No matter what language you're learning, and no matter how complicated its grammar seems to you, one thing holds true for any human language you might study:
There is hardly any grammar.
How so? Go into a bookshop or library and compare the size of the biggest grammar book with the biggest dictionary. And don't forget that big dictionaries are printed on thinner paperstock than grammar books.
Juan Kattan Ibarra's Modern Spanish Grammar has 472 pages, and is pretty comprehensive.
Collins' unabriged Spanish dictionary has a whopping 2208 pages, in a smaller typeface than the grammar book and with a printed area approximately equal to two pages of the grammar book, and formatted to reduce white space to an absolute minimum. In terms of raw text, a comprehensive dictionary is about 20 times as big as a good grammar book.
On top of that, each grammar point in a grammar book needs a couple of pages of explanation and multiple examples, where a word gets a couple of inches in each half of the dictionary.
Really, there's loads of words in any language, and hardly any grammar.
So why not get the grammar early on? It's quick and it is universally useful. Very few people can pass a single day without using the majority of the verb tenses and noun cases available in their native language.
Vocabulary is a different matter. When did I last say "robot"? I can't remember. "Lamb"? Roughly four weeks ago. "House"? About 2 weeks ago.
So if I study vocabulary, I not only have an almost never-ending task (the dictionary I mentioned above has 315,000 references), but I also find myself unable to remember words because I don't use them enough.
But if I study grammar, I can cover all the basics really quickly, and those basics can be used every single time I have a conversation, and they will stick.
The best part, though, is that once you know grammar, learning words is easier, because you can use them and understand them in various natural contexts, because grammar can change both the form and meaning of words.
Right now, I'm mapping out the grammar of Polish in order to teach it to myself and a friend, and when I'm done, I expect to know less than 50 words. But I can learn more words later.
Showing posts with label vocabulary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vocabulary. Show all posts
05 June 2011
10 December 2010
Whither comprehensible input?
In an earlier post discussing expository and naturalistic language, I linked to this video from a talk given by Stephen Krashen, discussing comprehensible input (CI):
So what exactly is comprehensible input? A very clever man once said that "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." That man was Albert Einstein, and never has a truer word been spoken.
I have never, ever had a simple explanation of what comprehensible input is. I have had trivial explanations, but while these are simple, they explain nothing. So I decided to go to my friendly neighbourhood search engine and look for that elusive definition, and ended up back in YouTubeLand.
First up, here's a teacher's explanation of CI, from a resource pack for teachers of modern languages:
The first thing of note is when she says "Sometimes easier to say what it's not" -- this is an immediate warning that we're in the field of not understanding in Einstein's terms. She then follows this up with a list of quite trivially obvious things that aren't good teaching practice (just like Krashen's first demonstration with German). Anyone watching the video should already be familiar with the idea that talking at full speed to a beginner is a no-no in the language classroom, so why is this of such note when discussing CI in particular?
As she continues, she gives an example of what she has developed as CI and says that "most sentences are about 4, maybe 5 words long." This is a very impoverished model of language, as she is therefore reduced to generating a series of independent declarative statements. The real meat of any language comes in the textual metafunction -- how words change each other's meaning. All those little connectors that compare, contrast and relate individual phrases by demonstrating cause and effect, simultaneity, sequence of events and all that stuff that allows simple facts to add meaning to each other (my recent post against rote learning demonstrated how I used various facts and consequences to learn the order of 4 of the US presidents).
Textual metafunctions are notoriously difficult to learn by induction from context and do appear to need genuine conscious teaching -- the TEFL methodology normally gets round this by defining them as inherently "advanced" and teaching them through target language several years down the line. However, doing this actually makes it harder to engage with authentic native materials, and the process of "grading" texts becomes ever more important. CI would appear to keep students away from native language, not get them closer.
Ok, so just before the one minute mark, she recommends that material is 80% comprehensible. This sounds very scientific, but at no point has she described how to measure percentage comprehensibility. I'm not sure where this 80% comes from, but I've heard it bandied about quite often, and I suspect it's just another generalisation from the Pareto Principle. (80% has become something of a superstition for our times -- the Pareto Principle has gone from being an observation of general behaviour in systems, to being considered an immutable law for success...) But in this case specifically, what does she mean? Well the general claim is that the reader will be able to infer no more than 20% of the meaning from the context provided by the other 80%. This is all well and good, but this is not a simple game of numbers -- certainly language features will provide useful context for working out others, but other features won't. If CI is to work, you need to look at which features interact in this way to reveal useful information about unknown language. Again, how to do this is never really explained in a discussion of CI. (It is discussed at some length by academic linguists, who develop some very sophisticated maps of how certain language features reveal others, but this remains in the journals, and never makes it into language teacher training materials.)
Now, at just after 3:30, the presenter goes quite far off the rails, telling us that texts that are "dry and uninteresting" are not CI. The whole video was announced as being on the topic of comprehensible input, but now she starts talking about something entirely different -- student engagement. This is a recurring problem in teaching methodologies -- a fairly simple idea covering a small part of the methodology is used to describe the whole methodology. Student engagement is very important, but engagement doesn't increase the "comprehensibility" of a text, it just increases the chances that the student will put in the effort required in order to understand it. Both of these two variables must be considered at all times, so it is not helpful to try to present them as a single item.
So, on we go, and here's another great example of Einstein's definition of not understanding.
The definition revealed on the slides between 0:50 and 1:00 is anything but clear. In fact, it isn't even a "definition" at all in the most common usage of the term -- the second and third bullet points, presented as part of the definition, are sidenotes on particular issues.
As she expands, the definition becomes rather circular. The first "characteristic of comprehensible input" that she defines is "understandable" (2:14), which is the Germanic synonym of the Latinate "comprehensible". The fact that she doesn't stop there means that she is, like the woman in the previous video, expanding the term "comprehensible input" in directions it wasn't intended to go in. But like the previous in the previous video, we quickly get a "what it's not", and again it's a trivially obviously bad way of teaching that she throws in. It does not help define CI.
As she expands on "understandable", she hits a particular danger zone, asking that you teach "using as many cognates as possible." In the TEFL world, that means using "arrive" when you really mean "get to" or "depart" when you mean "leave". Target-language-only teaching justifies itself by saying that we need to learn how words are used -- grading language by the introduction of cognates actively teaches language that is not natural, and the natural tendency for Romance language speakers to overuse terms such as "arrive" is something that has to be actively combatted in class, not reinforced.
Yes, using cognates is good when they can be used naturally. The example she gives is a good one -- English "important" vs Spanish "importante" -- but she presents no guidelines or advice on how and when to use cognates.
Like in the previous video, an unrelated variable is thrown into the mix -- the "affective filter". Again, this is not part of comprehensible input and only serves to distract from the discussion on what CI is/isn't. She then starts talking about repetition. Again, I'm confused as to how this fits into CI. Surely the point isn't about "repetition" in the rote sense, but the sense of having it come up in 7 different texts before production. But if she means that, she should say so.
Then she moves on to "visuals". This is quite insidious, because now that we've establish the notion that texts must be "comprehensible" as a sort of divine law, we can address the fact that it is impossible to make texts comprehensible. So step by step we redefine what is and isn't the text. We introduce the notion that including "visuals" makes the text understandable, when in reality we are using visuals because the text is not comprehensible. Why is it that visuals make a text "comprehensible", but a native-language equivalent word doesn't? The video gives us the normal line (3:33): connecting a "new vocabulary word" [sic] to a picture "they will remember it quicker rather than having to connect the word in their target language to the word in their native language and then [exasperated tone] finally to the image produced in their mind." The idea is thus presented that an image is more closely tied to the mental model of a concept than a word, but any look at the nature of abstraction and iconicity will show that this idea is built on very shaky ground (I'll explore this in greater depth in a later blog post).
The visuals is then supported by something else that all CI advocates propose: body language. Unfortunately body language is linguistic, meaning there is native body language, there is target body language, and there is something that is neither. Classroom body language is normally a constructed language, and it is not the target language. Suddenly the target-language-only classroom has grown a third language. And the student must learn that as well as the intended target language. At least if the native language was used there'd be no need to learn a third code.
I was particulary intrigued by the rather odd claim that unspecified "brain research" has somehow proven that we can only learn 7 new words per day. It's patently absurd -- you cannot "learn" any words in 1 day -- learning only takes place over the longer term, and I have never seen any language course that doesn't use less than 7 words in lesson one -- it would be a boring lesson indeed!
The demonstration given a 5:45 was something I did not expect; to me, this is nothing more than an audiolingual drill, which demonstrates something quite important: language teachers don't normally change their techniques to match what research proves is effective (or claims to, at least), but instead find ways to justify what they already do in terms of the new idea. Recasting the idea of audiolingual substitution as comprehensible input is dead easy -- if you want "N+1 comprehensibility (a woolly favourite of the CI crowd) then what could be more natural than taking a known structure and simply adding a new word?
The next video is an extreme example of the same phenomenon. It is an excerpt from a relatively old book-and-tape English course.
This is a really heavily behaviorist course, but someone has recently decided it's CI and relabled it as such for the purposes of the video. I don't believe it's what Krashen intended the term to mean, but it certainly fits the definition he and others provide. There's a lot of repetition, there are visuals supporting the text, the text uses context to support the comprehension of new structures and vocabulary...
...so we must conclude that "comprehensible input" is an overbroad term that doesn't really define anything specific.
Finally, here's a video presented as an example of "comprehensible input".
The language used in general is highly expository and not particularly naturalistic. The visuals she uses do not support the learning of grammar, they only assist in the learning of very concrete terms, particularly proper nouns. Does the Mexican flag assist us in understanding that she's talking about her family? No. It only helps us understand "Mexico", which is probably where most of the class are from.
Now, note at 0:58 she gets the students to say something -- a single word: south. She then proceeds to go through a string of questions with very simple one-word answers. The goal here isn't to get the students talking, it's merely to verify that they've understood.
And this is where CI theory falls flat: it is based on Krashen's idea that "language acquisition" is a matter of simply absorbing and absorbing a language until you know the full language, but the streets of any major city are full of immigrants who learn to understand the language of their new homes, but never learn to speak it with any particular degree of accuracy.
CI fails because it necessarily focuses on concrete vocabulary and on learning to understand. But these are far, far easier to learn than functional vocabulary (modal verbs, linkers etc) and learning to produce. More than that, these are the things that students can learn outside of the classroom. Surely it's the teacher's job to teach the hard stuff, the stuff that the student can't learn independently, and then let them do the rest on their own?
In an earlier post discussing expository and naturalistic language, I linked to this video from a talk given by Stephen Krashen, discussing comprehensible input (CI):
So what exactly is comprehensible input? A very clever man once said that "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." That man was Albert Einstein, and never has a truer word been spoken.
I have never, ever had a simple explanation of what comprehensible input is. I have had trivial explanations, but while these are simple, they explain nothing. So I decided to go to my friendly neighbourhood search engine and look for that elusive definition, and ended up back in YouTubeLand.
First up, here's a teacher's explanation of CI, from a resource pack for teachers of modern languages:
The first thing of note is when she says "Sometimes easier to say what it's not" -- this is an immediate warning that we're in the field of not understanding in Einstein's terms. She then follows this up with a list of quite trivially obvious things that aren't good teaching practice (just like Krashen's first demonstration with German). Anyone watching the video should already be familiar with the idea that talking at full speed to a beginner is a no-no in the language classroom, so why is this of such note when discussing CI in particular?
As she continues, she gives an example of what she has developed as CI and says that "most sentences are about 4, maybe 5 words long." This is a very impoverished model of language, as she is therefore reduced to generating a series of independent declarative statements. The real meat of any language comes in the textual metafunction -- how words change each other's meaning. All those little connectors that compare, contrast and relate individual phrases by demonstrating cause and effect, simultaneity, sequence of events and all that stuff that allows simple facts to add meaning to each other (my recent post against rote learning demonstrated how I used various facts and consequences to learn the order of 4 of the US presidents).
Textual metafunctions are notoriously difficult to learn by induction from context and do appear to need genuine conscious teaching -- the TEFL methodology normally gets round this by defining them as inherently "advanced" and teaching them through target language several years down the line. However, doing this actually makes it harder to engage with authentic native materials, and the process of "grading" texts becomes ever more important. CI would appear to keep students away from native language, not get them closer.
Ok, so just before the one minute mark, she recommends that material is 80% comprehensible. This sounds very scientific, but at no point has she described how to measure percentage comprehensibility. I'm not sure where this 80% comes from, but I've heard it bandied about quite often, and I suspect it's just another generalisation from the Pareto Principle. (80% has become something of a superstition for our times -- the Pareto Principle has gone from being an observation of general behaviour in systems, to being considered an immutable law for success...) But in this case specifically, what does she mean? Well the general claim is that the reader will be able to infer no more than 20% of the meaning from the context provided by the other 80%. This is all well and good, but this is not a simple game of numbers -- certainly language features will provide useful context for working out others, but other features won't. If CI is to work, you need to look at which features interact in this way to reveal useful information about unknown language. Again, how to do this is never really explained in a discussion of CI. (It is discussed at some length by academic linguists, who develop some very sophisticated maps of how certain language features reveal others, but this remains in the journals, and never makes it into language teacher training materials.)
Now, at just after 3:30, the presenter goes quite far off the rails, telling us that texts that are "dry and uninteresting" are not CI. The whole video was announced as being on the topic of comprehensible input, but now she starts talking about something entirely different -- student engagement. This is a recurring problem in teaching methodologies -- a fairly simple idea covering a small part of the methodology is used to describe the whole methodology. Student engagement is very important, but engagement doesn't increase the "comprehensibility" of a text, it just increases the chances that the student will put in the effort required in order to understand it. Both of these two variables must be considered at all times, so it is not helpful to try to present them as a single item.
So, on we go, and here's another great example of Einstein's definition of not understanding.
The definition revealed on the slides between 0:50 and 1:00 is anything but clear. In fact, it isn't even a "definition" at all in the most common usage of the term -- the second and third bullet points, presented as part of the definition, are sidenotes on particular issues.
As she expands, the definition becomes rather circular. The first "characteristic of comprehensible input" that she defines is "understandable" (2:14), which is the Germanic synonym of the Latinate "comprehensible". The fact that she doesn't stop there means that she is, like the woman in the previous video, expanding the term "comprehensible input" in directions it wasn't intended to go in. But like the previous in the previous video, we quickly get a "what it's not", and again it's a trivially obviously bad way of teaching that she throws in. It does not help define CI.
As she expands on "understandable", she hits a particular danger zone, asking that you teach "using as many cognates as possible." In the TEFL world, that means using "arrive" when you really mean "get to" or "depart" when you mean "leave". Target-language-only teaching justifies itself by saying that we need to learn how words are used -- grading language by the introduction of cognates actively teaches language that is not natural, and the natural tendency for Romance language speakers to overuse terms such as "arrive" is something that has to be actively combatted in class, not reinforced.
Yes, using cognates is good when they can be used naturally. The example she gives is a good one -- English "important" vs Spanish "importante" -- but she presents no guidelines or advice on how and when to use cognates.
Like in the previous video, an unrelated variable is thrown into the mix -- the "affective filter". Again, this is not part of comprehensible input and only serves to distract from the discussion on what CI is/isn't. She then starts talking about repetition. Again, I'm confused as to how this fits into CI. Surely the point isn't about "repetition" in the rote sense, but the sense of having it come up in 7 different texts before production. But if she means that, she should say so.
Then she moves on to "visuals". This is quite insidious, because now that we've establish the notion that texts must be "comprehensible" as a sort of divine law, we can address the fact that it is impossible to make texts comprehensible. So step by step we redefine what is and isn't the text. We introduce the notion that including "visuals" makes the text understandable, when in reality we are using visuals because the text is not comprehensible. Why is it that visuals make a text "comprehensible", but a native-language equivalent word doesn't? The video gives us the normal line (3:33): connecting a "new vocabulary word" [sic] to a picture "they will remember it quicker rather than having to connect the word in their target language to the word in their native language and then [exasperated tone] finally to the image produced in their mind." The idea is thus presented that an image is more closely tied to the mental model of a concept than a word, but any look at the nature of abstraction and iconicity will show that this idea is built on very shaky ground (I'll explore this in greater depth in a later blog post).
The visuals is then supported by something else that all CI advocates propose: body language. Unfortunately body language is linguistic, meaning there is native body language, there is target body language, and there is something that is neither. Classroom body language is normally a constructed language, and it is not the target language. Suddenly the target-language-only classroom has grown a third language. And the student must learn that as well as the intended target language. At least if the native language was used there'd be no need to learn a third code.
I was particulary intrigued by the rather odd claim that unspecified "brain research" has somehow proven that we can only learn 7 new words per day. It's patently absurd -- you cannot "learn" any words in 1 day -- learning only takes place over the longer term, and I have never seen any language course that doesn't use less than 7 words in lesson one -- it would be a boring lesson indeed!
The demonstration given a 5:45 was something I did not expect; to me, this is nothing more than an audiolingual drill, which demonstrates something quite important: language teachers don't normally change their techniques to match what research proves is effective (or claims to, at least), but instead find ways to justify what they already do in terms of the new idea. Recasting the idea of audiolingual substitution as comprehensible input is dead easy -- if you want "N+1 comprehensibility (a woolly favourite of the CI crowd) then what could be more natural than taking a known structure and simply adding a new word?
The next video is an extreme example of the same phenomenon. It is an excerpt from a relatively old book-and-tape English course.
This is a really heavily behaviorist course, but someone has recently decided it's CI and relabled it as such for the purposes of the video. I don't believe it's what Krashen intended the term to mean, but it certainly fits the definition he and others provide. There's a lot of repetition, there are visuals supporting the text, the text uses context to support the comprehension of new structures and vocabulary...
...so we must conclude that "comprehensible input" is an overbroad term that doesn't really define anything specific.
Finally, here's a video presented as an example of "comprehensible input".
The language used in general is highly expository and not particularly naturalistic. The visuals she uses do not support the learning of grammar, they only assist in the learning of very concrete terms, particularly proper nouns. Does the Mexican flag assist us in understanding that she's talking about her family? No. It only helps us understand "Mexico", which is probably where most of the class are from.
Now, note at 0:58 she gets the students to say something -- a single word: south. She then proceeds to go through a string of questions with very simple one-word answers. The goal here isn't to get the students talking, it's merely to verify that they've understood.
And this is where CI theory falls flat: it is based on Krashen's idea that "language acquisition" is a matter of simply absorbing and absorbing a language until you know the full language, but the streets of any major city are full of immigrants who learn to understand the language of their new homes, but never learn to speak it with any particular degree of accuracy.
CI fails because it necessarily focuses on concrete vocabulary and on learning to understand. But these are far, far easier to learn than functional vocabulary (modal verbs, linkers etc) and learning to produce. More than that, these are the things that students can learn outside of the classroom. Surely it's the teacher's job to teach the hard stuff, the stuff that the student can't learn independently, and then let them do the rest on their own?
03 December 2010
The 3 sources of confusion in vocabulary.
There are various pieces of advice on the internet regarding how to learn vocabulary, but most writers set out to write their advice with the goal of convincing you that their way is best. This means that they skip the weaknesses in their chosen method, and they attack other methods on rather simplistic, superficial grounds. I would be happy to do the same thing, as it would really stoke my ego to know that people were doing stuff because I said so. But that wouldn't be particularly useful, so I'm going to try to avoid telling you how to learn vocabulary.
Instead, what I want to do is arm you to make an informed decision on techniques yourself. It's a topic I may revisit later, but for now I want to focus on the reasons vocabulary items become confused. As per the title, I break confusion down into three main categories: confusion by form; confusion by function and confusion by co-occurrence.
Confusion by form
Confusion by form is the simplest. If two words sound and/or look alike, they are very easy to confuse. English is full of great examples -- classic spelling mistakes between homophones such as "bough" and "[take a] bow", "aloud" and "allowed" etc. Most languages aren't quite as bad as English for having homophones that are written differently, so the confusion is normally between similar words, not identical ones.
But there's more to it than that. Have you ever been trying to think of a word and you've got a sort of shadow of the word in your head? The features of words that are easiest to remember are the first syllable and the number of syllables, as well as which syllable is stressed. So similarity doesn't rely on just having similar letters all the way through -- it can occur on just the first syllable, or the words may both share a particular rhythm.
We can consider so-called "false friends" as simply a special case of confusion by form, as the only difference is that the confusion occurs across languages, rather than within a language.
Confusion by function
Confusion by function can be split into two subcategories: function of grammar and function of concept.
Confusion by function of grammar is fairly simple but has extremely absurd results. Some people can't believe it exists, but keep your ears open and you will hear it at some point. A word gets dropped in that fits the grammatical category of the place it is in the sentence, but it makes no sense. Anecdotally, I'd say that I've seen it occur mostly with verbs. So for example someone might say "I like drinking books". It's rare, but it happens.
Confusion by function of concept is where two words mean something similar. The obvious example would have to be that high school language class favourites: pets. I could never remember whether un cobaye was French for a gerbil or a hamster, and still don't. I don't suppose I would have recognised the difference between the two animals anyway, so the concepts in my brain were very similar: little fluffy critter.
But the two types of confusion by function can combine to create even bigger confusion. While we do occassionally see completely nonsensical statements like the "drinking books" example, learners will quite often substitute a verb with a similar meaning. So instead of saying "I didn't say anything" they might say "I didn't speak anything", of instead of saying "open the door" they might say "close the door", or even "close the window" (I had massive problems getting my open and close and door and window right in Welsh).
Confusion by co-occurrence
Finally we come to the one that is the most complicated and troublesome: confusion by co-occurrence. Basically, the brain likes to associate things with each other. We have salt and pepper and we have bread and butter, but we never have pepper and salt or butter and bread. When things appear with each other a lot, they start to stick. So when we're learning vocabulary, we can accidentally trick our brains into linking particular words more strongly than it should simply by having them appear next to each other a lot. This is one of the biggest risks with word lists -- in a list, each word is forced to co-occur with the rest of the words on the list, particularly those directly before and after. Reading the same list multiple times is almost guaranteed to create confusion by co-occurrence.
Multidimensional confusion
I've already demostrated how the two types of confusion by function combine to make a bigger problem, and of course all different forms of confusion can combine in this way.
I used to confuse my oats and my hazelnuts in Spanish. Both are food and go together in my breakfast bowl for a sort of home-made muesli (confusion by function of concept). They were stocked less than a metre apart in the local supermarket and I kept them next to each other in my kitchen cupboard (confusion by co-occurrence). Oats is "avena" and hazelnuts are "avellanas" (confusion by form). Even when I came back to Scotland, I still couldn't get the word right. Ironically, it is only when I started using this example that I became able to make the distinction correctly.
Lessons to be learnt
A learning technique cannot eliminate the confusions completely, but it must try to minimise them.
When evaluating a vocabulary learning strategy, or devising your own, look out for the 3 types of confusion. When you're learning, be mindful of your mistakes and what they tell you about how you're learning. If you can't think of a word, or keep getting it wrong, the chances are it's down to one of these types of confusion, and you should be able to refine or alter your technique to help you remember that word correctly, which over time should help you avoid making the confusion with new vocabulary in the future.
Instead, what I want to do is arm you to make an informed decision on techniques yourself. It's a topic I may revisit later, but for now I want to focus on the reasons vocabulary items become confused. As per the title, I break confusion down into three main categories: confusion by form; confusion by function and confusion by co-occurrence.
Confusion by form
Confusion by form is the simplest. If two words sound and/or look alike, they are very easy to confuse. English is full of great examples -- classic spelling mistakes between homophones such as "bough" and "[take a] bow", "aloud" and "allowed" etc. Most languages aren't quite as bad as English for having homophones that are written differently, so the confusion is normally between similar words, not identical ones.
But there's more to it than that. Have you ever been trying to think of a word and you've got a sort of shadow of the word in your head? The features of words that are easiest to remember are the first syllable and the number of syllables, as well as which syllable is stressed. So similarity doesn't rely on just having similar letters all the way through -- it can occur on just the first syllable, or the words may both share a particular rhythm.
We can consider so-called "false friends" as simply a special case of confusion by form, as the only difference is that the confusion occurs across languages, rather than within a language.
Confusion by function
Confusion by function can be split into two subcategories: function of grammar and function of concept.
Confusion by function of grammar is fairly simple but has extremely absurd results. Some people can't believe it exists, but keep your ears open and you will hear it at some point. A word gets dropped in that fits the grammatical category of the place it is in the sentence, but it makes no sense. Anecdotally, I'd say that I've seen it occur mostly with verbs. So for example someone might say "I like drinking books". It's rare, but it happens.
Confusion by function of concept is where two words mean something similar. The obvious example would have to be that high school language class favourites: pets. I could never remember whether un cobaye was French for a gerbil or a hamster, and still don't. I don't suppose I would have recognised the difference between the two animals anyway, so the concepts in my brain were very similar: little fluffy critter.
But the two types of confusion by function can combine to create even bigger confusion. While we do occassionally see completely nonsensical statements like the "drinking books" example, learners will quite often substitute a verb with a similar meaning. So instead of saying "I didn't say anything" they might say "I didn't speak anything", of instead of saying "open the door" they might say "close the door", or even "close the window" (I had massive problems getting my open and close and door and window right in Welsh).
Confusion by co-occurrence
Finally we come to the one that is the most complicated and troublesome: confusion by co-occurrence. Basically, the brain likes to associate things with each other. We have salt and pepper and we have bread and butter, but we never have pepper and salt or butter and bread. When things appear with each other a lot, they start to stick. So when we're learning vocabulary, we can accidentally trick our brains into linking particular words more strongly than it should simply by having them appear next to each other a lot. This is one of the biggest risks with word lists -- in a list, each word is forced to co-occur with the rest of the words on the list, particularly those directly before and after. Reading the same list multiple times is almost guaranteed to create confusion by co-occurrence.
Multidimensional confusion
I've already demostrated how the two types of confusion by function combine to make a bigger problem, and of course all different forms of confusion can combine in this way.
I used to confuse my oats and my hazelnuts in Spanish. Both are food and go together in my breakfast bowl for a sort of home-made muesli (confusion by function of concept). They were stocked less than a metre apart in the local supermarket and I kept them next to each other in my kitchen cupboard (confusion by co-occurrence). Oats is "avena" and hazelnuts are "avellanas" (confusion by form). Even when I came back to Scotland, I still couldn't get the word right. Ironically, it is only when I started using this example that I became able to make the distinction correctly.
Lessons to be learnt
A learning technique cannot eliminate the confusions completely, but it must try to minimise them.
When evaluating a vocabulary learning strategy, or devising your own, look out for the 3 types of confusion. When you're learning, be mindful of your mistakes and what they tell you about how you're learning. If you can't think of a word, or keep getting it wrong, the chances are it's down to one of these types of confusion, and you should be able to refine or alter your technique to help you remember that word correctly, which over time should help you avoid making the confusion with new vocabulary in the future.
19 November 2010
Expository vs Naturalistic Language Examples
A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing authentic materials. The main problem I identified was the lack of mutual reinforcement between individual texts (I hate that word, but I just can't find a suitable alternative...) meaning that very little language presented is retained.
So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?
Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox. Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts. If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals. The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.
The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour. Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.
But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea. In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.
But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?
The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.
There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.
To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".
Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach. The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.
I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.
He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"
And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."
There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise. We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.
I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.
An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago. I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back. The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition. So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.
The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]
This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples. Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural. Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article. "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets. But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?" The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal. We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").
The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable." Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar. This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.
And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel. When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response. This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.
"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice. Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap. The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do. The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong. The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that." Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you. This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us). The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost. Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears. Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses. If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.
OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.
One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube. He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language. He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ. Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out. His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.
But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material? Hmm....
Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ. My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."
The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.
And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.
So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against. The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.
One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue. Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts. Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog. Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues. Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.
The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language. This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen. I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen. It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.
Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this? Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability. Except that Bernard is not a boy. The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed. Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there. Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)
Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard. Maybe they're introducing themselves to us? Like a "piece to camera" in a video course? It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna. But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives. Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)
Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!
This odd dynamic continues throughout the book. The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains. From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it. Who exactly are they presenting information to? They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,
So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet. Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful. Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.
But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen. Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules. One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible". But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic. Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible". "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go. Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:
If you think about it, what did he start with?
He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy. Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input". But it was not comprehensible. Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.
So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language. But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language. The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.
In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem. But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better. It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation. And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc. These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course. In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*
Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration. Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept. Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate. Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language. When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious. If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".
So Jespersen is mostly wrong. Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.
So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?
Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox. Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts. If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals. The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.
The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour. Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.
But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea. In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.
But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?
The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.
There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.
To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".
Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach. The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.
I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.
He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"
And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."
There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise. We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.
I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.
An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago. I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back. The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition. So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.
The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]
This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples. Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural. Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article. "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets. But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?" The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal. We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").
The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable." Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar. This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.
And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel. When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response. This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.
"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice. Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap. The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do. The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong. The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that." Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you. This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us). The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost. Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears. Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses. If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.
OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.
One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube. He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language. He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ. Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out. His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.
But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material? Hmm....
Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ. My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."
The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.
And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.
So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against. The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.
One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue. Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts. Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog. Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues. Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.
The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language. This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen. I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen. It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.
Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this? Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability. Except that Bernard is not a boy. The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed. Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there. Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)
Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard. Maybe they're introducing themselves to us? Like a "piece to camera" in a video course? It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna. But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives. Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)
Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!
This odd dynamic continues throughout the book. The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains. From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it. Who exactly are they presenting information to? They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,
So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet. Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful. Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.
But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen. Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules. One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible". But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic. Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible". "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go. Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:
If you think about it, what did he start with?
He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy. Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input". But it was not comprehensible. Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.
So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language. But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language. The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.
In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem. But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better. It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation. And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc. These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course. In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*
Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration. Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept. Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate. Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language. When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious. If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".
So Jespersen is mostly wrong. Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.
05 November 2010
Word. New word. Different word.
One of the biggest problems facing many learners today is the problem of incidental vocabulary. One of the prevailing themes in education is the preference for so-called "authentic materials".
"Authentics", to use a bit of teacherese, is just another word for "native materials". Except you're allowed to doctor them a bit without making them less authentic. Once you hit upper-intermediate, you will be subjected to more and more authentic materials. Your lessons will be based around texts (that damn word again) drawn from newspapers, magazines and websites, or excerpted from novels or non-fiction books, and will be arranged in chapters based on themes like science and technology, arts, education and the like.
But there's suddenly a problem here. Throwing together a heap of articles that are related in topic is all well and good if your goal is to study the topic, but if you are aiming to study the language, then the relationship between the articles is entirely superficial. The structures that you are looking for just won't be there.
The simplest manifestation is in vocabulary. Key vocabulary in that would be incidental for a native sends many a learner scuttling for his dictionary. So a word appears once only in the article, and never again in the entire course -- that dictionary time is wasted as the learner does not learn the word. In a textbook chapter on technology, you can switch from satellites to biometrics to textiles. Each of these semantic domains has a vastly different stock of basic words. The learner is left trudging through a bog of heavy, unknown words, and looking back later those are lost in a fog, never to be recalled. A cursory look back may occur in a programmed "revision lesson", but it's a random sample of a fraction of the language covered, and usually limited to matching exercises (word+definition, sentence halves or question+answer) that tacitly admit that the student isn't capable of recalling the word without heavy prompting.
The same occurs with grammatical patterns, where a pattern may appear and be taught in one text, but then subsequent texts don't support, revise or otherwise consolidate that structure. On the other hand, it's in the grammar that a lot of doctoring takes place, with complexity thrown out of window to make the text easier to understand. But it is very difficult to program for increasing complexity when you're not writing the material yourself.
The end result is a lot of wasted time -- lots of material is presented to the learner, and little retained. The goal of exposing the student to native materials slows down the learning process, and in effect means that students may leave the course less well equipped to deal with native materials than they otherwise would be.
But wait... there's more!
There is a secondary consequence of this.
The reliance on themed material favours the well educated, because they are more likely to have knowledge of the topic under discussion, and in many language pairs, the terminology will be very similar. For example, "biometrics" in French is "la biométrie". This particular example came up in my last French course, and my classmates were confused by it, but as I already know a few things about biometrics, there was nothing in the articles themselves that challenged me.
The well educated and well read get better marks, and we justify this with by accepting that people who have done well in the past are "good students" and that those who haven't aren't. This is only marginally better than the old fallacy of equating education and intelligence.
But in reality, whether the historically "good" students are genuinely better than those without a good history of attainment, that's a side issue. The material presented favours those who really have the least need for favours. In my book that's a bad thing.
It's particularly worrying to me that the course I was studying is with an institute of higher education that takes pride in the fact that it makes learning available to everyone, regardless of educational background.
"Authentics", to use a bit of teacherese, is just another word for "native materials". Except you're allowed to doctor them a bit without making them less authentic. Once you hit upper-intermediate, you will be subjected to more and more authentic materials. Your lessons will be based around texts (that damn word again) drawn from newspapers, magazines and websites, or excerpted from novels or non-fiction books, and will be arranged in chapters based on themes like science and technology, arts, education and the like.
But there's suddenly a problem here. Throwing together a heap of articles that are related in topic is all well and good if your goal is to study the topic, but if you are aiming to study the language, then the relationship between the articles is entirely superficial. The structures that you are looking for just won't be there.
The simplest manifestation is in vocabulary. Key vocabulary in that would be incidental for a native sends many a learner scuttling for his dictionary. So a word appears once only in the article, and never again in the entire course -- that dictionary time is wasted as the learner does not learn the word. In a textbook chapter on technology, you can switch from satellites to biometrics to textiles. Each of these semantic domains has a vastly different stock of basic words. The learner is left trudging through a bog of heavy, unknown words, and looking back later those are lost in a fog, never to be recalled. A cursory look back may occur in a programmed "revision lesson", but it's a random sample of a fraction of the language covered, and usually limited to matching exercises (word+definition, sentence halves or question+answer) that tacitly admit that the student isn't capable of recalling the word without heavy prompting.
The same occurs with grammatical patterns, where a pattern may appear and be taught in one text, but then subsequent texts don't support, revise or otherwise consolidate that structure. On the other hand, it's in the grammar that a lot of doctoring takes place, with complexity thrown out of window to make the text easier to understand. But it is very difficult to program for increasing complexity when you're not writing the material yourself.
The end result is a lot of wasted time -- lots of material is presented to the learner, and little retained. The goal of exposing the student to native materials slows down the learning process, and in effect means that students may leave the course less well equipped to deal with native materials than they otherwise would be.
But wait... there's more!
There is a secondary consequence of this.
The reliance on themed material favours the well educated, because they are more likely to have knowledge of the topic under discussion, and in many language pairs, the terminology will be very similar. For example, "biometrics" in French is "la biométrie". This particular example came up in my last French course, and my classmates were confused by it, but as I already know a few things about biometrics, there was nothing in the articles themselves that challenged me.
The well educated and well read get better marks, and we justify this with by accepting that people who have done well in the past are "good students" and that those who haven't aren't. This is only marginally better than the old fallacy of equating education and intelligence.
But in reality, whether the historically "good" students are genuinely better than those without a good history of attainment, that's a side issue. The material presented favours those who really have the least need for favours. In my book that's a bad thing.
It's particularly worrying to me that the course I was studying is with an institute of higher education that takes pride in the fact that it makes learning available to everyone, regardless of educational background.
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