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 teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
01 November 2014
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.
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.
22 May 2014
Answer in sentences II: Death to abstraction!
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how the standard practice of forcing beginners to answer "in sentences" seemed to devoid the grammar of meaning.
It was inspired by trying to teach past continuous (he was running etc) and revise times (target: at five o'clock, he was running in the park, at half past eight, he was eating dinner in the dining room etc). Unfortunately, the weaker students would look at a time and say "it's five o'clock", and they would look at the action and say "he's running", and they would look at the location and say "he's in the park". The he's, it's etc structure was drummed so heavily into their heads that they didn't dare diverge from it.
This week, I observed a related problem, as I was giving an exam to some secondary school pupils.
They're preparing for a Trinity GESE exam (spoken English), and one of the features of the level they're at is that they're expected to answer to prompts that aren't actually questions. "Tell me about a time when you..." etc. This is considered a more advanced function because it requires abstraction.
But isn't it true that when we teach students to "answer in sentences", we do so by training them to recycle the words of the question...? Well, guess what. My students were regurgitating my words. I wrote Write about a past holiday, and many of the answers started In my past holiday... Obviously this is not natural English.
Is it the student's fault? Is the student incapable of abstraction? Certainly not! Instead, it seems to me that we as teachers actually train abstraction out of our students as soon as we start this "answer in sentences" thing, because it's a skill they have already learned in their first language, and we actively militate against them using it in the new language.
On the occasions where we do answer in sentences, natural language often uses non-symmetrical forms, such as answering What is your name? with I'm Niall.
Our second-language instruction, then, seems to teach language in a way that is quite contrary to nature....
It was inspired by trying to teach past continuous (he was running etc) and revise times (target: at five o'clock, he was running in the park, at half past eight, he was eating dinner in the dining room etc). Unfortunately, the weaker students would look at a time and say "it's five o'clock", and they would look at the action and say "he's running", and they would look at the location and say "he's in the park". The he's, it's etc structure was drummed so heavily into their heads that they didn't dare diverge from it.
This week, I observed a related problem, as I was giving an exam to some secondary school pupils.
They're preparing for a Trinity GESE exam (spoken English), and one of the features of the level they're at is that they're expected to answer to prompts that aren't actually questions. "Tell me about a time when you..." etc. This is considered a more advanced function because it requires abstraction.
But isn't it true that when we teach students to "answer in sentences", we do so by training them to recycle the words of the question...? Well, guess what. My students were regurgitating my words. I wrote Write about a past holiday, and many of the answers started In my past holiday... Obviously this is not natural English.
Is it the student's fault? Is the student incapable of abstraction? Certainly not! Instead, it seems to me that we as teachers actually train abstraction out of our students as soon as we start this "answer in sentences" thing, because it's a skill they have already learned in their first language, and we actively militate against them using it in the new language.
On the occasions where we do answer in sentences, natural language often uses non-symmetrical forms, such as answering What is your name? with I'm Niall.
Our second-language instruction, then, seems to teach language in a way that is quite contrary to nature....
14 May 2014
Language books and forgetting the rules of teaching.
I can't remember where I first heard it, but this rule immediately struck me as one of the most sensible and important rules in setting classroom tasks:
It's a fairly straightforward rule -- the stronger students will finish questions quicker than the weaker ones, so as a teacher you are left with a choice between stopping the exercise before all the students have finished, or leaving the faster students hanging around bored after they've finished.
We all typically compromise, leaving the stronger students waiting for a little while, but still not giving the weaker students the chance to finish everything. We formalise this with the immortal line "It doesn't matter if you haven't finished," but in reality, normally it does.
Have a look at most language exercises. You'll typically find that a great many question sets only cover a particular language point or case once, and if you don't answer that question, you don't practise that point. So yes, it does matter if you haven't finished.
The common-sense solution is to write a question set that covers all the points once, then add in additional questions that revisit the same points, but in a more complicated way. Say your minimal coverage of the grammar points can be done in 6 questions -- add another four to make it up to 10. Now you can watch for your weaker students finishing question 6 and declare in all truthfulness that it doesn't matter if they haven't finished... because actually, they have finished -- they just don't know that the remaining questions are primarily time-fillers.
But yes -- primarily time-fillers. As I said, they should also serve to practise more sophisticated uses of the point in question. This way every class is differentiated. All students cover the same basic material, but the advanced students get advanced practise.
Sadly, none of the materials I'm asked to use in class work this way, and I'm forced into the dishonest version of "it doesn't matter if you haven't finished." I would like to see books where the minimal coverage is marked with a line to indicate where "it doesn't matter..." becomes true, beyond which the questions are not strictly required.
This would be helpful. Shame they don't do it.
Always write more questions than you need.
It's a fairly straightforward rule -- the stronger students will finish questions quicker than the weaker ones, so as a teacher you are left with a choice between stopping the exercise before all the students have finished, or leaving the faster students hanging around bored after they've finished.
We all typically compromise, leaving the stronger students waiting for a little while, but still not giving the weaker students the chance to finish everything. We formalise this with the immortal line "It doesn't matter if you haven't finished," but in reality, normally it does.
Have a look at most language exercises. You'll typically find that a great many question sets only cover a particular language point or case once, and if you don't answer that question, you don't practise that point. So yes, it does matter if you haven't finished.
The common-sense solution is to write a question set that covers all the points once, then add in additional questions that revisit the same points, but in a more complicated way. Say your minimal coverage of the grammar points can be done in 6 questions -- add another four to make it up to 10. Now you can watch for your weaker students finishing question 6 and declare in all truthfulness that it doesn't matter if they haven't finished... because actually, they have finished -- they just don't know that the remaining questions are primarily time-fillers.
But yes -- primarily time-fillers. As I said, they should also serve to practise more sophisticated uses of the point in question. This way every class is differentiated. All students cover the same basic material, but the advanced students get advanced practise.
Sadly, none of the materials I'm asked to use in class work this way, and I'm forced into the dishonest version of "it doesn't matter if you haven't finished." I would like to see books where the minimal coverage is marked with a line to indicate where "it doesn't matter..." becomes true, beyond which the questions are not strictly required.
This would be helpful. Shame they don't do it.
30 April 2014
Putting Michel Thomas into practice
So I've finally found myself using Michel Thomas's techniques (or at least my interpretation of them) in the language classroom.
When I started my current job, I made the decision that I was going to do exactly what the school wanted of me, and stop worrying about the ineffectiveness of standard techniques -- after all, standard techniques are what the school sells, and therefore what the students have bought. Basically, I figured that I needed to start looking at teaching as a job rather than some kind of holy calling, so that I could go home at the end of the day and switch off, rather than beating myself up until bedtime for the day's errors.
It's ironic, then, that the student who's getting the most "me" in my teaching is the second class I started. I went in preparing to teach the standard course, and with only a couple of hours until the class started, I discovered that the method materials were aimed at large classes, and were inappropriate to a one-on-one class, so I went to the syllabus and wrote down the language features for the first few lessons. To be, to have, there is/are... OK, fine. The various things pointed in a direction I wasn't intending to head in, but there it was: Total Physical Response. For about half a dozen lessons we were putting things in a box, on a chair, on the floor... even on my head. I was lucky that I'd recently got in an online discussion about "Language Hunting" just before, as I had whole system analysed and fresh in my head.
The student was herself a teacher -- in fact, a headteacher -- and understood a lot about pedagogy. This was a double-edged sword, as while she was open to different ideas, she got kind of fixated on the "concreteness" of the TPR class, and was slightly reluctant to move on until I'd built up her confidence in herself and in me as a teacher. Once that confidence was there, it was time to switch, and switch we did.
Compliments from students are always welcome, but when they come from a trained and experienced teacher, they really feel good. Of course, at the same time, I recognise that it's the techniques drawing the praise, not me.
Teaching Michel Thomas style is actually even more difficult than I really appreciated. The last time I tried it, I wasn't teaching full-time, and I had enough space in my head to balance the repetition of the various language points, but in these classes I frequently find myself leaving revision of a particular word or structure late, and the student has forgotten it. She blames herself, when of course it's my fault. I'm trying to develop ways of notating and mnemonicising for myself to keep track of what to revise and when.
But overall, it's been clearly very effective, and it's reinforced my belief that Thomas's core methodology is constructed on sound concepts, and that there was nothing miraculous about Thomas as a teacher.
If there's a stressful element in it, it's seeing how much the lesson suffers when the teacher's on an off-day, something that doesn't happen as much when you're hiding behind worksheets and programmed materials. On the flip-side, though, this connection between teacher performance and learning eliminates the great existential angst of the teacher: "Are they learning because of me or despite me?"
When I started my current job, I made the decision that I was going to do exactly what the school wanted of me, and stop worrying about the ineffectiveness of standard techniques -- after all, standard techniques are what the school sells, and therefore what the students have bought. Basically, I figured that I needed to start looking at teaching as a job rather than some kind of holy calling, so that I could go home at the end of the day and switch off, rather than beating myself up until bedtime for the day's errors.
It's ironic, then, that the student who's getting the most "me" in my teaching is the second class I started. I went in preparing to teach the standard course, and with only a couple of hours until the class started, I discovered that the method materials were aimed at large classes, and were inappropriate to a one-on-one class, so I went to the syllabus and wrote down the language features for the first few lessons. To be, to have, there is/are... OK, fine. The various things pointed in a direction I wasn't intending to head in, but there it was: Total Physical Response. For about half a dozen lessons we were putting things in a box, on a chair, on the floor... even on my head. I was lucky that I'd recently got in an online discussion about "Language Hunting" just before, as I had whole system analysed and fresh in my head.
The student was herself a teacher -- in fact, a headteacher -- and understood a lot about pedagogy. This was a double-edged sword, as while she was open to different ideas, she got kind of fixated on the "concreteness" of the TPR class, and was slightly reluctant to move on until I'd built up her confidence in herself and in me as a teacher. Once that confidence was there, it was time to switch, and switch we did.
Compliments from students are always welcome, but when they come from a trained and experienced teacher, they really feel good. Of course, at the same time, I recognise that it's the techniques drawing the praise, not me.
Teaching Michel Thomas style is actually even more difficult than I really appreciated. The last time I tried it, I wasn't teaching full-time, and I had enough space in my head to balance the repetition of the various language points, but in these classes I frequently find myself leaving revision of a particular word or structure late, and the student has forgotten it. She blames herself, when of course it's my fault. I'm trying to develop ways of notating and mnemonicising for myself to keep track of what to revise and when.
But overall, it's been clearly very effective, and it's reinforced my belief that Thomas's core methodology is constructed on sound concepts, and that there was nothing miraculous about Thomas as a teacher.
If there's a stressful element in it, it's seeing how much the lesson suffers when the teacher's on an off-day, something that doesn't happen as much when you're hiding behind worksheets and programmed materials. On the flip-side, though, this connection between teacher performance and learning eliminates the great existential angst of the teacher: "Are they learning because of me or despite me?"
05 April 2014
Answer in sentences: death to meaning!
After my injury-induced half-year out of the classroom, I made myself a promise: I wasn't going to torture myself by wanting to undo all the mistakes of teaching orthodoxy in one go. It's not something I'm capable of doing, and in wanting to, I have ended up hampering my ability to get on with the task as requested by the people writing my paycheque. After all, while the orthodoxy may be far from perfect, it's at least tried and tested, and people have learned from it.
I have tried my best to stick to this philosophy since the start of my new employment, with a few particular exceptions where suitable materials weren't available in time and I had to improvise. You can hardly be expected to improvise in a style that isn't yours, after all.
The real danger in doing something someone else's way is that you might start to believe in it. I was never a fan of "answer in sentences" as it always seemed unnatural, but it's something I've come to rely on in class, and I was starting to view it uncritically, until I came face-to-face with the downside...
I was teaching a class of primary-age kids, and I was integrating times with the past tense of to be. The worksheet presented a clock representing the time, and a little picture of a location, to prompt sentences of the form "at five o'clock, he was in the kitchen," following a model example at the top of the first page. Some of the kids latched on to the point fairly quickly, but most needed repeated explanation and demonstration. (This is because I'm trying to stick to the orthodoxy of "the English only classroom" even though these kids don't speak English yet -- but that's a rant for another time.)
One in particular was having difficulties, as he's afraid of making mistakes: you can only fail if you try, so he's naturally afraid of trying. I led him through several questions directly, breaking the task into two parts: the time and the location. The problem was, when I pointed at the time, he would say "it's five o'clock", as per his answer-in-sentences training; and when I pointed at the location, he would say "he's in the kitchen". These kids have been trained (by myself and by other teachers) to never say any noun or adjective on its own, so that little contracted form it's has taken on a life that is divorced from its meaning, and appears in the language of many of the learners as little more than a particle that precedes certain words.
Basically, it has reawakened a long-held belief of mine that the frequent repetition of words doesn't truly aid in their memorisation, as the students simply aren't required to consider the context, and the language forms are devoided of all meaning.
But language is meaning.
I have tried my best to stick to this philosophy since the start of my new employment, with a few particular exceptions where suitable materials weren't available in time and I had to improvise. You can hardly be expected to improvise in a style that isn't yours, after all.
The real danger in doing something someone else's way is that you might start to believe in it. I was never a fan of "answer in sentences" as it always seemed unnatural, but it's something I've come to rely on in class, and I was starting to view it uncritically, until I came face-to-face with the downside...
I was teaching a class of primary-age kids, and I was integrating times with the past tense of to be. The worksheet presented a clock representing the time, and a little picture of a location, to prompt sentences of the form "at five o'clock, he was in the kitchen," following a model example at the top of the first page. Some of the kids latched on to the point fairly quickly, but most needed repeated explanation and demonstration. (This is because I'm trying to stick to the orthodoxy of "the English only classroom" even though these kids don't speak English yet -- but that's a rant for another time.)
One in particular was having difficulties, as he's afraid of making mistakes: you can only fail if you try, so he's naturally afraid of trying. I led him through several questions directly, breaking the task into two parts: the time and the location. The problem was, when I pointed at the time, he would say "it's five o'clock", as per his answer-in-sentences training; and when I pointed at the location, he would say "he's in the kitchen". These kids have been trained (by myself and by other teachers) to never say any noun or adjective on its own, so that little contracted form it's has taken on a life that is divorced from its meaning, and appears in the language of many of the learners as little more than a particle that precedes certain words.
Basically, it has reawakened a long-held belief of mine that the frequent repetition of words doesn't truly aid in their memorisation, as the students simply aren't required to consider the context, and the language forms are devoided of all meaning.
But language is meaning.
01 February 2013
Physician, heal thyself!
I have many criticisms about teaching and/or teachers, and this sometimes leads me to wind up other teachers. Not here, though, because I've been far too focused on my own teaching!
My criticisms aren't intended to be taken too personally, though. They're not personal failings, they're just mistakes that are pretty much endemic in teaching, so it's not really that surprising that I fall into the trap of making a lot of these mistakes myself.
So this post is a reflection on one of the errors I constantly find myself slipping into, and that I need to be on constant guard against.
A year ago I wrote about a personal experience as a learner, in a post entitled The Myth of Groupwork. My criticism of the groupwork was that it was too "task-focused", in that the students and the teacher were looking to fill in all the answers on the sheet, not to "learn" per se. The results of groupwork tasks give the teacher no insight into the level of knowledge of any individual student, and there's not normally any way of verifying that any of the lower-achieving students have actually learnt anything from the experience.
My error isn't in assigning groupwork, but it's that problem of being "task-focused". Sometimes I make the mistake of looking at the result of "the class", rather than verifying that every individual has learned from the experience.
Which is not to say that a classroom teacher can check every student's work for every task, every time. No, that's a logistical impossibility.
What I'm asking of myself is to stay mindful of any compromises I have to make between pedagogy and logistics. I'm asking myself to remember at the end of the class that I do not and cannot know whether that lesson has been a success... or at least not until exam marking day.
There's a very human tendency to start to accept the things you do as being intrinsically and unquestionably correct, even while retaining a superficial recognition that it is in fact a compromise. Once you do this, you stop trying to improve, and that's something that I never want to do. Realism forces me to accept the compromise, but optimism tells me that if I keep my eyes open, I'll find ways to slowly improve and compromise less.
What I've always aimed to do when criticising pedagogy and methodology is raise the questions and increase the readers' mindfulness of their own actions and motivations, but sometimes I've fallen into the trap of criticising more bluntly. That can be taken far too personally, and doesn't help anyone.
So I suppose that I have to be more mindful not only in the class, but when discussing classes too....
My criticisms aren't intended to be taken too personally, though. They're not personal failings, they're just mistakes that are pretty much endemic in teaching, so it's not really that surprising that I fall into the trap of making a lot of these mistakes myself.
So this post is a reflection on one of the errors I constantly find myself slipping into, and that I need to be on constant guard against.
A year ago I wrote about a personal experience as a learner, in a post entitled The Myth of Groupwork. My criticism of the groupwork was that it was too "task-focused", in that the students and the teacher were looking to fill in all the answers on the sheet, not to "learn" per se. The results of groupwork tasks give the teacher no insight into the level of knowledge of any individual student, and there's not normally any way of verifying that any of the lower-achieving students have actually learnt anything from the experience.
My error isn't in assigning groupwork, but it's that problem of being "task-focused". Sometimes I make the mistake of looking at the result of "the class", rather than verifying that every individual has learned from the experience.
Which is not to say that a classroom teacher can check every student's work for every task, every time. No, that's a logistical impossibility.
What I'm asking of myself is to stay mindful of any compromises I have to make between pedagogy and logistics. I'm asking myself to remember at the end of the class that I do not and cannot know whether that lesson has been a success... or at least not until exam marking day.
There's a very human tendency to start to accept the things you do as being intrinsically and unquestionably correct, even while retaining a superficial recognition that it is in fact a compromise. Once you do this, you stop trying to improve, and that's something that I never want to do. Realism forces me to accept the compromise, but optimism tells me that if I keep my eyes open, I'll find ways to slowly improve and compromise less.
What I've always aimed to do when criticising pedagogy and methodology is raise the questions and increase the readers' mindfulness of their own actions and motivations, but sometimes I've fallen into the trap of criticising more bluntly. That can be taken far too personally, and doesn't help anyone.
So I suppose that I have to be more mindful not only in the class, but when discussing classes too....
11 December 2012
Gamification... I'm not a fan
I'd been thinking for a while about writing something on Gamification, but I'd never got round to it. I was kicked into action today, though, by a video appearing on Slashdot by a US lecturer by the name of Clifford Lampe:
Gamification, if you don't know the word already, is to use game mechanics to improve whatever it is you do. It started as an idea for education and I wasn't a fan of the idea. It moved into business and I wasn't a fan of the idea. It's now moving back into the classroom ... and I'm still not a fan of the idea.
My main criticism is pretty blunt: learning is fun already.
"Now wait a moment," I hear you cry, "not everyone enjoys learning."
Well yes, yes they do. What they don't enjoy is when they're stuck in a classroom and they aren't actually learning anything. In fact, years ago I read an article claiming that by using a brain scanner, scientists had proven that all the fun in a game comes via the learning centres of the brain.
Gamification, in whatever I've read or heard on the subject, doesn't take this to heart. Instead, it focuses on the accoutrements of gaming, and tries to manipulate "achievement addiction". In business, you give out little badges to regular contributors to your website to encourage them to contribute, rather than making the actual process of contribution inherently rewarding. That's fine for customer retention, but it's misdirected focus if you're attempting to teach.
Basically, the teacher ends up looking for ways to convince students to complete the task in the hope that in doing so, they will learn, instead of designing a task that is so inherently educational that the student becomes engrossed in the process itself. The latter is what is traditionally known as "good teaching".
Gamification therefore continues the trend that talk of multiple intelligences and affective factors have established: an single small part of the puzzle eclipses the bigger picture and distracts educators from looking critically at their material in its own terms.
Now, Lampe's video is somewhat disingenuous (although that may be the editor's fault, not his). At no point is there any mention of what his course is, although the mention of a mix of computing and sociology students gives us a clue that it's something about online interaction, and if we look at his personal university page, we can see he teaches two things: a first year undergrad Introduction to Information Systems and a higher level course called eCommunities. Without this context, his talk about the use of social media in the classroom is utterly meaningless -- because web 2.0 isn't just the medium of the lesson, it's also the topic.
It's pretty hard to generalise out of this.
Worse, he himself suggests that the content of his teaching appears to be more memorable precisely because his teaching style is unique. Consequently the technique must logically lose effectiveness if used elsewhere. That's true of any mnemonic technique, of course. Give a student 2 or 3 useful acronyms and they'll remember them. Give them 2 dozen and they'll start to clash with each other and because impossible to use. So "teaching style as mnemonic" suggests we should all be doing very different things, not all adopting the same technique (for example: gamification!).
Some of the other things he suggests are elements of gamification are choice of assignments, but many teachers already do that. The question to be addressed is which teaching points can be fairly tested with a free choice assignment, and which need a specific task, because every point is different.
Moving on from Lampe specifically, the problem is that gamification comes down to the notion of "achievements". The notion of achievements started with scout badges, as far as I'm aware. Games started to recognise various skills rather than have everyone chase the same goal: the high score. With online high-score tables, that high-score became harder to achieve. But this evolved out of existing behaviour. Games provided sufficient information to start manually comparing metrics -- people started replaying Mario games and finding as many coins as possible. Sonic players took up the idea of the "speed run" in early levels. Games started giving more and more information to allow players to track their metrics: Doom told you how long you'd taken, how many secrets you'd uncovered and how accurate you were at shooting (shots on target:total shots).
So what does that mean? Early achievements were led by the players' existing behaviour -- it was not an imposition of "gamification" rules on gaming.
Of course, later achievements were an imposition of gamification on gaming. A target like "kill 500 orcs with the axe" doesn't reward skill specifically, just persistence. It doesn't promote learning, then. Others involve very specific skills that are not of general use. I tried for a while to get "Terminal Velocity" in the Steam achievements for the game Portal. To do it, you have to perform some very delicate maneouvers to fall continuously for 30,000 feet. But it's just fiddliness for its own sake, it's not a necessary skill to do anything pratical within the game itself. How ironic is that? Gamifying the game actually takes you away from the game?
They really are just using achievements as a drug to keep you coming back as an alternative to giving you a genuine reason to do so.
Copying this strategy into the university is a hiding to nothing, because you're encouraging time-on-task, but you're perverting their drive. You're rewarding time instead of rewarding learning. That's pretty rough.
And in the end, of course, any game can be gamed. We already have enough problems trying to prevent cheating against established metrics (exams and assignments), but any new assessment metric is going to need hardened against cheating....
Gamification, if you don't know the word already, is to use game mechanics to improve whatever it is you do. It started as an idea for education and I wasn't a fan of the idea. It moved into business and I wasn't a fan of the idea. It's now moving back into the classroom ... and I'm still not a fan of the idea.
My main criticism is pretty blunt: learning is fun already.
"Now wait a moment," I hear you cry, "not everyone enjoys learning."
Well yes, yes they do. What they don't enjoy is when they're stuck in a classroom and they aren't actually learning anything. In fact, years ago I read an article claiming that by using a brain scanner, scientists had proven that all the fun in a game comes via the learning centres of the brain.
Gamification, in whatever I've read or heard on the subject, doesn't take this to heart. Instead, it focuses on the accoutrements of gaming, and tries to manipulate "achievement addiction". In business, you give out little badges to regular contributors to your website to encourage them to contribute, rather than making the actual process of contribution inherently rewarding. That's fine for customer retention, but it's misdirected focus if you're attempting to teach.
Basically, the teacher ends up looking for ways to convince students to complete the task in the hope that in doing so, they will learn, instead of designing a task that is so inherently educational that the student becomes engrossed in the process itself. The latter is what is traditionally known as "good teaching".
Gamification therefore continues the trend that talk of multiple intelligences and affective factors have established: an single small part of the puzzle eclipses the bigger picture and distracts educators from looking critically at their material in its own terms.
Now, Lampe's video is somewhat disingenuous (although that may be the editor's fault, not his). At no point is there any mention of what his course is, although the mention of a mix of computing and sociology students gives us a clue that it's something about online interaction, and if we look at his personal university page, we can see he teaches two things: a first year undergrad Introduction to Information Systems and a higher level course called eCommunities. Without this context, his talk about the use of social media in the classroom is utterly meaningless -- because web 2.0 isn't just the medium of the lesson, it's also the topic.
It's pretty hard to generalise out of this.
Worse, he himself suggests that the content of his teaching appears to be more memorable precisely because his teaching style is unique. Consequently the technique must logically lose effectiveness if used elsewhere. That's true of any mnemonic technique, of course. Give a student 2 or 3 useful acronyms and they'll remember them. Give them 2 dozen and they'll start to clash with each other and because impossible to use. So "teaching style as mnemonic" suggests we should all be doing very different things, not all adopting the same technique (for example: gamification!).
Some of the other things he suggests are elements of gamification are choice of assignments, but many teachers already do that. The question to be addressed is which teaching points can be fairly tested with a free choice assignment, and which need a specific task, because every point is different.
Moving on from Lampe specifically, the problem is that gamification comes down to the notion of "achievements". The notion of achievements started with scout badges, as far as I'm aware. Games started to recognise various skills rather than have everyone chase the same goal: the high score. With online high-score tables, that high-score became harder to achieve. But this evolved out of existing behaviour. Games provided sufficient information to start manually comparing metrics -- people started replaying Mario games and finding as many coins as possible. Sonic players took up the idea of the "speed run" in early levels. Games started giving more and more information to allow players to track their metrics: Doom told you how long you'd taken, how many secrets you'd uncovered and how accurate you were at shooting (shots on target:total shots).
So what does that mean? Early achievements were led by the players' existing behaviour -- it was not an imposition of "gamification" rules on gaming.
Of course, later achievements were an imposition of gamification on gaming. A target like "kill 500 orcs with the axe" doesn't reward skill specifically, just persistence. It doesn't promote learning, then. Others involve very specific skills that are not of general use. I tried for a while to get "Terminal Velocity" in the Steam achievements for the game Portal. To do it, you have to perform some very delicate maneouvers to fall continuously for 30,000 feet. But it's just fiddliness for its own sake, it's not a necessary skill to do anything pratical within the game itself. How ironic is that? Gamifying the game actually takes you away from the game?
They really are just using achievements as a drug to keep you coming back as an alternative to giving you a genuine reason to do so.
Copying this strategy into the university is a hiding to nothing, because you're encouraging time-on-task, but you're perverting their drive. You're rewarding time instead of rewarding learning. That's pretty rough.
And in the end, of course, any game can be gamed. We already have enough problems trying to prevent cheating against established metrics (exams and assignments), but any new assessment metric is going to need hardened against cheating....
10 December 2012
Too many cooks spoil the net....
When I first took up English teaching in 2007, the internet was an incredibly useful resource. If I was stuck for a lesson idea, a quick Google search or a glance at one of my favourite sites would give me the inspiration and ideas I needed to build a useful lesson.
But now, the TEFL world and his dog are all posting their ideas on the internet. A search that would have brought up a handful of useful links in 2007 now brings up a load of low quality worksheets and seemingly aimless tasks. The act of searching for material is now arguably more time-consuming than just sitting down and writing your own material from the ground up, leading to the wonderful paradox that publishing more information leads to less reuse of material. And this potentially snowballs, as all those teachers who're making their own material "because they can't find good stuff" start to publish their stuff too, further exacerbating the problem.
Now this is not to say that the authors of these materials aren't good teachers, but it is clear that the worksheets and activities don't fully encapsulate the spirit and methods of their class. The warm-ups, the support activities, even the teacher's personality have a transformative effect on the material presented, and to take a list of a dozen questions and divorce them from that context robs them of their meaning and effectiveness.
People often compare the sharing of documents to the open-source software movement (well, it's getting less and less common now that document sharing is getting more and more common) but I've always considered that a falacious comparison. Open-source is about exposing the underlying logic to the wider world, and allowing them to improve that logic; but a document is merely the conclusions reached by the author, not the logic he followed to make those decisions.
A very well designed learning exercise or test will follow a very strict process to ensure a sufficiently wide coverage of concepts and minimise the influence of luck on obtaining the correct answer, but as soon as you change one question in a set, you can end up breaking the balance of concepts tested and leave out something important.
If we're honest with ourselves, though, most of us will admit that we don't properly balance our tasks. There will be times when we hand out a worksheet and realise that we've missed an important case, and I know that as soon as I started marking the last grammar test I set, I started spotting gaps where concepts weren't tested while other concepts were tested multiple times.
Which is, of course, why we look to other people to provide us with exercises and tests -- it is far more efficient to have one person spend all the time making a meticulously balanced question set and then have hundreds of teachers reuse those questions.
That's why books are such a great idea in theory -- it's just a shame that in practice a great many language teaching books don't live up to the promise; which is where the internet was supposed to help. Unfortunately, the online material I've found to date isn't of great help. There's two major camps: the let's-dump-our-worksheets-and-move-on crowd and the oh-look-what-I-can-do-with-technology crowd.
The first lot is basically what I've already talked about -- problem sets with little or no guidance on how to build a coherent lesson around them.
The second lot is people who have learned how to use some flashy little piece of software, but more often than not they find themselves being controlled by the software, rather than being in control of it. This leads to a proliferation of pairing exercises (question halves and question-with-answer) and ordering exercises (sentence order or line-by-line conversation) because that's what the author knows how to do with the software. It's a further weakening of pedagogy.
The last example I saw of this was for revision of conditional sentences (if...). There was an introductory page that described the four conditional types, and then a selection of revision exercises, but each exercise focused on one type of sentence only, so the learner never needed to choose which type of conditional to use, just remember how to form the given type. These sort of structurally-focused exercises are usually only recommended when initially teaching the form, with student scaffolding being reduced continually until they are able to make free, independent choices. But as I said, this was allegedly a revision page... yet they were doing exercises designed for introducing the structure, because that was the type of exercise the author knew how to create. And it looked nice, too.
So, yes, the internet is slowly becoming more of a problem, not a solution.
A way forward...?
This problem isn't really anything new -- it has been the perennial problem of the internet. In the early days, the web was a collection of articles written mostly by academics, so it was high quality, low volume. As more and more people started posting stuff online, the volume went up, and the average quality went down.
"No problem," the academics told us, "the network will self-organise, and the cream will float to the top."
The mechanism by which this self-organisation took place was intelligent linking. A trusted source recommends other trusted sources, and surfers navigated that way. It worked -- that's how I found a lot of information online at the turn of the century.
Then came Google, whose algorithm worked on the same principles -- links acted as recommendations, and the value of a link was related to the linking site's rating. It was very effective.
But this network of links just doesn't exist in the language resource world. Most resources are what we would technically consider "leaf" nodes in the network -- they are end-points that don't lead anywhere else. Even when they do, it's normally only to other materials on the same site -- there are very few teachers' resource sites that aren't dedicated to keeping you on their site and their site alone. Those that do link to other sites are (at least in my experience) pretty unfussy about what they link to, listing far too many resources and in effect simply echoing the results of a Google search in a different format.
This means that Google has very little to go on when trying to rate resources for language teachers, and this leads to a paradox from Google's point of view: Google has become so popular as the way to find resources that people are no longer building up the web of links that Google relies on. This isn't true in all fields, where forum posts have started to replace traditional websites as the source of recommendations.
However, most fields have a certain sense of simultaneity -- TV programmes, for example, are broadcast at a fixed time, and their importance fades. Most spheres are subject to such fashions, so people will be talking about the same thing at the same time. But language points don't come into or go out of fashion. Every teacher in the world teaches them... but not at the same time. Although there are forums related to the topic, it's not a topic that is really suited to the medium.
So there's not enough information out there to let Google separate the wheat from the chaff. It's a mess.
What's needed is for teachers who find genuinely useful material to start cataloguing it selectively, publishing a useful collection of links to a small number of resources that cover the major language points that most teachers need. Sites that favour quantity over quality. And we need to start sharing the links to those sites. And we need to start using those sites, rather than Google. If you know of any such sites, feel free to add links in the comments section!
Collaborative materials
More than that, though, if we genuinely want to share our materials, we need to make sure that they can be updated and improved upon. Millions of man-hours are wasted by producing multiple flawed worksheets, when we could make minor modifications to each other's and produce something of lasting value.
I doubt I'm the only teacher who alters the free materials I've downloaded from the internet, but like all the others, I keep my modifications to myself because the author's given me permission to use the material, but not to redistribute it. This is a shame, because some of the best designed materials I've come across have been from non-natives, and fixing one or two little non-native errors would make them into something valuable... but I refuse to use or recommend anything with even one non-native error in it.
But just permission to republish isn't enough, because that wouldn't stop the proliferation of materials -- it would worsen it. A dozen different sites with slightly different versions of the same worksheet... that would be a nightmare. We have to look at the software world again and look at how they control their edits, updates and revision; how they resolve differences of opinion... or not (projects often "fork" into two versions when people can't agree on a single way to progress, and quite often these forks are merged together a few years down the line).
Or...
We could stick to the books and materials we've produced ourselves. Your choice.
But now, the TEFL world and his dog are all posting their ideas on the internet. A search that would have brought up a handful of useful links in 2007 now brings up a load of low quality worksheets and seemingly aimless tasks. The act of searching for material is now arguably more time-consuming than just sitting down and writing your own material from the ground up, leading to the wonderful paradox that publishing more information leads to less reuse of material. And this potentially snowballs, as all those teachers who're making their own material "because they can't find good stuff" start to publish their stuff too, further exacerbating the problem.
Now this is not to say that the authors of these materials aren't good teachers, but it is clear that the worksheets and activities don't fully encapsulate the spirit and methods of their class. The warm-ups, the support activities, even the teacher's personality have a transformative effect on the material presented, and to take a list of a dozen questions and divorce them from that context robs them of their meaning and effectiveness.
People often compare the sharing of documents to the open-source software movement (well, it's getting less and less common now that document sharing is getting more and more common) but I've always considered that a falacious comparison. Open-source is about exposing the underlying logic to the wider world, and allowing them to improve that logic; but a document is merely the conclusions reached by the author, not the logic he followed to make those decisions.
A very well designed learning exercise or test will follow a very strict process to ensure a sufficiently wide coverage of concepts and minimise the influence of luck on obtaining the correct answer, but as soon as you change one question in a set, you can end up breaking the balance of concepts tested and leave out something important.
If we're honest with ourselves, though, most of us will admit that we don't properly balance our tasks. There will be times when we hand out a worksheet and realise that we've missed an important case, and I know that as soon as I started marking the last grammar test I set, I started spotting gaps where concepts weren't tested while other concepts were tested multiple times.
Which is, of course, why we look to other people to provide us with exercises and tests -- it is far more efficient to have one person spend all the time making a meticulously balanced question set and then have hundreds of teachers reuse those questions.
That's why books are such a great idea in theory -- it's just a shame that in practice a great many language teaching books don't live up to the promise; which is where the internet was supposed to help. Unfortunately, the online material I've found to date isn't of great help. There's two major camps: the let's-dump-our-worksheets-and-move-on crowd and the oh-look-what-I-can-do-with-technology crowd.
The first lot is basically what I've already talked about -- problem sets with little or no guidance on how to build a coherent lesson around them.
The second lot is people who have learned how to use some flashy little piece of software, but more often than not they find themselves being controlled by the software, rather than being in control of it. This leads to a proliferation of pairing exercises (question halves and question-with-answer) and ordering exercises (sentence order or line-by-line conversation) because that's what the author knows how to do with the software. It's a further weakening of pedagogy.
The last example I saw of this was for revision of conditional sentences (if...). There was an introductory page that described the four conditional types, and then a selection of revision exercises, but each exercise focused on one type of sentence only, so the learner never needed to choose which type of conditional to use, just remember how to form the given type. These sort of structurally-focused exercises are usually only recommended when initially teaching the form, with student scaffolding being reduced continually until they are able to make free, independent choices. But as I said, this was allegedly a revision page... yet they were doing exercises designed for introducing the structure, because that was the type of exercise the author knew how to create. And it looked nice, too.
So, yes, the internet is slowly becoming more of a problem, not a solution.
A way forward...?
This problem isn't really anything new -- it has been the perennial problem of the internet. In the early days, the web was a collection of articles written mostly by academics, so it was high quality, low volume. As more and more people started posting stuff online, the volume went up, and the average quality went down.
"No problem," the academics told us, "the network will self-organise, and the cream will float to the top."
The mechanism by which this self-organisation took place was intelligent linking. A trusted source recommends other trusted sources, and surfers navigated that way. It worked -- that's how I found a lot of information online at the turn of the century.
Then came Google, whose algorithm worked on the same principles -- links acted as recommendations, and the value of a link was related to the linking site's rating. It was very effective.
But this network of links just doesn't exist in the language resource world. Most resources are what we would technically consider "leaf" nodes in the network -- they are end-points that don't lead anywhere else. Even when they do, it's normally only to other materials on the same site -- there are very few teachers' resource sites that aren't dedicated to keeping you on their site and their site alone. Those that do link to other sites are (at least in my experience) pretty unfussy about what they link to, listing far too many resources and in effect simply echoing the results of a Google search in a different format.
This means that Google has very little to go on when trying to rate resources for language teachers, and this leads to a paradox from Google's point of view: Google has become so popular as the way to find resources that people are no longer building up the web of links that Google relies on. This isn't true in all fields, where forum posts have started to replace traditional websites as the source of recommendations.
However, most fields have a certain sense of simultaneity -- TV programmes, for example, are broadcast at a fixed time, and their importance fades. Most spheres are subject to such fashions, so people will be talking about the same thing at the same time. But language points don't come into or go out of fashion. Every teacher in the world teaches them... but not at the same time. Although there are forums related to the topic, it's not a topic that is really suited to the medium.
So there's not enough information out there to let Google separate the wheat from the chaff. It's a mess.
What's needed is for teachers who find genuinely useful material to start cataloguing it selectively, publishing a useful collection of links to a small number of resources that cover the major language points that most teachers need. Sites that favour quantity over quality. And we need to start sharing the links to those sites. And we need to start using those sites, rather than Google. If you know of any such sites, feel free to add links in the comments section!
Collaborative materials
More than that, though, if we genuinely want to share our materials, we need to make sure that they can be updated and improved upon. Millions of man-hours are wasted by producing multiple flawed worksheets, when we could make minor modifications to each other's and produce something of lasting value.
I doubt I'm the only teacher who alters the free materials I've downloaded from the internet, but like all the others, I keep my modifications to myself because the author's given me permission to use the material, but not to redistribute it. This is a shame, because some of the best designed materials I've come across have been from non-natives, and fixing one or two little non-native errors would make them into something valuable... but I refuse to use or recommend anything with even one non-native error in it.
But just permission to republish isn't enough, because that wouldn't stop the proliferation of materials -- it would worsen it. A dozen different sites with slightly different versions of the same worksheet... that would be a nightmare. We have to look at the software world again and look at how they control their edits, updates and revision; how they resolve differences of opinion... or not (projects often "fork" into two versions when people can't agree on a single way to progress, and quite often these forks are merged together a few years down the line).
Or...
We could stick to the books and materials we've produced ourselves. Your choice.
20 November 2012
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.
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.
13 November 2012
More than words....
It is a truism that a language isn't just a collection of words. This is interpreted by some teachers and learners that meaning that there's no point in studying a language formally, and they instead propose that we should memorise set phrases, and just read stuff until we understand.
OK, perhaps I'm overstating the case, and building something of a strawman out of the extreme position. However, even if most practitioners attempt to mix the two approaches, they've still missed the point of the observation.
It's called the "Principle of Compositionality" and it's summed up excellently in O'Reilly's book by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper on the Natural Language Toolkit for Python programming:
So a language isn't just a collection of words. It's a collection of words and a collection of ways of combining words. (Ignoring the fact that a "word" is often a combination of smaller morphemes.)
Teaching individual phrases as fixed units leaves behind much of the subtle, beautiful complexity of how languages build up their meaning.
In English teaching, it is often claimed that so-called "phrasal verbs" are not systematic and must be memorised, but what we do with "verb + particle", the Romance languages do with "prefix + verb root". A fire extinguisher puts out fires, and we shout out our exclamations. Seems pretty systematic to me. (Not to mention German, where a prefix often becomes detached from its verb and becomes a particle -- see? it's all part of a single spectrum....)
And when people talk about the arbitrarity of "to be" vs "to have" in ages (en "I am 33" vs fr, it, es etc "I have 33 years"), well, at least it's consistent within the language. It's a logical consequence of the Romance "to have" structure that phrases like "at 40" (life begins...!) become "with 40" in these languages.
But while most learners are capable of getting a handle on the be/have difference, I still meet a great many people who borrow the "with" structure into English. How easy would it be for the teacher to point out a few of these little things? To encourage the learner to build a meaningful model that (at least in part) mirrors the native speaker's one?
But perhaps that would take too much time. Nevertheless, we have built an environment where we discourage our students from looking for meaning and structure. We expect them to resign themselves to learning everything as an arbitrary single data-point.
That subtle, beautiful complexity I was talking about? We hide it from them. We keep it from them. We make learning a language into an ugly, clumsy drudge. What we are hiding from them isn't just thte beauty of the language, because that beauty is intrinsic to the language. To hide the beauty, we must hide the language.
How can we teach someone a language we are unwilling to truly share with them?
OK, perhaps I'm overstating the case, and building something of a strawman out of the extreme position. However, even if most practitioners attempt to mix the two approaches, they've still missed the point of the observation.
It's called the "Principle of Compositionality" and it's summed up excellently in O'Reilly's book by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper on the Natural Language Toolkit for Python programming:
the meaning of a complex expression is composed from the meaning of its parts and their mode of combinationThere's a deeper examination of the term at Wikipedia, but Bird et al's summary is pretty clear and correct.
So a language isn't just a collection of words. It's a collection of words and a collection of ways of combining words. (Ignoring the fact that a "word" is often a combination of smaller morphemes.)
Teaching individual phrases as fixed units leaves behind much of the subtle, beautiful complexity of how languages build up their meaning.
In English teaching, it is often claimed that so-called "phrasal verbs" are not systematic and must be memorised, but what we do with "verb + particle", the Romance languages do with "prefix + verb root". A fire extinguisher puts out fires, and we shout out our exclamations. Seems pretty systematic to me. (Not to mention German, where a prefix often becomes detached from its verb and becomes a particle -- see? it's all part of a single spectrum....)
And when people talk about the arbitrarity of "to be" vs "to have" in ages (en "I am 33" vs fr, it, es etc "I have 33 years"), well, at least it's consistent within the language. It's a logical consequence of the Romance "to have" structure that phrases like "at 40" (life begins...!) become "with 40" in these languages.
But while most learners are capable of getting a handle on the be/have difference, I still meet a great many people who borrow the "with" structure into English. How easy would it be for the teacher to point out a few of these little things? To encourage the learner to build a meaningful model that (at least in part) mirrors the native speaker's one?
But perhaps that would take too much time. Nevertheless, we have built an environment where we discourage our students from looking for meaning and structure. We expect them to resign themselves to learning everything as an arbitrary single data-point.
That subtle, beautiful complexity I was talking about? We hide it from them. We keep it from them. We make learning a language into an ugly, clumsy drudge. What we are hiding from them isn't just thte beauty of the language, because that beauty is intrinsic to the language. To hide the beauty, we must hide the language.
How can we teach someone a language we are unwilling to truly share with them?
09 November 2012
Speaking tasks.
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....
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....
10 April 2012
Decoo's wheel turns again....
I'm always referring to it, but everyone with an interest in language should read Wilfried Decoo's lecture "On The Mortality Of Language Learning Methods". By his reckoning, the latest "new" popular movement in teaching is long overdue. (The fact that the communicative approach is still king is probably due to its prevalence in TEFL, and the fact that anything else takes longer to train teachers to do.)
And one candidate is starting to emerge. There are whispers of "social media" echoing round the classroom.
Not that long ago, the watchword was "web", but what became of that? Certainly, the web gives us more access to more materials, but what we've seen to date is either simply the existing textbook styles rewrapped as webpages with automatic marking of exercises or a rapackaging of 90s style multimedia packages.
Digitised textbooks have their advantages over the paper textbook (no fiddling with the CD player to find the right track, instant feedback on many errors) at the expense of being something you couldn't just sit down and do on the train.
The multimedia websites, on the other hand, offer very little over the old CD-ROMs, but are a lot slower to use due to constant downloading of materials in between questions. And I can shove a CD-ROM in my laptop on the train, but I won't be able to get a connection to the internet without running up a fairly hefty 3G bill.
But the "social media" thing is starting to kick in. LiveMocha is a clone of the overpriced toy courses by Rosetta Stone, but they had the idea to get learners correcting each other's work. This is not an innovation in any real sense, it's just a poor man's version of paying a tutor. Of course, Rosetta Stone decided to jump on the social bandwagon too, and started setting up a language buddy/exchange site. Reports have it that the demographics are heavily skewed and it's difficult to find language buddies for many language combinations.
Steve Kaufmann's Lingq has taken the social approach down a different track. The website provides a shiny interface that doesn't really do much and gets people to insert screeds and screeds of texts with audio in various languages, and the user is expected to learn by induction from massive exposure. I don't buy the argument. The interface doesn't do much to guide me and the quality of the material varies wildly, with some people even just uploading lists of words, contrary to the site's main philosophy. But this is starting to get away from the notion of "social", and more into the realms of "crowdsourcing". It's only the credits-based correction system that retains any sort of "social" status, but even that's starting to stretch definitions a bit.
Tatoeba is unashamed crowdsource. It's a very intriguing idea: a bunch of sentences undergoing unstructured translation from one language to another, and another, and another. In mathematical terms, they describe it as a "graph" rather than a "table", a concept which probably merits a blog post to itself. I love it, and I find it a great exercise to translate stuff from various languages into Scottish Gaelic, as it gets me thinking about things I might not otherwise, and helps me identify holes in my abilities. That said, it's difficult to see what you can actually do with all that data. It has no concept of grammatical syntagms or paradigms, so you can't search for a structure and see examples of it.
But all these things -- web, social or crowdsource -- have one thing in common: they're outside the classroom. The internet is a solo phenomenon -- why would anyone work the web in the classroom? You might as well be at home!
Perhaps the biggest problem with computer-based learning is that it's all independent, so we can all make excuses and slack off. Maybe we'll start writing a blog post instead of studying, and we'll pretend to ourselves we're doing something productive....
But anyway, all that notwithstanding, there are still people who dream about getting social media into the classroom as an article in today's Guardian shows.
The justification for a focus on social media is, as far as I'm concerned, a non-sequitur:
At the end of the article, the author gives "Five ways you can start to engage with your pupils on social media", and if the term "engage with" doesn't immediately turn you off, you'll discover that once again, the "method" is not led by pedagogy, but by technology:
(This may actually be counterproductive -- why draw students' attention to the ubiquity of free translation tools if you're trying to demonstrate to them the value of learning a language?)
Why is this any better than setting a spoken homework task that only the teacher and/or the class sees?
As a learner, that frustrates me. As a teacher, it makes things harder to mark. What feedback do you give in the latter case? Do you write five or six lessons worth of teaching? Do say just mark it as wrong and say you haven't done that yet?
So I don't think social media's a great answer for the teacher, really. A fantastic resource for the independent learner, yes. A great way of maintaining a language in the absence of other contact, yes. But an important component of the modern classroom, no.
Edit 11/04/2012: Tatoeba's actually better than I thought. The search engine may not be as flexible or as specific as true corpus concordancing software, but it's pretty powerful, as the docs indicate. There's a "proximity operator" in there, so you can look for co-occurring words even if you don't have the exact phrase. Nifty.
And one candidate is starting to emerge. There are whispers of "social media" echoing round the classroom.
Not that long ago, the watchword was "web", but what became of that? Certainly, the web gives us more access to more materials, but what we've seen to date is either simply the existing textbook styles rewrapped as webpages with automatic marking of exercises or a rapackaging of 90s style multimedia packages.
Digitised textbooks have their advantages over the paper textbook (no fiddling with the CD player to find the right track, instant feedback on many errors) at the expense of being something you couldn't just sit down and do on the train.
The multimedia websites, on the other hand, offer very little over the old CD-ROMs, but are a lot slower to use due to constant downloading of materials in between questions. And I can shove a CD-ROM in my laptop on the train, but I won't be able to get a connection to the internet without running up a fairly hefty 3G bill.
But the "social media" thing is starting to kick in. LiveMocha is a clone of the overpriced toy courses by Rosetta Stone, but they had the idea to get learners correcting each other's work. This is not an innovation in any real sense, it's just a poor man's version of paying a tutor. Of course, Rosetta Stone decided to jump on the social bandwagon too, and started setting up a language buddy/exchange site. Reports have it that the demographics are heavily skewed and it's difficult to find language buddies for many language combinations.
Steve Kaufmann's Lingq has taken the social approach down a different track. The website provides a shiny interface that doesn't really do much and gets people to insert screeds and screeds of texts with audio in various languages, and the user is expected to learn by induction from massive exposure. I don't buy the argument. The interface doesn't do much to guide me and the quality of the material varies wildly, with some people even just uploading lists of words, contrary to the site's main philosophy. But this is starting to get away from the notion of "social", and more into the realms of "crowdsourcing". It's only the credits-based correction system that retains any sort of "social" status, but even that's starting to stretch definitions a bit.
Tatoeba is unashamed crowdsource. It's a very intriguing idea: a bunch of sentences undergoing unstructured translation from one language to another, and another, and another. In mathematical terms, they describe it as a "graph" rather than a "table", a concept which probably merits a blog post to itself. I love it, and I find it a great exercise to translate stuff from various languages into Scottish Gaelic, as it gets me thinking about things I might not otherwise, and helps me identify holes in my abilities. That said, it's difficult to see what you can actually do with all that data. It has no concept of grammatical syntagms or paradigms, so you can't search for a structure and see examples of it.
But all these things -- web, social or crowdsource -- have one thing in common: they're outside the classroom. The internet is a solo phenomenon -- why would anyone work the web in the classroom? You might as well be at home!
Perhaps the biggest problem with computer-based learning is that it's all independent, so we can all make excuses and slack off. Maybe we'll start writing a blog post instead of studying, and we'll pretend to ourselves we're doing something productive....
But anyway, all that notwithstanding, there are still people who dream about getting social media into the classroom as an article in today's Guardian shows.
The justification for a focus on social media is, as far as I'm concerned, a non-sequitur:
We are late to the party. Children now default to social media in nearly every aspect of their life. They use it to communicate with their friends, play games and watch TV. Our failure to provide language learning resources must partly be due to teachers and parents who either don't appreciate or don't understand the power of social media.To paraphrase: kids use it outside the class, so we must use it inside the class. But what of all the other things kids use outside the classroom? When I was a child, did the teachers use BMX bikes and Action Man to teach us stuff? No. They used TV to an extent, but even then it generally had the goal of making up for the classroom teacher's defiencies -- most primary teachers don't know much science, for example, so we watched a weekly science programme. So TV wasn't used because it was "what the kids use" but because it was the appropriate tool for the job. Any attempt to crowbar teaching into social media for its own sake is likely to be as successful as any other attempt adults make to "get down with the kids", and it will just look patronising.
At the end of the article, the author gives "Five ways you can start to engage with your pupils on social media", and if the term "engage with" doesn't immediately turn you off, you'll discover that once again, the "method" is not led by pedagogy, but by technology:
1. Create a Facebook page that your class can 'like'. Start posting updates to your timeline, but not in English. Ask your pupils to translate the text using Facebook's in-line Bing translation tool and ask them to gauge its accuracy.It looks to me like it's a matter of "it's there so we'll use it" -- correction is an occassional exercise in most classrooms, but here it's being promoted as part of the routing. Because it's there.
(This may actually be counterproductive -- why draw students' attention to the ubiquity of free translation tools if you're trying to demonstrate to them the value of learning a language?)
2. Create a Twitter account. Start tweeting in a foreign language, keeping in mind that you have a 140 character limit, and see if your pupils can strike up a conversation with you. Impose a non-English only reply and retweet rule.Nothing of note - nothing groundbreaking. Write stuff. But short. OK. Understood. But what stage do you get to in school language before you're able to write over 140 characters anyway. (See also "idiographic languages"...)
3. Create a YouTube account. Ask each of your pupils to record a video blog, or 'vlog', of their hobbies, thoughts or opinions on topical news stories, but speaking only in a foreign language. Those who want to have their video uploaded should send it to you first.I'm sorry, but I fail to see any teaching goal that is achieved by putting these on public display on YouTube. In fact, as a student it would horrify me to think that my errors would be on show, but then I'd probably feel browbeaten into agreeing, seeing as everyone else is doing it.
Why is this any better than setting a spoken homework task that only the teacher and/or the class sees?
4. Create a Pinterest account. Take some pictures of prompt cards, post-it notes or even objects with their description in another language and 'pin' them on your boards. You could even look for photos of the country, or infographics about languages in general, to help your pupils understand more about why they should learn it.I can't imagine this getting much use. What is the student's goal in using the pinboard? Why would I go to it? What on Earth could you put on it that would grab enough attention to make the endeavour worthwhile?
5. Create a blog or Tumblr. Dedicate it entirely to publishing content in the language you teach. Show your pupils why you love the language and inspire them to do the same. Ask them to write something, however small, and post it for the whole world to admire.All well and good in a liberal arts atmosphere, but like the videos, where's the innovative step between this and written homework? Besides, as a learner and a teacher, I prefer much more closely directed work. Why? Am I a tyrant? Hell no. An open task normally leads to either getting stuck in a rut using the same old "safe" language items over and over again, or frequent overreaching by trying to say something that you haven't been taught yet.
As a learner, that frustrates me. As a teacher, it makes things harder to mark. What feedback do you give in the latter case? Do you write five or six lessons worth of teaching? Do say just mark it as wrong and say you haven't done that yet?
So I don't think social media's a great answer for the teacher, really. A fantastic resource for the independent learner, yes. A great way of maintaining a language in the absence of other contact, yes. But an important component of the modern classroom, no.
Edit 11/04/2012: Tatoeba's actually better than I thought. The search engine may not be as flexible or as specific as true corpus concordancing software, but it's pretty powerful, as the docs indicate. There's a "proximity operator" in there, so you can look for co-occurring words even if you don't have the exact phrase. Nifty.
19 February 2012
In order to teach, you must understand
I was talking to several of my fellow students before Christmas about the courses on offer at SMO, Scotland's only college offering degrees through the medium of Gaelic, and in particular the lost opportunity to teach languages efficiently to a completely bilingual student body -- an opportunity that no other higher education institution in the country has.
The only foreign language course currently offered is a single 15-point module in Irish, and this isn't offered until 3rd year. Now one person said that it had been raised before, and it had been asked why Welsh never found its way onto the syllabus. Apparently the college feels it isn't similar enough to Gaelic to be worth doing. OK, there aren't many cognates between the two languages and those that there are aren't exactly transparent, but similarity can go much deeper than mere transparency. In fact, from an academic point of view, it's the less visible similarities that inform most.
I've been trying to improve my Welsh recently, and while doing so I've been looking for academically interesting issues, and one I found was in the adjectives.
In Gaelic, the most common adjective ending is -ACH. In Welsh, adjectives usually end in a vowel followed by G. Different? Not as much as you'd think. CH in Gaelic is a C modified by a process called "lenition" in all the literature. Lenition is the weakening of a consonant. There's a process of lenition in Welsh too, although it's called the "soft mutation" in Welsh learning literature. Guess what C becomes under soft mutation...? Yup, it's G. So even though the end result looks markedly different, on a process level, it's identical.
Teaching in this way (in either direction) may make the new language seem a little less arbitrary. But more than that, it also takes a single case that covers many examples and encourages an intuitive sense of equivalences across the languages, because it teaches you to accept unconsciously that Welsh G is often Gaelic CH and vice-versa. Thinking in terms of lenition as a process may also help students cope with examples that are lenited in one language and not the other. It opens up a framework of possibilities, and if we are open to more possibilities, we're more likely to understand new and unknown language.
But in order to do this, the teacher must understand the material at a far deeper level than they're intending to teach. You cannot simply spend your career one lesson ahead of your students in the textbook, because you have to know more about the subject than the textbook teaches.
The teacher needs to know a fair bit about the history and science that explains the development the language, even if he isn't going to talk about history or linguistic processes in class.
To give another example, it helps to know that the O->UE and E->IE changes in Spanish (eg poder->puedo, tener->tiene) are to do with Latin long and short vowels. Now I'm not sure, but I believe the words that undergo this change had short vowels in Latin, and the ones that never change had long vowels in Latin, but it might be the other way round. I don't need to know for sure, because I'm not going to teach this in class. But I understand the mechanism, which at the very least means I won't waste time looking for a non-existent pattern in the Spanish. ( Or more correctly, I've stopped looking for a non-existant pattern in the Spanish, because until I was told about Latin, everyone told me "it's irregular" and I didn't believe it could be.)
Also, while many books will present this as a feature of irregular verbs, I now know that it's no such thing -- in reality it's a fairly regular and productive phonetic feature. If you look at morphemes that can occur in multiple positions this same change occurs, and it happens for nouns, adjectives and adverbs as well as verbs.
The nouns "puerta" and "portal" share a root, and the latter retains the monophthong O simply because it's not in the stressed syllable.
An accountant (contable) works with accounts (cuentas) and again we see the change in action.
If we teach the vowel change as an irregular verb feature, the student won't necessarily be able to make the link between puerto and portal, or contable and cuenta -- the student won't have an understanding that imitates the intuition of the native speaker. One morpheme will end up being considered as two, and the learner will find it more difficult to learn vocabulary or to devine the meaning of new vocabulary on first encounter.
Knowing the background allows us to identify the important distinctions that we need to present to our students, and that's a very good thing.
As a teacher, I am aware that always-O and unstressed-O-stressed-UE are different phonemes which share certain allophones. This knowledge isn't explicitly required by my students (I'm a language teacher, not a linguistics professor) but it certainly must be known by them implicitly if they are to have a natural understanding of the language.
How can we do this?
The obvious place to start would be with a couple of common verbs. Poder and tener are very frequent, very useful, and a traditional place to start.
We have to make it clear what phoneme the student is using, and the O and E phonemes are never unambiguous in an unstressed position, so when we teach new vocabulary, we should pick a word that places the O or E in the stressed position -- so we teach "cuenta" before "contable". We make comment on the fact that cuent/contable share a morpheme (but we don't need the word "morpheme", because everyone's happy with the word "root") and that therefore it follows the same rule as verbs -- it's diphthongised in the tonic syllable and a monophthong elsewhere (although we can follow Michel Thomas's lead and replace the technical talk with the idea that the vowels "break under stress").
But plainly and simply, the student must have an implicit understanding of what's happening, or everything becomes arbitrary and meaningless, hence difficult to learn.
17 November 2011
A dull echo of bad practice in teaching...
There are many things in language teaching theory that are hotly debated, but there are some things that are universally accepted. In theory. In practice, they can be forgotten about. I'm currently working through the Michel Thomas Polish Foundation course and one of these springs to mind:
The echo effect
The echo effect is quite simple: the last thing you hear stays in your mind longest. The theory around this varies as our understanding of the human brain improves, and some people talk about "echoic memory", others about "feedback loops", others still "working memory". But whatever the theoretical models people come up with, they all seek to model the same universally agreed observation: the last thing you hear stays in your mind longest.
The echo effect in practice
So that's the theory, but how does this work in practice? The canonical example would be the listening exam. A sentence or passage presented in a listening paper will be followed by silence -- all instructions come before the passage so that the internal echo is the actual material, not the instructions. After all, if the instructions are clear, the student should understand and internalise them easily.
Failure to follow through to the classroom
However, you will find that some teachers don't consciously consider the echo effect in their day-to-day teaching. Instead, they try to follow a natural order for language. The reason this example is based on an MT course is that it's the nearest most lay people get to being able to observe a language class.
Let's look at a couple of quotes from Jolanta Cecula's MT course:
"I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand what you are saying"... talking to a man? (CD3 Track 2)
Notice here that the background information, "talking to a man" comes after the sentence to be translated. This means that "talking to a man" is in echoic memory, rather than "I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand what you are saying". This makes the task harder in a way that is of benefit to the learner.
Two tracks later, we get this:
"Can you help him", meaning to him, asking a woman? (CD3 Track 5)
Here we have two pieces of background information coming after the material that should really be in echoic memory. The learner then has to expend effort on recalling the prompt, distracting from the task of producing the desired target language.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work(ing memory) we go...
But the problem of prompt wording goes beyond the simple echo effect, and into bigger questions of language processing. On a few occassions, the course has prompts of the form:
So what would "" be? / So "" would be...?
Here we make life harder for working memory by interrupting the simple prompt with the phrase for translation. Processing the interrupted clause further distracts our working memory from the target translation, and makes the task unnecessarily difficult.
What I strive to do in class is to make sure the students know what is expected of them with the minimum of prompting. In the case of teaching-by-translation, MT-style, I would start a session with some explicit prompting, but quickly move to just giving them the target phrase with no other prompting.
Let them concentrate on the language, not on the classroom
There are many things in language teaching theory that are hotly debated, but there are some things that are universally accepted. In theory. In practice, they can be forgotten about. I'm currently working through the Michel Thomas Polish Foundation course and one of these springs to mind:
The echo effect
The echo effect is quite simple: the last thing you hear stays in your mind longest. The theory around this varies as our understanding of the human brain improves, and some people talk about "echoic memory", others about "feedback loops", others still "working memory". But whatever the theoretical models people come up with, they all seek to model the same universally agreed observation: the last thing you hear stays in your mind longest.
The echo effect in practice
So that's the theory, but how does this work in practice? The canonical example would be the listening exam. A sentence or passage presented in a listening paper will be followed by silence -- all instructions come before the passage so that the internal echo is the actual material, not the instructions. After all, if the instructions are clear, the student should understand and internalise them easily.
Failure to follow through to the classroom
However, you will find that some teachers don't consciously consider the echo effect in their day-to-day teaching. Instead, they try to follow a natural order for language. The reason this example is based on an MT course is that it's the nearest most lay people get to being able to observe a language class.
Let's look at a couple of quotes from Jolanta Cecula's MT course:
"I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand what you are saying"... talking to a man? (CD3 Track 2)
Notice here that the background information, "talking to a man" comes after the sentence to be translated. This means that "talking to a man" is in echoic memory, rather than "I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand what you are saying". This makes the task harder in a way that is of benefit to the learner.
Two tracks later, we get this:
"Can you help him", meaning to him, asking a woman? (CD3 Track 5)
Here we have two pieces of background information coming after the material that should really be in echoic memory. The learner then has to expend effort on recalling the prompt, distracting from the task of producing the desired target language.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work(ing memory) we go...
But the problem of prompt wording goes beyond the simple echo effect, and into bigger questions of language processing. On a few occassions, the course has prompts of the form:
So what would "
Here we make life harder for working memory by interrupting the simple prompt with the phrase for translation. Processing the interrupted clause further distracts our working memory from the target translation, and makes the task unnecessarily difficult.
What I strive to do in class is to make sure the students know what is expected of them with the minimum of prompting. In the case of teaching-by-translation, MT-style, I would start a session with some explicit prompting, but quickly move to just giving them the target phrase with no other prompting.
Let them concentrate on the language, not on the classroom
31 October 2011
When teaching grammar, stick with the uncontroversial stuff...
I was in a grammar class for my Gaelic course today, and we were looking at noun declensions. For one set of questions, we were using the word fàinne (ring). Unfortunately, this word is masculine in some dialects and feminine in others. The question stated that the word was masculine, but my partner for the exercise (a native speaker) has used it all her life as a feminine word. She declined it perfectly correctly in each case -- as a feminine word. The explicit instruction to decline it as masculine was ignored because she already has 100% intuitive command of the word.
Correct completion of the task therefore required that she stop dealing with the words as "language" and start thinking of them as some kind of mechanical logic puzzle.
The problem with the task is that it became counter-intuitive. When teaching grammar, we need to employ as much pre-existing knowledge as possible. Grammar teaching for natives has to start with forms they know, because you are not actually teaching "grammar", you are teaching "grammar awareness", and that simply means making them consciously aware of things they already know intuitively.
So you have to pick the most uncontroversial examples, the most universal and unchanging.
Work with your students, not against them.
I was in a grammar class for my Gaelic course today, and we were looking at noun declensions. For one set of questions, we were using the word fàinne (ring). Unfortunately, this word is masculine in some dialects and feminine in others. The question stated that the word was masculine, but my partner for the exercise (a native speaker) has used it all her life as a feminine word. She declined it perfectly correctly in each case -- as a feminine word. The explicit instruction to decline it as masculine was ignored because she already has 100% intuitive command of the word.
Correct completion of the task therefore required that she stop dealing with the words as "language" and start thinking of them as some kind of mechanical logic puzzle.
The problem with the task is that it became counter-intuitive. When teaching grammar, we need to employ as much pre-existing knowledge as possible. Grammar teaching for natives has to start with forms they know, because you are not actually teaching "grammar", you are teaching "grammar awareness", and that simply means making them consciously aware of things they already know intuitively.
So you have to pick the most uncontroversial examples, the most universal and unchanging.
Work with your students, not against them.
30 October 2011
Think before you teach
Every culture has its own set of persistent myths that are passed down the generations. I'm not talking about gods and monsters, though, I'm talking about myths about language. Myths are like optical illusions -- once you know what you're looking at, it's obvious to you, and you can't imagine how you missed it.
As teachers, we should be wary about passing on linguistic folklore uncritically. We should look at everything we've been told about our languages in detail to see whether it holds up to scrutiny, and if it doesn't, we shouldn't teach it.
I'd like to give you an example from the teaching of Scottish Gaelic.
If a course teaches noun cases explicitly, it will state that the "second noun" is always in the genitive. It will then go on to add the acception that if another noun follows it, it isn't in the genitive, so that in a long and complex noun-phrase, only the final noun is in the genitive.
So it is self-evident that "the second noun takes the genitive" is an incorrect rule. The actual rule is "the last noun in a noun phrase takes the genitive". Once you see this, it is obvious, but the "second noun" rule is now so all-pervasive that I'm currently hearing it in grammar classes aimed at fluent speakers in their second year of university study.
The myth is being passed on to a new generation.
As teachers, we should be wary about passing on linguistic folklore uncritically. We should look at everything we've been told about our languages in detail to see whether it holds up to scrutiny, and if it doesn't, we shouldn't teach it.
I'd like to give you an example from the teaching of Scottish Gaelic.
If a course teaches noun cases explicitly, it will state that the "second noun" is always in the genitive. It will then go on to add the acception that if another noun follows it, it isn't in the genitive, so that in a long and complex noun-phrase, only the final noun is in the genitive.
So it is self-evident that "the second noun takes the genitive" is an incorrect rule. The actual rule is "the last noun in a noun phrase takes the genitive". Once you see this, it is obvious, but the "second noun" rule is now so all-pervasive that I'm currently hearing it in grammar classes aimed at fluent speakers in their second year of university study.
The myth is being passed on to a new generation.
21 October 2011
How irregular!
I often say that the problem most people have with grammar isn't the grammar itself, but how it's described (I even wrote a post about this a couple of months ago). The Romans came up with quite a sophisticated way to describe grammar, and it was so successful that we still use it to this day. However, what a lot of grammarians still haven't twigged is that what meant a lot to Romans means absolutely nothing to your average inhabitant of 21st century Earth.
One of the words that would be completely straightforward to a Roman is regular, and of course the converse irregular. People familiar with grammatical terminology tend to think it should be easy for an English speaker too, because the root of the word is so common in English: reign, rule, regulations. A "regular" form is one that follows the rules. Simple.
Except it's not, because we don't use the word regular to mean a rule-follower in any other situation. Outside of language circles, it means to do something with a predictable frequency or schedule. So what - it's a different thing, so there's no need for confusion, right? Wrong, and this is a subtlety that's easy to miss, even though it goes to the very heart of irregular forms.
The majority of words in any language are regular -- the vast majority follow the rules. The irregular ones, the ones that break the rules, are in a minority. Which words are irregular? Well, it's always the common ones: to be, to have, to go; child/children etc. This is uncontroversial - it's a well-known statistic. That there are a few uncommon irregular forms (eg ox/oxen) doesn't break the rule, because these are forms that were common relatively recently (oxen were still in use 100 years ago, because not everyone could afford a new-fangled "tractor") and are being lost anyway (when did you last call talk about an "ox"?).
So here we have a rather nasty piece of cognitive dissonance - the forms that are most regular in terms of frequency of occurrence are the ones we call irregular, and the ones that are least regular by frequency of occurrence are called regular.
A word that is supposed to help us understand actually ends up confusing us further, and we're not even sure why we're confused. Not good.
This problem isn't limited to English, though, as the equivalent word in the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish etc) tends to have a similar meaning to the English.
The failure to understand the concept of regular has profound consequences in the teaching of forms, particularly when it comes to verbs.
How irregular?
The first thing that people forget is that regularity is not a yes/no question. While the majority of verbs are completely regular, some "irregular" verbs are only slightly irregular.
For example, the conditional and future simple of a Spanish verb are formed by adding a suffix to the infinitive. There are no verbs in the language that are irregular in terms of the suffixes. There are a handful of verbs that don't use the infinitive, instead forming a "future stem" by dropping the vowel from the infinitive ending. But then, is this even an irregularity? The process we're looking at here has a name -- syncope -- and it occurs in other languages. You can argue, then, that these future forms aren't irregular, because they do indeed follow a rule. After all, the 3 major verb groups in Spanish (-ar, -ir, -er) all follow different rules, yet we still refer to "regular" verbs in each "conjugation". So if we make a category of "vowel-dropping verbs", suddenly we find that we've defined the Spanish future as having no irregular verbs whatsoever. At the very least, I would argue that the verbs that undergo syncope are only slightly irregular.
But maybe it's unfair of me to talk about the future stem, because as a rule Spanish stems are far more stable than their counterpoints in Italian and French. In all three languages, the conjugation of "to go" is built on three different Latin roots -- ire, andare, vadare -- making it the single most irregular verb in the language (whereas the most irregular verb in English is be/is/was). But with other irregular verbs, Spanish picks a stem for a tense and runs with it. So while the present tense of "to have" in French and Italian is bisyllabic in the 1st and 2nd plural forms but monosyllabic in the singular forms, both words in Spanish ("tener", lexical verb; "haber", auxiliary verb) stay consistent across all persons, even though these are irregular verbs.
But all in all, we can see that some verbs are more irregular than others.
Introducing...
But if there is a scale of irregularity, what is the extreme of this scale? I'd like to introduce a new term to describe it. I call it...
...Contraregular
There are words out there that completely ignore the rules (eg go -> went), but there are others that go completely against the rules.
For example, nouns ending in -o in Spanish and Italian are masculine, as a rule (rule -- Latin regula -- regular). Yet "mano" (hand) is feminine. It goes completely contrary to the rule, hence "contraregular".
Why is this important?
This goes back to the fundamental nature of irregular forms that I mentioned earlier: they only occur in frequent words or structures. And in fact, the most common items are generally the most irregular.
And what is it that we tend to teach first? That's right, the most frequent words and structures. Hence the most irregular -- including the contraregular.
So in Spanish, you might learn the following within the first hour:
Good morning - Buenos días
Good afternoon/evening - Buenas tardes
Good night - Buenas noches
These are all contraregular -- -es normally marks masculine plural, but tarde and noche are feminine nouns, so the adjectives are marked in feminine plural. -as normally marks the feminine plural, but día is actually masculine, so the adjective is marked in masculine plural.
This isn't that big a deal if you just tell someone about it, but in many classes, you don't -- the student is expected to infer the grammar from examples. If your students are first exposed to counter-examples, to exceptions, how can they generalise? The irregular forms become a blockage, and the students are forced to learn each example as if there were no rules whatsoever.
But even if we do explain, should we be teaching this before we've covered the basics of regular adjectives? I see no reason why we should. There is no proven pedagogical advantage to being able to parrot a few fixed phrases before learning to use the grammar productively. As a practical matter, such greetings may seem immediately useful, but there is no genuine value in being able to say "good morning" when you are otherwise incapable of saying anything in the language. Besides, within a few hours in the classroom, you should be able to get your students to the point where they can construct such phrases themselves with a little bit of guidance.
I often say that the problem most people have with grammar isn't the grammar itself, but how it's described (I even wrote a post about this a couple of months ago). The Romans came up with quite a sophisticated way to describe grammar, and it was so successful that we still use it to this day. However, what a lot of grammarians still haven't twigged is that what meant a lot to Romans means absolutely nothing to your average inhabitant of 21st century Earth.
One of the words that would be completely straightforward to a Roman is regular, and of course the converse irregular. People familiar with grammatical terminology tend to think it should be easy for an English speaker too, because the root of the word is so common in English: reign, rule, regulations. A "regular" form is one that follows the rules. Simple.
Except it's not, because we don't use the word regular to mean a rule-follower in any other situation. Outside of language circles, it means to do something with a predictable frequency or schedule. So what - it's a different thing, so there's no need for confusion, right? Wrong, and this is a subtlety that's easy to miss, even though it goes to the very heart of irregular forms.
The majority of words in any language are regular -- the vast majority follow the rules. The irregular ones, the ones that break the rules, are in a minority. Which words are irregular? Well, it's always the common ones: to be, to have, to go; child/children etc. This is uncontroversial - it's a well-known statistic. That there are a few uncommon irregular forms (eg ox/oxen) doesn't break the rule, because these are forms that were common relatively recently (oxen were still in use 100 years ago, because not everyone could afford a new-fangled "tractor") and are being lost anyway (when did you last call talk about an "ox"?).
So here we have a rather nasty piece of cognitive dissonance - the forms that are most regular in terms of frequency of occurrence are the ones we call irregular, and the ones that are least regular by frequency of occurrence are called regular.
A word that is supposed to help us understand actually ends up confusing us further, and we're not even sure why we're confused. Not good.
This problem isn't limited to English, though, as the equivalent word in the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish etc) tends to have a similar meaning to the English.
The failure to understand the concept of regular has profound consequences in the teaching of forms, particularly when it comes to verbs.
How irregular?
The first thing that people forget is that regularity is not a yes/no question. While the majority of verbs are completely regular, some "irregular" verbs are only slightly irregular.
For example, the conditional and future simple of a Spanish verb are formed by adding a suffix to the infinitive. There are no verbs in the language that are irregular in terms of the suffixes. There are a handful of verbs that don't use the infinitive, instead forming a "future stem" by dropping the vowel from the infinitive ending. But then, is this even an irregularity? The process we're looking at here has a name -- syncope -- and it occurs in other languages. You can argue, then, that these future forms aren't irregular, because they do indeed follow a rule. After all, the 3 major verb groups in Spanish (-ar, -ir, -er) all follow different rules, yet we still refer to "regular" verbs in each "conjugation". So if we make a category of "vowel-dropping verbs", suddenly we find that we've defined the Spanish future as having no irregular verbs whatsoever. At the very least, I would argue that the verbs that undergo syncope are only slightly irregular.
But maybe it's unfair of me to talk about the future stem, because as a rule Spanish stems are far more stable than their counterpoints in Italian and French. In all three languages, the conjugation of "to go" is built on three different Latin roots -- ire, andare, vadare -- making it the single most irregular verb in the language (whereas the most irregular verb in English is be/is/was). But with other irregular verbs, Spanish picks a stem for a tense and runs with it. So while the present tense of "to have" in French and Italian is bisyllabic in the 1st and 2nd plural forms but monosyllabic in the singular forms, both words in Spanish ("tener", lexical verb; "haber", auxiliary verb) stay consistent across all persons, even though these are irregular verbs.
But all in all, we can see that some verbs are more irregular than others.
Introducing...
But if there is a scale of irregularity, what is the extreme of this scale? I'd like to introduce a new term to describe it. I call it...
...Contraregular
There are words out there that completely ignore the rules (eg go -> went), but there are others that go completely against the rules.
For example, nouns ending in -o in Spanish and Italian are masculine, as a rule (rule -- Latin regula -- regular). Yet "mano" (hand) is feminine. It goes completely contrary to the rule, hence "contraregular".
Why is this important?
This goes back to the fundamental nature of irregular forms that I mentioned earlier: they only occur in frequent words or structures. And in fact, the most common items are generally the most irregular.
And what is it that we tend to teach first? That's right, the most frequent words and structures. Hence the most irregular -- including the contraregular.
So in Spanish, you might learn the following within the first hour:
Good morning - Buenos días
Good afternoon/evening - Buenas tardes
Good night - Buenas noches
These are all contraregular -- -es normally marks masculine plural, but tarde and noche are feminine nouns, so the adjectives are marked in feminine plural. -as normally marks the feminine plural, but día is actually masculine, so the adjective is marked in masculine plural.
This isn't that big a deal if you just tell someone about it, but in many classes, you don't -- the student is expected to infer the grammar from examples. If your students are first exposed to counter-examples, to exceptions, how can they generalise? The irregular forms become a blockage, and the students are forced to learn each example as if there were no rules whatsoever.
But even if we do explain, should we be teaching this before we've covered the basics of regular adjectives? I see no reason why we should. There is no proven pedagogical advantage to being able to parrot a few fixed phrases before learning to use the grammar productively. As a practical matter, such greetings may seem immediately useful, but there is no genuine value in being able to say "good morning" when you are otherwise incapable of saying anything in the language. Besides, within a few hours in the classroom, you should be able to get your students to the point where they can construct such phrases themselves with a little bit of guidance.
20 June 2011
Teaching from mistakes
I find it curious that despite the claims that we learn best from our mistakes, many teachers are reluctant to take advantage of this in teaching.
Well, not reluctant, I suppose, but it's more a matter of wanting things both ways.
In your standard EFL class, we don't typically correct spontaneous errors on the spot (and there are certainly many circumstances where correction would break the flow of the conversation), instead giving "delayed feedback" -- a short period at the end of the class where several of the "big" mistakes of the day are put up on the whiteboard and discussed and corrected as a class.
One of the reasons for this is to avoid drawing attention to the invidual or causing any embarrassment. However, this means it's too late. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the student doesn't have the same emotional tie to the sentence and any correction is purely academic. What makes this into a particularly fruitless endeavour is that most of the time they know the correct answer in theory, but they just fail to apply the correct rule in practice, so the error isn't addressed properly.
But if we look at the various confusions I mentioned last time -- married vs tired, embarrassed vs pregnant, having a cold vs having constipation -- we see that correction is at its most effective when it connects on a very vivid, immediate, emotional level.
I'm not saying we should go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate learners, but that we shouldn't be afraid to take advantage of the humour or absurdity of an error in making the correction more memorable.
For example, I know one fellow Gaelic learner who hasn't really grasped the correct use of possessives, and is wont to say things like "tha mi cat agam a' dol dhan bheat", which means pretty much "I am one of my cats on my way to the vet". Now, you can correct her with "tha an cat agam" and she might repeat it, but 10 seconds later, she'll be saying it wrong again. So why not just tell her she's called herself a cat?
Ok, so you have to build up a certain rapport with the other party to make sure you're doing it in a good natured way, and they feel you're laughing with each other rather than laughing at the other person.
But delayed feedback is almost always too late: a mistake can only lose its power to embarrass when it no longer feels like that particular student's mistake, and if it's not that student's mistake then it's just another restatement of the rule.
Hang on a minute... let's get this straight. Delayed feedback isn't correction at all?!? Not on a personal level. On a technicality, yes, it is correction, but on an emotional, personal level, it's not. Or at least not always.
So either correct in time to make a difference, or else find a way to teach that avoids errors in the first place. (And that's not necessarily as hard as it sounds.)
I find it curious that despite the claims that we learn best from our mistakes, many teachers are reluctant to take advantage of this in teaching.
Well, not reluctant, I suppose, but it's more a matter of wanting things both ways.
In your standard EFL class, we don't typically correct spontaneous errors on the spot (and there are certainly many circumstances where correction would break the flow of the conversation), instead giving "delayed feedback" -- a short period at the end of the class where several of the "big" mistakes of the day are put up on the whiteboard and discussed and corrected as a class.
One of the reasons for this is to avoid drawing attention to the invidual or causing any embarrassment. However, this means it's too late. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the student doesn't have the same emotional tie to the sentence and any correction is purely academic. What makes this into a particularly fruitless endeavour is that most of the time they know the correct answer in theory, but they just fail to apply the correct rule in practice, so the error isn't addressed properly.
But if we look at the various confusions I mentioned last time -- married vs tired, embarrassed vs pregnant, having a cold vs having constipation -- we see that correction is at its most effective when it connects on a very vivid, immediate, emotional level.
I'm not saying we should go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate learners, but that we shouldn't be afraid to take advantage of the humour or absurdity of an error in making the correction more memorable.
For example, I know one fellow Gaelic learner who hasn't really grasped the correct use of possessives, and is wont to say things like "tha mi cat agam a' dol dhan bheat", which means pretty much "I am one of my cats on my way to the vet". Now, you can correct her with "tha an cat agam" and she might repeat it, but 10 seconds later, she'll be saying it wrong again. So why not just tell her she's called herself a cat?
Ok, so you have to build up a certain rapport with the other party to make sure you're doing it in a good natured way, and they feel you're laughing with each other rather than laughing at the other person.
But delayed feedback is almost always too late: a mistake can only lose its power to embarrass when it no longer feels like that particular student's mistake, and if it's not that student's mistake then it's just another restatement of the rule.
Hang on a minute... let's get this straight. Delayed feedback isn't correction at all?!? Not on a personal level. On a technicality, yes, it is correction, but on an emotional, personal level, it's not. Or at least not always.
So either correct in time to make a difference, or else find a way to teach that avoids errors in the first place. (And that's not necessarily as hard as it sounds.)
17 December 2010
I was for a very long time confused by the acronym "TPRS".
They told me it was TPR Storytelling, where TPR was Total Physical Response. But then they told me that it had nothing to do with TPR. Yeah. That's clear.
So anyway, when I was searching YouTube for language a definition of comprehensible input (see last week's post) a couple of suggestions popped up with the keyword TPRS, so I figured it was time to dive in and see what it really was about. I personally love the idea of teaching using stories, but I have to admit I was always skeptical about the practicalities of it.
The first video I came across was this one, which is an edited video of a TPRS demonstration, so explains quite a bit about what's going on (in French with English subtitles):
(There's another few good examples that show the process by user mrtejeda, but he has switched off embedding, so I can't include any of them directly in this article.)
The basic gist of it seems to be to tell them something and ask them what you've told them, then tell them something more and ask them what you've told them, ad nauseum.
The very odd thing here is how he starts by asking them what the fish (the subject of the story is called) but rejects all supplied names in favour of one of his own choosing. This isn't the first time I've seen this -- Pierre Capretz's video-based course French in Action does the same thing. In the case of French in Action, this is because he has the videos prerecorded, so can't change the names on the fly, but why does the teacher in this video, where the story could easily be changed (as the only resource here is himself as storyteller), not simply accept a name from the floor? When we talk about student engagement, we want the students to make a personal investment in the story, and getting them involved in building the story is a great way to do that. On the other hand, asking their opinions on something then completely ignoring it is a great way to alienate your students - it shows them you don't care what they think.
The problem here isn't with the idea of storytelling as a teaching method - rather the problem is the received wisdom that asking people's names is a core beginner skill. From this starting point, you're forced into practising asking names, and asking your students the name of the main character ends up as a staple of your early stories. But asking names is not an intrinsically basic skill, particularly in the Romance languages where it involves use of reflexive verbs. I actually think it could be detrimental to introduce it early, but that's a matter for another post. Really, there are other language points that would be far better suited to TPRS than introductions and pleasantries.
But anyway, once he asked students for a name, he should have gone with it, no matter how stupid. After all, he does appear to go on to allow one of the students to determine that the fish isn't very intelligent, and surely that's more fundamental to the story than the fish's name... (I say "appear to", because if there was a right answer, then the first respondent had a 50:50 chance of getting it right.)
Anyway, once the teacher has stopped the pointless guessing game and told them the fish's name, the class indicate their comprehension with a big clear "aaaaaaaaaaahhh", with is repeated every time the teacher provides a piece of new information. But does it really indicate comprehension? Note how the teacher is prompting for it - I'm sure many people in that class (or at least in my old high school) would make that noise on cue regardless of whether they understand or not.
When he asks questions about whether Fabio is a fish or a car, I'm left wondering why. It's slowing down the story, and surely by now all the sign-language has guaranteed some level of understanding...? If the sign-language makes the input into "comprehensible input", then comprehension is achieved despite not being familiar with the word, and you are at best testing the students' ability to understand the mime, not the word. This hardly seems an appropriate goal for a language class.
In fact, there are multiple cues that tell the student they can ignore this word.
The style of questioning during comprehension check is a bit different from that in the new information section, so students will learn to distinguish between when they're being asked their opinion and when they're being asked to confirm old information.
"Voiture" is a new word in this session, and we're in a comprehension check. "Poisson" is a word that has been said lots during that session. "Voiture" obviously can be ignored.
And if you still haven't twigged that it's a new word, just look at the teacher. He's miming, and he only does that with new words. If it's a new word, you can ignore it.
It arguably takes a bad learner to go beyond this point still caring that the mime is a car, but knowing that he's miming a car just tells you that whatever he's saying isn't relevant to the story of a fish.
Very few people will be paying attention to the word at this point, so no-one's learning it.
Another problem the teacher introduces is by presenting sentences and seeking affirmation of understanding from them, blurring the boundaries between question and statement.
He does seem to get through a few different language points, but it does seem odd to me that he's talking about laughing and crying, but still needs to point out "pourquoi" on the board. The whole thing seems just a little bit baffling, and by accepting one-word answers, we may know that they've understood the message, but we can't know that they've understood the language. But then again, as this technique emerges from the theoretical standpoints of a "Silent Period" and of "Comprehensible Input", we already know that the teacher assumes that understanding of content comes before understanding of grammar and/or vocabulary.
The problem I have with this assumption is quite straightforward: if you can understand the message without understanding the language, why would you ever need to learn the language? The brain generally only goes to the minimum of effort required to obtain an adequate result (which is why I assume most good learners will ignore "voiture"), and a great deal can be understood with a flawed model of the language.
Now, here's another demonstration, and notice how quiet the class is here.
The description of this video says:
"Me using my principal and his admin assistant as guinea pigs to give a demonstration of using 95% target language with high comprehension to teach Spanish. The demonstration was for the other 2 teachers in my department. The targets (off the top of my head with not much forethought) were quién, rojo & azul, masc/fem, come and canta."
So this is a class of theoretically "good" students, but they're pretty silent all the way through. In fact, the teacher looks increasingly frantic as she keeps asking "¿Quién?" but nobody answers (presumably because they haven't worked out that this means "who?" yet).
Several times over, she asks questions by saying "quién" and then a name, which is about as good as saying in English something like "Who, Mickey Mouse?" It's language, but it's not the common form, and in my opinion it is simplified to the point where it ceases to provide a good foundation for future learning. It suggests that TPRS, like so many techniques, doesn't really work until you've got a basic grounding to build on.
Now think about some of the statements and questions.
"Mickey Mouse es guapo."
Really? Mickey Mouse is good-looking? It seems a very odd way to demonstrate a new word. First of all, "guapo" or otherwise is a matter of subjective judgement, so is difficult to teach by example at the best of times. Secondly, how do you make that judgement about a cartoon mouse? Mickey Mouse doesn't demonstrate the concept of "good-looking", so the students can just fumble about and say yes or no without genuinely comprehending the question.
But then she goes on to ask which of two women is better looking. We're working in very new language and she's asking her class to make subjective judgements before they're clear on the meaning. In subjective judgements like this, there's no right or wrong answer, so it you simply cannot check comprehension. Yet the teacher feels the need to check comprehension and challenges the student. Unfortunately the student does not and cannot know what's going on and there's an awkward immobile moment of silence. Putting myself in the student's place (and while I've not been in a TPRS classroom, I have been in several target-language-only classrooms), I imagine my brain churning over, looking for whatever "mistake" I made that prompted this barrage of questions. If I was a schoolkid, I'd maybe even start blushing, wondering if I'd picked the socially unacceptable option, and the embarassment would snowball.
At 3'45" one of the student asks for confirmation of -a vs -o in adjectival endings, and the teacher tells him that's not how the class works. This is the usual insistence that in an immersive environment, grammar is not "taught", students just "acquire" it; but if we look at it, the teacher is explicitly highlighting the change of vowel. She is, whether she likes it or not, presenting the rule, and anyone who actually learns from her laboured routine of pointing and saying will be able to explain the rule. So if the student works it out, what's wrong with confirming? In fact, at 4'35", the student in background explains the rule, and the teacher says not to talk about it. It's difficult for me to accept that conscious knowledge of the rules could be so caustic that it has to be avoided at all costs when she is going to such lengths to give the rule in a roundabout way.
The other thing that this lesson demonstrates is the difficulty of relying on memory. At one point she asks the colour of someone's shoes. Does this test comprehension or does it test memory? It will never be clear whether a student's inability to respond comes from not remembering the fact under test or from not remembering the correct term. If you're asking someone to remember something, it needs to be something memorable, and colours (the first video used colours too) are minor aesthetic details - they are not usually what you pay attention to in stories, and making them more important than they naturally are will interfere with the learner's ability to process the language in a natural manner.
Now note this curiosity from the same demonstration:
We're getting back into classroomese again -- teaching an unusual mini-sign-language for students to use as a way of avoiding native language in the classroom. No matter how simple the code, introducing a sign language means the classroom is not monolingual, yet they insist that this is monolingual teaching.
Now the following example story, stripped back to just the "story" itself, struck me as rather surreal.
Is this really a "story"...?
Anyway, while it's obvious what language it's supposed to demonstrate (liking, wanting), it's not really clear whether it's going to be teaching anything more than the words "llama" and "elefante".
It's quite striking that of all the videos I've watched on TPRS, none demonstrates how to introduce new abstract language or structures. As with most target-language-only learning, in TPRS there seems to be a massive emphasis on concrete vocabulary.
And sadly, as I've said before, vocabulary is the easy bit. I don't have a great deal of time for any language teacher who does the easy stuff and avoids the hard stuff. The easy stuff we can do without their help. What I want from a teacher is for them to take the hard stuff and make it easy for me.
TPRS has it's place - I can see a well-constructed story offering a great change from the usual lesson format, but trying to build an entire course out of it just seems like madness, because for all its strengths, you still need something else to address the weaknesses I identified above.
They told me it was TPR Storytelling, where TPR was Total Physical Response. But then they told me that it had nothing to do with TPR. Yeah. That's clear.
So anyway, when I was searching YouTube for language a definition of comprehensible input (see last week's post) a couple of suggestions popped up with the keyword TPRS, so I figured it was time to dive in and see what it really was about. I personally love the idea of teaching using stories, but I have to admit I was always skeptical about the practicalities of it.
The first video I came across was this one, which is an edited video of a TPRS demonstration, so explains quite a bit about what's going on (in French with English subtitles):
(There's another few good examples that show the process by user mrtejeda, but he has switched off embedding, so I can't include any of them directly in this article.)
The basic gist of it seems to be to tell them something and ask them what you've told them, then tell them something more and ask them what you've told them, ad nauseum.
The very odd thing here is how he starts by asking them what the fish (the subject of the story is called) but rejects all supplied names in favour of one of his own choosing. This isn't the first time I've seen this -- Pierre Capretz's video-based course French in Action does the same thing. In the case of French in Action, this is because he has the videos prerecorded, so can't change the names on the fly, but why does the teacher in this video, where the story could easily be changed (as the only resource here is himself as storyteller), not simply accept a name from the floor? When we talk about student engagement, we want the students to make a personal investment in the story, and getting them involved in building the story is a great way to do that. On the other hand, asking their opinions on something then completely ignoring it is a great way to alienate your students - it shows them you don't care what they think.
The problem here isn't with the idea of storytelling as a teaching method - rather the problem is the received wisdom that asking people's names is a core beginner skill. From this starting point, you're forced into practising asking names, and asking your students the name of the main character ends up as a staple of your early stories. But asking names is not an intrinsically basic skill, particularly in the Romance languages where it involves use of reflexive verbs. I actually think it could be detrimental to introduce it early, but that's a matter for another post. Really, there are other language points that would be far better suited to TPRS than introductions and pleasantries.
But anyway, once he asked students for a name, he should have gone with it, no matter how stupid. After all, he does appear to go on to allow one of the students to determine that the fish isn't very intelligent, and surely that's more fundamental to the story than the fish's name... (I say "appear to", because if there was a right answer, then the first respondent had a 50:50 chance of getting it right.)
Anyway, once the teacher has stopped the pointless guessing game and told them the fish's name, the class indicate their comprehension with a big clear "aaaaaaaaaaahhh", with is repeated every time the teacher provides a piece of new information. But does it really indicate comprehension? Note how the teacher is prompting for it - I'm sure many people in that class (or at least in my old high school) would make that noise on cue regardless of whether they understand or not.
When he asks questions about whether Fabio is a fish or a car, I'm left wondering why. It's slowing down the story, and surely by now all the sign-language has guaranteed some level of understanding...? If the sign-language makes the input into "comprehensible input", then comprehension is achieved despite not being familiar with the word, and you are at best testing the students' ability to understand the mime, not the word. This hardly seems an appropriate goal for a language class.
In fact, there are multiple cues that tell the student they can ignore this word.
The style of questioning during comprehension check is a bit different from that in the new information section, so students will learn to distinguish between when they're being asked their opinion and when they're being asked to confirm old information.
"Voiture" is a new word in this session, and we're in a comprehension check. "Poisson" is a word that has been said lots during that session. "Voiture" obviously can be ignored.
And if you still haven't twigged that it's a new word, just look at the teacher. He's miming, and he only does that with new words. If it's a new word, you can ignore it.
It arguably takes a bad learner to go beyond this point still caring that the mime is a car, but knowing that he's miming a car just tells you that whatever he's saying isn't relevant to the story of a fish.
Very few people will be paying attention to the word at this point, so no-one's learning it.
Another problem the teacher introduces is by presenting sentences and seeking affirmation of understanding from them, blurring the boundaries between question and statement.
He does seem to get through a few different language points, but it does seem odd to me that he's talking about laughing and crying, but still needs to point out "pourquoi" on the board. The whole thing seems just a little bit baffling, and by accepting one-word answers, we may know that they've understood the message, but we can't know that they've understood the language. But then again, as this technique emerges from the theoretical standpoints of a "Silent Period" and of "Comprehensible Input", we already know that the teacher assumes that understanding of content comes before understanding of grammar and/or vocabulary.
The problem I have with this assumption is quite straightforward: if you can understand the message without understanding the language, why would you ever need to learn the language? The brain generally only goes to the minimum of effort required to obtain an adequate result (which is why I assume most good learners will ignore "voiture"), and a great deal can be understood with a flawed model of the language.
Now, here's another demonstration, and notice how quiet the class is here.
The description of this video says:
"Me using my principal and his admin assistant as guinea pigs to give a demonstration of using 95% target language with high comprehension to teach Spanish. The demonstration was for the other 2 teachers in my department. The targets (off the top of my head with not much forethought) were quién, rojo & azul, masc/fem, come and canta."
So this is a class of theoretically "good" students, but they're pretty silent all the way through. In fact, the teacher looks increasingly frantic as she keeps asking "¿Quién?" but nobody answers (presumably because they haven't worked out that this means "who?" yet).
Several times over, she asks questions by saying "quién" and then a name, which is about as good as saying in English something like "Who, Mickey Mouse?" It's language, but it's not the common form, and in my opinion it is simplified to the point where it ceases to provide a good foundation for future learning. It suggests that TPRS, like so many techniques, doesn't really work until you've got a basic grounding to build on.
Now think about some of the statements and questions.
"Mickey Mouse es guapo."
Really? Mickey Mouse is good-looking? It seems a very odd way to demonstrate a new word. First of all, "guapo" or otherwise is a matter of subjective judgement, so is difficult to teach by example at the best of times. Secondly, how do you make that judgement about a cartoon mouse? Mickey Mouse doesn't demonstrate the concept of "good-looking", so the students can just fumble about and say yes or no without genuinely comprehending the question.
But then she goes on to ask which of two women is better looking. We're working in very new language and she's asking her class to make subjective judgements before they're clear on the meaning. In subjective judgements like this, there's no right or wrong answer, so it you simply cannot check comprehension. Yet the teacher feels the need to check comprehension and challenges the student. Unfortunately the student does not and cannot know what's going on and there's an awkward immobile moment of silence. Putting myself in the student's place (and while I've not been in a TPRS classroom, I have been in several target-language-only classrooms), I imagine my brain churning over, looking for whatever "mistake" I made that prompted this barrage of questions. If I was a schoolkid, I'd maybe even start blushing, wondering if I'd picked the socially unacceptable option, and the embarassment would snowball.
At 3'45" one of the student asks for confirmation of -a vs -o in adjectival endings, and the teacher tells him that's not how the class works. This is the usual insistence that in an immersive environment, grammar is not "taught", students just "acquire" it; but if we look at it, the teacher is explicitly highlighting the change of vowel. She is, whether she likes it or not, presenting the rule, and anyone who actually learns from her laboured routine of pointing and saying will be able to explain the rule. So if the student works it out, what's wrong with confirming? In fact, at 4'35", the student in background explains the rule, and the teacher says not to talk about it. It's difficult for me to accept that conscious knowledge of the rules could be so caustic that it has to be avoided at all costs when she is going to such lengths to give the rule in a roundabout way.
The other thing that this lesson demonstrates is the difficulty of relying on memory. At one point she asks the colour of someone's shoes. Does this test comprehension or does it test memory? It will never be clear whether a student's inability to respond comes from not remembering the fact under test or from not remembering the correct term. If you're asking someone to remember something, it needs to be something memorable, and colours (the first video used colours too) are minor aesthetic details - they are not usually what you pay attention to in stories, and making them more important than they naturally are will interfere with the learner's ability to process the language in a natural manner.
Now note this curiosity from the same demonstration:
We're getting back into classroomese again -- teaching an unusual mini-sign-language for students to use as a way of avoiding native language in the classroom. No matter how simple the code, introducing a sign language means the classroom is not monolingual, yet they insist that this is monolingual teaching.
Now the following example story, stripped back to just the "story" itself, struck me as rather surreal.
Is this really a "story"...?
Anyway, while it's obvious what language it's supposed to demonstrate (liking, wanting), it's not really clear whether it's going to be teaching anything more than the words "llama" and "elefante".
It's quite striking that of all the videos I've watched on TPRS, none demonstrates how to introduce new abstract language or structures. As with most target-language-only learning, in TPRS there seems to be a massive emphasis on concrete vocabulary.
And sadly, as I've said before, vocabulary is the easy bit. I don't have a great deal of time for any language teacher who does the easy stuff and avoids the hard stuff. The easy stuff we can do without their help. What I want from a teacher is for them to take the hard stuff and make it easy for me.
TPRS has it's place - I can see a well-constructed story offering a great change from the usual lesson format, but trying to build an entire course out of it just seems like madness, because for all its strengths, you still need something else to address the weaknesses I identified above.
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