Saturday, December 29, 2012

How Do We Learn To Speak Another Language?

Stephen Krashen has been studying the question for almost his entire career.  His research gave birth to "The Natural Approach", which seems to be the starting point for a multitude of modern communicative methods that encourage the student to "just get on with it" and seem to assume that the most essential quality needed by a language student is willingness to speak.

Of course that is an exaggeration and a caricature of many interesting and progressive methods. Just as Krashen's ideas are frequently reduced to a caricature.  I heard one esteemed speaker call some of Krashen's proponents "the-talk-until-you-drop-school."

Those who advocate the "Natural Approach" assume that if a student hears enough language, he will be able to speak.  But many seem to have forgotten or chosen to ignore what Krashen said about "comprehensible input".  The teacher may very well speak in the target language 100% of the time, but if the students do not understand him, they are not receiving comprehensible input.  A more careful reading of Krashen suggests that language is acquired through an interactive negotiation of meaning.  The student has an important role to play, not by forcing himself to speak, but by signalling whenever he does not understand. Then the teacher must do whatever is necessary to make what she said comprehensible.  I don't have the reference at hand, but I read many years ago about a study that showed that while students forget most of what they are told by the teacher, they almost always remember the answers to their own questions. So I like to wait for students to ask questions, knowing that there's a good chance they'll retain my answer.

In an ever recurring debate on the moretprs forum about how much grammar explanation students need, someone suggested that there is a middle ground between all tprs and all grammar and vocabulary lists. I replied that there was once a debate about whether or not the world was flat and that there could be no middle ground about it.  If we believe that language is acquired through comprehensible input, we have to admit that grammar explanations in the native language are a waste of time and memorizing vocabulary lists in the short term memory are a waste of effort.  The words just aren't where we need them when we need them. 

Another teacher replied that adult learners can become very stressed when they are not given the grammatical explanations they crave, and that he thought there could be a balance between the two methods.  He also thought that teaching the grammar can help reduce the number of repetitions needed before a structure can be acquired.  This is my reply:

I'm afraid that when people say "middle ground" or "balance", they mean 50/50. I also have adult learners and mine are French, which means they went through the traditional learning process before it was called traditional because it was considered the only way to teach.  Occasionally I give them the grammar they request in order to lower their affective filter.  I'm able to do this in pop-ups and whenever they ask a direct question, I answer it. (Actually, I'm a reformed 4%er who used to pride herself on her "clear explanations" and loved linguistics, so I have to put on my grammar brake before their faces go green.)  I insist on meaning more than grammatical labels.  Very rarely, when I feel a certain level of frustration, I set aside an entire hour and I tell them, this is the only grammar lesson you are getting this year, so pay attention. And I draw a mandala with them as a graphic representation of the English verb system.  They carefully note everything and label all the parts and some of them actually keep it and refer to it from time to time, but my real aim is to convince them that the English verb system is completely different from the French, that there is no future, conditional or subjunctive as such, just different ways of expressing the same ideas.  So they will stop laboriously trying to find correspondences that don't exist.

I've noticed that after a while my adult students stop asking questions and start to relax and their expression improves.  I've also noticed that it's very much a question of personalities. In one of my groups there's a couple that traveled around the world and lived in the States for a while, but never studied English in school.  Obviously their English is acquired. Another woman studied German as her first foreign language, was a good student and could read an English text with a dictionary.  Another woman is dyslexic, failed English in school but many years later had an exchange student live with her for a short while and discovered that she was the only person in the family that could communicate with her.  There was only one that insisted on grammatical explanations.  I'll let you guess which one.  I gave them the one hour grammar lesson a year ago and they have never asked for more. They are now functioning as a fairly homogenous group and I can point out what would be considered advanced structures and they click immediately.

Of course there is a place for the monitor and that is in editing written work.  We now have the very interesting possibility of putting a student's written text on a smartboard and editing it with the class, discussing what is acceptable, what is incomprehensible, etc.  TPRS doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath. It means everything in its place.  Just as we aim at 95% target language use in a class, but accept translations when they are the most efficient way to give meaning to a new word or expression, I think the "balance" between Comprehensible Input and grammatical explanations should be about the same.  In TPRS grammar is called pop-ups and should last only a few seconds.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Teaching English in Cameroon

In 1967 I received a letter from the Peace Corps saying that I was accepted as a Volunteer trainee and assigned to teaching English in east Cameroon. I remember I had to look Cameroon up in the National Geographic collection of the Culver-Stockton library.  I discovered that it was in the crook of Africa. (Some people, referring to the hot, sweltering climate, say armpit.) And that it had giant frogs. This was where I thought I would spend the next two years of my life.  As it turned out, I spent seventeen years there before I moved on.

The Peace Corps training for our mission lasted three months.  The first month was in Boston where we were given French lessons eight hours a day, five days a week.  The lessons were designed for soldiers.  You learned a dialog by heart and then you were drilled on it.  It was repetitive, rapid-fire and mind numbing, but we were highly motivated and convinced this was the way to teach.

The second month was in Dartmouth, where we were given more French lessons, lectures about Cameroon, its history and social conditions and how to teach English as a foreign language.  I have retained very little of those lectures except that I was envious of the people assigned to West Cameroon because they were being given lessons in Pidgin English. At one point I was told to teach English to a family from Cambodia.  I was instructed not to use French and vaguely remember that they understood next to nothing of what I tried to teach them. From that experience I gained an immense respect for those who teach English to students with no common language.

For the third month we were sent to Quebec so we could practice our skills on French-speaking children. We were hosted by Canadian families as part of our immersion experience and I discovered that my Bachelor of Arts, French major, cum laude did not enable me to understand French Canadians. I remember very little about the lessons I gave or about my students, just that it all seemed very artificial.  I was pretending to be a teacher and they were pretending to be pupils.  I was speaking in English all the time and they were staring at me with bewildered looks.  I was told that a teacher had to speak only in the target language, but no one told me that you also had to be comprehensible.  I now know that history calls this "the Natural Approach".

Then we flew over the ocean and I eventually ended up in Kribi, Cameroon, a lovely little port on the Atlantic ocean. I was equipped with a bicycle to get to school, a thin, paperback textbook with dialogs, vocabulary lists and grammar exercises, a flannel blanket and cardboard cut out figures to illustrate the dialogs.  Since many of the schools had no reliable source of electricity, we hung the flannel blanket on the wall and stuck the cardboard figures to it to help our students visualize the characters' actions.

So my career as a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages began.  I had four classes, sixième, cinquième, quatrième and troisième. There were 60 twelve year olds in my sixième class.  The next grade had only 45, there were less than 30 in my quatrième class and less than 20 in my troisième class. I later discovered that students who had reached the troisième were considered scholars and some actually taught part time in the local primary schools.

It was a wonderful way to begin teaching.  Most green teachers are immediately confronted with discipline problems.  My students desperately wanted to continue their studies, knowing that education made the difference between comfort, even luxury, and severe poverty.  They wanted to learn English, the key to so many doors, especially in Cameroon where the two official languages are English and French, and they treated me with far more respect than I warranted.  For many of them I was the first white woman they had ever actually spoken with.

I remember one day I was teaching the sixièmes when a big tropical storm broke out.  The rain was coming down so hard that the noise on the tin roof drowned me out.  It was coming through the windows, which had no glass, only chicken wire, so we had to close the shutters.  There was one small naked light bulb, but the power was off because of the storm.  So there I was, in the dark with sixty pupils who couldn't see me or hear me.  Needless to say that I could see them even less because of their dark skins. I shouted at them to take out their notebooks and do exercise 4 in their books. There was not enough light to read by, but all sixty students took out their notebooks and pretended to do the exercise until the storm blew over and I could go on with my lesson.

With students like that, who needs to worry about teaching methods?   ........  (to be continued )