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?

• I am a teacher.  Ser or not ser?
• I am tired.  Ser or not ser?
• I am hungry.  Ser or not ser?

Because Direct Instruction calls for the widest possible variation in exemplars and non-exemplars, I cannot see any way of doing it while actually manipulating the language itself, as this would involve introducing far too much new information in one go.

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. ;-)

Rote vs Meaningful

Last time I wrote about the confusion of "Rote and meaningful" learning with "discovery and reception" learning.

This perhaps isn't as big a problem in language learning as it is in other forms of learning, as it would appear to be accepted in language-learning circles that all information learned is equal.  For example, if I learn the conjugations of a verb, then regardless of how I have done so, I have learnt it.  But it is the contention of David Ausubel that this is not the case -- if I learn something by rote, I learn it without structure or association, and if I learn it meaningfully, I know it by structure.
To quote Educational Psychology: a Cognitive Approach,

Rote learning occurs ... if the learner lacks the relevant prior knowledge necessary for making the learning task potentially meaningful, and also (regardless of how much potential meaning the task has) if the learner adopts a set merely to internalize it in an arbitrary, verbatim fashion (that is, as an arbitrary series of words). (2nd Ed, p 27)

The part I've put in bold here is the bit that most language teachers don't seem to appreciate.  There is a belief that somehow the inherent meaningfulness of language will shine through and all the rote-learned material will spontaneously become a single meaningful whole.  But core to Ausubel's core argument is that meaningful and rote learning are not merely superficial different methods, but that the internal modelling of learned knowledge relies on how it is learned.

So if a learner memorises yo estoy, tu estás, el está, nosotros estamos, vosotros estáis, ustedes están without having any previous exposure to Spanish verbs, each item will be more or less independent and unitary -- the inherently meaningful information (the regular and partially regular inflectional suffixes) cannot be noticed by a learner who has no previous concept or understanding of them.  Even once the learner is taught the rules of Spanish conjugation, the original representation of the rote memorised conjugations will remain intact -- it will not spontaneously decompose into morphemes.

A strong learner will eventually generalise this away and learn the verb meaningfully, but this will not take the form of "adjusting" the learned language, but of relearning it in a meaningful way.
What rote learning gives the learner is therefore not true learning, but the possibility of memorising the learning material which he can then teach himself at a later date.  By this token, phrase-based learning could be justified as providing a "corpus" (Wikipedia) which the learner can subsequently learn from. 

Such a "memorise first, learn later" approach can only really be justified if the memorisation stage takes significantly less time than the learning step, as a means of getting more learning out of a limited amount of tutor time.  Unfortunately, as I pointed out in a recent post entitled Who am I?, it takes a very long time to learn very short phrases, and it seems far more efficient to learn meaningfully from the outset.

Besides of which, "memorise first, learn later" assumes that all students are equally capable of teaching themselves, which is not true.  In my first foreign language, I made plenty of mistakes in trying to move from memorisation to learning, and from conscious to unconscious competence: mistakes that I now know how to avoid repeating in my subsequent languages.  How did I overcome these hurdles in the first place?  I was looking for them.  But nobody told me to look for them, so many people don't ever realise that they're there -- they instead justify their failure with phrases like "I'm no good at languages".

So to me, it makes no sense to have a student ever say anything if they don't understand it completely, ground-up.  The meaning of the sentence is irrelevant if they don't understand the vocabulary and construction of the sentence.

What do you know?

"If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: The most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly."

This quote was taken from a book by David P. Ausubel, one of the most influential figures in educational psychology.  It was used in his book Educational Psychology: a cognitive view, where it came directly after the dedication, and before the preface.  It is the first thing the reader will see in the book, and this is by design, because this is the most important principle that every reader should have in mind while reading the book.

To many, this may seem trivially obvious, and something that every teacher does.  After all, you couldn't teach someone to do ski jumping if they haven't learnt to ski downhill already.  But there's actually more to it than that, and the subtlety isn't in the words used in the quote, it's also about the words that he left out: words such as "subject".  This is crucial.  If he had set "what the learner already knows about the subject", then it would include the possibility of a student in a state of zero knowledge, but as it stands it assumes that there is no-one who enters the classroom without a considerable amount of pre-learned knowledge.

The error made by many teachers is to attempt to compartmentalise knowledge, and the subsequent belief that such "zero states" exist, and this is particularly prevalent in the language classroom.

But we all have different levels of knowledge.

A Spanish person knows what definite and indefinite articles are, although his native concept doesn't quite match the usage in English.  A Polish person has no concept of articles whatsoever.  These are very easy indeed to ascertain, yet we still don't tend to teach them according to these.  The profession has in general bought into the myth of a "Universal order of acquisition" and the myth that there's "no such thing as native language interference", and there are hundreds of language courses on the market that pay absolutely no heed to the learner's native language.  In fact, Cambridge themselves produce a series of books on "common errors" from their exams, all completely in English and all sold worldwide with no attempt to tailor the teaching to the specific problems that speakers of certain languages have.

What's to blame here is the obsessive fear of "translation" in the industry.  Avoiding translation has become associated with avoiding any sort of acknowledgement of the existence of the native language.  We are expected to turn it off -- all that knowledge, and we're not supposed to use it.

But we do use it.  As I've no doubt said here on many occassions, when we are taught "hello, my name is ... , how are you?" in any beginner's class, we are learning concepts that only exist in language, so we are going back to our native language.  We do it in the classroom; we rely on it in the classroom.  But we pretend we're not doing it, which prevents us developing more advanced strategies based on the principle of native language as "what we know".  We limit ourselves through the lie.  Once we, as an industry, accept the truth, we can start to improve.

Translation: an unjustified scapegoat

I couldn't count the number of times that I've heard a teacher respond to an error by saying "that's because you're translating! You need to think in the language!"  This is all well and goo... no, there's nothing good about it.  I found it particularly frustrating when I found myself incapable of saying something specific in Gaelic, and my "friend" refused to let me simply say it in English.  I then said it wrong and he then let loose with the old "because you're translating" line (except in Gaelic, just for variety).

Well no, the problem wasn't that I "was translating", it was that I had never learned how to say it.  I hadn't learned it, I couldn't say it -- simple as that.

Translation has become something of a bogeyman.  If you make an error caused by native-language-interference, the witchfinder in front of you will cry "translation!" and insist you must "learn to think in the language".  Except that quite often these days, the witchfinder will be someone who doesn't actually speak your language and therefore blames translation when the converse is actually true.

My favourite example is the English and Spanish conditional constructions.  Spanish-speakers regularly get the English wrong, and teachers are wont to issue the usual battlecry of "think in English!" followed by a lecture on "2nd and 3rd conditionals" in abstract grammatical terms.  But in fact, Spanish conditionals translate almost verbatim into their English equivalents, so if the Spanish folk were simply encouraged to translate, they'd master the English forms in about half-an-hour.

I found a quote on-line the other day:

"Disillusionment regarding the relevance and usefulness of learning theory for educational practice has been responsible, in part, for the emergence of the theories of teaching that are avowedly independent of the theories of learning."

Ausubel, David. Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View, 1968

1968, but this still seems to hold today.  When we discuss learning, there's one word that is perhaps more important than any other: generalisation.   Sadly, there's very little discussion of this in teaching literature.  Our job is to teach, your job is to learn, so generalisation is dismissed as the student's responsibility.

The problems that are often blamed on translation are better blamed on generalisation.

Native-language interference is inappropriate generalisation of known patterns (the fact that they are in the native language is incidental).

On top of that, generalisation even accounts for errors such as the conditionals where native-language interference should provide correct results.  How so?  Well, many intermediate and advanced learners have a tendency to try to construct any new target language structure out of known language structures -- ie they assume the language they have been taught is the whole language and try to generalise the known structures to cover any new case, and they fail to innovate.

For a specific example of generalisation gone wrong regardless of medium, I have to go back a good few years to my first experience of the language classroom: high-school French.

We started off with phrases, albeit with translation.  It was all "what is your name?" "I am 12 years old" "I'm fine, and you?"

Now our teacher told us that "j'ai" was "I have" and that it only meant "I am" when discussing ages, but several of the class got themselves in a right guddle over this.  Some would say "j'ai" instead of "je", and some would say "j'ai" instead of "je suis".  And then they would try using "je suis" instead of "j'ai".

The problem here wasn't translation, because we weren't building up from grammar rules -- we were substituting words in fixed phrases in the hopes of learning "by induction from examples".

So the problem needs to be described in terms of generalisation.  Regardless of what the teacher said, certain pupils automatically generalised telling their age to "I am".  A change of medium of instruction couldn't have altered that.

So what could have changed that?
I think the main problem was that this was our first encounter of the verb "to have".  Quite quickly we moved onto how many brothers and sisters we had, but by this point the confusion had set in.

Ausubel proposed something called progressive differentiation.  Under this framework you teach a core, high-level overview of a concept, and then refine all the particulars and special variations after.  The core use of "avoir" in French is possession of a physical thing.  If that had been taught and thoroughly learned before a specialist idiomatic form was encountered, inappropriate generalisation would have been impossible.

This is how Michel Thomas does it.  In his French, Spanish and Italian courses, you play around with "I have it", "I don't have it", "I don't have it but I want it" etc before coming anywhere near idiomatic constructions such as "to have hunger" for "be hungry".  It is thus impossible to generalise "to have" incorrectly as "to be".  Yes, you can generalise incorrectly the other way, and talk about being hungry (and then get a bollocking off your teacher for translating) but this is a far smaller error.  Not only that, this is an error of "not having learned yet", rather than an error of "learning wrong".

So please, don't simply shout down translation indiscriminately -- it's not the nasty beast you think it is.

Learning is fun

In every sphere of teaching, there is a tendency to try to "make learning fun".  This is done through games and the selection of "relevant" or "interesting" material.

I have always been of the opinion that most of the games presented in classes are a distraction from learning rather than an aid to learning, and that most of the attempts to make subjects relevant or interesting tend to obscure the point being taught.  In maths and physics at high school, I used to get given all sorts of contrived scenarios that boiled down to a pretty simple calculation, and many of my classmates would be puzzled by what the question was asking.  The "relevance" that was supposed to be helping motivate us became a hindrance.  And yet the teachers saw the difficulty as a good thing because in the real world, we wouldn't just be given a sum.  Well in the real world, we'd have a lot more variables to deal with.  Personally, I couldn't see any benefit.

I have always been of the opinion that one of the most mentally enjoyable things on the planet is learning.  "You would say that," people tell me, "because you're good at it.  Other people are different."

But to answer that is to miss my point, because learning is pure mental stimulation, and mental stimulation is (to simplify horribly) the basis of enjoyment.  I argue that there is no-one who doesn't enjoy learning.  "But what about the people who don't do well in school?  They don't enjoy it!"  But if learning is a universal pleasure, this is looking at things the wrong way round: underachievers don't fail to learn because they're not enjoying themselves, they fail to enjoy themselves because they're not learning!

On a recent trip to a charity shop, I was lucky enough to stumble across the book Towards a Theory of Instruction by Jerome S Bruner.  In the first chapter of the book, published in 1966 but based on earler papers and lectures, he says:

We discovered one point of especial value for my own future inquiry.  There is a sharp distinction that must be made between behavior that copes with the requirements of a problem and behavior that is designed to defend against entry into the problem.

 He says that the nature of the poor performance of the children he was studying...

was not so much a distortion as it was the result of their working on a different set of problems from those the school had set for them.

He then goes on to point out that

Once our blocked children were able to bear the problems as set -- when we were able to give them a chance for conflict-free coping -- their performance was quite like that of other children

Essentially, he tells us that kids' learning problems seem to be pretty much absolute and digital -- you've either learned or you haven't, which would suggest that changing the way the problem is stated isn't going to make any positive difference to the underperforming students, because they still won't use the appropriate strategy.

But Bruner's legacy is the idea of "discovery learning": that people don't need to be taught things, and that they learn better by discovering things for themselves.  It's an idea that has been horribly distorted and misrepresented over the years.  Certainly every description of this that I have ever read takes a much harder line than Bruner himself, and even Bruner's own studies on this were within a very confined field.

In the book, Bruner deals mostly with elementary maths, ostensibly because of the clarity of expression and the fact that all readers will be familiar with the basic arithmetic under study.  Using cubes to work out areas and volumes is fairly standard, but often the full potential is ignored -- Bruner's studies went on to explore recombinations, and then eventually on to elementary calculus, all at an early primary level.  Bruner was surprised and impressed by how little explicit instruction the children needed, and the additional concepts they explored without being asked.

But the physical constraints here were leading, and they also meant feedback was immediate.  When high schools try to employ discovery learning we get into dubious practices such as "discovering the boiling point of water".  You stick a thermometer in a beaker of water and put it over a bunsen burner.  When it boils, you read it off.

But wait... at what point is water officially "boiling"?  I'm in my 30s, and even though I'm a competent cook, I still couldn't identify with confidence the actual point at which a pan is "on the boil".  So as a teenager I was staring at this beaker, trying to decide when it was right, and scribbling down several numbers.  At the end of the "experiment", we all gave our numbers, and we were all wrong.  What exactly did we discover?  The teacher had to tell us that it was 100.  Yes, that's right, we were using Celsius, the temperature scale defined by the boiling and freezing point of water.  This exercise was pretty ridiculous....

So far, so irrelevant to the language learner.  Well, that's all background.

The idea of discovery learning has infected the language profession too.  But language is pure abstraction -- there is no physical reality to count or measure or explore.  The notion of "correct" language is so vague that it is exceptionally difficult to stumble upon by accident.  And whereas most physical experiments can be reattempted without prejudicing the results, every reformulation in language gives the listener a partial understanding.  Three or four attempts to speak make not result in a single correct sentence, but the other person may well know what you mean by the end of it.  You never need to discover the correct answer.

But as I said, most modern advocates of discovery learning are far more hard-line than Bruner.  In Toward a Theory of Instruction, Bruner didn't use the term very much at all.  Instead, Bruner focused on learning as a process of increasing abstraction, starting at enactive (physically carrying it out), moving through iconic (typified by diagrams) and finally becoming symbolic (including linguistic descriptions of the problem).  To Bruner, the point of physical learning seems to have been the idea that it is required to form the understanding of the concept.  On the simplest level, you can't really learn the word "biscuit" if you've no concept of baked goods.

This ties neatly to the work of one of Bruner's contemporaries: David Ausubel.  Ausubel proposed something called an "advance organiser".  According to Ausubel, the main thing was to prime the student to receive new information, and much of that was about showing why something wasn't new at all.

My dad taught chemistry, and he was big on advance organisers.

But an advance organiser doesn't have to be physical, like discovery learners think -- it can be conceptual.  He taught the wave equation (velocity = frequency * wavelength) by analogy to a factory conveyor belt.  Each item on the belt was a wavefront, and the gap was a wavelength.  Most kids want to have frequency increase when wavelength increases, but the analogy makes it clear why this can't happen.  Needless to say, he didn't have physical access to a baked bean cannery to carry this out in, so he did it on the blackboard.  Under Bruner's structure, it is therefore iconic, and he's skipped the enactive phase entirely.

So what does this mean for the language learner?

Well, a suitable advance organiser can bypass the "enactive" discovery stage if we already have a suitable analogy at another level of abstraction.  The physical reality of a conveyor belt is so easily understood that my father only needed to evoke the idea -- the "advance organiser" for the wave equation.  With language, we can go one step further -- we already have an advance organiser in the symbolic domain: ie our native equivalent.

Let's look at an example.  In EFL we tend to talk about 1st, 2nd and 3rd conditionals and teach them by example.
1st: I will do it if you tell me to.
2nd: I would do it if you told me to.
3rd: I would have done it if you had told me to.

Many teachers avoid translation, as they see at as a dangerous thing.  But what if we stop saying "translation" and start saying "by analogy to your native language"...?

Michel Thomas teaches the conditionals in his Spanish course, and he does it entirely by analogy to English.  Even the 3rd conditional, often considered hopelessly difficult and very advanced, becomes simplicity itself, because the structure in both languages is almost 100% equivalent.

Another device he uses is when teaching "to wait".  In the Romance languages, this doesn't take the "for" of the English "waiting for" someone.  So he takes the word "await" and uses it as an advance organiser, saying that in French, Spanish and Italian, you "await" someone.  But he still says "wait for" too, because he is evoking both the meaning and the form.

One of the most striking things about Thomas's courses is how little of the material in them is specific to any situation or context.  Thomas taught only the most general and reusable language, and by playing with the structures, he gave his students an incredible level of control over the language.  When he demonstrated his techniques in an English high school for a TV documentary (The Language Master), one of the regular teaching staff had this to say:

The revelation is that it's the learning process itself that motivates these kids, the mastery of the stucture, the mastery of part of the language is the thing that keeps them going, keeps them enthusiastic.  And we lose sight of that in the way we teach. ... We think we capture their interest by finding them interesting materials that are supposedly related to their interests outside in the world generally, and maybe we miss the point.  And I think he's probably onto something very important here.

Which leads us back to where we started: learning is fun.

What triggered this post was actually getting a link to an article on computer games (of all things!) in the Guardian several weeks ago.  To quote:

our growing love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations.

Central to it all is a simple theory – that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer – through systems and puzzles. Five years ago, Raph Koster, the designer of seminal multiplayer fantasy games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies wrote a fascinating book called A Theory of Fun for Game Design, in which he put forward the irresistibly catchy tenet that "with games, learning is the drug".

Games can sell themselves on superficial features like graphics, soundtracks and clever media campaigns, but in the long run, the fun in any game derives from the fact that learning stimulates the brain.

So while the experts in fun are telling us that it's the learning that matters, the experts in learning are trying to look elsewhere for fun....