncountables:
- Some ____ is good.
- Some ____ are good.
Here's your prompt
How many words are in this piece of text?
(And you have a paragraph or a page of text to hand.)
You could answer that as how many unique words or as the word processor does, recounting duplicates as often as they appear. Linguists call the first the number of "types" and the second the number of "tokens". The students understand the concepts, so just stick the labels on and be done.
Is "wants" a different word from "want"? And "wanted"?
The two concepts here are "word-forms" (you can say "wants" is a different word-form from "want" without claiming it's a different "word") and "lemmas" (the set of all variants of a single dictionary headword).
The English speaker already understands "want, wants, wanted" as a set -- we're just calling that set a "lemma". The English speaker already understands "cat, cats" as a set -- again, we're just slapping the label "lemma" on a known and understood concept.
Of course, you're all crying out that types, tokens, word-forms and lemmas are of no practical use in the language class, and you're probably right. It just so happens that I'm quite lazy, and rather than give dozens of examples of differing complexity, I wanted to skip from "simple" to "complex" in a single bound in order to demonstrate that even the most seemingly abstract linguistic ideas are readily available to the beginner. If the easiest questions can be addressed this way, and the most difficult ones can too, you can be confident that most things in between can be handled in the same manner.
The other very important thing to take out of the question "what is a word?" is that the human brain doesn't run on fixed rules. The human brain has a set of fuzzy rules that interact and make our own reality. We internally maintain innumerable unresolved paradoxes and contradictions, and yet the end result is still functional and useful. But each of these contradictions can be broken apart, and we only need one of them to teach a new concept -- one concept, "the word", gave us four distinct concepts: token, type, word-form and lemma.
So when we're taking a native-language concept and trying to use it to teach a slightly different target-language concept, we don't need to carry over the full thing -- keep the bits that work, ditch the things that don't. We don't need a full and precise rule -- the brain doesn't like them anyway.
03 August 2012
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:
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".
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:
- I like ____.
- I want a ____ one.
- Don't ____ me.
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".
28 July 2012
Ever-moving goalposts.
In 2004, I signed up for a degree with the Open University, Modern Language Studies. As the OU issues degrees in line with the English 3-year system, and as I was studying part-time, it was alwayd going to take me at least 6 years to complete it. At the time, I was planning on becoming a high school language teacher, so I had a look at the guidelines for teaching in Scotland, which said you had to live and work in a country where your languages were spoken for a year (your second language could be 6 months, but you'd have to make it up to a year to gain full registration.
This means that from the time I started, I really had at least 8 years until I could hope to enter teacher training. In that time, I reckon the rules have changed significantly 4 times, meaning that they would have changed at least once for anyone in a standard Scottish 4-year degree. For someone trying to plan out a career, this is pretty disappointing.
As I recall it, the rules when I started mandated a full year's worth of learning in your given subject (120 scotcat points), with at least half of that being at degree level (Scottish 3rd and 4th year, English 2nd and 3rd). Quite soon after I started, the requirements were reduced to two-thirds of a year (80 points) with at least half of it being Scottish 2nd year or above. The next change was halving the foreign residency requirements for language teachers.
These changes were all made to increase the number of applicants for teacher training, as the Scottish Government was worried about a crisis when a large number of current teachers retired.
But the numbers are up, and there's been a surplus of teachers in many subjects (the older guys are holding off retiring to build a bigger pension pot) so they've changed the rules again.
Before entering a PGDE, you now need to have 120 points again. At least 40 of them should be 3rd year undergrad or above, and another 40 should be 2nd year undergrad or above. 80 of those points must be in the subject and 40 can be on a "related" subject, whatever that means.
But...
I just spent a year at the Sabhal Mòr on Skye, doing the second year of the Gaelic-medium degree scheme so that I would be able to go into Gaelic teaching, and now, all of a sudden, it's no longer valid. If there'd been some kind of advance warning, I could have studied a mixture of second and third year courses, and brought myself up to the required standard in the same timeframe (and I would have probably enjoyed it more than the course I did, to boot!)
I've still got to get the French residency requirement covered (which my forthcoming year in Corsica will deal with) before I can go back and do a PGDE. But the plan was to do a PGDE in Modern Foreign Languages (French) and Gaelic, and as it stands, I'm not going to be eligible. Even if I switch to just MFL (French and Spanish), I still need to spend an additional 3 months working in a Spanish-speaking country in order to get teacher registration for Spanish.
Would it be too much to ask for changes to be announced a year or two in advance so that people like myself could attempt to plan their careers? As it stands, I'm left wondering whether to abandon the Gaelic or to start taking distance modules in order to make up the shortfall in degree-level credits.
But I really wanted to be finished with study. Since I started primary school, there's only been three-and-a-half days of my life where I haven't been in formal education. Any time I like, I can claim my third degree.
It's a bit of a disappointment.
This means that from the time I started, I really had at least 8 years until I could hope to enter teacher training. In that time, I reckon the rules have changed significantly 4 times, meaning that they would have changed at least once for anyone in a standard Scottish 4-year degree. For someone trying to plan out a career, this is pretty disappointing.
As I recall it, the rules when I started mandated a full year's worth of learning in your given subject (120 scotcat points), with at least half of that being at degree level (Scottish 3rd and 4th year, English 2nd and 3rd). Quite soon after I started, the requirements were reduced to two-thirds of a year (80 points) with at least half of it being Scottish 2nd year or above. The next change was halving the foreign residency requirements for language teachers.
These changes were all made to increase the number of applicants for teacher training, as the Scottish Government was worried about a crisis when a large number of current teachers retired.
But the numbers are up, and there's been a surplus of teachers in many subjects (the older guys are holding off retiring to build a bigger pension pot) so they've changed the rules again.
Before entering a PGDE, you now need to have 120 points again. At least 40 of them should be 3rd year undergrad or above, and another 40 should be 2nd year undergrad or above. 80 of those points must be in the subject and 40 can be on a "related" subject, whatever that means.
But...
I just spent a year at the Sabhal Mòr on Skye, doing the second year of the Gaelic-medium degree scheme so that I would be able to go into Gaelic teaching, and now, all of a sudden, it's no longer valid. If there'd been some kind of advance warning, I could have studied a mixture of second and third year courses, and brought myself up to the required standard in the same timeframe (and I would have probably enjoyed it more than the course I did, to boot!)
I've still got to get the French residency requirement covered (which my forthcoming year in Corsica will deal with) before I can go back and do a PGDE. But the plan was to do a PGDE in Modern Foreign Languages (French) and Gaelic, and as it stands, I'm not going to be eligible. Even if I switch to just MFL (French and Spanish), I still need to spend an additional 3 months working in a Spanish-speaking country in order to get teacher registration for Spanish.
Would it be too much to ask for changes to be announced a year or two in advance so that people like myself could attempt to plan their careers? As it stands, I'm left wondering whether to abandon the Gaelic or to start taking distance modules in order to make up the shortfall in degree-level credits.
But I really wanted to be finished with study. Since I started primary school, there's only been three-and-a-half days of my life where I haven't been in formal education. Any time I like, I can claim my third degree.
It's a bit of a disappointment.
27 July 2012
Sorry for going quiet
For the last month or so, I've been living on Islay, working on a summer placement at the Gaelic college. I've just found out that I've been accepted as an English teacher at the University of Corsica. It's a pretty junior post, but I'm looking forward to getting out there, and walking, climbing, swimming and cycling... not to mention learning one of the lesser-studied Romance languages (Corsican) while improving my command of one of the more widely studied ones (French).
It's also not really a full-time post, so it'll give me time to start trying to build my Skype client base, and maybe even to break into translation. It should also leave me with time to work on a wee language-related programming project I've started on.
And whatever else happens, I'll be in Corsica.
It's going to be a good year.
It's also not really a full-time post, so it'll give me time to start trying to build my Skype client base, and maybe even to break into translation. It should also leave me with time to work on a wee language-related programming project I've started on.
And whatever else happens, I'll be in Corsica.
It's going to be a good year.
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