Gatekrashen
One of the most popular figures in language methodology is a certain Stephen Krashen. People love him. People quote him. People even refer to what he does as "research", but Krashen himself has been involved in very little research, and most of the papers he writes cite papers which refer to other papers. And many of the papers he cites were written by him.
Krashen's view of teaching is massively oversimplistic, and unfortunately that appeals to people.
I've had a pop at Krashen in the past (in the latter part of my post Expository vs Naturalistic language), and I'm not the only one.
The journalist Jill Stewart got stuck into him over a dozen years ago about bilingual education in her Los Angeles Times article Krashen Burn. In it, she attacked his views on the education of Spanish speakers in the USA as being not only contrary to the evidence from teaching practice, but also diametrically opposed to the principles he professes for adult second language acquisition, even though he suggests adults should learn "like children".
In fact, Krashen's theories are so all-pervasive that Timothy Mason, when working as an English teacher trainer in the Université de Versailles St Quentin, dedicated most of a semester-long degree-level course to deconstructing Krashen's claims and rebutting them with references to real research and other academic opinions. And he's now put the lectures on-line for all to enjoy. [Edit 2015-07-30: the pages appear to have disappeared from the site, but are available via archive.org's wayback machine.]
As I said, Krashen's theories are popular because their apparent simplicity appeals to both the teacher and the learner. But more insidiously, Krashen claims there is really no such thing as "learning" a language, saying instead that you "acquire" it. Now logically, if there's no such thing as "learning", then there can be no such thing as "teaching". This is particularly appealing for the teacher, because if there's no such thing as "teaching", there is no such thing as "bad teaching"; instead, we have the idea that the teacher gives the student the opportunity to acquire the language, and can't really be blamed if the student doesn't take it.
(Actually, can we still call the language learner a "student"...? Or even a "language learner"...? If there is no learning, there is no study, so surely the appropriate word is "acquirer"? This may seem like a simple game of semantics, but my understanding of the word "student" is someone who actually works at learning. By continuing to use the term "student", Krashen's followers risk unconsciously passing all the blame for failed learning to the students.)
I understand all this, yet I am still baffled as to how the gaping flaws in Krashen's reason are still so hard to point out to people.
Krashen says we don't learn by production, we learn by listening and understanding. Yet it is self-evident that this simply isn't enough in the real world. Think of any immigrants you know. All over the UK we have had wave after wave of immigration, particularly since the second world war. There are loads of people who have lived here since the 70s who still haven't "acquired" English to a native-like level, with continued native-language interference.
As Timothy Mason points out, choosing not to correct mistakes "may be seen as a perfectly rational judgement on the part of the learner, who decides that any further investment in perfecting his grasp of the L2 will not pay sufficient dividends in added communicative and social power."
But it's more than this. Certain errors cost more to fix at a later date than others. I addressed one of these a few weeks ago: the falling together of phonemes.
Using the same example as in my previous post, we can predict that a French beginner of English will have difficulty distinguishing T from unvoiced TH, and D from voiced TH. We can intervene and make them see the distinction, but only through production. There is simply too much redundancy in language to be able to force the student to need to discriminate. Word pairs such as "this" and "diss" differ so much in usage that discriminating the phonemes is very rarely going to be required to comprehend the sentence.
And as I said in the earlier post, my French friend can pronounce all the phonemes of English (with a bit of an accent) and he can even hear them when he listens for them, but they are missing from his model of the language, and in order to learn to pronounce every word correctly, he would have to relearn all his vocabulary. He can function perfectly well in English, so learning correctly would certainly not pay "sufficient dividends" compared to the time he would have to invest, so it is "perfectly rational" that he doesn't.
The same goes for many people's grammar. Little errors like missing the word "to" from "need to" rarely confuse anyone, and so there is no impetus for correction.
Current thinking is that it is sufficient to focus on survival language and "getting the message across" without any concern for accuracy. Accuracy, they tell us, is an advanced skill for advanced students, and isn't worth the effort for most people, who just want to have a nice holiday.
But accuracy must be an early focus or it will never be achieved. Grammatical and phonological accuracy is cheap and easy to start with, and gets more difficult and expensive the later it's left.
So we have to teach, and we have to teach accuracy, or the student will never achieve it.
13 May 2011
10 May 2011
I've always been a bit concerned about learning other people's mistakes, but this never fully explained why I always feel a bit funny about talking to other learners.
Well, I think I've worked it out.
Last night, I was listening to a German woman talking Italian, and because I didn't have the Italian accent as a cue (she has a strong German accent), my brain didn't switch into Italian mode properly, and it felt like I was listening to Spanish-with-errors instead.
Interesting.
Well, I think I've worked it out.
Last night, I was listening to a German woman talking Italian, and because I didn't have the Italian accent as a cue (she has a strong German accent), my brain didn't switch into Italian mode properly, and it felt like I was listening to Spanish-with-errors instead.
Interesting.
06 May 2011
Repeating to learn or learning to repeat?
Repetitio est mater studiorum, it has been said, or repetition is the mother of learning to put it in a way even I would understand.
I was on a train last week and dozed off. As I woke up, I had a simple phrase stuck in my head: "repeating to learn or learning to repeat?" It's a crystallisation of something that I've been thinking about for a while.
When I look at wordlists, I see the danger that you associate the words in them with the list rather than with the intended item. (When I was in high school, I couldn't remember the names of any berries in French without recalling "strawberry = fraise" first and then continuing down the list from there -- everything above strawberry in the list I was given was a full-sized "fruit", so I must have mentally subdivided the list into two...)
When I look at recorded drills, I see the danger that repeated drilling of the same order leads to the same sort of "learning the list" as with wordlists.
But on top of this, there's something slightly different and slightly more insidious.
All too often, the tasks we set as teachers or that we are set as learners can be carried out without engaging in meaning or true language, which I term as working mechanically. The result is that we can produce a correct utterance without actually meaning it. In the immediate term, this gives an illusion of learning. What I'd never really thought about was how learning tasks build on this mechanical ability.
In terms of language learning, these mechanical skills are a dead end because they rarely lead to fluency, so I didn't think you could build on them. But then I started noticing how there is a certain skill to carrying out the mechanical tasks, so the tasks can become slightly more complicated, and the student learns to perform such tasks quicker and quicker. In the long term, then, the illusion of progress is maintained, even as the student's linguistic competence improves very little.
So there's two things here: learning of scripts instead of learning language, and learning mechanical skills vs learning linguistic skills. While it is important to remain conscious of the distinction, you can sum up both the erroneous strategies as "learning to repeat".
So teachers, when you set a task that focuses on repetition, ask yourself this: are your students repeating to learn, or merely learning to repeat?
Repetitio est mater studiorum, it has been said, or repetition is the mother of learning to put it in a way even I would understand.
I was on a train last week and dozed off. As I woke up, I had a simple phrase stuck in my head: "repeating to learn or learning to repeat?" It's a crystallisation of something that I've been thinking about for a while.
When I look at wordlists, I see the danger that you associate the words in them with the list rather than with the intended item. (When I was in high school, I couldn't remember the names of any berries in French without recalling "strawberry = fraise" first and then continuing down the list from there -- everything above strawberry in the list I was given was a full-sized "fruit", so I must have mentally subdivided the list into two...)
When I look at recorded drills, I see the danger that repeated drilling of the same order leads to the same sort of "learning the list" as with wordlists.
But on top of this, there's something slightly different and slightly more insidious.
All too often, the tasks we set as teachers or that we are set as learners can be carried out without engaging in meaning or true language, which I term as working mechanically. The result is that we can produce a correct utterance without actually meaning it. In the immediate term, this gives an illusion of learning. What I'd never really thought about was how learning tasks build on this mechanical ability.
In terms of language learning, these mechanical skills are a dead end because they rarely lead to fluency, so I didn't think you could build on them. But then I started noticing how there is a certain skill to carrying out the mechanical tasks, so the tasks can become slightly more complicated, and the student learns to perform such tasks quicker and quicker. In the long term, then, the illusion of progress is maintained, even as the student's linguistic competence improves very little.
So there's two things here: learning of scripts instead of learning language, and learning mechanical skills vs learning linguistic skills. While it is important to remain conscious of the distinction, you can sum up both the erroneous strategies as "learning to repeat".
So teachers, when you set a task that focuses on repetition, ask yourself this: are your students repeating to learn, or merely learning to repeat?
30 April 2011
Real and unreal
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You could paraphrase this and say that the road to bad teaching is paved with good intentions.
A couple of my students have a bee in their bonnet about something they refer to as "real listening". I'd never heard the term before they said it, but I was familiar with the concept: the use of genuine telephone recordings, street noise etc to make listening exercises harder and more lifelike.
The goal is admirable and easy to understand. It certainly appeals to the conscientious teacher, even if the students hate it.
But if you look below the surface, it maybe isn't that good an idea. First of all, in real conversation, any noise or telephone-line interference may be natural, but you will always have recourse to those magic words: "sorry, I didn't quite catch that".
But looking at street noise, we've got to start considering how the human brain and ears work.
In a real-life situation, we can filter out street noise quite effectively. This is not a linguistic skill, it's a much more basic neurological thing. We have two ears. Behind those ears is a sophisticated audio-processing mechanism that compares the input from each, and by comparing differences in timing and volume in the perceived sound, it can take the two one-dimensional signals received by the ear and produce a remarkably accurate three-dimensional image.
It is in producing that image that we naturally (and effortlessly) identify individual sounds. Listening to a recording does not give us the cues that we need to split out the relevant sounds, so it's a much, much harder thing than most of us will need to in our day-to-day lives.
Before anyone says it: yes, a native can listen to a tape with background noise and make out the speech. It may seem only slightly more difficult than doing it face-to-face, but anything that is slightly more difficult for a native is exponentially more difficult for the learner. And it's not something that you can or should force a learner to do -- the native speaker achieves it based on a firm, broad knowledge of the language. This allows the native speaker to fill in the gaps. But it is not a specific skill -- it's an enhancement to the general ability to listen and to infer missing information from the rest of the utterance.
If so-called "real listening" was something we expected people to start on only after they had the phonology and grammar down pat, that would be fine, but I see it as degrading the quality of input for anyone before that.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You could paraphrase this and say that the road to bad teaching is paved with good intentions.
A couple of my students have a bee in their bonnet about something they refer to as "real listening". I'd never heard the term before they said it, but I was familiar with the concept: the use of genuine telephone recordings, street noise etc to make listening exercises harder and more lifelike.
The goal is admirable and easy to understand. It certainly appeals to the conscientious teacher, even if the students hate it.
But if you look below the surface, it maybe isn't that good an idea. First of all, in real conversation, any noise or telephone-line interference may be natural, but you will always have recourse to those magic words: "sorry, I didn't quite catch that".
But looking at street noise, we've got to start considering how the human brain and ears work.
In a real-life situation, we can filter out street noise quite effectively. This is not a linguistic skill, it's a much more basic neurological thing. We have two ears. Behind those ears is a sophisticated audio-processing mechanism that compares the input from each, and by comparing differences in timing and volume in the perceived sound, it can take the two one-dimensional signals received by the ear and produce a remarkably accurate three-dimensional image.
It is in producing that image that we naturally (and effortlessly) identify individual sounds. Listening to a recording does not give us the cues that we need to split out the relevant sounds, so it's a much, much harder thing than most of us will need to in our day-to-day lives.
Before anyone says it: yes, a native can listen to a tape with background noise and make out the speech. It may seem only slightly more difficult than doing it face-to-face, but anything that is slightly more difficult for a native is exponentially more difficult for the learner. And it's not something that you can or should force a learner to do -- the native speaker achieves it based on a firm, broad knowledge of the language. This allows the native speaker to fill in the gaps. But it is not a specific skill -- it's an enhancement to the general ability to listen and to infer missing information from the rest of the utterance.
If so-called "real listening" was something we expected people to start on only after they had the phonology and grammar down pat, that would be fine, but I see it as degrading the quality of input for anyone before that.
16 April 2011
The Myth of the Quick Learner
It is often claimed that some people are quick learners, and some people are slow learners, and that's that. In many ways this is just a euphemistic way of saying that some people are "clever" and some people are "stupid".
Well, as someone accused of being a "quick learner" or a "good learner" or being "good at" whatever subject we are discussing, I'd like to refute that.
I am not a quick learner.
Learning is about incorporating new information with existing knowledge.
It follows, then, that learning is easier the more knowledge you have to build on.
Here's my learner-life-story in a condensed form.
My parents were both teachers. My mother chose to be a stay-at-home mum.
Think about that for a moment: I had less to learn.
How can I be a "quick learner" if I'm doing less than the people around me?
Logically, it's absurd to say that.
In reality, all that happened was that I was given adequate time to learn the material given to me, based on my previous experience. Many of my classmates weren't given that chance -- they were presented with ever more new information without giving the previous information time or opportunity to be integrated with the old information.
The result is a spiral of passing tests without ever really mastering any information, and it is not the pupil's fault.
It's not really the teacher's fault either, because the teacher doesn't have any control over the students' knowledge before they come into the room, but any good teacher will tell you that it's the student's knowledge that counts, not intelligence.
Even a good teacher will still struggle with this in practice, because it is very different to account for deficiencies in prior learning for the low attainers without boring the high attainers.
So there's no easy answers, but until the myth of the "slow learner" is well and truly scotched, the debate will always be dragged backwards and true progress won't be achieved.
Well, as someone accused of being a "quick learner" or a "good learner" or being "good at" whatever subject we are discussing, I'd like to refute that.
I am not a quick learner.
Learning is about incorporating new information with existing knowledge.
It follows, then, that learning is easier the more knowledge you have to build on.
Here's my learner-life-story in a condensed form.
My parents were both teachers. My mother chose to be a stay-at-home mum.
- As a child, my mum had me playing games that involved counting before I went to school.
- She taught me to play simple tunes on the piano.
- She taught me to read a little.
- She taught me to read the clock.
- On top of this, she spoke a very "standard" English, whereas the local way of speaking was a mixture of Scots and English.
- Arithmetic
- The recorder (a horrible little instrument, but cheap and accessible for a learner of music)
- Reading
- Telling the time
- English
Think about that for a moment: I had less to learn.
How can I be a "quick learner" if I'm doing less than the people around me?
Logically, it's absurd to say that.
In reality, all that happened was that I was given adequate time to learn the material given to me, based on my previous experience. Many of my classmates weren't given that chance -- they were presented with ever more new information without giving the previous information time or opportunity to be integrated with the old information.
The result is a spiral of passing tests without ever really mastering any information, and it is not the pupil's fault.
It's not really the teacher's fault either, because the teacher doesn't have any control over the students' knowledge before they come into the room, but any good teacher will tell you that it's the student's knowledge that counts, not intelligence.
Even a good teacher will still struggle with this in practice, because it is very different to account for deficiencies in prior learning for the low attainers without boring the high attainers.
So there's no easy answers, but until the myth of the "slow learner" is well and truly scotched, the debate will always be dragged backwards and true progress won't be achieved.
11 April 2011
The importance and unimportance of accent
Accent is essentially unimportant. It's the final coat of paint that makes our language pretty or ugly, shiny or dull. It is something that the beginning learner really doesn't need to think about.
Unfortunately, this is something that is frequently overinterpreted, because many people don't appreciate the fact that accent is only one part of pronunciation.
Every language has it's own phonology -- it has a set of possible sounds and possible combinations of sounds, and it has a set of distinctions between sounds. Though we do not need to learn a good accent from day one, we certainly need to learn the sound system of a language.
The most common consequence of conflating the sound system with accent is the idea that the "closest sound" from your native language is "good enough". Open up almost any beginner's book and it'll start with a list of sounds described along the lines of "like the a in cat", "like t in English". But this is rarely true.
Still, some languages will let you get away with this to some extent, but when you hit a more complicated language, it all crumbles.
Any book on Hindi will tell you that "closest sounds" just won't cut it, and that with that approach you will never be understood. This is because Hindi has more sounds than most other languages. In fact, there are 8 sounds that are approximately similar to T and D, so using an English T and D, or a French one, or a German one, would leave you completely unable to distinguish certain words, and unable to make yourself understood.
Worse, because you treat 4 different sounds as one, you will never learn to hear the difference either -- your brain only distinguishes sounds that mean something. The later you attempt to fix it, the harder it will be, because you will have to relearn all the vocabulary in order to learn the difference.
I've experienced this personally with Spanish. In Spanish C is pronounced like Z, when the C is followed by I or E. In some areas, these in turn sound like S, but in other areas, they don't. I started learning Spanish from a course that didn't make a distinction between S and Z, but as I progressed I spent more of my time with people who make the distinction than those who don't.
As a result, I started trying to speak like them. However, my brain was trained to see the two things as one, so I was prone to making mistakes such as pronouncing the word "especial" as "ezpesial". My errors were arbitrary, but not random -- they were consistent and there was a clear pattern. My brain was still seeing the two as equivalent, but was trying to explain it in terms of the other sounds in the word. Thankfully this was still pretty early, so I caught it and fixed it.
Other people are not so lucky. A local French teacher (from France) can pronounce all the sounds of English. But he couldn't before he came here. The result is that he has already learned all the words with the wrong sounds. The classic example is TH -- it's always T or D when he speaks. He's learnt the words now, so there's no going back.
Now, that's something that we call "falling together" (ah, a nice, self-descriptive term for once), but phonemes can also split apart.
Consider that Japanese doesn't make a distinction between liquids L and R. As an English speaker learning Japanese, I would likely hear these as different phonemes (meaningful units of sounds) instead of simply different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme ("allophones").
This splitting apart on its own isn't a big problem -- it doesn't lose information the same way falling together does. However, the two can very easily co-occur, and at that point they make a bad situation worse.
Take for example "CH" in German. It has two allophones -- a hard one (ach) similar to the sound in Scottish "loch", and a softer palatised one (ich) that takes on a quality similar to the English SH. But there's another phoneme that sounds even more like the English SH, one that's usually written SCH. And it gets worse, because in certain combinations of consonants, S starts to sound the same.
If we're not careful, the learner may end up splitting their Ss and their CHs, and putting half of each in the same box as SCH. The result is a map of the sound system which looks nothing like the native speakers view of things.
Accent is what we put on top of the sound system to give it colour and personality. You cannot develop a good accent based on an incorrect map of the sound system. Pronunciation has to be taught from the start in such a way as to encourage a consistent and correct sound system.
Accent can wait until later, but pronunciation must taught in some form right from the start.
Accent is essentially unimportant. It's the final coat of paint that makes our language pretty or ugly, shiny or dull. It is something that the beginning learner really doesn't need to think about.
Unfortunately, this is something that is frequently overinterpreted, because many people don't appreciate the fact that accent is only one part of pronunciation.
Every language has it's own phonology -- it has a set of possible sounds and possible combinations of sounds, and it has a set of distinctions between sounds. Though we do not need to learn a good accent from day one, we certainly need to learn the sound system of a language.
The most common consequence of conflating the sound system with accent is the idea that the "closest sound" from your native language is "good enough". Open up almost any beginner's book and it'll start with a list of sounds described along the lines of "like the a in cat", "like t in English". But this is rarely true.
Still, some languages will let you get away with this to some extent, but when you hit a more complicated language, it all crumbles.
Any book on Hindi will tell you that "closest sounds" just won't cut it, and that with that approach you will never be understood. This is because Hindi has more sounds than most other languages. In fact, there are 8 sounds that are approximately similar to T and D, so using an English T and D, or a French one, or a German one, would leave you completely unable to distinguish certain words, and unable to make yourself understood.
Worse, because you treat 4 different sounds as one, you will never learn to hear the difference either -- your brain only distinguishes sounds that mean something. The later you attempt to fix it, the harder it will be, because you will have to relearn all the vocabulary in order to learn the difference.
I've experienced this personally with Spanish. In Spanish C is pronounced like Z, when the C is followed by I or E. In some areas, these in turn sound like S, but in other areas, they don't. I started learning Spanish from a course that didn't make a distinction between S and Z, but as I progressed I spent more of my time with people who make the distinction than those who don't.
As a result, I started trying to speak like them. However, my brain was trained to see the two things as one, so I was prone to making mistakes such as pronouncing the word "especial" as "ezpesial". My errors were arbitrary, but not random -- they were consistent and there was a clear pattern. My brain was still seeing the two as equivalent, but was trying to explain it in terms of the other sounds in the word. Thankfully this was still pretty early, so I caught it and fixed it.
Other people are not so lucky. A local French teacher (from France) can pronounce all the sounds of English. But he couldn't before he came here. The result is that he has already learned all the words with the wrong sounds. The classic example is TH -- it's always T or D when he speaks. He's learnt the words now, so there's no going back.
Now, that's something that we call "falling together" (ah, a nice, self-descriptive term for once), but phonemes can also split apart.
Consider that Japanese doesn't make a distinction between liquids L and R. As an English speaker learning Japanese, I would likely hear these as different phonemes (meaningful units of sounds) instead of simply different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme ("allophones").
This splitting apart on its own isn't a big problem -- it doesn't lose information the same way falling together does. However, the two can very easily co-occur, and at that point they make a bad situation worse.
Take for example "CH" in German. It has two allophones -- a hard one (ach) similar to the sound in Scottish "loch", and a softer palatised one (ich) that takes on a quality similar to the English SH. But there's another phoneme that sounds even more like the English SH, one that's usually written SCH. And it gets worse, because in certain combinations of consonants, S starts to sound the same.
If we're not careful, the learner may end up splitting their Ss and their CHs, and putting half of each in the same box as SCH. The result is a map of the sound system which looks nothing like the native speakers view of things.
Accent is what we put on top of the sound system to give it colour and personality. You cannot develop a good accent based on an incorrect map of the sound system. Pronunciation has to be taught from the start in such a way as to encourage a consistent and correct sound system.
Accent can wait until later, but pronunciation must taught in some form right from the start.
08 April 2011
Speed reading's great - unless you want to learn a language.
Every now and then, I read someone on the internet quoting the remarkable reading speed of trained speed readers, and then asking whether this would help a language learner.
In principle, it sounds like a good idea. After all, if you can read four times faster, you can read four times as much, right? It seems like you can therefore expose yourself to more foreign language in a shorter time.
Unfortunately, the mechanics of speed reading -- and indeed reading in general -- do not allow this.
When we read, we take advantage of known, familiar patterns in the input. This means that we don't actually need to process everything that is printed in order to understand it. Tak# th{s sent#nce, f*r ex*m*pl*. As a reader, your knowledge of English is probably enough to fill in the gaps. We do this all the time. If we didn't, reading speeds wouldn't improve so dramatically just through frequent reading, but they do. Basically, our brains get in the habit of knowing the bits they need to read. "The book is ## the table": the eye knows those two ## shapes are "on" as there's nothing else they could be. "The book is ##### the table": well, that's just got to be under. So the brain recognises the rough shape and/or size and matches it with the known patterns -- it knows what it must be without actually reading it.
Speed-reading training isn't anything special. Although some speed-reading schools will tell you to do this, that or the other, in the end, all speed-reading classes do is encourage you to take this natural process to its logical conclusion.
So where does this leave the language learner?
Nowhere.
When we're learning a new language, we do not have deep knowledge of the language we are studying, so our brain cannot take the shortcuts required for speed-reading. Any assumptions it makes will come from outside the target language, and therefore will result in errors.
So, nice thought, but no.
Every now and then, I read someone on the internet quoting the remarkable reading speed of trained speed readers, and then asking whether this would help a language learner.
In principle, it sounds like a good idea. After all, if you can read four times faster, you can read four times as much, right? It seems like you can therefore expose yourself to more foreign language in a shorter time.
Unfortunately, the mechanics of speed reading -- and indeed reading in general -- do not allow this.
When we read, we take advantage of known, familiar patterns in the input. This means that we don't actually need to process everything that is printed in order to understand it. Tak# th{s sent#nce, f*r ex*m*pl*. As a reader, your knowledge of English is probably enough to fill in the gaps. We do this all the time. If we didn't, reading speeds wouldn't improve so dramatically just through frequent reading, but they do. Basically, our brains get in the habit of knowing the bits they need to read. "The book is ## the table": the eye knows those two ## shapes are "on" as there's nothing else they could be. "The book is ##### the table": well, that's just got to be under. So the brain recognises the rough shape and/or size and matches it with the known patterns -- it knows what it must be without actually reading it.
Speed-reading training isn't anything special. Although some speed-reading schools will tell you to do this, that or the other, in the end, all speed-reading classes do is encourage you to take this natural process to its logical conclusion.
So where does this leave the language learner?
Nowhere.
When we're learning a new language, we do not have deep knowledge of the language we are studying, so our brain cannot take the shortcuts required for speed-reading. Any assumptions it makes will come from outside the target language, and therefore will result in errors.
So, nice thought, but no.
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