iPad for teachers? No thanks.

My laptop is stuffed. There's some kind of fault in the power circuit and it keeps refusing the mains power. As the battery is nearly exhausted and holds about twenty minutes of charge at most, it's basically unusable.

As the problem worsened, I slowly migrated as much of my daily activities as possible to my iPad. First it was web browsing, then email, an eventually I bought a Python programming environment and the Pages word processor so I could continue developing software and producing material for my students.

There are lots of articles out there that will tell you how wonderful the iPad is for teaching, but these are often little more than superficial lists of frivolous apps for presentations, flashcards and the like.

As a language teacher, there are more fundamental features of the iPad that are instantly a problem: audio and video and file access.

Sound files? No thanks!

I wanted to do an exam simulation using one of the practice papers at www.cityandguildsenglish.com, so I downloaded the paper, the answer scheme and the listening transcript onto my iPad. But all this became a bit futile when I rediscovered that e iPad will not let you download MP3s from websites, preferring to force you to use either the iTunes store or the iTunes app. With the files not being available on iTunes andmy PC out of action, I have no way to get any audio or video files I need onto my iPad. Now for listening exercises I am forced to fall back on a rather old Android phone, as it allows me to download anything I want.

Why would you want to access your own files?

Apple have gone out of their way to prevent the iPad being a computer. In one aspect, it was a clever design decision, as now rather than having the abstract concept of "a file", most file types exist as documents within their respective applications. There's less confusion for the user and less danger of malicious or faulty software interfering with the files from other applications,

However, in my current job, I don't do my own printing and photocopying, so I'm always sending multiple worksheets to the course secretary. Without file browser access, I'm currently restricted to going into individual applications, and using the "share" function on individual files to send them as emails. Where once I had one email with 8 attachments, now I have 8 emails with 1 attachment each. This makes life hard for both me and the secretary, as there is a very good chance that one of us will forget something.

Overall

Feel free to tell me about the latest app that has made your life so much easier, but I will never be able to advise other teachers to use a device that complicates the very basics of digital technology for teachers. Most of those apps, or close equivalents, will be available for Android anyway, and Android gives you the power to do what you like with your own data.

Not only that, but the iPad is actually massively overpowered for the basic functions we teachers need (have you seen the complexity of some of the games?) so you're paying more than you need.

Buy a cheap Android tablet instead - it'll save you money and time.

Musings on confusings...

Since I first learned I had got the job in Sicily, my Spanish has suffered. The day after the job interview, I was at a Spanish/English language exchange, and I kept dropping words of Italian into my Spanish. The weird thing is that my Spanish was a million times stronger than my Italian then, but somehow my brain had switched "mode".

Obviously, living in Italy for four months has only served to intensify this, with my Spanish now being half-hidden behind fairly broken bits of Italian. My assumption for a long time was that my problem was in my accent -- I still speak Italian with a bit of a Spanish twang. This belief was bolstered by the fact that my Catalan, while being very, very weak from lack of use, didn't seem so badly affected. The Catalan accent is very, very different from Spanish and Italian.

However, I was at a Couchsurfing meeting on Friday night which changed my mind. There was an Andalusian tourist visiting, and when I spoke to her, my accent was more different from the one I use in Italian than I had expected. My brain started playing tricks on me, and I had difficulty speaking Italian when she was in my line-of-sight, and for a while I was wobbling between Italian and Spanish.

But that's not the important thing.

When I was speaking Italian, I got into much deeper and more complex conversations than I normally would, and rather than jamming up as I hit the limits of my Italian, I was automatically switching to Spanish to fill in the gaps. Now, I wasn't just importing words or grammar rules from Spanish into Italian -- no, I was switching into Spanish; conjugations, pronouns and all. As I became aware I was doing this, it dawned on me that I'd been doing it for my whole stay, but normally I'd just not thought about it too much and fallen back to English.

This is a bit of a new sensation... or actually, no. The only new thing is the fact that I was unaware of it. When it was Scottish Gaelic and French, for example, it would be instantly noticeable. The difference here is that the similarity of the languages (including, but not limited to, accent) allowed it to slip through the net on occasions.

The trigger mechanism is the same, regardless of language: hit a gap in your knowledge in one language and the brain will fall back on another. The only difference lies in detection.

This makes me wonder if the only option I have now to get my Spanish back is... to learn more Italian. My theory is that filling in the main gaps in my Italian will not only stop me falling back on Spanish when I run out of Italian, but that as a consequence of this, it will reduce the strength of the linkage between the two, allowing me to speak Spanish without Italian interrupting me.

It looks like I might be practising my Italian a lot, even once I leave Italy...

Benny Lewis... fluent in 3 months...?

People who know me from sites such as HTLAL will know there's no love lost between me and Benny Lewis. The man always refuses to discuss anything, and takes mortal offence at anyone who doesn't agree unquestioning with every single word he says.

This is a shame, because Benny has a wealth of experience in language learning, and being able to "mine" this experience would surely reveal a lot of good stuff. Sadly, though, Benny's refusal to engage in any critical analysis of his own performance has led him to maintain a blog that is full of positively charged platitudes and little of practical substance.

Years ago, I borrowed a copy of his "Language Hacking Guide" from a friend, and blitzed through it making notes for a review on this site, but in the end I decided to let it slide and never published anything.

Now, though, the guy has another book out, entitled Fluent in 3 Months and published by no less than Harper Collins, and the press seems to be lapping it up.

Has Benny grown a clue recently? Has he stopped and given any serious thought to the language learning process? The writing on his blog is as devoid of content as ever, so I doubt it.

I'm hoping to get a loan of a copy of the book in a few weeks time to do my own review, but for now, you can read a very thorough review of the book by the user Big_Dog on the Polydog forum (accompanied by much discussion).

I have to say, most of what he says strikes a chord with me as typical of Benny's style. Woolly definitions, constantly moving goalposts, contradictions, overinterpretations, and just often downright wrong.

Does Benny say anything useful? Yes, he does, but then again, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Let's be honest with ourselves....

Well, in the last few weeks it has dawned on my how little I have achieved in 3 months in Sicily.

I learned a few previously half-learned, half-forgotten verb suffices and a handful of new words. I noticed a little bit about differences in vowels between Italian and other Romance languages. But that was about it.

So a couple of weeks ago I bought a pile of DVDs. I now have 5 TV serieses and a couple of films, totalling about 70 or so hours. I've watched two serieses and my brain feels far more comfortable with Italian already.

Why didn't I do this earlier?

Well, I was stressed out with work. But that's a weak excuse, because I still had loads of free time that I was wasting on the internet and silly computer games. I could have been spending that time far more productively, and I would have relaxed more.

I've now got a month and a half left, and I need to improve quickly, to make the most of my stay.

I never learned any Sicilian, and I think I'll have to give up hope on that front, because I was relying on my software to help me with that, and it's still not quite working.

But I will leave with better Italian, I have to.

Return to forumland: Polydog.org

It's been over a year since I stopped using language learning forums on the internet. I was banned from one, and it was the right time for it to happen, as it had become my main method of procrastination.

But recently I got invited to join a new forum polydog.org. It seemed like the right time to get back into the community proper, so I signed up. If I'm honest with myself, my posts have slowly got less and less interesting as there's nothing to challenge my views if I don't get involved in discussions, so how are my views going to develop and change.

So it's time to talk. Lots.

An observation on the order of teaching (from English)

As I recently said, I've been experimenting with Michel Thomas-like techniques in the classroom of late.

One of the crucial elements of Michel Thomas's teaching, seemingly forgotten by the teachers after him, is to address student errors in complicated sentences by reverting to simpler, related sentences and then rebuilding the complexity. The effectiveness of this technique is that it builds and reinforces the underlying structural concepts in his students' minds, as opposed to just giving answers that don't train any linkage between structures.

But it turns out that doing this mindfully also presents the teacher with a hell of a lot of information about what is difficult and easy for students, and hence what order things should be taught in.

With my current MT-style student, my first divergence from standard teaching order was to focus on auxiliary verb-based tenses before the simple past and present, and this did seem effective.

Yesterday, I was trying to revise and solidify the whole pattern of positive declarative vs negative declarative vs interrogative. Now in English, there is only one main pattern, which has three variations: "to be" vs simple aspect vs auxiliaries.

I was eliciting each form from her to build up a table like this:

To be	Simple aspect	auxiliary tenses
I'm here.	I like it.	I'll do it.
I'm not there.	I don't like it.	I won't do it.
Are you there?	Do you like it?	Will you do it?
I was here.	I liked it.	I can do it.
I wasn't there.	I didn't like it.	I can't do it.
Were you here?	Did you like it?	Can you do it?

Nothing spectacular. I've always taught "two verbs in the negative and the question, unless the verb is 'be'," and that's what I was trying to show. What was different was my student's errors: she tried to say "I can to do it" -- a mistake I thought I'd wiped out ages ago. At that point, I instinctively moved on to the negative, because subconsciously I remembered that she didn't make the mistake in the negative, because she knew the difference between "I don't like to"/"I don't want to" and "I can't"/"I won't".

What I realised (and scribbled down in about three places) was that even despite constantly revisiting these structures, the original emphasis on the present had created an erroneous link between the two structures, as they look very, very similar, but as that similarity doesn't carry through to the negative form, the negative unlinks the two.

The result is that in future I intend to start by teaching negatives and interrogatives before introducing the positive forms, in order to force the students' brains to store the auxiliary verbs and verbs like "want" and "like" as different things.

Let me anticipate the first criticism: "students will end up overusing do/did in the positive." I don't think so. Yes, they will initially want to use an auxiliary, but I'll teach them not to -- that's my job after all, isn't it? Besides, the standard order of teaching leads to plenty of predictable, oft-repeated errors: do you can...? I can to do... I want do.... Even if I introduce one error, I'll be eliminating several more.

Answer in sentences II: Death to abstraction!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how the standard practice of forcing beginners to answer "in sentences" seemed to devoid the grammar of meaning.

It was inspired by trying to teach past continuous (he was running etc) and revise times (target: at five o'clock, he was running in the park, at half past eight, he was eating dinner in the dining room etc). Unfortunately, the weaker students would look at a time and say "it's five o'clock", and they would look at the action and say "he's running", and they would look at the location and say "he's in the park". The he's, it's etc structure was drummed so heavily into their heads that they didn't dare diverge from it.

This week, I observed a related problem, as I was giving an exam to some secondary school pupils.

They're preparing for a Trinity GESE exam (spoken English), and one of the features of the level they're at is that they're expected to answer to prompts that aren't actually questions. "Tell me about a time when you..." etc. This is considered a more advanced function because it requires abstraction.

But isn't it true that when we teach students to "answer in sentences", we do so by training them to recycle the words of the question...? Well, guess what. My students were regurgitating my words. I wrote Write about a past holiday, and many of the answers started In my past holiday... Obviously this is not natural English.

Is it the student's fault? Is the student incapable of abstraction? Certainly not! Instead, it seems to me that we as teachers actually train abstraction out of our students as soon as we start this "answer in sentences" thing, because it's a skill they have already learned in their first language, and we actively militate against them using it in the new language.

On the occasions where we do answer in sentences, natural language often uses non-symmetrical forms, such as answering What is your name? with I'm Niall.

Our second-language instruction, then, seems to teach language in a way that is quite contrary to nature....