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6 useless things teachers do | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 25 of 40 16 July 2015 at 1:13am | IP Logged | ||
I don't want to discuss anything else, but just to clarify, I'm a linguist. Although technically that's not a teaching degree, many people I've studied with have gone on to teach English, German or linguistics. Without taking a separate teaching course, that is. And we do have plenty of other people with language-related degrees, such as Iversen, hrhenry, Cristina, Sprachprofi, Julie. And heck yes, s_allard too. Basically, if degrees matter to you, no need to label people as amateurs without asking. Also, never trust a thin cook ;) Edited by Serpent on 16 July 2015 at 1:14am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5057 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 26 of 40 16 July 2015 at 6:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Let me preface the following comments by saying I neither have a PhD nor am an expert on language education,
but I am a graduate student and therefore regularly interact with other scientists who study human behavior. This doesn't give me authority on language teaching, but maybe I can say something about how to deal with expertise, knowledge, and uncertainty. First, not everything an expert says is true. The things experts say come in a few varieties. Some are well- established knowns, such as the fact that DNA is wound up into chromosomes. Others are matters of current debate, like whether newborn infants have the ability to imitate facial actions. Then there's their own work, but that isn't relevant here. Experts are qualified to speak about well-established knowns, but so are teachers and really anyone who's knowledgeable about the subject. Matters of current debate are different. Outside of exceptional circumstances, expert status is usually necessary to be taken seriously when arguing for or against a position that's still debated among experts--at least, when your argument is toward the ultimate goal of transforming the debated position into an established known. Therefore, the main type of thing that experts are uniquely qualified to speak on is precisely one in which they cannot be sure they are right, and neither can you. That's because academic experts are mainly specialized in advancing our knowledge, not curating a body of existing knowledge. If you believe everything that experts say, you will quickly end up in contradictions, because different experts will take different sides in ongoing controversies. This leads some people to doubt scientific claims in general, but that's a mistake. We need to learn to distinguish well-established knowns from claims on still-open questions. Experts need to write in ways that allow people to distinguish the two. Non-experts really have little credibility constructing arguments against an expert's claims, but they can safely hold opposing views by finding other credible experts who interpret things differently, establishing that the claim is not a well-established known. Personal anecdotes serve little purpose here other than to illustrate an idea with an example. They are only evidence against statements of the form "X cannot happen," which are rarely used in the sciences of human behavior. Of course, real teaching is more subtle than our current scientific understanding of it, and there's a vast amount of room to talk about it without encroaching on established scientific fact. Just ask any experienced teacher. In this case, the relevant research mainly applies to language teaching in a classroom setting. In fact, there is hardly any research on independent language learning, so it's fair to discuss what might or might not generalize. Edited by robarb on 16 July 2015 at 6:29am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 27 of 40 16 July 2015 at 7:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I totally agree.
Anecdata is better than this kind of speculation: In view of the invalidity of these constructs, labelling students as visual, kinesthetic or other may lead them, especially the younger ones, to form a self-fulfilling prophecy that may ultimately be detrimental to their learning. Based on the false premise that just because oversimplified research hasn't proven oversimplified learning styles, the whole idea is invalid and we all have brains that work the same way and if some people are making progress, the teacher is doing it right and the rest are lazy. For me the self-fulfilling prophecy was "listening is difficult and everyone is bad at it, so we won't do much listening and you'll be bad at it too". Edited by Serpent on 16 July 2015 at 7:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 40 16 July 2015 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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One of the things that make research in language learning hard is that learning a language takes a lot of time and you have to do a lot of different things to reach the goal.
And which goal? How do you measure success? Last fall I looked through a number of research reports and abstracts as a preparation for my lecture on vocabulary learning in Novi Sad, and it struck me that most research teams assessed the effect of different actions with the help of multiple choice tests. These are cheap and easy to score, but the downside is that they only test passive recognition. It is much harder to ask people what the word in language X is for some notion in their base language than it is to give them four choices and ask them to mark the right one. And in those few projects where both evaluation methods were used it appeared that the learning rates with multiple choice tests lay way above the results found with open ended questions. It is hard not to suspect that some teams actually were happy to get those high scores with methods like listening which are 'politically correct', but if you want to speak or write a language there won't be a multiple choice sheet - so at least for active skills the 'hard' open ended questioning would be much more revealing. So basically I had to write off a fair amount of research as irrelevant. Another part of the research into this specific subject are flawed because it uses meaningless test items. But those of us who have studied languages know how important the meaning of words are, and how important it is to be able to see relationships between them. The kind of research into memorization which bases itself on meaningless syllables may show some very low level differences under different conditions, but it is hard to see its relevance for language learning. A general problem with research into language learning is that you need test subjects. But test subjects are hard to control - especially outside the test facilities. And trying to do it by eliminating the 'rebellious' ones would leave you with a group biased towards obedience and conformity. If you want to test the hypothesis about learner profiles then you would as a minimum need a setup with four groups, who differed 1) on their perceived profile AND 2) on the effects of teaching them in accordance with their preferences or squarely against them. And there is no such thing as placebo in language learning. If you are taught using silly songs or FSI style drills you'll know it! For ethical reasons it would be problematic to ask some test subjects to waste several months of learning time on activities they hate, but researchers ocasionally do so - for instance in medicinal tests, where one group gets a placebo and the other the medicine under scrutiny. But in language leaarning you know what you are being subjected to, and the researchers can't control what you do outside the laboratory. And then they end up with no results, which could tempt some teachers to apply their favorite learning style to all their pupils, whether they like it or not. Or even worse: they apply the philosophy of the school founder without even asking whether it is suitable in a concrete case or not. I once saw a research report where the question was whether there is such a thing as 'visual learners' (unfortunately I didn't write down where I saw it or who did it). Anyway, the method used was to show words witha translation to the control group, and to the supposedly visual learners the same words and the same translation, but also a picture chosen by the research team. This is obviously a flawed setup: one group had to learn 2 things, the other 3 things. However if an image is going to help you remember something then it must form some kind of unity with the word in the mind of the learner, and it is the process of forming that bond that makes the word stick in your memory. Pictures are marvellous when it comes to telling people certain informations, like what a tudor castle or a pyramide looks like, but everybody knows what a dog looks like - even supposed non-imaginative learners have a lot of images of dogs in their head. You don't need one picture more of a dog to remember the Romanian word "cîine" - what you (may) need is to connect the images you already have in your head to the new word, and for some learners that may be essential, for others less so, but it is darned difficult to force those who usually do it to avoid doing it. And almost as difficult to make sure that 'imageless' learners do it. It may not even be enough to show them a picture of some random dog. In short, learners are clearly different in the ways they normally study, but if you try to find out whether this just is a habit that can be changed or some fundamental personality trait you'll discover that the test persons react in unexpected ways: they may overperform if you let them try something new (no matter what), or they may hate you and the things you make them do, and then their eagerness to follow your directives to the letter will be somewhat limited. Especially in experiments that run over months or years. Edited by Iversen on 17 July 2015 at 9:56am 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mork the Fiddle Senior Member United States Joined 3967 days ago 86 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 29 of 40 17 July 2015 at 12:03am | IP Logged | ||
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1. On Experts
Here are OED definitions of the word expert*. I hid the quotations from the OED entry. 1. One who is expert or has gained skill from experience. Const. at, in, with. 1853—1882 2. a. One whose special knowledge or skill causes him to be regarded as an authority; a specialist. Also attrib., as in expert evidence, expert witness, etc. 1825—1890 b. In recent use esp. one skilled in the study of handwritings. 1858—1886 By definition #1 Serpent, emk, iverson and a number of other members of HTLAL are experts in language learning. By way of disclaimer and by comparison, I myself am decidedly not an expert in language learning, no matter how well I read French and Spanish. * Source: "expert, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 16 July 2015. 2. On Gianfranco Conti's Ph.D. Conti is a holder of a PhD in Education (Reading/Oxford) with a specialization in Cognitive Psychology/Applied Linguistics; an MA in TEFL (Reading) and one in English Literature (Bari), a PGCE in Modern Languages and Physical Education (Hull) as well as a first degree in English and French Lit ( Bari). Note that this information comes from Conti himself (https://www.blogger.com/profile/15028254257572194734), but I am going to say that on this ground Conti also is an expert in language learning. 3. On Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) Conti's remarks above do not give a complete picture of the efficacy of WCF. Here is a paper published in the International Journal of English Studies (IJES, 10 (2), 2010, pp. 47-77): “Written Corrective Feedback: Practioners' Perspectives,” by Norman W. Evans et al. of Brigham Young University. (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ936910.pdf) These researchers have dug into the matter a bit more deeply, and provide an evaluation of WCF not entirely consonant with Conti's. One of the conclusions the writers of this paper draw is, “In addition this study shows that current L2 writing teachers' pragmatism suggests that corrective feedback has an impact on what their learners achieve—that there is causation between WCF and greater linguistic accuracy.” If you are a language tutor or language teacher who provides written corrective feedback, don't give it up just on Gianfranco Conti's say-so. There are other “experts” out there who disagree with him. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 30 of 40 17 July 2015 at 9:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I won't say I don't consider him an expert, it's just that for me [even] the experience of someone like mick33 or YnEoS is more valuable because they're not limited to the English+Romance bubble. Of course Conti clearly knows more about, for example, reaching a high level. And it's fine to have a specialization, every expert does. My actual frustration is his seemingly blind trust in research, and that he doesn't seem to care how his experience is limited to extremely popular and prestigious languages. For me things like learning styles, corrections and resource recommendations are mostly beyond the scope of his expertise.
Speaking of that, one major flow of SLA research that's not been pointed out explicitly is its English focus. Studies generally focus on English learners or English native speakers struggling with their first foreign language. Success with foreign languages has been referenced here, and it's an excellent read, focusing on what actually works for good learners, how diverse they are, and how what works for one successful learner won't work for another. We need more of that. (And on a purely personal level I dislike the metaphor of the "language gym". I'm sick of this ever-present pressure to work out, track the calories and kms run etc, and I really don't want that to invade language learning) Edited by Serpent on 17 July 2015 at 9:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4663 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 31 of 40 17 July 2015 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, even as a software developer, one of the groups most into the whole "quantified self" movement (tons of my coworkers have those wristbands that track steps, heart rate, and calorie consumption), I have gotten a bit sick of this, too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4519 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 32 of 40 17 July 2015 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds just like the Super Challenge ... ever-present pressure to read, track the
pages and minutes spent etc ... it's too late, the invasion has already begun (my approach to strength training or fitness in general is about as chaotic as my language learning by the way) Edited by daegga on 17 July 2015 at 5:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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