Link drop: English Next by David Graddol

In 2006 the British Council released a book called English Next by leading academic David Graddol, discussing the future of English as a global language.  You can download it free as PDF from the British Council website, and I'll be putting it on my little ebook reader for a leisurely read at a later date.

I'm not sure I'll agree with it, though.  While I agree that the English used in business meetings the world over isn't quite the language I speak, it's still not standardised, and it's pretty hard to imagine it ever becoming standardised with such a disparate discourse community.  Popular culture will probably still mostly be filtered through one of the major native-speaking populations (mostly Hollywood), and we're always going to need some model to teach to...

Good news! Fossilised errors don't exist!

It has been claimed that errors that are made frequently enough "fossilise" -- that is to say that they "harden" and become difficult to fix.  This, I feel, is overstating the case.  It's certainly easier to learn something correct to begin with than to have to "unlearn" it later in order to learn the correct form, but even then, it may be less of a big deal than people think.

The evidence

I learned French at high school from first year, and took direct entry into 3rd-year Italian as an additional language when I got the chance.  I learned Italian quicker than French.  Years later, I picked up Spanish, and learned it quicker than Italian.   More recently still, I picked up Catalan... at lightning speed.

Well, that's to be expected, right?  They are closely related languages after all.

But wait... if they are really similar, then one could describe one language in terms of another language and a set of differences.  And if you think about it, an "error" is no different from a "difference" in cognitive terms -- the only distinction is that an error is a difference that isn't shared with a whole linguistic group.

So if fossilised errors really were such a big thing, wouldn't it have been harder for me to learn Spanish after Italian, rather than easier?

And this even holds as we get to languages increasingly distant from each other, because all we're doing is increasing the number of differences, which fossilised error theory claims would make things difficult.

Taken to its logical conclusion, fossilised error theory would make adult language learning an impossible task, because every language point we learn can be considered at attempt to overcome a fossilised language pattern -- ie the equivalent language point in the native language.

The paradox propounded by promoters of fossilised errors

The idea of a fossilised error is used as a warning against attempting to say things you don't know how to.  This is pretty logical.  But the idea of fossilised errors is particularly popular among the learn-by-listening crowd.  Take the site Antimoon, and what they call "myths" about language learning:
Myth #2: "The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it"
Myth #3: "It is OK to make mistakes"
Myth #4: "As a beginner, you're bound to make a lot of mistakes"
Basically, they reckon that if you make lots of mistakes, they will fossilise and you will learn badly.  So you should listen to and read lots of examples so that you know it well before you attempt to say it.

But that's an inconsistent argument.  How can it be that we learn mistakes by speaking and learn correct language by listening?  Internally, the brain treats "correct language" and "errors" in the same way -- they're both just language forms.

So if it's the speaking that teaches us our errors, surely it's also the speaking that teaches us our correct language too?  I mean if speaking does fossilise language, surely it's to our advantage to use that to fossilise good language?

Conclusion

It's certainly a good idea to learn things properly from the word go, because it's easier.  Languages are internally more consistent, logical and systematic than many people give them credit for, and the real danger is that errors may distort the overall picture of the language, but they are never fatal and incurable.

It's better to avoid errors, but don't start distinguishing between "fresh" and "fossilised" errors and only attack the "fresh" ones.  Do not give up, because... well, it's just lazy.  If you start using "fossilisation" as an excuse, you'll find yourself making excuses for all your errors and you'll never really get as good at the language as you would like.

Why I chose to study grammar

No matter what language you're learning, and no matter how complicated its grammar seems to you, one thing holds true for any human language you might study:

There is hardly any grammar.

How so?  Go into a bookshop or library and compare the size of the biggest grammar book with the biggest dictionary.  And don't forget that big dictionaries are printed on thinner paperstock than grammar books.

Juan Kattan Ibarra's Modern Spanish Grammar has 472 pages, and is pretty comprehensive.
Collins' unabriged Spanish dictionary has a whopping 2208 pages, in a smaller typeface than the grammar book and with a printed area approximately equal to two pages of the grammar book, and formatted to reduce white space to an absolute minimum.  In terms of raw text, a comprehensive dictionary is about 20 times as big as a good grammar book.

On top of that, each grammar point in a grammar book needs a couple of pages of explanation and multiple examples, where a word gets a couple of inches in each half of the dictionary.

Really, there's loads of words in any language, and hardly any grammar.

So why not get the grammar early on?  It's quick and it is universally useful.  Very few people can pass a single day without using the majority of the verb tenses and noun cases available in their native language.

Vocabulary is a different matter.  When did I last say "robot"?  I can't remember.  "Lamb"? Roughly four weeks ago.  "House"?  About 2 weeks ago.

So if I study vocabulary, I not only have an almost never-ending task (the dictionary I mentioned above has 315,000 references), but I also find myself unable to remember words because I don't use them enough.
But if I study grammar, I can cover all the basics really quickly, and those basics can be used every single time I have a conversation, and they will stick.

The best part, though, is that once you know grammar, learning words is easier, because you can use them and understand them in various natural contexts, because grammar can change both the form and meaning of words.

Right now, I'm mapping out the grammar of Polish in order to teach it to myself and a friend, and when I'm done, I expect to know less than 50 words.  But I can learn more words later.

Mechanics' Meaningful Music

It is often claimed that an adult cannot learn the sound system of a new language.  This claim is followed by the caveat that some adults do, but these adults are dismissed as exceptional, and non-typical.  Certainly, they are exceptions, because most people don't, but there's a big difference between "don't" and "can't".

A sound system is composed of phonemes, which are often defined as minimal units of meaning in sound.  Every human is capable of producing a whole range of sounds, regardless of their language, and to process every single detail of the sound produced would simply be too much for the brain, so we bundle the sounds up together, and even though the sounds of the T in "try" and "butter" may be slightly different (or completely different, depending on your accent), we still recognise them as being the same thing.

As a general strategy, this works.  The adult human meets lots of people with slightly different accents, but the phonemes are all roughly the same, so the detail of the differences is irrelevant.

As a language learner, though, this starts to pose problems.  Our brains believe that only certain sounds are meaningful, and therefore discard any information they believe to be irrelevant.  If you have a language with two phonemes equivalent to one in your language, you will not believe the distinction is meaningful.  Just take a look at Japanese, where they have one phoneme equivalent to the English L and R.  Many Japanese learners of English cannot hear the difference between "law" and "raw" or "appear" and "appeal" without active concentration.

Most people get stuck in this rut their whole lives, and this is used as evidence that you can never learn the sound system.  But if we step outside the world of language, we might just find reason to be more optimistic.

It's amazing what an experienced mechanic can determine about a car or other machine just by listening to it.  Sounds that to you or me would just be squeaks and squeals are to him a full description of the workings and faults of the engine.

Mechanics develops this skill over time through a mixture of direct instruction and experiential learning.  The engines they work on give constant feedback that develops into a meaningful structure -- if a given whine co-occurs with a drop in revs, the two become associated and the sound takes on meaning.

But by this reasoning, surely language itself should give a meaningful framework to sounds?

Unfortunately, it would appear not, and it isn't actually that hard to see why.

Language has evolved to have a certain amount of redundancy, a certain level of "fault tolerance".  It is very difficult indeed to find any complete sentences that function as minimal pairs (ie that differ by one phoneme only), particularly within the restricted language set that most beginners are faced with.

Going back to my earlier examples, "law" is a noun, "raw" is an adjective.  There will always be enough information in the context to tell the two apart.  "Appeal" and "appear" are both verbs, but the usages are distinct.

Essentially, I believe that the average learner is never really forced to build a meaningful framework for these differences.  The end result is that they get deeper and deeper into the language, building more and more coping mechanisms that a native speaker would never rely on.  The model of the language they build is wrong, and while they can understand most things they hear, the person they are speaking to often cannot understand them because, as I said, the native speaker doesn't employ the same strategies as the learner.

What is needed is for the teacher to force a meaningful framework, and the only way I can see that happening is through early teaching of pronunciation.  If a learner has to pronounce the difference between ż and ź in Polish, and is corrected when using the wrong one, his brain will know there's a meaningful difference.

It may not be fashionable, but some negative feedback is definitely necessary....

Learning is fun

In every sphere of teaching, there is a tendency to try to "make learning fun".  This is done through games and the selection of "relevant" or "interesting" material.

I have always been of the opinion that most of the games presented in classes are a distraction from learning rather than an aid to learning, and that most of the attempts to make subjects relevant or interesting tend to obscure the point being taught.  In maths and physics at high school, I used to get given all sorts of contrived scenarios that boiled down to a pretty simple calculation, and many of my classmates would be puzzled by what the question was asking.  The "relevance" that was supposed to be helping motivate us became a hindrance.  And yet the teachers saw the difficulty as a good thing because in the real world, we wouldn't just be given a sum.  Well in the real world, we'd have a lot more variables to deal with.  Personally, I couldn't see any benefit.

I have always been of the opinion that one of the most mentally enjoyable things on the planet is learning.  "You would say that," people tell me, "because you're good at it.  Other people are different."

But to answer that is to miss my point, because learning is pure mental stimulation, and mental stimulation is (to simplify horribly) the basis of enjoyment.  I argue that there is no-one who doesn't enjoy learning.  "But what about the people who don't do well in school?  They don't enjoy it!"  But if learning is a universal pleasure, this is looking at things the wrong way round: underachievers don't fail to learn because they're not enjoying themselves, they fail to enjoy themselves because they're not learning!

On a recent trip to a charity shop, I was lucky enough to stumble across the book Towards a Theory of Instruction by Jerome S Bruner.  In the first chapter of the book, published in 1966 but based on earler papers and lectures, he says:

We discovered one point of especial value for my own future inquiry.  There is a sharp distinction that must be made between behavior that copes with the requirements of a problem and behavior that is designed to defend against entry into the problem.

 He says that the nature of the poor performance of the children he was studying...

was not so much a distortion as it was the result of their working on a different set of problems from those the school had set for them.

He then goes on to point out that

Once our blocked children were able to bear the problems as set -- when we were able to give them a chance for conflict-free coping -- their performance was quite like that of other children

Essentially, he tells us that kids' learning problems seem to be pretty much absolute and digital -- you've either learned or you haven't, which would suggest that changing the way the problem is stated isn't going to make any positive difference to the underperforming students, because they still won't use the appropriate strategy.

But Bruner's legacy is the idea of "discovery learning": that people don't need to be taught things, and that they learn better by discovering things for themselves.  It's an idea that has been horribly distorted and misrepresented over the years.  Certainly every description of this that I have ever read takes a much harder line than Bruner himself, and even Bruner's own studies on this were within a very confined field.

In the book, Bruner deals mostly with elementary maths, ostensibly because of the clarity of expression and the fact that all readers will be familiar with the basic arithmetic under study.  Using cubes to work out areas and volumes is fairly standard, but often the full potential is ignored -- Bruner's studies went on to explore recombinations, and then eventually on to elementary calculus, all at an early primary level.  Bruner was surprised and impressed by how little explicit instruction the children needed, and the additional concepts they explored without being asked.

But the physical constraints here were leading, and they also meant feedback was immediate.  When high schools try to employ discovery learning we get into dubious practices such as "discovering the boiling point of water".  You stick a thermometer in a beaker of water and put it over a bunsen burner.  When it boils, you read it off.

But wait... at what point is water officially "boiling"?  I'm in my 30s, and even though I'm a competent cook, I still couldn't identify with confidence the actual point at which a pan is "on the boil".  So as a teenager I was staring at this beaker, trying to decide when it was right, and scribbling down several numbers.  At the end of the "experiment", we all gave our numbers, and we were all wrong.  What exactly did we discover?  The teacher had to tell us that it was 100.  Yes, that's right, we were using Celsius, the temperature scale defined by the boiling and freezing point of water.  This exercise was pretty ridiculous....

So far, so irrelevant to the language learner.  Well, that's all background.

The idea of discovery learning has infected the language profession too.  But language is pure abstraction -- there is no physical reality to count or measure or explore.  The notion of "correct" language is so vague that it is exceptionally difficult to stumble upon by accident.  And whereas most physical experiments can be reattempted without prejudicing the results, every reformulation in language gives the listener a partial understanding.  Three or four attempts to speak make not result in a single correct sentence, but the other person may well know what you mean by the end of it.  You never need to discover the correct answer.

But as I said, most modern advocates of discovery learning are far more hard-line than Bruner.  In Toward a Theory of Instruction, Bruner didn't use the term very much at all.  Instead, Bruner focused on learning as a process of increasing abstraction, starting at enactive (physically carrying it out), moving through iconic (typified by diagrams) and finally becoming symbolic (including linguistic descriptions of the problem).  To Bruner, the point of physical learning seems to have been the idea that it is required to form the understanding of the concept.  On the simplest level, you can't really learn the word "biscuit" if you've no concept of baked goods.

This ties neatly to the work of one of Bruner's contemporaries: David Ausubel.  Ausubel proposed something called an "advance organiser".  According to Ausubel, the main thing was to prime the student to receive new information, and much of that was about showing why something wasn't new at all.

My dad taught chemistry, and he was big on advance organisers.

But an advance organiser doesn't have to be physical, like discovery learners think -- it can be conceptual.  He taught the wave equation (velocity = frequency * wavelength) by analogy to a factory conveyor belt.  Each item on the belt was a wavefront, and the gap was a wavelength.  Most kids want to have frequency increase when wavelength increases, but the analogy makes it clear why this can't happen.  Needless to say, he didn't have physical access to a baked bean cannery to carry this out in, so he did it on the blackboard.  Under Bruner's structure, it is therefore iconic, and he's skipped the enactive phase entirely.

So what does this mean for the language learner?

Well, a suitable advance organiser can bypass the "enactive" discovery stage if we already have a suitable analogy at another level of abstraction.  The physical reality of a conveyor belt is so easily understood that my father only needed to evoke the idea -- the "advance organiser" for the wave equation.  With language, we can go one step further -- we already have an advance organiser in the symbolic domain: ie our native equivalent.

Let's look at an example.  In EFL we tend to talk about 1st, 2nd and 3rd conditionals and teach them by example.
1st: I will do it if you tell me to.
2nd: I would do it if you told me to.
3rd: I would have done it if you had told me to.

Many teachers avoid translation, as they see at as a dangerous thing.  But what if we stop saying "translation" and start saying "by analogy to your native language"...?

Michel Thomas teaches the conditionals in his Spanish course, and he does it entirely by analogy to English.  Even the 3rd conditional, often considered hopelessly difficult and very advanced, becomes simplicity itself, because the structure in both languages is almost 100% equivalent.

Another device he uses is when teaching "to wait".  In the Romance languages, this doesn't take the "for" of the English "waiting for" someone.  So he takes the word "await" and uses it as an advance organiser, saying that in French, Spanish and Italian, you "await" someone.  But he still says "wait for" too, because he is evoking both the meaning and the form.

One of the most striking things about Thomas's courses is how little of the material in them is specific to any situation or context.  Thomas taught only the most general and reusable language, and by playing with the structures, he gave his students an incredible level of control over the language.  When he demonstrated his techniques in an English high school for a TV documentary (The Language Master), one of the regular teaching staff had this to say:

The revelation is that it's the learning process itself that motivates these kids, the mastery of the stucture, the mastery of part of the language is the thing that keeps them going, keeps them enthusiastic.  And we lose sight of that in the way we teach. ... We think we capture their interest by finding them interesting materials that are supposedly related to their interests outside in the world generally, and maybe we miss the point.  And I think he's probably onto something very important here.

Which leads us back to where we started: learning is fun.

What triggered this post was actually getting a link to an article on computer games (of all things!) in the Guardian several weeks ago.  To quote:

our growing love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations.

Central to it all is a simple theory – that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer – through systems and puzzles. Five years ago, Raph Koster, the designer of seminal multiplayer fantasy games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies wrote a fascinating book called A Theory of Fun for Game Design, in which he put forward the irresistibly catchy tenet that "with games, learning is the drug".

Games can sell themselves on superficial features like graphics, soundtracks and clever media campaigns, but in the long run, the fun in any game derives from the fact that learning stimulates the brain.

So while the experts in fun are telling us that it's the learning that matters, the experts in learning are trying to look elsewhere for fun....

"Say what sounds right."

Bad advice has an annoying habit of sounding like good advice, and this little phrase really is something of a wolf in sheep's clothing.  It's definitely appealling when someone points out that that's what we do in our own language.

I wouldn't argue that my end-goal isn't to be able to simply say what sounds right, but I just can't see how that end-goal affects my learning path: nothing will never "sound right" until I've learnt it, so how can I learn by what "sounds right"?

The consequences of this are not insubstantial, because if I've not learned it yet, what's going to sound right to me?  What sounds right is something that I have learned, but this will be out of context.

Take for example the verb "start" in English.
You can "start something".
You can "start doing something".
You can "start with something".
You can "start by doing something".

If you learn only two of these, then only those two will "sound right".

Saying "what sounds right" traps you into what you know and stops you expanding your language.  What you need to do is stop and think, and use the appropriate form, even if it isn't familiar enough to "sound right" yet.

Here's another example.

French has a feature called "liaison" -- certain final consonants are silent but reappear when followed by a vowel, but only if the two words are tied together syntactically.

In the word "vous", the S is normal silent, but in the phrase "vous allez" (you go), it has a /z/ sound.
Now, the past participle of to go is "allé", which is pronounced identically to "allez", so when you ask "êtes-vous allé" (have you gone), if you go by what "sounds right", you might pronounce that /z/.  But in this question "vous" and "allé" are not syntactically bound together and liaison should not occur.

The idea of "what sounds right" reaches a very messy conclusion in Scottish Gaelic. A single syllable consisting of a schwa before a noun can be one of three things: "the", "his" or "her".  "his" always causes initial lenition (soft mutation of the first consonant) of the following noun, "her" never does.  As "the", this form can occur before masculine and feminine nouns in certain cases, and causes initial lenition, and only with certain letters.

Many teachers suggest that you learn noun gender by "what sounds right", by agreement with the article, but your ear will be exposed to the various case-inflected forms and possessives, so what sounds right might not be "the boy" at all, but "her boy" or "his boy".

The problem with podcasts

I'll get to the point quickly.  The problem with (language learning) podcasts is quite simply that they are modelled on radio.

Podcasting started with a bunch of early technology adopters who wanted to play at being a DJ.  They produced programs (semi-)regularly playing music, talking about minority interests etc.  They built a successful little community, and everyone suddenly wanted to hang out with the cool kids.

The language profession has always looked for ways to employ new media to produce new ways of delivering classes, and suddenly they had something new.  Or so they thought.

I'll indulge myself with a bit of repetition: the problem with (language learning) podcasts is quite simply that they are modelled on radio.  Radio -- that's nothing new.  Language learning hasn't been popular on the radio since people called it "the wireless".  They found it didn't work very well, but moved onto TV.  However, there haven't been many major TV language projects since the 80s (except in the field of English teaching).  Again, it didn't really work.

Why?

Because radio and TV are effectively the same thing, under the hood.

They are casual media.  You tune in, you tune out, as and when you like.  Programs have to be clever to avoid this: soaps are popular with producers because they retain their audiences through extended story arcs.  A more profound effect is that professional musicians are losing favour in TV prime-time to amateurs -- because a talent show has winners and losers, and with a knock-out format you come back to root for your favourite, even if you don't like the other guys.

Dedication to a single program, to tune in week after week, isn't easy, which is why most TV shows fail.  Which shouldn't be a problem for a language course, because people doing it are going to dedicate the time to it, right?

But holding your viewers isn't worth anything if you can't pick up new ones.  About 10 years ago there was a sci-fi series called Farscape.  It was very well written, and as a book it would have been an outstanding success.  But the problem was that it kept building on itself, so it was difficult for new viewers to understand, or for people to come back to viewing it after a break.  Though the series had a strong following, the few viewers it did lose were never replaced, and it got cancelled before it reached the final series.

And this is the problem for the language program on TV or radio: by its very nature it cannot build an audience: you have to watch from the start.

So why is this a problem for podcasts?  After all, we can download old podcasts -- we're not just restricted to this week's....

True, but once the program has been written as though it were a weekly radio program, there's a certain cognitive dissonance with playing catchup.

Every podcast has its jingles, it's little chatty banter, and all too often they end with "see you next week" or something of that ilk.  I for one find it unpleasant to listen to that when I'm doing an episode every day.  In fact, I find a lot of the banter irritating if I'm only listening to one episode a week.  The banter is part of the radio style, it's not alway there for pedagogical reasons.

So I have to ask myself: why write a language course modelled on radio programs, when instead you could write a language course modelled on language courses?  It's not like there's a dearth of materials out there to model yourself on: Linguaphone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas and several other successful products exist on the market, and among them, some have survived a notably long time, unlike the short-lived fad for radio programmes.

Many of these don't have jingles (unlike the irritating audio accompanying many school textbooks), none of them are interspersed with chatty banter and very few have inane encouragement (phrases like "keep it up, you're really doing well" in a patronising voice really wind me up).  Lessons usually start with a lesson number and a title, and nothing else.  You may be given advice on the recommended frequency of use, but it's not rammed down your throat by someone gushing "see you next week! Cheeeeriooooo!"

So please, people; write language lessons, not radio programs