Decoo's wheel turns again....

I'm always referring to it, but everyone with an interest in language should read Wilfried Decoo's lecture "On The Mortality Of Language Learning Methods".  By his reckoning, the latest "new" popular movement in teaching is long overdue.  (The fact that the communicative approach is still king is probably due to its prevalence in TEFL, and the fact that anything else takes longer to train teachers to do.)
And one candidate is starting to emerge.  There are whispers of "social media" echoing round the classroom.
Not that long ago, the watchword was "web", but what became of that?  Certainly, the web gives us more access to more materials, but what we've seen to date is either simply the existing textbook styles rewrapped as webpages with automatic marking of exercises or a rapackaging of 90s style multimedia packages.
Digitised textbooks have their advantages over the paper textbook (no fiddling with the CD player to find the right track, instant feedback on many errors) at the expense of being something you couldn't just sit down and do on the train.
The multimedia websites, on the other hand, offer very little over the old CD-ROMs, but are a lot slower to use due to constant downloading of materials in between questions.  And I can shove a CD-ROM in my laptop on the train, but I won't be able to get a connection to the internet without running up a fairly hefty 3G bill.

But the "social media" thing is starting to kick in.  LiveMocha is a clone of the overpriced toy courses by Rosetta Stone, but they had the idea to get learners correcting each other's work.  This is not an innovation in any real sense, it's just a poor man's version of paying a tutor.  Of course, Rosetta Stone decided to jump on the social bandwagon too, and started setting up a language buddy/exchange site.  Reports have it that the demographics are heavily skewed and it's difficult to find language buddies for many language combinations.
Steve Kaufmann's Lingq has taken the social approach down a different track.  The website provides a shiny interface that doesn't really do much and gets people to insert screeds and screeds of texts with audio in various languages, and the user is expected to learn by induction from massive exposure.  I don't buy the argument.  The interface doesn't do much to guide me and the quality of the material varies wildly, with some people even just uploading lists of words, contrary to the site's main philosophy.  But this is starting to get away from the notion of "social", and more into the realms of "crowdsourcing".   It's only the credits-based correction system that retains any sort of "social" status, but even that's starting to stretch definitions a bit.

Tatoeba is unashamed crowdsource.  It's a very intriguing idea: a bunch of sentences undergoing unstructured translation from one language to another, and another, and another.  In mathematical terms, they describe it as a "graph" rather than a "table", a concept which probably merits a blog post to itself.  I love it, and I find it a great exercise to translate stuff from various languages into Scottish Gaelic, as it gets me thinking about things I might not otherwise, and helps me identify holes in my abilities.  That said, it's difficult to see what you can actually do with all that data.  It has no concept of grammatical syntagms or paradigms, so you can't search for a structure and see examples of it.

But all these things -- web, social or crowdsource -- have one thing in common: they're outside the classroom.  The internet is a solo phenomenon -- why would anyone work the web in the classroom?  You might as well be at home!
Perhaps the biggest problem with computer-based learning is that it's all independent, so we can all make excuses and slack off.  Maybe we'll start writing a blog post instead of studying, and we'll pretend to ourselves we're doing something productive....

But anyway, all that notwithstanding, there are still people who dream about getting social media into the classroom as an article in today's Guardian shows.
The justification for a focus on social media is, as far as I'm concerned, a non-sequitur:

We are late to the party. Children now default to social media in nearly every aspect of their life. They use it to communicate with their friends, play games and watch TV. Our failure to provide language learning resources must partly be due to teachers and parents who either don't appreciate or don't understand the power of social media.

To paraphrase: kids use it outside the class, so we must use it inside the class.  But what of all the other things kids use outside the classroom?  When I was a child, did the teachers use BMX bikes and Action Man to teach us stuff?  No.  They used TV to an extent, but even then it generally had the goal of making up for the classroom teacher's defiencies -- most primary teachers don't know much science, for example, so we watched a weekly science programme.  So TV wasn't used because it was "what the kids use" but because it was the appropriate tool for the job.  Any attempt to crowbar teaching into social media for its own sake is likely to be as successful as any other attempt adults make to "get down with the kids", and it will just look patronising.
At the end of the article, the author gives "Five ways you can start to engage with your pupils on social media", and if the term "engage with" doesn't immediately turn you off, you'll discover that once again, the "method" is not led by pedagogy, but by technology:

1. Create a Facebook page that your class can 'like'. Start posting updates to your timeline, but not in English. Ask your pupils to translate the text using Facebook's in-line Bing translation tool and ask them to gauge its accuracy.

It looks to me like it's a matter of "it's there so we'll use it" -- correction is an occassional exercise in most classrooms, but here it's being promoted as part of the routing.  Because it's there.
(This may actually be counterproductive -- why draw students' attention to the ubiquity of free translation tools if you're trying to demonstrate to them the value of learning a language?)

2. Create a Twitter account. Start tweeting in a foreign language, keeping in mind that you have a 140 character limit, and see if your pupils can strike up a conversation with you. Impose a non-English only reply and retweet rule.

Nothing of note - nothing groundbreaking.  Write stuff.  But short.  OK.  Understood.  But what stage do you get to in school language before you're able to write over 140 characters anyway.  (See also "idiographic languages"...)

3. Create a YouTube account. Ask each of your pupils to record a video blog, or 'vlog', of their hobbies, thoughts or opinions on topical news stories, but speaking only in a foreign language. Those who want to have their video uploaded should send it to you first.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see any teaching goal that is achieved by putting these on public display on YouTube.  In fact, as a student it would horrify me to think that my errors would be on show, but then I'd probably feel browbeaten into agreeing, seeing as everyone else is doing it.
Why is this any better than setting a spoken homework task that only the teacher and/or the class sees?

4. Create a Pinterest account. Take some pictures of prompt cards, post-it notes or even objects with their description in another language and 'pin' them on your boards. You could even look for photos of the country, or infographics about languages in general, to help your pupils understand more about why they should learn it.

I can't imagine this getting much use.  What is the student's goal in using the pinboard?  Why would I go to it?  What on Earth could you put on it that would grab enough attention to make the endeavour worthwhile?

5. Create a blog or Tumblr. Dedicate it entirely to publishing content in the language you teach. Show your pupils why you love the language and inspire them to do the same. Ask them to write something, however small, and post it for the whole world to admire.

All well and good in a liberal arts atmosphere, but like the videos, where's the innovative step between this and written homework?  Besides, as a learner and a teacher, I prefer much more closely directed work.  Why?  Am I a tyrant?  Hell no.  An open task normally leads to either getting stuck in a rut using the same old "safe" language items over and over again, or frequent overreaching by trying to say something that you haven't been taught yet.
As a learner, that frustrates me.  As a teacher, it makes things harder to mark.  What feedback do you give in the latter case?  Do you write five or six lessons worth of teaching?  Do say just mark it as wrong and say you haven't done that yet?

So I don't think social media's a great answer for the teacher, really.  A fantastic resource for the independent learner, yes.  A great way of maintaining a language in the absence of other contact, yes.  But an important component of the modern classroom, no.


Edit 11/04/2012: Tatoeba's actually better than I thought.  The search engine may not be as flexible or as specific as true corpus concordancing software, but it's pretty powerful, as the docs indicate.  There's a "proximity operator" in there, so you can look for co-occurring words even if you don't have the exact phrase.  Nifty.

The effects of Michel Thomas in the wider teaching world

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

One of Decoo's central points was :

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

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

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

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

Learn to form sentences, instead of parroting phrases.

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

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

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

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

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

Take nobody's word for it - not even mine.

The world is a difficult place for a language learner.  With so much advice out there, how do you know which to take?  Unfortunately, you can't take anyone's advice without a pinch of salt.  The usual response to this is to use your "common sense" or your "critical faculties", but neither of those is going to get us very far.

Before getting into the meat of the question, I'd like to quote Marcel Pagnol:
<<Telle est la faiblesse de notre raison : elle ne sert le plus souvent qu'à justifier nos croyances.>>
(Such is the weakness of our reason: most often it serves only to justify our beliefs.)

Pagnol wrote this in his autobiography La gloire de mon père, in reference to the rigorous debates between anti-clerical schoolmasters and the clergy, something of an everyday occurrence in post-revolutionary France.  Both sides were well educated and well read, and both could set forth a good argument, but for the most part their arguments were always built on selective evidence.

This is a problem that bedevils research even to this day.  In writing a paper, many researchers will quote research that supports their view, and will only cite research that disagrees with it when they can counter the point raised.

It the field of language learning, this is a particularly vexing problem.  People on a regular basis go back and cite sources from the 60s and 70s, completely ignoring decades of research that run counter to it.  Here our critical faculties as individuals fail us: it is not that we cannot be critical, but we are not presented with all the relevant information.  Even if it was, we would be incapable of processing all the relevant information due to the sheer volume of research carried out.

We can be "blinded by science".

So much for critical reasoning.  What about common sense?

Well, if it really was a question of "common sense", you wouldn't even need to ask, right?  Common sense is just another word for a person's beliefs.  At one time the existence of gods was common sense, and today the argument for or against gods boils down to the same thing -- all sides consider their view "common sense" and "logical".

Nope, common sense is no good, and reasoning can trick you, so you have to be careful.

Regular readers will know that my favourite piece on language is Wilfried Decoo's lecture On the mortality of language learning methods.  One of the key points of Decoo's argument is that most methods have a broad basis of similarity, and differ in the inclusion or exclusion of one or two particular features, or even just in declaring that one particular feature is made more prominent.

In short, for all their arguing, most methods are incredibly similar.  For example, Assimil claims that you doesn't teach rules, and that you learn by "natural assimilation", yet more of a typical Assimil book is dedicated to grammatical explanations than dialogues.  On the other hand, any grammar-heavy course may say that the rules are the important bit, but most use lots of examples.  Even the proponents of grammar-free "natural" learning produce courses with a structured introduction to grammatical features.

Problem 1: One all-important concept

Decoo says, "A new method draws its originality and its force from a concept that is stressed above all others. Usually it is an easy to understand concept that speaks to the imagination."  Traditionally, this could be disregarded simply as marketing, and not directly harmful to the student.  However, the internet has changed that, and these claims are becoming downright dangerous.

Why?

Well, people are going out and trying to recreate these methods for themselves, not based on the content of the methods, but on these stated principles. So while Krashen advises lots of listening, he offers a structured lesson.  Yet a self-teacher can't produce a structured lesson, and listening to poorly selected material won't get you anywhere.

Problem 2: Nobody really knows what they're doing

As a general rule, when we're involved in doing something, we're not normally aware of exactly what it is we're doing.  For example, can you describe how you walk?  How you ride a bike?  Probably only very superficially.  So how are we to trust someone's claims about how they learn languages.

Aside from this general observation, we've got another problem -- the human brain can make insignificant things seem very significant indeed.

For example, if you live in a big city, you'll walk past thousands of people in a week.  Yet run into one old schoolmate, and you'll comment on how unlikely it is, or how it's a small world.  Statistically, that one friend is insignificant, but psychologically, that friend is more significant than every stranger in your town.

This phenomenon inhibits our individual ability to evaluate the effectiveness of our learning techniques.  If you learn 3 things from a given technique and forget 300, by definition you only remember the things you learned.  The 3 things become used as proof that you learned effectively from that technique.

In fact, I find that if I can remember a few specific examples that I learned in a particular way, it usually means quite the opposite: if a technique is effective, I rarely remember specific examples of things I learned with it.  If I remember one or two examples, they're often the only things I learned well using that technique. So quite unhelpfully, the things that stick in my mind are actually the least helpful techniques.  (I previously wrote about a similar phenomenon: the unspoken value of student feedback.)  (This is part of something called recall bias, and it is one of the reasons very little science relies on survey responses these days.)

As a consequence, I'm generally sceptical when someone advises something as what they do, because, quite simply, how do they know?

Stone Soup (a folk tale)

A long time ago, there was a war between two kingdoms.  When the war was over, the surviving soldiers were all sent home.

Now, the soldiers had been given meagre rations, and many ran out of food on their way home and had to resort to hunting in the woods or begging, and many died of hunger before making it home.

There was a group of three soldiers heading home to the same town, and they had run out of food, when they came upon a village.  They knocked at every door in the village, but at every one they were told that there was no food.

With no other option, they went to the inn.

"Innkeeper," said the first soldier, "we have no food and have been walking for days."

"If you have money," said the innkeeper, "then I have plenty of food for you."

"Good sir," said the second soldier, "our army was defeated, and our wages taken as spoils of war, so we have no money."

"In that case," replied the innkeeper, "I can be of no help to you."

"But perhaps you still can," said the third soldier, "If you cannot offer us food, perhaps you would be so kind as to let us use one of your cauldrons today."

The innkeeper was perplexed.  If they had no food, why would they want a cauldron?  But he had a cauldron that he would not need that day, so he so no reason to object.   "Alright," he said, and led them to the store where his spare cauldron was.

The three soldiers carried the cauldron out into the village square and began building a fire underneath it.  The innkeeper, still perplexed, looked on as the soldiers drew water from the well to fill the cauldron.  "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Ah," said the first soldier, "we are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!" cried the innkeeper, "why I have never heard such nonsense.  You cannot make soup from a stone!"

The soldier smiled, but said nothing. He took a small bag from his backpack, and opened it.  Inside were several stones.  He took each one in turn, examined it closely, and sniffed it.  Eventually he chose three and dropped them in the pot.  "Ah," he said, "these will make a good soup."

The innkeeper was stunned, and went back to his inn.

Shortly afterwards, another villager appeared. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Ah," said the second soldier, "we are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!" cried the villager, "why I have never heard such nonsense.  You cannot make soup from a stone!"

"Ah no," said the soldier, "that is where you are wrong." He took a spoonful of the soup and tasted it.  "Yes, it's coming along quite nicely now."

The villager was intrigued, and wanted to try the soup, but he didn't say anything.

"But there's something missing," the soldier continued, "maybe a little salt and pepper."

The villager jumped in at this point.  "I have some salt and pepper at home.  I'll give you some in exchange for a bowl of your soup."

The soldiers looked at each other for a while, then eventually agreed.  The villager ran off to fetch the salt and pepper, and the soldiers added it to the pot.

Another villager arrived. "What are they doing?" he asked the first villager.

"Ah," said the other, "they are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!  Why I have never heard such nonsense.  You cannot make soup from a stone!"

"Ah, well," said the first, "I'll tell you when I've tried it.  I swapped a little bit of salt and pepper for a whole bowl!"

One of the soldiers took a spoonful of the soup and tasted it.  "It's coming along quite nicely now.  But there's something missing," the soldier said, "maybe a bit of carrot."

The second villager jumped in at this point.  "I have some carrots at home.  I'll give you some in exchange for a bowl of your soup."

The soldiers looked at each other for a while, then eventually agreed.  The villager ran off to fetch the carrots, and the soldiers added them to the pot.

One by one more villagers arrived, and one by one they swapped something in exchange for a bowl of the miraculous stone soup: potatoes, barley, cabbage, celery, turnips, beans....  As the ingredients were added, the smell of the soup got better and better, until all the villagers wanted to try it, and swapped something for a bowl.  But eventually the cauldron was full, but only half of the villagers had given anything.

"Ah," said the first soldier, "it is ready.  But you know what?  I always like a bit of cheese in my stone soup."

"You're right," said the second soldier, "it is ready.  But you know what?  I always like a bit of salami in my stone soup."

"You're both right," said the third soldier, "it is ready.  But you know what?  I always like a bit of bread to soak up every last little bit of my stone soup."

Hearing this, the remaining villagers ran home, each returning with a lump of cheese, a salami or a loaf of bread to exchange for his own bowl of this incredible stone soup.

In the end, everyone in the village -- including the soldiers -- got a bowl of stone soup, with a lump of cheese and a slice of salami in it, and with a hunk of bread to soak up every last bit, and no-one was hungry.

THE END.

It's an old story that one, and it comes in various forms. Some are about beggars rather than soldiers.  Some have one instead of three.  Some have only one victim of the con, others say that this happened in every village.  Some paint the story as a lesson in cooperation, others just leave it as a pure and simple confidence trick.

But the moral of the story for the language learner is a little different. To go back to one of my favourite pieces on language learning, Wilfried Decoo's On the mortality of language learning methods, Decoo points out that:

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

...

 Typical is that such a single idea, which only represents a component, becomes the focal point as if being the total method. This publicity-rhetoric gives the impression of total reform, while often all that happens is a shift in accentuation, or the viewing from a different angle, because many common components remain included in each method.

In essence, Decoo's point is that a soup can be named after any of its ingredients, and many methods use the same ingredients, but simply name the method after a different ingredient.  A soup made of chicken, bacon, sweetcorn and potato can be called "chicken soup", "chicken and sweetcorn soup", "chicken and bacon soup", "potato and bacon" or any other combination.  It could even be something not directly related to any of the ingredients -- "townsville soup" or "Lord Such-and-such broth".

It is immediately obvious when you discuss language-learning with anyone that they start out with a single "most important" ingredient for their language soup.  But as the conversation continues, you will slowly find the other ingredients added to the pot.

The justifications for all these (essential) ingredients as "unimportant" don't tend to vary too much. The two killers are:

• "I do this, but everybody's different."  It's hard to declare that your method works without it if you've only tried it with it.  How can you know it's nonessential?
• "Its importance is overemphasised by everyone else."  This is no excuse.  You cannot assume that someone reading your advice has read all the material that overemphasises whatever point you're discussing.  Advice needs to be balanced in and of itself - you can't rely on external sources that the other party may or may not have read to provide the balance for you.

Now, I think Decoo has been a little too generous.  He assumes that the key idea in a method is a genuine ingredient in the language soup.

Me, I think that it's all too often the case that the core idea pushed is little more than the stone in your stone soup. Learning like a child is the biggest such stone.

What is "learning like a child"?

So let's cook a pot of "learning like a child" soup.

Recipe 1:

First step, a teacher walks into the room and greets you (good morning, good afternoon, good evening).

Silence.

Teacher greets you again and cups his hand to his ear to indicate he's waiting for you to say something. 

Class repeats the greeting.

Teacher congratulates the class (very good)

Teacher introduces himself.

He asks someone what his/her is name, then prompts the student with the needed answer structure, and congratulates the student afterwards.

This is repeated through the class.  If anyone gets it wrong, the teacher talks them through saying it right.

Recipe 2:

You shove the CDROM in the drive.

A picture comes up on-screen and a voice says "a boy". This is reinforced by the written word onscreen.

Another picture comes up and a voice says "a girl". This is also reinforced by the written word onscreen.

"Man" and "woman" are added in.

Then four pictures come up and one of "man", "woman", "boy", "girl" is said.  You click the corresponding picture.

But none of this matches the natural learning path of an infant.

How does a child really learn?

Infants sits listening for ages (from before birth) in order to work out what sounds have any meaning.  They know the whole phonetic makeup of a language before they even say their first words.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." in a different order.  After all, you can't ask an adult to spend 2 years listening to the language for every waking hour before starting to learn.

Infants cannot repeat.  They can only say something if they have learned the elements that the sentence is made up of.  Yet adults can repeat complex foreign phrases like "¿como te llamas?" (literally "what do you call yourself?") within minutes of starting.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." taking advantage of the differences in the adult brain and the child brain.

Infants produce utterances that they believe are grammatical, based on an incomplete knowledge of grammar.  It is only over the course of several years that the knowledge is filled in. In adult classes, we start off with the perfect grammar of those repeated sentences, and hopefully never say "me want choklit!"  So kids start with a fuzzy version of the full picture and slowly fill in the detail, whereas adults start with a detailed fragment of the full picture and add in further detailed fragments without a view of the whole picture.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." avoiding the entire process of developing an internal model of grammar.

When the teacher comes in and says "good morning", we know what he means from our experience of social language in our mother tongue.  The same goes for "what is your name", "how do you do" and all those other social pleasantries.  And after being greeted with "good morning" and praised with "very good!", speakers of most languages are going to be able to tell you what "good" means in their language.  Kids simply don't learn that way!

When a teacher cups his hand to his ear, he gives us a known linguistic signal that he is waiting to hear something.  An infant wouldn't understand that!

And even if the infant did understand that, he or she would still not be able to repeat the full sentence.  Their brains just don't work that way.

The only thing that immersive techniques generally have in common with children's learning is the oral medium, which is a pretty flimsy link.

"Learning like a child" is nothing more than a stone in your language learning soup.

As it's almost the New Year, there's only one more thing to say:
Lang may yer lum reek.

On-line language learning -- new solutions or new problems?

Way back in 2001, Wilfried Decoo gave what I consider one of the most important lecturers in the history of language learning.  The transcript has disappeared from his university site, but is still available on archive.org . The lecture was entitled "On the mortality of language learning methods", and was a brief history of the predominant language learning methods of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Decoo said "Of all disciplines, language learning is one that is the most ignorant of its own past." He notes that of all fields in academia, language learning is unique in this regard.  Science, mathematics, literature, law... in every other field of study, the history of the subject is an integral part of the student's workload.  In fact, he goes on to say that if there is any mention of past methods during teacher training, it is usually only to say how wrong it was and to show why the new method is better.

But the picture Decoo paints is of history repeating itself.  Of "instant experts", ignorant of the past, making authoritative statements and declaring that they have discovered a new, better way to teach language, but almost inavariably they're saying the same thing as thousands before them.

How will language learning progress if teachers continue to make the same mistakes, generation after generation?  Even then, things haven't progressed quite as Decoo predicted.

Almost 10 years on, the Communicative Approach is alive and well, thanks to the behemoth of the English teaching industry.  The Communicative Approach's core strength is that a native speaker needs minimal training to teach his language using it, making it the only way to fill the demand.  People involved in TEFL tend to believe and repeat the hype uncritically, and it is widely accepted as a progressive and modern approach, despite being recognised as limited and outmoded in the 1990s.

Decoo also predicted that our methods now would be led by the internet, but we're only now at the stage where internet language programs are truly becoming the mainstream.  Sites like livemocha offer various free and fee-paying courses, modelled loosely on the Rosetta Stone software.  Rosetta Stone itself is moving onto the net.  A new generation of electronic learning software like Hot Potatoes is giving teachers the tools to produce their own tasks quickly and easily.

But as Decoo said in 2001, the method is being led by the medium.  He said that "The irony of Internet as the new panacea is that it has less functionality compared to a well-designed CD-rom for language learning."  This is no longer true -- the internet can now do almost anything a CD-ROM can do, but in terms of access time, it is an awful lot slower.  Comparing the Rosetta Stone online demo with a demo CD of the same package, or comparing LiveMocha with anything else shows the experience to be less immediate, and I find those little delays let my brain cool off and switch off.  I get bored or impatient or both.

Decoo says that all courses pick one feature as their key selling point, and in this case that selling point is interaction with native speakers.  LiveMocha has amateur marking (which is often excellent, but equally often of little or no value) and both push heavily the idea of social networking and language exchange.  But this interaction is not integrated with the course design, and the courses themselves do not equip the learner with sufficient language to engage in meaningful interaction.  Talking to native speakers is an add-on, a sideshow; yet it is used as a keyword, a catchphrase, the hook to draw you in.  LiveMocha bolsters this with the supremely arrogant soundbite "Livemocha brings language learning out of the stone age".  Nice.


Hot Potatoes has a different problem.  It is a toolbox to allow teachers to make a limited set of learning tasks.  Where's the harm in that?  The moment something becomes easier, it will be done more often.  One of the tasks in hot potatoes is the gap-fill, which I discuss in an earlier post.  There is no support on choosing when each type of task is appropriate, so there is a very real danger that tasks will be designed around the tools available rather than around educational goals.  It is a case of, as Decoo puts it, the medium making the method.

Computers offer up infinite options, yet somehow they seem to limit us more than they enable us.  It is an interesting paradox.