So, last time I was talking about a discussion I had with a communicative approach hardliner. A couple of days later, I had a new student ask for exam prep classes, so I got out my exam prep materials and had a quick look over them to remind myself of the specifics of the Cambridge Advanced exam, and I very quickly remembered something else from Sunday's conversation.
One of his big bugbears about the Scottish education system was that the foreign language exams all have their instructions in English. This, of course, is a natural consequence in the belief in immersion above all else -- if language must be immersive, then native-language task instructions clearly break the immersion, and therefore burst the language "bubble".
But here's the thing: when I prepare students for an exam, I explain the language task to them and then practise it over and over. By the time my students reach the exam, they don't need to read the instructions. Now the exams I prepare people for are international exams, so economies of scale dictate that the exam questions stay in English. My students go into the exam, don't need to spend time reading and understanding the question and can instead focus on carrying out the actual task that is set for them.
But there are people who don't do a lot of preparation for exams, and will go in and need to read the task. Sometimes they misunderstand the task, which means they lose marks. A hardliner would say this is fair enough, because if they don't understand English, they shouldn't pass an English exam. That would be all well and good if anyone really understood the question first time round, but students who prepare are not being tested on understanding the nature of the task, so this is inherently asymmetrical.
Indeed, most adherents to a target-language-only method are also likely to believe in the "four skills" model of language (which I don't agree with, but that's not the point here), which is fundamentally incompatible with target-language-only exam instructions.
How so? Well, if you believe that language is composed of reading, writing, speaking and listening, then it follows that you should test the four components individually. However, if you put task instructions in the target language, then every exercise includes a reading component, and you cannot objectively measure the students' levels in the other four skills.
It's a dilemma I have heard discussed even at university level, and it's very much a living debate, so nobody really should be putting forward their views as though they are objectively correct, because as with everything, we can all agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere, but we all have different views on where.
I personally feel that with a student cohort with a shared native language, native-language task instructions are the fairest way to ensure that students are being tested on the skills that we claim to be testing.
But what about listening tasks? Should we be asking the comprehension questions in the native language too, in order to ensure that we are genuinely assessing their listening comprehension? I kind of think we should, but at the same time, it doesn't feel right. But I have personally done exam past papers with students where they have clearly understood the meaning of the recording, but didn't understand the synonym used in the answer. How can you lose a mark in a listening comprehension test for failing to understand a piece of written language?
But of course, that argument does start to extend to the reading comprehension test too, because you can understand the set passage perfectly, but again have problems with the question. Here it is a reading comprehension problem leading to a lost reading mark, but there is still a fundamental question to answer about whether you should be setting an exam where you cannot determine the cause of the students' errors.
When you think about it, though, the problem in both previous paragraphs (although only one example of the various types of errors that students might make) is not really one of listening or reading anyway -- it's a vocabulary problem; vocabulary, which we do not consider worthy of the title "skill".
Some examiners have tacitly recognised this, and stopped trying to explicitly score the "four skills" individually, such as the Open University, whose degree-level exams have only spoken and written assessment, with the written part incorporating listening and reading as source material for an essay writing task. It's a holistic approach that accepts that trying to identify why a student isn't good enough isn't really an issue -- either they are or they aren't. I was perfectly happy with the approach as a student, and I would be happy with it as a teacher.
Language is certainly too complicated for us to ever hope to devise a truly fair and balance way to assess student attainment, but the current orthodoxy has tied itself in something of a knot trying to reconcile two competing goals. So are we offering immersion, or are we assessing the skills?
Showing posts with label target-language-only. Show all posts
Showing posts with label target-language-only. Show all posts
16 November 2012
Just how do you prompt a student?
I'm a big fan of the courses recorded by Michel Thomas before his death, and I'm always happy to say so. The biggest complaint I hear about the Thomas courses are that they "teach you to translate". The argument goes that because the students are only ever prompted with their native language (English) then they never learn to "think in" their target language. This bold assertion lacks any substantial evidence. I would argue that translation is one of the best methods of prompting a student, and that avoiding it actually delays proficiency.
Last year I wrote a post entitled Translation: an unjustified scapegoat, in which I pointed out that translation is very very often blamed for errors that do not arise from native-language interference, and therefore cannot be translation errors. What I neglected to say is that this is a real demotivator for learners. To be told categorically that they're translating, when they don't really believe they are translating, and to be told to do something else without any instructions on how to do it... well, the teacher is essentially blaming the student. That's not teaching, sorry.
Anyway, that's not the main point of this article, so time to put the train of thought back on the rails.
I am in favour of translation for three main reasons:
1: Translation allows simultaneous focus on meaning and form
If you perform a language class in the target language only, it is all too common for the answer to be mechanically reproducible from the question, without any real need to understand the meaning of either.
eg Do you have a flargrard? - No, I don't have a flargrard.
I've no idea what a "flargrard" is, so it's a reasonable bet I don't have one. (Note to non-native English-speaking readers: the word "flargrard" doesn't exist -- I made it up for this example.)
It gets worse if you include substitution drills:
eg
House: I have a house - I have a house
Cat - I have a cat.
Dog - I have a dog.
Flargrard - I have a flargrard
Translation, on the other hand, gives the student a prompt that can be understood unambiguously. The student cannot fail to understand the full meaning of the sentence, a meaning which will therefore be instrinsically linked to the target sentence.
2: The so-called "form focus" of many monolingual tasks is really no such thing.
If the task can be done mechanically, as in the "answer in questions" example above, or the substitution drill, then you never have to select the appropriate form. You never have to recall it from memory. If you don't have to recall it from memory, you cannot learn to recall it from memory.
In fact, it is pretty much impossible to devise a monolingual language task that will elicit the required grammar point/structure spontaneously. You either supply them with the structure, or you end up involved in a metalinguistic discussion that leads to one or two of the class recalling the "rule", and if we end up talking about rules, we're not connecting with spontaneous language.
3: Target-language-only normally fails to be "naturalistic".
I've discussed the issues of expository vs naturalistic language before, and in this case, I'll refer you back to the question Do you have a flargrard? The natural response is to say simply "No," or "No, I don't," but we're generally forced to answer in (unnatural) sentences in the monolingual classroom: "No, I don't have a flargrard." I don't know about you, but I don't like "answering in sentences" -- my brain knows it's wrong and unnecessary. I don't like telling students off for not answering in sentences because I see this as evidence that they're actually involved in language, rather than just juggling words.
So target-language-only is potentially devoid of practice of both meaning and form, which I'd say is a pretty big problem for language learning!
Is translation the panacea then?
Well, no, because it certainly has its pitfalls.
For example, if I ask you to translate "a brown bear", am I asking you to say "a bear of colour brown" or "a bear of the species brown bear, also known as grizzly"? And even if both translate to the same thing in the target language, there's a point of assymetry when we hit "white bear", which is not ambiguous. Prompts for translation must be very carefully selected, then.
This limits how far we can learn a language by translation, obviously. We cannot learn every noun and idiom by direct translation, but we don't need to -- the trick is to use translation where it's (1) obvious and easy or (2) where conscious awareness of the difference helps overcome a specific difficulty.
(1) The "obvious and easy" would include my favourite example: conditional sentences in English vs Romance languages, which translate pretty much directly -- eg "If I was/were you, I would...", "If I'd known you were coming I'd have baked a cake" etc. This is "advanced" material in traditional classes, but translation makes it trivially easy (to the point where Michel Thomas would be teaching it on the second or third day of his courses).
(2) An example of a specific difficulty is the difference in idiom between "to be" an age in English and "to have" an age in the Romance languages. Not a difficult rule, but even after loooots of practice, you'll often here a learner make the mistake one way or the other. So the practice method the teacher uses gets the student to produce the desired answer, but it doesn't build any resistance to native-language interference, so in an uncontrolled setting the original error returns. (And the teacher blames the student for translating, and the student is confused and disheartened etc.)
One of the biggest visible benefits of translation though, is simple:
Speed, volume and throughput of practice
Because translation starts with a readily-understood prompt, you don't have to waste too much time thinking about what the prompt means or what you're being asked to do. This means you can get through a lot more questions. A translation-based lesson that manages to present no more questions than a target-language-only lesson is a wasted opportunity.
In an attempt to teach myself Corsican, I've written a little program that conjugates, combines and declines words and presents them to me as translation tasks, checks my answers and tells me if I got them right or wrong. I can batter through hundreds of examples in very little time. Kind of exhausting, yes, but pretty effective. A couple of hours using it, spread over a couple of weeks, has hammered in some of the basics pretty solidly.
But...
Translation's biggest problem
Once you start whipping through the questions at speed, you really do start to work on autopilot, and you start to see patterns emerging in your errors. And I noticed one specific type of mistake that I made frequently that I hadn't been too aware of before... I kept switching my "I" and my "you".
It makes perfect sense, now that I think about it, and I probably did it a lot with MT, even though I didn't pay it any mind at the time. And heck, I've even heard the same thing from some of my students when I've asked them to translate short sentences.
Because when the computer says to me "you know it", that "you" refers to me. It's "eio", "io", "je", "yo", "ich" or whatever. That's what it means. Literal direct translation is therefore something of a higher-order function, an abstraction.
And yet it seems to be quite effective. So what do we do?
Well, personally I'll be attempting to stay away from first and second-person references as much as possible. I'll be sticking to the minimum required to learn them individually as grammar points, but when the person is included only as part of the context for a sentence testing another grammar point, I'll favour "he/she/it/they" over "I/we/you".
But I'll certainly be paying more attention to what exactly happens when we translate. I still think it's one of the best tools the learner has, but we've just got to work to eliminate the ambiguities....
Last year I wrote a post entitled Translation: an unjustified scapegoat, in which I pointed out that translation is very very often blamed for errors that do not arise from native-language interference, and therefore cannot be translation errors. What I neglected to say is that this is a real demotivator for learners. To be told categorically that they're translating, when they don't really believe they are translating, and to be told to do something else without any instructions on how to do it... well, the teacher is essentially blaming the student. That's not teaching, sorry.
Anyway, that's not the main point of this article, so time to put the train of thought back on the rails.
I am in favour of translation for three main reasons:
1: Translation allows simultaneous focus on meaning and form
If you perform a language class in the target language only, it is all too common for the answer to be mechanically reproducible from the question, without any real need to understand the meaning of either.
eg Do you have a flargrard? - No, I don't have a flargrard.
I've no idea what a "flargrard" is, so it's a reasonable bet I don't have one. (Note to non-native English-speaking readers: the word "flargrard" doesn't exist -- I made it up for this example.)
It gets worse if you include substitution drills:
eg
House: I have a house - I have a house
Cat - I have a cat.
Dog - I have a dog.
Flargrard - I have a flargrard
Translation, on the other hand, gives the student a prompt that can be understood unambiguously. The student cannot fail to understand the full meaning of the sentence, a meaning which will therefore be instrinsically linked to the target sentence.
2: The so-called "form focus" of many monolingual tasks is really no such thing.
If the task can be done mechanically, as in the "answer in questions" example above, or the substitution drill, then you never have to select the appropriate form. You never have to recall it from memory. If you don't have to recall it from memory, you cannot learn to recall it from memory.
In fact, it is pretty much impossible to devise a monolingual language task that will elicit the required grammar point/structure spontaneously. You either supply them with the structure, or you end up involved in a metalinguistic discussion that leads to one or two of the class recalling the "rule", and if we end up talking about rules, we're not connecting with spontaneous language.
3: Target-language-only normally fails to be "naturalistic".
I've discussed the issues of expository vs naturalistic language before, and in this case, I'll refer you back to the question Do you have a flargrard? The natural response is to say simply "No," or "No, I don't," but we're generally forced to answer in (unnatural) sentences in the monolingual classroom: "No, I don't have a flargrard." I don't know about you, but I don't like "answering in sentences" -- my brain knows it's wrong and unnecessary. I don't like telling students off for not answering in sentences because I see this as evidence that they're actually involved in language, rather than just juggling words.
So target-language-only is potentially devoid of practice of both meaning and form, which I'd say is a pretty big problem for language learning!
Is translation the panacea then?
Well, no, because it certainly has its pitfalls.
For example, if I ask you to translate "a brown bear", am I asking you to say "a bear of colour brown" or "a bear of the species brown bear, also known as grizzly"? And even if both translate to the same thing in the target language, there's a point of assymetry when we hit "white bear", which is not ambiguous. Prompts for translation must be very carefully selected, then.
This limits how far we can learn a language by translation, obviously. We cannot learn every noun and idiom by direct translation, but we don't need to -- the trick is to use translation where it's (1) obvious and easy or (2) where conscious awareness of the difference helps overcome a specific difficulty.
(1) The "obvious and easy" would include my favourite example: conditional sentences in English vs Romance languages, which translate pretty much directly -- eg "If I was/were you, I would...", "If I'd known you were coming I'd have baked a cake" etc. This is "advanced" material in traditional classes, but translation makes it trivially easy (to the point where Michel Thomas would be teaching it on the second or third day of his courses).
(2) An example of a specific difficulty is the difference in idiom between "to be" an age in English and "to have" an age in the Romance languages. Not a difficult rule, but even after loooots of practice, you'll often here a learner make the mistake one way or the other. So the practice method the teacher uses gets the student to produce the desired answer, but it doesn't build any resistance to native-language interference, so in an uncontrolled setting the original error returns. (And the teacher blames the student for translating, and the student is confused and disheartened etc.)
One of the biggest visible benefits of translation though, is simple:
Speed, volume and throughput of practice
Because translation starts with a readily-understood prompt, you don't have to waste too much time thinking about what the prompt means or what you're being asked to do. This means you can get through a lot more questions. A translation-based lesson that manages to present no more questions than a target-language-only lesson is a wasted opportunity.
In an attempt to teach myself Corsican, I've written a little program that conjugates, combines and declines words and presents them to me as translation tasks, checks my answers and tells me if I got them right or wrong. I can batter through hundreds of examples in very little time. Kind of exhausting, yes, but pretty effective. A couple of hours using it, spread over a couple of weeks, has hammered in some of the basics pretty solidly.
But...
Translation's biggest problem
Once you start whipping through the questions at speed, you really do start to work on autopilot, and you start to see patterns emerging in your errors. And I noticed one specific type of mistake that I made frequently that I hadn't been too aware of before... I kept switching my "I" and my "you".
It makes perfect sense, now that I think about it, and I probably did it a lot with MT, even though I didn't pay it any mind at the time. And heck, I've even heard the same thing from some of my students when I've asked them to translate short sentences.
Because when the computer says to me "you know it", that "you" refers to me. It's "eio", "io", "je", "yo", "ich" or whatever. That's what it means. Literal direct translation is therefore something of a higher-order function, an abstraction.
And yet it seems to be quite effective. So what do we do?
Well, personally I'll be attempting to stay away from first and second-person references as much as possible. I'll be sticking to the minimum required to learn them individually as grammar points, but when the person is included only as part of the context for a sentence testing another grammar point, I'll favour "he/she/it/they" over "I/we/you".
But I'll certainly be paying more attention to what exactly happens when we translate. I still think it's one of the best tools the learner has, but we've just got to work to eliminate the ambiguities....
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