Language, Education, Technology

While updating my list of podcasts in the field of applied linguistics for my MATEFL studens, I ran into this neat resource from Steve McCarty, a Professor at Osaka Jogakuin College. One of the episodes in his podcast is a talk about child bilingualism by Fred Genesee, a renowned scholar in this area of inquiry.

In this talk, Genesee discusses two big questions: 1) Are bilingual children (assuming they are exposed to two languages from birth) first monolingual? and

The theory that bilingual children are first monolingual primarily comes from the evidence that children at the very early stage of their language acquisition (around one word stage) tend to code-mix a lot. This has led some scholars to conclude that the two distinctive languages the child is exposed to have not been differentiated in the mind of the child at this stage. The studies that Genesee and his colleagues carried out showed, however, that bilingual children do have separate linguistic systems in the brain, and one reason they code-mix is to fill in the lexical gaps when they talk to either of the caregivers (parents in their studies).

During my several months’ stay in Russia, I kept hearing about so many secondary schools purchasing smart boards, mostly through grants. I was puzzled at this smart board sway in Russian education. Why would a school decide to buy this expensive technology, if instead they could invest this money into a small computer lab, where students could work collaboratively on group projects and expand their computer literacy skills while learning the content? Instead of a smart board, why would the school not use the same money to also buy an LCD projector and a laptop that can be moved from one room to another if a teacher wants to demo something on the big screen to class.

I started questioning my own understanding of technology in education, until recently I came across an interview with Marc Prensky, an advocate of serious gaming, the one who came up with the popular dichotomy of “digital natives” vs “digital immigrants”. And he mentioned exactly the same thing that’s been bothering me all this time about smart boards. To paraphrase him, teachers should not be allowed to use smart boards. IT should be used by students to avoid the misuse of this technology.

Otherwise, why spend all this money on the technology that makes the teacher more important in class and reduces the role of the student?

This is a fascinating topic. With so much evidence that correction in writing doesn’t make much difference in language development, there’s only a handful of practitioners that would buy into the implications of these findings. John Truscott is a big name in error correction.

Here’s Truscott’s own words, “when students are corrected on a point for which they are not yet ready, the correction is not likely to have any value” (p. …). To continue his argument, it’s not only practical for teachers to figure out when it’s timely and when not to make correction. It’s not even clear to researchers how these developmental sequences are arranged. If these two are reconciled then we may be able to pitch our feedback more effectively. He also raised issues of pseudolearning – surface learning that disappears with time and a distinction between ability to state rules and ability to correct errors – two different things and the former is not indicative of the latter.

Children are often envied for their unique privilege to pick up language or even a few of them without any conscious effort. The second half of the 20th century has produced a host of language learning methods and approaches all in attempt to find the magic key to the door in our brain that leads to more efficient language development in adults (e.g., ALM, Total Physical Response, Silent Way, Communicative Language Teaching, Content-based instruction, the Natural Approach). Suggestopedia, perhaps, has gone the furthest to tap into the mysterious brain resources in this search. Then back in the 90-s, Jack Richards said that we were now in the post-methods era, which in a way came as a verdict that none of those methods alone were a panacea for L2 development. Decades have passed, and adults still have to spend hundreds of intensive hours of conscious engagement with the target language in order to achieve decent results. So what’s in store for us in the future of L2 pedagogy?

Everyone familiar with the language acquisition literature knows about the critical language learning hypothesis. Today, neuroscientists are providing the nitty gritty details about this hypothesis by studying the functions of the brain. Norman Doidge, a neuro-psychiatrist, in his best-selling book “The brain that changes itself” says  that the secret in effortless language acquisition among children consists in a number of factors. Babies due to the acute sensitivity of their brains pay attention to everything in their environment:

What is remarkable about the cortex in the critical period is that it is so plastic that its structure can be changed just by exposing it to new stimuli. That sensitivity allows babies and very young children in the critical period of language development to pick up new sounds and words effortlessly, simply by hearing their parents speak; mere exposure causes their brain maps to wire in the changes. After the critical period older children and adults can, of course, learn languages, but they really have to work to pay attention. (here is a link to a chapter from Doidge’s book published by someone online)

More specifically, a certain kind of protein, referred as BDNF, seems to be critical to this kind of complex brain wiring. When we learn a complex task that fires multiple neurons and forces them to wire together, the brain releases BDNF. During the critical period, BDNF also activates the nucleus basalis, which helps us remember things better. When most of the learning has been done in childhood, the amount of BDNF released in the brain increases, and it shuts down the system of active effortless learning in order to to achieve stability.

The nucleus basalis can be artificially activated in adults by electrodes or chemicals, Doidge says. Whether this is ethically, physically, and psychologically safe is a big question. Perhaps, humans could achieve this state by other more natural means in the future.

In a fascinating interview with “Brain Man”, Daniel Tammet, a young man who suffered from autism in his childhood and was able to grow to an adult with extraordinary brain capabilities, Norman Doidge comments that different parts of the brain compete with each other. Creative powers compete with analytical powers, visual cortex competes with auditory cortext, etc. This partly explains why autistic chidren, while lacking fundamental mental abilities, are so phenomenal at other skills, such as memory or replication of sounds. To give another example, I personally have always been amazed how blind people can closely replicate the pronunciation of the target second language acquired in their adulthood. Doidge also impies that we could potentially turn off some functions of the brain in order to activate others that are critical for a particular kind of learning. Once again it’s a question of ethics and health.

I find Larry’s blog tremendously helpful for myself as a teacher trainer and ESL/EFL curriculum developer and teacher. As far I can tell, he works primarily with middle and high school kids in an ESL setting, hence his focus not only on ESL/EFL, but content, which is one reason why I like his take on online resources. I dare say , his blog ranks one of the best among ESL/EFL practitioners.

Larry Ferlazzo is one list master out there. I figured I’d create a list about his many lists. Here it goes:

The best of online ESL/EFL teacher videos – highlights a few links to websites with ESL/EFL teachers in action (posted ).

The best web 2.0 apps for education – a list of 31 online applications for ESL/EFL classroom use with brief annotations (posted Sept. 2008).

The best online learning games – a list of twenty online games for content and ESL/EFL learning (posted July 2008)

The best of 2007 – a compilation of a number of lists of websites and online applications that Larry considers the best

I may add a few other lists as I keep visiting Larry’s blog.

This post is a follow-up on the panel discussion from the NATE 2009 Conference Day 2 “Curriculum Design and Course Assessment: Are we  On the Same Page?”. It would have been a shame to miss this session with my keen interest in curriculum development and assessment. This post, in a way, is feedback on the draft proposal of a new FL curriculum in higher education presented by the panelists.

According to my understanding,  the Ministry of Education of Russia formed a board that was charged with the revisions of the current FL curriculum in higher education. God bless their efforts. This endevor is so much needed. I remember the turmoil of the recent changes in the FL curriculum in elementary and secondary ed in the US. In my humble opinion, their politicians could have heeded to the pleads of their educators’ community a little more closely. Jim Cummins’ plenary address at the 2007 CATESOL conference in San Diego, US came as a thundering vote of no confidence to the government from the national community of FL educators. Here’s a piece from his talk from this link:

A lot of folks at higher levels in the hierarchy don’t want you to know that you have choices because the dominant model of school improvement that is being inflicted in many states as part of the No Child Left Behind reading-first approach is to impose what is viewed as a scientifically supported approach to instruction and to wipe out teacher choice, to make it as teacher-proof as possible.

I’m happy to see the degree of trust that the Russian government has placed in the hands of Russian FL eductors, and the degree of openness that the board is exhibiting by sharing their developments with the larger community of educators in the country.

Here are some of the highlights of the proposed changes and my thoughts on each:

Student Placement

My understanding is limited here, but the proposal seems to suggest that all incoming students be placed into the same level and proceed through three consecutive levels: A1, A 2, and A2+ (beginning, beginning intermediate, beginning advanced?), the assumption apparently being that non-language majoring freshmen can’t be of higher level of proficiency. Is that a safe assumption in this day and age, when English is becoming a symbol of power and when digital natives are exposed to English in their natural everyday environments, virtual or real? I tend to think that placement testing is essential although I’m not a fan of fine-tuned placements since psychometric testing is not panacea to student placement. But a couple of levels could make a big difference in accomodating the diversity of all students. On top of that, FL faculty may need to be trained to adapt their instruction to potentially hetergeneous classrooms in terms of proficiency levels.

Content

As I gather, non-language majoring students have traditionally studied EFL through English for specific purposes (ESP). According to the new proposal, they will now study English through more generic everyday content. My reaction – well, duh! Suprising that beginning level students had to deal with ESP courses in the first place.

There’s lots of theoretical justification for this decision. Cummins (1981a, 1981b) divides FL proficiency into two broad categories: basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP). BICS is characterized by context-embedded, concrete reference, and cognitively undemanding language, typical of daily use of language in informal situations. Conversely, CALP is context-reduced, highly abstract, hence cognitively demanding, which is common in schooling settings (a link to the original discussion here, and my own here). It would be unrealistic and unsound to plunge beginning proficiency students into CALP without giving them BICS.

From the perspective of content-based language instruction (CBLI), there’s a continuum from loose everyday content to more specific content (academic subject matter). Brinton, Snow, Wesche (2003) like to show this continuum in terms of types of courses:

theme-based ———- sheltered courses ———- adjunct courses

(everyday content)                          (heavy content without much scaffolding)

This model has been further developed, but the recommendations remain the same: theme-based courses for beginning-intermediate proficiency students, sheltered courses for intermediate-advanced students, and adjunct for advanced students.

So the proposed shift in the FL curriculum from ESP driven to more generic content seems reasonable and well-justified.

Issues of Power and Politics

One potential area of improvement I perceived from the presentation is the power relationships between the federal establishment that generates regulations and regional constinuencies, i.e. specific colleges and universities that are expected to abide by these regulations. The proposal seems to suggest a specific list of topics and their sequence for each level of the curriculum and module/unit of individual courses (such as every day encounters, tourism, etc.). The US government made a similar decision by restricting the freedom of regional decision-makers in school districts. This has resulted in much agitation across the country, among parents, children, and educators (see my earlier reference to Cummins’ address).

We are long past the stage of industrial epistemologies in education. Educators today make every effort to be responsive to their students, bring in multiple perspectives in their classrooms, and make instruction student-centered. David Warlick talks about the flattening of the world and information. This is a neat concept that describes the flattening of hierarchy in human relations that controls the flow of info, hence the process of decision-making. Web 2.0 technologies put the previously unaccessible info right at our fingertips. Micromanagement and control run against these emerging trends.

Perhaps, a more feasible solution would be to identify the most critical criteria that define the sequence of the content and other aspects of curriculum as minimal guidance for educators. Among such pedagogically critical criteria could be matching students’ profeciency levels with the cognitive demand of the content (whether it is tourism or my dream apartment shouldn’t really matter).

Texbooks

The board also raised the question of developing in-house instructional materials and textbooks. This endevor sounds reasonable, but I don’t think any specific in-house or off-the-shelf commericial textbook should be imposed on schools. If I were an administrator of a FL college department, my immediate reaction would be to use commercial textbooks. From my first hand experience both students and teachers like better commercially-produced textbooks better for many good reasons. Besides, developing in-house textbooks financially may not be the best proposition. Textbooks get dated too fast these days, as one of the board members remarked. Spending money and time on developing, piloting, and publishing one to find out that it’s gone out of date, may not be a sound strategy  given the financial struggles common in most Russian colleges. Freedom of choice could open doors for the exchange of experience from all corners of the country. The best practices in this environment will always emerge for the benefit of all.

Feedback on the Proposal

One final thought I have is a process of consultation and negotiation as this proposal is being crafted and revised. Perhaps, the board could utilize one of the recent Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate this going back and forth of ideas that they initiated. No doubt, as educators in the 21st century, we realize that the best solutions to our challenges emerge in dialogic engagement within the community of practice. A social network (e.g., www.ning.com, www.facebook.com, etc.) set up to facilitate such engagement could benefit the board in their efforts to gather valuable feedback as well as develop a sense of ownership among other educators when they start implementing the actual regulations in their constituencies. Moreover, students as key stakeholders should also be encouraged to comment on the proposal.

Plenary Session by Joan Kang Shin

Joan Kang Shin’s talk was another stimulating piece (http://www.kazannate2009.ru/articles_15.html). She reiterated Kerr’s idea that I mentioned from Day 1 of the conference in that to make students’ aware of the target culture, they need to become aware of their own.

The focus was Bennet’s (1993) developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (DMIS) that consists of six stages on the continuum from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism:

1) denial -> 2) defense -> 3) minimization -> 4) acceptance -> 5) adaptation -> 6) integration

Shin’s talk was an eye-opener in that I tend to reject certain aspects of my own Russian or American culture, and this taxonomy forces me to delve into the nitty-gritty of my identity, face and cleanse its dark corners. Apart from personal benefits, her talk had lots of practical classroom application.  She provided specific ideas on how to move students along the intercultural sensitivity continuum:

1. introducing surface culture elements
2. highlighting commonalities between the target and students’ own culture
3. unpacking deeper elements of the target culture
4. playing with fictitious simulation cultures: Barnga, Bafa-Bafa
5. participating in model UN organizations
6. having students to be multicultural mediators

Plenary Talk by Marklen Konurbayev

Konurbayev talked about teaching our students phonetics of English (http://www.kazannate2009.ru/articles_28.html). I’ve always thought that Russian school of phoneticians is one of the best of those I’m familiar with. He reminded me of my professor of phonetics from the Bashkir State University who emphasized memorized recitation, read-alouds, and immitation, and who had an outstanding artistic ability to reproduce all sorts sounds and emotions. I was both well-entertained and well-informed by Konrbayev’s talk.

Electronic Village

I wasn’t expecting this level of expertise and experience from the NATE electronic village. Shame on me for underestimating my Russian colleagues, and bravo to all presenters! Many presenters are very-well versed in Web 2.0 technologies. Here are a few links I found particularly helpful, some of which I’ve heard and seen earlier but didn’t have a chance to investigate in more detail:

• http://pbworks.com
• www.ning.com
• http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/teachersweb20

The following are some of my observations on the language acquisition of our 3-year-old son. These notes are updated on a regular basis.

Some research indicates that balanced bilinguals are more creative thinkers. Baker and Jones (1998) believe that “having two or more words for the same object or idea allows bilinguals more freedom and richness in their thinking” (p. 67). The Sapir-Worfian hypothesis sheds an interesting light on this argument. If human thinking is determined by their language, being conversant in more more than one language expands this perceptive capacity of the brain.