2015 report
OK, I'll be the first to admit it. I got one foot into retirement (I am now teaching 3/4 time, writing 1/4 time), and I realized how tired I was, after about thirty years of teaching. I still have lots of ideas. I do lots of things in my class. But a lot of times, I come home from teaching, and all I want to do is rest.
Part of the problem is that, having ten children, I never get that rest, whether I do extra ESL stuff or not. In fact, the ESL tends to be kind of a break from the children, an enjoyable, academic kind of break, like having conversations with interesting people I know, but I don't have time for it. I'm taking kids to their sports practices, or to the dentist, or getting groceries, etc. But another part of it is that I really
love writing, and I also
love music, and these are sides of me that went undeveloped for many years. So, when I apologize for failing a little at this end, just consider me as backing off a little. I can't possibly keep up the pace I kept for many years.
Nonetheless, here are some interesting things I've been doing in 2015.
First, I became almost entirely a writing teacher, so I had two advanced writing classes. My students are very high level graduate students who are trying to maintain and improve what they consider their weak point. The stronger ones take the class on their own, knowing that there's always a lot to learn. The weaker ones are pressured to take it by their departments, where they really don't want to teach graduate students writing, but just want them to crank out good useful dissertations and articles regularly. It's high-level; the students are bright. I had one do a blog on
gay marriage (their choice) and the other
campus carry (gun control, also their choice). We published everything we wrote, and it was good, and interesting. I helped teach them formatting things online, as well as the usual writing things - citation, reference, etc. I had the usual run-ins with plagiarism. I taught a lot of students a lot of things.
One of my graduate students became interested in the concordance movement, so I became reacquainted with it. The first step was learning more about it as a tool, how to use it, whether it really works. I am genuinely interested in the process of learning how students integrate tools into their writing process - how, why, how easily, etc. They are not especially forthcoming about the tools they use, being convinced, I guess, that so many of them are illegal. Nevertheless, as a class (both of them, really), we discussed opening up the concordance, seeing what it can do, applying the simplest of grammar problems to it, etc. It was interesting. My Graduate Assistant was fascinated. And, interestingly, even the students found one aspect of it interesting: they are stats people. They like to run the numbers. To be able to run the numbers on the words you use, that's an interesting concept. They are still shaking their heads.
We have a conference in the spring; there is some doubt about whether we'll do it this spring, with its main organizer gone now. Last spring, I was caught unprepared, and didn't even present. There are many things I could present, but I presented zip, I didn't even go. I believe I was out of town, but I don't even remember where; perhaps New Mexico. But I
did present at TESOL, the usual, and I could have presented on various subjects of interest, if I could keep from being drawn into the world of personal fiction publishing.
The first would be on cultural flexibility as a requirement of good language learning. I feel that the characteristic of cultural flexibility, being able to unhinge your self-image from its cultural trappings, is measurable, and crucial in the process. I'd like to define it better, and work toward writing about what I mean. I gave a presentation at our 2014 spring conference, and very easily could have given another. But I was interrupted, and, I'm sorry to say, I dropped the ball.
In the course of doing that one, I became interested in Order of Acquisition as a given construct in Language Learning. Actually, I'm more interested in proving that there
isn't one; it's part of my constructivist belief that each learner decides for himself/herself what order to acquire anything in, and each learner has his/her own idea of what is crucial, or what should go first. And, it would be possible to manipulate the system. For example, one could convince a learner to learn all the religious words first (salvation, heaven, savior, etc.) and skip the ones having to do with cooking, if that learner were proselytizing ten hours a day, and never cooking. One's viewpoint determines what one acquires, not an innate natural order. But I'd like to prove that, if I had time.
My TESOL presentation is basically about how grammar programs have messed with people's heads. That's putting it lightly. But something has come up that is tangentially related to this. The War on Passive is something we researched, and wrote a little about, and learned how to teach. In essence some departments, specifically social sciences, dislike the passive intensely; others, namely the hard sciences, still cling to it. There is a wide variety. Read about it on this blog. I could easily ride this one to another TESOL, but I haven't...why not?
Finally, there is the language-as-a-self-organizing-system project; this has been dormant for a while now, and is beginning to fossilize in its dormant phase. I have written voluminously about it. I haven't given up on it. It needs to be published before I give up altogether. Hello?
Meanwhile I help out at the office. My classes are full. I enjoy teaching, and I also teach American students these days; I like that too. Texas Tech is benevolent and enjoyable to me. I avoid politics. This year, due to wife's surgery, mother's near-death health experiences, and family issues, I avoided all office parties, poetry readings, etc. as well. I am in demand at the poetry reading, as people like haiku, and believe it or not, one
can write bilingual haiku that pulls on both language universes in seventeen short syllables; I am one who could do it as I've been literally immersed in poetry for months now. However as I said,
I was busy. Life is full here, the nights are beautiful, and there are lots of stars out, even in the city. And the mountains are even better; the 9000 feet woods beckon. I am, in the end, partially retired.
Labels: creative, krashen, personal, plagiarism, self-organized systems, tesol, ttu, weblogs, writing
Neofunctionalism
I just had another experience which I would assume is common to ESL teachers: you teach an entire semester, and at the end of it, in that busy rush and exchange of e-mails with students, you realize that, as high level as they may be, and focused on whatever the class covered (in this case writing), they still don't know how to write a proper e-mail, or how to address a teacher properly. This infuriates me, because they are often highly competent in their own fields, if not others, and pretty good at English overall. But they can't address a teacher?
My idea is to reorganize all my teaching, all teaching, according to the functional value of things that they need to know. If I had done this, I would have made sure they sent 6-10 e-mails during the term, since being able to send an e-mail to a teacher is far more important than writing a good bibliography. I would have pounded it into them so that every student in that class knew how to write an e-mail. I would have made them address me so often that they would think twice before addressing me the wrong way.
In grammar, a good example is questions. Questions are hard, grammatically; we might put them late in a curriculum and I've seen them overlooked. But, from a functional standpoint, they're essential. I have high-level students who are uncomfortable asking for things. Why? Because they know their grammar may be wrong? Somebody should put questions first in the curriculum. Ram it down their throats. Make sure that, no matter what level they are (above 0), they know how to ask for a bathroom. Especially in an emergency.
In the old days, functionalism meant setting up lessons on ordering in a restaurant, or making a phone call. But I had some students who said, essentially, they never went to a restaurant, period. In a way I'm saying, take the things that are essential; rate them high; organize curricula around them; don't let anyone get far without knowing how to function in a basic way.
In a sense we can see the culture as a big blanket that covers the language. If you have no sense of the culture, the language to some degree won't get you very far. For example, if you don't know how to shake hands, or how to address someone, every interaction gets off to a bad start, and the subtle effects of being outside the culture or being inappropriate tend to overshadow all the good stuff or the human natural tendency to give you a break for being an outsider. In the same way, people who are trying to learn pronunciation are sometimes hampered by the fact that the very way you hold your mouth - its tension, its setting, etc., influences every sound - so that if you are too tense nobody can understand you
no matter how well you make the words...neofunctionalism is my way of saying, if people can't walk out my classroom door and address someone, or ask a question, then maybe I've failed them in a fundamental way and should rethink my priorities. It doesn't matter to me as much if they can't tip at the restaurant, that's further down the list, because my priorities start with the stuff that's most essential for their survival and which should be clear to them, life is
really easier for you if you learn this stuff.
Krashen used to say that basic social interaction, the oral kind, was the foundation of language skills and thus should be taught until it's mastered,
before one attempts reading and then, later, writing. This was what he was after too, the idea that once a student understood and could respond appropriately to the teacher, then serious class-learning of such things as reading could commence,
not before...Today's world is much more writing-oriented, with so much business happening by e-mail, etc. Sometimes I think the best thing I could do with these high-level students (powerhouse readers, adequate writers, clueless listeners) is to separate them into an immersion experience where, when it was over, they could at least ask for help in any area, they thought in English
often, they were used to addressing people; they spoke up
often to get what they need, etc. Concentration on immersion/needs/questions first. If they walk out of your classroom and know how to get stuff, they'll probably be ok.
Labels: krashen, learning theory, personal, reading, ttu, writing
all grammar, all the time
I'm lucky in the sense that something I'm passionate about is something I see playing out in my classrooms, day in and day out. I'm referring to grammatical acquisition, or lack thereof, and the fact that my students, all adults, all free, pretty much, of outside concerns like survival or getting basic provisions, are willing, interested, and eager to do whatever I/we tell them. So why, after about a year in our program, do they get to the top, and still have weak grammar? This was a question I was asking myself as I taught highest-level writing just months ago. Then, voila, I was given an AE2 (level 4/middle) grammar class; this term, I was given it again; and, this time, it was made more or less clear to me that, since the system was not working well as is, and is likely to be changed, a little experimenting would be tolerated.
The class starts with Chapter 13 of the blue Azar book (adj. clauses), moves through 17-19 (adv. clauses), back to 12 (noun clauses) and hits 16 & 20 if it has time, which it rarely does. It skips 14 & 15 (gerunds & infinitives are in there) and other stuff. Basically, they had to make decisions and try to hit the most important stuff. In a single class at a single level, between 35 and 45 hours in a term, one flies through, gives students practice if possible, tests heavily on what one is doing, puts oral practice in there, and then, when transferred to the higher level, notices that the system doesn't work well. Other programs (ours is not the only one with grammar issues) integrate grammar completely into the other classes; that obviously would be a possibility for us too, and may in fact happen soon. Or, they use books that are less banal than Azar, in hopes that students will start seeing grammar in their everyday lives more, and acquire it faster. Students continue to like Azar, partly because they are so familiar with it, but they have mastered the art of taking tests from it, without actually learning grammar. And that's the heart of the problem.
So, here's my experiment, given that I haven't given up on the book yet, and also am not going to change the curriculum overnight: a series of 12-pt. quizzes, that cover all grammar, all the time. Simple a-b-c-d multiple choice, but one is right and the other three are common, but wrong. I crank them out, because people like them, yet in my class they also fear them, because in fact, their grammar is bad. They miss not only what they were supposed to have covered, last term, but also gerunds & infinitives, stuff they never covered and never will. My attitude at first was, after they pass my level, which many will, they won't have another grammar class, they'll only have writing. If I at least
show them what they don't know, they can then at least go look it up before they leave. When I found out they didn't know what they were supposed to have
covered already, either, I widened it out. I covered last term's stuff, last week's stuff, gerunds & infinitives, and some advanced but everyday, important stuff- all in each quiz. All grammar, all the time.
I have a wide range of grammar skills in this particular class- people who are very good, who have nothing to fear from any of these quizzes, basically, and people who know almost nothing, intimidated by all of it. And one problem for the latter is that we now have to fly through the regular course material, because we occasionally get bogged down on the answers to the frequent all-grammar quizzes. But, and this is far more important for me, I have people sitting on the edge of their seats, every day. Even the good ones. And everyone is learning, all the time, at whatever level they happen to be at- although some are learning
only the basic stuff, and feeling totally overwhelmed by
everything else.
My feeling was that a system that lulled them into believing that passing a Ch. 13 exam was learning the right chunk of the total picture, and was learning enough, was basically deceiving them, because it wasn't showing them the whole range of what there was and what they didn't know. And even then, the chapter 13 exam was happening in isolation- here was a whole exam with nothing but adjective clauses- so, since every sentence had that in common, it became easier to spot and master the quirks of adjective clauses. It's quite a different story when a given sentence might have any of dozens of issues- as the TOEFL proves every time. So, as it happened, classes of students getting 90's on chapter 13 exams wasn't translating into those same classes getting good TOEFL scores, or even mastering adjective clauses, even two terms later and more in many cases. Of course, there could have been many other reasons: students not hearing or using enough language in the rest of their program, for example; or, in the rest of their lives; copies of old tests getting out, i.e. students having taken pictures of the exams with their cell phones, etc. Without dwelling on the possible problems, I only knew: something had to change.
My philosophy was based partly on a book I got wrapped around in the early eighties called
At the Point of Need by Marie Wilson Nelson. I've mentioned it before (click the writing tag); I'm about to request it again at the library (it lives somewhere "up north" - Normal, maybe, though she taught in Chicago, maybe)...and it's a classic, in it's own way. The title will tell you basically how she feels about when people acquire stuff.
At the heart of acquisition is that it happens in the context of everything that students are seeing, hearing, saying and writing- it happens as part of an overall picture, of which the grammar teacher is only a small part. I can't, myself, be entirely responsible for their grammatical skills at the top, even if I take over the whole grammar program, do it my way, change books, do all quizzes, or whatever. But on the other hand, I'm done walking into a grammar class and saying, we're going to do these pages today, and it doesn't matter if you've mastered it, or if it's way over your head, or wherever you are in the big picture, because all we are going to talk about is pages 113-118. My new philosophy is: all grammar, all the time. You want to know, I'll tell you. Or, you can go look it up, since Azar is the perfect book to do that, it'll explain it, without vocabulary getting in the way. And tomorrow, guess what? All grammar, all the time. Read 'em & weep.
Labels: grammar, krashen, language, learning theory, writing
i've got a few i could lend you...
Two new things I've written, both unpublished, which I'd like to comment on.
Leverett, T. (2008, Apr.).
Tale of two hypotheses. Unpublished manuscript. http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/k2me3.html.
Leverett, T. (2008, May).
Principle wanted. Unpublished
manuscript. http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/z/sos/pw.html.
First, it may be brazen of me, or rather naive, to just put this stuff on the CESL server, but CESL and SIUC in general seem to be stable in terms of what sits in their space; it at least stays there, though it may be ignored or unceremoniously dumped occasionally. I say brazen, because if it is really traitorous to the field, some probably wouldn't want it there; I say naive, because if it is of any value, I might want to keep it for myself. But, since a roof accident of Dec. 2007, I've become more urgently transparent, knowing that I could be gone at any moment, and thus so would all this hard work and deep thinking about the nature of language. I come up with this stuff, by the way, as I'm absently watching boys tumble around a front yard, climbing trees, landing on each other, etc.
The first I put with my work on Krashen (Krashen-2-me.html) because I've always thought Krashen had important stuff to say about language learning, and I agree with most of it. But I don't agree with these two, at least not completely. I wrote this literally on my way out the door to TESOL, in early April.
But as I stewed on it a little, it occurred to me that, rather than attack poor Krashen, who I actually admire, it would be more to the point to explain what principles
are involved in language learning, rather than continuously harping on what these guys had wrong. After all, collectively, the field has been full of very interesting and insightful people. Somehow it seems that collectively the entire group of us could pull something together that would be useful to the world.
The second is more related to language and language change itself, and thus I put it on the "sos" files- the language as a self-organizing system pages. This is closer to what I'm really getting at- that we can explain language behavior in terms of natural human processes that govern other human behaviors also. To this end I've begun to study
Cooley and the looking glass self. The title, by the way, comes from a "Help wanted" ad back in my job-hunting days- it was a school district in Minnesota, I believe...at the time, I thought, I've got a few I could lend you.
To recap, briefly:
There is no "Language acquisition device" or special mechanism that allows humans and only humans to do the complex decoding necessary for language understanding. There are no natural restrictions that govern all languages; humans are free to do as they wish in creating and changing language. And in fact, they do a wide variety of things- restricted only by the shape of the mouth, the ability to hear certain sounds, and the intrinsic nature of words referring to either things or actions.
Language behavior is best analogized by looking at human behavior in, for example, walking across a campus, or driving across town: One starts by doing as one has observed others doing; One's behavior is governed, somewhat, by perceptions and actions of others; One carefully measures the price vs. benefit of trying new actions, and acts accordingly; The brain, in its ruthless efficiency, is always open to options of reorganization, but is innately cautious because of the high price of failure; in addition, people have different values with respect to this fear of failure, and thus develop a more or less cautious approach to their production.
This only begins to sum up what I've been thinking about- but, if interested, jump in. I welcome comments.
Labels: bib, chomsky, krashen, language, learning theory, siuc, sla
Krashen 2 me
I've been rereading a book that I reviewed a while ago; the review appears here:
Leverett (2003).
Review of Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use: The Taipei Lectures, by Stephen Krashen,
TESL-EJ, vol. 7, no. 2, Sept.
but I have much more to say about it, four and a half years later. I'm about to embark on a project that uses Krashen's work as a starting point, and I have to decide whether to base it on him and his hypotheses, or just base it on my own, weaving him and his ideas into it. He is an interesting guy in the world of language acquisition, and I have a lot of respect for him, partly because he watched teachers and learners carefully for years, and based his observations on the same kinds of things we teachers experience continually. He is lambasted regularly by researchers who denounce his hypotheses as unprovable, and I'll leave that one alone until I can either attempt to prove one, restate one so that it can be proven, or dismiss it as irrelevant altogether. But there's more to it than that, even. He rose in prominence at a time when one dared not challenge Chomsky, and Chomsky was wrong about a number of things, in my book. Here are some of my observations on rereading this small volume.
1. He apparently started a major argument on the value of teaching discreet grammatical points; he has long maintained that this is worthless, since we can raise students' conscious awareness of rules, but only temporarily, and even then only at huge cost. Much of the book he addresses to reviewing the studies of people who tried to fight him on this; this was what some have called a "noticing" group of studies, basically trying to prove that, if you point out grammatical forms to students, and make sure they "notice," they'll do better on tests and ultimately will acquire those forms. Of all the things he said and did, this may have been the biggest, if only because hours and hours of studies have now been wrapped up in this argument. But I'm getting a little impatient with the argument in general, both sides, for reasons I've yet to put carefully into words.
2. One stores one's conscious learned knowledge in a Monitor, which has a capital M like the Civil War Battleship. However, he also uses Monitor as a verb, in which situation it is
also capitalized; we Monitor our own output, but we climb upon our capital M's to do it. Actually I think he's making more out of this than necessary. We listen to ourselves, yes. Do you Mind?
3. Then there's the LAD, language acquisition device, a term coined by Chomsky who maintains a genetic disposition to language, through this genetic little device that we all carry around, that just acquires language for us, like magic, thus separating us from animals who don't have the same genetic makeup. I'm a little impatient with this device too. I'd like to see if maybe WalMart can sell me a couple of them, maybe I'll turn them around on resale.
4. Affective filter. Here's my problem with the filter. Supposedly it keeps stuff from coming
in, when you're feeling anxious, unhappy, upset, distracted, etc. That's what a
filter does. But we're talking about acquisition here. My feeling is that anxiety, unhappiness, distraction, etc. mess up the process in two different ways, and neither of them have to do with
input. First is when you lose faith or desire to acquire the language, you lose motivation, and it's hard to wake up in the morning and consciously commit yourself to knowing the language better. You are, after all, taking on a second, and foreign, identity, and at our core we rebel against this. But this doesn't affect our
input, or how much we
understand of what we hear or read. It can affect how much we
try to decode, but that's slightly different. Second, improving one's language is basically experimental- it takes time, energy, noticing, deliberate and proactive as a process. Kind of like choosing a new, faster route to work, and seeing if taking the tollway will cut off five minutes of one's commute. But one doesn't do this when one is late, harried, anxious, upset, or in any way distracted. On those days, like Monday for example, one sticks to the usual route, and grips the wheel with severe resolution, which is actually counterproductive, as we well know. Affective factors are important- don't get me wrong. But it's not a
filter...
5.
i +1. Here's what bothers me about this. Teachers worldwide have loved this since its inception. It basically says you have to give a student language at the exact level of their learning, plus a little bit. So that they can use what they already know, to figure out one thing at a time. Makes sense, yes? In fact I've made a living spotting appropriate level of materials for students; even today, I feel confident that I can spot level pretty quickly and do well with it.
So here's what bothers me. This
i +1 terminology makes it sound like language is a system of abstract theoretical formulae, concepts which must be deeply meditated upon and ingested carefully, one before the other. But it's not. It's basically linear, very simple, though the stunning variety and complex interplay of rules throws people off every time. Sure, there is some embedding of sentences- relative clauses fit into basic sentences, sometimes several times within a single sentence- so therefore, for example, one would have to learn a basic sentence, before one could look at relative clauses. But this isn't deep conceptual stuff. When I was in college, we were on the block plan; we studied only one subject for an entire month. Sciences hated it. They said, you had to spend time to learn these concepts, and you couldn't build on them because you were in such a hurry, you had to move on to another concept before a student had really taken in the first one. But the language people didn't share that kind of frustration. We learned Russian very well (I studied Russian in two of the coldest months in Iowa history, much like Feb. 2008 has been for Carbondale)...the
i + 1 terminology gives us the impression that one has to master concepts to get to a level, then move on. I'd like to get at what one really has to do, to move on in any language. I think there
are levels, natural plateaus. I don't think they are conceptual, though. I think they're simple, like paths through the forest. One has to be comfortable with them, before one understands them, let alone takes them. But this is much more of a linear process than the terminology would imply.
6. Finally (and this goes back to the beginning), I have lost the page, but Krashen at one point admits that adults learning a second language occasionally need to have some grammar points explained to them. Or, at least he admits that this is acceptable in the context of a language classroom, an appropriate thing for a teacher to do. Students ask, we answer, that's ok. Maybe he published this entire book, so that he could bury that one little concession, deep on some page where I was unable to find it again after I went back looking for it. Yet first time through, it hit me, even in passing, like a red neon EAT sign in the Mojave desert. Of course! They ask because they need to know. We answer because we know they're sincere and they need to know (not because we really believe that
we know all the answers)...
This is just the beginning, by the way. More to come.
Labels: chomsky, krashen, language, learning theory, sla
ice storm cometh
The campus and southern Illinois are gripped in an ice storm that is in its second day; though SIUC is open after a day off, there are many who are not coming to class, or having problems with the ice in general. Without commenting on that (yet), I'm posting to say: when I get a break, I write. Here is the latest:
For my upcoming TESOL presentation,
Teaching writing in online and paper worlds, this is one I'm proud of:
Leverett, T. (2008).
Communicative competence in the digital era. Part of Teaching writing in online and paper worlds, Demonstration, Writing-IS, TESOL, New York City, April.
Here are two more in a general series on the communicative era, Krashen, language learning, etc.
Leverett, T. (2008).
Communicative theory rocks the late 20th century. Unpublished manuscript. Available http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/k2me1.html.
Leverett, T. (2008).
Grammar wars. Unpublished manuscript. Available http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/k2me2.html.
Bibliographies laughably inaccurate; not finished. As usual, comments welcome...enjoy!
Labels: bib, krashen, learning theory, personal, tesol
075 in the rearview mirror
I have a lot to blog about, but have been falling behind- I'll try to give you a summary of what I
should be blogging about, but haven't had time to...these I will cover, hopefully, as soon as possible.
A tale of four surveys- basically, my
Newstalk classes decided what they wanted to learn about (WalMart twice, Starbucks, Guns & Crime), came up with four surveys, and made a snapshot of American opinions and attitudes, in the group weblogs coming off of the Newstalk weblog. Interesting! I have lots of comments about the results- you may have to scroll down, in each case, to find the results of the surveys themselves.
RRJ's- reading reaction journals, now going online, all of them, off of the
EAP1 weblog, where the names appear in the templates. I'm proud of them, every last one of them. My own personal monument in favor of reading, against using the same old stuff, and getting away with it. You can tell, however, that I didn't win my battle 100%.
Vocabulary project- part of my EAP1 Core- I never quite finished explaining, how exposure figured in, or whether it made any difference, in how well students had organized and learned vocabulary prior to a stressful testing experience. Does stress ruin everything? If so, it explains why so many students never score over 450. But if they never learn vocabulary, that would explain it too.
CESL Today, slowly but surely displaying student work, this edition without its pictures or contributors listed; I'd like to do some design experimentation, and tie old CESL Todays together, for example with a web tour of cesl music picks, or a folk tale page. Now that I'm teaching writing, I need html to give me a mental rest from intensive and continuous grading. html is actually restful, with its tiny little slash-carats. There's a world-a-html out there waiting for me.
A web report, made for my colleagues, telling what's going on with the weblogs & the static web pages. Still on its way.
An attempt to explain language learning, which at this point is still too jumbled to show off. I'm experimenting with titles like "After Krashen: Get more dummies," etc. No wait a minute. Maybe more like: After Krashen, learn the rules of the road. I actually like Krashen. I don't believe in a "LAD" or language acquisition device, though. And I'm
really curious about order of acquisition. Will share, with time. Not yet, though.
Great movies & slide shows made fot the CESL EOT exhibit- proving that our students are at least as up on the modern personal movie-making technology as anyone. I'll link to them, I hope. It's wonderful.
University plagiarism scandal- I'd like a better way to keep track of the stuff I hear, not to mention the articles flying in the media. If only my students could read them...
Labels: cesl, internet, krashen, learning theory, plagiarism, weblogs, writing
The -s dilemma
I have left my Krashen book at work, and I am at home, late at night, but I feel I ought to comment on this before it slips my mind. One of Krashen's original hypotheses was that there was a distinct order in which people acquire grammatical forms, and that that order was not really affected by the order in which you taught things, etc. Therefore you could arrange a syllabus however you wanted, and it wouldn't really change anything; people would acquire in their own order, regardless of grammar "teaching"...so, can the grammar class, it doesn't have any effect anyway.
Now one thing I like about Krashen was that he did all this while keeping an eye on the classroom and on classroom teachers; he was partly right, in that the order of acquisition is often independent of what is happening in the classroom on a day-to-day basis. However his attempts at finding an immutable "order" were futile, and it certainly wasn't genetic, or universal, or the same for all second-language learners, or even all first-language learners. Or, to be more exact, if there is a common order, they couldn't prove it, or didn't find it.
And, in the book I have, where he looks back over his entire legacy, he brings up the -s dilemma, almost as if that was the thing that beat him. For, if you listen carefully to immigrants, and people who have been here for many years, some have
never acquired the habit of putting -s on verbs appropriately. They have learned everything else: relative clauses, complex sentences, etc. But they are still saying, He study English. She live in Chicago.
Now if there were a natural, immutable order, wouldn't this be about the first? It is certainly one of the simpler, more basic rules. It is a rule upon which others are built. Yet, here we are, sometimes 15, 20, 25 years into an acquisition history, and it's not acquired. What's up with that? It felt to me, in reading, that Krashen had been reduced to mumbling into his beer about his failure to explain this. He promised to explain later, but if he did, I never found it.
I maintain that acquisition order can be explained; that it goes straight to human motive and whether a form is
necessary to communicate something that could be communicated without it. Thus the answer is, simply, because they can get away with
not doing it. Because, unlike other forms, there is little price for not worrying about it.
And the calculations of "price" are scientific- psychological with a human dimension, but measurable, different from person to person, and clearly explainable. It is and always will be a mistake to explain such things as due to complexity of the form itself, or someone's inability to understand or know how to conjugate a verb. People "know how" to conjugate a verb. Though there may have been a point at which they didn't "know how" the verb system worked, it is impossible to explain an extremely late acquisition of -s to "knowledge," since they have now heard -s millions of times; they have even produced it millions of times, in other environments, on plural nouns for example, or possessives, when it's far more necessary to convey specific meaning. So it's also not explainable in terms of the complexity of the
sound or the difficulty of producing it under pressure (though I guess that's possible). I think these may be factors, for some learners, especially at the beginning, but in the big picture, for people who are still working with it after 20 years-they begin to fade.
I suspect that if a person were systematic in looking at
all learners (and perhaps somebody has done this), he/she would find that in fact people acquire -s at
all different times in their acquisition history, depending on different independent variables, which could be mapped out and explained, at least theoretically. Why did someone go thirty years and still not get it? And another person pick it up right away? Surely not because of its
essential complexity, or the basic nature of the language itself. Surely people who are looking at this, trying to explain it systematically, have found something they could share. Or, like Krashen, they end up mumbling in their beer, unable, truly, to explain anything?
Labels: krashen, language, learning theory, sla
krashen the hard drive
My new plan is to pull my thoughts about language learning together into a single location; at the moment much of what I've said can be accessed through clicking on the Krashen label below this post. I've had some new ideas but haven't really written them down; tonight I decided to put a few of them here.
Basically I'm organizing language learning by analogy. Learning a second language is like learning to ride a bicycle: it's primarily mind-to-body coordination; it's something that, once you learn it, you might forget parts of it, but you'll pick it up fairly quickly when you try it again.
Language learning is similar to a secretary, or anyone who controls a lot of information, reorganizing the files. You don't do it until after you realize it's necessary; sometimes a good while after. You don't do it unless you know it will make your life easier for a long time to come. You are aware that changing the
system is different and much harder than just adding information to it.
But here's the big one: Learning a new language is like cutting through a field, or taking a new route to work. If you just got a new job, you'll take the interstate for a few days, until you suspect that there's a better or faster way. You won't really investigate until you feel more stable at the job, in other words, when you
are sure that being more efficient will save you time on a regular basis...in other words, part of your calculation, in trying a new route, involves the risk: what about unforeseen problems, red lights, etc. But part of the calculation involves analysis of future gain: if I actually cut five minutes off my time, but do it only once, is it worth the risk? (no...) but, if I could save five minutes every day, would I take the risk to find out if it would be worth it? (yes)...
I maintain that such calculations play a part in learning new grammar: or actually, in making a new grammatical rule part of one's
system...that, one will not do it, until that calculation has played out. And I would like to show exactly how people calculate that, and how people have that kind of calculation in common, much as people would, say, all drive from the west side to the center of town; all would calculate in factors such as perceived time taken for each route; perceived risk; perceived atmosphere of the route; yet each driver may come away with a different calculation.
What does Krashen have to do with it? Don't know yet. Lots of good puns come from his name: Krashen burn, after krashen, call the insurance, etc. I will no doubt use a few. But, exactly how I feel about Krashen's theories, I haven't quite nailed down. Obviously I believe in the acquisition/learning distinction: I think it's crucial to understanding. I don't believe that language learning is genetic, any more than choosing a new route through town is genetic. One does what works; life is a series of compromises, many of which are with the traffic gods and the passenger-only lane. But I will say: you read it first here.
Labels: krashen, language, learning theory, sla
acquisition of present perfect
A colleague of mine is teaching the TOEFL class, and I remarked to her that one of the hardest TOEFL questions I ever heard referred to a simple response to the question: (W) "How are you?" (M) "I've been better." It could have been that TOEFL was trying to test the intonation- the speaker was clearly saying that he was not great. It could also have been that a real TOEFL would not have tested an answer that was so ambiguous (though this is a common answer, it can in fact be interpreted in two ways).
If you think too hard about it, you'll end up in a backwater of confusion, as I did on the day I was trying to teach my way out of this situation. But, this post is really about what my colleague said:
Yes, present perfect is difficult. They have a hard time figuring out why we need it.I thought this answer was a perceptive, incisive comment, coming as it did from a veteran language-learner and linguist, so I thought I'd save it. Though I've studied acquisition of relative clauses a little more carefully (see below), I've also had my eye on present perfect for several reasons. First, even at the high levels (where I teach
now), they have trouble with it; they haven't acquired it yet; and quite often I see sentences (given the time markers
until now or
since I got to Carbondale where one would typically use it. More often, we native speakers might use it naturally but they would not, and give us no time markers to show what they might have missed. In any case it is hard to pinpoint the fact that they
don't have it, but it is safe to say that although they were taught it as long as two or three terms ago, it is still on the horizon for them, and, a distant one at that...
in spite of the fact that it seems somewhat basic for us, essential to our concept of action, early-on in the systems of first language learners, and a basic building block in more complicated forms.
I'll explore this more later, but for now, I'll just say- you aren't born dividing actions into finished/not finished, set in time/not set in time, etc.; you have to acquire the need to express these things, as well as the ability, if you are an L2 learner; and, the situation is partly governed by how much you can get away with, on a day-to-day basis, without causing severe misunderstanding. If such a phrase as
until now will suit your purpose, and express the same meaning as present perfect, in spite of the native speaker's immediate reaction (this is grammatically wrong but I can live with it), then you get away with it- indefinitely- until you learn a better way.
That's it for now- until later-
Labels: krashen, language, learning theory, sla, toefl
it's all relative
This may seem arcane to some of my readers, but if you're in the position I'm in (that is, missing your glasses, late at night, after spending a week grading endless papers), it's a subject of great interest. I've watched hundreds or thousands of students stumble through the upper levels of our program, some never acquiring relative clauses, others picking them up quite easily but stumbling on other things.
Now I don't believe that it's all genetic, or natural, or that there is a universal order that all language learners will follow on their way to fluency. Sure, they'll pick up relative clauses after they pick up basic sentences, but that's obvious. A tougher question would be: are they all at the same stage of development when they
do pick them up? I'm not sure. And, you can run them through a grammar class where you teach them relative clauses explicitly, and it will only make a tiny difference: they will use them for about a week. Then they'll go back to whatever they were doing before. I can't be sure of this though; I only see some of their writing.
In any case, I'm especially interested in two kinds of learners. The first are Arabic speakers, who seem to have something like relative clauses in Arabic, but whose native relative clauses leave a trace, as I believe they would say in my linguistics class. Thus, they'll say, Carbondale is a city that I like it. The "it" is a trace left behind when "that" presumably moved.
What's interesting about this is that, because both languages
have lots of relative clauses (use them easily, in many circumstances), Arabic speakers appear to acquire them fairly easily, early in the game. But, because of the trace, you can have a clue that they didn't construct the sentence with native English logic. Constructed in Arabic, it comes out with a relative clause that is flawless, except for the trace which gives away the translation. One could in fact argue that they have not been acquired at all; they are just being used as part of a translation. Which brings up one thorny issue in the measuring of "acquisition".
But the other case is that of Japanese, which has slightly more possibilities of making complex noun structures as appeared for example in the following sentence: "Eighty percent of the people use energy comes from hydroelectric dams." Now we native English speakers would about have to use "energy that people use" - a relative clause - in this sentence, but this speaker obviously didn't feel it was necessary, or didn't want to. Or, was unable to.
I'm interested in the chain of thought in cases like this- and I'm interested in how to change it, since that would represent acquisition I'd like to get to the bottom of it. Comments, anecdotes welcome.
Labels: endangered languages, krashen, learning theory
Learning theory
Oddly, I was at a pleasant dinner, outside on a nice, steamy June day, watching children tear around a shady back lawn, when it hit me about how I would pull all this learning theory stuff together. Of course, a lot of it will have to be written as I go along, and is not set in stone yet, even in my mind. But I've already done a bit of writing on the subject, and I believe I'm ready to organize and move forward with what I've got. I'll lay out the plan below. That way I can say I've published it; I put it down, printed it, got it out there in the world, whether I die tomorrow or not.
Krashen was right about a number of things, and wrong about a few crucial things. When he clearly defined the difference between learning and acquisition, most veteran teachers said
yes! - because anyone who has taught a language has experienced the students who can learn tricks for a test, yet be unable to use them in real situations, sometimes less than ten minutes later. We teachers knew that things, lots of things, were learned but never acquired; that Krashen was onto a crucial distinction. With time, researchers sneered at him, because he was unable to show exactly how one would prove that something was learned but not acquired. Krashen in fact has a very bad name among SLA researchers for basically having unprovable hypotheses.
On this problem I'll say, I agree with the teachers; he was onto something. Just because he was unable to show exactly how it could be done, doesn't mean it can't be done. His model, in this instance at least, was quite right.
His biggest weakness was that he was caught up in the Chomsky era and assumed or believed that so much of what happened in language learning was inherent or derived from completely natural, inborn systems. In this regard he was wrong about a number of other hypotheses; first of which was a LAD, or language acquisition device, which made me laugh when I first heard about it, and still reminds me somewhat of a tumor, or maybe a heart implant. But that's not really what i'm posting about.
Because he thought of acquisition as a natural, inborn process, he didn't take much time distinguishing the differences between first and second language acquisition, which are in fact substantial. The whole Chomskian era, with its emphasis on the inborn nature of acquisition, has this weakness. The two are quite different, and all the differences are behavioral, since the second language learner has a language system already, when he starts, and thus builds new understanding of a new language
on top of assumptions which are, in many cases, false.
Thus the first language learner is like a filing clerk who looks at a huge pile of files and says, I'll have to look at these for a while before I really know how to organize them- but I'll start organizing them anyway, as I look at them, because I have to have a way to process this information as I get it, and I can always change my system a little as I go along. The second language learner, however, says, it's a pile of files, it's probably organized like the last pile. I'll use that system, the one I used for the first pile, until I figure out that this one is different, or, at least until I have a better way of organizing it, and until I really believe my life will be simpler if I reorganize it.
Notice that the two filing clerks have profoundly different approaches. Notice also that, by definition, the L2 learner whose first language is Korean has a profoundly different approach to English than the L2 learner whose first language is Arabic, for example. An entirely different system of understanding the language, an entirely different set of systemic hurdles to understanding it completely and becoming fluent.
One of Krashen's hypotheses was that there is a natural order of acquisition. People will learn one grammatical structure before they'll learn another. When they tried to prove this, things got complicated; they ended up with examples that made me angry. I'd say, sure people learn
A before they learn
B, since you
have to learn
A before you can possibly learn
B...but, I figured, that doesn't prove anything, and certainly doesn't prove that language learning is a natural, inborn process, genetic and as preprogrammed as getting an Adam's apple.
I think he was wrong about that. People whose first language has relative clauses will learn relative clauses at a different time, developmentally, than people whose first language doesn't have them, or whose first language has them, but avoids them at all costs. We choose to acquire what we feel we need the most- and our perception is guided by our experience. Different experience -> different perception -> different needs analysis -> different acquisition order.
Acquisition is basically when the filing clerk says, my life will be simpler if I organize it this new way. I will reorganize my data because I recognize now that a different or better system of organization will be more efficient- will better reflect the data I have- and will thus make it easier for me to communicate, and use the system.
Here are my (rudimentary, I admit) principles of second language acquistion:
Progress in second language acquisition is marked by a voluntary change in the system of the learner- the brain reorganizing itself for the purposes of creating better language and/or being understood more clearly . For example, my Spanish teacher can teach me the difference between
ser and
estar (
ser- the existential
be;
estar, the locational
be) and I can get it right on the quiz
and the midterm, but still use
ser for all
be when I speak Spanish. Then one day I figure it out, and basically put a programming order in my system, one that says, basically, when you're talking about location, use
estar; use
ser for the other stuff. When this order is successfully put into my production system (I actually remember when I did this- though I couldn't tell you when or where), the learner can be said to have
acquired the difference. We can notice that the learner begins getting it right- getting the difference and using the correct verb in the correct slot. And, it's a different time than the time when somebody actually taught him/her the difference.
The mind is aware of the need to reorganize, long before it actually takes the time and effort to do it. This is self-explanatory. We are conservative, and don't take matters of internal organization lightly.
Nobody can tell us how to organize our own filing system. They can, however, point out truths about the way the data is organized, which we, as language learners, will recognize when we see, and respond to accordingly. Some semblance of control is necessary, however, if only for the sake of pride. It's my mind. I'll change it only when I'm ready, you lay off telling me how to think.
The kid who becomes bilingual at a young age is at a distinct advantage, because he/she sets up two filing systems right away, rather than running the second one through the first. More about this later.
The baby hears mountains of data before actually having to produce anything in a first language. The adult second language learner, however, hears much less, and, as an adult, will have to produce much sooner. And furthermore, he/she hears a lot less of some things, for example commands, that kids hear a lot of. So it is possible that he/she has a different kind of interpretation
just on the basis of what he/she has already heard, let alone a different interpretation
based on false assumptions carried over from the first language. One that I recall, though I don't remember it being proven in any way, was a theory that the -ING form of a verb was the basic form (the most common- the starting point). If you didn't go through several years of
come here, give me a kiss, go to bed, eat your spinach..., that might be possible, I suppose. I'd like to ask some language learners.
More about this later. This whole treatise will be moved, I assure you, to a permanent home on the web somewhere.
Labels: chomsky, endangered languages, krashen, learning theory
principle wanted, again
I'll never forget this title of a help-wanted ad I encountered years ago when looking for an esl/efl job, perhaps the one I've got now. It was run by an elementary school, and I was inclined to suggest to them that I had a few principles to offer, the first being, learn how to spell when you publish. But I veered off, stayed out of public primary education, and ended up where I am today instead.
Speaking of principles, however, I am looking for a name for what I have been working on: a series of principles that deal with the learner and how the learner begins to adapt to picking up and incorporating elements of a language.
When Krashen first came on the scene, parts of his philosophy resonated deeply with thousands of language teachers, especially the part about the distinction between learning and acquisition. Speaking jut for myself now, I could relate to that, having seen it in the classroom and understanding it in myself and my own experiences with learning a language. Other parts of his theories, namely the "language acquisition device" which, due to its awkward name, sounded like some little machine placed in one's innate machinery, made much less sense.
Acquisition researchers came to scorn him for several reasons: first, he was way too popular. Second, how can you define acquisition vs. learning? How can you quantify it? And, this "device"- what's up with that?
Krashen, I believe, is now at the end of his career, much more involved in the bilingual-ed controversies especially as they have played out in California, and may not be so worried about the way acquisition researchers have scorned him over the years. He is, after all, famous in his own right, and for good reason. He at least laid out a system that made sense to thousands of people who recognized the kernel of truth that it captured.
This is why, twenty years later, I'm beginning to wonder: exactly why is it impossible to quantify the distinction between acquistion and learning? I have seen it played out in front of my eyes for years. I have seen people store information temporarily, pass tests with it, and go on to prove, sometimes in the same hour, or same sentence, that the aspect of grammar in question was no more part of their working grammar than encryption code. They learn a structure, pass tests using it, recognize what they need to know and prove they know it, yet it's somewhere way
way down the road, that they actually slip into
using it in appropriate circumstances.
The answer to this lies in the mind's internal sense of prioritizing, reorganizing, making life simpler and smoother. We have a surface organization and a deep organization, and we're not likely to mess with the big potato until we're good and sure it's worth our while. But the mind is a ruthlessly efficient organizer, and if a new reality truly intrudes upon it, it can and will act upon the new information...that's because we're survivors, and have learned to read the writing on the wall.
I've moved the work
here while I stew on it, and decide how to incorporate things like this post into it. I've written a bit about Krashen; that's
here. For now, the looming
tesol presentations forces me to keep my eyes on the road.
But for the record, what I'm getting at is this:
I believe that the point at which the learner reorganizes, acquires and uses something, whether it be using a structure regularly, or putting knowledge of a word in an active memory-retrieval site, can be found, measured, sought and exploited. We can orient our teaching and learning around the systematic crossing of these thresholds; teachers can work with learners to say, hey, it's not enough that you just learn this. What you want to do is use it enough until you convince yourself that it's something you want to use every time, and put it somewhere where you have access to it every time you open your mouth.
Now this is a kind of rustic way to put it, but it boils down to this: the learner has control; the learner's personal organization system, the mind's own secretary, works on its own schedule, and it may not be as cooperative as the learner himself/herself, who will often learn, understand, and use information to pass tests quite well, even intending to improve his or her grammar, to no avail. The acquisition preceeds at an entirely different pace than the learning. Yet it does proceed, and we can see it.
I need a better name than "volume theory," but, it'll come to me.
Back to work. But first, I'll get some sleep. 071 just ended, and spring's a-poppin', lots going on, and young ones growing, right in front of my eyes.
Labels: krashen, learning theory
