So, last time I was talking about a discussion I had with a communicative approach hardliner. A couple of days later, I had a new student ask for exam prep classes, so I got out my exam prep materials and had a quick look over them to remind myself of the specifics of the Cambridge Advanced exam, and I very quickly remembered something else from Sunday's conversation.
One of his big bugbears about the Scottish education system was that the foreign language exams all have their instructions in English. This, of course, is a natural consequence in the belief in immersion above all else -- if language must be immersive, then native-language task instructions clearly break the immersion, and therefore burst the language "bubble".
But here's the thing: when I prepare students for an exam, I explain the language task to them and then practise it over and over. By the time my students reach the exam, they don't need to read the instructions. Now the exams I prepare people for are international exams, so economies of scale dictate that the exam questions stay in English. My students go into the exam, don't need to spend time reading and understanding the question and can instead focus on carrying out the actual task that is set for them.
But there are people who don't do a lot of preparation for exams, and will go in and need to read the task. Sometimes they misunderstand the task, which means they lose marks. A hardliner would say this is fair enough, because if they don't understand English, they shouldn't pass an English exam. That would be all well and good if anyone really understood the question first time round, but students who prepare are not being tested on understanding the nature of the task, so this is inherently asymmetrical.
Indeed, most adherents to a target-language-only method are also likely to believe in the "four skills" model of language (which I don't agree with, but that's not the point here), which is fundamentally incompatible with target-language-only exam instructions.
How so? Well, if you believe that language is composed of reading, writing, speaking and listening, then it follows that you should test the four components individually. However, if you put task instructions in the target language, then every exercise includes a reading component, and you cannot objectively measure the students' levels in the other four skills.
It's a dilemma I have heard discussed even at university level, and it's very much a living debate, so nobody really should be putting forward their views as though they are objectively correct, because as with everything, we can all agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere, but we all have different views on where.
I personally feel that with a student cohort with a shared native language, native-language task instructions are the fairest way to ensure that students are being tested on the skills that we claim to be testing.
But what about listening tasks? Should we be asking the comprehension questions in the native language too, in order to ensure that we are genuinely assessing their listening comprehension? I kind of think we should, but at the same time, it doesn't feel right. But I have personally done exam past papers with students where they have clearly understood the meaning of the recording, but didn't understand the synonym used in the answer. How can you lose a mark in a listening comprehension test for failing to understand a piece of written language?
But of course, that argument does start to extend to the reading comprehension test too, because you can understand the set passage perfectly, but again have problems with the question. Here it is a reading comprehension problem leading to a lost reading mark, but there is still a fundamental question to answer about whether you should be setting an exam where you cannot determine the cause of the students' errors.
When you think about it, though, the problem in both previous paragraphs (although only one example of the various types of errors that students might make) is not really one of listening or reading anyway -- it's a vocabulary problem; vocabulary, which we do not consider worthy of the title "skill".
Some examiners have tacitly recognised this, and stopped trying to explicitly score the "four skills" individually, such as the Open University, whose degree-level exams have only spoken and written assessment, with the written part incorporating listening and reading as source material for an essay writing task. It's a holistic approach that accepts that trying to identify why a student isn't good enough isn't really an issue -- either they are or they aren't. I was perfectly happy with the approach as a student, and I would be happy with it as a teacher.
Language is certainly too complicated for us to ever hope to devise a truly fair and balance way to assess student attainment, but the current orthodoxy has tied itself in something of a knot trying to reconcile two competing goals. So are we offering immersion, or are we assessing the skills?
Showing posts with label 4 skills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 4 skills. Show all posts
29 July 2011
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").
vowe
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 consonant 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 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 edit (2-feb-2014): Spanish has at least one non-syllabic morpheme: plural S after a vowel.) 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.
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").
vowe
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 consonant 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.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 need __ explanation.
He is __ honest man.
I have __ university degree.
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 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.
14 July 2011
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:
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.
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.
12 July 2011
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:
and your brain might decide to jiggle the order round until it's reading the same as English:
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:
", 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.
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:
*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.Je ai dit lui le
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.
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.
08 July 2011
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:
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.
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.
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.
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