The obligatory car analogy...

When you want to explain something complex to a non-expert, there's no tool more useful than a good analogy. Sadly, there's are few tool more open to abuse than the humble analogy, and in a great many cases, the subject of this abuse is the humble automobile. There is a rule of thumb on the internet that says you should never trust a car analogy.

The danger in analogy is that it comes to what appears to be a logical conclusion, even when the analogy is false, but thankfully we've had the conceptual tools to analyse logic since at least Ancient Greece. Heck, even the words “logic” and “analogy” come from the Ancient Greek language.

Regular readers will know that I'm not a fan of the “learning/acquisition” distinction, or the school of thought that says that rules don't matter, and that the only way to “acquire” is through exposure.  Well, recently I was reminded of that particular school-of-thought's own pet car analogy, and I would like to dismantle it here.

Grammar, they tell us, is unimportant. Do we need to know how a language works in order to speak it? Well, they say, consider a car: do you need to know how the engine works in order to drive it?

The reasoning seems persuasive to those who are predisposed to listen, but as with all analogies, the problem lies in the equivalence of the analogised items.

Is “how a language works” analogous to “how the engine works”? Certainly not – it is analogous to “how the car works”. Some commentators would suggest that the engine is how the car works – I would like to argue against this.

To a driver, a car is not the engine. From the very beginning, the goal of the engineer has been to abstract away features that the driver shouldn't have to think about and turn the engine into something of a “black box” – you read the instrumentation, manipulate the controls, and then the car responds in a consistent and predictable way based on what you tell it to do. The driver does not need to know what “RPM” means to recognise when they're over-revving the engine – revolutions-per-minute, cylinder cycles... irrelevant – but the driver does have to be told that over-revving is a bad thing, and has to learn the “rules” of reading the needle and listening to engine noise to avoid doing it.

The acquisition crowd are not, I hope, suggesting that you could put someone in a car with no knowledge of the steering system, gearbox, speed controls and indicator and just let them get on with it. The end result of this would at best nothing, at worst a seriously damaged car. OK, so you're not going to destroy someone's brain by throwing them into a language at the deep end, but if they can't even start the language's “car”, they're never going to get any useful feedback at all.

So we have three elements in the target of our analogy:

• The car as a whole
• The car's control system
• The car's engine

The question is, is the grammar the “control system” or the “engine”. Quite simply... urm... possibly maybe both....

Grammar as Control Sytem

Most of the grammar of a language is unambiguously “control system”, as the speaker must directly manipulate it in order to make himself understood.

Consider the spark-plugs in a diesel engine. Wait... a diesel engine doesn't have any spark-plugs. But this doesn't matter – this makes practically no difference to the driver. The accelerator works the same as the accelerator in a petrol engine with its spark plugs, and pressing it down harder makes the wheels spin faster. “The car”, as an entity, is operated identically – as far as the driver is concerned, it “works the same way”.

But let's look at a grammatical distinction, and for the sake of the argument I'll take the use of articles. English has them, Polish doesn't. If articles were like spark-plugs, that would mean that the article is entirely irrelevant to the manipulation of the language, but this is patently false. If you don't correctly manipulate the article, your sentence is wrong.

So a great many grammar rules are undeniably part of the control system.

Grammar as engine

Grammar as a whole has been a very expansive and extensive field of study – in fact, I'm led to believe that grammar originally meant the description of a whole language. Grammar today usually means “everything except vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling”, so a lot of stuff gets caught up in it which may be considered “engine”. Historical changes, derivational morphology (the etymology of the word presuppose is of very little use to the average learner of English) and distinctions like that between reflexive and impersonal/pronominal pronouns in the Romance languages.

But to use these few examples as a reason to throw out all conscious description of grammar is hugely short-sighted.

My car analogy

So that's their car analogy disproven, and I'd like to replace it with one of my own.

To ask someone to learn a language without grammar is like putting someone in the driving seat of a car without drumming the words “mirror, signal, manoeuvre” into their heads, and without telling them never to cross their hands at the wheel.

On the other hand, a lot of grammar-heavy teaching is like teaching someone to drive by carrying out the exact same manoeuvre 20 times in superficially different (but functionally identical) locations, then moving on and doing the same thing with a different manoeuvre.

This is not what any good driving teacher does.

A driving teacher takes the beginner to a safe, simple environment (eg an empty car park) and teaches the basic rules of operating the vehicle. The learner won't even be allowed to start the engine until they've started building the habit of checking all mirrors. Then they will learn to start and stop. A bit of controlled speed, then a bit of steering. The complexity increases steadily, and the instructor chooses increasingly complex environments so that the learner has to apply and combine the rules in ever more sophisticated ways. Rules are introduced gradually, as required, and then applied and manipulated as the situation demands. The teacher initially picks routes that don't require turning across traffic, then picks a route with a safe across-traffic turn, then adds in crossroads, traffic lights, roundabouts, filter lanes etc one by one. But these features are never treated as discrete items to learn individually – they are elements of one continuous whole that must be practised in the context of that whole.

This is what a good driving teacher does, and this is what a good language teacher does. Listen to one of Michel Thomas's courses¹ and you'll see that's exactly what he does: an increasingly complicated linguistic environment, and no language point ever treated in isolation beyond its basic introduction.  That's proper teaching, and it's all built on grammar and rules.

1I mean a course that he himself planned and delivered, not one of the courses released after his death.

The effects of Michel Thomas in the wider teaching world

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

One of Decoo's central points was :

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

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

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

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

Learn to form sentences, instead of parroting phrases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can be "blinded by science".

So much for critical reasoning.  What about common sense?

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

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

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

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

Problem 1: One all-important concept

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

Why?

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

Problem 2: Nobody really knows what they're doing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stone Soup (a folk tale)

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

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

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

With no other option, they went to the inn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END.

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is "learning like a child"?

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

Recipe 1:

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

Silence.

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

Class repeats the greeting.

Teacher congratulates the class (very good)

Teacher introduces himself.

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

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

Recipe 2:

You shove the CDROM in the drive.

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

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

"Man" and "woman" are added in.

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

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

How does a child really learn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expository vs Naturalistic Language Examples

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing authentic materials.  The main problem I identified was the lack of mutual reinforcement between individual texts (I hate that word, but I just can't find a suitable alternative...) meaning that very little language presented is retained.

So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?

Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox.  Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts.  If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals.  The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.

The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour.  Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.

But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea.  In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.

But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?

The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.

There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.

To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".

Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach.  The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.

I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.

He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"

And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."

There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise.  We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.

I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.

An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago.  I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back.  The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition.  So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.

The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]

This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples.  Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural.  Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article.  "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets.  But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?"  The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal.  We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").

The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable."  Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar.  This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.

And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel.  When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response.  This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.

"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice.  Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap.  The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do.  The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong.  The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that."  Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you.  This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us).  The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost.  Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears.  Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses.  If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.

OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.

One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube.  He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language.  He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ.  Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out.  His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.

But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material?  Hmm....

Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ.  My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."

The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.

And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.

So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against.  The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.

One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue.  Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts.  Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog.  Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues.  Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.

The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language.  This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen.  I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen.  It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.

Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this?  Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability.  Except that Bernard is not a boy.  The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed.  Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there.  Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)

Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard.  Maybe they're introducing themselves to us?  Like a "piece to camera" in a video course?  It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna.  But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives.  Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)

Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!

This odd dynamic continues throughout the book.  The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains.  From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it.  Who exactly are they presenting information to?  They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,

So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet.  Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful.  Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.

But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen.  Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules.  One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible".  But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic.  Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible".  "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go.  Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:

If you think about it, what did he start with?

He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy.  Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input".  But it was not comprehensible.  Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.

So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language.  But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language.  The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.

In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem.  But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better.  It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation.  And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc.  These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course.  In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*

Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration.  Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept.  Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate.  Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language.  When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious.  If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".

So Jespersen is mostly wrong.  Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.

I was down in London with work, and I had a spare half-an-hour on my way to the airport.  I was just about to head down into King's Cross-St Pancras underground when I remembered a bookshop I'd been meaning to visit.

LCL International Booksellers is on Judd St, under five minutes' walk from Kings Cross.  I walked in the door and was immediately asked if I needed help.  I didn't, so I told the shopkeepeer that I'd heard about the place and just had to see it for myself.

It was incredible.  Every nook and cranny was jammed with a bookcase and every bookcase was full.  There was every language course you could think of (except Rosetta Stone, which I think says something!) plus many you would never have realised existed, and many that don't exist any more.

I could bankrupt myself in a place like that.  What particularly intrigued me were all the CDROM courses on offer.  Now I know they'll all be rubbish -- all computer-based self-teaching packages are, but I'm just so curious about different people's ideas on how to teach languages with computers.  What ideas were lost when Transparent Language and Rosetta Stone absorbed the market?  What ideas did newer entrants to the market build on?

But in the end, there's no guarantee that I could get any of these older packages to run on a current computer, so I headed back to the "proper" book section.

So yeah, I did spend a bit of cash, but I only baught two books! (This is the first time I've ever been glad of draconian hand-baggage limitations on aeroplanes.)

This first is something I've been meaning to get for a long time -- Cronómetro.  It's a book for preparing for the Spanish DELE exams, and I picked up the advanced version.  I don't really put all that much stock in exams, but unfortunately the Open University recently aligned their marking scheme to the CEFR, and their final Spanish course is graded as B2/C1.  Now that I've got an official rating against the CEFR, I feel compelled to better it -- my ego doesn't like not reaching the highest point.  Also, I've found that various among the finer points of Spanish grammar are starting to slip away from me, so I really need to focus myself on something to get a better command of all those bits and pieces.
(I'm actually not a fan of the CEFR and I've got a couple of posts in the pipeline about the whys and wherefores, so I'll not bore you with that now.)

The second book was something a little different. It was Hippocrene Books' Beginner's Basque by Win Jansen.  I really shouldn't have bothered -- I knew that at the time -- but my judgement was impaired by a cracking occular migraine that was constantly threatening to turn the world into shards of coloured glass like you'd find in a kaleidoscope.  Talking to a shopkeeper whose head is trying to turn into a fountain of rhomboids is more than a little disorientating. (Crossing the road later was very disturbing, and walking through the tube station with a bloke from a stained glass window pacing me in my peripheral vision was also extremely bizarre.)  This book has kind of inspired me to another post on one of the big problems with dialogues in language books, but that'll come later.

Right now, I'm more interested in the place of bookshops in the modern world.  There is no specialist language bookshop in Edinburgh as far as I know, and I'm sure enough people know I would be interested that someone would have told me by now.  Many of the books in there just wouldn't get space in even the best-stocked Waterstones, so there is no way for most people to discover them.

But what about the internet, I here you cry?  I'm not hopeful.  Years ago, the big buzzword in internet economics was "the long tail".  They said that the internet would be great for the little guy by making things always available and available everywhere.  It does, but that doesn't mean that folk will buy it.

The results have been disheartening.  The internet seems to be concentrating more and more consumer power into less and less products.

Part of the problem is the problem of too much choice, and lack of the expert shop assistant.  How do you decide what to buy?  You get what everyone else is getting.

And it gets worse, because in a bookshop, you don't open up a book and see an advert for a rival book, but when I went to Amazon the other day and had a look at a course from the Michel Thomas range, I saw the following blurb in an advert for a rival product: " Tried Michel Thomas? New Spanish & French Audio Courses from Collins ".  Almost everywhere I look for information on language learning, I see adverts for Rosetta Stone (a package which is almost universally derided by serious language learners).  Hell, they even had their own display in the airport departure lounge I was in that same day.

So what is the future for language learning materials?  Will we see increased consolidation on the market leaders, or will there be greater diversification?  And in the end, does it really matter?

Word. New word. Different word.

One of the biggest problems facing many learners today is the problem of incidental vocabulary.  One of the prevailing themes in education is the preference for so-called "authentic materials".

"Authentics", to use a bit of teacherese, is just another word for "native materials".  Except you're allowed to doctor them a bit without making them less authentic.  Once you hit upper-intermediate, you will be subjected to more and more authentic materials.  Your lessons will be based around texts (that damn word again) drawn from newspapers, magazines and websites, or excerpted from novels or non-fiction books, and will be arranged in chapters based on themes like science and technology, arts, education and the like.

But there's suddenly a problem here.  Throwing together a heap of articles that are related in topic is all well and good if your goal is to study the topic, but if you are aiming to study the language, then the relationship between the articles is entirely superficial.  The structures that you are looking for just won't be there.

The simplest manifestation is in vocabulary.  Key vocabulary in that would be incidental for a native sends many a learner scuttling for his dictionary.  So a word appears once only in the article, and never again in the entire course -- that dictionary time is wasted as the learner does not learn the word.  In a textbook chapter on technology, you can switch from satellites to biometrics to textiles.  Each of these semantic domains has a vastly different stock of basic words.  The learner is left trudging through a bog of heavy, unknown words, and looking back later those are lost in a fog, never to be recalled.  A cursory look back may occur in a programmed "revision lesson", but it's a random sample of a fraction of the language covered, and usually limited to matching exercises (word+definition, sentence halves or question+answer) that tacitly admit that the student isn't capable of recalling the word without heavy prompting.

The same occurs with grammatical patterns, where a pattern may appear and be taught in one text, but then subsequent texts don't support, revise or otherwise consolidate that structure.  On the other hand, it's in the grammar that a lot of doctoring takes place, with complexity thrown out of window to make the text easier to understand.  But it is very difficult to program for increasing complexity when you're not writing the material yourself.

The end result is a lot of wasted time -- lots of material is presented to the learner, and little retained.  The goal of exposing the student to native materials slows down the learning process, and in effect means that students may leave the course less well equipped to deal with native materials than they otherwise would be.

But wait... there's more!
There is a secondary consequence of this.

The reliance on themed material favours the well educated, because they are more likely to have knowledge of the topic under discussion, and in many language pairs, the terminology will be very similar.  For example,  "biometrics" in French is "la biométrie".  This particular example came up in my last French course, and my classmates were confused by it, but as I already know a few things about biometrics, there was nothing in the articles themselves that challenged me.
The well educated and well read get better marks, and we justify this with by accepting that people who have done well in the past are "good students" and that those who haven't aren't.  This is only marginally better than the old fallacy of equating education and intelligence.
But in reality, whether the historically "good" students are genuinely better than those without a good history of attainment, that's a side issue.  The material presented favours those who really have the least need for favours.  In my book that's a bad thing.

It's particularly worrying to me that the course I was studying is with an institute of higher education that takes pride in the fact that it makes learning available to everyone, regardless of educational background.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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