Stuck in your headword

Headword: n. a word which begins a separate entry in a reference work.

You'll know if you've been following this blog for a while that I'm opposed to the view that learning by translating is simply learning to translate. But why do so many people hold this view? Well in many cases I imagine it's due to their own experience, and awareness of their own blockages when learning.

Most of us who have studied languages will have felt at some point this sensation of juddering along from word to word, one by one. I certainly have, but it's not something I put down to translation; and if I'm right, avoiding translation not only fails to solve the problem, but actually risks making the problem worse.

What I came to realise was that juddering wasn't caused by looking for the English word, just simply by looking for the “word”. That is to say that I had one form of the word in front of me, but in order to understand it, I needed to recall a “reference form”. Their are two candidates for the reference form: the dictionary headword in the target language and the dictionary headword in your native language. In order to translate a word back to your native language, you need to first disinflect* the form you see back to the headword form in your target language, a task which is going to be a lot more difficult than recalling the link between the target and native headword forms (which should be instantaneous because you get far too much practice of this anyway).

(* No, disinflect isn't a real word, but it's just so beautifully apt here that I couldn't resist. It just seems so sterile, so clinical, so... “unlanguage”....)

Don't believe me? Well consider you're learning a verb from a language with a reasonable number of conjugations (think Spanish or German). If we take a totally regular verb, we may have 6 forms in each tense, and we've got multiple tenses – let's say 6. If I quiz a student on all 36 conjugations, and they have to convert back to the headword form, they perform the conversion of each form to the headword once only. If they take it one step further and translate to the headword form in their own language, they've practised that conversion 36 times. At a ratio of 1:36 you can see that the translating step will very quickly be learned to the point of automaticity.

So it's the disinflection – the removal of conjugation or declension – that's takes the time, and it's that that we need to eliminate.

And yet that's precisely what a lot of target-language-only courses encourage, but explicitly asking the students to conjugate time and time again, reinforcing this unintuitive, dictionary-led model where the meaning exists only in the headword form. Consider this sort of task:

Put the following verbs into the appropriate tense:

1. I ____(tell)_____ you if I knew. (answer: would tell)
2. I gave him a biscuit after he ____(stop cry)____ (answer: stopped/had stopped crying)

Any teacher will recognise it, and it was only in the course of writing this post that I realised that what I was criticising was something that I do all the time. Oh, the shame....

As we go along, then, we're reinforcing the headword form in every task, and the individual inflected forms a fraction of the time. Little wonder, then, that the students have no problems with the headwords and massive problems with everything else, and we end up descending into Tarzan-speak: I … go … shop … yesterday.

(Which leads back to my ponderings the other day about whether creole languages are really created by the speakers, or if teaching has a role to play in their creation. In TPR you could suggest that the imperative supplants the dictionary headword as the “reference form” of choice.)

The consequences of this headword fixation can be quite embarrassing, and can even cause offense, when you consider that headwords in the Romance languages, for example, are usually male. You risk ruining the effect of a chat-up line if you accidentally call a woman beautiful in the masculine form....

But this type of error is difficult to eliminate after the fact, because no matter how many remedial exercises you give the student, if they solve the problem by reference to the headword form, then they're reinforcing the behaviour that causes the problem.

Summarising the problem and the misunderstanding

The anti-translation camp thinks it is a problem if we label the equivalent of “to go” in our target language with the English “to go”. If it's Spanish, we should label it with “ir”, if it's German it should be “gehen”.

But it is the very notion of having a label in the first place that is wrong. We need to think of it as a fuzzy concept, a collection of go, went, gone, goes and going with none of them being more important than the others.

Headwords are for dictionaries, not for our heads.

So what do we do?

The headword form is a form with little communicative function (ironic then that the communicative approach places so much emphasis on it!) and while it may be useful at the very beginning, we have to eliminate it as soon as possible.

And that means no vocabulary tests: if you want to test that a student knows a word, you need to give them the opportunity to use it in all it's forms, individually and separately, but you also need to give them a reason to use it, and a context in which it actually means something.

That means varied practice, and in the context of controlled practice, it means that target-language-only is unlikely to cut the mustard, as it is very difficult to avoid a reference for except in very specific circumstances, such as converting between direct and indirect speech in English:

“I'm tired,” he said. ↔ He said he was tired.

Which leads back to a conclusion that you may (rightly) accuse me of taking as a premise anyway: translation is a Good Thing if you do it right.

Guardians of Grammar

I came across a link before Christmas that I found quite interesting.  It was a Guardian guest article by an applied linguistics lecturer, Dr Catherine Walter.  The headline was bold and clear: "Time to stop avoiding grammar rules", so of course I was interested, being firmly in the pro-grammar camp myself.  The subhead went for the jugular: "The evidence is now in: the explicit teaching of grammar rules leads to better learning"

Excellent, I thought, everything I've ever said has been vindicated.  Does this mean the tide will now turn in the teaching world?  Sadly not.

The article was something of a disappointment.  Despite its mention of meta-analyses, it provided precious little evidence and instead went down the road of discussion views and hypotheses... views and hypotheses which I personally agree with, but do nothing to convince those currently holding the opposite view.

That said, I still find it difficult to see how this sort of logic fails to convince people:

most English language learning takes place in countries where English is not the predominant language: a foreign language situation. Much of the thinking leading to strictures against grammar teaching has taken place in countries where English is the predominant language: a second language situation. The enormous difference in exposure to the target language makes arguments based on exposure or emergence much less plausible in the foreign language situation.

ie the leading lights of the ESOL/EFL world are working in an atypical environment (and of course Walter one of them) -- their students have plenty of opportunities for practice outside of class.  Why are so many teachers so quick to accept the pronouncements of people whose teaching environment and student base is so radically different from theirs?

(This argument alone goes beyond the article's boundaries of exposure vs training and drills into the fundamental identity crisis of the Communicative Approach: in a class with a shared native language, isn't English inherently a barrier to communication, not a facilitator of it?  Surely the communicative imperative is broken if the language gets in the way?)

She also talks about "chunking" -- a central pillar of the lexical approach.  She says:

But the best estimate is that there are hundreds of thousands of chunks in English; learning enough of these to have an appropriate chunk to hand in a given situation is not a quick or trivial job. With much less time and effort, learners can acquire grammar for putting together comprehensible phrases and sentences that can serve them on the long journey towards more native-like proficiency.

...which is perfectly correct.  If a chunk is composed of regular grammatical features, then the chunk can be understood as a construction until the learner has seen it enough times to identify it as a chunk.  Learning some of the underlying grammar rules of a language makes the learner capable of dealing with a lot larger a subset of the language than learning the same number of chunks.

But Walter doesn't go far enough, because she doesn't point out the inconsistency of those who espouse both "learn by induction" and "learn by chunks".  Learning by induction is supposed to be the "natural" way -- it's how babies do it.  But it is readily demonstrable that babies learn grammar before they learn chunks -- they cannot repeat a large chunk until and unless they have internalised the component language.  OK, you will find babies and older children who have incorrectly generalised two frequently co-occurring words as units, but even if you consider that chunking (the alternative interpretation is that they've mistakenly identified the two words as being single ones), the vast majority of early language appears to be unchunked.

If the justifications and theoretical underpinnings of the approach are inconsistent, why have any faith in it?

Just what is applied Linguistics?
A lot of teachers will be likely to reject Walter's views because she's an academic, a linguist.  Sadly, the term "applied linguistics" is somewhat opaque, because applied linguistics could involve so many things -- from forensic linguistics ("was this confession written by the accused?") right through to producing better instruction manuals for washing machines.  But no, applied linguistics is used almost exclusively to mean one thing and one thing only: language teaching.  Most "applied linguists" are genuine, honest-to-goodness teachers, but ones that do research as well (many universities make a lot of money by running summer EFL courses out of their Applied Linguistics departments).

Applied linguistics as a field is so far from ivory towers that one author named his textbook "An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: from Practice to Theory" (Alan Davies, Edinburgh University Press), in order to highlight that all language teaching theory starts in the classroom, and all theory is an attempt to describe and understand successful teaching.

So Walter isn't an outsider -- she isn't just someone who doesn't understand the reality of teaching, which is one of the criticisms most often aimed at academics who attempt to give advice on how to teach.  It didn't pop up in the comments thread explicitly, but there was a rumbling...  One commenter, Espoolainen, noted the lack of "chalkface examples".

The collective noun for "anecdotes" is "an internet"
We all know that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but yet anecdote is what the internet thrives on.  We don't want figures, we don't want proof, we want one or two stories with real protagonists.  It doesn't matter to many of the commenters on the article that the uncontrolled variables in a single example make it meaningless -- that's what people want to hear, but they don't call it "anecdote", they call it "chalkface examples" and kid themselves on that it's not really anecdote.  (On the other hand, I'd bet good money that if Walter had given any genuine examples, 101 commenters would have jumped on her for using anecdotes in her article.)

One of the other commenters linked to a paper by the National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy(NRDC) which was proclaimed by the very next commenter as "more useful than the original article".

The report is full of "chalkface" examples.  One chapter is called "take 40 teachers: ESOL teachers' working lives", and the next "take 40 classrooms: teaching and learning strategies in the classrooms observed", followed by "Telling cases: ten classroom case studies".

That's a plurality of anecdotes, isn't it?

Meta-analyses and literature reviews
The problem with arguing any case in terms of figures, evidence or science, is that for every published paper you can cite to support your case, your opponent will be able to cite one that states exactly the opposite.

Good academic practice relies on a thorough and complete overview of all available data, which is nigh-on impossible for any one person to do, and a humungous waste of time for everyone to do.  This is where meta-analyses and literature reviews come in.  Someone (more often a group of people) sits down and sifts through all the published papers they can get their hands on and try to work out what they all mean when taken together.

This means eliminating studies with unreliable methodologies, checking whether the conclusions were truly warranted and balancing the volume of evidence on both sides.

This is the sort of material that Walter claims backs her up, and when pressed she quoted the following sources:
Norris, J. M. & L. Ortega. 2000. Effectiveness of L2 instruction: a research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. Language Learning 50/3: 417-528.
Gass, S. & L. Selinker. 2008. Second Language Acquisition: an Introductory Course (Third Edition). New York: Routledge/Taylor.
Spada, N. & Y. Tomita. 2010. Interactions between type of instruction and type of
language feature: a meta-analysis. Language Learning 60/2: 1-46.
Spada, N. & P. M. Lightbown. 2008. Form-focused instruction: isolated or integrated?
TESOL Quarterly 42: 181-207

Now let's look at the NRDC study.  In the introduction they say:

The five NRDC Effective Practice Studies explore teaching and learning in reading, writing, numeracy, ESOL and ICT, and they set out to answer two questions:

1. How can teaching, learning and assessing literacy, numeracy, ESOL and ICT be improved?
2. Which factors contribute to successful learning?

Even before NRDC was set up it was apparent from reviews of the field (Brooks et al, 2001; Kruidenier, 2002) that there was little reliable research-based evidence to answer these questions. Various NRDC reviews showed that progress in amassing such evidence, though welcome where it was occurring, was slow (Coben et al, 2003; Barton and Pitt, 2003; Torgerson et al, 2003, 2004, 2005). Four preliminary studies on reading, writing, ESOL and ICT were undertaken between 2002 and 2004 (Besser et al, 2004; Kelly et al, 2004; Roberts et al, 2004; Mellar et al, 2004). However, we recognised the urgent need to build on these in order greatly to increase the research base for the practice of teaching these subjects.

So what we've got is a group saying that they were essentially starting from scratch; that they were incapable of performing a meta-analysis with the existing research.  That makes this a single, solitary study, with 500 students (not a lot if you're building a national strategy on it).  And there's absolutely no mention of Norris and Ortega's meta-analysis, either to rule it in or rule it out of their work.  There are two possible interpretations of its absence: either they didn't know about it or they didn't like its conclusions.  If it's the latter, in my book that's just dishonesty.  If you disagree with something, don't ignore it: explain why you are disregarding it, so that readers can judge for themselves.

The NRDC report is pretty much what Walter complained of in the article:

Each approach has been defended with carefully structured arguments, and some approaches have been embraced enthusiastically by ministries of education around the world.

Arguments, not evidence, define policy.  That's what she's saying, and it's all too often true -- just Google the term "policy-based evidence"!

Taking off the blinkers of English
Dr Walter came so close to making an important point when she said:

There is a problem with English: it is a morphologically light language. It doesn't have many different verb endings, and its nouns only inflect for plural. If the language under discussion were Polish, with its three noun genders and seven cases, the idea that teaching grammar rules wasn't necessary would probably not even occur.

Why did she not expand on this?  I came across a masters thesis on the net a while ago on the teaching of Finnish and it took as a given that conscious grammar study was required, because decades of figures showed conclusively that immigrants really never quite "got" the language without a bit of explanation.

The problem with Finnish is often claimed to be its complexity, but the author of the thesis was more interested in the difference between Finnish and the immigrants' native languages.  Just look at the very first sentence of the abstract:

Research has shown that explicit instruction with a focus on forms is needed in learning a very different language.

Difference: that's what we should be looking at.

Consider that one of France's top-selling language products is Assimil, a course that makes a big deal out of learning by assimilation.  We'll leave aside the fact that there's still a fair bit of explicit grammar explanation in the books and instead look at the situation in terms of differences.  French is anything but a language isolate, being part of a broad continuum of Romance languages.  When you consider that Italian and Spanish are two of the most popular languages for study in France, it's easy to argue that Assimil got its reputation by teaching languages with a very low "difference" from the learner's native tongue.  Even German, the other big neighbour, isn't too different from French in many respects.  (French may not mark case in nouns, but its pronoun system still makes a distinction between subject, direct object, indirect object and possessive that maps closely enough to German's nominative, accusative, dative and genitive to give the learner a head-start.)

ESOL has justified itself generally by dismissing any learner errors as unimportant, but it can be readily seen that the most common errors are caused by fundamental differences between languages, and the most obvious example is the use of articles, because most learners have some kind of problem with them.  Speakers of article-less languages either leave them out or add them in an arbitrary and meaningless way (NB: arbitrary, not random: most are consistent in their misuse) and speakers of Romance languages tend not to be able to chose between an indefinite article and the number one.


Even if English isn't very complex, it is still different in several fundamental ways from any given language, and if that's a problem for Finnish, it must be a problem for us too...


...and it is, because these problems never go away.  There's no magic tipping point where the Spanish speaker has had enough exposure to English to tell the difference between "a car" and "one car", or where a Polish speaker suddenly can distinguish between "cars" and "the cars".  It just doesn't happen.

Walter's cardinal sin
But Walter's biggest mistake was trying to make it sound as though her conclusions were based on some piece of brand-new research.  It grabs the attention, but it undermined her argument when she got called on it.

Why not simply point out that the evidence has been available for years to those who were willing to listen?

I know it's a hard argument to sell, but it's the only intellectually honest one.  Giving an explanation of why orthodoxy is so slow to change won't necessarily have an immediate effect, but in the long term it should open peoples critical faculties.

Why orthodoxy is so slow to change
The human lifecycle is a fairly predictable thing.  We are born. We go to school.  If we do well at school, we'll probably end up in university.  After university, we walk out into the world looking to do things differently and better than those who came before us.  But nobody listens to us and we end up as the least important employee in our companies.

Over the next decade or two, the genuinely gifted start to rise to prominence in their careers.  It's only now that they can start to impose "their way" on the world, but their information is over a decade out of date by this point.  Their view of the mainstream is in reality a river that ran its course a long time past.

This leads them to reject new research that supports the old orthodoxy that they have already "proven" wrong in their heads.

Would any of us in our 30s or 40s pass our university exams if we went back now?  Probably not -- our information is hopelessly dated (unless you're a mathematician, perhaps).  So who are we to tell others in our field what to do?

Don't they remember what it was like to go into that first job and have everything you knew about your field rubbished by people who just didn't understand the new stuff?  Why do we visit this same humiliation upon the next generation?

TPR: how to teach Creole...?

I'm suffering from a persistent head cold that's messing up my right ear.  It's not just clogged or muffled, there appears to be some fluid buildup behind the drum that's messing around with frequencies and stuff.  So I went to the doctor, who really wasn't interested in my history (this has happened before, and the last doctor said it was liable to recurr) and more interested in what he could see (which isn't much, because the ear canal is badly inflamed).

Well, he's lived up to the stereotype of the French medical system and prescribed me more medicine than even my dear old granny had in the final years of her life.  The sound in my ear doesn't appear to be getting any worse, which probably means it's getting better.  (The last time I went back to the doctor several times over the course of the month complaining that it wasn't getting better, until eventually I got a different doctor who told me that even though the infection was gone, the fluid would take a long time to drain away, and there really was nothing to worry about.

It's not easy teaching a language when sounds are messed up, but in practical terms it only means that the students have to be more careful with their pronunciation.

But one little conversation in the waiting room really sparked my interest.  There was a guy there who must have been in his 60s.  His dad had been in the French military, so he had spent a lot of his younger years in Africa, where he had also been involved in teaching French to the locals, and his opinion on teaching was simple: "you have to move; there has to be movement".

Even though he wasn't familiar with the terminology, he was talking about the principles behind Total Physical Response: learning by reacting to commands, and then moving on to giving commands.  I'd been reading an amateur ebook on Mauritian Creole a couple of nights before, and something clicked...

Verbs in Mauritian Creole don't conjugate, and they have at most two forms: a "long form" with an /e/ sound at the end and a short form without it.  (There are some verbs with only one form, ending in a consonant.)  These two forms are more or less the singular and plural imperative forms: (you boy,) do that! and (you lot) do that!

On reflection, I may have jumped the gun a bit, because most French verbs in a fair percentage of their conjugations match quite closely with one of these two forms (parler, parlez, parlé, parlait, parlaient etc are all pronounced the same).

Still, there's enough data there to make me wonder, even if I can't draw a firm conclusion, because most French verbs not ending in -er (/e/) in the infinitive still become -ez (/e/) in the plural imperative.

The responsibility for the formation of Creole languages is often put down to the speakers themselves trying to muddle through the best they can, but isn't it possible that the pedagogy of the imperial powers has contributed to it to?

I doubt the man I was chatting to had ever heard of James Asher (the "inventor" of TPR) and I imagine he was doing what the French military and overseas administration had been doing for ages, given that their teachers probably knew little or nothing of the local tongues.

I'm certainly preinclined to accept this theory, as I have encountered a lot of very common errors in learner English that don't have their origins in native-language interference, and can therefore only be explained as teaching errors....

Ability vs ability

The Telegraph was talking nonsense.  The BBC have the real story.

A friend of mine shared a link to an article about a man from England who had a stroke and started speaking Welsh, despite having only spent a short spell in Wales when he was evacuated there during the Second World War.

This is pretty interesting from a neurolinguistic perspective.  I did a tiny bit of AI at uni first time round, and one of the few things that stuck with me long-term was the notion that the brain works by a combination of activations and inhibitions.

Here's the concept in a simplified form (possibly oversimplified, but hey-ho)....

Human brain cells become excited or "activated" when they receive appropriate stimulation.  You can extend this idea of activation to groups or paths of neurones that map to more specific concepts.

Unlike a computer, this structure lets our brains evaluate multiple things literally at the same time.  If we have a complex problem, our brains will be contemplating multiple solutions.  But with so many possible solutions, how does the brain decide on which one to choose?

Evolution's solution was the mechanism of "inhibition" -- certain activations inhibit other responses.  In the case of a complex problem, the strongest solution "inhibits" the others, effectively switching them off.

Alun Morgan, then, had learnt enough Welsh to speak it... in theory.  But he hadn't learnt enough to overcome the inhibitions that English had placed in the way of him speaking it.

The Real Challenge
That, then, is the real challenge for any language learner: not just learning enough to be able to speak it, but learning enough to be able to defeat the native language that's competing with it.

This is where the apparent "magic" of immersion comes in: the brain picks up on the fact that the native language isn't any use.  On the other hand, this is probably why forced immersion so often fails -- because the learner knows that they don't need the target language to communicate with the other people in the classroom.

So do we give up on immersion?

Not "give up", no, but we have to stop seeing it as something magical.  Finding ways to make the language feel genuinely necessary to ourselves or to our students is not easy.  I don't personally believe that we can ever overcome the native language as a source of inhibition through pure force of will.  In fact, I believe it often has the opposite effect, turning the target language into a barrier to communication rather than a means of communication.

Computer games as language study

Before the Christmas holidays I tried to give advice to my students about what to do to keep practicing their English in the holidays, and the thing I really recommended them to do was to play computer games, and I was sure I'd blogged about computer games before, but apparently not...

Anyway, computer games as language study?  Nonsense, right?  "Blam blam blam, pow pow zap kaboom" is the same in any language, after all.

True.  Not all games are of any use to a language learner as most have virtually zero language content.  Action games really aren't much use... unless you're playing with native speakers on the internet, but most people aren't going to do that when they can play with people who speak their own language (and also on a local server minimising the lag).

The games that I recommend to my students are point-and-click adventures, the likes of the old Lucasarts Monkey Island series (if you're familiar with those).  If you're not familiar with the genre, you basically go around talking to people and trying to find objects to solve puzzles.  There isn't usually any way to die, you just keep going until you find the solution and win the game.  These are particularly useful for several reasons:

1. Dialogue is central to the game.
   In most action games, very little of the dialogue is needed to complete the game; in a point-and-click adventure, the dialogue is full of clues on how to solve the puzzles.  The learner is therefore forced to pay attention and to try to understand.
2. Dialogue is partially repetitive and has a restricted vocabulary.
   On the simplest level, there are default phrases that are repeated whenever the player tries to perform a task that isn't part of the game (eg "I don't want to cut that", "It's too heavy").  More subtley, though, the vocabulary is very "tight" as the same words appear very frequently to give you clues as to how to solve the puzzles.
   When you're watching a film or reading a book, there is repetition of language, but not to the same extent.  And yet, because these games are designed for native speakers, the repetition is not so blatant and restrictive that it becomes boring, unlike many dedicated learners' resources.
3. Subtitled dialogue.Most of the games in this genre have voices and text, although the earlier ones are text only.  Having the option to read the text as you're listening seems to help train people to recognise the spoken form of words they know how to read.  You can't really do that with film and TV, because the subtitles never match exactly what the actors say (subtitles have to be easy and quick to read) but in these games, the spoken and written dialogue is almost always exactly the same -- as a rough estimate, I'd say at least 95% of all dialogue matches.  This makes this the only class of "authentic materials" that offers the ability to read and listen at the same time.
4. Slow pacing.
   The dialogue in these games is pretty easy to follow, as it's not subject to the usual sources of interference.  In films, people talk over each other and loud sound effects mix with the dialogue.  In a point-and-click adventure, everything is usually clear and distinct (and if it's not, you can usually turn down the volume on music and sound effects independently of the dialogue).  As a bonus, the pacing of the game gives you plenty of time to look up unknown vocabulary as it occurs -- the game naturally waits for you, so there's no need to pause and unpause.

There's a few games of this type available for free at scummvm.org, and there are others for sale at GOG.com and on Steam, in various languages.

I've used this approach myself, having bought the first two Runaway games when I arrived in Spain, and having downloaded a couple of games in French before moving there.

It won't teach you a language by itself, but as a form of practice when you're at the immediate level, it's very, very effective, and I would recommend it to anyone, even if you don't normally play computer games....

Classroom activity: the ever-expanding story

When I started learning Gaelic, I was learning from a very experienced teacher.  She was a retired headmistress (former music teacher) and had been teaching Gaelic since she gave up her previous job.  (Dr Margaret MacKinnon, a long-serving judge at the Gaelic music festival "the Mod".)

It was an intensive week-long course and towards the end of the week she had us lined up on the steps of the outdoor amphitheatre (it was a gorgeous sunny day) and she got us to tell a story.  The rule was simple: repeat everything that had already been said, then add something.

I liked this, and I've frequently gone back to analyse why.

My first attempt at an explanation was this:
It is easy to try to translate received language into your native language.  It is easy to remember the story as the meaning only, and forget about the words.  With a short sentence, you can usually get away with translating backwards and forwards.  As the sequence grew longer, the complexity of trying to mentally juggle the original sentence, the translation and meaning became too great.  The most efficient way to carry out the task was to stick with the Gaelic.

So that was my first thought: it "maxes out" your brain, forcing you to be more efficient.

Now I recently tried something similar but without the repetition -- just the addition of words.  It was only partially successful, leading to two further observations:

1. The complexity of the structure of the story and language is supported by the repetition.
2. The need to repeat is a great piece of classroom management.

The second realisation was useful to me.  Too many tasks leave gaps in the need for student attention, and it's in those gaps that many of my lessons have fallen apart.  If everyone listens -- if everyone has to listen -- the teacher owns the class.

The first one is pretty interesting to me, as I'm very much against rote learning, so of course I had to justify to myself why this repetition isn't rote. ;-)

Well, for one thing, they're not going to be able to recite the story the day after, so it's not really rote "learning", even if it's a somewhat rote process.  Well that's sophistry, so I couldn't really kid myself on with that for very long.

The second justification is that I found that the longer the sentence got, the more I needed to visualise the story in order to remember it.  You can repeat a short phrase parrot-fashion, but it takes a long time to memorise a long passage if you don't understand it.  Therefore the student is forced to engage in the material meaningfully.  This is just a refinement of my earlier assessment of it as a "maxing out" of the brain, but I believe it's crucial to addressing classroom problems in all activities.

Too many tasks that I have been faced with as a learner have left me with the choice between a rote, mechanical approach to solving the problem and a meaningful approach.  I've always chosen the meaningful approach, which is what makes me a successful learner.  The least successful learners are the ones who chose the mechanical approach -- but that's not the learner's mistake, it's the teacher's mistake, because the human brain always seeks the most efficient approach to complete the task at hand.  If the easiest way to complete a language task is a mechanical one, that's bad task design.

I cannot emphasise this point enough.  I have spoken to a great many teachers who simply don't get it.  They say my approach is the "correct" one, and what others should be doing too.  They blame the weaker students for making the wrong choice.  But how can they make that choice if they don't know what it is?  I knew how to learn because I was taught to learn: I spent most of my pre-school hours in the care of my mother, a fully-qualified school teacher, playing with educational toys.  I did not need to be taught how to learn, but the others did.  Please don't ask students to make a choice until you've started to teach them how to make that choice...

But I'm diverging from the activity....

So we've got a task that requires attention, discourages distraction, forces the student to process language efficiently and meaningfully. 

The next big concept I picked up on was the idea of "mirror neurones".  I had long believed that receiving and producing language were intrinsically linked, and that we understood others by considering what would make us say the things that the other party says.

Then I read about mirror neurone theory, which claims that this is pretty much what happens.  So does the activity put words in your mouth?  Are the students going through the process of production every time they hear this language that they now understand?  I hope so, and even as the teacher doing this task in English, I feel myself "speaking" in my head while the students are trying to recall the whole story.

But today I refined my views further in terms of gamification, which I have been thinking about a lot lately.

My lack of belief in gamification has been previously documented here, and can be summed up as "gamification isn't about the core mechanics of a game, and it's the mechanics of the game that make a game 'fun'."  In a gamified classroom, this activity would be rejected as there are no scores and no winners and losers.  There is no "competition" or "achievements".

If you tried to add anything like that in, you would reduce the effectiveness of the game.  When Margaret did it with us, she encouraged us to correct our own mistakes before continuing.  When I do it with my students, I correct their mistakes and work them into the story.   If a frequent pairing comes out in the wrong order due to the turn-taking, I stop and I fix it, and the language content improves (eg if one student said "butter..." and the next said "...and bread", I would correct it to the neutral order "bread and butter" to prevent rehearsing an unusual collocation).

But the only way of scoring it would be to penalise mistakes, which would probably result in much shorter and much less effective sentences.

However, the activity has a natural "game mechanic" which is solid and motivates learning: there is a challenge, and the challenge increases, and as you face the challenge you learn to cope with it.  That's what a game is: learning to progressively cope with more and more difficult, and more and more varied, challenges.  "Gamifying" this activity, like most educational activities, would kill "the game" that's already there... which is why gamification is such a waste of time.

So after all that theory and pontification, here's:

The activity

Arrange the class such that there is a clear order.  That can be rows, a single line, or a circle.

Say one, two or three words to start the story.

The first student repeats your words, then adds 1, 2 or 3 of his own.
The second repeats his, and adds 1, 2 or 3 more.

Now it's vital that this happens quickly.  Some students will want to stop and think of "what" to say when a quick "so he", "then it" or even just "and" keeps the game moving and leaves it to the next person to finish (and they've got the whole time of the repeat to think of something).

Correct errors.  Make sure they're repeating correct language.

It will stutter and slow down.  Some people will need prompting with a few words to jog their memory.  Keep it going for a while longer -- don't restart at the first forgotten word.

But at some point stop it and start afresh -- a few problems is a challenge, but too many is frustrating, which is never good.

Don't let them write it down -- that just gives them a way to stop paying attention.  (In a very mixed group, it might seem necessary for the weakest, but it's a survival strategy and it seems to reduce the educational value.)

So why all that pontificating before?

Why didn't I just explain the activity on its own, before all the theorising?

Because a learning task must serve a purpose and the teacher must know what that purpose is.

Because I'm personally tired of seeing teaching activities described without giving a clear description and justification of what they're supposed to achieve and how.

Because I don't want readers to see the activity and then "adapt" it without fully understanding what it currently does.  I don't want people to delete the repetition on grounds of being "boring" or "rote" -- the activity is far more boring without it.

And maybe mostly because I'm a self-important wee so-and-so who loves the sound of his own voice.  Aren't we all?

Unrepresentative representation

I've heard it said that with a local councillor, a directly-elected MSP, several local list MSPs, a Westminster MP and an MEP in Europe, us Scottish people are better represented today than we have ever been.  But is that the case?  Commenters have noted that as populations have grown (and as the vote has been extended to commoners, women, and then younger people) the number of people represented by any individual politician has increased.  How can one person represent thousands of very different people?

When we consider also that most of these politicians represent a handful of major parties and are in many ways mere figureheads for "party policy", in the end you have 6 or 7 manifestos representing the entire population of the UK.  Clearly, they can't serve the public will.

When Thatcher wanted to dismantle union power in the 70s and 80s, she missed a trick: if there's one thing that democracy has taught us, it's that the best way to beat collective bargaining is by granting power to a representative body, rather than by taking it away, because the more diverse a group represented by a body, the less the body is representative of the group.

So you're probably asking yourself what this is doing on a language learning blog....

Well, it's not a language issue per se, but it is an education issue.  It's an issue for universities, and for education funding.  In my opinion, one of the worst things to happen to post-school education in the UK was when the technical colleges were given incentives to become new universities.  The line between vocational and academic education was blurred unnecessarily.  Do hairdressers need 4-year degree?  Few people would genuinely say they do.  And university education aims to build learner independence, when vocational education relies very much on supervised, hands-on training.

The two things are very different, and rather than grant vocational education the respect that it deserved in and of itself, they tried to make out it was something it wasn't.

Who is there today to campaign for a reversal of bad decisions?  No-one.

Why?  Representation.

University teachers' unions represent university teachers in all types of institution, and students' unions represent students in all types of institutions.  This means that neither the students' group or the teachers' groups are able to stand up and point at one group of universities and say "they shouldn't be universities".  It's pretty much impossible for these bodies to argue against any government policy (except across-the-board budget cuts) as any change will be beneficial for some of their members, and it's pretty much impossible to campaign for any new policy as it would likely be detrimental to some of their members.

The unions have therefore been given more and more representational power, leading to them rendering themselves powerless, and the government is free to do whatever they like.  Even where protests have led to changes in policy, this usually on delays matters by a year or two and the changes happen anyway.


So you may be wondering why this topic came up all of a sudden.

I recently received an email from a university advertising a couple of new CPD certificates they were offering.  For those of you who don't know, CPD stands for "continuing professional development", and is essentially means "job-related training courses".  It is all right and proper that universities should be seeking to earn additional income from the professional training market, and I have no problem with that.  These CPD certificates were built on modules in the university's degree scheme.  It is all right and proper that universities should be seeking to reuse existing material in new ways, and I have no problem with that.

What I do have a problem with is the fact that these modules were priced at the standard cost of a Scottish Higher Education module.  Presumably, then, the university is offering professional training, but putting it through the system as higher education and claiming government funding for it.

I contacted the student president for the institution to express my concerns about this, and he leapt to their defence.  Everyone has a right to an education, he told me.  Now I agree with this, but everyone should have the same right as everyone else.  Why should certain people get government funding for their CPDs when other people don't?  All in all, this seems like fiddling the books to me.

But in the end it doesn't matter what he personally believes, because he is duty-bound to represent all matriculated students at his institution.  (I did point out to him that the CPD students aren't students until they actually sign up, but that's not the main point.)

What we have here, then, is a situation where a small group are benefitting from special treatment at the cost of an education budget with a specific goal, but no-one is able to raise an effective protest against the misuse of funds because everyone represents someone who benefits from it, even though it is to the detriment of most of the people they represent.

How can we defend free education when we aren't able to denounce those who harm the system?