A somewhat left-field theory on the discrepancy between learner performance in the written and spoken modes

In the post 4 skills safe, I argued that writing could be carried out using declarative memory, but that procedural memory was required during speech, but there may still be more to it than that, and I have a theory.  Feel free to tell me I'm crazy - it doesn't deny what I said about declarative vs procedural memory in the first place.

I have been told when you are reading, your eye scans each word on average three times.  This is because the written sentence is missing many important cues we would have in the spoken form, and it needs information from the context to reconstruct the full meaning.  And this is in your own language, so what must it be like in a foreign language you're not fluent in yet?  Your eyes dart backwards and forwards across the page as you try to decode the meaning, and in the end, without realising it, you develop the habit of reading in the wrong order.  You could be faced with a French sentence like:

Je le lui ai dit

and your brain might decide to jiggle the order round until it's reading the same as English:

*Je ai dit lui le

Why would the brain do that?  Because it already knows English, so it's easier that way. The thing is, you won't necessarily be consciously aware you're doing it, and the only way to ever find out that you are might be to head to your local uni's language science department for an eye-tracking study.

Well actually, maybe not, because if you're reading in the wrong order, you're probably going to... (drum roll please)... try to speak in the wrong order, because you end up creating a procedural knowledge of grammar based on your reading style.  And guess what?  Yup, lots of learners do indeed try to speak in the wrong order.

So what appears superficially to be a good "reading skill" is actually flawed reading, bad reading, disordered reading.  We celebrate a student's success in reading as motivation when they're not doing well in speaking, but in isolating and rewarding reading as a single "skill", we may actually be encouraging and reinforcing the very behaviour that is limiting their spoken fluency.

That can't be right, though, because they're still writing in the correct order!

Well yes, but the brain is subtle, and writing is a very slow activity compared to speaking or signing, so it has a hell of a lot more time and freedom.  The thing is that whatever language you're writing in, native or foreign, your brain is likely to be several words ahead of your hand.  This is where it gets twisted.  In theory, the brain has enough time to recall the words in the wrong order and then shuffle them about spacially to write them down.  As a skill, this would be good enough and fast enough for writing, but would not transfer into speaking; it may even prejudice against proper speaking.  By isolating and rewarding writing as a single "skill", we may again be encouraging and reinforcing a problematic behaviour.  I may be wrong, but without testing it, is this a risk we want to take?

And this time we can't even use eye-tracking software to detect the problem, because everything goes on inside the brain.

Except that there is one very subtle clue that comes along a little down the road: some people's grammar is great in a short sentences, but even simple grammar is beyond them when the sentence grows in length and complexity.  Traditional thinking puts this down as simply being "a difficult sentence", but really, it's just a combination of language points* that we have already taught and tested to our satisfaction.  If the students know the rules, why do they fail to combine them.

What if what we're really seeing is the writer running out of working memory or time?  If learners do indeed recall the structure out-of-order and reconstruct it on the fly, then it stands to reason that they will quite quickly fill up their working memory once they have to hold something in it while constructing a complex phrase, or even an embedded clause.

I think a good example is the difference in how German and English handle defining clauses (and you'll have to forgive me if this isn't quite right as I've not learned German properly yet.  Corrections gratefully received.)

I would like to buy the book you like.
Ich möchte das Buch kaufen, das Sie mögen.

Here we have a slight crossover as "the book" and "to buy" switch places.  But (as I understand it) it's actually that book in German, and the that is repeated after "to buy".  This means that "the book you like" is split up, and if you're trying to hold the whole structure in working memory, you'll be taxing your memory.

And it gets worse as you add in more information, as German lets you insert things in a multitude of ways that I'm personally not comfortable with yet.  And if its "the book you told me about yesterday", it gets even messier...
And thus the "out-of-order recall" strategy that was initally the simplest strategy for the brain to follow becomes unworkable and a barrier to further learning.

Consequences for teaching

Now first of all, I'll stress that it's just a theory and so any change of teaching practices should balance "what if he's right" with "what if he's wrong".  Furthermore, I'm not claiming that this is an inevitable consequence of certain teaching methods, but that certain teaching methods open the possibily that a student develops these flawed strategies.

What I want, therefore, is for teachers to work to reduce the possibility for students to develop suboptimal or counter-productive strategies.  I suggest this can be done by adopting two simple principles:

1. Students should be made to produce spoken language of equal or greater complexity to their written language from the beginning.  This way the student is forced to adopt a strategy suited to spoken language.
2. Language should be integrated with previously-taught language points early and often.

This second principle I cannot stress enough.  I was once made to teach children from a book in which each unit consisted of two 1-hour lessons.  The first lesson taught a verb structure in the positive declarative (=statement) form, and the second lesson introduced the negative declarative and the positive interrogative (=question) forms.  But the structures taught included such things as "I used to ", and the negative and interrogative forms taught were fully regular ("I didn't use to..." & "Did you use to...?") so could have been dealt with from the word go.  Neither lesson integrated with the present tense or the past simple to produce sentences such as "I used to play football, but I don't anymore" or "I used to play tennis but I stopped a year ago".  These are sentences that any learner at that level should be able to produce, yet we often delay them, and students are left without the confidence or competence required to use these straightforward conversational devices.

Footnote: Why did I come up with this crackpot theory?

When I started doing written grammar drills in Spanish, I found myself frequently missing the object pronoun then writing it in afterwards (object pronouns appear before the verb in Spanish, like in French).  I got better at doing this, until I was thinking a few words ahead of my pen by a word or two.  So I was still thinking of the verb before I had thought of the pronoun, and in the end I made a conscious effort to stop doing this and I refuse to put pen to paper for as long as my brain tried to put the verb first.

That's a sample size of one, so doesn't really prove anything.  But it does give a plausible mechanism for observed data, and one of my big problems with much of the writing on language that I've read is that in general, mechanisms are rather vague and hand-wavy.  Empirical data is all well and good, but all too often what is recorded is merely the tasks given to the students and the end result -- the process followed by the student is rarely tracked.

If anyone knows of an eyetracking experiment that has explored this, I'd be interested to know.  And if anyone fancies studying it as a masters thesis, let me know how you get on!


* "Language point" is a catch-all term for vocabulary items, fixed phrases, grammatical rules, etc.

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:

1. The other person doesn't want to be rude, so continues to nod politely rather than cause potential embarrassment by commenting.
2. 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.
3. The other person understands you, so doesn't see the need to mention the error.
4. The mistake is noticed and mentioned but not corrected, because the other person suffers what is known as "language blindness".

Each of these is troublesome in different ways.

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.)

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.)

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.