I'd like to open up a can of worms. I like cans of worms. Let me start with one of my favorite quotes by A.L. Becker:
“Our ‘picture’ of language is the single most important factor…in determining the way we choose to teach one.”
Overwhelmingly, for both the lay public and the vast majority of language teachers, the underlying picture of language is a machine-metaphor. Language is conceptualized as a largely autonomous factory consisting of "rules, procedures, and lexicon" locked away "in the skull" of an individual. Virtually ever L2 textbook in the world tacitly reinforces this picture. In my opinion, this is the picture of language reflected in the Spanish lesson that Jo Kay linked to.
Many Japanese learners of English were first introduced to English with the notoriously silly sentence "This is a pen." The blatant banality is accepted because it presents what is considered a "core" sentence structure Subject + Verb + (article) Object. This approach is not limited to Japan nor EFL. When I was studying Arabic in college, we were presented with the following two sentences (which I'm giving here in English): Who killed Fadhal's dead horse?" and "What color is the blind janitor's jacket?" I kid you not. The rational behind these pointless sentences was the grammatical structures to be extracted and explicated.
By the way, here's a story. A couple of years ago I was visiting the southern side of my island of Shikoku and came across a small antique shop. As I entered I heard an old women in the back exclaim (with some alarm): "Ara! zis-iz-a-peng ga kita!" (Oh my! A this-is-a-pen [person] is here!") .
In contrast to the machine metaphor are pictures that see language as a set of socially shared and oriented to "practices" and resources, inseparable from the dynamic lifeworlds we inhabit, and which in some sense only exist "out there" in the social space between interactants. Competence is always shared and co-constructed, never personally owned.
So what is YOUR picture of language and how might that picture be reflected in the learning activities you design for your students?
When Don and I used to work at the same Language Center in Muscat Oman, we perhaps attended the same language classes, which were taught by Haridi Selim, the Arabic language employee of the predominantly English dominated LC. Haridi used to give us lessons based on the picture described above. The main problem with this picture was that it was so mindless that it encouraged classmates to ask in English equally mindless questions about obscure grammar points, which were answered in English, so that there was very little Arabic exchanged in a class except for the mindless part.
ReplyDeleteMy solution was to form a group of like-minded colleagues who would agree to a simple rule, there was no English to be used in the classroom, ever, under any circumstances. Haridi did not have to prepare anything, his role was simply as informant (on the Arabic language). Sometimes I'd buy an Arabic newspaper and bring it to class in case we ran out of things to talk about. I put a cassette tape recorder on the table and recorded our conversations. I would replay these in the car, even on long trips into the desert, which my family hated :-). Another way that Don and I both learned was to make long hikes into the mountains where no one spoke English and talk to the people there over dates and coffee.
I described this picture more fully in this article the "Implications for Arabic language teaching" section of this chapter, Stevens, Vance. 2006. Learner strategies at the interface: Computer-assisted language learning meets computer-mediated communication. In Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century, Kassem Wahba, Zeinab Taha, and Liz England (Eds.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., http://www.erlbaum.com. The most updated pre-publication draft of my article from September 2005 is here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/cairo2004/hbalt-gvs05sep.htm.
I didn't take Haridi's classes but wish now I had. Instead I had two years of first year Arabic while at university. The first year was great taught by a professor with deep field knowledge of spoken (and of course) written Arabic. He had compiled the first dictionary of Chadian Arabic. He made the bold choice of teaching us a dialect (Khaliji, Gulf) rather than the MSA (Modern Standard Arabic, spoken "natively" by no Arab) which was and still is the normal starting point for most Arabic programs. The second year, another professor (from the Classics department) was assigned the class and he used a horrible old textbook that wouldn't have been out of place in the 1940s.
ReplyDeleteBut you know my deeper point is not the "method" but picture of language. Two teachers might employ completely opposite methodologies, e.g. explicit grammar instruction and communicative approach, yet they might still both hold THE SAME view on the nature of language, that of an autonomous system of rules in the mind of the individual learner. Pinker is just paraphrasing Chomsky's LAD (Language Acquisition Device) and Krashen was just channeling Pinker. All believed in some sort of "language instinct" that was somehow separate from how all other forms of human interaction is learned. In my SLA courses, I refer to this a the two-theory vs. one-theory debate. Chomsky, Pinker, Krashen, and others support the "two theories" position, i.e. that how we learn language, in particular, is distinct from how we learn everything else. In contrast, the more socially oriented theories of SLA, e.g. Socio-Cultural Theory, and Vygoskyan theory in general, argue that all learning is managed the same way. I support the 1-theory position. That is, I reject Pinker's "language instinct" but would instead talk about a "learning instinct."
ReplyDeleteI've had teachers insist on teaching this unspoken MSA because if you know that you can talk to anyone in the Arab world, kind of like learning Latin so you can travel in Europe. Also, they try not to complicate their teaching (though it complicates your learning) by insisting on writing everything in English transliteration. Until you can see the words in their original script, you will never understand their derivation and interrelationships so critical to forming your picture of that language.
ReplyDeleteWhen I studied Japanese at the U of Hawaii, we first learned Katakana (and then started noticing all the po-ru-no signs around Honolulu aimed at Japanese tourists) and of course hiragana, which all our materials were written in. Kanji was a bit of a stretch. Kedo zenbu de nihon go wasuremasita.
Another element here is that certain languages seem to be associated with certain styles of teaching. Russian is nearly always taught in fiercest grammar-translation mode, similar to Latin where the rigor of dealing with grammar is considered more the point than actually learning the language. Arabic often can't escape from cultural attitudes that see MSA as closer to the "pure" language of the Koran. In Spanish textbooks it seems that Juan and Jose are forever talking about going to the beach or a party. French students study high-culture in immersion, while German students are forever reading dry texts about Thomas Mann.
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