So I've finally found myself using Michel Thomas's techniques (or at least my interpretation of them) in the language classroom.
When I started my current job, I made the decision that I was going to do exactly what the school wanted of me, and stop worrying about the ineffectiveness of standard techniques -- after all, standard techniques are what the school sells, and therefore what the students have bought. Basically, I figured that I needed to start looking at teaching as a job rather than some kind of holy calling, so that I could go home at the end of the day and switch off, rather than beating myself up until bedtime for the day's errors.
It's ironic, then, that the student who's getting the most "me" in my teaching is the second class I started. I went in preparing to teach the standard course, and with only a couple of hours until the class started, I discovered that the method materials were aimed at large classes, and were inappropriate to a one-on-one class, so I went to the syllabus and wrote down the language features for the first few lessons. To be, to have, there is/are... OK, fine. The various things pointed in a direction I wasn't intending to head in, but there it was: Total Physical Response. For about half a dozen lessons we were putting things in a box, on a chair, on the floor... even on my head. I was lucky that I'd recently got in an online discussion about "Language Hunting" just before, as I had whole system analysed and fresh in my head.
The student was herself a teacher -- in fact, a headteacher -- and understood a lot about pedagogy. This was a double-edged sword, as while she was open to different ideas, she got kind of fixated on the "concreteness" of the TPR class, and was slightly reluctant to move on until I'd built up her confidence in herself and in me as a teacher. Once that confidence was there, it was time to switch, and switch we did.
Compliments from students are always welcome, but when they come from a trained and experienced teacher, they really feel good. Of course, at the same time, I recognise that it's the techniques drawing the praise, not me.
Teaching Michel Thomas style is actually even more difficult than I really appreciated. The last time I tried it, I wasn't teaching full-time, and I had enough space in my head to balance the repetition of the various language points, but in these classes I frequently find myself leaving revision of a particular word or structure late, and the student has forgotten it. She blames herself, when of course it's my fault. I'm trying to develop ways of notating and mnemonicising for myself to keep track of what to revise and when.
But overall, it's been clearly very effective, and it's reinforced my belief that Thomas's core methodology is constructed on sound concepts, and that there was nothing miraculous about Thomas as a teacher.
If there's a stressful element in it, it's seeing how much the lesson suffers when the teacher's on an off-day, something that doesn't happen as much when you're hiding behind worksheets and programmed materials. On the flip-side, though, this connection between teacher performance and learning eliminates the great existential angst of the teacher: "Are they learning because of me or despite me?"
Showing posts with label Michel Thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michel Thomas. Show all posts
30 April 2014
20 June 2013
Pattern identification and language learning
A few weeks ago I read an article reporting on a scientific study which had found that students who are good at abstract pattern matching tasks perform better in Hebrew language lessons. (Unfortunately I don't have access to the original journal paper.)
Now, we have two ways of interpreting this outcome: the fatalistic and the optimistic.
"Rules" are a bit out of fashion in language teaching. I've always said that this is because people have been teaching incorrect rules, rather than that rules are inherently unsuited to language teaching. A linguistic "rule" is (or should be, at least) nothing more than an observed pattern emerging from real usage. If successful learners are those who can identify patterns, then we must assume that after identifying these patterns, they learn them.
So I would suggest that the logical conclusion is that we should be teaching these patterns to students, rather than relying on them identifying them.
So while my classmates were attempting to memorise the irregular verb tables by rote, I was saving myself time and effort by only memorising the conjugations that didn't arise out of bog standard, regular conjugation.
Now it could be that the advocates of the discovery method are right, and that part of my success was down to the fact that I worked this out for myself, but I doubt it. And even if that's true, is it fair to trade off the success of the majority against the success of a lucky few? It is obvious that being told this would have reduced the effort required by my classmates to learn their irregular verbs.
Take one of the patterns in Spanish taught by Michel Thomas:
The third person plural conjugation of a verb is the third person singular conjugation plus N, except in the preterite.
Now that's not how he taught it, but that's the concise description. When he taught it, he simply used it in the present, and then got the students to apply it in the other tenses.
One of the reasons some people don't like this pattern is that "except" bit, but this really isn't a problem, because the pattern also holds for the second person singular: third singular +S, except (again) in the preterite.
It's regular, it's predictable. Even the "exception" is regular in that it's an exception for both 2S and 3P.
This is the sort of pattern that I suspect all those successful learners are finding, and this is the sort of pattern that made Thomas such an effective teacher.
So let's find those patterns, and let's teach them.
Now, we have two ways of interpreting this outcome: the fatalistic and the optimistic.
The fatalistic interpretation
A fatalist will say that it is proof positive of the existence of talent, and that those who do not have this talent are doomed to failure at learning languages.The optimistic interpretation
The optimistic interpretation is to say that the successful learners are succeeding despite the teaching, and that this study is, by shedding new light on what the successful learners actually do, showing what teachers should be doing if they want to be successful."Rules" are a bit out of fashion in language teaching. I've always said that this is because people have been teaching incorrect rules, rather than that rules are inherently unsuited to language teaching. A linguistic "rule" is (or should be, at least) nothing more than an observed pattern emerging from real usage. If successful learners are those who can identify patterns, then we must assume that after identifying these patterns, they learn them.
So I would suggest that the logical conclusion is that we should be teaching these patterns to students, rather than relying on them identifying them.
An example pattern
When I was learning French (my first foreign language) at high school, I noticed the distinction between the "long conjugations" and the "short conjugations" of the present tense (the long conjugations are the nous and vous forms, and the short conjugations are the rest), and I noticed that in irregular verbs, these forms were almost always regular. (Is there any verb other than être that has irregular long conjugations?)So while my classmates were attempting to memorise the irregular verb tables by rote, I was saving myself time and effort by only memorising the conjugations that didn't arise out of bog standard, regular conjugation.
Now it could be that the advocates of the discovery method are right, and that part of my success was down to the fact that I worked this out for myself, but I doubt it. And even if that's true, is it fair to trade off the success of the majority against the success of a lucky few? It is obvious that being told this would have reduced the effort required by my classmates to learn their irregular verbs.
Teaching patterns vs teaching rules
The problem with most of the "rules" traditionally presented in grammar books is that they are more strictly ranked and regimented than they are in real life. Real patterns in real language can't be so neatly packaged by tense.Take one of the patterns in Spanish taught by Michel Thomas:
The third person plural conjugation of a verb is the third person singular conjugation plus N, except in the preterite.
Now that's not how he taught it, but that's the concise description. When he taught it, he simply used it in the present, and then got the students to apply it in the other tenses.
One of the reasons some people don't like this pattern is that "except" bit, but this really isn't a problem, because the pattern also holds for the second person singular: third singular +S, except (again) in the preterite.
It's regular, it's predictable. Even the "exception" is regular in that it's an exception for both 2S and 3P.
This is the sort of pattern that I suspect all those successful learners are finding, and this is the sort of pattern that made Thomas such an effective teacher.
So let's find those patterns, and let's teach them.
13 February 2013
Putting the cart before the course.
After getting in a discussion with Debbie Morrison on her blog Online Learning Insights, I came to
realise that we were misunderstanding each other over the vagueness
of the definition of what a MOOC really is, and I was going to write
a post about this, when I realised that in order to do that, I would
first have to consider what the meaning of the word “course” is.
This train of thought had actually been
idling in the station for a while, ever since I watched a video of atalk given by Roger Schank to staff at the World Bank. Something
Schank said didn't ring true – he described the word “course”
as imply a race, winners and losers. I wasn't happy with this
interpretation, but it wasn't until I got into the discussion with
Debbie that I realised why.
A course is not a race, although many
races take place on courses. No, a course is a route, a path. A
river finds its “course” to the sea.
Many in Western education look at the
Eastern tradition with some sense of awe. We are told that in the
East a teacher isn't a “teacher”, but “one who has walked the
path”, and a student isn't a “student” but a seeker of knowledge. But the question is: do the Easterners know this? The origin of our word
“course” shows that our system is built on the same philosophy,
but we're not aware of this. Maybe they are blind to the meaning of
their words, just as we are blind to the meaning of ours.
Now where does that leave us on the
meaning of MOOC?
Well, in a rather pedantic sense, the
MOOC as proposed by the people who coined the term is not a “course”
at all, because there is no set path whatsoever, which is in fact part of the
point of connectivist learning theory – the learning experience
(for wont of a better term) is driven and steered by the students,
with each student finding their own path through the information
presented. Cormier says in his video introduction to the idea of a
MOOC that there is “no right way to do the course, no single path.”
If course is synonymous with path, this is a paradox.
Is it useful to define this as “not a course”? You may not agree with me, but I think it's not only useful, but perhaps even essential.
Connectivism is just the latest combatant in an on-going ideological war between whole-subject and basic skills teaching. Why do I call this an ideological war, and not a pedagogical one? Because neither side really has much of an argument or evidence behind them.
In the real world, basic skills and whole-subject teaching are two ends of a spectrum of teaching styles, and most teachers use different parts of the spectrum at different times.
In general, education follows a progression that starts with the aim of teaching certain well-defined basic skills, then we start to use them in more complex environments. As we progress through our education, we build levels of abstraction over those basic skills.
The question is whether we can learn those basic skills and abstract skills and basic skills at the same time. I personally believe that we can, but that it is less efficient. If you put the cart before the horse, the horse can push it, but it would be more efficient pulling it behind.
But perhaps the reason that the MOOC as proposed by Dave Cormier doesn't really fit the term “course” is because what it aims to replace isn't really a “course” either. Cormier mentions “lifelong learning”, but “lifelong learning” is a term that is in itself ambiguous.
There are two sides to lifelong learning – there's what we'd traditionally call “adult education”, which can be stereotyped as evening classes offering high school or university-level classes to adults who dropped out of the education system at a young age; then there's continuing professional development (CPD) for people who are qualified and working in a degree-educated field. (Well, not two sides, per se, as there's a whole spectrum in between, but never mind.)
I really think that what Cormier did
was create something that was far more orientated towards that
highest level of abstraction: the qualified, experienced practitioner
who already had a well-developed framework for understanding the
material presented, and as I said in a previous post, at that stage
most professional development takes place in seminars, not in strict
“courses”.
The whole concept of informal learning is now firmly entrenched in the Scottish teaching system. Teachers are set targets of CPD points to acquire through the year. Many of these are given through traditional in-service training days and seminars, but teachers are expected to top these up with other things through personal initiative. There is a large catalogue of activities that qualify as optional points, even down to watching a television documentary on a subject related to your teaching field.
That informal online learning is
effective for people for whom informal offline learning is already
known to be effective should not be a surprise
One of the biggest influences on my thinking about education was Michel Thomas. Thomas studied psychology, and he wanted to study the learning process. He reportedly chose to teach languages for a very simple reason: languages provide the best opportunity to work with a student with zero starting knowledge of the subject being taught. Eliminating the variable of prior knowledge made reaching conclusions about the effectiveness of teaching easier, he reasoned.
The style of teaching he developed is
demonstrated in the courses he recorded before his death for Hodder.
(He recorded courses in Spanish, French, German and Italian. The
other languages released in his name are very different indeed.)
They are all examples of very tight control by the teacher, offering
a well-defined, clearly sign-posted learning path. As the courses he
produced are live recordings with genuine students, you can observe
him diverge from his preferred path as a reaction to things said by
the student (for example, when one student makes a mistake
conjugating a verb in Spanish and accidentally says an imperative,
Thomas is forced to introduce the imperative early, because he
doesn't want to tell the student that he's wrong), so there's a fair
degree of flexibility there, but we can see that there is a definite
“course” there.
The amount that the students on the recordings pick up even in just the first 2 hours is quite extraordinary – I've never seen anyone else achieve similar results
But he's working with absolute beginners, and beginners need a path to follow, they need a course. It would be a mistake, I believe, to try to use the term “course” to describe an undirected, pathless learning experience, as this leads to the conclusion that such a learning experience is a replacement for a genuine guided course, when I really think it's only something that can really be done once the student has finished with courses.
16 November 2012
Just how do you prompt a student?
I'm a big fan of the courses recorded by Michel Thomas before his death, and I'm always happy to say so. The biggest complaint I hear about the Thomas courses are that they "teach you to translate". The argument goes that because the students are only ever prompted with their native language (English) then they never learn to "think in" their target language. This bold assertion lacks any substantial evidence. I would argue that translation is one of the best methods of prompting a student, and that avoiding it actually delays proficiency.
Last year I wrote a post entitled Translation: an unjustified scapegoat, in which I pointed out that translation is very very often blamed for errors that do not arise from native-language interference, and therefore cannot be translation errors. What I neglected to say is that this is a real demotivator for learners. To be told categorically that they're translating, when they don't really believe they are translating, and to be told to do something else without any instructions on how to do it... well, the teacher is essentially blaming the student. That's not teaching, sorry.
Anyway, that's not the main point of this article, so time to put the train of thought back on the rails.
I am in favour of translation for three main reasons:
1: Translation allows simultaneous focus on meaning and form
If you perform a language class in the target language only, it is all too common for the answer to be mechanically reproducible from the question, without any real need to understand the meaning of either.
eg Do you have a flargrard? - No, I don't have a flargrard.
I've no idea what a "flargrard" is, so it's a reasonable bet I don't have one. (Note to non-native English-speaking readers: the word "flargrard" doesn't exist -- I made it up for this example.)
It gets worse if you include substitution drills:
eg
House: I have a house - I have a house
Cat - I have a cat.
Dog - I have a dog.
Flargrard - I have a flargrard
Translation, on the other hand, gives the student a prompt that can be understood unambiguously. The student cannot fail to understand the full meaning of the sentence, a meaning which will therefore be instrinsically linked to the target sentence.
2: The so-called "form focus" of many monolingual tasks is really no such thing.
If the task can be done mechanically, as in the "answer in questions" example above, or the substitution drill, then you never have to select the appropriate form. You never have to recall it from memory. If you don't have to recall it from memory, you cannot learn to recall it from memory.
In fact, it is pretty much impossible to devise a monolingual language task that will elicit the required grammar point/structure spontaneously. You either supply them with the structure, or you end up involved in a metalinguistic discussion that leads to one or two of the class recalling the "rule", and if we end up talking about rules, we're not connecting with spontaneous language.
3: Target-language-only normally fails to be "naturalistic".
I've discussed the issues of expository vs naturalistic language before, and in this case, I'll refer you back to the question Do you have a flargrard? The natural response is to say simply "No," or "No, I don't," but we're generally forced to answer in (unnatural) sentences in the monolingual classroom: "No, I don't have a flargrard." I don't know about you, but I don't like "answering in sentences" -- my brain knows it's wrong and unnecessary. I don't like telling students off for not answering in sentences because I see this as evidence that they're actually involved in language, rather than just juggling words.
So target-language-only is potentially devoid of practice of both meaning and form, which I'd say is a pretty big problem for language learning!
Is translation the panacea then?
Well, no, because it certainly has its pitfalls.
For example, if I ask you to translate "a brown bear", am I asking you to say "a bear of colour brown" or "a bear of the species brown bear, also known as grizzly"? And even if both translate to the same thing in the target language, there's a point of assymetry when we hit "white bear", which is not ambiguous. Prompts for translation must be very carefully selected, then.
This limits how far we can learn a language by translation, obviously. We cannot learn every noun and idiom by direct translation, but we don't need to -- the trick is to use translation where it's (1) obvious and easy or (2) where conscious awareness of the difference helps overcome a specific difficulty.
(1) The "obvious and easy" would include my favourite example: conditional sentences in English vs Romance languages, which translate pretty much directly -- eg "If I was/were you, I would...", "If I'd known you were coming I'd have baked a cake" etc. This is "advanced" material in traditional classes, but translation makes it trivially easy (to the point where Michel Thomas would be teaching it on the second or third day of his courses).
(2) An example of a specific difficulty is the difference in idiom between "to be" an age in English and "to have" an age in the Romance languages. Not a difficult rule, but even after loooots of practice, you'll often here a learner make the mistake one way or the other. So the practice method the teacher uses gets the student to produce the desired answer, but it doesn't build any resistance to native-language interference, so in an uncontrolled setting the original error returns. (And the teacher blames the student for translating, and the student is confused and disheartened etc.)
One of the biggest visible benefits of translation though, is simple:
Speed, volume and throughput of practice
Because translation starts with a readily-understood prompt, you don't have to waste too much time thinking about what the prompt means or what you're being asked to do. This means you can get through a lot more questions. A translation-based lesson that manages to present no more questions than a target-language-only lesson is a wasted opportunity.
In an attempt to teach myself Corsican, I've written a little program that conjugates, combines and declines words and presents them to me as translation tasks, checks my answers and tells me if I got them right or wrong. I can batter through hundreds of examples in very little time. Kind of exhausting, yes, but pretty effective. A couple of hours using it, spread over a couple of weeks, has hammered in some of the basics pretty solidly.
But...
Translation's biggest problem
Once you start whipping through the questions at speed, you really do start to work on autopilot, and you start to see patterns emerging in your errors. And I noticed one specific type of mistake that I made frequently that I hadn't been too aware of before... I kept switching my "I" and my "you".
It makes perfect sense, now that I think about it, and I probably did it a lot with MT, even though I didn't pay it any mind at the time. And heck, I've even heard the same thing from some of my students when I've asked them to translate short sentences.
Because when the computer says to me "you know it", that "you" refers to me. It's "eio", "io", "je", "yo", "ich" or whatever. That's what it means. Literal direct translation is therefore something of a higher-order function, an abstraction.
And yet it seems to be quite effective. So what do we do?
Well, personally I'll be attempting to stay away from first and second-person references as much as possible. I'll be sticking to the minimum required to learn them individually as grammar points, but when the person is included only as part of the context for a sentence testing another grammar point, I'll favour "he/she/it/they" over "I/we/you".
But I'll certainly be paying more attention to what exactly happens when we translate. I still think it's one of the best tools the learner has, but we've just got to work to eliminate the ambiguities....
Last year I wrote a post entitled Translation: an unjustified scapegoat, in which I pointed out that translation is very very often blamed for errors that do not arise from native-language interference, and therefore cannot be translation errors. What I neglected to say is that this is a real demotivator for learners. To be told categorically that they're translating, when they don't really believe they are translating, and to be told to do something else without any instructions on how to do it... well, the teacher is essentially blaming the student. That's not teaching, sorry.
Anyway, that's not the main point of this article, so time to put the train of thought back on the rails.
I am in favour of translation for three main reasons:
1: Translation allows simultaneous focus on meaning and form
If you perform a language class in the target language only, it is all too common for the answer to be mechanically reproducible from the question, without any real need to understand the meaning of either.
eg Do you have a flargrard? - No, I don't have a flargrard.
I've no idea what a "flargrard" is, so it's a reasonable bet I don't have one. (Note to non-native English-speaking readers: the word "flargrard" doesn't exist -- I made it up for this example.)
It gets worse if you include substitution drills:
eg
House: I have a house - I have a house
Cat - I have a cat.
Dog - I have a dog.
Flargrard - I have a flargrard
Translation, on the other hand, gives the student a prompt that can be understood unambiguously. The student cannot fail to understand the full meaning of the sentence, a meaning which will therefore be instrinsically linked to the target sentence.
2: The so-called "form focus" of many monolingual tasks is really no such thing.
If the task can be done mechanically, as in the "answer in questions" example above, or the substitution drill, then you never have to select the appropriate form. You never have to recall it from memory. If you don't have to recall it from memory, you cannot learn to recall it from memory.
In fact, it is pretty much impossible to devise a monolingual language task that will elicit the required grammar point/structure spontaneously. You either supply them with the structure, or you end up involved in a metalinguistic discussion that leads to one or two of the class recalling the "rule", and if we end up talking about rules, we're not connecting with spontaneous language.
3: Target-language-only normally fails to be "naturalistic".
I've discussed the issues of expository vs naturalistic language before, and in this case, I'll refer you back to the question Do you have a flargrard? The natural response is to say simply "No," or "No, I don't," but we're generally forced to answer in (unnatural) sentences in the monolingual classroom: "No, I don't have a flargrard." I don't know about you, but I don't like "answering in sentences" -- my brain knows it's wrong and unnecessary. I don't like telling students off for not answering in sentences because I see this as evidence that they're actually involved in language, rather than just juggling words.
So target-language-only is potentially devoid of practice of both meaning and form, which I'd say is a pretty big problem for language learning!
Is translation the panacea then?
Well, no, because it certainly has its pitfalls.
For example, if I ask you to translate "a brown bear", am I asking you to say "a bear of colour brown" or "a bear of the species brown bear, also known as grizzly"? And even if both translate to the same thing in the target language, there's a point of assymetry when we hit "white bear", which is not ambiguous. Prompts for translation must be very carefully selected, then.
This limits how far we can learn a language by translation, obviously. We cannot learn every noun and idiom by direct translation, but we don't need to -- the trick is to use translation where it's (1) obvious and easy or (2) where conscious awareness of the difference helps overcome a specific difficulty.
(1) The "obvious and easy" would include my favourite example: conditional sentences in English vs Romance languages, which translate pretty much directly -- eg "If I was/were you, I would...", "If I'd known you were coming I'd have baked a cake" etc. This is "advanced" material in traditional classes, but translation makes it trivially easy (to the point where Michel Thomas would be teaching it on the second or third day of his courses).
(2) An example of a specific difficulty is the difference in idiom between "to be" an age in English and "to have" an age in the Romance languages. Not a difficult rule, but even after loooots of practice, you'll often here a learner make the mistake one way or the other. So the practice method the teacher uses gets the student to produce the desired answer, but it doesn't build any resistance to native-language interference, so in an uncontrolled setting the original error returns. (And the teacher blames the student for translating, and the student is confused and disheartened etc.)
One of the biggest visible benefits of translation though, is simple:
Speed, volume and throughput of practice
Because translation starts with a readily-understood prompt, you don't have to waste too much time thinking about what the prompt means or what you're being asked to do. This means you can get through a lot more questions. A translation-based lesson that manages to present no more questions than a target-language-only lesson is a wasted opportunity.
In an attempt to teach myself Corsican, I've written a little program that conjugates, combines and declines words and presents them to me as translation tasks, checks my answers and tells me if I got them right or wrong. I can batter through hundreds of examples in very little time. Kind of exhausting, yes, but pretty effective. A couple of hours using it, spread over a couple of weeks, has hammered in some of the basics pretty solidly.
But...
Translation's biggest problem
Once you start whipping through the questions at speed, you really do start to work on autopilot, and you start to see patterns emerging in your errors. And I noticed one specific type of mistake that I made frequently that I hadn't been too aware of before... I kept switching my "I" and my "you".
It makes perfect sense, now that I think about it, and I probably did it a lot with MT, even though I didn't pay it any mind at the time. And heck, I've even heard the same thing from some of my students when I've asked them to translate short sentences.
Because when the computer says to me "you know it", that "you" refers to me. It's "eio", "io", "je", "yo", "ich" or whatever. That's what it means. Literal direct translation is therefore something of a higher-order function, an abstraction.
And yet it seems to be quite effective. So what do we do?
Well, personally I'll be attempting to stay away from first and second-person references as much as possible. I'll be sticking to the minimum required to learn them individually as grammar points, but when the person is included only as part of the context for a sentence testing another grammar point, I'll favour "he/she/it/they" over "I/we/you".
But I'll certainly be paying more attention to what exactly happens when we translate. I still think it's one of the best tools the learner has, but we've just got to work to eliminate the ambiguities....
25 September 2012
Michel Thomas vs Direct Instruction
So I popped in to check for new comments the other day and there were none, but there was a spike in reader numbers. Checking the stats, I spotted that most were views of the post Talent Schmalent, so I had a look at the traffic sources and found it was coming from a post on the How-To-Learn-Any-Language.com forum about Michel Thomas and Engelmann's Direct Instruction. I'd exchanged a few emails with Owen Richardson after he commented on my blog, but at the time I was finishing a job at the Ionad Chaluim Chille Ìle, on the beautiful island of Islay, and preparing to travel a thousand miles across the continent to the equally beautiful island of Corsica, where I'm now teaching.
It's a shame that he sent me links to the scans of the preface to the book (also in the thread), because it was actually massively off-putting. The whole thing is just too passionately enthusiastic, with the air of having been written by a cult disciple rather than a rational intellectual. So I read it, and didn't read anything more.
Fortunately, when I saw the thread on HTLAL, I decided this time to read the online module on Direct Instruction from Athabasca University. It's a third party item, so it's pretty neutral. It doesn't therefore tell us how great and wonderful it is, but dispassionately tells us that it was empirically more successful than other methods in independently monitored trials. And it even makes clear that this was a study of complete methods, so wasn't tracking independent variables. So the conclusion of the study was that Direct Instruction was the best of the tested methods, not "the best method ever". Having read that, I was more open to reading further on the subject.
However, it did remind me why I hadn't looked into Direct Instruction further after reading about it in Jonathan Solity's book on the Michel Thomas Method -- because it's really fundamentally rather different. Solity's book diverged far too far from the actual Thomas method when he started talking about exemplars and non-exemplars in the DI manner. The example he gave was of "over" vs "not over" with a ball or a table. Thomas rarely, if ever, used examplars and non-exemplars.
To use examplars and non-exemplars in a language course would be far too abstract, and you would be back to learning about the language rather than learning the language.
Many professional Spanish teachers, on first hearing the MT Spanish course, would probably be horrified that he taught "es" as "it is", with no explanation of the difference between "ser" (to be for permanent characteristics; I am Scottish) and "estar"(to be for temporary conditions; I am tired). He taught purely by exemplar, and not by non-exemplar.
How would we teach "ser" and "not ser"? Would it be like this?
Solity's justification for claiming Thomas's taught by examplar and non-exemplar was weak, because after introducing one thing, several hours later he would teach a different (but related) concept by exemplar, and then contrast the two. That isn't a non-exemplar, as we are never asked to define it by what it's not, only by what it is. What Thomas does here is far better defined as "integrative reconciliation", a term defined by the late David Ausubel, a pivotal figure in the development educational psychology and cognitive science after the behaviorist* years. (I've written a bit about him before on several different occasions.)
Ausubel talked about what he call "reception learning", where the information was given, as opposed the better-known "discovery learning" proposed by one of his contemporaries, Jerome Bruner. He argued that given information was not necessarily rote, and that discovered information was not necessarily meaningful, and I would personally agree with that.
Two of the key items in meaningful learning, he suggested, were "progressive differentiation" (the studying of a concept initially at a simple level then increasingly breaking down the concept into more and more complex subdivisions) and "integrative reconciliation", by which he means constantly comparing and contrasting new concepts to previously-learned ones to remove any ambiguity or confusion.
So when Thomas eventually does compare ser and estar, he's reconciling two potentially conflicting pieces of information with each other -- ie "es is he is" and "está is he is". That's integrative reconciliation, not exemplars and non-exemplars.
Perhaps language teaching could be done better if it follow the principles of DI, but I can't see how. After all, Thomas's teaching-by-exemplar-only works extremely well, because the prompts he uses are (mostly) individually unambiguous. Notice that he doesn't constantly ask what "it is" is in Spanish (that's not unambiguous) but keeps asking for "it's possible", "it's improbable" etc. The exemplars and exercises don't seem to provide much opportunity for overgeneralisation (as long as you complete the course, that is!), so he doesn't actually need to use any non-exemplars.
So rather than DI being able to improve on Thomas's techniques, I'd really say it's more likely that Thomas's techniques can be used to improve on DI.
That said, I've found a lot that I like in DI. In particular, Engelmann wrote an interesting polemic against the guys that dismiss him out of hand, called Socrates on reading mastery (another of Owen's links), where he has an imagined debate between the philosopher and an educational guru who refuses to see the value in DI. While he does seem a bit bitter at times, he demolishes the complaints against him fairly resoundingly. In truth, a lot of education isn't methodology, but ideology. We convince ourselves that something is best without any evidence, and then we dismiss empirical evidence on the grounds that our unproven principles aren't followed. You'll hear the same thing in criticism of Thomas -- "it can't work because you have to translate," "there's too much English," "you can't 'learn' a language, you have to 'assimilate' it," etc etc ad nauseum.
And Engelmann is an ardent supporter of "basic skills"/"bottom-up" teaching, which is something I think is only logical. Starting from large-scale problem solving increases task complexity significantly. In algebra or in science, you have to control for one variable at a time, and in bottom-up teaching you control for one variable at a time. But when you are trying to manage multiple variables, you need a lot more information before you have full control of even one variable, and in the meantime, you risk drawing false conclusions and making overgeneralisations about the data/formula/language features.
This is a point that Engelmann makes in the Socrates story. He points out that an evil person could make a bad course that follows Rosenthal's principles of what makes a good course, and Rosenthal agrees. He then extends that to it's logical conclusion:
This is a point that I often try to make myself, and it's something that a lot of people find hard to accept. Just because something works for one person doesn't mean it's good -- the goal in all teaching is to eliminate the possibility of misinterpretation. This is true on the level of materials themselves just as much as on the level of guidelines for producing materials.
Another interesting difference between Thomas and DI is that DI relies on chorusing, but Thomas instead makes everyone take the time to think about it, but then he lets only one student answer. Would chorusing be possible in an MT-style course? Would it be desirable? My gut reaction is "no", because it would take some of the life out of the language. Rationally, I could back that up by pointing out that the responses from the students are often slightly halting, so they're not going to be able to do it simultaneously.
Which leads to a question: are Thomas's students on the CD struggling because he went too quickly? Does DI say we should slow it down? Maybe. Is absolute mastery of these at full speed required before moving on? Maybe. But regardless of how well we know Thomas's material, it's only an introduction to the language, and there's a lot still to be learned after, so you've still got a fair learning path to get fully up-to-speed before you're going to be able to really use the language anyway, so there's going to be plenty of opportunity for ongoing practice as you continue. Also, it may not really be desirable to have complete mastery of the grammar with virtually zero vocabulary.
But that's all conjecture.
But the most troubling conclusion that Engelmann reaches is that a script is better than an independent teacher. Troubling, because it's likely true. When I did my CELTA course, it's amazing how many of my questions about methodology and task selection were answered with "Use your judgement as a teacher." Well, sorry, but I couldn't have that judgement until somebody taught me how to be a teacher, and that is why I was on a teacher training course in the first place. Teacher judgement does indeed open up the possibility of making errors of judgement.
And I have to ask myself whether there is any point in me teaching Spanish MT-style, or if I should just tell everyone to buy the CDs, which already exist and probably teach the language a bit more effectively than I do. (Which is just one of the reasons I'm not currently teaching Spanish to English speakers, but English to French speakers.)
That isn't to say that Engelmann's scripts, or Thomas's recordings, are universally optimal -- I sincerely doubt they are (and, in fact, I know that Thomas's are not) -- just that they are better than most teaching, and applying judgement risks introducing errors of judgement. Perhaps many teachers would do better teaching from a script initially and trying to internalise the logic and the process of teaching before ever being forced to operate independently.
But I don't believe DI is the be-all-and-end-all of education, and I don't believe the MT method can be improved by the blind application of DI principles.
The MT method is not well-enough understood, and I think not even MT himself knew what it was -- there are pretty fundamental differences between some of his courses, and despite "telling" his method to two people, there is no document that adequately describes it, and the courses claiming to follow his principles have surprisingly little in common with his teaching. DI may give us an extra frame of reference within which to view and discuss Thomas's teaching, but no more than that.
*Yes, I distance myself so far from behaviorism that I even spell it in US English. ;-)
It's a shame that he sent me links to the scans of the preface to the book (also in the thread), because it was actually massively off-putting. The whole thing is just too passionately enthusiastic, with the air of having been written by a cult disciple rather than a rational intellectual. So I read it, and didn't read anything more.
Fortunately, when I saw the thread on HTLAL, I decided this time to read the online module on Direct Instruction from Athabasca University. It's a third party item, so it's pretty neutral. It doesn't therefore tell us how great and wonderful it is, but dispassionately tells us that it was empirically more successful than other methods in independently monitored trials. And it even makes clear that this was a study of complete methods, so wasn't tracking independent variables. So the conclusion of the study was that Direct Instruction was the best of the tested methods, not "the best method ever". Having read that, I was more open to reading further on the subject.
However, it did remind me why I hadn't looked into Direct Instruction further after reading about it in Jonathan Solity's book on the Michel Thomas Method -- because it's really fundamentally rather different. Solity's book diverged far too far from the actual Thomas method when he started talking about exemplars and non-exemplars in the DI manner. The example he gave was of "over" vs "not over" with a ball or a table. Thomas rarely, if ever, used examplars and non-exemplars.
To use examplars and non-exemplars in a language course would be far too abstract, and you would be back to learning about the language rather than learning the language.
Many professional Spanish teachers, on first hearing the MT Spanish course, would probably be horrified that he taught "es" as "it is", with no explanation of the difference between "ser" (to be for permanent characteristics; I am Scottish) and "estar"(to be for temporary conditions; I am tired). He taught purely by exemplar, and not by non-exemplar.
How would we teach "ser" and "not ser"? Would it be like this?
- I am a teacher. Ser or not ser?
- I am tired. Ser or not ser?
- I am hungry. Ser or not ser?
Solity's justification for claiming Thomas's taught by examplar and non-exemplar was weak, because after introducing one thing, several hours later he would teach a different (but related) concept by exemplar, and then contrast the two. That isn't a non-exemplar, as we are never asked to define it by what it's not, only by what it is. What Thomas does here is far better defined as "integrative reconciliation", a term defined by the late David Ausubel, a pivotal figure in the development educational psychology and cognitive science after the behaviorist* years. (I've written a bit about him before on several different occasions.)
Ausubel talked about what he call "reception learning", where the information was given, as opposed the better-known "discovery learning" proposed by one of his contemporaries, Jerome Bruner. He argued that given information was not necessarily rote, and that discovered information was not necessarily meaningful, and I would personally agree with that.
Two of the key items in meaningful learning, he suggested, were "progressive differentiation" (the studying of a concept initially at a simple level then increasingly breaking down the concept into more and more complex subdivisions) and "integrative reconciliation", by which he means constantly comparing and contrasting new concepts to previously-learned ones to remove any ambiguity or confusion.
So when Thomas eventually does compare ser and estar, he's reconciling two potentially conflicting pieces of information with each other -- ie "es is he is" and "está is he is". That's integrative reconciliation, not exemplars and non-exemplars.
Perhaps language teaching could be done better if it follow the principles of DI, but I can't see how. After all, Thomas's teaching-by-exemplar-only works extremely well, because the prompts he uses are (mostly) individually unambiguous. Notice that he doesn't constantly ask what "it is" is in Spanish (that's not unambiguous) but keeps asking for "it's possible", "it's improbable" etc. The exemplars and exercises don't seem to provide much opportunity for overgeneralisation (as long as you complete the course, that is!), so he doesn't actually need to use any non-exemplars.
So rather than DI being able to improve on Thomas's techniques, I'd really say it's more likely that Thomas's techniques can be used to improve on DI.
That said, I've found a lot that I like in DI. In particular, Engelmann wrote an interesting polemic against the guys that dismiss him out of hand, called Socrates on reading mastery (another of Owen's links), where he has an imagined debate between the philosopher and an educational guru who refuses to see the value in DI. While he does seem a bit bitter at times, he demolishes the complaints against him fairly resoundingly. In truth, a lot of education isn't methodology, but ideology. We convince ourselves that something is best without any evidence, and then we dismiss empirical evidence on the grounds that our unproven principles aren't followed. You'll hear the same thing in criticism of Thomas -- "it can't work because you have to translate," "there's too much English," "you can't 'learn' a language, you have to 'assimilate' it," etc etc ad nauseum.
And Engelmann is an ardent supporter of "basic skills"/"bottom-up" teaching, which is something I think is only logical. Starting from large-scale problem solving increases task complexity significantly. In algebra or in science, you have to control for one variable at a time, and in bottom-up teaching you control for one variable at a time. But when you are trying to manage multiple variables, you need a lot more information before you have full control of even one variable, and in the meantime, you risk drawing false conclusions and making overgeneralisations about the data/formula/language features.
This is a point that Engelmann makes in the Socrates story. He points out that an evil person could make a bad course that follows Rosenthal's principles of what makes a good course, and Rosenthal agrees. He then extends that to it's logical conclusion:
If it is possible to design a failed program on purpose, isn’t it possible for some program designers to create a failed program because of bad judgement...?
This is a point that I often try to make myself, and it's something that a lot of people find hard to accept. Just because something works for one person doesn't mean it's good -- the goal in all teaching is to eliminate the possibility of misinterpretation. This is true on the level of materials themselves just as much as on the level of guidelines for producing materials.
Another interesting difference between Thomas and DI is that DI relies on chorusing, but Thomas instead makes everyone take the time to think about it, but then he lets only one student answer. Would chorusing be possible in an MT-style course? Would it be desirable? My gut reaction is "no", because it would take some of the life out of the language. Rationally, I could back that up by pointing out that the responses from the students are often slightly halting, so they're not going to be able to do it simultaneously.
Which leads to a question: are Thomas's students on the CD struggling because he went too quickly? Does DI say we should slow it down? Maybe. Is absolute mastery of these at full speed required before moving on? Maybe. But regardless of how well we know Thomas's material, it's only an introduction to the language, and there's a lot still to be learned after, so you've still got a fair learning path to get fully up-to-speed before you're going to be able to really use the language anyway, so there's going to be plenty of opportunity for ongoing practice as you continue. Also, it may not really be desirable to have complete mastery of the grammar with virtually zero vocabulary.
But that's all conjecture.
But the most troubling conclusion that Engelmann reaches is that a script is better than an independent teacher. Troubling, because it's likely true. When I did my CELTA course, it's amazing how many of my questions about methodology and task selection were answered with "Use your judgement as a teacher." Well, sorry, but I couldn't have that judgement until somebody taught me how to be a teacher, and that is why I was on a teacher training course in the first place. Teacher judgement does indeed open up the possibility of making errors of judgement.
And I have to ask myself whether there is any point in me teaching Spanish MT-style, or if I should just tell everyone to buy the CDs, which already exist and probably teach the language a bit more effectively than I do. (Which is just one of the reasons I'm not currently teaching Spanish to English speakers, but English to French speakers.)
That isn't to say that Engelmann's scripts, or Thomas's recordings, are universally optimal -- I sincerely doubt they are (and, in fact, I know that Thomas's are not) -- just that they are better than most teaching, and applying judgement risks introducing errors of judgement. Perhaps many teachers would do better teaching from a script initially and trying to internalise the logic and the process of teaching before ever being forced to operate independently.
But I don't believe DI is the be-all-and-end-all of education, and I don't believe the MT method can be improved by the blind application of DI principles.
The MT method is not well-enough understood, and I think not even MT himself knew what it was -- there are pretty fundamental differences between some of his courses, and despite "telling" his method to two people, there is no document that adequately describes it, and the courses claiming to follow his principles have surprisingly little in common with his teaching. DI may give us an extra frame of reference within which to view and discuss Thomas's teaching, but no more than that.
*Yes, I distance myself so far from behaviorism that I even spell it in US English. ;-)
03 August 2012
Everyone understands grammar.
I've often heard it said that grammar is difficult or that normal people don't understand grammar. Some teachers believe that grammar would be useful in the language classroom, but only if the students came in understanding grammar in the first place -- they don't want to waste time teaching theoretical grammar before they can start teaching the target language.
And these are good arguments but for one small detail:
everyone understands grammar.
It has been observed that in cloze tests (passages of texts with blanked out words) native speakers will have a notion of the word-class of the correct answer before they know what the specific word is.
Take these three simple examples:
So they have an internal concept of word-classes, even if they don't have an explicit awareness of it. This means that there's very little work for the teacher to do -- all you've got to do is point out what they already know.
Michel Thomas tried to do this a different way, and it's a way that tends to draw a lot of flak. On his recorded courses, you can hear him say that he doesn't like the traditional definition of "person, place or thing", and then he gives a couple of examples of abstract nouns, which he says aren't really things. He then goes on to introduce his prefered rule -- a noun is anything you can use "the" before -- and a couple of examples, using both abstract and concrete nouns.
It is quite trivial to prove that his rule is wrong -- "the white house"; adjective after "the"; wrong. "John"; most proper nouns don't take "the"; wrong. And yet for all it's inaccuracy, this "rule" seems to work better than most. Why? Because Thomas isn't trying to teach a new concept -- he is merely trying to evoke the concept that the learner already has. In fact, he is doing exactly the opposite of defining, and I would argue that he is doing so on purpose -- if you already know about the concept, thinking too much will override your instinctual understanding, so thinking should be avoided.
What Thomas did was quite subtle. He took the traditional (correct) rule, but said he didn't like it, freeing the student from feeling inadequate for not understanding it. He then presented the case that causes consistent real problems for students, the abstract noun. All he basically said in informational terms was "these are nouns too", but he worded it in such a way as to say "it's not your fault if these don't make sense in the old rule", swatting away any confusion and guilt or inadequacy. His final comment, about "the", is valueless out of context -- it is factually incorrect, but he uses it to reinforce the concepts already clarified by the old rule and the abstract examples. He ties them into one bundle. The student never writes down the rule, the student never memorises the rule, in fact, regardless of what he says, he has not given a rule. All he does is evoke the learner's internal concept of nouns and label it with the word noun. I'm pretty confident that the average student coming out of a face-to-face class with Thomas would have forgotten he'd even said it, but they'd be able to label nouns pretty acccurately if asked to.
It took Thomas a few minutes to teach "noun", "verb" and "adjective" that way, less time than it takes me to explain what he did.
Any concept that exists in the student's native language has the potential to be taught in a similar way.
The secret is not to take too long, and not to get hung up on the technicalities. All you need to do is evoke the concept and stick a label on it.
And if you think about it, that's what we do as teachers every day -- it's called "vocabulary".
And these are good arguments but for one small detail:
everyone understands grammar.
It has been observed that in cloze tests (passages of texts with blanked out words) native speakers will have a notion of the word-class of the correct answer before they know what the specific word is.
Take these three simple examples:
- I like ____.
- I want a ____ one.
- Don't ____ me.
So they have an internal concept of word-classes, even if they don't have an explicit awareness of it. This means that there's very little work for the teacher to do -- all you've got to do is point out what they already know.
Michel Thomas tried to do this a different way, and it's a way that tends to draw a lot of flak. On his recorded courses, you can hear him say that he doesn't like the traditional definition of "person, place or thing", and then he gives a couple of examples of abstract nouns, which he says aren't really things. He then goes on to introduce his prefered rule -- a noun is anything you can use "the" before -- and a couple of examples, using both abstract and concrete nouns.
It is quite trivial to prove that his rule is wrong -- "the white house"; adjective after "the"; wrong. "John"; most proper nouns don't take "the"; wrong. And yet for all it's inaccuracy, this "rule" seems to work better than most. Why? Because Thomas isn't trying to teach a new concept -- he is merely trying to evoke the concept that the learner already has. In fact, he is doing exactly the opposite of defining, and I would argue that he is doing so on purpose -- if you already know about the concept, thinking too much will override your instinctual understanding, so thinking should be avoided.
What Thomas did was quite subtle. He took the traditional (correct) rule, but said he didn't like it, freeing the student from feeling inadequate for not understanding it. He then presented the case that causes consistent real problems for students, the abstract noun. All he basically said in informational terms was "these are nouns too", but he worded it in such a way as to say "it's not your fault if these don't make sense in the old rule", swatting away any confusion and guilt or inadequacy. His final comment, about "the", is valueless out of context -- it is factually incorrect, but he uses it to reinforce the concepts already clarified by the old rule and the abstract examples. He ties them into one bundle. The student never writes down the rule, the student never memorises the rule, in fact, regardless of what he says, he has not given a rule. All he does is evoke the learner's internal concept of nouns and label it with the word noun. I'm pretty confident that the average student coming out of a face-to-face class with Thomas would have forgotten he'd even said it, but they'd be able to label nouns pretty acccurately if asked to.
It took Thomas a few minutes to teach "noun", "verb" and "adjective" that way, less time than it takes me to explain what he did.
Any concept that exists in the student's native language has the potential to be taught in a similar way.
The secret is not to take too long, and not to get hung up on the technicalities. All you need to do is evoke the concept and stick a label on it.
And if you think about it, that's what we do as teachers every day -- it's called "vocabulary".
13 October 2011
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 :
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:
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.
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.
24 December 2010
Dialogues from Day One.
I discussed dialogues briefly in an earlier post on expository and naturalistic language. Fasulye suggested in the comment section that dialogues didn't necessarily lead to the use on unnaturalistic language. OK, so I didn't say that it did -- the point I raised was that dialogues aren't a "magic bullet" that makes all language seem naturalistic.
However, that said, I'm not a big fan on dialogues anyway, so today I'm going to talk about how starting a course with dialogues from the very first lesson actually slows down progress for the learner.
My contention:
The need for a coherent dialogue forces the author to use language that the student isn't yet ready to understand.
The dialogue format forces the learner to move between such a variety of different language, that it forces the student to attempt to learn too many things at once.
I'll use as my example one of the ever-popular Teach Yourself books.
Lesson 1 TY Welsh opens with the following dialogue (my translation)
Matthew: Good morning.
Elen: Good morning. Who are you?
Matthew: I'm Matthew.
Elen: How's things? I'm Elen, the Welsh course tutor.
Matthew: I'm a learner, a very nervous learner!
Elen: Welcome to Lampeter, Matthew. Don't be nervous, everything will be fine.
What do we start off with? It's those old favourites -- hello, what's your name etc.
But what does this teach us?
Let's have a look at the Welsh for "who are you" and "I'm Matthew": "Pwy dych chi?" and "Matthew ydw i".
These two phrases are completely alien to the English speaker. There is only one clue that the English speaker can use to try to make sense of this -- the name "Matthew". A learner might assume that "pwy" and "ydw" are linked, but they're not -- "dych" goes with "ydw", even though the two are not visibly related.
This is the verb "to be", and this problem isn't unique to Welsh -- consider the English "are", "am" and "is". So even when we look at dialogues from an entirely expository point of view, we have a problem that means we have too many unknowns for the new learner.
Consider the following (not a real example) as though it was in lesson one:
John: Are you tired?
Sally: Yes, I am tired.
You as a learner are asked to contrast the question with the answer, but we have a massive amount of variation in a very simple sentence. First of all, we have the matter of the irregular verb forms, as above. Secondly, the pronouns are radically different (as in most languages). Finally, we have a change of word order. Learners could confuse their verbs and pronouns, and miss the word order entirely.
OK, that's not a real lesson 1 example, but I've already given a worse example from the Welsh course - Pwy dych chi?. In the Welsh, the word order doesn't change for the answer Matthew ydw i, but that's arguably as difficult for an English speaker as English word order is for speakers of a language that doesn't change order. We also have no repeated recognisable word form to highlight any the word order in Welsh. There is an awful lot of rules in play here, each interacting to make the full meaning of the sentence. Without seeing these in isolation, the role of individual elements is obscured.
And it's even more complicated in French. Many courses will introduce Comment t'appelles tu? and the response Je m'appelle Jean-Pierre (or whatever name). This introduces the complication of the reflexive pronoun, which is a version of the object pronoun. Well, actually, the reflexive pronoun is identical to the normal object pronoun for "me" and "you", which actually makes this more confusing. While the change of word order for the question is theoretically the same as English, the lack of auxiliary do (eg Do you know?) in French questions makes it completely different to the untrained eye. The fact that this places the object before the subject is particularly alien to the English speaker. This is massively difficult, and so the learner is only expected to memorise or learn to recognise the phrase. The assumption here is that by exposure to later examples, the learner will induce the underlying patterns, but this is something that dialogues are actually very bad at.
Dialogues by their nature attempt to model naturalistic conversations, and this leads them to include a very wide variety of language. Unfortunately, variety means very little repetition, so there is very little material to induce the rules from. It gets worse when the writer is trying particularly hard to be naturalistic, because many of the expository cues are lost. Remember this from earlier? I'm a learner, a very nervous learner! Notice that this uses elision (the ommission of repeated words) for increase naturalisticness, but missing the opportunity to reinforce the structure "I am".
French courses rarely follow up the je m'appelle with any other reflexive constructions -- the only thing it is contrasted with is usually il/elle s'appelle (he/she/it is called). The student is left knowing the phrase for a long time without being given the input to learn why it means what it means. In fact, this risks interfering with normal (non-reflexive) object pronouns, because the learner is overexposed to the reflexive form, and unexposed to the base form for a long time.
The root cause of the problem
The language in a naturalistic dialogue is linked by context, and elision is a major feature of natural language.
In short, we actively avoid repeating language in a conversation.
This leaves us teaching language that is only bound by context, so is semantically reinforcing, but not syntactically reinforcing.
If we progress in a language by learning a new word, it opens up a few extra possibilities, but learning new grammatical structures can double our knowledge of the language.
So imagine you know "I like...", "I have..." and "cars", "trees" and "dogs" -- you can say 6 combinations. If you next learn to say "cats", that's an additional two sentences -- "I like cats" and "I have cats" -- so 8 in total.
But if instead you learn the negation "don't", that doubles the number of sentences to 12.
Massive growth in beginner language is only possible if you focus on teaching language points that can be combined within a sentence to make bigger and more complicated sentences. The dialogue format militates against this, and after one dialogue-based lesson, a learner is not likely to be able to produce even as much as is in the dialogues themselves. Compare with the Michel Thomas courses where (even excluding the -ible/-able words) the learner has a range of expression that while limited still covers dozens of different possible sentences. By building on this, the student experiences almost exponential growth. That's cool.
However, that said, I'm not a big fan on dialogues anyway, so today I'm going to talk about how starting a course with dialogues from the very first lesson actually slows down progress for the learner.
My contention:
The need for a coherent dialogue forces the author to use language that the student isn't yet ready to understand.
The dialogue format forces the learner to move between such a variety of different language, that it forces the student to attempt to learn too many things at once.
I'll use as my example one of the ever-popular Teach Yourself books.
Lesson 1 TY Welsh opens with the following dialogue (my translation)
Matthew: Good morning.
Elen: Good morning. Who are you?
Matthew: I'm Matthew.
Elen: How's things? I'm Elen, the Welsh course tutor.
Matthew: I'm a learner, a very nervous learner!
Elen: Welcome to Lampeter, Matthew. Don't be nervous, everything will be fine.
What do we start off with? It's those old favourites -- hello, what's your name etc.
But what does this teach us?
Let's have a look at the Welsh for "who are you" and "I'm Matthew": "Pwy dych chi?" and "Matthew ydw i".
These two phrases are completely alien to the English speaker. There is only one clue that the English speaker can use to try to make sense of this -- the name "Matthew". A learner might assume that "pwy" and "ydw" are linked, but they're not -- "dych" goes with "ydw", even though the two are not visibly related.
This is the verb "to be", and this problem isn't unique to Welsh -- consider the English "are", "am" and "is". So even when we look at dialogues from an entirely expository point of view, we have a problem that means we have too many unknowns for the new learner.
Consider the following (not a real example) as though it was in lesson one:
John: Are you tired?
Sally: Yes, I am tired.
You as a learner are asked to contrast the question with the answer, but we have a massive amount of variation in a very simple sentence. First of all, we have the matter of the irregular verb forms, as above. Secondly, the pronouns are radically different (as in most languages). Finally, we have a change of word order. Learners could confuse their verbs and pronouns, and miss the word order entirely.
OK, that's not a real lesson 1 example, but I've already given a worse example from the Welsh course - Pwy dych chi?. In the Welsh, the word order doesn't change for the answer Matthew ydw i, but that's arguably as difficult for an English speaker as English word order is for speakers of a language that doesn't change order. We also have no repeated recognisable word form to highlight any the word order in Welsh. There is an awful lot of rules in play here, each interacting to make the full meaning of the sentence. Without seeing these in isolation, the role of individual elements is obscured.
And it's even more complicated in French. Many courses will introduce Comment t'appelles tu? and the response Je m'appelle Jean-Pierre (or whatever name). This introduces the complication of the reflexive pronoun, which is a version of the object pronoun. Well, actually, the reflexive pronoun is identical to the normal object pronoun for "me" and "you", which actually makes this more confusing. While the change of word order for the question is theoretically the same as English, the lack of auxiliary do (eg Do you know?) in French questions makes it completely different to the untrained eye. The fact that this places the object before the subject is particularly alien to the English speaker. This is massively difficult, and so the learner is only expected to memorise or learn to recognise the phrase. The assumption here is that by exposure to later examples, the learner will induce the underlying patterns, but this is something that dialogues are actually very bad at.
Dialogues by their nature attempt to model naturalistic conversations, and this leads them to include a very wide variety of language. Unfortunately, variety means very little repetition, so there is very little material to induce the rules from. It gets worse when the writer is trying particularly hard to be naturalistic, because many of the expository cues are lost. Remember this from earlier? I'm a learner, a very nervous learner! Notice that this uses elision (the ommission of repeated words) for increase naturalisticness, but missing the opportunity to reinforce the structure "I am".
French courses rarely follow up the je m'appelle with any other reflexive constructions -- the only thing it is contrasted with is usually il/elle s'appelle (he/she/it is called). The student is left knowing the phrase for a long time without being given the input to learn why it means what it means. In fact, this risks interfering with normal (non-reflexive) object pronouns, because the learner is overexposed to the reflexive form, and unexposed to the base form for a long time.
The root cause of the problem
The language in a naturalistic dialogue is linked by context, and elision is a major feature of natural language.
In short, we actively avoid repeating language in a conversation.
This leaves us teaching language that is only bound by context, so is semantically reinforcing, but not syntactically reinforcing.
If we progress in a language by learning a new word, it opens up a few extra possibilities, but learning new grammatical structures can double our knowledge of the language.
So imagine you know "I like...", "I have..." and "cars", "trees" and "dogs" -- you can say 6 combinations. If you next learn to say "cats", that's an additional two sentences -- "I like cats" and "I have cats" -- so 8 in total.
But if instead you learn the negation "don't", that doubles the number of sentences to 12.
Massive growth in beginner language is only possible if you focus on teaching language points that can be combined within a sentence to make bigger and more complicated sentences. The dialogue format militates against this, and after one dialogue-based lesson, a learner is not likely to be able to produce even as much as is in the dialogues themselves. Compare with the Michel Thomas courses where (even excluding the -ible/-able words) the learner has a range of expression that while limited still covers dozens of different possible sentences. By building on this, the student experiences almost exponential growth. That's cool.
19 November 2010
Expository vs Naturalistic Language Examples
A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing authentic materials. The main problem I identified was the lack of mutual reinforcement between individual texts (I hate that word, but I just can't find a suitable alternative...) meaning that very little language presented is retained.
So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?
Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox. Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts. If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals. The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.
The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour. Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.
But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea. In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.
But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?
The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.
There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.
To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".
Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach. The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.
I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.
He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"
And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."
There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise. We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.
I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.
An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago. I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back. The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition. So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.
The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]
This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples. Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural. Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article. "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets. But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?" The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal. We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").
The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable." Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar. This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.
And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel. When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response. This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.
"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice. Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap. The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do. The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong. The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that." Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you. This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us). The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost. Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears. Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses. If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.
OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.
One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube. He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language. He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ. Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out. His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.
But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material? Hmm....
Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ. My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."
The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.
And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.
So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against. The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.
One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue. Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts. Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog. Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues. Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.
The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language. This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen. I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen. It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.
Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this? Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability. Except that Bernard is not a boy. The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed. Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there. Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)
Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard. Maybe they're introducing themselves to us? Like a "piece to camera" in a video course? It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna. But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives. Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)
Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!
This odd dynamic continues throughout the book. The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains. From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it. Who exactly are they presenting information to? They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,
So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet. Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful. Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.
But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen. Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules. One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible". But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic. Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible". "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go. Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:
If you think about it, what did he start with?
He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy. Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input". But it was not comprehensible. Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.
So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language. But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language. The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.
In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem. But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better. It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation. And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc. These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course. In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*
Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration. Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept. Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate. Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language. When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious. If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".
So Jespersen is mostly wrong. Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.
So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?
Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox. Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts. If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals. The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.
The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour. Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.
But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea. In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.
But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?
The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.
There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.
To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".
Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach. The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.
I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.
He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"
And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."
There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise. We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.
I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.
An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago. I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back. The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition. So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.
The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]
This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples. Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural. Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article. "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets. But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?" The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal. We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").
The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable." Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar. This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.
And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel. When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response. This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.
"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice. Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap. The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do. The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong. The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that." Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you. This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us). The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost. Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears. Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses. If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.
OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.
One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube. He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language. He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ. Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out. His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.
But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material? Hmm....
Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ. My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."
The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.
And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.
So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against. The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.
One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue. Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts. Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog. Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues. Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.
The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language. This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen. I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen. It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.
Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this? Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability. Except that Bernard is not a boy. The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed. Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there. Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)
Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard. Maybe they're introducing themselves to us? Like a "piece to camera" in a video course? It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna. But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives. Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)
Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!
This odd dynamic continues throughout the book. The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains. From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it. Who exactly are they presenting information to? They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,
So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet. Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful. Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.
But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen. Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules. One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible". But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic. Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible". "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go. Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:
If you think about it, what did he start with?
He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy. Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input". But it was not comprehensible. Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.
So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language. But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language. The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.
In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem. But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better. It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation. And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc. These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course. In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*
Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration. Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept. Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate. Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language. When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious. If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".
So Jespersen is mostly wrong. Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.
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