All teachers lie (or "The myth of the target-language-only classroom")

So last time I was talking about the danger of  the philosophy of answer-in-sentences, but I mentioned the English-only-classroom in passing.

It's a commonly stated goal that we, as teachers, should be aiming to use only the target language in the classroom, and that we shouldn't be introducing "translation". In the guidelines of my school, translation is marked down as a "last resort".

However, most teachers kid themselves on. In a heterogeneous, mixed-mother-tongue class (foreigners studying in an English-speaking country), obviously you can't use the students' mother tongue as there is no other shared language, but once you go into a homogenous class, translation becomes a matter of course. I've observed other teachers doing it, and I've even had advice from teachers that has thrown in translation as a completely standard tool. (EG. a former boss in Spain who insisted that he taught in English only told me that the best way to correct Spanish kids saying "one car" instead of "a car" was to say "uno coche?" thus demonstrating that "one" was explicitly a number. He was completely unconscious of the dichotomy of philosophy vs practice.)

When I've witnessed this in observed classes, what I tend to experience is a careful, elaborate explanation of a task or grammar point in consciously graded English, followed by a very quick, concise summary in the students' native language. How are we to know whether it's the difficult-to-understand English or the exceptionally easy mother-tongue instruction that they're learning from? Common sense, perhaps? It strikes me as obvious which one would be more effective.

I've had three full-time jobs in different foreign countries, and in all of them, I've walked in and been told to pretend I don't know anything about the local language, and each time I've tried to do so. It has never worked. It's not a question of how well I grade my English, either -- it's simply that you cannot and will not stop the stronger students translating for the weaker ones, which means losing control of the classroom (particularly when the students doing the translation have failed to understand themselves). This translation problem is even more serious in a mixed-mother-tongue class where a large subset of the students already share a common language, where there is a large heterogeneous immigrant population (I'm told there are a lot of South Americans in Italy, for example, and they would have to learn Italian.)

An English-only classroom presents a huge psychological barrier, as the students see themselves as unable to communicate with the teacher. English should be a means of communication, yet we present it to our students in such a way as to make it an impediment to communication. That can't be right, surely....

Answer in sentences: death to meaning!

After my injury-induced half-year out of the classroom, I made myself a promise: I wasn't going to torture myself by wanting to undo all the mistakes of teaching orthodoxy in one go. It's not something I'm capable of doing, and in wanting to, I have ended up hampering my ability to get on with the task as requested by the people writing my paycheque. After all, while the orthodoxy may be far from perfect, it's at least tried and tested, and people have learned from it.

I have tried my best to stick to this philosophy since the start of my new employment, with a few particular exceptions where suitable materials weren't available in time and I had to improvise. You can hardly be expected to improvise in a style that isn't yours, after all.

The real danger in doing something someone else's way is that you might start to believe in it. I was never a fan of "answer in sentences" as it always seemed unnatural, but it's something I've come to rely on in class, and I was starting to view it uncritically, until I came face-to-face with the downside...

I was teaching a class of primary-age kids, and I was integrating times with the past tense of to be. The worksheet presented a clock representing the time, and a little picture of a location, to prompt sentences of the form "at five o'clock, he was in the kitchen," following a model example at the top of the first page. Some of the kids latched on to the point fairly quickly, but most needed repeated explanation and demonstration. (This is because I'm trying to stick to the orthodoxy of "the English only classroom" even though these kids don't speak English yet -- but that's a rant for another time.)

One in particular was having difficulties, as he's afraid of making mistakes: you can only fail if you try, so he's naturally afraid of trying. I led him through several questions directly, breaking the task into two parts: the time and the location. The problem was, when I pointed at the time, he would say "it's five o'clock", as per his answer-in-sentences training; and when I pointed at the location, he would say "he's in the kitchen". These kids have been trained (by myself and by other teachers) to never say any noun or adjective on its own, so that little contracted form it's has taken on a life that is divorced from its meaning, and appears in the language of many of the learners as little more than a particle that precedes certain words.

Basically, it has reawakened a long-held belief of mine that the frequent repetition of words doesn't truly aid in their memorisation, as the students simply aren't required to consider the context, and the language forms are devoided of all meaning.

But language is meaning.

The borders of cultural references....

I'm currently teaching in Italy, and as they all speak an H-less language here, it's unsurprising that a lot of them make mistakes with Hs.

Many of them do try, but unfortunately this often leads to the phenomenon called "hypercorrection" -- ie. they attempt to correct things that aren't wrong to start off with. In the case of H, this means Hs inserted into words naturally starting with vowels.

And so it was today that I was teaching the future tense, and when I was looking for the answer "I will", a couple of my students said "h-I'll".

Now how's a teacher supposed to react to that? I spun round from the board, straightening my arm and shouting "HEIL!". Now what I had forgotten was that what most of the world thinks of as the "Nazi salute" is actually a pan-fascist salute, a neo-imperial confection claimed by its originators to be a revival of Roman tradition. And of course, Italy had plenty of fascists of its own.

Oops.

On the move...

Well there was a nice surprise... just as the window was closing on spring recruitment for TEFL posts, I got invited to a Skype interview and offered a job! At the moment, I'm packing for the flight to Sicily.

Between the job and my side project programming computer software, I'm going to be pretty busy from now until the summer, which can only be good.

From a language perspective, I'll be able to finally firm up my Italian, which I use so rarely that it's kind of stuttery and weak. It's better than I expected, though, and that's probably thanks to the Corsican I learnt last year. I even found myself speaking Spanish and Catalan last night, and accidentally throwing in a few Italianisms, so my brain's clearly getting prepped in the background.

Will I learn Sicilian while I'm there? Well, I'd certainly like to, but I'm going to have a pretty heavy workload to deal with, and there's also the problem of trying to manage two highly similar languages essentially simultaneously. Would I be able to keep the two separate...? I suppose I'll just have to try and find out.

It might be nice to go and visit the "Piana degli Albanesi", but I don't think I'll be able to dedicate time to studying the local Albanian tongue, sadly!

(Any pointers to good materials on learning Sicilian gratefully received.)

Language learning software: a continual disappointment

If I've gone a bit quiet of late, it's because I'm getting less comfortable writing about other people and companies. You see, I've been trying on and off for a while to develop some language learning software, so there's a risk that anything I write could later be construed as just another company bad-mouthing the competition. On top of that, I'm now becoming a bit cautious about going into depth in my criticism and giving away too much of the thinking behind my software.

Anyhow, at the weekend I was having a break from coding and decided to have a little audit of my competition, including a lot of projects on sites like indiegogo and kickstarter. In recent months, the number of language learning applications being touted on these sites and elsewhere has skyrocketed, but I can't say I'm impressed with the quality of the proposals.

For the most part, these projects are touted as "revolutionary", but to anyone with any awareness of the language learning marketplace, it's just the same old stuff everyone else is already marketing. Among the main "differences" that people try to use to sell their wares is "real, conversational language" and "language to help you as a traveller in real situations". Tied to that is "no boring grammar". Whether this is the right way or not is not my point (not yet -- I'll come back to that) -- what's most depressing that everyone is doing the same thing and calling it "new and exciting".

Now from listening to the pitches, I get the feeling that this isn't just shysterism -- they genuinely believe that they're doing something new and different, which means they can't have researched what's available, and they can't know much about teaching.

This does put them in good company, though. One of the world's biggest language software vendors was founded by someone with no background in teaching, but who had been overseas for a bit (putting him on the fringes of my "professional language learner" category).

Now, many of the proposals are too thin on detail to be investable, and true to expectations, these ones never pick up any meaningful number of pledges. It's all well and good to tell me it's going to be immersive and revolutionary, but what is it going to look like? What is it going to do?

Of those that go into a little more detail, many seem like glorified flashcards, and many take their cues directly from Rosetta Stone. Others still are just a blend of absolutely standard techniques -- translations, gapfills, word-rearranging, picture-word matching etc etc.

It's these ones I would be most interested in, because if teachers have been using these techniques for all these years, they must have some merit, and if we can improve on them with technology, then we should do so. Sadly, once we've seen a demonstration (in those cases where development has progressed far enough for there to be some kind of prototype), there's no real innovation presented. A cute picture of an animal to go with your new vocabulary does not an innovative pedagogy make!

One product that looked reasonably unique among the crowd (not found on the crowdfunding sites) was one that used Microsoft's Kinect hardware to track the user, to allow more "active" engagement. While the presenter was enthusiastically telling us about how this opens up all sorts of possibilities for "interactive environments", nothing in the demonstration was any more sophisticated than a Total Physical Response lesson, and while TPR is still used by some teachers, it never really took off as it was always a very limited technique. Anything in this package that wasn't just eTPR (to coin a phrase) was essentially vocabulary practise, selecting things that the computer asked for in the target language, and I imagine most users would find it easier to just use the mouse to point and click the item requested than to move about in front of a webcam. Furthermore, as more and more of the software market migrates to tablets and smartphones, the touchscreen really seems a much more mass-market technology to employ.  The limitations of the product prototype on display fulfil Wilfried Decoo's observation that "the medium makes the method" -- ie that most new movements in language learning are just the most obvious means of the application of a new technology to language learning.

I even came across one project for a learning game that recreated the "bad old days" of early "edutainment" software -- it was a fairly basic shoot-em-up game where the educational material wasn't really part of the game, instead being an interruption to gameplay: you walked up to a door and couldn't open it until you gave the correct translation.

But in my opinion, the single worst thing that I came across was perfectly harmless and ordinary until I got to the bit about what they wanted the money for: to translate the lessons. Yes, "template teaching" is alive and well in the computer world. Remember folks: every language is different!

The persistence of origin myths

It's quite hard to challenge the orthodoxy in most fields, and language is no exception. This only seems fair - you need a lot of evidence to disprove an existing theory... or do you? I suppose that depends on what evidence there is for the existing orthodoxy.

The orthodoxy of language origin theories is often distinctly lacking in evidence, as in many cases it is tied into notions of ethnic origin, most of which are being proven wrong even as we speak.

A great many national ethnic origin myths are based on the idea of conquest as an annihilation of the existing population. For example, take the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and south-east Scotland. Received wisdom is that the Norsemen started invading the territory roughly corresponding to modern Denmark, and started killing and displacing the locals, who fled across the North Sea and started killing and displacing the local Celtic Britons on the east coast of Great Britain.

That gives us the creation myth of England, that was built on hearsay.

I mean... did the Romans kill and displace the locals? No, they ruled over them. We were asked to believe they were the exception.
But did the Greeks kill and displace the locals? No, they ruled over them. Another exception, perhaps? The Moguls in the Indian subcontinent? The Mongols?
And more recently the Ottoman Empire? Or indeed the French or British Empires?

The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of well-documented "invasions" in history have simply involved the installation of a new elite over the existing population. The genocide perpetrated in the Americas and Australia is actually pretty unique in history.

So why are we expected to assume that all the poorly-documented invasions are so different from the documented ones? Why shouldn't the Anglo-Saxon invasion be more like the Romans?

Well, thanks to DNA, that old orthodoxy has been turned on its head. Genetic testing suggests that there's a heck of a lot of Celtic ancestry where the old kill-them-all theory of historical invasion would have left us with only Anglo-Saxon blood.  On top of this, in the old Anglo-Saxon homeland around Denmark, they still have predominantly Anglo-Saxon DNA, where we were supposed to believe that the Norsemen had killed or exiled all the Anglo-Saxons.

But we shouldn't have needed DNA evidence. We know that the Anglo-Saxon kings of England claimed descent from King Arthur, a figure not from Anglo-Saxon mythology, but from British Celtic mythology. This alone should have proven conclusively that a huge portion of the English population was drawn from Celtic stock. Not to mention that the Danes have never looked all that similar to the Norwegians and Swedish. The Norse Vikings that invaded the west of Scotland were towering red-heads, while the Danish Vikings that invaded Northumberland were normal height and had dark hair.

This naturally has direct consequences in the origin myths of languages.

The best documented case of language birth brings us once again back to the Romans.

We know a heck of a lot about Classical Latin, but we know very little about the colloquial speech of the common man in ancient Rome. We know it was different, but we don't know how much. We also know that when they went out and conquered other nations, the locals tried to learn Latin, but did so imperfectly. We know that these imperfect Latins eventually developed into the Romance language family we know today (French, Italian, Spanish etc). Crucially, while we know very little about the early stages of the Romance languages, this is because Latin remained the language of the elite, so all literature was in Latin.

This means that the single best-attested example of language evolution revolves around an elite language hiding changes in the common language.

We can compare this to creole languages. Even today, many creole-speaking countries are run by elites that prefer to speak in French or English, and resist efforts to raise the profile of the local creole language.

All our most reliable data on language birth comes from languages where a large population have imperfectly learned the language of the elite, and where the elite language and the common language have existed in parallel for a significant period of time. It stands to reason that this should be our default assumption for all languages.

And yet our standard model of language development is still based on time periods: Old followed by Middle followed by Modern.

Given all that, it came as no surprise to me that someone recently published a paper proposing that a lot of so-called "Middle English" was actually contemporaneous with "Old English", and that the loss of grammatical complexity wasn't due to the Norman invasion (the Normans were a tiny minority elite ruling over a huge population) but rather the result of the Britons imperfectly learning the Anglo-Saxon of their rulers. The reason he gave for the apparent abrupt change was quite simple: the Anglo-Saxon elite were disenfranchised and Norman French became the language of literature. Middle English literature was not written by the descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon elite, but by the descendants of the peasantry, or people of Norman descent who learned it from the peasantry.

Shouldn't that have been our default assumption all along...?

Language learning professionals vs Professional language learners

The internet, they say, "democratises" human activity. We no longer need to go to the ivory towers of academia to learn; we no longer need experts as intermediaries: we can collaborate with one another.

This is true, certainly, but with it comes a certain set of dangers.

First, the "wisdom of the crowds" is generally fallacious, and we either get a mass of people who constantly contradict each other flat-out or we get little cliques that share and reinforce each other's views, to the exclusion of all new information.

More importantly, though, people want to defer to experts. This means that it's actually quite easy for someone with the right patter to set themself up as a "lay expert". Once they do so, they gather a little clique of the "wisdom of the crowds" type who will support and propound the self-appointed expert's proclamations.

There are many such "experts" in language learning. Typically they say they teach not on "dry, academic grounds" or the "received wisdom of the establishment", but "from experience". Their argument is simple and appealing: I have learned a language, therefore I know how to learn a language. But wait... haven't millions upon millions of people learned a language too? Why you and not them?

I call these people "professional language learners". Wouldn't we all like to learn languages as a job? Wouldn't that be great? I know I'd love it... except that's only of benefit to me, so really there's no reason for anyone else to pay me to do it. I find it difficult to stomach that there are people out there who make their entire living by writing and making videos about their language learning, and kidding themselves and their audiences on that they're giving some immensely valuable and unique insight into the learning process.

But they're not.

Their advice is at best vague, and very often even inconsistent and self-contradictory (eg Sid Efromovich's video that I discussed recently). Vague advice can be followed to the letter, and still have you doing something almost entirely the opposite of what was intended. As advice it's at best useless, at worst detrimental. Why am I failing? What am I doing wrong? Frustration sets in. Maybe I'm just no good at languages.

But why is the advice vague? Is it a fault in the author's use of English? His writing composition? Maybe, but mostly it seems to me that these people don't actually fully understand their own process. There is much to be learned from these people, but only if they're willing to discuss it, so that we can help each other tease out the details.

This is why we need to defer to language learning professionals, people who have trained, and studied, and (hopefully) taught. But most importantly, they are in a position to experiment. They can try something on one class, identify the weaknesses, then try it on another class in an adjusted form. Did it work better? Then it's better. A professional language learner only has a sample of one, and therefore cannot identify the changes that make things better.

That is not to say that all language learning professionals are always correct; sadly, language teaching standards are pretty poor at present. Many teachers and academics continue to parrot outdated and/or unproven theories as gospel, but if they can express their views more clearly, then at least you'll be better able to follow them if you choose to.

Of course, a lot of language teachers aren't really experts anyway. Most professional teachers of English as a foreign language have a four week certificate that is essentially a walk-through of typical classroom techniques, and no real in-depth analysis of what works, when it works, why it works or how. Simply being a teacher does not make you an expert, and very few teachers would ever try to claim otherwise. A real expert is someone who has dedicated multiple years of their life to both academic study of the topic and real life application.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of money to become an expert, and for those of us who are going through all the slog of trying to become genuine experts, it's kind of galling to see these guys walking the easy route and getting pretty handsomely rewarded for it.