Answer in sentences: death to meaning!

After my injury-induced half-year out of the classroom, I made myself a promise: I wasn't going to torture myself by wanting to undo all the mistakes of teaching orthodoxy in one go. It's not something I'm capable of doing, and in wanting to, I have ended up hampering my ability to get on with the task as requested by the people writing my paycheque. After all, while the orthodoxy may be far from perfect, it's at least tried and tested, and people have learned from it.

I have tried my best to stick to this philosophy since the start of my new employment, with a few particular exceptions where suitable materials weren't available in time and I had to improvise. You can hardly be expected to improvise in a style that isn't yours, after all.

The real danger in doing something someone else's way is that you might start to believe in it. I was never a fan of "answer in sentences" as it always seemed unnatural, but it's something I've come to rely on in class, and I was starting to view it uncritically, until I came face-to-face with the downside...

I was teaching a class of primary-age kids, and I was integrating times with the past tense of to be. The worksheet presented a clock representing the time, and a little picture of a location, to prompt sentences of the form "at five o'clock, he was in the kitchen," following a model example at the top of the first page. Some of the kids latched on to the point fairly quickly, but most needed repeated explanation and demonstration. (This is because I'm trying to stick to the orthodoxy of "the English only classroom" even though these kids don't speak English yet -- but that's a rant for another time.)

One in particular was having difficulties, as he's afraid of making mistakes: you can only fail if you try, so he's naturally afraid of trying. I led him through several questions directly, breaking the task into two parts: the time and the location. The problem was, when I pointed at the time, he would say "it's five o'clock", as per his answer-in-sentences training; and when I pointed at the location, he would say "he's in the kitchen". These kids have been trained (by myself and by other teachers) to never say any noun or adjective on its own, so that little contracted form it's has taken on a life that is divorced from its meaning, and appears in the language of many of the learners as little more than a particle that precedes certain words.

Basically, it has reawakened a long-held belief of mine that the frequent repetition of words doesn't truly aid in their memorisation, as the students simply aren't required to consider the context, and the language forms are devoided of all meaning.

But language is meaning.

Classroom activity: the ever-expanding story

When I started learning Gaelic, I was learning from a very experienced teacher.  She was a retired headmistress (former music teacher) and had been teaching Gaelic since she gave up her previous job.  (Dr Margaret MacKinnon, a long-serving judge at the Gaelic music festival "the Mod".)

It was an intensive week-long course and towards the end of the week she had us lined up on the steps of the outdoor amphitheatre (it was a gorgeous sunny day) and she got us to tell a story.  The rule was simple: repeat everything that had already been said, then add something.

I liked this, and I've frequently gone back to analyse why.

My first attempt at an explanation was this:
It is easy to try to translate received language into your native language.  It is easy to remember the story as the meaning only, and forget about the words.  With a short sentence, you can usually get away with translating backwards and forwards.  As the sequence grew longer, the complexity of trying to mentally juggle the original sentence, the translation and meaning became too great.  The most efficient way to carry out the task was to stick with the Gaelic.

So that was my first thought: it "maxes out" your brain, forcing you to be more efficient.

Now I recently tried something similar but without the repetition -- just the addition of words.  It was only partially successful, leading to two further observations:

1. The complexity of the structure of the story and language is supported by the repetition.
2. The need to repeat is a great piece of classroom management.

The second realisation was useful to me.  Too many tasks leave gaps in the need for student attention, and it's in those gaps that many of my lessons have fallen apart.  If everyone listens -- if everyone has to listen -- the teacher owns the class.

The first one is pretty interesting to me, as I'm very much against rote learning, so of course I had to justify to myself why this repetition isn't rote. ;-)

Well, for one thing, they're not going to be able to recite the story the day after, so it's not really rote "learning", even if it's a somewhat rote process.  Well that's sophistry, so I couldn't really kid myself on with that for very long.

The second justification is that I found that the longer the sentence got, the more I needed to visualise the story in order to remember it.  You can repeat a short phrase parrot-fashion, but it takes a long time to memorise a long passage if you don't understand it.  Therefore the student is forced to engage in the material meaningfully.  This is just a refinement of my earlier assessment of it as a "maxing out" of the brain, but I believe it's crucial to addressing classroom problems in all activities.

Too many tasks that I have been faced with as a learner have left me with the choice between a rote, mechanical approach to solving the problem and a meaningful approach.  I've always chosen the meaningful approach, which is what makes me a successful learner.  The least successful learners are the ones who chose the mechanical approach -- but that's not the learner's mistake, it's the teacher's mistake, because the human brain always seeks the most efficient approach to complete the task at hand.  If the easiest way to complete a language task is a mechanical one, that's bad task design.

I cannot emphasise this point enough.  I have spoken to a great many teachers who simply don't get it.  They say my approach is the "correct" one, and what others should be doing too.  They blame the weaker students for making the wrong choice.  But how can they make that choice if they don't know what it is?  I knew how to learn because I was taught to learn: I spent most of my pre-school hours in the care of my mother, a fully-qualified school teacher, playing with educational toys.  I did not need to be taught how to learn, but the others did.  Please don't ask students to make a choice until you've started to teach them how to make that choice...

But I'm diverging from the activity....

So we've got a task that requires attention, discourages distraction, forces the student to process language efficiently and meaningfully. 

The next big concept I picked up on was the idea of "mirror neurones".  I had long believed that receiving and producing language were intrinsically linked, and that we understood others by considering what would make us say the things that the other party says.

Then I read about mirror neurone theory, which claims that this is pretty much what happens.  So does the activity put words in your mouth?  Are the students going through the process of production every time they hear this language that they now understand?  I hope so, and even as the teacher doing this task in English, I feel myself "speaking" in my head while the students are trying to recall the whole story.

But today I refined my views further in terms of gamification, which I have been thinking about a lot lately.

My lack of belief in gamification has been previously documented here, and can be summed up as "gamification isn't about the core mechanics of a game, and it's the mechanics of the game that make a game 'fun'."  In a gamified classroom, this activity would be rejected as there are no scores and no winners and losers.  There is no "competition" or "achievements".

If you tried to add anything like that in, you would reduce the effectiveness of the game.  When Margaret did it with us, she encouraged us to correct our own mistakes before continuing.  When I do it with my students, I correct their mistakes and work them into the story.   If a frequent pairing comes out in the wrong order due to the turn-taking, I stop and I fix it, and the language content improves (eg if one student said "butter..." and the next said "...and bread", I would correct it to the neutral order "bread and butter" to prevent rehearsing an unusual collocation).

But the only way of scoring it would be to penalise mistakes, which would probably result in much shorter and much less effective sentences.

However, the activity has a natural "game mechanic" which is solid and motivates learning: there is a challenge, and the challenge increases, and as you face the challenge you learn to cope with it.  That's what a game is: learning to progressively cope with more and more difficult, and more and more varied, challenges.  "Gamifying" this activity, like most educational activities, would kill "the game" that's already there... which is why gamification is such a waste of time.

So after all that theory and pontification, here's:

The activity

Arrange the class such that there is a clear order.  That can be rows, a single line, or a circle.

Say one, two or three words to start the story.

The first student repeats your words, then adds 1, 2 or 3 of his own.
The second repeats his, and adds 1, 2 or 3 more.

Now it's vital that this happens quickly.  Some students will want to stop and think of "what" to say when a quick "so he", "then it" or even just "and" keeps the game moving and leaves it to the next person to finish (and they've got the whole time of the repeat to think of something).

Correct errors.  Make sure they're repeating correct language.

It will stutter and slow down.  Some people will need prompting with a few words to jog their memory.  Keep it going for a while longer -- don't restart at the first forgotten word.

But at some point stop it and start afresh -- a few problems is a challenge, but too many is frustrating, which is never good.

Don't let them write it down -- that just gives them a way to stop paying attention.  (In a very mixed group, it might seem necessary for the weakest, but it's a survival strategy and it seems to reduce the educational value.)

So why all that pontificating before?

Why didn't I just explain the activity on its own, before all the theorising?

Because a learning task must serve a purpose and the teacher must know what that purpose is.

Because I'm personally tired of seeing teaching activities described without giving a clear description and justification of what they're supposed to achieve and how.

Because I don't want readers to see the activity and then "adapt" it without fully understanding what it currently does.  I don't want people to delete the repetition on grounds of being "boring" or "rote" -- the activity is far more boring without it.

And maybe mostly because I'm a self-important wee so-and-so who loves the sound of his own voice.  Aren't we all?

Meaningful vs rote: traps

Despite everything I've said so far, the term "meaningful" is quite dangerous in language.

Because, after all, from a certain point of view, all languages is arbitrary - That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet - but from another point of view, all language is meaningful.

So we need to recognise that the term "meaningful" has to relate to the relationship between the material and the learner and is not some inherent property of the material.

One of the biggest "meaningful" traps is the idea of word-pairs.  The most common word-pair would have to be the antonym (opposites).

So we teach "beautiful - ugly; tall - short; big - small".

The idea is that by linking the words, we're utilising the meaningful relationships between the words.  Ignoring the potential for confusion (discussed previously), teaching by antonyms fails to exploit the learners own meaningful framework.

If you have never encountered beautiful before, then it cannot help you learn the meaning of ugly.  So in the end, you're learning two things that are arbitrary to the learner -- you're teaching them by rote.  That the data is meaningful is irrelevant, because it is not meaningful to the learner.

Better then to teach one and then the other.  Previously learned vocabulary is part of the learner's framework that can be used to allow later meaningful learning.

Meaningful vs Rote: a worked example

I've been discussing meaningful and rote learning recently, and Thrissel made this comment to one of my earlier posts:

A layman's question: one of the first things I learnt when beginning with Gaelic was that the n in an changes to m before b, f, m, p. Was it rote learning (because I wasn't told why these particular four) or meaningful learning (because it constituted a rule)?

I told him that this is rote learning, because he's simply learned a list of letters and a mechanical rule.  But there is a more meaningful way to learn this, which makes it an excellent example to work through to demonstrate my point.  I'll use a bit of linguistics terminology, but I'll try to make sure that I make the meanings clear as I go.  Remember, though, that just because I'm using it here, doesn't mean I'm advocating its use in the classroom.

To make a rule meaningful, there has to be structure round about it that makes automatic sense to the learner.  Logic's good, but logic neither guarantees nor is necessary for something to be meaningful.  (In fact, my Dad used to quote one of his lecturers all the time: people don't think logically, they think psychologically.)

The key to making it meaningful is tying it into a network of easily-understood relationships.  (And sometimes the thing that's easy to remember isn't altogether logical.)

In order to work out a meaningful teaching strategy, you need to analyse the material to be taught.

In this case we have a fairly simple rule:

"An" becomes "am" before words starting with B, F, M or P.

(The complication is that "an" is actually several different words, but we'll skip over that for now.)

What are the special properties of these four letters?

B, F, M and P are labial consonants, ie. they are pronounced using the lips.  In fact hey are the only labial consonants in Gaelic.

M and N are nasal consonants, and are very closely related, as they're nasal consonants.  It's not particularly easy to switch from N to a labial consonant, so the N steals the labial quality of the following consonant and becomes an M.

The technical rule:
The unstressed clitic forms "an" become "am" before a labial consonant.
So we have a full linguistic description of what's going on.  If you say that this isn't "meaningful", you're right -- only a trained linguist would be able to make use of this information.  It's the teacher's job to turn this technical knowledge into something meaningful -- but the teacher needs to understand this technical rule before he can teach it.

The next thing is to look for something similar that the student already knows.

Let's have a look at how N behaves in English.

The prefix in- is used for negatives.  We know these are negative and we know they're N.
Admissable - Inadmissable
Tractable - Intractable
We know this.

But what happens when we want to add it to a word starting with B, M or P?
Balance - Imbalance
Material - Immaterial
Possible - Impossible

This doesn't just happen with negatives.  The opposite of ex- is also in-
External - Internal
...which also changes to M:
Explicit - Implicit.
So the students now know that N changed to M before B, M and P.  You can now explain that it's because these consonants are pronounced with the lips (or you can get the students to notice that for themselves).  Now the Gaelic rule is no longer strange and arbitrary, but quite familiar and comfortable. 

(It might also pay to point out that while you might see words that appear to break this rule in the written form, they tend to follow it in pronunciation -- eg input.)

This only leaves F as a troublesome case, but seeing as your students are now aware of the notion of a labial consonant (although you've never used the word "labial") you can just point out that while B, M and P use both lips (ie they are bilabial), F uses one lip and your teeth (called labio-dental).  As it's only using one lip it's a borderline case.  Some languages bundle it with B, M and P, others with the rest of the consonants.  Gaelic's one of the former.  Shrug and move on.  It makes sense, and it doesn't pay to think about it. 

Yes, there is an element of "smoke and mirrors" here.  But some people have a tendency to overthink things and start to question things that don't need questioning.  Write it down as a formal rule and people will analyse and question it.  If instead you present it quickly as natural, if you don't encourage thinking, people will accept this, and that's good.
Now that may seem a much longer way than "an becomes am before B, F, P or M", but taking five minutes to make sure people understand it means you're not going to spend as much time revising it later.  Less haste, more speed.


However, you can do more than make this one rule meaningful -- you can also prepare the student to learn later parts of the language meaningfully.

The concept of N taking on a labial quality is analogous to several other changes in the language -- the student needs to be aware that sounds affect each other.  For example, in a phrase like an comhnaidh, the C starts to sound like an English G, because the voiced nature of the N affects the C.  The O becomes a nasal vowel, due to the influence of MH.  In many dialects, the C has an effect on the preceding N, too.  Just like how English ink is pronounced like ingk because of the effect of the NK combination, and how engage is often pronounced eng-gage rather than en-gage, the N picks up an "ng" quality -- an becomes ang.

As this sound "spreading" is an important and productive feature of the language, bringing it in early makes it all easier later on.


Also, you can help your students understand related sounds better.  In my example, B, M and P were presented separately from F, echoing the distinction between the bilabials and the labio-dental.  We can go one step further, and rearrange BMP to something else.  I would advise putting B and P together because they're both plosives, ie they have a "pop" involved (thing explosion).  Now we have a choice: do we stick B and M next to each other?  Both are voiced, so it would make sense.  Now we have MBP or PBM, rather than the alphabetical BMP.  We're building associations that can be built on later, and we're subtely drawing attention to something the student really already knows, at a fundamental level.  Which brings us to the core point of meaningful learning: it must be built on what the student already knows.

Rote vs Meaningful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meaningful vs rote, discovery vs reception

Ausubel takes great pains to point out that many teachers believe all discovery learning is inherently meaningful, and that all reception learning is inherently rote.

I wrote once before about the nonsensical "discovery learning" we were asked to do in science at high school: boiling a beaker to determine the boiling point of water.  This was an absolute waste of time, and it was pure rote learning -- we determined that it was less than a hundred degrees, then the teacher told is it was 100 degrees.  But this is rote -- although we allegedly "discovered" the knowledge, the simple act of setting up the apparatus did not provide a meaningful framework in which to understand the data.  The act of boiling did not reveal anything new.

However, reception learning gives us a very memorable framework.

How do you measure heat?  What is your standard?  Well, we all know what ice feels like.  We all boil water.  So we already know about that.  Which is why some Swedish guy decided that it would make sense to use the boiling point and freezing point of water as the reference points on a scale.  Now, you should know before it comes to boiling that water freezes at zero -- now we know that it's no accident.  But what about boiling?  Well, how do divide up a metre?  Correct.  100 Centimeters.  So water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.  (He could have made it 1000, but that would have been confusing as his name starts with C, and millimetres start with M.  OK, so he probably wasn't vain enough to think this way, but as we associate C with hundreds, it's a meaningful association, even if accidental.)

So now we have two useful points of reference, and all within a meaningful and useful framework.  Heck, you could even throw in Celsius's first name (Anders) if you wanted to, and you could talk about body temperature too, and all this would be taught and learned in less than the time it takes to boil a beaker of water on a bunsen burner.

No demonstration is needed, because the student has all the concepts required - I don't need to see boiling water to understand the concept of "boiling", nor do I need to see a block of ice to understand the concept of "freezing".
OK, so I've wandered off the language track a bit with that, but I think it's an important point to make, because it shows that a known abstract concept can be meaningful.

The concept of zero is evoked by talking about ice.  The concept of that temperature is evoked by that word "ice".  The word itself evokes the concept better than any demonstration.  As language teachers, we can use that... as long as we don't fear the "translation bogeyman"....

One of the big arguments that comes up on the net is over the usefulness or otherwise of rote learning.  It is near universal that people who support "rote learning" don't actually know what rote learning is.  To them, "by rote" is synonymous with "by repetition".  If this were so, we would not have invented the word rote, and there would be no argument, as everyone knows that there is no learning without repetition.

What rote learning is is repetition without meaning.  Rote learning is when we memorise a list of dates, or the order of kings of France without any background.  Learning these meaningfully means looking for linkages and cause and effect.

The example I recently used elsewhere was the presidents of the USA, a subject that I don't really know much about.

Here's four of them:
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford

How did I remember these?

First of all, part of it is mnemonic.  If you look at the syllables, you have !.. !. !. ! (where ! is a stressed syllable and . is an unstressed one).  To me, there's a rhythm in there that's reminiscent of playground chants.  Are mnemonics rote?  To a point, maybe, but mnemonics aim to give artificial meaning to inherently meaningless data, so not strictly rote.  Besides, this is not the main way I learned the order, it's just an additional support.

First up, I looked at the order on the internet.  I looked for links.
The first thing I recalled was that I had seen TV archive footage of Nixon and Kennedy running against each other in the presidential elections.  Kennedy was shot, while Nixon resigned, but that doesn't tell me who was first.  The meaningful information that tells me Kennedy was first is the archive footage mentioned previously, but more specifically the accompanying analysis: it is said that it was TV that won the election for JFK, because he looked so much nicer.  Hearing that said over the top of pictures of Kennedy smiling and waving with Nixon hunched up and looking concerned sticks -- it really means something.

So Kennedy was before Nixon.  How do the other two fit in?

Well, that relies on knowing a little bit about the American terms of office.  If a president dies or steps down, he is replaced by his vice-president.  Nixon and Kennedy ran against each other, so there must have been another president between them, as Kennedy died.  And when Nixon resigned, his VP took over.

The names Johnson and Ford don't really mean much to me, and here's where the mnemonic chant helps, but if we look a little further we can make things more meaningful.

Johnson, as it turns out, was re-elected for a second term.  He won the largest majority of a US president in history.  Why?  Many commentators say it was a sympathy vote for JFK, as it wasn't really that long after the assassination.

Ford, on the other hand, was never re-elected.  Which isn't a surprise given that he took over from someone who resigned in disgrace.  To make matters worse, the economy was on a downturn at the time.

Filling in a picture of the most prominent features of these two gives me context -- meaning -- and looking at their photographs makes them people rather than facts.

I fully expect to be able to recall this right up until I start to go senile, because it now really does mean something to me.