[I actually wrote this about 6 months ago and I'm not sure why I didn't publish it. I've read it over and it looks finished to me...]
It's always seemed weird to me that some people claim that L2 errors are not related to the form of the learner's L1. Surely it's common sense? For instance, a speaker of Chinese, or Polish, or any other language with no articles is going to have a problem learning when to use "a", when to use "the" and when not to use an article at all in English, right?
But of course, common sense is only common sense until it's proven wrong. It was once common sense that the sun went round the Earth and that there was such a thing as "races" of people -- scientific study has since shown us otherwise.
So language must be open to scientific study, and teachers must be open to the results of study. And there are plenty of studies that purport to disprove the idea of cross-linguistic interference.
For example, I'm currently skimming through bits of the book Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega. There's a chapter on "cross-linguistic influences" (they reject the term "interference", because they reckon it puts too much blame on the L1) and they open by looking at a couple of studies that show that the similarities and differences between languages have less influence than might be expected. The first of these is to do with the placement of negatives in Swedish, where they find that learners on the whole tend to incorrectly place negatives before the verb, even if their own language also places negatives after the verb. [Hyltenstam, K., 1977. Implicational patterns in interlanguage syntax variation. Language learning, 27(2), pp.383-410.]
What questions does this raise? First I would say that negation is an undeniable universal of language, so here we're talking about a linguistic concept that is already known to the learner, and the only variable under examination is word placement -- syntax. There is no examination of usage -- for example, what happens with complex clauses? In English we most commonly say "I don't think so", but some languages are more likely to say "I think not", which now sounds quite old-fashioned. It's far more likely that a native English speaker would say "I don't think he's coming" than "I think he's not coming", but "creo que no viene" is perfectly normal in Spanish. It's readily apparent that this sort of transference occurs at the phrasal level, and this is the sort of thing that is often never taught and simply left to the student to work out. It is also readily observable that learners make errors handling polysemy (multiple meanings of a single word) -- again, looking at Spanish "esperar" is to wait, to hope and to expect, and it doesn't take long in the company of Spanish learners of English to hear someone pick the wrong one of the three.
I haven't had a chance to read the original paper yet (I'm not familiar with my new university's online search and I'm feeling too impatient today to start hunting) so for the moment I'm just thinking about what I'll be looking for when I get round to reading it (which might not be for a while!). First up, is there anything that goes deeper than simple word placement? Secondly, as a tangent to the point about cross-language transfer, and continuing the thread on slots, does something change when it's a multi-part structure, with the two sections separated by other language content?
Besides, is negatives even a fair example? My gut reaction is that in every language that I've come across a sort of "Tarzan speak", the stereotypical form is for pre-negation ("me no hurt pretty pretty" and the like).
The second paper cited discusses object pronoun placement in French-speaking learners of English and English-speaking learners of French. [Zobl, H., 1980. The formal and developmental selectivity of LI influence on L2 acquisition. Language learning, 30(1), pp.43-57.]
Again, I've not read the paper yet, but the summary in the book baffles me a bit, because it seems somewhat obvious. We have the example of the pair "je les vois"/"I see them" and it is observed that English speakers often erroneously say "*je vois les", but French speakers don't tend to say "I them see". This is not a symmetrical error, but then, this is not a symmetrical pattern. As I see it, the difficulty for the English speaker isn't simply one of the absolute position of the pronoun, but the fact that pronouns appear in a different place from explicit noun phrases as object -- je les vois vs je vois des hommes. The English speaker learning French has the difficulty that he sees pronoun noun phrases and explicit noun phrases as subcategories of a single thing that share a position, and in order to learn French accurate must learn a fundamentally new distinction between weak pronouns and other noun phrases. The French learner of English, conversely, doesn't necessarily need to learn the English speaker's categorisation, and can maintain the French distinction and notion of two slots, and can then simply focus on the syntax, learning two different positions that happen to be the same. It feels to me that focusing on the superficial differences here has failed to account for the real underlying difference.
Another question this leaves in my head is about my own observations from dealing with Romance speakers. I recall hearing a lot of them dropping weak pronouns altogether, and my first reaction is that the article focuses on the lack of examples of "*I them see" as proof that there's not a problem, but doesn't comment on the presence or absence of examples of pronounless renderings (i.e. "I see", with no them). My observation from my own pupils was that several of them had learned not to place the pronoun before the verb, but if the verb in Spanish would be the last word of a sentence, they'd just stop without including the pronoun at all. I'm now left second-guessing my own recollection here, though, as recently I only recall hearing this error with Spanish people saying "I like" for "me gusta", and of course there's no explicit "it" in the Spanish, so that's a different issue (but still cross-linguistic).
This is an issue that intrigues me, and I hope to revisit it during the year when I'm working on cross-linguistic issues as part of my masters. For now, though, I just wanted to get my thoughts jotted down for future reference.
Showing posts with label errors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label errors. Show all posts
25 September 2016
09 October 2013
A wrod on errors
Since I started learning languages, I've had lots of discussions, both online and face-to-face, about the nature of errors. What always surprised me was how blasé many people were about errors -- including teachers.
There are two particular philosophies that I find quite worrying.
First:
In the extreme case, this means no correction whatsoever, leaving the student to pick it up from input.
In the more moderate case, the teacher is expected only to give minimal correction, relating to the very specific error.
But isn't it self-evident that this is not the case? Hasn't everyone met at least one immigrant who still speaks with errors that are systematic and predictable? It's easy to dismiss this as an immigrant "language bubble", with the immigrant living and socialising within his minority community, but that only works in a major urban area, where there is enough of a concentrated population for clique community to form. But when you get to a rural community, and there's only one or two minority families in the area, why is it that a pensioner who has lived in the country for half his life still sounds decidedly foreign? And not just in accent, but in language patterns too?
Errors do not take care of themselves.
So on to the second:
This is a pretty insidious leap of logic, and confuses two issues.
First up, you have the distinction between two classes of errors: systemic errors where the speaker doesn't know the correct structure or word; and performance errors, or "slips", where the speaker stumbles during speech, despite being perfectly comfortable with the correct form.
Then we've got that hoary old chestnut of "bad grammar". Apparently, when we split our infinitives, or end a sentence with a preposition, or use "who" for a grammatical object, we're natives making errors. Well, no. People "break" these rules all the time, so they are in fact not errors. At worst, they are variant forms and therefore a correct form; at best they are the most common forms, hence the correct form.
In truth, the only type of error a native can make is a slip, a performance error, because a native has a full internal model of their language (in a particular dialect), assuming we are talking about someone without a mental or learning disability.
As many linguists say: there is no such thing as a common native error.
The main inspiration for this post was an error I noticed recently in my own French.
It was something along the lines of*ça ne me rien dit, which should've been ça ne me dit rien. I noticed the mistake immediately, and what I said was the corrected version, but my brain had initially formed the sentence incorrectly.
Why? What was the underlying cause of the error?
For those of you who aren't familiar with French, basic negatives traditionally consist of two parts: the particle ne before the verb and any clitic pronouns, and a second particle (pas=not, rien=nothing, jamais=never etc) after the verb. Or rather, I should say "after the first verb", which is more correct, even if some teachers don't bother to go that far.
You see, in French, there is very often only one verb -- where we add "do" in the negative (I do not know), the French don't (je ne sais pas -- compare with the archaic English I know not).
As high school had drummed this into me in simple (one word) tenses, I initially had great difficulty in correctly forming compound verb structures -- I would erroneously place the "pas" after the final verb:
*je ne peux voir pas instead of je ne peux pas voir
and
*je n'ai vu pas instead of je n'ai pas vu
That was a diagnosable error, and having diagnosed it, I consciously worked to eliminate it, and now I have no problems with ne... pas.
And yet I made this mistake with the placing of jamais, even though it's the exact same structure... and when I made this mistake, I recognised that it was something I struggle with frequently. Furthermore, I make that mistake with every negative word except "pas".
So I have a diagnosis for this error: my internal model has incorrectly built two structures where it should have created one, because a native speaker has only one. It is clearly, therefore, a non-native error.
(Actually, there's a longer story about a series of errors and corrections, but let's keep it short, shall we?)
Well, it's not easy, but we have to monitor our students constantly to identify consistent errors. Moreover, we have to look out for apparently inconsistent errors -- I say "apparently" inconsistent, because there really is no such thing as an inconsistent error. If it appears inconsistent, it means that the learner has done what I did with French negatives: used two rules where one should be used. It is then the teachers job not to correct the broken rule, but to guide the student to use the correct rule.
The more you spot these errors, the more you'll see them recurring in different students, and you'll find that they're actually pretty common errors. The fixes you implement for your students will feed into your initial teaching as a way to avoid the errors in the first place, and everyone wins in the long-term.
There are two particular philosophies that I find quite worrying.
First:
"Errors take care of themselves."
The belief expressed by many is that there's no need for any systematic correction of errors, as the learner will work them out given enough time and contact with the language.In the extreme case, this means no correction whatsoever, leaving the student to pick it up from input.
In the more moderate case, the teacher is expected only to give minimal correction, relating to the very specific error.
But isn't it self-evident that this is not the case? Hasn't everyone met at least one immigrant who still speaks with errors that are systematic and predictable? It's easy to dismiss this as an immigrant "language bubble", with the immigrant living and socialising within his minority community, but that only works in a major urban area, where there is enough of a concentrated population for clique community to form. But when you get to a rural community, and there's only one or two minority families in the area, why is it that a pensioner who has lived in the country for half his life still sounds decidedly foreign? And not just in accent, but in language patterns too?
Errors do not take care of themselves.
So on to the second:
"Errors don't matter - native speakers make mistakes too"
This one I've heard in many situations, but the most potentially damaging of these is in the learning of minority languages, because in those instances, it is argued that a learner who has failed to learn correctly is somehow equal to a native speaker.This is a pretty insidious leap of logic, and confuses two issues.
First up, you have the distinction between two classes of errors: systemic errors where the speaker doesn't know the correct structure or word; and performance errors, or "slips", where the speaker stumbles during speech, despite being perfectly comfortable with the correct form.
Then we've got that hoary old chestnut of "bad grammar". Apparently, when we split our infinitives, or end a sentence with a preposition, or use "who" for a grammatical object, we're natives making errors. Well, no. People "break" these rules all the time, so they are in fact not errors. At worst, they are variant forms and therefore a correct form; at best they are the most common forms, hence the correct form.
In truth, the only type of error a native can make is a slip, a performance error, because a native has a full internal model of their language (in a particular dialect), assuming we are talking about someone without a mental or learning disability.
As many linguists say: there is no such thing as a common native error.
Non-native errors are real, and informative
But common non-native errors do exist, and we do a disservice to ourselves and/or our students by ignoring them, as errors provide a very useful insight into what's wrong with a learner's internal model of the language.The main inspiration for this post was an error I noticed recently in my own French.
It was something along the lines of
Why? What was the underlying cause of the error?
For those of you who aren't familiar with French, basic negatives traditionally consist of two parts: the particle ne before the verb and any clitic pronouns, and a second particle (pas=not, rien=nothing, jamais=never etc) after the verb. Or rather, I should say "after the first verb", which is more correct, even if some teachers don't bother to go that far.
You see, in French, there is very often only one verb -- where we add "do" in the negative (I do not know), the French don't (je ne sais pas -- compare with the archaic English I know not).
As high school had drummed this into me in simple (one word) tenses, I initially had great difficulty in correctly forming compound verb structures -- I would erroneously place the "pas" after the final verb:
*
and
*
That was a diagnosable error, and having diagnosed it, I consciously worked to eliminate it, and now I have no problems with ne... pas.
And yet I made this mistake with the placing of jamais, even though it's the exact same structure... and when I made this mistake, I recognised that it was something I struggle with frequently. Furthermore, I make that mistake with every negative word except "pas".
So I have a diagnosis for this error: my internal model has incorrectly built two structures where it should have created one, because a native speaker has only one. It is clearly, therefore, a non-native error.
(Actually, there's a longer story about a series of errors and corrections, but let's keep it short, shall we?)
Taking action...
What can we do as teachers?Well, it's not easy, but we have to monitor our students constantly to identify consistent errors. Moreover, we have to look out for apparently inconsistent errors -- I say "apparently" inconsistent, because there really is no such thing as an inconsistent error. If it appears inconsistent, it means that the learner has done what I did with French negatives: used two rules where one should be used. It is then the teachers job not to correct the broken rule, but to guide the student to use the correct rule.
The more you spot these errors, the more you'll see them recurring in different students, and you'll find that they're actually pretty common errors. The fixes you implement for your students will feed into your initial teaching as a way to avoid the errors in the first place, and everyone wins in the long-term.
09 November 2011
Overgeneralising and undergeneralising in general...
In English, we have two ways to talk about nouns in a general sense. In normal speech, we say things like cats are vicious little creatures -- i.e. we use an indefinite plural. In some very formal prose, you'll see instead the cat is a vicious little creature --i.e. a definite singular.
The existence of the second is probably just a case of "translationese" -- it arises in lots of translations of Latin works, and I believe it is used that way in most of the modern Romance languages (French, Italian etc). Unfortunately this isn't easy for me to verify, as I have no idea whatsoever what to look for in the index of my grammar books.
Bizarrely, this fundamental (and straightforward) element of language seems to have been overlooked in the classical grammar models, so there is no common label for it (hence me not being able to look it up!). This means it is often overlooked in teaching, too. Many beginners' courses pass it by, and even when it comes up, you're not likely to get more than a little box-out mentioning it. It's not really "taught" in the same way as other grammar points. I suppose the reason for this goes back to the very basics of the structuralist view of grammar, which values form over meaning, and too often simply gives a few short sentences explaining usage after drilling form.
But we've been moving away from structuralism for quite some time now. The in-general/universal has been marooned by the incoming tide, as functional and communicative approaches have picked up on the link between form and meaning in the noun and article for specifical and truly indefinite cases, but they've not integrated the general/universal with it.
This underemphasis of the general/universal is particularly noticeable in Gaelic. It's not a subject I've seen come up often at all. I read it in one book and one book only, and I don't believe I've ever heard it discussed ever in classes. According to the book (well, my memory of it -- the book's 100 miles away), the general/universal in Gaelic is the definite singular. (The cat is a vicious little creature, the lion is a noble beast etc.) And yet....
When you study the genitive in Gaelic, it may be pointed out to you that while "describer nouns" in English always stay singular even when representing a plural concept (for example "biscuit" in "biscuit tin", "tooth" in "toothbrush"), this isn't the case in Gaelic genitives, which have both singular and plural forms.
So I was giving a talk in a classroom debate, and I mentioned "teenage pregnancy" which I rendered as "leatromach nan deugairean" -- "pregnancy [of] the teenagers". Genitive, plural. After the class, I started asking myself if that was right, thinking of the general/universal rule. Now I'm too confused and I'll just have to ask one of my teachers to try to clarify....
The existence of the second is probably just a case of "translationese" -- it arises in lots of translations of Latin works, and I believe it is used that way in most of the modern Romance languages (French, Italian etc). Unfortunately this isn't easy for me to verify, as I have no idea whatsoever what to look for in the index of my grammar books.
Bizarrely, this fundamental (and straightforward) element of language seems to have been overlooked in the classical grammar models, so there is no common label for it (hence me not being able to look it up!). This means it is often overlooked in teaching, too. Many beginners' courses pass it by, and even when it comes up, you're not likely to get more than a little box-out mentioning it. It's not really "taught" in the same way as other grammar points. I suppose the reason for this goes back to the very basics of the structuralist view of grammar, which values form over meaning, and too often simply gives a few short sentences explaining usage after drilling form.
But we've been moving away from structuralism for quite some time now. The in-general/universal has been marooned by the incoming tide, as functional and communicative approaches have picked up on the link between form and meaning in the noun and article for specifical and truly indefinite cases, but they've not integrated the general/universal with it.
This underemphasis of the general/universal is particularly noticeable in Gaelic. It's not a subject I've seen come up often at all. I read it in one book and one book only, and I don't believe I've ever heard it discussed ever in classes. According to the book (well, my memory of it -- the book's 100 miles away), the general/universal in Gaelic is the definite singular. (The cat is a vicious little creature, the lion is a noble beast etc.) And yet....
When you study the genitive in Gaelic, it may be pointed out to you that while "describer nouns" in English always stay singular even when representing a plural concept (for example "biscuit" in "biscuit tin", "tooth" in "toothbrush"), this isn't the case in Gaelic genitives, which have both singular and plural forms.
So I was giving a talk in a classroom debate, and I mentioned "teenage pregnancy" which I rendered as "leatromach nan deugairean" -- "pregnancy [of] the teenagers". Genitive, plural. After the class, I started asking myself if that was right, thinking of the general/universal rule. Now I'm too confused and I'll just have to ask one of my teachers to try to clarify....
26 July 2011
Common Errors: my mistake!
Hmmm... I should maybe reread my posts more before publishing, because in another article I said "we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it" and then forgot to describe the process in any detail.
Because even though the solution I proposed was to legitimise the writing of contractions, this is not the internal process causing the change. If the average speaker's internal model saw 've as a contraction of have, then no-one would make the 'mistake' of using of instead.
Put it this way: the "error" only occurs when have is used as a second auxiliary -- no-one would say *I of done it in place of I've done it/I have done it, for example.
So it would appear that here we have ceased to think of 've as an verb at all, let alone an infinitive. At best it is a clitic that modifies the first auxiliary to make it part of the perfect construction, but in fact it would appear to me to be in reality a new suffix, because I cannot see any situation where you could syntactically separate 've from the first auxiliary.
What we see here is English gaining a new fusional feature, and while English has displayed a tendency to become more isolating over the centuries, it isn't unknown for a language to pick up new fusional elements even when the general tendencies is towards isolation.
Consider, Latin vs the Western Romance language family.
Latin was a highly fusional language, and relied on very few periphrastic constructions. However, the future was a periphrastic form, consisting of the verb in the infinitive followed by the present indicative of to have -- so I will do was literally formed as to-do I-have.
Most members of the Western Romance family has lost a lot of the fusional features of Latin, but at the same time, the future has mutated into an inflected tense, with suffixes derived from (and in some cases identical to) the present tense of to have added to a future root that is almost identical to the infinitive.
Note that the creation of these new suffixes didn't alter the present tense of to have in any other constructions, even though in the early stages of this change, grammarians would most likely have declared that it was "obvious" that they were the same thing, and lamented the "common error" of people saying nous le ferons instead of the previous nous le faire avons. But today, the latter looks so unnatural that it would not be understood except by a scholar.
This is analogous to what I believe is happening in English. One particular usage of the verb to have is becoming replaced with a suffix derived from, but not identical to, a form of the verb. However much the status quo appears more logical, the frequency of occurrence of the "of" error (Google "would of", "could of" etc, and you get millions upon millions of hits) tells us that people's brains just don't work that way.
You cannot rewrite how people pick up their native language. People seem to pick up 've as a suffix, not an infinitive, so it's time to stop resisting. While it would be natural for a suffix to be incorporated into the word without the apostrophe, that would be a step too far for most pedants, and even besides that would be a fairly radical change that would take a bit of getting used to.
So I advocate using the contraction notation for now, but recognising that it has now ceased to be a contraction in the mind of the native speaker.
Hmmm... I should maybe reread my posts more before publishing, because in another article I said "we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it" and then forgot to describe the process in any detail.
Because even though the solution I proposed was to legitimise the writing of contractions, this is not the internal process causing the change. If the average speaker's internal model saw 've as a contraction of have, then no-one would make the 'mistake' of using of instead.
Put it this way: the "error" only occurs when have is used as a second auxiliary -- no-one would say *I of done it in place of I've done it/I have done it, for example.
So it would appear that here we have ceased to think of 've as an verb at all, let alone an infinitive. At best it is a clitic that modifies the first auxiliary to make it part of the perfect construction, but in fact it would appear to me to be in reality a new suffix, because I cannot see any situation where you could syntactically separate 've from the first auxiliary.
What we see here is English gaining a new fusional feature, and while English has displayed a tendency to become more isolating over the centuries, it isn't unknown for a language to pick up new fusional elements even when the general tendencies is towards isolation.
Consider, Latin vs the Western Romance language family.
Latin was a highly fusional language, and relied on very few periphrastic constructions. However, the future was a periphrastic form, consisting of the verb in the infinitive followed by the present indicative of to have -- so I will do was literally formed as to-do I-have.
Most members of the Western Romance family has lost a lot of the fusional features of Latin, but at the same time, the future has mutated into an inflected tense, with suffixes derived from (and in some cases identical to) the present tense of to have added to a future root that is almost identical to the infinitive.
Note that the creation of these new suffixes didn't alter the present tense of to have in any other constructions, even though in the early stages of this change, grammarians would most likely have declared that it was "obvious" that they were the same thing, and lamented the "common error" of people saying nous le ferons instead of the previous nous le faire avons. But today, the latter looks so unnatural that it would not be understood except by a scholar.
This is analogous to what I believe is happening in English. One particular usage of the verb to have is becoming replaced with a suffix derived from, but not identical to, a form of the verb. However much the status quo appears more logical, the frequency of occurrence of the "of" error (Google "would of", "could of" etc, and you get millions upon millions of hits) tells us that people's brains just don't work that way.
You cannot rewrite how people pick up their native language. People seem to pick up 've as a suffix, not an infinitive, so it's time to stop resisting. While it would be natural for a suffix to be incorporated into the word without the apostrophe, that would be a step too far for most pedants, and even besides that would be a fairly radical change that would take a bit of getting used to.
So I advocate using the contraction notation for now, but recognising that it has now ceased to be a contraction in the mind of the native speaker.
23 July 2011
In language, there's no such thing as a common error
This is a statement mired in controversy. It wasn't me that first said it, but I agree with it... with one caveat: we're talking about native language.
For many, many years, grammarians and school teachers would hound us for saying things wrong. As a child, I was constantly "corrected" by my mother for asking for permission with Can I...? instead of Please may I...? or for saying if I was you... in place of if I were you....
So when I studied English at university it was very heartening to find that modern linguistics considers everything that is said by a sizable chunk of the population as acceptable language. And of course this includes both Can I...? and if I was you....
What triggered this post was seeing an article on the Register about a grammatical error in a BBC headline: Phone-hacking: the other news you might of missed.
This is one of those "errors" that's now common enough and consistent enough that we may have to stop calling it an error.
When I suggest this, people often recoil in horror. "But it's the perfect tense," they cry, "logically it must be have." (And yes - I know that perfect is an aspect, not a tense, but pointing that out at this point would seem like cheap point-scoring so I generally let it lie.) But since when was language logical? You must and You have to are logically equivalent in some usage, but when you negate them you get two very different things: you mustn't and you don't have to.
The thing is, logic aside, we have empirical evidence that shows people's brains don't see it as have -- the errors themselves stand as proof of an emerging norm. Rather than fretting about the logic of have=perfect, we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it.
This does not mean that we have to accept might of, could of etc. No, because there is an existing mechanism that rids us of this problem: contractions.
Contractions are mostly hated by our schoolroom English teachers, but they are gaining growing acceptance. We're allowed can't now, where my primary school teacher insisted on cannot, and even I'm where my teacher insisted on I am. Yet we're still told off by teachers and editors if we try to use could've or coulda, should've or shoulda, might've or mighta. But these are what we say. Our habits of speaking have gradually reduced the auxiliary have to something more of a fusional element, a suffix, than a word. It is only when a writer is expected to write "in full words" that might've becomes might of, so why not simply accept might've? It would eliminate both the error and the controversy, and would say several pedants a few more grey hairs....
This is a statement mired in controversy. It wasn't me that first said it, but I agree with it... with one caveat: we're talking about native language.
For many, many years, grammarians and school teachers would hound us for saying things wrong. As a child, I was constantly "corrected" by my mother for asking for permission with Can I...? instead of Please may I...? or for saying if I was you... in place of if I were you....
So when I studied English at university it was very heartening to find that modern linguistics considers everything that is said by a sizable chunk of the population as acceptable language. And of course this includes both Can I...? and if I was you....
What triggered this post was seeing an article on the Register about a grammatical error in a BBC headline: Phone-hacking: the other news you might of missed.
This is one of those "errors" that's now common enough and consistent enough that we may have to stop calling it an error.
When I suggest this, people often recoil in horror. "But it's the perfect tense," they cry, "logically it must be have." (And yes - I know that perfect is an aspect, not a tense, but pointing that out at this point would seem like cheap point-scoring so I generally let it lie.) But since when was language logical? You must and You have to are logically equivalent in some usage, but when you negate them you get two very different things: you mustn't and you don't have to.
The thing is, logic aside, we have empirical evidence that shows people's brains don't see it as have -- the errors themselves stand as proof of an emerging norm. Rather than fretting about the logic of have=perfect, we should be paying close attention to the thought processes behind this change and trying to make the way we right English match the way we speak it.
This does not mean that we have to accept might of, could of etc. No, because there is an existing mechanism that rids us of this problem: contractions.
Contractions are mostly hated by our schoolroom English teachers, but they are gaining growing acceptance. We're allowed can't now, where my primary school teacher insisted on cannot, and even I'm where my teacher insisted on I am. Yet we're still told off by teachers and editors if we try to use could've or coulda, should've or shoulda, might've or mighta. But these are what we say. Our habits of speaking have gradually reduced the auxiliary have to something more of a fusional element, a suffix, than a word. It is only when a writer is expected to write "in full words" that might've becomes might of, so why not simply accept might've? It would eliminate both the error and the controversy, and would say several pedants a few more grey hairs....
21 July 2011
Receptive skills as a reflective act
I'm not feeling my usual self this week. I've got an infection under a fingernail, so it's a bit sore to type, which makes it hard to concentrate. It's leading to silly mistakes in everything I do, so I'm going to avoid the complex topic I'd planned to write about this week (phonology) and stick to something a bit less involved.
A couple of weeks ago, in my post 4 skills safe, I suggested that the comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that we understand by considering what would cause us to say the sentence we've just heard or read.
Now, I mentioned mirror neuron theory, and my Dad said to me at the weekend "you'd better have a better explanation than that." My Dad taught in a high school up until retiring, and one constant throughout his career was that new teaching fashions would always be justified by the latest idea from psychology, but that it was all theory, no practice.
Now I can't offer anything in the way of empirical research, only anecdote. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes that I offer will be universal enough that other teachers will see the same phenomena occurring in their own students.
Let's just briefly revisit what I said last time (minus the bit about mirror neurons):
OK, so now let's move to anecdote.
Last night, I was at a language exchange (Spanish and English). I was talking to a young woman called Cristina who I've spoken to on several occasions. At one point she was concentrating so hard on what I was saying (in English) that she actually started mouthing the words. Not the trembling lip of the neurological condition I mentioned before, she was literally mouthing the words. It was a conscious act.
Now let's contrast this with reading, because I think reading aloud offers the best indication of language as reflection.
The first time I really noticed this was with a student in San Sebastian back in 2007. Most of his peers read robotically when asked to read aloud -- What - I - Mean - Is - That -They - Would - Pronounce - Each - Word - Dist - inc - tly - And - Careful - ly. This guy was different. He spoke with natural flow and good intonation... but he didn't read what was on the page. Specifically, he got his prepositions wrong. Not wrong in a random way, though -- he simply substituted the preposition he would use for the word on the page.
Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone -- studies of native language reading have established that most prepositions (and in fact many function words) aren't actually "read" by fluent readers. Instead, the brain simply notices a "small word" and works it out from the context.
I've since seen multiple variations on this theme -- I had one student who kept reading "attitude" as the Spanish "actitud" with the English stress pattern imposed on it ("áctitud" or "acteetood", more or less), and one who adds an S to "sort of thing", to match the pluralisation of the Spanish phrase "tipo de cosas".
But this is reading, and as I said last week, that's not a core language skill (incidentally, since then I've found that Lev Vygotsky described speaking and reading as "second-order abstractions" -- I wish I'd had that quote when I wrote the post). However, it does demonstrate how much preconceptions can affect our perceptions.
So will this hold in the spoken mode?
First, consider that language generally has a high degree of redundancy. Even if a noise obscures part of a sentence, you often still manage to understand the sentence. If you compare "attitude" with "áctitud", in my accent there are three perceptible differences: English has the C, the schwa in the middle syllable (possibly i-schwa), and the Y-glide in the final syllable. In many accents (mostly American), there isn't even a Y-glide, so there's only two differences. There is no other word that similar, so the "filter of perception" will probably let it through without really caring about the differences.
The same goes for the "sort of things". If a Spanish person understands me when I say "sort of thing", I cannot take it as granted that he perceived it without an erroneous final S. His brain may simply have assumed it is missing. This is a particular issue for Spanish, as in some dialects, a final -S may be dropped completely*, so it would be very easy for a Spanish speaker to percieve the word "thing" as "things" if context suggested this.
What are the consequences for the teacher or learner?
Assuming this is true (and I accept that many readers will believe otherwise), the consequences are pretty profound. If our perception of received input is altered to match our existing internal model of language, then no amount of input alone will lead to perfection in a language. The internal model can only be rebuilt by some directed process.
The success of some students in "silent period"-style environments doesn't disprove this - such a student may well have succeeded through an active analysis of the input, rather than simply through the sheer volume of input.
* This is less common than many Spanish speakers think. Most "dropped Ses" are in fact [s] phonemes realised by an aspirant allophone (/h/) or a hiatus. And here again the filter of perception comes into play -- there is no [h] phoneme in Spanish, so even some native speakers don't seem to notice the /h/ sound in something like "rastos" (=rahhtohh) and appear unable to distinguish it from "rato"
I'm not feeling my usual self this week. I've got an infection under a fingernail, so it's a bit sore to type, which makes it hard to concentrate. It's leading to silly mistakes in everything I do, so I'm going to avoid the complex topic I'd planned to write about this week (phonology) and stick to something a bit less involved.
A couple of weeks ago, in my post 4 skills safe, I suggested that the comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that we understand by considering what would cause us to say the sentence we've just heard or read.
Now, I mentioned mirror neuron theory, and my Dad said to me at the weekend "you'd better have a better explanation than that." My Dad taught in a high school up until retiring, and one constant throughout his career was that new teaching fashions would always be justified by the latest idea from psychology, but that it was all theory, no practice.
Now I can't offer anything in the way of empirical research, only anecdote. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes that I offer will be universal enough that other teachers will see the same phenomena occurring in their own students.
Let's just briefly revisit what I said last time (minus the bit about mirror neurons):
- People often finish each other's sentences. To do so they must be actively constructing the utterance as they go.
- People often mistakenly say that they've said something, when actually it was someone else who said it, and they only heard it. So we identify very closely with sentences we hear (and agree with), suggesting a very close link between the mental process behind listening and that of speaking.
- There exists a (fairly harmless) neurological disorder which causes someone's lip to tremble when they're being spoken to, and they often echo the last word of your sentences (often suffixed with "uh-huh" for assent). For these people merely listening activates the physical speech organs.
OK, so now let's move to anecdote.
Last night, I was at a language exchange (Spanish and English). I was talking to a young woman called Cristina who I've spoken to on several occasions. At one point she was concentrating so hard on what I was saying (in English) that she actually started mouthing the words. Not the trembling lip of the neurological condition I mentioned before, she was literally mouthing the words. It was a conscious act.
Now let's contrast this with reading, because I think reading aloud offers the best indication of language as reflection.
The first time I really noticed this was with a student in San Sebastian back in 2007. Most of his peers read robotically when asked to read aloud -- What - I - Mean - Is - That -They - Would - Pronounce - Each - Word - Dist - inc - tly - And - Careful - ly. This guy was different. He spoke with natural flow and good intonation... but he didn't read what was on the page. Specifically, he got his prepositions wrong. Not wrong in a random way, though -- he simply substituted the preposition he would use for the word on the page.
Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone -- studies of native language reading have established that most prepositions (and in fact many function words) aren't actually "read" by fluent readers. Instead, the brain simply notices a "small word" and works it out from the context.
I've since seen multiple variations on this theme -- I had one student who kept reading "attitude" as the Spanish "actitud" with the English stress pattern imposed on it ("áctitud" or "acteetood", more or less), and one who adds an S to "sort of thing", to match the pluralisation of the Spanish phrase "tipo de cosas".
But this is reading, and as I said last week, that's not a core language skill (incidentally, since then I've found that Lev Vygotsky described speaking and reading as "second-order abstractions" -- I wish I'd had that quote when I wrote the post). However, it does demonstrate how much preconceptions can affect our perceptions.
So will this hold in the spoken mode?
First, consider that language generally has a high degree of redundancy. Even if a noise obscures part of a sentence, you often still manage to understand the sentence. If you compare "attitude" with "áctitud", in my accent there are three perceptible differences: English has the C, the schwa in the middle syllable (possibly i-schwa), and the Y-glide in the final syllable. In many accents (mostly American), there isn't even a Y-glide, so there's only two differences. There is no other word that similar, so the "filter of perception" will probably let it through without really caring about the differences.
The same goes for the "sort of things". If a Spanish person understands me when I say "sort of thing", I cannot take it as granted that he perceived it without an erroneous final S. His brain may simply have assumed it is missing. This is a particular issue for Spanish, as in some dialects, a final -S may be dropped completely*, so it would be very easy for a Spanish speaker to percieve the word "thing" as "things" if context suggested this.
What are the consequences for the teacher or learner?
Assuming this is true (and I accept that many readers will believe otherwise), the consequences are pretty profound. If our perception of received input is altered to match our existing internal model of language, then no amount of input alone will lead to perfection in a language. The internal model can only be rebuilt by some directed process.
The success of some students in "silent period"-style environments doesn't disprove this - such a student may well have succeeded through an active analysis of the input, rather than simply through the sheer volume of input.
* This is less common than many Spanish speakers think. Most "dropped Ses" are in fact [s] phonemes realised by an aspirant allophone (/h/) or a hiatus. And here again the filter of perception comes into play -- there is no [h] phoneme in Spanish, so even some native speakers don't seem to notice the /h/ sound in something like "rastos" (=rahhtohh) and appear unable to distinguish it from "rato"
15 July 2011
False Etymologies and Prescriptivism
Q: When is an error not an error?
A: When it's a fixed phrase.
My mother has a bit of a tendency towards linguistic prescriptivism: in her mind, some things are wrong and some things are right. Like most of us, she can find sufficient justication.
One of her pet hates is the phrase "moment in time". To her, this is very wrong, because it's tautologous. What other type of moment can there be, after all?
Well, I just happened to read Prisoner of Zenda this year, as I thought it was on the reading list for the Cambridge exam First Certificate of English which several of my current students were intending to take. (Special thanks to About.com for having an out-of-date and undated list of books....)
The first chapter ends as follows:
Another thing my mother objects to quite strongly is the word "bloody", and the history of this one is quite fascinating. Somebody somewhere along the line basically decided that the word was offensive (well, it has to be, doesn't it? Common people use it!) and then looked for why it was offensive. From there came the bizarre myth that it was swearing in the name of Mary, Jesus's mother in the High Christian traditions, and anyone who subscribes to a high church religion would consider that a very bad thing indeed, because Mary typifies virtue and purity. The trouble is, there is no attested process by which "by Our Lady" would mutuate into "bloody". And even more damning -- I'm told that other Germanic languages use (or used to, at the very least) cognates exactly like we use "bloody": both as a descriptive adjective (that shirt is very bloody) and as an intensifier (that bloody shirt is bloody awful).
Quite often, these days you'll hear UK English speakers decrying "Americanisms" creeping into the language on this side of the Atlantic, but very often when you look at the historical records and listen to old recordings you'll discover that these so-called Americanisms have been alive and well in the UK for centuries. Many of them are actually Scotticisms, borrowed into English in the US by Scots-speaking immigrant communities. Many others are simply dialectal variation within England. And a surprising number of them are in fact the most common form in use in the UK.
Denouncing another native speaker's language as "wrong" is very dangerous, because if you're the one who is wrong, you leave yourself looking like a prat. And no-one wants to look like a prat.
A: When it's a fixed phrase.
My mother has a bit of a tendency towards linguistic prescriptivism: in her mind, some things are wrong and some things are right. Like most of us, she can find sufficient justication.
One of her pet hates is the phrase "moment in time". To her, this is very wrong, because it's tautologous. What other type of moment can there be, after all?
Well, I just happened to read Prisoner of Zenda this year, as I thought it was on the reading list for the Cambridge exam First Certificate of English which several of my current students were intending to take. (Special thanks to About.com for having an out-of-date and undated list of books....)
The first chapter ends as follows:
"Colour in a man," said I, "is a matter of no more moment than that!"—and I gave her something of no value.
"God send the kitchen door be shut!" said she.
"Amen!" said I, and left her.
In fact, however, as I now know, colour is sometimes of considerable moment to a man.Clearly, "moment" here is nothing to do with time. I figure that this sense of "moment" must be the root of the word "momentous", meaning very important. Even though this sense of the word is now dead in common speech, "moment in time" has survived as a fixed phrase, so it is difficult to justify it as "wrong". (See also "moment of inertia" in physics.)
Another thing my mother objects to quite strongly is the word "bloody", and the history of this one is quite fascinating. Somebody somewhere along the line basically decided that the word was offensive (well, it has to be, doesn't it? Common people use it!) and then looked for why it was offensive. From there came the bizarre myth that it was swearing in the name of Mary, Jesus's mother in the High Christian traditions, and anyone who subscribes to a high church religion would consider that a very bad thing indeed, because Mary typifies virtue and purity. The trouble is, there is no attested process by which "by Our Lady" would mutuate into "bloody". And even more damning -- I'm told that other Germanic languages use (or used to, at the very least) cognates exactly like we use "bloody": both as a descriptive adjective (that shirt is very bloody) and as an intensifier (that bloody shirt is bloody awful).
Quite often, these days you'll hear UK English speakers decrying "Americanisms" creeping into the language on this side of the Atlantic, but very often when you look at the historical records and listen to old recordings you'll discover that these so-called Americanisms have been alive and well in the UK for centuries. Many of them are actually Scotticisms, borrowed into English in the US by Scots-speaking immigrant communities. Many others are simply dialectal variation within England. And a surprising number of them are in fact the most common form in use in the UK.
Denouncing another native speaker's language as "wrong" is very dangerous, because if you're the one who is wrong, you leave yourself looking like a prat. And no-one wants to look like a prat.
14 July 2011
3 Skills Safe
Last week, I discussed the traditional "4 skills" of language teaching: speaking, listening, reading and writing. I presented a different set of four skills: syntax, morphology, phonology and orthography. I then set about showing why the skill of syntax demonstrates the problems caused by the traditional model, and then went into a quite extreme theory expanding on this. This time, I'm going to focus on orthography and phonology.
Actually, I lied first time round. I said:
Centuries ago, people couldn't read quietly. According to QI and my good friend the internet, there is a historical record of the first man known to be able to read without moving his lips: Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397AD). Nowadays, it's not a particularly notable skill -- in fact, we use the idea of not being able to read without moving your lips as a way of insulting someone's intelligence. Most people today would swear that when they read, their brains are silent. Neurolinguists suggest otherwise.
Modern brain scanners are incredibly sensitive machines that can detect activity in any part of the brain, and last I'd heard, no-one had been found whose auditory functions weren't activated by reading -- ie. all reading seems to be translated into sound in order to be understood, whether we're aware of it or not.
And that is why this post is called 3 Skills Safe: because language is composed of 3 core skills: syntax, morphology and phonology. Orthography is something we're all born with the ability to learn, but in some weird way it appears to be an adjunct to language, something we add on top.
But what about sign language? I hear you cry. Very few people consider sign language as a form of writing, but rather as a form of speaking. Many respected language scientists now believe that the first human language was a gestural (sign) language, not a spoken language. In fact, the work of V S Ramachandran suggests that even spoken language is gestural in nature, and sound is merely the medium of transmission for that gesture. As a theory, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It all revolves around the so-called "mirror neuron" -- a mechanism in the brain that takes observations and turns them into experience. So we hear a sound and our brain understands it by recreating mentally how and why we ourselves would have produced that sound. This would explain the crossover between speaking and listening that I highlighted last week and it has some very profound consequences for the teaching of phonology, which I'll spend more time on soon.
But if phonology is about shape, why use a term derived from the Greek for sound? Well, simply put, it's the established term. Perhaps someone will make a new name for it in the future, but right now we're stuck with the words people use. But phonology is not restricted to the spoken medium, and interestingly enough, "orthography" is similarly not restricted to its usual visual medium. There is Braille, of course, but more interesting than that is the audio channel.
Though massively outdated now, telegraphy revolutionised global communication. The vital components in this global engine were the telegraphers, who relayed messages via Morse code. While they were working mostly through the medium of sound, the code was still denoting letters, not phonemes. An expert coder would have no problem even with the phonetic irregularities of English, such as the famous "rough, cough, bough, through" example. We can only conclude that they must have been "reading" through their ears.
Reading and writing therefore cannot be considered independent of speaking and listening. They are not separate "skills" but something that is built on top of spoken skills. Which means that before you start teaching reading and writing, you must ensure you have something to build on!
What happens if you don't?
Well, the learner builds on something else -- either an arbitrary pattern or on their first language. Case in point: many English speakers have problems with the "3 Es" of French: E, É, È. You will hear even some advanced students asking "Does this E have an accent? Which one?" But this is a regular feature of French: each refers to a distinct sound. By starting from the written form and almost invariably picking the "e" of English "pet", the learner has not built a proper representation of French phonemes and they've all merged into one. With only one sound behind all three forms of E, the choice of accent seems arbitrary and is difficult to remember. But to someone who has learnt from phonology, the correct accent is a matter of second nature.
Note that I said "someone who has learnt from phonology", not "someone who has learned by listening", because the two are not the same. People can also fail to notice phonemic differences when listening -- phonology must be taught explicitly. The irony is that after everything I've said, in some languages (Spanish, but not Chinese, for example) orthography can actually be a useful tool in teaching phonology... but that path is rather convoluted so we'll avoid going down it today and leave it for another time.
An anecdote from personal experience
I've held the above beliefs for a good few years now, but it wasn't until I started trying out LiveMocha's Polish course that the reality hit home.
My Polish is pretty basic, but I do know how the orthography works. I understand the non-palatised/alveolar-palatal/retroflex distinction in the main consonants, I know how it's written and I know how to pronounce it. And yet...
LiveMocha's speaking practice exercises ask you to read out a script. And I kept making silly mistakes. For example, I kept pronouncing C as /k/, rather than the correct /ts/. I put the stress in the 3rd-to-last syllable sometimes, or the last syllable sometimes. Why? Well although I "know" the rules of Polish sound, I'm not really comfortable with them yet. Reading pushed me beyond my level of ability, and I fell back on the systems of other languages.
Conclusion and consequences
I suggested previously that an apparent better ability in the written mode than in the spoken mode was a sign that the learner was using inappropriate and untransferrable strategies in the written mode, which means that the common learner situation of having a higher ability in the written mode than the spoken mode is actually a disordered state and consequently leads to long-term difficulties.
Today, I've tried to give another reason why this is such a disordered state, by showing that the written mode isn't pure language, but rather a layer of abstraction added on top of the language, and you can't build on a foundation that hasn't been laid yet.
Now let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone should be better at listening than at reading (this is something I plan to discuss in my next article, on phonology), but simply that a beginner has an urgent need to develop performance in the spoken mode. I'm not even saying that all new vocabulary should be presented in the spoken mode. No, if the vocabulary is built on phonemes that the student knows and has rehearsed sufficiently, and the orthography is regular enough, it's not a problem. But introducing new phonemes in the written mode is just mental. The student will learn to read them, but he will have to construct his own phonology underneath that orthography, and that will almost certainly be wrong.
Actually, I lied first time round. I said:
two of the skills are common to both the spoken and the written mode.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, three of the skills are common to both the spoken and written mode.
Centuries ago, people couldn't read quietly. According to QI and my good friend the internet, there is a historical record of the first man known to be able to read without moving his lips: Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397AD). Nowadays, it's not a particularly notable skill -- in fact, we use the idea of not being able to read without moving your lips as a way of insulting someone's intelligence. Most people today would swear that when they read, their brains are silent. Neurolinguists suggest otherwise.
Modern brain scanners are incredibly sensitive machines that can detect activity in any part of the brain, and last I'd heard, no-one had been found whose auditory functions weren't activated by reading -- ie. all reading seems to be translated into sound in order to be understood, whether we're aware of it or not.
And that is why this post is called 3 Skills Safe: because language is composed of 3 core skills: syntax, morphology and phonology. Orthography is something we're all born with the ability to learn, but in some weird way it appears to be an adjunct to language, something we add on top.
But what about sign language? I hear you cry. Very few people consider sign language as a form of writing, but rather as a form of speaking. Many respected language scientists now believe that the first human language was a gestural (sign) language, not a spoken language. In fact, the work of V S Ramachandran suggests that even spoken language is gestural in nature, and sound is merely the medium of transmission for that gesture. As a theory, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It all revolves around the so-called "mirror neuron" -- a mechanism in the brain that takes observations and turns them into experience. So we hear a sound and our brain understands it by recreating mentally how and why we ourselves would have produced that sound. This would explain the crossover between speaking and listening that I highlighted last week and it has some very profound consequences for the teaching of phonology, which I'll spend more time on soon.
But if phonology is about shape, why use a term derived from the Greek for sound? Well, simply put, it's the established term. Perhaps someone will make a new name for it in the future, but right now we're stuck with the words people use. But phonology is not restricted to the spoken medium, and interestingly enough, "orthography" is similarly not restricted to its usual visual medium. There is Braille, of course, but more interesting than that is the audio channel.
Though massively outdated now, telegraphy revolutionised global communication. The vital components in this global engine were the telegraphers, who relayed messages via Morse code. While they were working mostly through the medium of sound, the code was still denoting letters, not phonemes. An expert coder would have no problem even with the phonetic irregularities of English, such as the famous "rough, cough, bough, through" example. We can only conclude that they must have been "reading" through their ears.
Reading and writing therefore cannot be considered independent of speaking and listening. They are not separate "skills" but something that is built on top of spoken skills. Which means that before you start teaching reading and writing, you must ensure you have something to build on!
What happens if you don't?
Well, the learner builds on something else -- either an arbitrary pattern or on their first language. Case in point: many English speakers have problems with the "3 Es" of French: E, É, È. You will hear even some advanced students asking "Does this E have an accent? Which one?" But this is a regular feature of French: each refers to a distinct sound. By starting from the written form and almost invariably picking the "e" of English "pet", the learner has not built a proper representation of French phonemes and they've all merged into one. With only one sound behind all three forms of E, the choice of accent seems arbitrary and is difficult to remember. But to someone who has learnt from phonology, the correct accent is a matter of second nature.
Note that I said "someone who has learnt from phonology", not "someone who has learned by listening", because the two are not the same. People can also fail to notice phonemic differences when listening -- phonology must be taught explicitly. The irony is that after everything I've said, in some languages (Spanish, but not Chinese, for example) orthography can actually be a useful tool in teaching phonology... but that path is rather convoluted so we'll avoid going down it today and leave it for another time.
An anecdote from personal experience
I've held the above beliefs for a good few years now, but it wasn't until I started trying out LiveMocha's Polish course that the reality hit home.
My Polish is pretty basic, but I do know how the orthography works. I understand the non-palatised/alveolar-palatal/retroflex distinction in the main consonants, I know how it's written and I know how to pronounce it. And yet...
LiveMocha's speaking practice exercises ask you to read out a script. And I kept making silly mistakes. For example, I kept pronouncing C as /k/, rather than the correct /ts/. I put the stress in the 3rd-to-last syllable sometimes, or the last syllable sometimes. Why? Well although I "know" the rules of Polish sound, I'm not really comfortable with them yet. Reading pushed me beyond my level of ability, and I fell back on the systems of other languages.
Conclusion and consequences
I suggested previously that an apparent better ability in the written mode than in the spoken mode was a sign that the learner was using inappropriate and untransferrable strategies in the written mode, which means that the common learner situation of having a higher ability in the written mode than the spoken mode is actually a disordered state and consequently leads to long-term difficulties.
Today, I've tried to give another reason why this is such a disordered state, by showing that the written mode isn't pure language, but rather a layer of abstraction added on top of the language, and you can't build on a foundation that hasn't been laid yet.
Now let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone should be better at listening than at reading (this is something I plan to discuss in my next article, on phonology), but simply that a beginner has an urgent need to develop performance in the spoken mode. I'm not even saying that all new vocabulary should be presented in the spoken mode. No, if the vocabulary is built on phonemes that the student knows and has rehearsed sufficiently, and the orthography is regular enough, it's not a problem. But introducing new phonemes in the written mode is just mental. The student will learn to read them, but he will have to construct his own phonology underneath that orthography, and that will almost certainly be wrong.
04 July 2011
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:
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.
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, 19681968, 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.
25 June 2011
Not Learning From Mistakes
I've been talking a fair bit recently. First I pointed out that the emotional power of correction of mistakes is often overstated on the basis of a few exceptional cases, and then I pointed out that in the classroom it's underemployed for fear of embarrassment.
Not being corrected
But here's another perspective on the whole thing: some mistakes just don't get corrected. There's several reasons for this:
The first couple you can do nothing about, but it's really frustrating if your conversation grinds to a halt after five minutes when you discover that neither of you has a clue what the other is talking about.
From the third, it is tempting to conclude that if an error doesn't stop the other person understanding, it's an acceptable error (a widely held belief among communicative approach teachers). But in general this isn't true, because it ignores the fact that what is unambiguous in one context may be very ambiguous in another. For example, many learners of English have problems pronouncing the past suffix -ed (except in -ted, -ded) and drop it. In the sentence I walked there but it was closed, losing the "ed" doesn't make the tense ambiguous (I walk there but it was close), because "was" clearly marks the tense, but if you only say I walked there and it comes out as I walk there, suddenly it's very ambiguous indeed. The problem gets worse as phrases, clauses and sentences get more and more complicated as you proceed through the language, and as error builds on top of error, language gets less and less accurate. One of the main ideas in the communicative approach is that you can "get by" with flawed language and that accuracy will take care of itself later on, but by saving up mistakes for later, they militate against improvement, which is a shame for the students....
And finally, language blindness. This is when you know what is being said or what you want to say, but you can't find the words or the structure. In translation it happens when the structure you're translating from blocks you from seeing the appropriate target structure, and it's something that you can't think your way out of, because the material you're working from seems only to get stronger when you think about it. In the situation of conversational corrections, you've understood what the other people are trying to say, but when you try to correct it all you can hear is what they said, and in the end you cannot give them any hints as to what they said wrong.
Incorrect "correction"
And even if you do get corrected, how do you know the correction is correct?
Take a sentence like *I am going walking yesterday. There are two likely intended sentences: I was going walking yesterday and I am going walking tomorrow. Now with this sentence, most correctors would offer both options. However, in general, listening is a subconscious act, so when listening to someone speak we hear only one thing. If the corrector misunderstands the error, he will obviously give an incorrect form in response.
Also, you have to remember that very few people genuinely know how they speak - most of us only know how we were told we should speak, and I have heard native speakers "correcting" foreigners for using a (descriptively, statistically) correct grammatical form by providing an outdated (prescriptive) school-book form that they themselves don't use. Or when pressed for a translation, they give something that is almost correct, but it subtley inappropriate.
All in all, correction during conversation is more than a little hit-and-miss.
While I feel that the idea of fossilised errors is a gross exaggeration, it's still better to get started on the right form as soon as possible to build up good habits.
If you rely on conversational corrections to teach you correct grammar, conversations will become a drag. Maybe not for you (if enjoy the process of puzzling through), but most people don't have the patience to put up with it for long and you'll find yourself going through conversational partners very quickly indeed. This is fine if you live in an area with lots of speakers of your target language, because you can always just hang about in a bar until another speaker comes along, but if you're trying to maintain a friendship (or even a romantic relationship), the language will soon start to be a barrier to communication.
Overall, it's just much quicker and more efficient to learn in a structured way where one thing leads to (and supports) another, rather than having a scattergun approach of learning whatever comes up even if it is in no way linked to what you already know.
And it is best to get your teaching from an informed speaker of the language - that is to say someone who not only speaks the language, but has studied it and is consciously aware of the subtleties of grammar and usage, of connotations and register differences. (And yes, that means that sometimes a non-native speaker can be a better teacher than a native.)
I've been talking a fair bit recently. First I pointed out that the emotional power of correction of mistakes is often overstated on the basis of a few exceptional cases, and then I pointed out that in the classroom it's underemployed for fear of embarrassment.
Not being corrected
But here's another perspective on the whole thing: some mistakes just don't get corrected. There's several reasons for this:
- The other person doesn't want to be rude, so continues to nod politely rather than cause potential embarrassment by commenting.
- The other person doesn't understand you and says so, but can't correct you because he doesn't know what you're trying to say.
- The other person understands you, so doesn't see the need to mention the error.
- The mistake is noticed and mentioned but not corrected, because the other person suffers what is known as "language blindness".
The first couple you can do nothing about, but it's really frustrating if your conversation grinds to a halt after five minutes when you discover that neither of you has a clue what the other is talking about.
From the third, it is tempting to conclude that if an error doesn't stop the other person understanding, it's an acceptable error (a widely held belief among communicative approach teachers). But in general this isn't true, because it ignores the fact that what is unambiguous in one context may be very ambiguous in another. For example, many learners of English have problems pronouncing the past suffix -ed (except in -ted, -ded) and drop it. In the sentence I walked there but it was closed, losing the "ed" doesn't make the tense ambiguous (I walk there but it was close), because "was" clearly marks the tense, but if you only say I walked there and it comes out as I walk there, suddenly it's very ambiguous indeed. The problem gets worse as phrases, clauses and sentences get more and more complicated as you proceed through the language, and as error builds on top of error, language gets less and less accurate. One of the main ideas in the communicative approach is that you can "get by" with flawed language and that accuracy will take care of itself later on, but by saving up mistakes for later, they militate against improvement, which is a shame for the students....
And finally, language blindness. This is when you know what is being said or what you want to say, but you can't find the words or the structure. In translation it happens when the structure you're translating from blocks you from seeing the appropriate target structure, and it's something that you can't think your way out of, because the material you're working from seems only to get stronger when you think about it. In the situation of conversational corrections, you've understood what the other people are trying to say, but when you try to correct it all you can hear is what they said, and in the end you cannot give them any hints as to what they said wrong.
Incorrect "correction"
And even if you do get corrected, how do you know the correction is correct?
Take a sentence like *
Also, you have to remember that very few people genuinely know how they speak - most of us only know how we were told we should speak, and I have heard native speakers "correcting" foreigners for using a (descriptively, statistically) correct grammatical form by providing an outdated (prescriptive) school-book form that they themselves don't use. Or when pressed for a translation, they give something that is almost correct, but it subtley inappropriate.
All in all, correction during conversation is more than a little hit-and-miss.
While I feel that the idea of fossilised errors is a gross exaggeration, it's still better to get started on the right form as soon as possible to build up good habits.
If you rely on conversational corrections to teach you correct grammar, conversations will become a drag. Maybe not for you (if enjoy the process of puzzling through), but most people don't have the patience to put up with it for long and you'll find yourself going through conversational partners very quickly indeed. This is fine if you live in an area with lots of speakers of your target language, because you can always just hang about in a bar until another speaker comes along, but if you're trying to maintain a friendship (or even a romantic relationship), the language will soon start to be a barrier to communication.
Overall, it's just much quicker and more efficient to learn in a structured way where one thing leads to (and supports) another, rather than having a scattergun approach of learning whatever comes up even if it is in no way linked to what you already know.
And it is best to get your teaching from an informed speaker of the language - that is to say someone who not only speaks the language, but has studied it and is consciously aware of the subtleties of grammar and usage, of connotations and register differences. (And yes, that means that sometimes a non-native speaker can be a better teacher than a native.)
20 June 2011
Teaching from mistakes
I find it curious that despite the claims that we learn best from our mistakes, many teachers are reluctant to take advantage of this in teaching.
Well, not reluctant, I suppose, but it's more a matter of wanting things both ways.
In your standard EFL class, we don't typically correct spontaneous errors on the spot (and there are certainly many circumstances where correction would break the flow of the conversation), instead giving "delayed feedback" -- a short period at the end of the class where several of the "big" mistakes of the day are put up on the whiteboard and discussed and corrected as a class.
One of the reasons for this is to avoid drawing attention to the invidual or causing any embarrassment. However, this means it's too late. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the student doesn't have the same emotional tie to the sentence and any correction is purely academic. What makes this into a particularly fruitless endeavour is that most of the time they know the correct answer in theory, but they just fail to apply the correct rule in practice, so the error isn't addressed properly.
But if we look at the various confusions I mentioned last time -- married vs tired, embarrassed vs pregnant, having a cold vs having constipation -- we see that correction is at its most effective when it connects on a very vivid, immediate, emotional level.
I'm not saying we should go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate learners, but that we shouldn't be afraid to take advantage of the humour or absurdity of an error in making the correction more memorable.
For example, I know one fellow Gaelic learner who hasn't really grasped the correct use of possessives, and is wont to say things like "tha mi cat agam a' dol dhan bheat", which means pretty much "I am one of my cats on my way to the vet". Now, you can correct her with "tha an cat agam" and she might repeat it, but 10 seconds later, she'll be saying it wrong again. So why not just tell her she's called herself a cat?
Ok, so you have to build up a certain rapport with the other party to make sure you're doing it in a good natured way, and they feel you're laughing with each other rather than laughing at the other person.
But delayed feedback is almost always too late: a mistake can only lose its power to embarrass when it no longer feels like that particular student's mistake, and if it's not that student's mistake then it's just another restatement of the rule.
Hang on a minute... let's get this straight. Delayed feedback isn't correction at all?!? Not on a personal level. On a technicality, yes, it is correction, but on an emotional, personal level, it's not. Or at least not always.
So either correct in time to make a difference, or else find a way to teach that avoids errors in the first place. (And that's not necessarily as hard as it sounds.)
I find it curious that despite the claims that we learn best from our mistakes, many teachers are reluctant to take advantage of this in teaching.
Well, not reluctant, I suppose, but it's more a matter of wanting things both ways.
In your standard EFL class, we don't typically correct spontaneous errors on the spot (and there are certainly many circumstances where correction would break the flow of the conversation), instead giving "delayed feedback" -- a short period at the end of the class where several of the "big" mistakes of the day are put up on the whiteboard and discussed and corrected as a class.
One of the reasons for this is to avoid drawing attention to the invidual or causing any embarrassment. However, this means it's too late. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the student doesn't have the same emotional tie to the sentence and any correction is purely academic. What makes this into a particularly fruitless endeavour is that most of the time they know the correct answer in theory, but they just fail to apply the correct rule in practice, so the error isn't addressed properly.
But if we look at the various confusions I mentioned last time -- married vs tired, embarrassed vs pregnant, having a cold vs having constipation -- we see that correction is at its most effective when it connects on a very vivid, immediate, emotional level.
I'm not saying we should go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate learners, but that we shouldn't be afraid to take advantage of the humour or absurdity of an error in making the correction more memorable.
For example, I know one fellow Gaelic learner who hasn't really grasped the correct use of possessives, and is wont to say things like "tha mi cat agam a' dol dhan bheat", which means pretty much "I am one of my cats on my way to the vet". Now, you can correct her with "tha an cat agam" and she might repeat it, but 10 seconds later, she'll be saying it wrong again. So why not just tell her she's called herself a cat?
Ok, so you have to build up a certain rapport with the other party to make sure you're doing it in a good natured way, and they feel you're laughing with each other rather than laughing at the other person.
But delayed feedback is almost always too late: a mistake can only lose its power to embarrass when it no longer feels like that particular student's mistake, and if it's not that student's mistake then it's just another restatement of the rule.
Hang on a minute... let's get this straight. Delayed feedback isn't correction at all?!? Not on a personal level. On a technicality, yes, it is correction, but on an emotional, personal level, it's not. Or at least not always.
So either correct in time to make a difference, or else find a way to teach that avoids errors in the first place. (And that's not necessarily as hard as it sounds.)
16 June 2011
Learning from mistakes...?
I've heard it said many times that the best way to learn a language is to make mistakes and be corrected, because this correction somehow "personalises" the learning. But to me, this is a logical absurdity.
Here's an example from my personal experience. In Spanish, there is a special word hay that is equivalent to the English there is. You therefore do not translate there is verbatim (which would give you *allí está). In Spanish, they also have a word "demás" which is used for other(s), meaning the rest of a group (not other as in different).
Now I often mistranslate the others (the rest of the guys) as *los otros, but I never mistranslate there is as *allí está. This means I can say hay correctly despite never being corrected and I keep getting los demás wrong despite fairly frequent correction, and conceptually one is no more difficult than the other.
This is only one example, but in general when someone corrects my Spanish, it's for one of a closed set of mistakes that I make all the time. Being corrected seems to have absolutely no direct effect on my errors.
The only effect is when I subsequently choose to work consciously to eradicate that mistake. Or perhaps more accurately, when I consciously work to learn the correct form, because more often than not, an error isn't the result of learning something wrong, but actually an indication that you haven't learnt it at all. I get hay right because I learned it early on, I get los demás wrong because I never really learned it, and even now I'm only "aware of existence" -- I still don't feel I've learned it.
This isn't to say that errors and correction are valueless, not at all. Corrections have no special ability to make language stick, but they at least indicate a gap in your knowledge and they often give you a starting point for filling that gap, so you certainly should listen to and take note of any corrections you're given. What you shouldn't do is ascribe magic powers to corrections and believe that they are a substitute for other ways of learning -- this will only slow down your progress while making conversations in your target language far less enjoyable for both parties.
Why is this idea so persistent?
There is a small set of mistakes that people only make once. For example, when a Spanish learner tries to say she's tired (cansada) but instead says he's married (casada), it is an instantly memorable situation and unlikely to happen again. Of course it's a situation that's quite embarrassing, which might be compounded if she now mistakenly says she's pregnant (embarazada). And she'll never do that again. Similarly a Spanish speaker suffering a cold is unlikely to forget that being constipated is not the same as having a bunged-up nose (constipado in Spanish).
So these mistakes certainly do lead to better recall of the correct form, but this is not because of how correction works as a generally applicable learning strategy, but rather a consequence of the vocabulary in question. Saying translación (an archaic variation of translación - movement/transfer)instead of traducción (translation) doesn't have the same comedic value (and in fact isn't likely to obscure the meaning in context) so doesn't have the same potential to stick.
Most often it is these extreme cases, these outliers, that are used to convince us of the efficacy of the technique, but don't be fooled: learning the correct form from the word go is far more effective than making it up as you go along and picking up a catalogue of corrections.
I've heard it said many times that the best way to learn a language is to make mistakes and be corrected, because this correction somehow "personalises" the learning. But to me, this is a logical absurdity.
Here's an example from my personal experience. In Spanish, there is a special word hay that is equivalent to the English there is. You therefore do not translate there is verbatim (which would give you *
Now I often mistranslate the others (the rest of the guys) as *
This is only one example, but in general when someone corrects my Spanish, it's for one of a closed set of mistakes that I make all the time. Being corrected seems to have absolutely no direct effect on my errors.
The only effect is when I subsequently choose to work consciously to eradicate that mistake. Or perhaps more accurately, when I consciously work to learn the correct form, because more often than not, an error isn't the result of learning something wrong, but actually an indication that you haven't learnt it at all. I get hay right because I learned it early on, I get los demás wrong because I never really learned it, and even now I'm only "aware of existence" -- I still don't feel I've learned it.
This isn't to say that errors and correction are valueless, not at all. Corrections have no special ability to make language stick, but they at least indicate a gap in your knowledge and they often give you a starting point for filling that gap, so you certainly should listen to and take note of any corrections you're given. What you shouldn't do is ascribe magic powers to corrections and believe that they are a substitute for other ways of learning -- this will only slow down your progress while making conversations in your target language far less enjoyable for both parties.
Why is this idea so persistent?
There is a small set of mistakes that people only make once. For example, when a Spanish learner tries to say she's tired (cansada) but instead says he's married (casada), it is an instantly memorable situation and unlikely to happen again. Of course it's a situation that's quite embarrassing, which might be compounded if she now mistakenly says she's pregnant (embarazada). And she'll never do that again. Similarly a Spanish speaker suffering a cold is unlikely to forget that being constipated is not the same as having a bunged-up nose (constipado in Spanish).
So these mistakes certainly do lead to better recall of the correct form, but this is not because of how correction works as a generally applicable learning strategy, but rather a consequence of the vocabulary in question. Saying translación (an archaic variation of translación - movement/transfer)instead of traducción (translation) doesn't have the same comedic value (and in fact isn't likely to obscure the meaning in context) so doesn't have the same potential to stick.
Most often it is these extreme cases, these outliers, that are used to convince us of the efficacy of the technique, but don't be fooled: learning the correct form from the word go is far more effective than making it up as you go along and picking up a catalogue of corrections.
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