Decoo's wheel turns again....

I'm always referring to it, but everyone with an interest in language should read Wilfried Decoo's lecture "On The Mortality Of Language Learning Methods".  By his reckoning, the latest "new" popular movement in teaching is long overdue.  (The fact that the communicative approach is still king is probably due to its prevalence in TEFL, and the fact that anything else takes longer to train teachers to do.)
And one candidate is starting to emerge.  There are whispers of "social media" echoing round the classroom.
Not that long ago, the watchword was "web", but what became of that?  Certainly, the web gives us more access to more materials, but what we've seen to date is either simply the existing textbook styles rewrapped as webpages with automatic marking of exercises or a rapackaging of 90s style multimedia packages.
Digitised textbooks have their advantages over the paper textbook (no fiddling with the CD player to find the right track, instant feedback on many errors) at the expense of being something you couldn't just sit down and do on the train.
The multimedia websites, on the other hand, offer very little over the old CD-ROMs, but are a lot slower to use due to constant downloading of materials in between questions.  And I can shove a CD-ROM in my laptop on the train, but I won't be able to get a connection to the internet without running up a fairly hefty 3G bill.

But the "social media" thing is starting to kick in.  LiveMocha is a clone of the overpriced toy courses by Rosetta Stone, but they had the idea to get learners correcting each other's work.  This is not an innovation in any real sense, it's just a poor man's version of paying a tutor.  Of course, Rosetta Stone decided to jump on the social bandwagon too, and started setting up a language buddy/exchange site.  Reports have it that the demographics are heavily skewed and it's difficult to find language buddies for many language combinations.
Steve Kaufmann's Lingq has taken the social approach down a different track.  The website provides a shiny interface that doesn't really do much and gets people to insert screeds and screeds of texts with audio in various languages, and the user is expected to learn by induction from massive exposure.  I don't buy the argument.  The interface doesn't do much to guide me and the quality of the material varies wildly, with some people even just uploading lists of words, contrary to the site's main philosophy.  But this is starting to get away from the notion of "social", and more into the realms of "crowdsourcing".   It's only the credits-based correction system that retains any sort of "social" status, but even that's starting to stretch definitions a bit.

Tatoeba is unashamed crowdsource.  It's a very intriguing idea: a bunch of sentences undergoing unstructured translation from one language to another, and another, and another.  In mathematical terms, they describe it as a "graph" rather than a "table", a concept which probably merits a blog post to itself.  I love it, and I find it a great exercise to translate stuff from various languages into Scottish Gaelic, as it gets me thinking about things I might not otherwise, and helps me identify holes in my abilities.  That said, it's difficult to see what you can actually do with all that data.  It has no concept of grammatical syntagms or paradigms, so you can't search for a structure and see examples of it.

But all these things -- web, social or crowdsource -- have one thing in common: they're outside the classroom.  The internet is a solo phenomenon -- why would anyone work the web in the classroom?  You might as well be at home!
Perhaps the biggest problem with computer-based learning is that it's all independent, so we can all make excuses and slack off.  Maybe we'll start writing a blog post instead of studying, and we'll pretend to ourselves we're doing something productive....

But anyway, all that notwithstanding, there are still people who dream about getting social media into the classroom as an article in today's Guardian shows.
The justification for a focus on social media is, as far as I'm concerned, a non-sequitur:

We are late to the party. Children now default to social media in nearly every aspect of their life. They use it to communicate with their friends, play games and watch TV. Our failure to provide language learning resources must partly be due to teachers and parents who either don't appreciate or don't understand the power of social media.

To paraphrase: kids use it outside the class, so we must use it inside the class.  But what of all the other things kids use outside the classroom?  When I was a child, did the teachers use BMX bikes and Action Man to teach us stuff?  No.  They used TV to an extent, but even then it generally had the goal of making up for the classroom teacher's defiencies -- most primary teachers don't know much science, for example, so we watched a weekly science programme.  So TV wasn't used because it was "what the kids use" but because it was the appropriate tool for the job.  Any attempt to crowbar teaching into social media for its own sake is likely to be as successful as any other attempt adults make to "get down with the kids", and it will just look patronising.
At the end of the article, the author gives "Five ways you can start to engage with your pupils on social media", and if the term "engage with" doesn't immediately turn you off, you'll discover that once again, the "method" is not led by pedagogy, but by technology:

1. Create a Facebook page that your class can 'like'. Start posting updates to your timeline, but not in English. Ask your pupils to translate the text using Facebook's in-line Bing translation tool and ask them to gauge its accuracy.

It looks to me like it's a matter of "it's there so we'll use it" -- correction is an occassional exercise in most classrooms, but here it's being promoted as part of the routing.  Because it's there.
(This may actually be counterproductive -- why draw students' attention to the ubiquity of free translation tools if you're trying to demonstrate to them the value of learning a language?)

2. Create a Twitter account. Start tweeting in a foreign language, keeping in mind that you have a 140 character limit, and see if your pupils can strike up a conversation with you. Impose a non-English only reply and retweet rule.

Nothing of note - nothing groundbreaking.  Write stuff.  But short.  OK.  Understood.  But what stage do you get to in school language before you're able to write over 140 characters anyway.  (See also "idiographic languages"...)

3. Create a YouTube account. Ask each of your pupils to record a video blog, or 'vlog', of their hobbies, thoughts or opinions on topical news stories, but speaking only in a foreign language. Those who want to have their video uploaded should send it to you first.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see any teaching goal that is achieved by putting these on public display on YouTube.  In fact, as a student it would horrify me to think that my errors would be on show, but then I'd probably feel browbeaten into agreeing, seeing as everyone else is doing it.
Why is this any better than setting a spoken homework task that only the teacher and/or the class sees?

4. Create a Pinterest account. Take some pictures of prompt cards, post-it notes or even objects with their description in another language and 'pin' them on your boards. You could even look for photos of the country, or infographics about languages in general, to help your pupils understand more about why they should learn it.

I can't imagine this getting much use.  What is the student's goal in using the pinboard?  Why would I go to it?  What on Earth could you put on it that would grab enough attention to make the endeavour worthwhile?

5. Create a blog or Tumblr. Dedicate it entirely to publishing content in the language you teach. Show your pupils why you love the language and inspire them to do the same. Ask them to write something, however small, and post it for the whole world to admire.

All well and good in a liberal arts atmosphere, but like the videos, where's the innovative step between this and written homework?  Besides, as a learner and a teacher, I prefer much more closely directed work.  Why?  Am I a tyrant?  Hell no.  An open task normally leads to either getting stuck in a rut using the same old "safe" language items over and over again, or frequent overreaching by trying to say something that you haven't been taught yet.
As a learner, that frustrates me.  As a teacher, it makes things harder to mark.  What feedback do you give in the latter case?  Do you write five or six lessons worth of teaching?  Do say just mark it as wrong and say you haven't done that yet?

So I don't think social media's a great answer for the teacher, really.  A fantastic resource for the independent learner, yes.  A great way of maintaining a language in the absence of other contact, yes.  But an important component of the modern classroom, no.


Edit 11/04/2012: Tatoeba's actually better than I thought.  The search engine may not be as flexible or as specific as true corpus concordancing software, but it's pretty powerful, as the docs indicate.  There's a "proximity operator" in there, so you can look for co-occurring words even if you don't have the exact phrase.  Nifty.

3 months or 5 days?

You may be aware of Benny Lewis and his blog Fluent in 3 Months.  If so, you'll probably be aware that he's generally involved in some controversy or other.  If you had to pick someone as his "arch-rival", you'd probably have to go with Steve Kaufmann.

Now I'm not a fan of either, but this morning I was alerted to a new video Kaufmann posted on YouTube which would appear to be a direct challenge to Benny.  Not only is it called "Fluency in Five Days", but he even makes reference to the 3 month thing in his opening.  Take a look if you like:



The whole thing hangs on the meaning of "fluency" -- in technical terms, fluency is the ability to function flowingly and without (much) hesitation.  The other parts of language are "accuracy" and range.  So what he's proposing to do is just to cram as much and build his accuracy, and then immerse himself for a week to get up to speed in actually using it.

Basically it's a direct challenge to Benny's idea that you have to speak from day one (which is the name of Benny's current commercial product).  I have to say that I agree with Kaufmann on this.  I don't agree with his methodologies (or that of his commercial website Lingq), but I definitely agree that there is value to initial study without any immersive usage... as long as you later go into an immersive situation.

I've always said that the value of an immersive environment is limited by what you know going into it -- the more you know, the more you'll pick up.

I look forward to seeing Steve's results.

Languages in schools...?

It's well-known throughout much of the world that the UK has an exceptionally bad record at teaching languages in schools.  Every few years, someone stands up and vows to change this.  Years ago the Scottish education department declared that everyone going into primary school teaching had to be able to teach a second language.  As I understand it, England followed suit shortly after.  What ever came of it?  Not much, because as language is only compulsory for two years at high school either side of the border, and the vast majority of teacher-training candidates didn't have any language qualifications at all, and enforcing the law would have led to a serious lack of primary school teachers all round.

So instead they started special "[insert language name here] for primary teachers" courses, like this one from the Open University.  It's for complete beginners, and costs only £275 regardless of where you live in the world -- that's equivalent to 5% of the tuition fees for a year of study at an English university, meaning it can't be particularly substantial.  According to the site, it can be done entirely at your own pace, so it doesn't seem like you'll get any live tuition whatsoever.  This really cannot teach you enough to turn you into an effective language teacher.  And yet it must be done, to pay lipservice to an admirable goal that is simply too expensive to meet.

Looking at the resources that are used in primary school languages, I can only despair.  Take, for example, Languagenut, a computer-based resource claiming to meet the "Key Stage 2 Modern Foreign Languages" syllabus -- that's an English thing, but they also say that they're aligning to the Scottish "Curriculum for Excellence".

It's a colourful and appealing package, but where is the substance?  This isn't Languagenut's fault, really.  The Languagenut software is nothing more than a repackaging of the most common techniques in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) along with the syllabus goals of the primary curriculum.  The problem is in the whole culture of CALL and the whole system of primary education.  The idea of "games" that involve very superficial matching exercises is engrained in both cultures, as is the concept of "modularisation" that leads to the isolation and compartmentalisation of language, instead of continuously constructing a single large overview of the language.  Even if this compartmentalisation wasn't a bad thing in and of itself (and I certainly believe that it is), the act of compartmentalisation always leads to one resource blocking every other resource out, because no resource can ever be fully compartmentalised -- there will always be an underlying order to the material, and no two resources will follow exactly the same order.  Dipping in and out is usually very difficult indeed.

"Resources" will never be a replacement for a teacher in the classroom.  What is required is teachers who know the material.

But maybe there is a way to get the competence we need, at both ends.  I don't know about England, but in Scotland there's a surplus of qualified teachers, as the government made a point of ramping up training in anticipation of a mass retirement that's due any year now.  Why don't we have a government scheme to get them abroad?  The demand for teachers of English is always high, and these guys are trained and experienced classroom teachers.  When they come back, they'll be looking to teach.  So why not set up a scheme where teaching grads get the first shout on teaching assistant posts overseas, reciprocated by bringing in foreign teaching grads as language assistants.  The language assistant schemes are atrophying at the moment, and could really do with government intervention to prevent the local authorities closing them down as an unnecessary expense.

Certainly, it will take something far more radical than a few ministerial proclamations to raise the standard of language teaching to anything useful. If in doubt, have a look at the Scottish Standard Grade or English GCSE exam papers to see what's expected of you after four years of learning....

Oops!

Ooops... this wasn't a finished post -- it was a set of notes for a future post.  Deleted.

It referred to an MA thesis regarding the teaching of Finnish grammar.

http://scripties.let.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/Master/DoorstroomMasters/ToegepasteTaalwetens/2010/Tilma/MA_0243450_C_Tilma.pdf

Reinventing old (and useful) wheels, and forgetting etymology

If you collect old books, particularly specialist ones, you'll have noticed that many of them have something called a "subscriber list" at the start.  It seems a bit odd to us.  I've subscribed to several publications, and I never expect to get a credit in the magazine itself.  But some book editors even went as far as to write prefaces praising the subscribers for their support.

A subscriber wasn't someone who just bought stuff regularly but someone whose money was directly responsible for getting the book published in the first place.  I recently heard the Gaelic translation of the term: "fo-sgrìobhadair".  Literally "under-writer", which is etymologically the same word as "subscriber".  It's one of those moments when you want to slap yourself for having missed something so obvious for such a long time.

Essentially, the subscribers of old made sure there was enough money to compile eg. a dictionary and do an initial print-run.  This took the risk off what would otherwise have been a very expensive, low turn-over item.  A subscriber was, in the traditional sense, a patron of the arts.
It's an idea that died out with the increasing corporatisation of publishing.  Why would anyone give charitable donation to a commercial publishing operation?
But every good idea will be had several times, and subscription is back with a new name: "crowdfunding".  A lot of people don't really get it -- they want to look at it as an investment, but it's not.  It's people putting up enough money to ensure the product gets made, with the product itself as the only reward (well, actually, many crowdfunding operations have a sliding scale of rewards, but these are often just trinkets like stickers etc).

This crowdfunding model has been used for everything from industrial design and manufacturing to software development.  It's even gone right back to where it started and been used as a way to get funding to set up a new printrun of out-of-print books.

It's an idea that certainly has its benefits for the language world.
One company put up an adventure game project and said that it would be translated to other languages if enough money was put up.  Unfortunately, the platform they were using didn't let you pledge on the grounds of a specific language.  There are several languages that would have got me to pledge my money (I have never come across an adventure game in Catalan, for instance, and I find adventure games quite a good way to practice language -- although that's a matter for another post) but in the end I didn't pledge.
One of the questions that keeps coming up on the internet is "if you love the language, why don't you teach me for free?"  The answer is quite simple: because I have to make a living.  If I spent a lot of time putting together an effective course then gave it away, that would be several years of my working life out the window, with nothing to show for it.  But if people are willing to stump up the dough up front, there's no problem, and that's what the guys at languagehunters.org are doing -- they've raised cash via a Kickstarter campaign to fund them filming a set of videos teaching the Irish language. Now I'm not convinced by their teaching methodology (regular readers already know what I think about the notion of learning like a child, and I'm not a fan of excessive signing), and most of the methodology is really no different from what millions of teachers around the world are already doing, but the idea of funding in this way certainly appeals to me.

Except that the figures don't really add up.  The Kickstarter page says that they'd spent 400 man hours before even opening the pledge drive -- that's already worth more than the £3820 they asked for, so they're still going to have to get a lot more money later down the line.

Wouldn't it be better if they could raise enough money to make it completely free, available for posterity?  Which all ties into what I was asking last time: to what extent can we justify having the individual pay for and/or produce language materials for others (possibly including corporations) to use later down the line?

I now find my asking myself what language projects I could propose where I could sell my time in advance via Kickstarter.... anyone want me to produce a free Quechua course?  I'll need a plane ticket to Peru, somewhere to stay for a few months, a few classes in the language, some time to write the course............

Towards a model for sustainable language learning resources

The volume of language learning materials released over the years is unimaginable.  And yet, the resources available to the individual learner or teacher are incredibly limited.  Too much of the material that is available is bound to a particular course or learning task.

Nowadays people are making available for free, via the internet, material that is of use to the language learner, but unfortunately a lot of it is still bound to a particular task.

What we need is to see a critical mass of materials that can be used together by the creative teacher or learner.  There are a few current projects working towards this.  For example, there's the Leonardo Pools project, and notably among the Leonardo members, the Scottish Gaelic and English Guthan nan Eilean/Scottish Island Voices project.

What we've got here is videos that are available under an open license for teachers to use any way they chose.  (Sadly they've not given legally useful terms for the license, but it's a start...)  There's also a linked project around building online tools to use these resources, but to me that's a secondary issue.

What I said was that we need a "critical mass" of material, and what we're seeing from even the most prolific of the Pools teams isn't enough on its own to reach that level.  That's why we should all be thinking about what we could be doing to work towards that goal.  I'm not a fan of Benny Lewis's blog or his advice, but he's fairly prolific in making videos.  Now most of those videos aren't a great deal of use to the learner because they feature his own learner speech, but recently he posted a video of a presentation given in Quechua about traditional crafts, which is exactly the sort of thing that I would love to see more of.

So we could all go out and video natives speaking their own language.  Problem solved, right?

Not quite.  Who's going to use those materials?  How do we make sure people have the right to use them?  And what rights do we give them?

Should a commercial operation such as Lingq.com be allowed to use the material for free, in order to make a profit?

It's a tough one.  The limiting factor in most language courses is the volume of material, and the limiting factor with regards volume of material is the cost of production and licensing.  But still, should the public and publicly funded projects be paying for the production of the material and someone else be making the money?

Is language learning enough of a "social good" that the ability of others to profit without giving back is a necessary evil?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Why do I speak English?

Perhaps this seems like a weird question for an English speaker to ask himself, but I found myself facing this very question today.

I was invited up to the college counsellor's office for a quick chat.  I wasn't sure why, but I went along.  Well, it turns out that what it was was that we have a "Gaelic language officer" here, who is supposed to encourage us to speak Gaelic.

Well anyway, she'd raised that she'd heard me speaking English a few times recently.  I wasn't in trouble for it, like many of my classmates have been made to feel in the past, because I'd commented months ago that I was feeling low and you could always tell when I'm feeling low because I end up speaking English.  This isn't something that's specific to English -- when I'm low (or when I'm hungover) my language capacity just drops and speaking a foreign language becomes a chore and a source of frustration.

So the counsellor was more interested in making sure I was OK than telling me off, which was nice.

But it started me thinking about why I was speaking English yesterday, when the language officer had given me a rather stern warning.

Well I had been feeling a bit down either side of the weekend, but I think I'd cheered up a bit -- the nice summery weather we're getting really puts you at ease.

So maybe it was the tail end of a spell of avoiding Gaelic.
Or maybe it was that I was chilling out with an ice cream and English was part of that relaxation.

But I think there's more to it than that.

The guys I was with at the time were all from the learner course.  That immediately makes it harder to have a conversation.

One of them is a good friend who I'm always giving big brotherly advice to, and as most of the conversations we have go beyond her ability in Gaelic (and often mine too), we talk English, so English has become the default language for us.

One of the others I don't get on so well with.  She's very sarcastic and usually disapproves of everything I say or do.  And thinking about it, I tend to avoid speaking to her in Gaelic normally too.  So why?  The memory that jumps to mind when thinking about her is her getting upset at me for trying to correct her.

And that's probably the biggest reason I stick to a particular language with some people.  I just don't like listening to someone making mistakes consistently and repeatedly and not doing anything about it.  If the person won't take correction, then why are they speaking in that language?  You can't consider it a "learning experience" if you're not learning anything, so what's your goal?

So I've worked myself out: there's got to be a reason for speaking the language you're speaking -- it's either the best means of communication or you're learning from it.  (Or possibly you're doing it specifically to be friendly.)  Just speaking for the sake of it doesn't cut it with me.