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
correction revisited
Leverett, T. (2009, Mar.).
Red ink and the OK Corral, written for
Error correction frontier: The good, the bad and the ugly (Discussion, Writing IS,TESOL 2009, Denver CO USA). Available https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1JCPRiIt2yBGSGCMdwDTbaalPipTvGw1fw3JD52L7DYk
Leverett, T. (2009).
Red ink and the mud-wrestler’s grasp. Available: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1zpEfLQpYIdR2b682ggi0D9DUUTq5OZR6VLc6thAt2xw.
These two, when I went looking for them, were hard to find. I'd written them, and put them on SIU's web; when SIU took down its web, I put them on Google docs, but I went to find them the other day and Google made me log in. That, and the fact that even typing one title into Google elicited
nothing, and now I'm pretty sure they're too hard to find.
One thing I think that happens is that Google gets tired of dead links and gets a little too aggressive about wiping them out. So that, since these titles were associated with dead links,
all links with these titles were suspect and pretty soon there are
no links to the articles themselves. But the other question involves google-docs itself. Do you really have to log in to read them? If so I can see how the free web now has
no links. And I'd like to correct it, for what it's worth. The idea was for people to
be able to read them. Not that they do.
This brings me to the topic itself. It is a running argument in my present workplace. We have heard the standard line (Truscott's) that making grammatical correction is not going to improve their English as much as just purely reading more. Many of us believe that it is an important step in the process, whether you see improvement directly (the day after) or not; we know from watching people learn, whether they have learned anything or not, whether we've wasted our time, whether they needed to hear it or not. One thing I find interesting is that in a lab setting you get to watch individual people better and because you know them, you actually see if things did in fact work. You learn better ways of saying things, better ways of handling situations. I'm enjoying that; it's interesting. It is, by nature, a different crowd, and therefore a different question from the one dealt with in the articles above. But similar logic applies: We have to decide what's the best use of our time. And it's an open question, still.
Labels: bib, grammar, sla
Atkinson, Dwight (2011, Mar. 2). Adaptive intelligence and a sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition. Linguistics Luncheon, Student Center, Southern Illinois University.
I mention this first because it's amazing to some degree that there is still a Linguistics Luncheon; that the tradition continues; that we have a respected second language acquisitionist here; that many people attended. I won't dwell on this but I think it's good to have a record
somewhere that linguistics is still alive at SIUC.
Then, as for what he said, I'll review. There was a cognitive revolution. It was anti-behaviorist. It considered mind as number one, and its proponents became interested in the idea of mind as computer. The sociocognitive approach combines social and cognitive approaches, and rejects the idea that cognitive processes are locked away in an isolated prison of the mind. We are adaptive by nature, good at frisbee but bad at math (abstract math, anyway). We have an extremely complex environment for several reasons; we learn as we adapt and the two are bound together. There is the
inseparability principle and the
alignment principle in which we have many tools of alignment including eye gaze, gesture, facial expression, etc.; language fits into this alignment process and has to be seen as part of it.
There was an active question-answer session, the first question being about our present alignment toward online communication and how this would alter our view of language and language learning. Dr. Atkinson brought up the chat-bots who carry on entire but disjointed conversations with each other and how that alters our view of "conversation" and "alignment." There were more but my cell phone rang, and I was called away on a personal situation. But thank you Dr. Atkinson! I hope I haven't too seriously misrepresented what you said; I realize that my notes are somewhat simplistic. It can be recaptured in more formal form, as necessary.
Labels: bib, chomsky, linguistics, siuc, sla
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
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
fluency first
Last May, I borrowed and read an old book from the communicative heyday called
At the Point of Need, and wrote a small review of it at the link. It's worth rereading books from the old days because you forget where we've been and what was special about those ways of looking at things. In this case what has stayed in my mind is something that I didn't even write down, at the time I was recording my impressions of Marie Wilson-Nelson's book. One thing that stood out to me was that after a while, in her tutoring center, she didn't distinguish assignments that much; you had to write what you had to write; and furthermore, students were all on similar paths in terms of grammatical and organizational acquisition; they were on their way to fluency, some further along the path than others. But what the real obstacles were, to her students' and tutors' success, were dependence, low self-esteem, apathy, belief that it didn't matter, that one wouldn't need writing, or that one couldn't learn it. Of these,
dependence was by far the most crippling. Our system teaches dependence, she said, when it should be teaching independence.
Partly in response to this, I started doing fluency exercises in my
high-level class. I have lots of pedagogical justification for them; my students write endless paragraphs about whole numbers of interesting topics, which make fascinating reading and provide a window into their minds. But a lot of my reasons come directly from Wilson. I make no demands on their structure; my only demand is that they write quickly (and that they be in class to do it). I give them a choice about what they want to write about: three prompts, choose one. My assistant corrects the grammar and they publish them in good time.
The line-editing is a chore, but my assistant (and I) enjoy it. My justification for line-editing every word comes from an old teaching philosophy known as Community Learning (?)- where the idea was to just lower the pressure, help people communicate in real contexts, and gently change everything that is necessary to change in order to meet that purpose. I believe in this although I respect teachers who maintain that it's just not necessary or even possible to do this for all work. In any case, a second rationale is that the process of uploading, editing, finding things on blogs, tagging one's name, etc. are all in a sense a kind of fluency- technological fluency, fluency in the medium of writing. And a third possibly more important justification is that in the process of getting the community all in one place, looking at one set of paragraphs, which happen to speak to them and be very interesting, a lot of reading at a very appropriate level is taking place.
In the course of doing these fluency exercises several things become apparent. One is that very few of them are really afraid of the medium itself, although they have all kinds of interesting ways of dealing with things that in some cases I would have never imagined. I find out, for example, how many of them do double-space (on paper) entirely by hand, thus making a format that looks like a tornado hit a railroad track, when they put it on the blog. My point is this- that what they used to call "strategic competence" (Del Hymes 1971 ??), the mastery of the oral environment and the strategies to find what one needed to survive in it- that was missing in the people who had studied arcane (in time/on time) grammar points for fifteen years, but couldn't say "fine thank you" if you said "how are you?" -- is something that is not unique to the oral environment, but in fact equally applicable to the new media, such as blogs, chat, videocam, etc. This will be the basis of
a tesol presentation that I am working on and will give in April in New York City.
By the way my students also write full essays (click on their names in the template) and will eventually link to entire research papers on their own weblogs, with abstracts on the class weblogs. This is my pride and joy, hard to keep in mind, I must say, while I'm sweltering here, in a lab, giving a midterm, and grading a stack that is threatening to rise above the height of a university-grade stapler.
More later...
Labels: cesl, chat, internet, learning theory, sla, writing
in a third kind of way
I've been thinking a bit about teaching writing and how I do it, partly because I've been accepted at TESOL for a
demonstration that is primarily about teaching writing in both paper and online worlds simultaneously. This of course leads me to compare the two, mull them over, make little comments in class about paper versions ending up in the recycling bin, while "blog posts are forever," at least until you delete them.
But that's not what this post is about. I want to reflect on the process of teaching writing in general, all aspects of it, and one aspect has been weighing on me a little. Part of being a writing teacher (two classes, all day) is basically reading lots of essays in all your free time; reading essays sometimes until I fall asleep at night, my mind shuts off. My students come up to me trained to make their points in order and say First, Second, and Third...In fact I get a little sick of this, and wish they would just have the confidence in their writing to
know that they are able to communicate the order of their points without those words at the top of each paragraph. One term I actually said that to my class, and had the feeling that going against what a previous teacher had told them, was not going over all that well. Well, i said, what works at the lower levels, might not always serve you perfectly all the way through your writing journey. Even this didn't go over so well. Students, I could tell by their faces, felt like saying, well, is it right or is it wrong? Because if it's wrong I've just lost my respect for one of my teachers...
So now, I just tolerate it. It's ok. Let them use First, Second, and Third until they've seen enough essays without them to know, with confidence, that they could leave those tricks in their bags. Let them use a successful writing strategy, clear, blunt, orderly, until they genuinely, easily, effortlessly feel they can live without it. And until then, I may just have to read upwards of a hundred each First, Second, and Thirds.
But here's where it gets interesting. Some students actually become aware of the little -ly endings. Firstly, Secondly, and Thirdly are actually words. I can't imagine using them myself. I find myself thinking, why would anyone need to say, in a second kind of way? Not me. I read these with even more firmly clenched teeth-on-lips. Finally I snapped the other day, and said to a student: Why would you want to say, in a second kind of way? What's up with this?
It so happens that there are some people, who, when given the option of making something a little fancier, a little longer, a little more complicated, will take it, just on principle. And that's interesting. I think they may have a very rudimentary conception of the difference between second and secondly (I may not be correct myself)- but, they have chosen this option for a reason entirely within their own head. They surely didn't learn it from me!
It could be a grammatical issue- the feeling that an adverb goes here, so one should use the adverbial form- not knowing that
second will work just as well. This would actually be giving them some credit- it could come from hours of TOEFL study and learning that words like
fortunately/fortunate appear on the TOEFL at the beginning of the sentence, and the adverb is right. Possible?
Whatever it is, it provides a window into their learning/acquisition path. And, I suppose, into my twisted mind and waning patience, given an endless stack of essays...
Labels: cesl, sla, vocabulary, writing
traffic report
My theory of language is that it is similar to traffic: it is fundamentally thousands, or millions, of people, acting on the basis of their own perceptions, at any moment doing what they see as the easiest or best way of getting from point A to point B. And that this vast number of people essentially create the system, just as the people of a city create traffic patterns, which have a life of their own but which are fundamentally controlled by the individual decisions of the little people, acting in their own best interests.
And that, when you set off from point A to point B, whether it be in language or in your car, your decisions are made scientifically, though based upon your own perception. They are measurable and predictable to some degree; you do them for reasons; your reasoning is strongly influenced by others, to the point that you may occasionally follow some car, in an attempt to find an alternate route through a neighborhood. In large cities, people talk to each other about alternate routes; they listen to traffic reports; they fine-tune perceptions of the quality of different routes at different times of day. In the same way, fluent language learners develop alternate ways of saying things, and choose them carefully at appropriate times, but the novice language learner has fewer choices at his/her disposal, and may choose poorly, or choose correctly but for misguided reasons. In any case the behaviors of large numbers of people are of great interest and great consequence, though they are based entirely on the perceptions of individuals, which can in the end be manipulated or altered. They are not controlled by a central authority, though perception of the law and its requirements is usually part of the equation. For example, running stop signs would definitely make a ride through the neighborhoods faster, but it would also add considerable stress to the driver's morning, and it's debatable whether it is actually "fear of a ticket" that leads the driver to stop at stop signs, or more likely the norm: We generally stop at stop signs; it's safer, easier, and that's what everyone expects- so, it's more likely to result in successful and speedy passage...
Just outside of New York City they put a stop sign in front of the Lincoln Tunnel, not because there was another road feeding into it, but basically because human behavior is predictable and predictably erratic without it. People can and do manipulate these systems from above, hoping to alter human perceptions, and improve the flow of traffic or information. Nevertheless, people are guided by their own motivations; communication, like driving in traffic, is done for a higher purpose, without regard to what it does to influence the language (or traffic pattern) as a living, growing organism. This I learned the summer I lived in Chicago (1994), listening to the radio announcer, as he mentioned the Edens, the Dan Ryan, the Hillside Strangler, inbound on the Eisenhower. A novice, half the time I gave up and took the el. But, looking back, I remember the lessons I learned as if they were yesterday. I hear the traffic report, sometimes, especially if I'm caught by a train, which is our town's version of a traffic jam. Your life is, according to your perception. Yet you make life, as others perceive it, as you sit there, counting boxcars, and sipping American coffee.
Labels: language, learning theory, self-organized systems, sla
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
