So I've been setting lots of speaking tasks in class recently, and I've had a chance to test out a bit of received wisdom that was passed on to me in my training, and appears in various books etc. It is said that giving students the opportunity to script a speaking task helps build confidence and ability for later spontaneous production.
My experience is slightly different. What I see again and again is students crippled by indecision. I hear them sitting discussing (in French) what to write, and almost invariably deciding that they can't write that. They agree on a great many things that they can't write, and very few that they can. If it takes more than a quarter of an hour to script a minute or two of dialogue, I can't see how that will be of any use to them in later spontaneous production.
I don't think I'll be doing a great many of this type of exercise in the future....
Showing posts with label production. Show all posts
Showing posts with label production. Show all posts
09 November 2012
14 August 2011
Phonology -- whats and hows part II
Last time, I wrote about phonology and the necessity of physically training the tongue to produce new sounds. However, as I pointed out, not all new phonemes require new physical skills. Can we pick these up just by listening? I think not, and I'd be happy to tell you how.
Meaningful sounds
The problem that I'm always trying to stress is that the brain is only interested in meaningful input -- if something has no meaning, the brain isn't interested.
This leads to some striking (and often unexpected) results. The BBC documentary Horizon showed this with colours in the programme Do You See What I See? (UK only). In the program, you see several Himba tribespeople trying to pick out different colours on a computer screen. The show two tests -- one with a very slightly different green, which is difficult for the viewer and fairly easy for the Himba, and one with an obviously different colour... well, obvious to us, but not to the Himba.
The distinctions that the Himba find easy are ones that they have names for, and the distinctions we find easy are the ones we have names for. It would appear that the act of naming something focuses the consciousness on it, so if you tell me that a French P has a puffy sound, I'm more likely to notice it, because I know what I'm looking for.
Consider the old face/vase optical illusion: the first time you look at it, you see either the faces or the vase, and your brain fixates on that single image. If someone else tells you about the other picture, you struggle to see it at first, because your brain already sees something meaningful in the image. But once your brain finally sees the second image, you can change your mental focus between the two meaningful images at will.
But that example doesn't say much about subjectivity and objectivity, because the two objects are fairly arbitrary. A better example would be one where you can predict what the viewer will see based on simple demographic information. Maybe adults vs children, like this painting, where adults immediately see a particular image and children see a different one. (View the picture, and then read the explanation on the page. I saw the second picture without reading the explanation, but only because I could understand the French label on the bottle....)
So what is meaningful to us is normally a matter of past experience and expectation. When it comes to meaningful sounds, past experience and expectation all comes from the languages we already speak. So it would follow that we need to consciously draw the student's attention to the differences, or they're just not likely to notice them.
What do we need to draw their attention to?
The phoneme is not the minimal unit of sound
The phoneme is often mistakenly considered the atomic unit of pronunciation in a language, but most languages build their phonemes out of a series of distinctions, in a fairly systematic manner.
In English, for example, we have voicing of consonants as a distinction, and it occurs pretty much wherever it can. Voicing is the difference between P & B (at the front of the mouth), T & D (in the middle) and C/K & G (at the back). We also have nasalisation, which takes those three pairs and gives us the sounds M, N and NG. It's a stable and systematic structure.
There are other languages (EG Gaelic) where the distinction between P & B is not one of voicing, but aspiration. The same distinction carries through for P&B and T&D. In fact, it's hard to find any language that has a voicing distinction on one of those pairs, but makes a distinction in aspiration -- in general, the same distinction carries through.
Polish gives a great example of how regular these consonant distinctions can be.
In the diagram above, you can see a clear structure uniting 12 sounds in 3 distinctions (two 2-way distinctions, one 3-way distinction). It's almost entirely systematic -- this cannot happen by accident, so we must assume that the native speaker's internal model of language acts on the level of these distinctions.
For this reason, I believe that it is not enough to draw the learner's attention to an individual phoneme, but that we must teach them the individual distinctions.
This doesn't have to be done in a dry "linguistics" way, though.
Teach once, then repeat
When teaching a phonemic distinction like voicing or aspiration, you don't need to start with the idea in the abstract. Instead, you can start by teaching the pronunciation of one letter, then its contrast (eg P first, then B). In teaching the contrast, you pick a word that describes it ("puffiness" or "breathiness" is more meaningful than "aspiration") or you just describe it. Then when you move onto the next pair (T,D), you can refer back to the first pair, because it's the same difference. And once you get to the final pair (K,G), it'll be very easy to do.
Of course, this means that you have to restrict the number of phonemes to start off with, but there are many people who are theoretically in favour of gradually introducing phonemes -- it's just the order of material that messes them up.
Teaching one thing at a time
Most teachers like to start with seemingly useful words and phrases. Hello, how are you, goodbye -- that sort of thing. This takes away the teacher's control over the phonemes -- teachers don't choose them, they just use whichever ones pop up.
Worse, quite a lot of teachers will introduce numbers early on, and in many languages you'll have encountered half of the phonemes of the language by the time you reach ten. (This probably isn't an accident -- ambiguity in numbers would be a problem, so they naturally evolve to be fairly different.)
One commercial course points out this problem, and suggests that the way round it is to teach numbers one at a time, in a way which supports a progressive increase in the number of phonemes. The example they used was 10 and 100 in Spanish: diez and cien. These two words share all but one phoneme (C before I or E is pronounced the same as Z in Spanish), so if you teach one then the other, you're only introducing one phoneme the second time round.
(I think I remember which course this was, but the blurb on the website no longer mentions this, so I'm not going to link to it.)
And after all, why should we teach numbers in numerical order in a second language? When teaching children numbers in their first language, we're teaching both the concepts and the words, but in a second language you're only teaching the words, because they've already got the appropriate concepts to peg them to. We can now selectively use any of those pegs we want to, in any order we want to.
Putting it together
So if we teach a couple of consonants well, and then we introduce new consonants one by one, we can use the earlier consonants as an anchor to show repeated distinctions. It doesn't matter whether the student can consciously remember what those distinctions were -- a native speaker normally wouldn't have a clue. What matters is that the model the student uses automatically for pronunciation implicitly respects the consistent rules of the language.
This will not happen if the student is left to listen, because one misheard phoneme can threaten the integrity of the entire structure -- pull any one of the sounds out of my neat little Polish diagram and dump it somewhere else and the whole thing will collapse.
Next time
Previously I spoke about sounds as new muscle movements, today I spoke about simply the meaning of sounds. Next time, I'd like to demonstrate how almost all new sounds really are new physical movements anyway.
Last time, I wrote about phonology and the necessity of physically training the tongue to produce new sounds. However, as I pointed out, not all new phonemes require new physical skills. Can we pick these up just by listening? I think not, and I'd be happy to tell you how.
Meaningful sounds
The problem that I'm always trying to stress is that the brain is only interested in meaningful input -- if something has no meaning, the brain isn't interested.
This leads to some striking (and often unexpected) results. The BBC documentary Horizon showed this with colours in the programme Do You See What I See? (UK only). In the program, you see several Himba tribespeople trying to pick out different colours on a computer screen. The show two tests -- one with a very slightly different green, which is difficult for the viewer and fairly easy for the Himba, and one with an obviously different colour... well, obvious to us, but not to the Himba.
The distinctions that the Himba find easy are ones that they have names for, and the distinctions we find easy are the ones we have names for. It would appear that the act of naming something focuses the consciousness on it, so if you tell me that a French P has a puffy sound, I'm more likely to notice it, because I know what I'm looking for.
Consider the old face/vase optical illusion: the first time you look at it, you see either the faces or the vase, and your brain fixates on that single image. If someone else tells you about the other picture, you struggle to see it at first, because your brain already sees something meaningful in the image. But once your brain finally sees the second image, you can change your mental focus between the two meaningful images at will.
But that example doesn't say much about subjectivity and objectivity, because the two objects are fairly arbitrary. A better example would be one where you can predict what the viewer will see based on simple demographic information. Maybe adults vs children, like this painting, where adults immediately see a particular image and children see a different one. (View the picture, and then read the explanation on the page. I saw the second picture without reading the explanation, but only because I could understand the French label on the bottle....)
So what is meaningful to us is normally a matter of past experience and expectation. When it comes to meaningful sounds, past experience and expectation all comes from the languages we already speak. So it would follow that we need to consciously draw the student's attention to the differences, or they're just not likely to notice them.
What do we need to draw their attention to?
The phoneme is not the minimal unit of sound
The phoneme is often mistakenly considered the atomic unit of pronunciation in a language, but most languages build their phonemes out of a series of distinctions, in a fairly systematic manner.
In English, for example, we have voicing of consonants as a distinction, and it occurs pretty much wherever it can. Voicing is the difference between P & B (at the front of the mouth), T & D (in the middle) and C/K & G (at the back). We also have nasalisation, which takes those three pairs and gives us the sounds M, N and NG. It's a stable and systematic structure.
There are other languages (EG Gaelic) where the distinction between P & B is not one of voicing, but aspiration. The same distinction carries through for P&B and T&D. In fact, it's hard to find any language that has a voicing distinction on one of those pairs, but makes a distinction in aspiration -- in general, the same distinction carries through.
Polish gives a great example of how regular these consonant distinctions can be.
For this reason, I believe that it is not enough to draw the learner's attention to an individual phoneme, but that we must teach them the individual distinctions.
This doesn't have to be done in a dry "linguistics" way, though.
Teach once, then repeat
When teaching a phonemic distinction like voicing or aspiration, you don't need to start with the idea in the abstract. Instead, you can start by teaching the pronunciation of one letter, then its contrast (eg P first, then B). In teaching the contrast, you pick a word that describes it ("puffiness" or "breathiness" is more meaningful than "aspiration") or you just describe it. Then when you move onto the next pair (T,D), you can refer back to the first pair, because it's the same difference. And once you get to the final pair (K,G), it'll be very easy to do.
Of course, this means that you have to restrict the number of phonemes to start off with, but there are many people who are theoretically in favour of gradually introducing phonemes -- it's just the order of material that messes them up.
Teaching one thing at a time
Most teachers like to start with seemingly useful words and phrases. Hello, how are you, goodbye -- that sort of thing. This takes away the teacher's control over the phonemes -- teachers don't choose them, they just use whichever ones pop up.
Worse, quite a lot of teachers will introduce numbers early on, and in many languages you'll have encountered half of the phonemes of the language by the time you reach ten. (This probably isn't an accident -- ambiguity in numbers would be a problem, so they naturally evolve to be fairly different.)
One commercial course points out this problem, and suggests that the way round it is to teach numbers one at a time, in a way which supports a progressive increase in the number of phonemes. The example they used was 10 and 100 in Spanish: diez and cien. These two words share all but one phoneme (C before I or E is pronounced the same as Z in Spanish), so if you teach one then the other, you're only introducing one phoneme the second time round.
(I think I remember which course this was, but the blurb on the website no longer mentions this, so I'm not going to link to it.)
And after all, why should we teach numbers in numerical order in a second language? When teaching children numbers in their first language, we're teaching both the concepts and the words, but in a second language you're only teaching the words, because they've already got the appropriate concepts to peg them to. We can now selectively use any of those pegs we want to, in any order we want to.
Putting it together
So if we teach a couple of consonants well, and then we introduce new consonants one by one, we can use the earlier consonants as an anchor to show repeated distinctions. It doesn't matter whether the student can consciously remember what those distinctions were -- a native speaker normally wouldn't have a clue. What matters is that the model the student uses automatically for pronunciation implicitly respects the consistent rules of the language.
This will not happen if the student is left to listen, because one misheard phoneme can threaten the integrity of the entire structure -- pull any one of the sounds out of my neat little Polish diagram and dump it somewhere else and the whole thing will collapse.
Next time
Previously I spoke about sounds as new muscle movements, today I spoke about simply the meaning of sounds. Next time, I'd like to demonstrate how almost all new sounds really are new physical movements anyway.
10 August 2011
Phonology -- whats and hows
A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the importance of phonology, trying to demonstrate why it should be consciously dealt with in the teaching/learning process, but I took the decision not to include any comments on how to teach it in that article. Basically, I didn't want to give anyone any grounds to reject my argument out-of-hand. In this post, I'd like to cover how I believe it should be taught, but remember that this, the how, doesn't affect my argument on the importance, the why. Reject my methods if you want, but please don't reject phonology as an area of study.
So, what did I establish in the previous post?
Can we learn pronunciation from listening?
Some even argue that we learn pronunciation from hearing (and they sometimes add "just like children"). However, as I tried to demonstrate in my recent post receptive skills as a reflective act, there is good reason to believe that we understand language by comparison to our own internal model of the language. In the follow-up post, I gave a concrete example of mishearing a word on Italian radio, and how my flawed internal model was good enough to understand the message without perceiving every sound.
OK, so that's anecdotal and doesn't prove a general case, but ask yourself this: how many different accents can you understand in your own language? And how many of those accents can you speak in?
So you can see that simple exposure hasn't given you extra accents. As I said above, accent is not phonology. But our brains have learned to ignore accental differences (to an extent) to enable us to understand the widest possible number of people around us. So if our brain assumes a different phonology is just a different accent, it throws away all the information you're supposed to be learning from.
So I really don't believe it's possible to learn from "just listening", no matter how much you do.
Motherese and exaggeration
Here's the outcome of an interesting study (YouTube video). It turns out that when we teach kids to speak, we don't expect them to learn from natural speech, but we exaggerate our phonemes, effectively making them "more real than real" or "whiter than white". And if you think about it, isn't this what we do when speaking to foreigners or people with a very different accent from ours?
The point is that we have to make the differences clear and noticeable, so that one phoneme doesn't blend into another.
I would suggest that this points towards the right answer in language teaching to adults: if even children (who have no preconceptions of what a phoneme is) need extra emphasis to understand the difference between similar phonemes, then us adults (who are biased towards our native language's phonology) really could do with a bit of help. The brain has to be told that this new information is useful, or it will throw it all away.
Exaggeration of pronunciation appears to help the listener notice the differences.
Learning pronunciation through pronouncing
However, we learn to dance by dancing, and we learn to drive by driving. In both cases we can pick up a few hints and tips from watching, but we need a heck of a lot of practice. Why shouldn't this be the case with language?
People are very quick to tell me that language is different from every other skill. That is a valid opinion, but it is still only an opinion - no-one has ever presented anything to me that demonstrates it to be true, or even likely. Right now, it's just a theory... and it's one I do not believe.
To me, pronunciation is a muscle skill. Let's consider some of the extremes sounds that don't occur in English.
Take retroflex consonants. Retro - backwards; flex - bend. In retroflex consonants, your tongue bends backwards, and the tip goes behind the alveolar ridge. This type of sound doesn't occur in English, so a monolingual English-speaker will probably never produce this sound in his life. If you ask such a person to put their tongue into that position, they won't be able to -- their tongue just can't bend that way.
But then your average person couldn't do yoga postures on a first attempt either -- the yoga teacher will lead them through some simple postures and exercises to encourage the muscles to stretch and strengthen appropriately until they are capable of performing the required movements.
The brain doesn't prepare the muscles just because you've seen the movements; the body prepares the muscles once you've started doing the movements. Your brain similarly cannot train the tongue as it's just another muscle, after all -- only the body can do that.
So clearly, there are certain sounds that must be taught consciously, or the learner won't physically be able to say it. But obviously there are also sounds that the learner is physically capable of saying, but isn't in the habit of saying.
This post is starting to get a bit on the long side, so I'll come back to the question of this second category of sounds next time.
How I learned to pronounce retroflex consonants
I had a notion to learn a few words in various Indian languages a few years ago when I was working in IT support. Our front-line helpdesk was in India and I wanted to try to build a better rapport with my coworkers.
One of the sources I used stated quite plainly that while languages like French and Spanish let you get away with "close enough" pronunciation (not entirely true...) with Hindi, you would simply not be understood if you spoke in an English-speaker's accent. It described the retroflex articulation and what I did was to start doing a regime of "tongue stretches" -- as I walked to and from work, I would tap my tongue continually off the roof of my mouth, and move it slowly backwards and forwards, to create a sort of silent T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t or D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Every day I could reach slightly further back, and in about a week and a half I was able to produce a convincingly Hindi-like retroflex for all of the various consonants (except R, cos that's really quite complicated). I was curious about how far I could go, and within another few days I'd got to the point where I could touch the tip of my tongue to my soft palate.
So certain sounds need to be learned physically, and it's something that can be done. Next time, I'll start looking at sounds that are more a matter of habit, and showing that the boundary between "habit" and "ability" isn't always that clear.
A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the importance of phonology, trying to demonstrate why it should be consciously dealt with in the teaching/learning process, but I took the decision not to include any comments on how to teach it in that article. Basically, I didn't want to give anyone any grounds to reject my argument out-of-hand. In this post, I'd like to cover how I believe it should be taught, but remember that this, the how, doesn't affect my argument on the importance, the why. Reject my methods if you want, but please don't reject phonology as an area of study.
So, what did I establish in the previous post?
- Incorrect pronunciation of an individual phoneme leads to problems in pronouncing clusters with that phoneme.
- Problems in pronouncing certain sequences of phonemes lead to grammatical errors.
- That vocabulary is harder to learn when you're not familiar with the rules of pronunciation in a language.
- That not understanding target language phoneme boundaries makes it hard to understand native speakers.
- That sounds that the learner drops in speech are often matched by a dropping of the corresponding letters in writing.
Can we learn pronunciation from listening?
Some even argue that we learn pronunciation from hearing (and they sometimes add "just like children"). However, as I tried to demonstrate in my recent post receptive skills as a reflective act, there is good reason to believe that we understand language by comparison to our own internal model of the language. In the follow-up post, I gave a concrete example of mishearing a word on Italian radio, and how my flawed internal model was good enough to understand the message without perceiving every sound.
OK, so that's anecdotal and doesn't prove a general case, but ask yourself this: how many different accents can you understand in your own language? And how many of those accents can you speak in?
So you can see that simple exposure hasn't given you extra accents. As I said above, accent is not phonology. But our brains have learned to ignore accental differences (to an extent) to enable us to understand the widest possible number of people around us. So if our brain assumes a different phonology is just a different accent, it throws away all the information you're supposed to be learning from.
So I really don't believe it's possible to learn from "just listening", no matter how much you do.
Motherese and exaggeration
Here's the outcome of an interesting study (YouTube video). It turns out that when we teach kids to speak, we don't expect them to learn from natural speech, but we exaggerate our phonemes, effectively making them "more real than real" or "whiter than white". And if you think about it, isn't this what we do when speaking to foreigners or people with a very different accent from ours?
The point is that we have to make the differences clear and noticeable, so that one phoneme doesn't blend into another.
I would suggest that this points towards the right answer in language teaching to adults: if even children (who have no preconceptions of what a phoneme is) need extra emphasis to understand the difference between similar phonemes, then us adults (who are biased towards our native language's phonology) really could do with a bit of help. The brain has to be told that this new information is useful, or it will throw it all away.
Exaggeration of pronunciation appears to help the listener notice the differences.
Learning pronunciation through pronouncing
However, we learn to dance by dancing, and we learn to drive by driving. In both cases we can pick up a few hints and tips from watching, but we need a heck of a lot of practice. Why shouldn't this be the case with language?
People are very quick to tell me that language is different from every other skill. That is a valid opinion, but it is still only an opinion - no-one has ever presented anything to me that demonstrates it to be true, or even likely. Right now, it's just a theory... and it's one I do not believe.
To me, pronunciation is a muscle skill. Let's consider some of the extremes sounds that don't occur in English.
Take retroflex consonants. Retro - backwards; flex - bend. In retroflex consonants, your tongue bends backwards, and the tip goes behind the alveolar ridge. This type of sound doesn't occur in English, so a monolingual English-speaker will probably never produce this sound in his life. If you ask such a person to put their tongue into that position, they won't be able to -- their tongue just can't bend that way.
But then your average person couldn't do yoga postures on a first attempt either -- the yoga teacher will lead them through some simple postures and exercises to encourage the muscles to stretch and strengthen appropriately until they are capable of performing the required movements.
The brain doesn't prepare the muscles just because you've seen the movements; the body prepares the muscles once you've started doing the movements. Your brain similarly cannot train the tongue as it's just another muscle, after all -- only the body can do that.
So clearly, there are certain sounds that must be taught consciously, or the learner won't physically be able to say it. But obviously there are also sounds that the learner is physically capable of saying, but isn't in the habit of saying.
This post is starting to get a bit on the long side, so I'll come back to the question of this second category of sounds next time.
How I learned to pronounce retroflex consonants
I had a notion to learn a few words in various Indian languages a few years ago when I was working in IT support. Our front-line helpdesk was in India and I wanted to try to build a better rapport with my coworkers.
One of the sources I used stated quite plainly that while languages like French and Spanish let you get away with "close enough" pronunciation (not entirely true...) with Hindi, you would simply not be understood if you spoke in an English-speaker's accent. It described the retroflex articulation and what I did was to start doing a regime of "tongue stretches" -- as I walked to and from work, I would tap my tongue continually off the roof of my mouth, and move it slowly backwards and forwards, to create a sort of silent T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t or D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Every day I could reach slightly further back, and in about a week and a half I was able to produce a convincingly Hindi-like retroflex for all of the various consonants (except R, cos that's really quite complicated). I was curious about how far I could go, and within another few days I'd got to the point where I could touch the tip of my tongue to my soft palate.
So certain sounds need to be learned physically, and it's something that can be done. Next time, I'll start looking at sounds that are more a matter of habit, and showing that the boundary between "habit" and "ability" isn't always that clear.
21 July 2011
Receptive skills as a reflective act
I'm not feeling my usual self this week. I've got an infection under a fingernail, so it's a bit sore to type, which makes it hard to concentrate. It's leading to silly mistakes in everything I do, so I'm going to avoid the complex topic I'd planned to write about this week (phonology) and stick to something a bit less involved.
A couple of weeks ago, in my post 4 skills safe, I suggested that the comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that we understand by considering what would cause us to say the sentence we've just heard or read.
Now, I mentioned mirror neuron theory, and my Dad said to me at the weekend "you'd better have a better explanation than that." My Dad taught in a high school up until retiring, and one constant throughout his career was that new teaching fashions would always be justified by the latest idea from psychology, but that it was all theory, no practice.
Now I can't offer anything in the way of empirical research, only anecdote. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes that I offer will be universal enough that other teachers will see the same phenomena occurring in their own students.
Let's just briefly revisit what I said last time (minus the bit about mirror neurons):
OK, so now let's move to anecdote.
Last night, I was at a language exchange (Spanish and English). I was talking to a young woman called Cristina who I've spoken to on several occasions. At one point she was concentrating so hard on what I was saying (in English) that she actually started mouthing the words. Not the trembling lip of the neurological condition I mentioned before, she was literally mouthing the words. It was a conscious act.
Now let's contrast this with reading, because I think reading aloud offers the best indication of language as reflection.
The first time I really noticed this was with a student in San Sebastian back in 2007. Most of his peers read robotically when asked to read aloud -- What - I - Mean - Is - That -They - Would - Pronounce - Each - Word - Dist - inc - tly - And - Careful - ly. This guy was different. He spoke with natural flow and good intonation... but he didn't read what was on the page. Specifically, he got his prepositions wrong. Not wrong in a random way, though -- he simply substituted the preposition he would use for the word on the page.
Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone -- studies of native language reading have established that most prepositions (and in fact many function words) aren't actually "read" by fluent readers. Instead, the brain simply notices a "small word" and works it out from the context.
I've since seen multiple variations on this theme -- I had one student who kept reading "attitude" as the Spanish "actitud" with the English stress pattern imposed on it ("áctitud" or "acteetood", more or less), and one who adds an S to "sort of thing", to match the pluralisation of the Spanish phrase "tipo de cosas".
But this is reading, and as I said last week, that's not a core language skill (incidentally, since then I've found that Lev Vygotsky described speaking and reading as "second-order abstractions" -- I wish I'd had that quote when I wrote the post). However, it does demonstrate how much preconceptions can affect our perceptions.
So will this hold in the spoken mode?
First, consider that language generally has a high degree of redundancy. Even if a noise obscures part of a sentence, you often still manage to understand the sentence. If you compare "attitude" with "áctitud", in my accent there are three perceptible differences: English has the C, the schwa in the middle syllable (possibly i-schwa), and the Y-glide in the final syllable. In many accents (mostly American), there isn't even a Y-glide, so there's only two differences. There is no other word that similar, so the "filter of perception" will probably let it through without really caring about the differences.
The same goes for the "sort of things". If a Spanish person understands me when I say "sort of thing", I cannot take it as granted that he perceived it without an erroneous final S. His brain may simply have assumed it is missing. This is a particular issue for Spanish, as in some dialects, a final -S may be dropped completely*, so it would be very easy for a Spanish speaker to percieve the word "thing" as "things" if context suggested this.
What are the consequences for the teacher or learner?
Assuming this is true (and I accept that many readers will believe otherwise), the consequences are pretty profound. If our perception of received input is altered to match our existing internal model of language, then no amount of input alone will lead to perfection in a language. The internal model can only be rebuilt by some directed process.
The success of some students in "silent period"-style environments doesn't disprove this - such a student may well have succeeded through an active analysis of the input, rather than simply through the sheer volume of input.
* This is less common than many Spanish speakers think. Most "dropped Ses" are in fact [s] phonemes realised by an aspirant allophone (/h/) or a hiatus. And here again the filter of perception comes into play -- there is no [h] phoneme in Spanish, so even some native speakers don't seem to notice the /h/ sound in something like "rastos" (=rahhtohh) and appear unable to distinguish it from "rato"
I'm not feeling my usual self this week. I've got an infection under a fingernail, so it's a bit sore to type, which makes it hard to concentrate. It's leading to silly mistakes in everything I do, so I'm going to avoid the complex topic I'd planned to write about this week (phonology) and stick to something a bit less involved.
A couple of weeks ago, in my post 4 skills safe, I suggested that the comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that we understand by considering what would cause us to say the sentence we've just heard or read.
Now, I mentioned mirror neuron theory, and my Dad said to me at the weekend "you'd better have a better explanation than that." My Dad taught in a high school up until retiring, and one constant throughout his career was that new teaching fashions would always be justified by the latest idea from psychology, but that it was all theory, no practice.
Now I can't offer anything in the way of empirical research, only anecdote. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes that I offer will be universal enough that other teachers will see the same phenomena occurring in their own students.
Let's just briefly revisit what I said last time (minus the bit about mirror neurons):
- People often finish each other's sentences. To do so they must be actively constructing the utterance as they go.
- People often mistakenly say that they've said something, when actually it was someone else who said it, and they only heard it. So we identify very closely with sentences we hear (and agree with), suggesting a very close link between the mental process behind listening and that of speaking.
- There exists a (fairly harmless) neurological disorder which causes someone's lip to tremble when they're being spoken to, and they often echo the last word of your sentences (often suffixed with "uh-huh" for assent). For these people merely listening activates the physical speech organs.
OK, so now let's move to anecdote.
Last night, I was at a language exchange (Spanish and English). I was talking to a young woman called Cristina who I've spoken to on several occasions. At one point she was concentrating so hard on what I was saying (in English) that she actually started mouthing the words. Not the trembling lip of the neurological condition I mentioned before, she was literally mouthing the words. It was a conscious act.
Now let's contrast this with reading, because I think reading aloud offers the best indication of language as reflection.
The first time I really noticed this was with a student in San Sebastian back in 2007. Most of his peers read robotically when asked to read aloud -- What - I - Mean - Is - That -They - Would - Pronounce - Each - Word - Dist - inc - tly - And - Careful - ly. This guy was different. He spoke with natural flow and good intonation... but he didn't read what was on the page. Specifically, he got his prepositions wrong. Not wrong in a random way, though -- he simply substituted the preposition he would use for the word on the page.
Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone -- studies of native language reading have established that most prepositions (and in fact many function words) aren't actually "read" by fluent readers. Instead, the brain simply notices a "small word" and works it out from the context.
I've since seen multiple variations on this theme -- I had one student who kept reading "attitude" as the Spanish "actitud" with the English stress pattern imposed on it ("áctitud" or "acteetood", more or less), and one who adds an S to "sort of thing", to match the pluralisation of the Spanish phrase "tipo de cosas".
But this is reading, and as I said last week, that's not a core language skill (incidentally, since then I've found that Lev Vygotsky described speaking and reading as "second-order abstractions" -- I wish I'd had that quote when I wrote the post). However, it does demonstrate how much preconceptions can affect our perceptions.
So will this hold in the spoken mode?
First, consider that language generally has a high degree of redundancy. Even if a noise obscures part of a sentence, you often still manage to understand the sentence. If you compare "attitude" with "áctitud", in my accent there are three perceptible differences: English has the C, the schwa in the middle syllable (possibly i-schwa), and the Y-glide in the final syllable. In many accents (mostly American), there isn't even a Y-glide, so there's only two differences. There is no other word that similar, so the "filter of perception" will probably let it through without really caring about the differences.
The same goes for the "sort of things". If a Spanish person understands me when I say "sort of thing", I cannot take it as granted that he perceived it without an erroneous final S. His brain may simply have assumed it is missing. This is a particular issue for Spanish, as in some dialects, a final -S may be dropped completely*, so it would be very easy for a Spanish speaker to percieve the word "thing" as "things" if context suggested this.
What are the consequences for the teacher or learner?
Assuming this is true (and I accept that many readers will believe otherwise), the consequences are pretty profound. If our perception of received input is altered to match our existing internal model of language, then no amount of input alone will lead to perfection in a language. The internal model can only be rebuilt by some directed process.
The success of some students in "silent period"-style environments doesn't disprove this - such a student may well have succeeded through an active analysis of the input, rather than simply through the sheer volume of input.
* This is less common than many Spanish speakers think. Most "dropped Ses" are in fact [s] phonemes realised by an aspirant allophone (/h/) or a hiatus. And here again the filter of perception comes into play -- there is no [h] phoneme in Spanish, so even some native speakers don't seem to notice the /h/ sound in something like "rastos" (=rahhtohh) and appear unable to distinguish it from "rato"
08 July 2011
4 skills safe
It is common in language circles to talk about the "4 skills" of language learning: speaking, listening, reading and writing. These skills can be categorised as receptive vs productive and spoken mode vs written mode, and you often get this represented in a neat little diagram like this:
This looks very tidy and regular, and there's nothing we like better in language than tidyness and regularity. But yet language is never tidy, and language is very rarely truly regular, so we must suspect that there's something wrong with this diagram.
Really, this analysis of language is superficial to the point of uselessness. These 4 things are not skills at all, but the basic categories of language use, each category requiring multiple skills. The actual skills of language are far more subtle and far more fundamental, and there is a massive amount of shared skill between these activities than is apparent when we elevate these mere "activities" to the status of "skill".
Where does this idea of "skills" come from?
It is obvious and undeniable that some students find it easier to speak, and others find it easier to write. I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of students find reading easier than listening in a foreign language.
There is a great temptation therefore to say that what people find difficult is a "difficult skill" and leave it at that, but that is to shortchange the student, because these high level "skills" distract us from drilling down and finding the underlying core skills, and identifying which of them is the root of the problem. What gets measured gets managed, to quote a business-speak proverb, and when we identify the problem as simply "listening", we really don't get much of a clue how to fix it.
Try to suggest a spoken-only class and most teachers will throw up their hands and declare that we simply must teach all 4 skills, or we are doing our students a disservice. But are we? What if focussing on these 4 skills independently is one of the reasons many people have difficulties with language?
What are the real skills of language?
I would suggest the broadest useful four skills we have are syntax, morphology, phonology and orthography.
Syntax: how we build sentences out of words.
Morphology: how we build words out of roots and affixes.
Phonology: the sound system of language.
Orthography: the form the language takes on paper.
Note that there is nothing in my four skills that makes a distinction between productive and receptive skills, and that two of the skills are common to both the spoken and the written mode.
In this article, I'm going to talk in general terms about the division of skills in the traditional model, and will use morphology to demonstrate why I think the traditional model is dangerously flawed. I'll come back to phonology and orthography in a follow-up article. But I haven't really got a lot to say about morphology, to be honest....
Commonality between spoken and written modes
With a few exceptions due to register and conservative schooling, the spoken and written modes of any language are based on the same syntax and morphology. This is pretty obvious, and really goes without saying. But if we carry this forward and ask ourselves why a student's accuracy in speaking is so often worse than in writing, we're in a hole. How can someone know syntax to write, but not know it to speak?
It's a question that is actually pretty easy to answer. The answer is that they don't know syntax. It's that simple.
But wait, how can they produce grammatically correct target language if they don't know syntax? Well, maybe it's not really "that simple".
At a superficial level, we have the difference between declarative and procedural knowledge. Someone can consciously know the rules without having internalised them to the point where they become automatic. On a simple level, reading and writing can be carried out using declarative knowledge, because time is not a factor. Speaking and listening, on the other hand, rely on procedural knowledge, because time and speed are critical factors. Modern language teaching philosophy disfavours declarative knowledge, and many teachers often claim to teach directly to procedural knowledge, and yet students still perform better in writing than in speaking (ignoring issues of pronunciation).
Productive vs receptive skills
As I said, my new four skills don't make a distinction between productive and receptive skills. Why? Because I believe that comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that I understand language by imagining what would have made me say the same thing.
This is not as outlandish as it may sound. One of the most important current theories in neuroscience is what is called mirror neuron theory (Wikipedia) which says that we understand a lot about each other through reconstructing their experiences.
Even stepping outside of that, there is still plenty of evidence for language as a reflective act:
Conclusion and consequences
Treating reading, writing, speaking and listening as 4 skills encourages people to develop strategies specific to these 4 areas, but students attempt to generalise these strategies across skills, and they don't transfer.
It is the teacher or course designer's job to make sure that the learner develops core strategies that are appropriate for and generalisable across all four areas. What gets measured gets managed, and we can never objectively measure a student's comprehension of a piece of language. Even in writing, the student's thought process is obscured by the relatively slow pace of production.
It is therefore only in speaking that we genuinely know that a student is following the correct process, and it is only through monitoring spoken output that we can diagnose and correct faults. As a classroom teacher or even a self-teacher, this is the only way to monitor progress accurately and confidently.
This looks very tidy and regular, and there's nothing we like better in language than tidyness and regularity. But yet language is never tidy, and language is very rarely truly regular, so we must suspect that there's something wrong with this diagram.
Really, this analysis of language is superficial to the point of uselessness. These 4 things are not skills at all, but the basic categories of language use, each category requiring multiple skills. The actual skills of language are far more subtle and far more fundamental, and there is a massive amount of shared skill between these activities than is apparent when we elevate these mere "activities" to the status of "skill".
Where does this idea of "skills" come from?
It is obvious and undeniable that some students find it easier to speak, and others find it easier to write. I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of students find reading easier than listening in a foreign language.
There is a great temptation therefore to say that what people find difficult is a "difficult skill" and leave it at that, but that is to shortchange the student, because these high level "skills" distract us from drilling down and finding the underlying core skills, and identifying which of them is the root of the problem. What gets measured gets managed, to quote a business-speak proverb, and when we identify the problem as simply "listening", we really don't get much of a clue how to fix it.
Try to suggest a spoken-only class and most teachers will throw up their hands and declare that we simply must teach all 4 skills, or we are doing our students a disservice. But are we? What if focussing on these 4 skills independently is one of the reasons many people have difficulties with language?
What are the real skills of language?
I would suggest the broadest useful four skills we have are syntax, morphology, phonology and orthography.
Syntax: how we build sentences out of words.
Morphology: how we build words out of roots and affixes.
Phonology: the sound system of language.
Orthography: the form the language takes on paper.
Note that there is nothing in my four skills that makes a distinction between productive and receptive skills, and that two of the skills are common to both the spoken and the written mode.
In this article, I'm going to talk in general terms about the division of skills in the traditional model, and will use morphology to demonstrate why I think the traditional model is dangerously flawed. I'll come back to phonology and orthography in a follow-up article. But I haven't really got a lot to say about morphology, to be honest....
Commonality between spoken and written modes
With a few exceptions due to register and conservative schooling, the spoken and written modes of any language are based on the same syntax and morphology. This is pretty obvious, and really goes without saying. But if we carry this forward and ask ourselves why a student's accuracy in speaking is so often worse than in writing, we're in a hole. How can someone know syntax to write, but not know it to speak?
It's a question that is actually pretty easy to answer. The answer is that they don't know syntax. It's that simple.
But wait, how can they produce grammatically correct target language if they don't know syntax? Well, maybe it's not really "that simple".
At a superficial level, we have the difference between declarative and procedural knowledge. Someone can consciously know the rules without having internalised them to the point where they become automatic. On a simple level, reading and writing can be carried out using declarative knowledge, because time is not a factor. Speaking and listening, on the other hand, rely on procedural knowledge, because time and speed are critical factors. Modern language teaching philosophy disfavours declarative knowledge, and many teachers often claim to teach directly to procedural knowledge, and yet students still perform better in writing than in speaking (ignoring issues of pronunciation).
Productive vs receptive skills
As I said, my new four skills don't make a distinction between productive and receptive skills. Why? Because I believe that comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that I understand language by imagining what would have made me say the same thing.
This is not as outlandish as it may sound. One of the most important current theories in neuroscience is what is called mirror neuron theory (Wikipedia) which says that we understand a lot about each other through reconstructing their experiences.
Even stepping outside of that, there is still plenty of evidence for language as a reflective act:
- People often finish each other's sentences. To do so they must be actively constructing the utterance as they go.
- People often mistakenly say that they've said something, when actually it was someone else who said it, and they only heard it. So we identify very closely with sentences we hear (and agree with), suggesting a very close link between the mental process behind listening and that of speaking.
- There exists a (fairly harmless) neurological disorder which causes someone's lip to tremble when they're being spoken to, and they often echo the last word of your sentences (often suffixed with "uh-huh" for assent). For these people merely listening activates the physical speech organs.
Conclusion and consequences
Treating reading, writing, speaking and listening as 4 skills encourages people to develop strategies specific to these 4 areas, but students attempt to generalise these strategies across skills, and they don't transfer.
It is the teacher or course designer's job to make sure that the learner develops core strategies that are appropriate for and generalisable across all four areas. What gets measured gets managed, and we can never objectively measure a student's comprehension of a piece of language. Even in writing, the student's thought process is obscured by the relatively slow pace of production.
It is therefore only in speaking that we genuinely know that a student is following the correct process, and it is only through monitoring spoken output that we can diagnose and correct faults. As a classroom teacher or even a self-teacher, this is the only way to monitor progress accurately and confidently.
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