Beyond the symbolic violence dome of the native speaker teacher

An article titled How to end native speaker privilege was posted recently on the always readable site Language on the Move. It includes an intriguing historical account of teachers of Persian in India and England in the 18th and 19th centuries. It also includes a framing of the native and non-native (English) speaker (teacher) which is problematic.

The first problem is the othering of native speaker teachers – who are implicitly depicted as a homogenous, static, monolithic entity, an undifferentiated mass of native speaker teachers.

The second problem is seen in the symbolic violence of phrasing such as “Subordinating native speakers” and that the injustices suffered by non-native speaker teachers can be resolved by “replacing” native speaker teachers with non-native speaker teachers.

Research in France by Martine Derivry-Plard and Claire Griffin reveals a picture of native speaker teachers and non-native speaker teachers in a more differentiated light. And it explores the question of going beyond the widespread symbolic violence that is due to a monolingual-monocultural world view.

Symbolic violence is a way to impose social order by social agents. The social agents act to position themselves favorably in a field. In the present case the field is the foreign language teaching field which is part of the language teaching field which in turn is part of the linguistic field of teaching which itself forms part of the linguistic field.

It is certainly the case that in the foreign language teaching field of English non-native speaker teachers are subject to various forms of symbolic violence. The Language on the Move article notes in passing that certain aspects of this violence are being addressed such as legal prohibitions on discriminatory job adverts and growing discussions of complementary strengths of non-native and native speaker teachers. Derivry-Plard and Griffin (2017) report on symbolic violence present in the experiences of native (mainly English) speaker teachers working in France.

In the first study 19 native English speaking teachers (NESTs) and 19 non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs) teaching a BTS course (a 2 year course after the baccalaureate) are interviewed. The interviews revealed that NNESTs criticized the teaching skills of their native colleagues, that is NESTs were seen more as speakers than as teachers of English:
“some had not the project of teaching English …I have seen native English-speaking teachers who did not do the job … but, it is just because they are not teachers, they turned up in a classroom … they delivered what they could, they thought that speaking English for two hours is enough! … but this is not having a conversation, speaking about this or that for an hour ? …And some do not know French enough, which is a problem .. Some do not teach!” (Derivry-Plard & Griffin, 2017:39)

Conversely the NNESTs are denied as speakers of English by their native colleagues and consequently NNEST’s cannot be good teachers of English:
“well, it’s second language, it’s second-hand! … in this schoolbook written by French, there are a few mistakes … they make mistakes, with English vowels, their accent is not as good … Sometimes, her accent was awful and there were English teachers I could barely understand …She made so many mistakes .. and some pupils were as good as she was in English! …She could not give a precise meaning of a word with all the connotations… even if the dictionary gives that meaning, it has no longer that meaning…at a certain point, a non native teacher will be embarrassed, this is for sure because, at one point, he/she will apply a grammar rule that we no longer use …they will never get all the shades of meaning ...” (Derivry-Plard & Griffin, 2017:39)

These attitudes reflect the two teaching legitimacies that have developed in the foreign language (FL) teaching field of English in France, since the 19th century, from the spaces of the public education system (institutional) and the private educational system (non-institutional).
1. The professional legitimacy of non-native teachers in institutional spaces was based on the assumption that they were the best teachers as they went through the same learning process as their pupils, so they would be better able to explain the target language to learners sharing the same mother tongue. This is the legitimacy of the FL teacher as a learning model.
2. The professional legitimacy of native teachers in non-institutional spaces was based on the opposite assumption that they were the best teachers because they taught their own “mother tongue” and that they knew more about it. This is the legitimacy of the FL teachers as a language-culture model. (Derivry-Plard & Griffin, 2017:34)

For some time these two legitimacies were not challenged, but with the globalization and marketization of education the boundaries between institutional and non-institutional are breaking down and with it the increase in symbolic violence on non-native and native speaker teachers.

In the second, doctoral study, Claire Griffen interviewed 24 native speaker teachers. 21 were native English speakers from the UK and the Republic of Ireland and 3 were native speakers of Italian, Greek and German who worked in the secondary education sector. These teachers experiences were grouped and analysed into various themes. For example: experiences of resentment at native speakers being able to take the national competitive exams; encounters that NEST’s are not already qualified even if they have in fact more qualifications than their non-native colleagues –
“sometimes people assume that you’re only an English teacher because you’re English. “Well what else is she going to do, she’s married? What else is she going to do? She’s got children. What else can she do? She can speak English” (Derivry-Plard & Griffin, 2017:43);

NESTs are forever operating in the mode of a “learner” as they were not initially socialized in the education system as children; experiencing symbolic violence such as “but you never had to learn English like us, you just have to open your mouth” (Derivry-Plard & Griffin, 2017:46).

I remember when I started teaching in France a student was impressed by what he described as an Oxbridge accent. His subsequent question of where I had studied made me embarrassed to reveal to not having been educated at either Oxford or Cambridge. Although to be fair to the student he did not seem to show any disappointment at my un-elite education. Also, back then, when new English friends and acquaintances found out I teach English as a foreign language they would joke that there would be a generation of French people speaking English with a Welsh accent. Though that joke has not been heard for many a year.

Having described some of the issues faced by native English speaker teachers in France there is a danger that we move from talking about who is the best teacher to who is the most discriminated teacher (Derivry-Plard, 2018). How then do we go beyond the symbolic violence? The embedded fields given earlier i.e. linguistic field < linguistic field of teaching < language teaching field < foreign language teaching field can help us to see the multilingual multicultural paradigm of today. The linguistic field of teaching involves all subject matter as language is the medium used to deliver the subjects. i.e. all teachers are to some extent language teachers (this is very evident in say CLIL contexts). Next the field of language teaching can be divided into first language, second language and foreign languages. In this way the embedded model of fields takes into account language diversity, lingua cultures and cultural repertoires.

A French teacher of English in a recent twitter chat on native and non-native speaker issues commented jokingly on teaching French teenagers :
“To tell the truth, I feel like speaking their native language doesn’t help either…. someone speaking the “teenager” language would be better off!!” [https://twitter.com/Pascalune12/status/1001905158719229959]

Can we say here that the appearance of “teenager language” in the humor is a glossed acknowledgement of the pluricultural landscape of teaching? The native speaker paradox derives from a monolingual and monocultural assumption that is largely due to the centuries old drive to nation states which culminated in the 19th century. The multilingual, pluricultural paradigm encompases the monolingual-monocultural one. While in the old monolingual paradigm native speakers are included and non-native speakers are excluded in the multilingual world the native speaker is not excluded as a way to right wrongs but is part of the plurilingual continuum.

As Derivry-Plard puts it:
“There are no longer any dichotomies but continua for defining languages, cultures, speakers, and teachers as social actors. In other words, the monolingual paradigm is restrictive and exclusive, whereas the multilingual paradigm is comprehensive and inclusive and accounts for a broader perspective and better understanding of the linguistic field and the linguistic markets.” (Derivry-Plard, 2018:143)

She does not deny that embracing this is a difficult task, however, ignoring the necessity of this challenge is unethical and counterproductive.

Thanks for reading.

References

Derivry-Plard, M. & Griffin, C. (2017). Beyond Symbolic Violence in ELT in France. In Agudo, J. D. D. M. (Ed.) Native and Non-native Teachers in English Language Classrooms: Professional Challenges and Teacher Education (Vol. 26) (pp. 33-51). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

Derivry-Plard, M. (2018). A Multilingual Paradigm in Language Education: What It Means for Language Teachers. In Houghton, S. A. & Hashimoto, K. (Eds.) Towards Post-Native-Speakerism (pp. 131-148). Springer, Singapore.

Update:

Some other thoughts on this topic, Native speakerism and Hegel echoing Robert Brandom.

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Overloading on cognitive load theory in SLA

This is a response to a John Sweller article in 2017 on applying cognitive load theory to language teaching.

Geary and the interface hypothesis

I want to first discuss cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist David Geary’s, 2007,  two types of knowledge since Sweller invokes Geary to assert a critical division or discontinuity between child first language acquisition and adult second language acquisition.

Geary’s first type of knowledge (or abilities/domains/cognition, Geary uses these terms interchangeably) has evolved over human evolutionary time and is labelled primary knowledge. Such knowledge (such as your first language) is said to be fast and implicit. Geary’s second type of knowledge develops due to cultural reasons and is slower and explicit. Geary uses reading as an example of secondary type of knowledge. I have dropped the label biological as I think it is unhelpful for the present discussion.

We could see a parallel here between Geary’s division and the conscious/unconscious or explicit/implicit division discussed in second language acquisition (SLA). The following quotes of Geary:

“I focus on primary abilities because these are the foundation for the construction of secondary abilities through formal education.” Geary, 2007:3
“Academic learning involves the modification of primary abilities…” Geary, 2007:5
“I assume that primary knowledge and abilities provide the foundation for academic learning.” Geary, 2007:6

seem to indicate when applied to language that there is some sort of interface between conscious learning of language and its unconscious acquisition.

So does such an interface exist? If so how does it work? Absent answers to such questions we should accept the default position that there is no interface, that explicit conscious language knowledge is separate from implicit unconscious knowledge (John Truscott, 2015).

Discontinuities and the nature of language

Cognitive scientists such as Susan Carey (2009) class language as a core cognitive activity (core cognition differs from sensory-perceptual systems and theoretical conceptual knowledge) along with object, number, and agent cognition. And there is (largely) a continuity of such core cognitions from childhood to adulthood. Discontinuities happen with say object knowledge and physics knowledge – infants know that objects are solid yet when older the theory of physics tells them that objects are not really solid. Here the physics is “incommensurate” with object cognition and this contributes to the difficulty for students of studying physics at school. Physics is at the same time more expressively powerful than object cognition.

It is unclear from Geary what kind of discontinuity is being described or even if there is one (as the labels primary and secondary seem to point to). From what I can gather Geary seems to think that primary knowledge can help with secondary knowledge (seen as the interface position in SLA) and so the two may not be so conflictual after all. I may of course be mistaken in my reading here of Geary.

The unclarity from Geary of what kind of discontinuity he means may explain the logical leap that Sweller seems to have made, namely, adult second language acquisition is secondary knowledge and incommensurate with the child’s first language acquisition. Let’s look at the passage where he indicates this:

“Learning a second language as an adult provides an example of secondary knowledge acquisition as do most of the topics covered in educational institutions. We invented education to deal with biologically secondary information. Learning to listen to and speak a second language as an adult requires conscious effort on the part of the learner and explicit instruction on the part of instructors. Little will be learned solely by immersion. Furthermore, since learning to read and write are biologically secondary because we have not evolved to acquire these skills, they also require conscious effort by learners and explicit teaching by instructors, irrespective of whether we are dealing with a native or second language.”

Sweller seems to be mixing up literacy skills with (adult) language acquisition. And further seems to switch between the two – compare “learning to listen to and speak a second language as an adult requires conscious effort” and “learning to read and write are biologically secondary”. Also he assumes that because languages are taught in schools that means they are like other school subjects i.e. language is like developing conceptual knowledge in physics, maths, chemistry etc.

This assumption that language is like conceptual knowledge is very evident in this 1998 article by Graham Cooper and his use of a “foreign language” example to explain an aspect of cognitive load theory:

Graham Cooper “foreign language” and element interactivity

Most language teachers will find this view of language very peculiar. For example, the assumption that because a vocab item may be a single word it can be classed as a low element interaction. This ignores the semantics of single words for a start. More generally, as seen in the screenshot, there is an assumption that language is an object that can be transmitted to learners from the environment much like concepts in a subject like maths.

Ignoring SLA

I want to now comment on some more paragraphs in the Tesol Ontario article. Let’s start with the first paragraph:

“Most second language teaching recommendations place a considerable emphasis on “naturalistic” procedures such as immersion within a second language environment. Immersion means exposing learners to the second language in many of their daily activities, including other educational activities ostensibly unrelated to learning the second language.”

I guess by “naturalistic” procedures Sweller may be alluding to the Natural approach by Krashen and Terrell? If so he has badly understood what that means and is badly out of date with the debate. Badly understood since the natural approach does not entail immersion and badly out of date by ignoring developments such as task based learning which arguably “includes other educational activities ostensibly unrelated to the second language”.

“Information-store principle. In order to function, we must store immeasurably large amounts of information in long-term memory. The difference between people who are more as opposed to less competent in any area including competence in a second language is heavily determined by the amount of knowledge held in long-term memory (Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Nandagopal & Ericsson, 2012).”

This may, with caveats, apply to vocabulary learning or pragmatics, but how applicable is it to other language systems such as syntax or phonology. Further the studies quoted are based on novice and experts in non-language domains like chess.

“In second language learning, this means teachers should explicitly present the grammar and vocabulary of the second language rather than expecting learners to induce the information themselves (see Kirschner et al., 2006, for alternative formulations that emphasise implicit learning) as occurs when dealing with a biologically primary task such as learning a native language as a child.”

Sweller is characterizing child acquisition as “expecting learners to induce the information”. What is meant by induction here? Does he mean usage based notions of induction where statistical information in the environment is used by the child to learn a language? If so then usage folks say the same process also happens in adult language learning and further that process is not explicit in the sense used by Sweller.

“Requiring learners to go to a separate dictionary imposes an additional cognitive load. Learners should not be required to search for needed information.”

How does this claim compare with say the involvement load hypothesis of Batia Laufer and Jan Hulstijn from 2001, where “search” is one of the cognitive components and more “search” e.g. consulting a dictionary is said to lead to better vocabulary retention? (as an aside – involvement load hypothesis was influenced by the levels of processing theory, a general critique of cognitive load theory is why should more load lead to learning problems? Contrast this to levels of processing which implies deeper (more load?) processing would lead to better performance).

“Another recommendation is to avoid redundancy. Unnecessary information frequently is processed with learners only finding after the event that they did not need to process the additional information in order to learn.”

Considering the reported benefits for novice language learners of elaborated input (not translations but “redundancy and clearer signaling of thematic structure in the form of examples, paraphrases and repetition of original information, and synonyms and definitions of low-frequency words” – Sun-Young Oh, 2001), what evidence is there that such elaborated input is not as beneficial for more expert language learners?

To conclude, note that the summary report from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (2017) which ELT Research Bites covered, describes several criticisms of cognitive load theory in general. My discussion attempted to critique the application of this theory to language acquisition. This critique is only very cursory but it is I think enough to raise serious doubts about the extent of Sweller’s awareness of SLA research and hence to take any applications very critically. This does not preclude future applications of cognitive load theory in language teaching and certainly, notwithstanding the general critiques, it is applicable in the domain of instructional design where it originated.

Thanks for reading.

References:

Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts. Oxford University Press.

Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. (August, 2017). Cognitive load theory: Research that teachers really need to understand. Downloaded from https://www.cese.nsw.gov.au/publications-filter/cognitive-load-theory-research-that-teachers-really-need-to-understand.

Cooper, G. (December 1998). Research into Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design at UNSW. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20191020161006/http://dwb4.unl.edu/Diss/Cooper/UNSW.htm

Geary, D. C. (2007). Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 1–99). Greenwich: Information Age. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242124970_Conceptual_Foundations_for_an_Evolutionary_Educational_Psychology

Laufer, B., & Hulstijn, J. (2001). Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language: The construct of task-induced involvement. Applied linguistics, 22(1), 1-26.

OH, S. Y. (2001). Two types of input modification and EFL reading comprehension: Simplification versus elaboration. Tesol Quarterly, 35(1), 69-96.

Sweller, J. (August 2017). Cognitive load theory and teaching English as a second language to adult learners. Contact Magazine, 43(2), 5-9. Retrieved from http://contact.teslontario.org/cognitive-load-theory-esl/.

Truscott, J. (2015). Consciousness and second language learning. Multilingual Matters.

Related reading:

Geary and the orthodox view of writing/reading

#IATEFL2017 – A very partial commentary

The following is my very partial take of the first presenter in Outside in: bringing new technology perspectives to ELT ¹. I play the role of the Muppet critics Statler and Waldorf, as this urge seems to come across me often when reading about technology in language learning. So do take it with that spirit in mind.

Ooh an image on this blog not seen that for a while, if ever

Derek, Duncan, Donald Clark asserts:
“Actually many many more people learn language outside the context of a classroom and formal courses than ever do in classrooms.”

Fair enough this seems a truism, as people do spend more time outside of school or formal learning and so potentially learn more outside of formal context. Donald Clark continues with:

“In this country we have tens of thousands of kids learning German, Spanish, Italian and French and barely any of them can come out and even ask for a cup of coffee in the target country after 8 years of sitting in a classroom.”

Assuming language classes are indeed offered for 8 years at say 2 hours a week for 38 weeks that’s 608 hours  which would arguably be enough for a low aptitude student to reach a low intermediate level of proficiency and be able to order a cup of coffee ².

So what’s going on!? The horror!

Clark adds:
“But generally, the reason why many more people are learning English outside the classroom is because of technology. Wherever I go, I travel all over the world, I meet young people who constantly say two or three things to me when I say how did you learn your English. They say Youtube, number 1, they say music number 2, they say movies and increasingly young people around the world have access to every single video and movie by torrenting and not paying for it at all.”

When I met my wife some 13 years ago,  who is from France, and I asked her how she learned English, she mentioned listening to Beatles songs on top of working hard in English classes in school. So arguably young people today do similarly but has the increased accessibility of interesting content via technology led to more English learning? A claim to be investigated and not taken at face value.

The next bit of presentational style is:
“AI is the new UI.”

Clark goes on to point out many commercial services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon use AI.

“AI is the guiding hand in almost everything you do online except learning. So when you go on a VLE or Moodle it’s like stepping back into the 1990s a little bit because that is the 1990s actually. That’s where it comes from.”

Clark seems very tickled by this.

The laugh seems to be on him since if we take Google as an example when they started all their technology was from 1990’s AI work ³.

Moving on Clark says:
“Look at the things that’s happening in AI here. NLP, speech to text, text to speech all of this is entirely relevant to what you do for a living. AI is starting to tackle some serious issues around the teaching and learning of languages. So you cannot ignore this. It’s huge and it already is huge.”

One could say if we take NLP that it is has been “relevant” to teachers since the 1980s. Maybe Clark meant commercially driven relevancy? What serious issues is AI starting to tackle in the teaching and learning of languages? Is it serious issues such as lack of teachers which is being tackled by say video conferencing in projects like Plan Ceibal? Probably not what Clark is pushing. Side note the “huge” remark somehow reminded me of the “massive” remark by a well loved ELT bod ⁴.

Clark goes on to talk about bots in various enterprises:
“Bots are everywhere. Duolingo is an AI driven system out of Carnegie Mellon, it’s worth half a billion dollars, it’s got a 150 million people on it. If you don’t think AI is coming at your market, think again. It’s been there for a while. And of course they’ve added bots onto this as well.”

Adding without any seemingly obvious sign of irony, referring to bots:

“Don’t get too carried away though they are incredibly difficult things to make and not particularly effective if you get it wrong.”

Clark continues:

“Alexa..I have an immersive language system which is absolutely free sitting in my house”

He forgets to mention – sitting in your house hovering up your personal information, mind you he does add later it costs 150 “bucks” which is cheap apparently (Does he mean cheap compared to teachers?)

He talks about a “cool” maths app which is all very nice but not relevant to learning languages, a very different learning challenge.

He modestly mentions his company and a company he consults for. He mentions assessment via an hilarious meme.

““If only I had a few more papers to grade” said no teacher ever”

That is very funny that is.

One of his final comments would have made a much more interesting start to this talk:
“We have a chance as educators to change the world for the good…”

If Clark had started by describing how he thinks educators can change the world for the good via technology the talk would have certainly resonated. A direction that Professor Yvonne Rogers took well by beginning her talk with the vision of promoting collaborative learning, curiosity and playfulness. Methinks Prof Rogers has had more experience presenting to teachers than to investors.

A final comment when asked a question from the audience “Will teachers be replaced by robots?” Clark suggested that the “first wave” of replacements was seen with “Google and librarians”.

“The number of librarians in the world has dropped and it’s not a neo-liberal plot. People don’t go to libraries any longer and that’s the truth of the matter”.

If we can take US trends as similar to world trends then:
“If libraries receive more public funds, more people use them. And if governments invest less in its libraries (as they have since 2009), fewer people visit—though the drop in visits from disinvestment isn’t as strong as the rise from investment would be.” ⁵

So maybe it is a neo-liberal plot after all, and that’s the truth of the matter.

Thanks for reading.

Notes:

1. IATEFL2017 Outside in: bringing new technology perspectives to ELT

2. [http://www.languagetesting.com/how-long-does-it-take]

3. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence]

4.Massive video

5. [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/americans-like-their-libraries-but-they-use-them-less-and-less-pew/477336/]

#IATEFL2017 – Stopping the buck

The interviews with Andy Hockley ¹ and Marek Kiczkowiak ² discuss the issue of native speakerism –

“a pervasive ideology within ELT, characterized by the belief that ‘native-speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology” ³.

Marek Kiczkowiak who campaigns on this via TeflEquity Advocates ⁴ responded to the interviewer’s question of the reception of his pre-conference talk to academic managers and directors of studies (DOS’s):

“Most of those DOS’s that came here today are very supportive of non-native speakers, they are interested in equal opportunities but they do find that very often that their hands are tied. Because sometimes the way agents sell the courses to the students who then come to the UK to their school is very different to what their school offers. The school offers a very diverse staffroom but the way the agents have sold the course is that they will have the class with your typical white western looking native speaker.” (my emphasis)

I was surprised that Marek accepted what he has called in the past the TEFL blame game ⁵ – native speakerism is due to market demand, what students and parents want. If we look at the issue of agents we could point out that a lot of the major schools have an agent procedure. So these big schools could apply positive pressure to what their agents sell. Similarly the British Council who accredit language schools can also play a big part, since agents often only work with BC accredited schools.

The systemic bias that is evident in the current setup of ELT has to be examined alongside the individual bias. Some glimpses of this systemic or structural bias are seen in the interview with Andy Hockley. Initially individual biases are mentioned, for example:

“hire ethically, don’t have biases”
“people who come to this conference are not among the most biased”
“the majority of those who come to the conference are converted let’s call it”
“in smaller schools, in smaller places there is this unconscious bias that native speakers are better than non-native speakers”

Andy Hockley then mentions his research on academic managers where “increasingly educational organizations are merging, are becoming bigger and more corporate”. Managers complain “they have to do so much corporate number stuff, kpi’s and all these things, they don’t have time to focus on education”.

KPIs are organizational metrics called key performance indicators, which have been critiqued as performativity i.e. “indicators of quality that are taken as definitions of quality”. ⁶ Andy makes this point when he says “people read data with their own biases in the first place so the data is not really relevant” and “I don’t think, at least so far, that the data is telling us much about what is going on in the classroom”.

Here the organizational reasons, the managers who talked to Andy gave, show the nature of the challenge for TEFL Equity Advocates and other groups such as TaWSIG ⁷ to organize for fairer and more equitable working conditions.

So let’s stop passing the buck and start hitting it.

References:

1. IATEFL 2017 Andy Hockley interview:

2. IATEFL 2017 Marek Kiczkowiak interview:

3. Holliday, A. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT journal, 60(4), 385-387. [https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article/60/4/385/499514/Native-speakerism]

4. TEFL Equity Advocates [https://teflreflections.wordpress.com/]

5. The TEFL blame game continued [https://teflreflections.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/the-tefl-blame-game-continued/]

6. Biesta, G. (2015). Education, Measurement and the Professions: Reclaiming a space for democratic professionality in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1-16. [http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/11141]

7. TaWSIG [http://teachersasworkers.org]

C’est compliqué: TESOL France 2016, Fractals and things

TESOL France Colloquium 2016 starts this Friday 19 November and no doubt the star attraction is linguist Diane Larsen-Freeman who will be doing a plenary and a Q&A session on the Saturday.

Her talk is titled “Patterns in Language: Why are they the way that they are?”

From her abstract:

Drawing on my contention that language is a complex, dynamic system, I will demonstrate that the shape of patterns in language are fractal.

Larsen-Freeman, 2016:15

The claim that language is a “complex, dynamic system” has been critiqued by Kevin Gregg (2010) and supported, albeit with important caveats, by William A Kretzschmar (2011) when both reviewed the book Complex systems and applied linguistics by Diane Larsen-Freeman and Lynne Cameron.

Gregg thinks it is false that language, when seen from a narrow viewpoint, as linguistic competence, is dynamical. Everyone learning their first language reaches a steady state and for second language learners there is also the state of fossilisation. He also argues that seeing language in more general terms as an entity in a complex dynamic system is incoherent as language is not a thing but rather an abstraction.

Possible question to Larsen-Freeman 1 – How are you demarcating language when applying dynamic systems theory (DST)?

Kretzschmar who has his own, more plausible, account of DST for speech or language in use, takes issue with Larson-Freeman-Cameron (LFC) for conflating complex systems  and chaotic systems. Chaotic systems cycle through a very large number of states whereas complex systems are on the edge between fixed states and chaos. This can be seen in the difference between Mandelbrot Koch Island fractals and Mandelbrot San Marco Dragon fractals. The former are well-ordered and are a simple collection of basic patterns which form self-similarly at different scales, whereas the latter goes through a series of many states, tracing a “long orbit of successive positions” (Kretzschmar, 2010).

Possible question to Larsen-Freeman 2 – What kind of fractals are you talking about?

Kretzschmar points out that Larson-Freeman’s study of individuals using DST breaks an assumption that complex systems needs numerous interacting elements. Apart from one example given by LFC which does seem to use a DST term appropriately Kretzschmar is highly critical of the general uses of terms from the DST field made by LFC.

I said earlier that in my (very) shallow reading of Kretzschmar I found his account of applying DST to speech much more plausible. One of the reasons is that he keeps with the linguistic tradition of Saussure’s notion of langue and parole, or Chomsky’s concept of competence and performance. He comments on the Five Graces Group which promotes DST in second language acquisition, of which prominent members include Larson-Freeman and Nick Ellis:

…the Five Graces Group is right to insist on usage as what builds a speaker’s cognitive sense of a language, but are not credible in their assertion of a direct connection between speech and grammar as a network of categories…Grammar…when it is defined as a network or hierarchy of categories or rules is something essentially different from the output of the complex system of speech, something only indirectly related to language in use.

Kretzschmar, 2015:91

Possible question to Larsen-Freeman 3 – How does your application of DST to language compare to Kretzschmar?

I hope attendees to the colloquium will find these three suggested questions of use. All errors and omissions mine. Do pop further questions in the comments.

For more info on the critical side have a read of https://criticalelt.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/larsen-freeman-lost-in-complexity-bullshit-baffles-brains/.

Edit: Thanks to Geoff Jordan for reminding me of another one of his essential posts a review of Larsen-Freeman’s talk at IATEFL 2016 https://criticalelt.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/larsen-freemans-iatefl-2016-plenary-shifting-metaphors-from-computer-input-to-ecological-affordances/

Enjoy the conference and thanks for reading.

References:

Gregg, K. R. (2010). Review article: Shallow draughts: Larsen-Freeman and Cameron on complexity. Second Language Research, 26(4), 549-560. DOI: 10.1177/0267658310366582

Kretzschmar, W. A. (2010). Language variation and complex systems. American speech, 85(3), 263-286. DOI: 10.1215/00031283-2010-016

Kretzschmar, W. A. (2011). Book Review: Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics. By Diane Larsen-Freeman & Lynne Cameron. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008. xi+ 287. ISBN 978-0-19-442244-4. Journal of English Linguistics, 39(1), 89-95. DOI: 10.1177/0075424210366194

Kretzschmar Jr, W. A. (2015). Language and complex systems. Cambridge University Press. https://books.google.fr/books?id=r5fwCAAAQBAJ&lpg=PR9&ots=jtFmWnsRQB&dq=Language%20and%20Complex%20Systems%20By%20William%20A.%20Kretzschmar%2C%20Jr&lr&pg=PA91#v=snippet&q=graces%20group%20is%20right&f=false

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2016). Patterns in Language: Why are they the way that they are? Paper presented at TESOL France Colloquium, Paris, France. Retrieved from http://www.tesol-france.org/uploaded_files/files/Full%20TF%20Colloquium%20Programme.pdf

Chomsky, he’s not the messiah, he’s a very misquoted linguist

Sean Wallis runs a great corpus linguistics blog. So I was intrigued as to a recent click bait post titled Why Chomsky was wrong about Corpus Linguistics. I thought initially he was going to go over the history that has been rightly critiqued by Jacqueline Léon in Claimed and Unclaimed Sources of Corpus Linguistics (pdf). In fact he uses an interview given by Chomsky in 2001. Further in developing his first point he takes as given Christina Behme’s assertion that Chomsky “acts now as if no data can challenge his own proposals”.

I think Wallis’ article about some major issues in corpus linguistics stands on its own well and does not need the Chomsky angle.

The part Behme quotes to the question What kind of empirical discovery would lead to the rejection of the strong minimalist thesis? is All the phenomena of language appear to refute it, she even emphasises the All!

I looked up the fuller quote she uses to make her claim about Chomsky dismissing any data that goes against his theory (AB & LR are Adriana Belletti, Luigi Rizzi):

AB&LR:: What kind of empirical discovery would lead to the rejection of the strong minimalist thesis?

NC: All the phenomena of language appear to refute it, just as the phenomena of the world appeared to refute the Copernican thesis. The question is whether it is a real refutation. At every stage of every science most phenomena seem to refute it. People talk about Popper’s concept of falsification as if it were a meaningful proposal to get rid of a theory: the scientist tries to find refuting evidence and if refuting evidence is found then the theory is given up. But nothing works like that. If researchers kept to those conditions, we wouldn’t have any theories at all, because every theory, down to basic physics, is refuted by tons of evidence, apparently. So, in this case, what would refute the strong minimalist thesis is anything you look at. The question is, as in all these cases, is there some other way of looking at the apparently refuting phenomena, so as to preserve or preferably enhance explanatory power, where parts of the phenomena fall into place and others turn out to be irrelevant, like most of the phenomena of the world, because they are just the results of the interactions of too many factors?

Chomsky (2002), On Nature and Language, pg. 124

Looking at it one can clearly see Chomsky is expounding on the nature of scientific enquiry not denying data to his own theories. This pattern of Chomsky critics misquoting him for their own polemic appears often. I was still surprised that this one was so blatant. I did leave a comment on the Behme post so will update this post in the event of a response.

Thanks for reading and remember, Chomsky, he’s not the…ah you get the point.

Update:

Christina Behme responds, I think she accepts she was misquoting (if it makes me happy). You can read responses and decide for yourself, do comment either here or there should you wish to.

References:

Chomsky, N. (2002). On Nature and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

TESOL France 2014 – thoughts, poster, handout and links

TESOL France 2014 flew by again over the weekend (14-16 November). This year I presented a poster on using PirateBox in class. I felt there was quite a strong interest in this and pleased that some may take up the challenge of using it. I know of one teacher in Germany,  paulw @josipa74, who has set up the open-wrt version on a portable router. Hoping to read about more take-ups in the future. The poster handouts went quickly and I had more which I had forgotten to replace!

I had an interesting question about the security of PirateBox for Android from one conference attendee, he was concerned with technically able students being able to look at other folders on his phone. It was a good question that I had not thought of it before. I guess any system is open to security holes, I should pose this question on the PirateBox forums. Oh and I won the poster prize competition (many thanks to Kevin Stein ‏@kevchanwow for great feedback on poster and Ela Wassel ‏@elawassell for letting me know via twitter as I could not make the closing sessions).

Stephen Krashen and Carole Read were plenary speakers. I caught Krashen’s non-plenary talk (see presentation 1 notes below) on the Friday where he amongst other things repeated his click-bait assertion that EAP teaching was a dead duck. What I found surprising is that he did not really angle his talk for a hall full of teachers who I assume wanted to know about pedagogy. There seemed to be a lot of headnodding and ELT amens and hallelujahs after certain assertions amongst the crowd. There were certain notable dissenters such as Hugh Dellar, for example.

By contrast Carole Read’s plenary on Saturday (see blog post below) was oriented to teaching concerns, in particular on teacher  development, and was harmless enough though there was some language that skirted on and even at one point referenced NuLP, Neurolinguistic Programming.

On the Friday I went to a talk on spoken discourse analysis by Carole Ann Robinson where she described using out of context language and asking her high level students to put back the context they thought was appropriate. Inevitably a lot of context will be culturally loaded and as a colleague pointed out with French students such tasks would have to be set up very carefully and would necessarily be limited by the French context. Nevertheless there were some good activities to consider using limited language as prompts.

On Saturday before lunch I attended a talk on the TOEIC exam by Miles Craven, which was good though I wished the presenter had spent more time on the examples he used in the book he was selling. Some of them I had not really considered and would have liked to have seen more details on it.

The talk I attended after lunch on Saturday on team teaching by Paul Wheal was very interesting from what I managed to gather as I had missed the first thirty minutes (blame the lunch). It was on how he taught and corrected English in parallel with a content expert who was delivering the subject matter. There was a nice video interview with the subject-matter expert exploring the benefits and challenges of team teaching.

The final talk I attended on the Sunday was a panel discussion and presentation of a national survey of working conditions of English teachers/trainers in France. The numbers seemed to back up what the audience already perceived as the grim present and future prospects for the industry here. I may do a separate post on this.

As ever I am very grateful to all the hardworking volunteers who make this conference possible, thank you!

For more reading on TESOL France 2014 check out some of the posts below by Fab Englishteacher ‏@fabenglishteach:

Review- Carol Read’s Plenary: Reflections on how to become a highly efficient teacher

Workshop Review -Esra Girgin Gümüstekin – Teach Empowered

Workshop Review : Sophie Handy – Top Tips For Teens

My TESOL FRANCE workshop –: L1 – How to avoid it and ways of using it in the language classroom.

Stephen Krashen has put up notes of his three talks:

Presentation 1: TESOL France – Compelling Comprehensible Input

Presentation 2: TESOL France – Animal language

Presentation 3: TESOL France – controversies

Judith Dubois @judyldubois has written about:

My Encounter with Stephen Krashen

Mark Hancock  @HancockMcDonald  ponders why some teachers like to hear about the demise of teaching:

Stephen Krashen at TESOL France

and reports on:

Carol Read at TESOL France

TESOL Times Magazine interview with Stephen Krashen

You should have the body!

Mark Hancock has a nice write-up of a talk given by Mike McCarthy on spoken English. The write-up concludes with an interesting metaphor of a corpus being a corpse, language that is no longer alive. It asks whether only using corpus examples is the best way of trying to improve a learner’s use of English.

Very few corpus folks would suggest only using corpus examples, and furthermore a lot of corpus work goes beyond the purely quantitative to also consider the teaching implications.

For example there is a great paper Listening for needles in haystacks: how lecturers introduce key terms by Ron Martinez, Svenja Adolphs, and Ronald Carter on the spoken language of academic lecturers.

They extracted lexical bundles from a spoken corpus of 1.7 million words and then went through those manually to keep only the pedagogically interesting ones. e.g. in other words (kept) vs er this is a (discarded).

Manual review of the list also showed them a hitherto under-emphasized aspect of spoken lectures – the introduction and definition of new terms.

Their analysis split these up into the more transparent but less frequent cues such as call and mean, e.g. …what theorists call.., …what do we mean by… and the less transparent but more frequent cues like basically and essentially e.g. …which are basically…, …so it’s essentially…

Further they also showed how complex the delivery of a lot of the definitions or concepts were i.e. there was a lot of rephrasing sometimes using the word or but many times using no signposting language and key definitions usually came at the end of a series of connected points (back-loading).

In addition they found that often lecturers did not explicitly refer to their power point slides which could make it difficult for students to pick out the key terms.

A corpus may be like a corpse but like on the crime show CSI there is an awful lot that dead bodies can reveal.

Habeas corpus, you should have the body! 🙂

Minimal evidence tweets?

A quick thought related to the recent attention paid to evidence in education e.g. ResearchED 2013. What would constitute the minimum evidence for you to consider tweeting/linking to an intervention claiming to improve or beat a traditional one?

How about this link titled Artificially Intelligent Textbook Helps Students Learn, Boosts Test Scores? Fairly threadbare on relevant info no? What about this New Scientist link to the same story? The intelligent textbook that helps students learn. More info on the treatment and control groups yet no info on say statistical significance, if groups randomly assigned or how blind the study was?

Then what do we find when we get to the company website January 2012 evaluation – <<result was not statistically significant>>.

What for you would be a minimal evidence tweet?

Re-booting educational conferences

The IATEFL conference 2012 is being held in Glasgow this year. I have never been to one of these conferences but what strikes me is the lecture dominated nature of the delivery. Some concession has been granted to the 21st century by the accompanying IATEFL conference online resources which include forum discussions and useful videos of the lecture sessions. But why not more practice based sessions?

If you agree that

Lecture is the lowest common denominator of learning

Chad – Classroots.org

then why do we stand for it in conferences which are supposed to promote our professional development?

Alternatives can be drawn from the world of games, web development and maker communities. Usually these events involve building code, or web page or whatever in a limited time frame using various constraints.

See this video from the Cut&Paste design battle:

Cut&Paste Global Champs 2010-11 from Cut&Paste on Vimeo.

In this battle they have 3 categories, for example in one of these categories participants have 15 mins to create a 2D design based on an assigned brief. They are provided with computers and software and are allowed to bring one pre-made asset.

Maybe a future IATEFL conference will host a Lesson Plan Jam where competing teachers have 15 mins to design a lesson plan using an assigned theme. Then they swap the lesson plans and have 15 mins to adapt the plan, the ‘jam’ in Lesson Plan Jam. The audience response along with a jury would be judges of the best plans?

There could be various categories such as Video-based lesson plan, Online-based lesson plan, Dogme lesson plan etc.

There could be participative sessions to improve or ‘hack’ current teaching practice and training, e.g. improve CELTA training by cutting down or out input parts as suggested by Scott Thornbury in a comment on a Willy Cordoso blog post?

Whether you agree or don’t agree that educational conferences have to set an example and change their format please do comment.

Update 1:

More riffing on this theme at We Can Flip More Than Classrooms by @cogdog and Flipping the conference by @audreywatters

Update 2:

Sharon Hartle (@hartle) warns us of Hannibal Lecturing in The silence of the audience and Naomi Epstein (@naomishema) wants participative debates in Is it possible to have output session at a conference?

Update 3:

A glimpse of what participant based edu conferences can look like by Roger Dupuy (@rogerdupuy) The Speaker-Less Session.

Update 4:

Willy Cardoso describes an open space session on professional development. And read this English Central Anti Conference Conference for more details on open space discussion outcomes shared by Tyson Seburn.