Newsflash: unquestioning praise considered harmful!

I have found myself for years defending the teaching profession against what I saw as unwarranted attacks. People accused the culture of praise in modern schooling as being namby-pamby liberal nonsense. I tried to explain there was a good body of evidence behind it.

But news came this week of a report rubbishing the practice.

Perhaps my mistake was in trying to educate the lay people rather than the teachers. You see, most teachers didn't get it, not because individually they aren't bright, motivated professionals, but because the news came to them filtered through layers of management, focus groups and in-service training teams, each of which reinterpreted what the last had told them in a great game of academic Chinese whispers.

The message that reached the teachers wasn't the message that the psychological studies had given, but something completely different: "Always encourage! Never criticise!" I never believed that could work. I have always hated praise or encouragement when I don't understand something. The difference between me and a "bad learner" is that when this happens, I don't lose faith in myself -- I lose faith in the teacher. (And I have lost a lot of faith in a lot of teachers over the many years I've spent in full-time and part-time education.)

No, the advice was more subtle and nuanced than that.

As I recall it, the observation came first with misbehaving children. It was noted in classroom observations (carefully managed studies involving timing of teacher-pupil interactions) that teachers spent a lot more time berating misbehaving children than they did praising them when they behaved well. There is a school of thought that sees most children's misbehaviour as a call for attention, and by giving children more attention for misbehaving than behaving, on a certain level you reward the bad behaviour. The theory was that by increasing contact time during periods of good behaviour, you would reinforce the fact that good behaviour leads to adult approval.

But it went further than that. The observers noted that the teachers' response to a misbehaving child just wasn't positive at all. There was visible relief, and the teachers would actually draw attention to the child's normal poor behaviour. By doing so, the researchers claimed, they were establishing the teachers' low expectations, and undermining the pupils' confidence.

Now, can anyone really argue against the idea that we should show kids that we appreciate their good behaviour? Does anyone think that showing a kid that us adults have identified them as a "problem child" has any possible benefits? I doubt it.

So far, so uncontroversial.

But the follow-up to this was that researchers identified similar patterns with children that didn't necessarily misbehave, but just weren't doing well. Criticism for getting it wrong, implied criticism on the occasions they do get it right.

I still think we're in pretty uncontroversial territory here, because the advice is still pretty straightforward: when an underperforming child finally answers a question right, don't say "Thank God! At last you've got one right!"

And, in fact, the most uncontroversial advice from the experts was to smile as you say it, because they saw teachers who never smiled at a correct answer from an underperforming pupil.

The experts were not calling for uncritical, undeserving praise.

How does that translate into the classroom?

Well, a couple of years ago, I was teaching English in a French university. The French (like the Italians and the Spanish) believe themselves to be incapable of learning languages. I also had the challenge of an extremely mixed-ability first year group in the law faculty, everything from people with no previous experience of English to people I could have sat and talked to for an hour or two without problems. Imagine trying to teach a room of 20+ in that situation. It was not fun.

Often trying to get answers felt like trying to get blood from a stone, and when I finally got a good answer from some of them, the relief was palpable...

... and that was it. I had caught myself falling into the trap that the experts warned about. My attitude was more or less "why couldn't you have said that in the first place?!?" and it was all too obvious. The students were reluctant to give answers, and when they did give them, I did nothing to bolster their confidence.

What I had to do wasn't a simple matter of giving out "well done" stickers, but a complete change in my attitude to the students. I was seeing them as obstacles, as problems, when the problem was the circumstance, and my reaction to it. It was easier to see this as a situation that I could do nothing about than to actually do something.

So I set about the task of finding material that was suitable for everyone (and to a great extent succeeded), but more importantly, I changed my attitude to my students. Instead of feeling relieved when I finally got the correct answer, I felt happy. Instead of dropping my shoulders and saying "why didn't you say that earlier?" I smiled and said "of course! I told you you knew it"... until I had built such a rapport with them that I could start dropping my shoulders again and saying "why didn't you say that earlier?"

Which brings us back to the report, and the suggestion that invariable praise projects low expectations onto the students.

In the end, whatever I did was projecting my expectations onto the students. I always had higher expectations of the students than they had of themselves. But my projection had to satisfy two criteria for the students to accept it: it had to be realistic based on their ability, and it had to be close to their own expectations.

If a student's confidence is five steps behind their ability, there's no point in projecting a confidence that matches their ability -- you have to project one that's one step ahead of theirs, and slowly bring up their confidence.

Pattern identification and language learning

A few weeks ago I read an article reporting on a scientific study which had found that students who are good at abstract pattern matching tasks perform better in Hebrew language lessons. (Unfortunately I don't have access to the original journal paper.)

Now, we have two ways of interpreting this outcome: the fatalistic and the optimistic.

The fatalistic interpretation

A fatalist will say that it is proof positive of the existence of talent, and that those who do not have this talent are doomed to failure at learning languages.

The optimistic interpretation

The optimistic interpretation is to say that the successful learners are succeeding despite the teaching, and that this study is, by shedding new light on what the successful learners actually do, showing what teachers should be doing if they want to be successful.

"Rules" are a bit out of fashion in language teaching.  I've always said that this is because people have been teaching incorrect rules, rather than that rules are inherently unsuited to language teaching.  A linguistic "rule" is (or should be, at least) nothing more than an observed pattern emerging from real usage.  If successful learners are those who can identify patterns, then we must assume that after identifying these patterns, they learn them.

So I would suggest that the logical conclusion is that we should be teaching these patterns to students, rather than relying on them identifying them.

An example pattern

When I was learning French (my first foreign language) at high school, I noticed the distinction between the "long conjugations" and the "short conjugations" of the present tense (the long conjugations are the nous and vous forms, and the short conjugations are the rest), and I noticed that in irregular verbs, these forms were almost always regular.  (Is there any verb other than être that has irregular long conjugations?)

So while my classmates were attempting to memorise the irregular verb tables by rote, I was saving myself time and effort by only memorising the conjugations that didn't arise out of bog standard, regular conjugation.

Now it could be that the advocates of the discovery method are right, and that part of my success was down to the fact that I worked this out for myself, but I doubt it.  And even if that's true, is it fair to trade off the success of the majority against the success of a lucky few?  It is obvious that being told this would have reduced the effort required by my classmates to learn their irregular verbs.

Teaching patterns vs teaching rules

The problem with most of the "rules" traditionally presented in grammar books is that they are more strictly ranked and regimented than they are in real life.  Real patterns in real language can't be so neatly packaged by tense.

Take one of the patterns in Spanish taught by Michel Thomas:
The third person plural conjugation of a verb is the third person singular conjugation plus N, except in the preterite.

Now that's not how he taught it, but that's the concise description.  When he taught it, he simply used it in the present, and then got the students to apply it in the other tenses.

One of the reasons some people don't like this pattern is that "except" bit, but this really isn't a problem, because the pattern also holds for the second person singular: third singular +S, except (again) in the preterite.

It's regular, it's predictable.  Even the "exception" is regular in that it's an exception for both 2S and 3P.

This is the sort of pattern that I suspect all those successful learners are finding, and this is the sort of pattern that made Thomas such an effective teacher.

So let's find those patterns, and let's teach them.

Is language subconscious?

Is language subconscious?  It's a question I hadn't given much thought to -- I'd always pretty much taken it for granted that it was.

Well anyway, apparently it's been a pretty contentious topic in linguistics and psychology for a while now, but a group of scientists from Hebrew University have found compelling evidence that it is, indeed, subconscious.  (And not only "language" language, but even symbolic mathematical language to an extent).

Discussing this elsewhere called to mind a time when I was working on learning Scottish Gaelic with the aid of a piece of software.  It flashed the word "eye" up on the screen, and I couldn't translate it.  I had a complete block.  I knew the word.  I knew I knew the word.  But it wouldn't come.

It felt to me like my brain didn't believe it was "eye", and that it wasn't sure it wasn't "I", or "aye" (or possibly even "ay").

The way I see it, a conscious language skill should have allowed me to override this confusion through conscious attention to the written form, which is (in theory) unambiguous.  The fact that I couldn't force my way through to the correct meaning suggested that language is something you have less conscious control over than you think....

But fair enough, I've always felt that contextless words are very much a first step, and that for the most part you should be practising in context.  This experience kind of confirmed it for me.

But the publishing of the findings came at the perfect time for me, having just written the draft of my last blog post about translation, and the way I automatically translated frames of reference (eg using the first person when the software says "you are..." etc), because that's the source of my dilemma:

Translation is effective precisely because native language is understood subconsciously.  You understand and internalise the meaning effortlessly.  This means you know exactly what message you want to express in the target language.  There is no other means for a teacher, book or software package to indicate so clearly to a learner what do say.  Also, there is no other means to ensure that the teacher knows exactly what the student is trying to say (I've heard many teachers "correct" students errors by leading them to say something that is valid in the target language, but completely different in meaning to what they intended to say).

Translation is ineffective if and whenever the native language is not understood subconsciously.  Too many courses present contrived, meaningless examples.  Perhaps these aren't quite as nonsensical as the examples the researchers from Hebrew University used, but as long as they are unnatural, they will interfere with subconscious processing, leaving the learner to process them consciously -- it's not "translation" that's the real problem here, it's "word juggling".

And translation's weak spot is the one I mentioned in my last blog post: our subconscious deals with relative references automatically.  When you say the word "I" to me, I understand the concept of you, the person speaking.  So dealing with first and second person pronouns is a perilous task.  In order to do it correctly, the student has to stop using their subconscious processing, and language starts to become a conscious process... which is when translation stops working as a language learning technique.

This leads me to a conclusion that I really didn't expect, and that I'm not yet fully convinced of:
the optimal mixture of native-language instruction and target-language instruction in the classroom isn't a simple function of how advanced the students are, it goes right down to the level of "I" vs "he".

Wow.

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.

Learning styles, teaching strategies

Anyone who has talked to me in person about learning will be aware that I don't believe in "learning styles", the idea that people have their own personal optimal way of learning.

Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't treat people differently in a classroom, because there are individual differences.  All I'm saying is that these differences are differences in past experiences, not fundamental differences in their ways of thinking.  If a new subject relies on knowledge that the student lacks, these holes must be filled before the new subject can be learned.

If we look at physics, a student that is not strong mathematically is going to have a lot of bother, because physics is built on maths.  No physics teacher is going to accept that the student is a "non-mathematical learner" and teach physics in a non-mathematical way -- this would be nonsensical and impossible.

Discussing learning styles with language learners and teachers is interesting.  I have heard and read many many learners claiming that they need the written word because they are "visual learners".  Now most professional educators (people with degrees, not one-month teaching certificates) would decry that as a misinterpretation of what learning styles is all about, but I haven't had a solid explanation of how to apply learning style theory in a classroom.  As Einstein said, if you can't explain it clearly, you don't understand it well enough.  This leaves us with the idea that no-one understands learning styles, yet it is now part of the fabric of the modern teaching system.

So what is there instead?  I've always held that we should talk about learning strategies, that the learner should be encouraged to develop strategies appropriate to the problem at hand rather than believing he has a fixed "style" that the task must be distorted to fit.  This latter notion always struck me like trying to drive screws into wood with a hammer.  It takes more time and effort, and the end result may look OK from the outside, but underneath, the structure is weaker.

But I've re-evaluated and decided that while the end-goal is learning strategies, the only thing we can really focus on is teaching strategies.  The appropriate strategy can only be known by someone familiar with the desired end-state knowledge and the learner's initial knowledge.  The course given to the student must define the optimal strategy and walk the learner through it, because it is only be doing that we learn, so it follows that in employing a strategy, we learn it.  We then hope that the learner will recognise in future where to apply the strategy he has now learnt.

Anyway, so I was very glad when I was recently directed to the journal article Learning Styles: concepts and evidence.  The article is a very specific type of review of the published literature on learning styles: it looked at the methodology behind the experiments supporting (or otherwise) learning style theory, to see if they really proved anything.  The findings were pretty damning: the only experiments that held up to examination showed that learning styles had no discernable effect on the optimal strategy for teaching a subject.

The authors were very careful to say that this does not disprove learning style theory, but they stated quite clearly that their professional opinion was that the focus on learning styles in modern education is distracting attention and money from finding the optimal approach for the subject itself, and that there is no place for learning styles in modern education.

And they're quite right.  Even if language styles do exist, we still don't know what they really are or we certainly don't know how to account for them, so discussion of learning styles is the equivalent to the old clichéd philosophical debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Passive vs Active (cont) -- Assimil.

In my previous post, active vs passive, I mentioned the Assimil series of books.

I've was listening to one of their courses in the bath this morning and it strikes me that they are on the right track here -- in some languages.

Each lesson in the Assimil method teaches by dialogues, and you are expected to listen to each dialogue multiple times.  This is backed up by a translation exercise that in the course I was listening to (Le Catalan) was actually quite effective in rearranging the language taught into a new and fairly different form, but one that is still within the reader's comprehension.  Unfortunately the other book I've tried (Iniciación al Euskera) presents tasks that are impossible given the previously taught knowledge.

With all the listening, reading and relistening of the main dialogue, you're possibly only getting 5-10% of your time exposed to new comprehensible material.  The study I quoted said that even a 50-50 split of active vs passive was as effective as 100% active study.  Does this suggest that Assimil is not optimally efficient or that the fundamental differences between music and language are enough that this doesn't apply?

Passive vs Active

I read an interesting article on Wired.com recently, relating to a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience.  The study looked at a small set of musical skills.  Common wisdom is that you can only learn music by performing it, which is analogous to learning language by production.  Previous studies support this, and prove that you can't learn to play music just by listening, which is analogous to language learning by practicing receptive skills.

The study noted that previous research has focussed on an all-or-nothing approach -- all practice or no practice -- and instead looked at the effects on passive perception in addition to practice, and they claim that timed right, it's just as effective to spend 50% of your time listening to what you've just learned.  They are, of course, talking about fairly early learners, as professional level musicians can show remarkable skills in learning and playing new music.

This makes a great deal of sense to me -- I have always said that I can only understand something that I can say (or, in the case of language I've forgotten, could have said previously).  This doesn't mean that I ever would say it, but that it is possible in my internal model of the language.  This, I feel, is analogous to the example of musicians.

A beginner in both fields has a small set of "devices" to employ (specific notes and practised combinations thereof vs specific words and practised combinations of them) and neither is going to be able to directly relate to any material that goes beyond that set.  As the learner develops in both fields, the set of devices grows, and the learner will be able to generalise to all material made up of items within their arsenal of devices.  Thus the musician who masters one style of music will be able to play any piece in that style by ear, because it is a recombination of musical devices he knows, but will not be able to do the same for a piece in a radically different style.  The language learner with high fluency and proficiency in his new language will be able to understand lots of individual sentences that he has never heard before but are composed of language he knows, but if someone says an idiomatic phrase he has never learned, he obviously can't understand it -- are you hip to my jive, man?

If this research proves to hold true for language learning as it does for musical skills, then the language teaching industry is missing a trick by producing materials that students can't understand in their entirety.  Perhaps instead students would be better listening to things that they have just been taught to say, even if they can only say them shakily.  Some lessons in the Pimsleur method do this, repeating at the end of the lesson the dialogue that was used to teach that lesson.  Assimil teaches you from a dialogue, and then asks you to listen to the dialogue again once you've learned it all, without reading any notes, so that you understand it in its entirety. This may be a lazy way to do it, because it doesn't really require true understanding, but many people are happy with it.  It's curious then that neither Teach Yourself nor Colloquial, the two biggest book-shelf brands available in the UK, give the learner any instruction to relisten to each lesson's dialogues at the end of the lesson.  It seems like a pretty quick win -- at present the dialogue is only listened to before the presentation of the associated language points, when the learner will most likely understand almost none of it.

Personally I would like to see the post-learning listening being a new and unheard piece, but built up of the elements used earlier in the lesson.  This is easier said than done, though.  If you start from a situational point of view (Chapter 1: Greetings, Chapter 2: Meet the family etc), then you are going to be recycling the same phrases and it will be an almost identical dialogue to what's been used in the lesson.  If you go from a grammar-led course, on the other hand, it's going to be difficult to find anything interesting to say, and you're likely to end up with something that sounds quite contrived.

It's a difficult one.

(NB.  The Journal of Neuroscience isn't available in my university library, so I've only read the abstract.)