Easter in Famalicão...plans and learning opportunities

The square in a corner of which rests the Pensão Ferreira-quietly

Sitting on my bed in the Pensão Ferreira in Vila Nova de Famalicão on Easter Sunday. I can hear the sounds of Easter in a part of the world where such things are taken seriously.

I got up early this morning, found an open café for breakfast and wandered in the sun for a leisurely hour or two. Those few who were about were dressed for the day. Ladies in finery, gents in suits and there were fireworks going off in the distance here and there, bells ringing periodically, springtime flowers blooming-a pretty picture indeed.

I stayed with my friend Anabela and her family the first night here and stayed up late to listen and to chat. The school where she is secretary had had some problems with a teacher and she told of the where’s and why fors at length but what interested me was her reference to the dreaded Headway (which the school is obviously using) and how the offending teacher had managed to ‘get through’ 4 units of this book in a mere two weeks. Quite a feat.

I remembered how much in control the director of the school was. Unit X to be done by such the end of month Y etc. ‘Because’, they say, ‘that’s what the students want’. And so when I arrived back at the pensão after my walk and read Scot Thurnbury’s latest posting on his A-Z of ELT, I immediately picked up on a quotation he made. The approach of the director of the school here is typical in that it reflects the view that  language learning is the incremental accumulation of discrete-items of linguistic knowledge.

The quotation was from Diane Larsen-Freeman and here it is , "learning linguistic items is not a linear process - learners do not master one item and then move on to another. In fact, the learning curve for a single item is not linear either. The curve is filled with peaks and valleys, progress and backslidings"  (Larsen-Freeman, D. 1997. Chaos/Complexity science and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics 18) The posting was about planning and what exactly is learned in a lesson.Thought provoking and very much to the point. I recommend that you look at the post and I'll go a wandering again. 

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/a-is-for-aims/ 

Learning English online-away from the crowds

I couldn't have been further away from the online world today. A day trip to the Lake District with my brother and the kids. Climbed a few mountains and sat by a waterfall at the far reaches of an ancient glacial valley. Far from the world. But days like this are made possible because I now work from home. 

The reasons learning and teaching languages online are becoming ever more popular are many. Not least the convenience of not having to travel to and from lessons at unsuitable times of day. All you need to do to learn a new language, or improve at one you are already familiar with, is to turn on your computer in the comfort of your own home or office for an hour or two every few days and have access to high-quality, face-to-face learning experiences with a trained expert based anywhere in the world. 


Learning online does not necessarily mean the loss of the of pace and dynamics of the traditional face-to-face classroom and in fact can enhance the best features of this type of learning. 








Additionally, learners who are less extrovert can benefit from the relatively anonymous nature of the internet and our work to date has shown that well-structured online lessons maintain attention in a way that is not possible in a traditional classroom environment. 


Learners on our pilot scheme regularly reported being entirely focused on the language or text being used and on communicating the meanings they were trying to express. The high-pressure demands of real time communication were lessened by the security they felt in being in a space where not only they were not afraid to make errors, but that they felt comfortable with these being on view. This represents an important development.


People can feel at home (or even be at home!), feel secure and 100% focused on their learning. No transport problems and no distractions. 
Tony Winn
Kirkstone Pass
Cumbria

An English Country Churchyard-and Mr. Jackson's Socks

THE EPITAPH. Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.	120
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,	125
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose,)
The bosom of his Father and his God.

From Gray's Elegy written in an English country churchyard. The churchyard that reminded me of this poem was at Kirkby Lonsdale. Just over the border between Lancashire and Cumbria on the Cumbrian side by about a mile. This pristine,  or perhaps twee on another less perfect day, small town far from the dark classroom at Kenton Comprehensive   in brutal Newcastle, where as a youth I heard these lines  for the first time. Read to us as always by Mr. Jackson a man who had a gift. He made English literature come alive to urchins like myself. Something for which I have  felt grateful  ever since. The favorite teacher of lore, he wore odd-socks, failed to notice the presence of extra boys in the class and was fond of wearing his wife's spectacles, by accident or design we'll never know. Despite, or more likely because of, his endearing eccentricities and the fact that he came from a place beyond  ( descended on us from his Oxbridge world, went to university with Spender and was on a nodding acquaintance with Auden no less among others)  he transmitted his values without having to broadcast them. The gentle socialism of his generation, the veneration of  well-constructed and living verse, the making of his life a philanthropic exercise in bringing education to the masses he didn't understand. And make no mistake. He had absolutely no idea of what life was like for us on the estate- not the kind inhabited by Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I am not being trite heres, and in these days dominated by the fleeting and the shallow simply making  a statement like this about value may sound distinctly odd. In the cluttered world we inhabit such value is said to have been swallowed up whole and seems as but a wisp against the huge clouds of information without depth that rush past us from dawn till dusk. No time for anything, they say. Bloody fools they are. People don't have the same attention span they had. Silly nonsense. The day they can't take the time to appreciate the sonnets that glow, the words that connect us to our past, the odd sock wearers of the world is the day we all die a little. And that simply cannot come. You see, a few of us had time for it. We were taken down into mysterious caverns where Alph the sacred river ran, we could feel the presence of the the miller's wife when read aloud from a tattered Chaucer for the umpteenth time. Totally convincing and enthralling. And he took the time to make those who would listen understand. We loved our Shakespeare and our  war poets and our Lawrence. (A man from a place like our own. grandparents'). We learned to question the placing of wreaths on the war memorial in town. We learned that the map with filled with pink on the classroom wall was half the story. We learnt that old men in the street  with shell-shock he been to a world beyond out imagining. And returned. They had been the lucky ones. And I spoke of him to the retired parson and his wife Marcus and myself had met having lunch in the quintessential pub in the quintessential English village on the quintessentially English spring day. Daffodils and all. And this parson had bemoaned the youthful clergy's inability to produce strong arguments at will to counter the evil Dawkins and crew. (I kept silent of course on that one.) But he too was of the same generation and unworldly in the best sense. We talked of logic and language and how it was taught in his day. Languages in the plural-as they say.  He told us of how each morning all of the boys (and all boys they were) had been required to write on the blackboard a word a day as the register was being called . In Latin, Greek and Sanskrit! The huge board having been divided for this very purpose. Before long they had acquired a respectable vocabulary of each. The idea, he said. of another inspirational teacher.  He asked if I could help him with understanding this internet thing. Happy to do what I can-but far from understanding it, I'm beginning to get a clear picture of why my original suspicions of its worth...it's real worth...were well-founded. The pair of them  like characters from Austen or Trollope themselves, except that the lady wife of the good parson was reading the latter on a Kindle before our two hour chat. What Mr. Jackson would have made of the Kindle, I really don't know. Or maybe I do. A gentle, tolerant soul like his would have been glad to see Trollope was being read no matter how. We wandered through the churchyard conversation flowing before going our separate ways. Marcus and myself to Ruskin's View and to the Devil's Bridge and they to their cottage. Oh yes. Quite the English day. And thanks to Mr. Jackson, I saw it as a pleasure to be taken and one to remember for a long time to come. http://www.kirkbylonsdale.co.uk/home/

SLA-errors & correction

The term SLA, or Second Language Acquisition, refers to the study of how second or additional languages are acquired. Researchers look not only at classroom settings. Their work involves studying how people pick up languages when, for example, settling in another country. They are interested in the way learners acquire their target language (the mental and environmental factors that affect the success or otherwise of acquisition), and in the language itself, as seen at different stages in the process of learning.

A relatively new field of study, the discipline emerged from what was known as the CA or Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. a core belief of which is that when conflict occurs between L1 and L2 rules, then predictable errors would occur. This meant that there were identifiable characteristic errors exhibited by speakers of any particular language or language family. The implication being that these could be readily identified and then be corrected. This was believed to assist learners to produce the 'correct' version in future.

These ideas fitted well with behaviourism, a psychological theory of learning very influential in the 1940s and 50s. According to this view, the student who answers ‘Yes, we do’ to the question ‘Do we need any milk?’ and gets an approving look from the teacher will, after a suitable number of repititions of this process, have learnt this item.  Learning as a process of habit formation has had an enormous influence in our profession, on both classroom practice and on course design, most clearly seen in audio-lingualism, learners were ‘drilled’ and errors were seen as something to be avoided. They might, after all, lead to bad habits!

In the mid 60s cognitive psychologists began to challenge the view that language learning is no different from any other kind of stimulus-response reinforcement cycle.

The linguist Noam Chomsky, in particular, claimed that human beings are biologically pre-programmed for language acquisition. He cited as evidence for this the fact the the language environment is one of false starts, incomplete sentences and generally confusing information. Not only this, evidence suggested that correction of language errors is at best inconsistent and often non-existent for children learning their first language. An even more telling criticism was that our remarkable ability to invent novel and highly complex sentences simply cannot be accounted for by habit formation.

One major innatist theory which had lasting effect on practice is to be found in the work of Stephen Krashen who argued that ALL that was necessary for acquisition to take place was comprehensible input. Krashen believed that there was a fundamental difference between acquisition and learning. Acquisition being the non-conscious internalization of rules and patterns, and learning the conscious attending to rules, usually in the formal setting of the classroom. For Krashen input must contain grammatical forms which are one step ahead of the learner’s current interlanguage (see below). This would mean that no overt teaching would be necessary since the learner’s own internal acquisition processes would be set in action to integrate new items.

Another important development in the 60s came with the realisation that errors were in fact a part of the learning process itself. Studies of learners’ errors revealed that there were systematic errors not predicted by the CA hypothesis and that learners seemed to move through a series of stages on their way to achieving competence in their target language. Just like child language, learner language was claimed to be a dynamic system in its own right. This came to be known as the interlanguage (the term itself coined by Larry Selinker in 1972). This developing and rule governed system was shown to have characteristics of the learner’s own language, the second language and other general characteristics common to most, if not all, interlanguages.

Cognitive psychologists see the elements of language like the building blocks used to construct an edifice. Learners need to pay attention to features of the target language in order to build up knowledge which they can eventually, after practice (note that here this does not imply the mechanical practice associated with approaches based on behaviourist theories of learning) they can call on automatically. This in turn frees up mental space for them to attend to new features of the language.

According to Richard Schmidt, the role of noticing in this is crucial to the learning process. (Like the cognitive psychologists, Schmidt made no distinction between learning and acquisition). Almost everything we know about a language is at first noticed consciously. So we should probably be shifting our focus, and the learner's attention, from what the learner can't do towards features or patterns of the language as it actually is. Schmidt's ideas are neatly extended by Jane Willis, in her ‘Framework for Task Based Learning’ where she claims that there are four conditions for successful language acquisition. (Willis pp11-13) These are exposure to a rich variety of language as it is used in the real world, in both spoken and written forms, use of language to achieve concrete ends, that is, in the exchange of meaning, and motivation, either intrinsic or extrinsic, to ‘process and use’ the language. These three are essential-or in logical terms-'necessary conditions'. Bringing up the rear is instruction. This is deemed merely desirable-or, in conjunction with the other three, a .'sufficient condition.

SLA is an area about which many teachers are often indifferent, and it is certainly true that many fail to see the relevance of much research to their daily teaching lives. But it is in the interests of professionals to know something about how to provide the best conditions in which acquisition can take place.  The case of the use or non-use of overt correction is a case in point. Perhaps more focus on the external linguistic world of text and pattern and lesson on chastisement under the guise of a necessary evil will get learners much further.

References

P Lightbown & N Spada          How Languages are Learned              OUP                2000

J Willis                                     A Framework for Task Based Learning               Longman     2000

S Thornbury                            An A-Z of ELT                                      MacMillan       2006

D Nunan                                  ‘Second Language Acquisition’

In The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

CUP                  2001

R Schmidt                                ‘The role of consciousness in second language learning’

                                                                                    Applied Linguistics 11:17-46

Lancaster

I arrived back in grey Lancashire yesterday afternoon. Sim picked me up from John Lennon airport  and after a quick drive up the M6 there I was in Lancaster. Tired after working in the Algarve sun on Andy's acre of land. clearing the brush and moving concrete blocks from one space to another. Loads of wildlife inside the holes in the blocks. A snake we thought a viper, a dozen lizards of various kinds, a wasp nest and insects aplenty. Spring happening. Sporting Clube de Portugal baseball cap necessary for protection against the sun and I still caught it on my face. Nice. Not the hat-I'd borrowed that.


A different season here. Cool and cloudy. The people grim looking. The big difference I notice every time is the predominance of the written word everywhere you look. Public information-or misinformation. Do this-don't do that. Labels complex and ubiquitous. Marketing everywhere you look. From the plane onwards. Boundless oceans of the written word. Is this what sophistication means? 

But then the upside. Straight down to Lancaster's public library this morning and I came away with a pile of reading material for the next week. And useful stuff too. All of it related to the upcoming work. And that, after all, is why I'm here. Time for action and putting the sunglasses away for a while. Sadly, no vipers or 'vespas' to fascinate. Mother's garden to look after and that will have to do. All in good time. We need, at times, to step back to look forward. 

Early Spring in the Algarve

Got down here yesterday after leaving Picoas and getting a taxi to Oriente. Sat and did some work on bringing together different approaches to provide an answer. A combination of TBL and a lexical approach with an eye to concordance information and the grammar and lexis of spoken English.

Still finishing off the last part while I sit in somebody else's Algarvian mansion with swimming pool, duck pond and tennis courts. It's isolated out here.

Memories. It's all very fresh.