Issues in ELT / Issues in SLA

October 28, 2012 by ddeubel

I haven’t written much about language recently but I’m definitely always thinking about it. It is itself a jailer, something I can’t get away from and like the adage goes “I am language”.

But been thinking about language as it relates to what we teachers do – teaching it. I think teachers both need to be aware of the issues surrounding the teaching aspect of their profession but at the same time, the issues surrounding how students learn a language. Lets call them the practical vs the theoretical ( the house (visible) and the foundation (invisible) ).

So here is a list with a few notes I made along the way, outlining off the top of my head, the main issues in English language teaching (the practical) and Second language acquisition (the theoretical). Please comment and add your own but I think this list will be helpful to a lot of beginning teachers and help them see the breadth of our profession.

Issues in ELT

1. Native speaking teachers vs Non-native speaking teachers - pay / power / role?

2. The backpacking teacher vs the certified teacher. Is accreditation needed/useful?

3. The role of technology. Problems. Eteaching boon or bane?. Teacher training – how?. Digital literacy.

4. Textbooks. Are they necessary? Are any materials necessary (Dogme)?

5. Edutainment. Do students learn through games, being entertained? How much is too much?

6. Edubusiness. Does the profit motive hurt / hinder student learning? Are there low cost / no cost alternatives?

7. Prof. Development. Does it always mean conferences/workshops? Online PLNs, sharing.

8. Education vs Applied Linguistics. Which orientation should drive the profession and be given importance? Following good pedagogical practices or the research driven findings of linguists?

9. Proficiency. What is a fluent speaker? Can a learner attain native fluency? How do we know what a student knows?

10. Methods. Is methodology important? Is there a magic bullet/pill? What works best?

Issues in SLA

1. Poverty of stimulus. How do we produce language in such unique ways (know and use grammar rules ) without very much input. What’s at work here?

2. Order of Acquisition. Does this apply to learning a second langauge? What are the stages of learning a second language – grammar / words? What are the differences between L1 and L2 learning? Interlanguage – does it exist?

3. Age. Critical period hypothesis. Are young learners better language learners or just different?

4. Cognitive Issues. How does the brain store and process language? How are the brain and language linked. Do we think in words? Can we feel language? How is memory related to a second language. Does the language we speak change the brain (Whorf)? What mechanisms drive acquisition? Innate vs learned behavior.

5. Identity and Culture. Do we become different when we speak another language? Culture. Is language culture specific – how? Is it important to save languages and have many languages spoken in the world?

6. Form vs Function / Input vs Output / Skills Focus vs Immersion

– do we learn a language best through an inductive nature or by deductive explanation and then application? Do we learn the rules informally or formally? Can be break up language into discrete skills/units to study or is it too messy an affair?

7. What is a word? What is the basis of meaning and upon which communication is built? Semiology – how do things have meanings and what is the relationship? Why can’t a wink be as good as a nudge?

8. Social factors. The affective filter. How do factors like intelligence, affluence/poverty, peer grouping, development, motivation affect learning? Are they critical? Personality – how does it effect learning a language (risk taking).

9. Aptitude. Why are some people better at learning languages? Why are females better? What factors drive this success – innate / learned?

10. Error correction. How? Should it be done at all? What makes a self correcting learner?

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy “Insights Into SLA”

Focal vs Tacit knowledge

January 21, 2011 by ddeubel

Technology. Everyone wants to learn it and everyone wants the “key” that might open up the door to these skills.

Truth is, there is no easy way! I’ve been mucking about and learning as I go – for a long time. And that’s what I love about technology and education. I can learn by riding my waves of motivation – surfing toward possibility. There is so much damn possibility! However, how best can you learn to get up on the surfboard and feel the power and freedom of that wave? How?

Well, most teachers learn by doing and trying and struggling. I do think there is an easier way – you can benefit from a course. However, IMHO and from my own experience being wrong – most technology courses are given in the wrong manner.

I was prompted to think about this after commenting on Jeremy Harmer’s blog post about technology and by default, his own efforts to learn an audio recording program. I commented that I thought despite how most training programs work – that an embedded approach is the best way to “teach” technology.

What do I mean? Well, as the above tweet so nicely relates, it is about making technology the servant, the means and not the king or product. Technology should be taught in the process of teaching other things – it should not be the focus. Programs are ill effective when they take the, “Let’s learn how to do subtitles” approach.

I’ve been there, I’ve done it and it effects little change in teachers. They get a nice little diploma, maybe a pay raise, maybe a confidence boost but that’s mostly it (except for those spark plugs and you don’t ever teach them – they’d learn even if exiled on the moon). Why do I think this direct, technology course approach is ineffective? Because we learn by doing but even more so with technology through “purposeful” doing.

One thinker extraordinaire is Michael Polyani (the lesser known of a family of thinkers and of many amazing Hungarian intellectuals of his era). I read him extensively while in university, especially his “Personal Knowledge“. To me, he is brilliant in his explanation and support of “tacit knowledge” over explicit or what he called, “focal knowledge”. As he famously said, “We can know more than we can tell.” This speaks volumes for both language trainers and teachers.

Focal or explicit knowledge (or Polyani would say, “knowing” for knowledge is never a static phenomena) is something we are directly attending to. We can count it and define it and share it. Tacit knowledge is an ability or skill to solve a problem based on one’s own problems and concerns. It is very difficult to show another person or “transfer”. Both have a place but some things (like skills, like technology) are not very well transferred by way of explicit knowing. You must learn it indirectly. [and please note, I'm massacring Polyani's subtle thought - he'd never so brutally divide these two ways of knowing...]

To explain by way of a good metaphor, let’s think of an apprentice. An apprentice might go to school but more often than not, he/she observes, tries, imitates, practices. They don’t follow strict steps or listen to someone tell them how to lathe a 3/8 inch pipe. They do it but most importantly, they do it as an actual, real and personal thing. Not just for the sake of learning….. They don’t think, “Wow, I’m learning how to lathe a pipe!” What they are thinking is, “this will work well and fit perfectly”.

It is kind of like looped feedback. You model the technology in use and teachers learn by seeing it in use as it should be and then using it not in and of its own sake but for an outcome that is non technology related. You see, we never use technology in order to use technology (or few of us do, maybe those unfortunates showing off their latest ipad while doing squat). We learn technology by using it as a means to something else.

Let me give a practical example. Take the usual course on “Moodle” . You go there and learn and practice tutorials on how everything works. Then maybe you do a final project to show how brilliantly you can “do” moodle. My way is completely different. You don’t take a course in moodle. You’d say take a course in curriculum development and learn moodle as you learn about curriculum development and develop your online syllabus. Two different animals. You learn tacitly. You make it personal.

In my own teacher training classes, I have got trainees using technology to produce learning outcomes that aren’t technology related. That’s the way to go. And of course, I got many teachers saying, I can’t do that! However, they always managed – LOL! And that’s how we learn, we struggle and we try but not in the name of technological competence but in the attempt to do something else, communicate something else. Technology is a means, not an end.

Let me list a few more examples of how this would work (and will work in my new TESOL certificate course).

I’d love to know what you others think about learning technology through a course which isn’t “about” technology? Also, shouldn’t we be hiring teacher trainers that are good with technology – that can model it in every day class instruction, so teachers can learn it indirectly, tacitly?

Insights about SLA …..

January 14, 2011 by ddeubel

I’ve recently been updating articles and resources on the TESOL Teacher Training page/course. One article that I read several years ago has always stood out for me. What do we know about learning and teaching second language – Implications for teaching. Written by Francis Mangubhai, it is somewhat technical but still can be read by teachers and gleamed for its intelligence. He sets out some things that he can be pretty sure of, after 25 or more years in the field.

I’ve listed his “insights” below but read the whole article for his own elaboration. Also, please vote here – I’d like to know your opinion on how acquisition happens. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making a few brief comments of my own about each insight. So today let’s start with the first –

1. Adults and adolescents can “acquire” a second language

This suggests the most valuable of all knowledge for teachers – that we don’t “learn” a language but rather “acquire” a language. It is through exposure, an environment of meaningful communication that we “get” language – not by memorization or conscious, ABC building.

Take the learning to drive metaphor. Yes, you can learn to drive in the sense that you can read a book about it, attend a lecture, memorize all the parts of the car and the rules of the road, pass a test. But can you just with that alone drive a car? Not a chance. You must observe (we call this input – and see Stephen Kraschen’s work for more elaboration) for many hours, drivers in action. Further, you then must actually drive a car (see Swain’s notion of Comprehensible Output). You can’t actually drive a car through just conscious learning. It has to come in the backdoor through productive practice. Same with language – language learning always comes in the back door and not the front door.

Why do students in foreign countries take so much longer to acquire English, despite all their hours of English classes? Mostly because unlike in an ESL setting, these EFL students don’t get the necessary amount of input. They don’t encounter English enough in the public realm, in the real, non-artificial , non-classroom world. They don’t have the opportunity to “acquire” English through unconscious learning. Of course they learn something, but never enough to actually say they can “drive a car” / “speak “X” language.

But with a proper environment, both adults and adolescents can acquire a second language, especially if give sufficient input (and children do actually need less exposure to language to acquire it). Extensive reading has been shown as one method to foster language input, social media (videos, radio, TV) is another. We as teachers have to learn to “speak” to the student’s need to learn language “implicitly” and realize our “subject” is not like so many others but one which involves “tacit” and personal knowledge and knowing — not facts, blocks and unmovable knowledge.

We might also think about how this might challenge the more “nativistic” views of language acquisition in L1 – such as Chomsky’s own notion of a “language acquisition device”. This LAD according to Chomsky, is hard wired in our brain and with input, we can sort it out and “acquire” language. But do we really need a part of our brain geared to language? Isn’t our brain already powerful enough? (and new “connectivist” theorists would say it is). Chomsky says that the “poverty of input” that a child gets suggests that we do have an LAD. I’m not so sure. We can’t just define language as words or what is spoken, but it is also very non verbal and most children don’t need a lot of verbal input to still start to create connections and organize language in their heads. I’m not so convinced that in our evolutionarily short span of time as “language makers” , we would have developed this “LAD”. So I’m going to sit on the fence.

But what I suggest this “insight” really says to every day teachers is that we should teach language through inductive and playful means. There should be an effort to “hide” the instruction and for students to be unaware they are really learning English. I”m still a big cheerleader of the “keep them talking” notion. The best teachers can step away and be the guide at the side, not the sage on a stage!

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Insights into Language acquisition and learning.

1. Adults and adolescents can “acquire” a second language

2. Learners need to focus on form also in order to develop a more complete grammatical repertoire in the second langauge.

3. The learner’s developing grammatical system, the interlanguage, is often characterized by the same systematic errors as made by a child learning that language as a first language.

4. There is a predictable sequence in second lang. acquisition; learners have to acquire certain structures first before they can acquire aothers as their interlanguage develops.

5. To become fluent in a language – one must practice it! (and get extensive input)

6. Knowing a language rule and being able to use it in communication or writing are two different things.

7. Isolated, explicit error correction is usually ineffective in SL learning.

8. In meaningful contexts, learners are able to comprehend much more than can be judged by their ability to produce accurately language of comparable complexity.

9. The different rate of learning observed in our students arises out of individual differences.

10. The “pour” into a vessel view of knowledge doesn’t work.

11. Teachers’ practical theories guide their behaviour in classrooms.