thomas leverett weblog

CALL theory

Labels: call theory, internet, learning theory

posted by tom @ 3:31 PM 0 comments

Motivation part II

I'm out here in Lubbock; it's a good place to ride off into the sunset, because when you do, you end up 9000 ft. up in the Sacramento Mountains, and that's what I plan to do as soon as I can.

But in the meantime I was asked to review a paper done on "motivation" and did it, my final parting shot to a semester that came to a relatively smooth end recently. Motivation has always been the key to language learning, but like everything else, people have had trouble figuring out what it is, what to do with it, how to construct it, etc. The world is full of EFL teachers in remote places who have told me, basically, all the "how-to-teach" lessons you give me are no good if you can't motivate the students. OK, fair enough. Let's figure out what it is, so we can figure out how to use it to help people learn.

So this writer starts out and brings in CST, as if that's the foundation of the new approach. Twenty years of research done by the Robert Gardner school, gone, not a trace, it's all this new approach based on CST. Well CST (Complex Systems Theory) is a set of ways to explain things in nature where every little actor acts based on the environment. So, if you boil the water at the bottom of a bucket eventually the molecules bump into each other, and the hot ones make the other ones warmer, and mathematical equations along with network theory can help explain how fast and in what order, etc. It actually can be applied to language: You move to Texas, you say "thank you" twenty times a day, but when everyone says "think you" back, eventually your vowels change based on what you hear. It's the environment you're in; it's not a rule or a decree that makes you do it.

Now apply this to motivation. Anyone who wanted to apply CST to motivation was probably looking at a football team, where everyone has to get their collective anger up and relies on feeding off his teammates; if one gets really riled up, it'll help get the rest to play their best. But that doesn't really apply to a language classroom. You can put people in groups repeatedly, but they start from the general maxims "Do what is required" and "Do as little as possible" along with "Don't let them see you break a sweat," which is perhaps the most important. One can see CST operating here, namely motivations changing based on perception of the environment, but there is a crucial difference. The teacher can change the requirements. The teacher can change what "possible" refers to. The teacher can change what is "required." People are not flailing around in a leaderless vacuum. The students we are talking about always have one eye on the teacher, and the other on their classmates.

The problem I see with the above scenario, and with group work in general, is that the collective influence works in both ways. It's not like a football team where everyone is invested in a single outcome. You can have a group huddle at the beginning and say to them, in effect, hey, it's in your best interest to put your whole souls into this group work, but basically, it isn't going to happen.

It isn't even going to happen in the U.S., where people have paid literally thousands to come over here, get an apartment, and maintain a life so they can learn English in order to get integrated into the society. A lot of our (ESL) students are more than willing to do the best they can in group work, but motivational forces are still pushing and pulling them simultaneously. In Japan, or Peru, it's much worse. The collective spirit is definitely a pulling force.

I was impatient, not so much with the assertion that motivation required a CST-kind of explanation, but with the failure to explain how, or why. It's not such a revelation that motivation is at the bottom of everything. You can look at any class, ESL or EFL, worldwide, and say, motivation is the problem here. But sometimes I think people pull out concepts like "CST" in order to say, "it's all so complicated, there's no way we normal people can figure it out." Actually, I think we can figure it out. I don't think I can say I've done it yet, though.

Labels: learning theory, motivation, self-organized systems, sla

posted by tom @ 2:28 PM 0 comments

motivation links

Leverett, T. (2012). Review of Motivation and Second Language Acquisition: The Socio-Educational Model, by R. C. Gardner, TESL-EJ (TESL Electronic Journal), 16, 2, Sept.

Razavi, Lauren. (2014, Mar. 19). Language learning: What motivates us? theguardian. Accessed 5-16 from
 http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/mar/19/language-learning-motivation-brain-teaching

Labels: grades, learning theory, motivation

posted by tom @ 11:49 AM 0 comments

motivation part 1

TESL-EJ signed me up as a reviewer on a lengthy paper which I agreed to review recently. It deals with motivation amongst language learners. The reason they looked me up was because I had reviewed a book by Gardner a few years back. I guess that makes me a rational observer of the motivation research field.

Gardner, unrelated to the Gardner of multiple intelligences (as far as I know) had been the leader of motivation research for many years. He was living in French Canada, where there was a large number of people studying languages in both directions, and lots of despair over the process in general.

It's been standard in the language teaching business for many years that "motivation is everything" and "if you are motivated, you'll learn the language" regardless of any obstacles in your way. I didn't quite agree with any of this, or at least the sweeping generalization part of it, but there was no question, motivation is important. Gardner presided over a period of time when they tried to define kinds of motivation (such as instrumental, for example - needing a language to use it for some other personal need, like studying engineering, as opposed to integrative, actually wanting to be part of the culture you are seeking to communicate with). Finally, by the time he wrote the book I reviewed, he was quite frustrated with various kinds of motivation, and he said, it doesn't matter where it comes from, and it's impossible to divide or discern the kinds, as they get all confused anyway. What matters is the juice you get from them. If your motivation makes you go to class every day, then it's good motivation, and real. If it gets you to do your homework, it's real. But it doesn't matter if you want to learn a language, but still can't get out of bed to go to class in the morning. If you aren't getting anything out of it, it's not real.

So Gardner goes on to say that if you're motivated you'll go to class, you'll like class, you'll do your homework, and you'll get out of bed in the morning. I may be misquoting him a little here, but he was saying something like that, and I was wondering, wait a minute, it's possible to want to learn a language, and still be disillusioned enough about a given class, to not want to go to that class.

So what we're really arguing about is the process between, or the connection between, your deeper personal motivation, and your immediate problem, which is getting out of bed. And I realize that I've basically been studying that connection all of my life. It turns out that if you can get either of those kinds of motivations entwined in any way, you get extra benefit from doing it. It's kind of like being in the wake of a truck on an icy highway, and getting the benefit of not only having the truck break the wind, but also having him/her grind up the ice/snow on the road. It's hard to define how you get people to do the work that they should want to do anyway, but if the two motivations are connected in any way, you're going to be pulled along in the right direction. That's the essence of it.

Now the curious thing about the paper is that although someone named Dornyei is all over it (he/she has apparently written extensively on motivation), Gardner is nowhere to be seen. Is his work forgotten? Did he undo his own legacy by telling us what he did about motivation? I'm curious to find out.

Labels: grades, learning theory, motivation

posted by tom @ 11:12 AM 0 comments

TESOL session report

Session Report:
Leverett, T. (2016, Apr.). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the ESL writer. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL International, Baltimore, MD, USA.

This appears on my weblog which is specifically about the topic; unfortunately, this weblog was not advertised in my handout. The handout will appear on Google docs soon, but I'm reorganizing my google docs, and I'm not sure how soon.

Labels: grammar, internet, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing

posted by tom @ 8:36 PM 0 comments

TESOL presentation

Day and Time: Friday, March 27 2:30-3:20 PM

Computer Station: MAC 4

All invited!

Labels: google translate, grammar, internet, language, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing

posted by tom @ 11:42 AM 0 comments

Watson, A. (2012, Feb. 20). Navigating ‘the pit of doom’: Affective responses to teaching ‘grammar’. English in Education. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1754-8845.2011.01113.x/. Accessed 1-15.

"...Interviews with 31 (secondary English) teachers reveal two discourses which frame the ways in which teachers express their feelings (about grammar teaching): a dominant discourse of grammar as threatening, reactionary and dull, and an oppositional discourse which positions grammar as inspiring, fascinating, and empowering." (from the abstract).

Jean, G. & Simard, D. (2011, Aug. 10). Grammar Teaching and Learning in L2: Necessary, but Boring? Foreign Language Annals. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2011.01143.x/. Accessed 1-15.

"...Results showed only slight discrepancies between students’ and teachers’ beliefs and perceptions, and very few differences according to the target language and students’ gender or age. The main findings suggest that grammar instruction is perceived by both students and teachers as necessary and effective, but not as something they enjoy doing." (from the abstract)

Myhill, D., Jones, S., Watson, A. & Lines, H. (2012, Nov. 27). Playful explicitness with grammar: a pedagogy for writing. Literacy. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4369.2012.00674.x/. Accessed 1-15.

Truscott, J. (2006, Oct. 27). The Case Against Grammar Correction in L2 Writing Classes. Language Learning 46(2), 327-369. June 1996.

Labels: grammar, learning theory

posted by tom @ 8:21 AM 0 comments

Cultural flexibility presentation

Leverett, T. (2014). Cultural flexibility as a characteristic of good language learners. Third Annual AL/SL Conference on Language Learning and Teaching, Texas Tech University, April.

Gave this presentation today, and got lots of input. The handout will follow, as will links to several things I've written about it. I'm a little slow in getting it all online, but will, all in good time.

The essence of it is, when you fill a classroom with well-motivated adults wanting to learn a second language, their own native culture will be an impediment to their learning, and will provide variation in learners. For example, those from languages without article systems will find our article system pointless and ridiculous, and will have trouble learning it, whereas those from Spanish or Portuguese backgrounds, for example, will have the mental framework and will have already accepted the principle of such a system. People spoke of things in language that were hard to swallow: An old Chinese man spoke of how he couldn't get over English's failure to distinguish kinds of cousins (mother's side? father's side? male? female? older? younger? etc.). An American woman learning Arabic spoke of the way the language pulled you into the religion and she had trouble with that. One Chinese woman pointed out that she herself had reservations about acquiring such expressions as "bless you" which seem overtly Christian. The trouble we have in just adapting an entire system is often internal resistance to the culturally unpalatable demands of the new situation.

More on this later. It was to some degree unfinished business; I taught ESL for 28 years, and now am seeing the top end of it, people who are almost fluent. How can I look back at the whole process, and dispense wisdom from what I've seen? Basically, everyone was motivated, at least on the first day. Everyone had a memory and a working mental apparatus, with the slight exception of a few that were missing a switch here or there. So what remained, and why did people learn languages at different rates? This presentation attempts to get at the answer.

A good discussion occurred about the passive voice. A claim was made earlier in the day that active was more basic than passive, thus bound to be acquired earlier; that would be more natural, that would be as it was meant to be. There is a natural order to these structures, this speaker said, and we learn them in order.

Alas, but my presentation points out the ways we don't learn them in order, or, we take that order in our own hands, and impose our own order on the system, and acquire any feature only when we're ready. Thus it would be possible for a person to acquire articles first, or last, depending on their inclination, but more important, with passives, it would be theoretically possible for a person to deliberately acquire passive and passive only, since it is not required to know active before one knows passive, or to "enter" the cognitive sphere through the active voice. Is it? That, I think, would be my more fundamental research question.

Labels: grammar, language, learning theory, personal, ttu

posted by tom @ 10:20 PM 0 comments

Cultural Flexibility

I've written a little about this before, but I'm about to begin a serious inquiry and have lots of preliminary thoughts to put down before I start.

First, I was heavily influenced by a book on motivation that I reviewed for TESL-EJ. To me the essence of the book, my walk-away tip, was that motivation, or pure desire to learn a language, wasn't worth anything until it could be translated into measurable outcomes. For example, you would like your language class more if you were motivated to learn a language, and this could be measured, simply by asking you if you liked to go to that class. You would do more studying of that language, because your motivation had been converted, so to speak, into the juice that ran the engine, and that juice was measurable, in the sense that if you did more than you used to, or more than the next guy, you were clearly more motivated. Your motivation had converted successfully into useful, measurable units of juice.

Now I didn't quite buy this at the time, and I still have trouble with it, a little, because in fact I believe you can really want something and still be unable to convert it, and then, in that case, what do you call the desire? You can be crying inside to learn a language and still be unable to sit in a class, for example, or learn your vocabulary words. Ah, but skip that argument. When it comes to cultural flexibility, the problem is the same, but it's much more fun to worry about. For example, some things about a language are more unpalatable than others. And, that unpalatable-ness (unpalatability?) can be measured, right? So, you learn to use a, an, or the, but you never quite bought into the idea that you should have to be bothered with such a thing. This would be unpalatable, and your cultural ability to bite the bullet, or just say to yourself, look, this is something I have to learn for cultural reasons, is going to determine your success. If you are stubborn in the sense that your feeling about the unpalatability of that characteristic of language is stronger than your cultural need to fit in, get along, do as everyone is doing, you will have more trouble with getting your articles right, and this will be one of the last features that you master.

Now, in the world of features, first, there are several kinds. There are unpalatable sounds, (like th) which can be distinguished from sounds that are merely difficult to make (zh as in measure). AE as in bat or hat is another example; it may sound unpleasant, or you may know that people in England don't have to bother with it, or are able to make it in a slightly less offensive way. Sometimes the grammar, as in a/an/the/0, is routine, and you'll bump into it twice per sentence; other times it's a little more rare. Sometimes you can get away with errors a lot longer in certain areas, than in others, because certain mistakes are more repairable on the part of the listener (or the reader as the case may be). So errors or features have characteristics of their own: frequency, importance, etc. that influence the necessity of learning them first, later, or not at all.

In Korean you actually speak a different language to people who are older than you, people who are the same age or level as you, people who are below you, and children; this fundamental division of the human race before one opens one's mouth is unpalatable to democratic Americans who basically use the same language for everyone, and are proud of it, although sometimes they're fooling themselves. Nevertheless one would have to admit that this is a fundamental characteristic of the Korean language; you won't go far if you don't master it. You'll be corrected in a fundamental kind of way, and that's because you have violated a very important rule. That's not to say this can't be done; English speakers eliminated the thee/you distinction at one time, but it could be called a social revolution and was no small deal. What I'm saying is that features of a language can be foundational, or more of whatever the opposite of foundational would be.

Now I'm inclined to say that one of the primary considerations here is that often what we are watching here is subconscious. People detest the a/an/the situation because it seems so trivial, yet they know it causes problems, and they have trouble integrating the awareness into their systems so as to correct the problem. When it is subconscious, I like to bring it to the front and ask them about it. For example, I have high-level students who never make a th correctly and I know they can do it, so I'm in the habit of asking them if it's just too embarrassing to stick their tongue out in public, and are they really unable to do that just because they are stubbornly cultural about doing something that, back in their home culture, one would never do. By the way, I feel this way about walking around someone's house in my socks; I really don't want to do it. I kind of feel like feet stink, especially when they're in socks, and it's better just to keep one's shoes on, as dirty and muddy as they might be. But the question of cultural flexibility is simple: how much are you willing to give up, just because you know that it's what is done, it's what this culture has decided is necessary, it's what you do to become "fluent"?

What I am trying to prove is that, first, the sense of discomfort you feel with customs (like leaving one's shoes at the threshold, or sticking one's tongue out to make a th) can be measured. Your cultural flexibility, therefore, can also be measured. We should be able to predict how well you will do with learning a language by measuring your cultural flexibility, in the same way that if we could measure the size of your memory, or your ability in retrieving what you want out of it, we could measure your success in mastering vocabulary. These are characteristics that make good language learners. Pure intelligence, I am convinced, is not really one of them, because we are not really talking about rocket science, as puzzling as another language's grammar may seem. It is not made to be too complex for the average person to figure out...on the contrary, languages must be accessible, or they would be virtually useless. That doesn't mean they're easy, though. Geniuses have trouble with them. And I intend to get to the bottom of what is most difficult in mastery of them.

Here are some research questions that I would like to explore, refine, and/or answer:
1. Language features clearly can come in different kinds: grammatical or phonological, to start with. But what about semantic? Are there more? What am I missing?
2. So we test you, and determine that you are quite stubborn, unwilling to stick your tongue out, so to speak, so you are doomed to years of trouble mastering any given language that requires this or that cultural concession. Are you doomed to failure because of your basic nature, or can you actually teach yourself to be more flexible? I suspect the latter. I suspect that it is difficult, but it is the key to language learning.
3. OK, so we set about making subconscious problems conscious; for example, I point out that the reason you are having such trouble with a/an/the/0 is that deep down, you feel that it's a pile of horse pucky and you shouldn't have to be bothered with such triviality. You readily agree, and now realize why you've had such trouble for so many years mastering such a trivial feature. Does your awareness of your own feelings help you master the problem? Is this a useful teaching tool? I can ask everyone about the relative unpalatability of various features of English or the language that they are embarking upon learning, but will that matter?

Labels: language, languages, learning theory

posted by tom @ 1:10 PM 0 comments

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

posted by tom @ 10:09 AM 0 comments

instant karma

When I was in graduate school, all teaching methods that involved instant feedback were out. If you were to jump on a student for pronouncing "three" as "tree," for example, he would stammer, make the correct "three" word again, lose his train of thought (not to mention his confidence), etc. Theory favored the affective side of it: let him speak as much as he is capable of speaking; let him string entire sentences together; correct him later, if at all, privately, and let him know that his pronunciation and/or grammar are impeding meaning, or should be worked on before the others. Naturally, those that impede meaning are more urgent than those that don't. Also, we are well aware that with much feedback in general, there is not a direct relationship between what you tell them to work on, and what actually gets improved on the following day. They like feedback, and appreciate it, and are especially grateful to know when it is responsible for their grade's being a little lower than they'd like, but, even when they apply themselves to changing their pronunciation or grammar, often they can't, at least not right away. Or, they will change it on a prepared speech, but immediately get thrown off when asked a question or expected to produce language spontaneously.

Now I am in a situation where I am teaching high-level learners; grammar and pronunciation are sometimes an issue, but usually not. The issue for them is often lack of tone, poor tone, long thought groups or poorly broken up thought groups, lack of prominence or no stress on important words. Tone, I think, is extremely important. They drift into a monotone, and people fall asleep, losing not only the information but also a sense of how important it is. Tone doesn't come naturally to speakers of other languages. They're head is full with creating sentences, recalling what they meant to say, making correct pronunciation (which, as I've said, is not bad at this level.

But a graduate student, A.H., has taken to giving them instant feedback on their DI (discourse intonation), mostly with their permission, and her partner, R.R., now jumps right in there beside her. They'll stop a student in the middle of the second sentence and say, "No tone!" or "Why are you using a rising tone? Are you unsure of yourself?" or perhaps, "Mind your prominence! Stress on the important words!"

Students, as I've said, liked this, and agreed to it willingly at first. They needed to know their faults and the sooner the better, they figured, even at the expense of obviously losing their train of thought, getting rattled in front of a crowd, etc. Generally they would be teaching in front of their peers. Generally their presentation was limited - maybe ten minutes at most. Generally they would stumble upon being corrected, but get back on their feet fairly quickly. Sometimes the fault that was pointed out would be corrected in what they produced after the feedback. In those cases, we could say it was a success. They were directed to mind an aspect of their DI (often one they weren't paying attention to); they would mind it; they would improve, and presumably they would learn the skill of considering DI simultaneously with the other things they were trying to juggle.

I stuck to my traditional method, which was to point out their weaknesses on a grading sheet, to be given them after (well after) their presentation, which often pointed out both DI weaknesses and traditional, pronunciation/grammar problems. My theory was that private, separated feedback could be handled more rationally later, could be separated from the plain view of peers, and allow their immediate observations more room to develop as they were speaking.

The instant feedback system had several negative consequences. One is interesting and worth noting. One poor girl, frustrated at being criticized for lack of tone, had adopted an uptalk kind of style. This actually is quite common. Students hear others doing it, and adopt it, and notice that they do better with uptalk than with nothing. I actually encourage it, although I know it's rather grating to the ears of a native speaker, it makes us say, "you're from the valley?" or "you're asking me?" or some such. But it is a tone, developmental as it is, and it helps them begin to hear them, hear their consequences, etc. So A.H. jumps on her for her uptalk, and says, basically, "You're giving out your syllabus (true). You're telling them how you're going to grade them (also true)...and you make it a question? WHY are you using uptalk?" The poor girl, flustered, starts over again. She realizes the feedback is intended to help her, she's not overwhelmingly embarrassed. But she really doesn't know how to vary her tones, or she would have done it. She is more embarrassed by not being able to make what she wants, than just being mistaken.

And this, in general, is probably the biggest problem. Tone becomes fluent in developmental increments, which are now disrupted, and not allowed to be half-perfect. If she develops a fear of uptalk, or picks up the disparagement on the part of native speakers in the room, she goes back to monotone. The disruption of the process sets back the entire thing, and, as a result, she can't use varying tones at all until she is entirely ready to make them all right.

I have often pointed out this tendency in the development of grammatical structures, for example, present perfect continuous. A student, in trying to say "I have been going to the Rec Center" says instead "I have been go to the Rec Center," producing an intermediate, developmental form. The computer tells them that's bad, go back to square one, or, the student is corrected and set back by an aggressive grammar-cop type of ESL teacher, who jumps on him, marks him down, publicly shames him, or whatever. Bottom line: avoid that structure altogether. Avoid trying it, avoid developing it, avoid putting it out there. Correction can have an opposite effect of stifling ordinary natural developmental progress. And it certainly doesn't reward experimentation, the risk-taking required to master anything.

These may be the traditional arguments against all feedback, and they remind me a bit of the writing "Error correction wars" in which some theorists argued strenuously against all error correction, and even those who were in favor of it were reduced to saying how much and how strenuously they would couch it in positive terms, save it until the end, devalue it or absorb it into larger meaning-expression issues. That kind of feedback, in writing, was out and was staying out as far as I could tell, last I checked. Those who wanted to know principal from principle were left looking online for one of those online proofreaders.

I should mention, by the way, that A.H. and R.R. tried to set up a study; they asked students how they felt; they tried to determine whether this method worked, and how students actually felt about it. While getting accurate results on its efficacy may be extremely difficult, the controlled environment under which they asked students their true opinions might yield interesting results; I'll keep you posted.

Labels: grammar, ita's, learning theory, ttu, writing

posted by tom @ 8:42 AM 0 comments

translation plateau, cont'd

A lot of times on the first day of class you get very interesting questions; these are the better students, who have been studying during the breaks, and have been saving up these questions because they're really stuck. In this case it was a Sri Lankan woman, with very good English, who is going to be an international teaching assistant here and thus is almost ready to actually teach in English.

She said the following, roughly: "I don't have any trouble thinking and using English when I'm in my own field, because I learned everything in that field in English. But the rest of the time, I have trouble thinking in English; I always think in my native language and then translate. Why do I have such trouble? I know I can do it, I just can't bring myself to do it?

My answer was roughly the following. People have trouble at this point switching over to thinking in English. My guess is that you are afraid of losing something related to your native language. If you think about it, you won't really lose your ability to speak and remember your native language. You might forget a few words, or not have as good access to it, when you bring English to the front and use English all the time. But you won't actually lose anything.

I suspect the answer lies more in fear of losing an aspect of your native culture that you really are afraid of losing, for example, some part of its values, or its code. People at first look at American culture as if it's like the movies - it's wild, and violent, and immoral, etc. When they get here they are genuinely attracted by certain aspects of it: increased freedom and respect for women, more liberal attitudes toward the disabled or different groups of people; Americans have different attitudes toward guns, toward extramarital sex, toward racial differences. These are all bound together in what it means to you to "become more American." But it is not necessarily related to the language you speak. It is theoretically possible to speak English 100% of the time, and not really change your values or your morals at all from what you had when you got here.

What happens, though, is that we change our values little by little, subconsciously, and in some cases we are even aware of changing our values a little. And that scares us; we feel now truly cast adrift from the native culture, looking back on it and being somewhat apart from it. It reminds me of a story an Asian told me about how he went back home, possibly to Korea, and someone told him he looked like he was walking like an American, possibly taking up too much of the sidewalk. Could it be that he actually walked differently after a stint in the U.S.? If so, it could have been subconscious. The point is, we are sometimes aware we are changing, and sometimes not aware, but in the same way, we fear this, we dig in, we react to our own changes within ourselves.

I am not a counsellor, I told her, so I can't address how you talk to yourself to alleviate these fears, and absorb yourself more deeply in your new language, so as to make your life more efficient, and integrate yourself better into your new community. As you speak to yourself, separate language and morality - you can speak whatever language you want, and still keep the values that you yourself have chosen to live by. Second, assure yourself that you will not lose anything of substance - you will know your native language forever, regardless of how long you speak with something else. Finally, efficiency, ease of speech, and clear communication are enough of a reward that you will soon see that this change is worthwhile, and overdue; what is a little harder, maybe, is getting at the true differences between cultures that do involve values and morals, and decide for yourself what you want. If it's related, even in your mind, to the language you are speaking, it doesn't have to be. You learned it once purely for the ability to participate fully in your field, and teach in it. Now, use it also to really know the culture you are in. You can suspend your acceptance of all the values you presently associate with it, and take those or leave them at will.

The decision to think in a new language all the time often comes after it's efficient, easy or even possible. It ties people up because they can't do it and they can't even identify their reasons for being unable to do it. So, it seems inevitable here that we accept the idea that sometimes we are at war with ourselves subconsciously, and we have to have a good talk with ourselves to resolve it, and come out with a kind of working peace treaty. At times the next step is a very large one, and has to be taken with the entire body.

Labels: language, learning theory, ttu

posted by tom @ 9:55 PM 0 comments

What do you have to do to get an A around here?

Becker, H., Geer, B., and Hughes, E. (1968). Making the Grade. New York: Wiley & Sons.

I didn't exactly read this book, but I liked its message and it's especially relevant to me because I've just finished my first full semester in an American classroom with a large (~40) group of bright American students, fully focused on their grade, who learned whatever they had to but mostly cared about the distinction between B- and A+, and what it took to get across that line.

In retrospect, the term went well, as I made sure they had to read the book or at least be very familiar with it, in order to get those grades, and they did, and were. At one point I tried to get them to do a linguistic experiment involving counting emoticons in their phone, and they wouldn't; one, however, asked if he could get extra credit for it. I often think of that as a difference between American egocentrism vs. international group-orientation (my international students would have done it in a minute, just for fun, or just on the power of my suggestion); thus, we were robbed of a source of data, or an opportunity to learn. Aside from that I had no regrets about the class; it was less interactive than I would have liked, but that was my own fault.

The book makes several points. One is that what students are doing here is collective behavior; they are all playing the same game and trading notes to some degree. Two, there is a significant amount of cheating associated with this process and the teachers are complicit not only in making classes cheatable (forgive me), but also putting significant energy into gearing up the war machine to prevent it. Finally, the whole system is a detriment to their real learning, since it is so geared to results and quantification.

Around the time the book was written student riots were at their peak (the book mentions Columbia and Berkeley) and in fact several schools abolished grades as a response, most significantly Antioch and UC-Santa Cruz (which has since reestablished them). Actually my knowledge of these no-grade systems is limited; I'd like to know how people at these institutions actually view this situation (Do students learn more? Are they happier? Has another system of good-eval-hunting come to replace grades?). I can say, however, that the effect is far greater at other institutions that have to deal with their students. One Antioch graduate had a hard time getting a scholarship (which he richly deserved) because his transcript was essentially held up by the fact that it didn't have grades on it. It's like not having a phone; it's fine for you, but it's an enormous hassle for people who you deal with.

Things have not changed that much since 1968, except for a few details. At SIUC, the distinction between B*, B and B- was lost, and virtually nobody in graduate classes or even in the upper level undergraduate ones got C or lower, so it was essentially a 2-grade system for much of academic life. People talk about there actually being 5 grades, but if, in essence, people don't give the bottom three, that's not saying much. And if B is the lowest grade, it becomes generally undesirable, a stain or a blot on one's record. In my time, B was still "better than average", so I fight my impulse to tell people, you should be proud of this; it means you did your work and learned a lot. I maintain the idea that "A" is "exceptional" and not just "better than average" or "did everything I asked him/her to". What I'm saying is that to some degree there are competing impressions of these grades as symbols, and some of the older impressions, somewhat anachronistic, may guide professors' minds, or even the students' minds, while the world to some degree has changed. I was happy, here, to have more choices; it seemed that I could make a statement with "A-" or "C+" that I couldn't make without the finer gradation; yet I also felt that we, collectively, were forced into a glass-bowl situation, in which the world would use these letters as their best interpretation of what students did and why they were there.

So what are the alternatives? I thought of one thing, but I'm still mulling over how it would work. That would be, to make all academia entrance-test oriented, so that what is learned in class would be implicitly directed toward certain entrance tests, but not directly. Thus, in my linguistics class I would be free to teach whatever I wanted, with the implicit understanding that what I taught might appear on an entrance test of some linguistics or anthropology graduate program, but would not otherwise be useful in any other way, since my own grade would be pass/fail, or no grade at all. Several questions would arise from this: 1) Doesn't the competitive drive to be better than one's peers actually motivate some learning; in other words, wouldn't students learn less in this situation? 2) The echoes of graduate entrance exams would quickly and thoroughly saturate the system; I don't believe that's happening now with the GRE's, but my guess is that if that were all there were things would be better, not worse; 3) it is not clear to me that an overhaul of the whole system has any political support whatsoever; Antioch has not succeeded in changing anyone, and therefore any innovation would be like a shout in the dark, and face problems that Antioch has in setting itself against the grain of American culture.

By that last part I am saying that basically, graduate schools, employers, and everyone else looks at those numbers (GPA, etc.) and says, here's a person who can compete with his/her mind, who gets up in the morning and does his/her job, who shows evidence of some learning and achievement. All of these assumptions are questionable to some degree, in any given particular case, given the cheating that occurs and other intangible factors, but it's the collective momentum of valuing these symbols that we're up against here, that any alternative system would have to be able to replace. These grades have functions in modern society, and students, rebels that they are, may not like this system, but are maintaining it collectively anyway. I'm not sure that riots like those at Columbia or Berkeley would change anything at this point, and that's why I'm sure they are just gliding down the river of life, taking it as it comes, as unable to change the system as I am.

It makes one wonder: What other alternatives have been proposed?

Labels: grades, learning theory

posted by tom @ 9:26 AM 0 comments

motivation

Leverett, T. (2012). Review of Motivation and Second Language Acquisition: The Socio-Educational Model, by R. C. Gardner, TESL-EJ (TESL Electronic Journal), 16, 2, Sept.

This is an interesting review because this researcher is clearly tired of the general public's misuse or misunderstanding of what he calls "motivation". Motivation to him is not a reason to do things, but rather, only the juice you can successfully convert that reason into. So that, if have a good reason to study English for example, but you don't enjoy your classes, you cannot truly be called motivated, since you haven't converted your reason to a useful kind of energy.

Now this language of "converting" is entirely mine, but Gardner's point remains: motivation has to be measurable, and measurable in terms of what you do and feel in the activities that you are "motivated" to do, and just having a reason isn't worth much, since everyone has a reason. For example, everyone has a good reason to exercise, but only a few of us actually do it. So the reason isn't a "motivation." The "motivation" is measurable in that if I really want it, I will do it, report getting something out of it, and enjoy it.

Ah but you can't change the words people use, or what they mean by them, unless you have an extensive campaign or unless, by chance, thousands of people read your book and act according to your wishes. Well, this is a good start, maybe.

Labels: bib, learning theory, motivation, personal

posted by tom @ 11:56 AM 0 comments

articles

Dreifus, C. (2011, May 30). The Bilingual Advantage. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html?_r=3&hp. Accessed 6-11.

O'Dea, C. (2011, May 31). No more pencils, no more books: Technology-driven education in NJ schools. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/11/0530/2255/. NJ Spotlight, accessed 6-11.

Johnson, B. and Maxson McElroy, T. (2011, June). The changing role of the teacher in the 21st century. teachers net gazette 8, 6.http://teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/dr-brad-johnson-tammy-maxson-mcelroy/changing-role-of-the-teacher/. Accessed 6-11.

Labels: bib, languages, learning theory

posted by tom @ 1:15 PM 0 comments

grammar-checkers cont'd

I have widened the scope of the grammar-checker project, and have become very interested in several aspects of the grammar-checker problem, namely:

1. What influence does constant interaction with a green-line producing program (or even the red-lining spell-check) have on human perception of a second language? How does it affect learning? Clearly it helps their learning in some ways and hinders it in others. I can tell you that what I've learned so far is more or less here although fresh developments at the SIUC web emporium have rendered almost all our sites impractical at least for the time being. You have to tolerate bizarre templates to get to the content. Other things I have written on the topic are at c, b, and a.
2. If computer grammar programs can so quickly and relentlessly influence human behavior, why don't we just harness them to create perfect language learners?
3. What are the results of the work people have been doing to improve these programs? I'm just moving into this territory, btw; can't answer this one at all, yet. But, as concordancers get involved, the equation is definitely more interesting.
4. What is the most appropriate response on the part of teachers?
a. Recommend the best of the programs, show students how to access them and even expect or demand that students use them (this btw is what many people do about spell-check)
b. Ban them entirely from computer labs, and expect students to disable them on all computers used for class papers; give tests on computers with disabled grammar-check, or better yet, in pen and paper;
c. Assume that the default grammar-check on most Word programs are what our students are and will use most of the time, and work with them on their use of this or what we know of this; teach them, for example, to interpret the grammar-check's "Fragment" message properly. If students ask, show them the preferred settings (if we have a mutually agreed-upon choice)
d. Ignore them entirely. Pretend they don't exist.
e. March fearlessly into the future. Before they invented books, people used to memorize entire sagas, what would today be 600-page books. Humans have lost that ability. But who cares? Why do you need to remember anything you can look up in Google?

Labels: grammar, internet, learning theory, personal, siuc, writing

posted by tom @ 10:42 AM 0 comments

linguistic intelligence

The other day a group of Taiwanese students were having their last day of class; they were five in a class of fourteen, a sizable minority. They were nice; I liked them, yet I knew that most of them would never be back to the USA, or even study English very seriously again, chances are. So, I made a mini-lecture for them which I have written below, more or less, telling them what I believe and making a kind of listening exercise out of it. We had been talking about whether "linguistic intelligence" is actually a different kind of intelligence, as is "emotional intelligence" or "motorkinesthetic intelligence".

The question of whether linguistic intelligence is really different from the kinds of intelligence we already know and test, such as memory and physical dexterity, relies mostly on knowing exactly what kinds of skills language learning really involves, and it depends mostly on the question of how unique that process is, compared with the other things we learn and master. I believe that it is hard, but that the skills that it involves are skills we have and learn in other realms as well.

The process of speaking well, and pronouncing carefully, is a matter of mind-body coordination, more akin to learning to ride a bicycle or skateboard, than learning abstract physics or rocket science. In other words, the pronunciation of a new language, though confusing and enormously frustrating, is not that way because of abstract structure or something that is impossible to understand. It is more because the set of movements we need to make- in this case in our mouths, in coordination with what we hear- is totally unfamiliar to us, and goes against habits and movements we've already established. It is like skateboarding in several crucial ways: it involves coordination of several senses at once; the younger we are, the easier it is; and, when we miss, or do something wrong, a certain stinging pain sets in that gives the whole process a rather steep price.

You might protest with all of those analogies: skateboarding involves coordination of balance, sight, and physical movements, while pronunciation involves coordination of the tongue & mouth, with what one hears, and at the same time what one notices others hearing and responding to. Well, that's a kind of balance, a balance of one's attention, if nothing else.

What about the 3-5% of language learners who get perfect pronunciation? (This percentage is elusive; I don't know where this has been studied or quantified; I am not sure at all about the percentage; yet I am confident that, as we move about the world of language learning, we find this small group of people who just pick it up, learn it and master it as if sounding perfect were the only consideration in the world). I compare this group to the skateboarder who goes to the Olympics, or the piano player who goes on to become a concert pianist. We can all master the skill to some degree; we can all learn a minimum of what's necessary, at great price, to make the right sounds and get by. But only a small percentage of us cares enough to follow through all the way on the sound angle of it, to truly perfect what we produce, so that others cannot tell we are not native. It is to me a kind of musical intelligence, similar to wanting to hear a violin play exactly the right note.

A new grammar is extremely confusing and frustrating to a learner, but again, it's not because it's rocket science, or abstract physics. Quite the contrary; a grammar is made by the masses, like a traffic jam, with each individual actor doing what is best for him or her, and collectively creating a difficult but moving system that will take you where you want to go. In this sense grammar is confusing because you may not know why things are the way they are, yet you still know you have to do what others are doing in order to get anywhere. A new grammar is enormously frustrating, and to feel that we can only sense how much we love traffic in our own big cities, much less one where we really don't know the rules.

This brings me to my last point. Memory and motivation are by far the two biggest considerations or factors in language learning. But the third is a sense of cultural flexibility. It is hard to describe this except to say that, at various points, you have to separate yourself from what you picked up from your culture; see what is cultural about the new language and the new situation, and adopt it without questioning or worrying about why. To explain this point, I told a story of standing in a threshold in Asia, worrying about taking my shoes off in a local family's living room. Taking shoes off inside is a custom in Asia, but makes many westerners, including myself, uncomfortable. This is partly because my socks sometimes have holes in them, but also just because it feels rather personal. So, I was standing in this doorway, feeling uncomfortable, when along come these men carrying a piano, and walking right through the doorway. One man stopped and removed his shoes right in front of me, effortlessly, while still holding the piano. I was stunned. I thought, well, one gets used to this. After a point one just does it, and doesn't even think about it.

(end of lecture)

Later, I went over some of the points with the class. They were very interested, but in general found it hard to grasp the analogies that I had presented, and in fact, I was not so comfortable with all of them myself, on review. But, I put them down here, for the sake of record, because I think relating the skills we must develop in order to learn a language, to skills we have developed for other things, helps us to normalize the process and realize that it's within our grasp. I don't really believe that successful language learners live in a class of their own, as Michael Jordan does, by the way, or Einstein. Nor do I believe that we are somehow born with a mysterious skill that doesn't really get used anywhere else, or have any crossover with the rest of life. On the contrary, any part of it that you can explain using other things we already do, is one more thing that people can use behavioral machinery to function successfully in different groups. The key is behavioral: we watch, we practice, we do the best we can, and we're capable of doing it in different groups, in different places.

Having said that, I wished them godspeed, a safe trip back to Taiwan, a happy life for all.

Labels: grammar, language, learning theory, self-organized systems, sla

posted by tom @ 3:44 AM 0 comments

grammar technology

A few years back Spell-check snuck up on us, and I was quick to point out that all the consequences of this were not good. It was not that I was opposed to Spell-check, as some people accused me of being; it was more that I felt that such innovations arrive; we adopt them; we don't question what we've lost in the process; they become a staple and necessity of our existence; we can't imagine what we'd do without them; why would anyone learn how to spell when a machine can do it for you?

You follow where I'm going with this; the same is obviously happening with Grammar-check. And, it's not that I'm concerned that a whole population of Americans, or international students, will lose the ability to think about grammar, or even the feeling that they might need to, in the rush to get where they're going. Yes, a good machine might leave a grammar teacher in the dust; it could conceivably correct every error, or at least give the students enough good choices to correct every error on their own.

I'm more concerned with some of the more subtle ramifications of the thorough integration of a machine into the working systems of the majority of writers in the country. For example, with Spell-check, we can now observe certain patterns: errors of there/their/they're seem to be more common, since Spell-check can't catch them, but since it catches all errors of non-words, we see none of those. If the mediocre speller slips through the cracks, the machine at the end of his/her fingers is making that harder to discern; we must now spot the lazy references, the unclarity of thought, and are no longer able to rely on sloppy spelling as a first indicator of inexperience or careless craft. For international students, many of whom are clear thinkers, but poor grammarians, it's a different picture. Spell-check gives them an array of choices; if they are deliberate and careful, they can make the right ones. Occasionally they make the wrong ones. As an example of this, I once had a student who wanted to talk about the fate of the crocodile; he spelled fate as fait, and Spell-check pressured him to change that to faith. To me, as the writing teacher, I had to work backwards from faith, and try to figure out what he was talking about; my job would have been easier had he simply left the misspelled fait in the slot.

I call this (for lack of a better term) the woods advice principle. When lost, don't pick a random direction to walk; just sit still and wait. This advice is based on the principle that you'll be harder to find if you wander off in a random direction, than if you had sat still where fate had put you to begin with.

We (writing teachers) can all come up with examples where students in effect did this; they gave us a word that gave us a chuckle, but in fact was harder to decipher than the simple misspelling would have been.

Now here comes the research question. Assuming that grammar-checkers are as pervasive, or becoming as pervasive, as spell-checkers were, say five years ago when I wrote the story, "Faith of the Crocodile." Assuming that virtually all of our students have one, probably at the computer of their choice, at the one they write their papers on, if not the one in the CESL lab, or the LMC, or the laptop they so weightlessly hook up to use wireless and print. Assuming this grammar-check routinely catches all their Subject-verb mismatches, so that we no longer see those; we still get mistakes, but they are mostly of a different kind, a kind that grammar-check cannot catch as easily.

But, does the lost-in-the-woods principle apply here? Are there cases where it is actually more difficult to interpret what a student means, by virtue of grammar-check having beat us to the pencil, and pushed the student down the wrong road? I'll guarantee that this principle applies. I'll guarantee that there are systematic differences in the writing that we read these days, as compared to what we read even a few years ago. I'll guarantee this because I'm a writing teacher, not because I could tell you, off hand, what they are. But I intend to find out.

I do not aim to remove grammar-checker from our computers; on the contrary. If they are part of modern life (like spell-check, and the computer itself), it is more to the point to teach students how to use them effectively (then, as I do with Spell-check, assume that they have it and understand it, and mark them down if they don't...if it's a working part of every writer's production system, then it becomes a ubiquitous part of the modern world, something to be understood, managed, talked about, mastered, etc. Yet, to my knowlege, people don't talk about it much. How do teachers know what this machine is doing under their noses? Why would a student bring up the fact that he/she has a hidden tech ally in the war to be smooth and fluent? This ally, presumably, will stay with him/her right through my class and into the next. This ally, presumably, has a mind of its own, and may not always give the perfect advice. This ally, therefore, must be managed, along with the keyboard, the printer, fonts, ink, paper, and a stapler.

Exactly my point. I don't know how my own car works, really, but if I can explain why my stack of papers looks different from the one I had a few years back, I'll be happy.

Labels: grammar, internet, learning theory, tesol, writing

posted by tom @ 6:38 PM 1 comments

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

posted by tom @ 7:30 PM 0 comments

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

posted by tom @ 10:51 AM 0 comments