The Fruit of Language Learning

Abhijit Tembhekar, “A Red Apple.” March, 10, 2009 via Wikimedia, Creative Commons Attribution.

I’m jumping into the new year worrying away at a pocket full of knots I can’t seem to untie.  Two years ago (give or take a few days) I stumbled upon Scott Thornbury’s blog an A-Z of ELT.  One of the very first posts I read was about affordances.  In it, Scott muses over the fact that conversation is not only the product of interlocutors, but is the result of a complex interplay between environment and speakers.  And he wonders, “is there no getting away from the fact that classrooms are just not good places to learn languages in?  And that, instead of flogging the present perfect continuous to death, it might not be better simply ‘to take a walk around the block’?”

There’s nothing particularly new in the idea that language teachers, all teachers in fact, must struggle against the confining nature of the classroom.  The fact that I shift desks around and set up chairs in rows of 3-2-3 to give my room the feel of an airplane, or that I bring in a dog leash and picture of a dog when students role-play a scene in which they are searching for a lost pet are ample evidence that I (and most of the teachers I know) do everything we can to help the students psychically break out of the limiting space of the classroom.

Leo van Lier’s (2000) believed that language learning is ecological in nature, “Immersed in an environment full of potential meanings,” and that, “these meanings become available gradually as the learner acts and interacts within and with this environment.” It seems clear to me that an impoverished environment is also an environment in which learning is impoverished.  With that in mind, this year I tried a few experiments to see how I could change and hopefully enrich that environment.  So I thought the start of 2014 was a good chance to go over my class notes and see what worked and what didn’t:

Short Walks: For two hours on Friday afternoon, I have total and absolute control of what I want to do in my classroom.  Those two hours are also elective classes for the students, each week the students freely choosing which lessons they will attend.  So for one of those hours I took the students on a walk through the neighbourhood.  Students took their dictionaries, notebooks, and simply walked.  The only rule was that if they had something to say, they try to do so in English.  The first walk was met with large swaths of silence interrupted by scattered bursts of one word conversation.  We passed a storefront with peeling paint and old glass windows that had warped and caught the sunlight in pools of colour.  Which led to reactions like, “pretty,” “good style,” “I like it.”  The second walk was more of the first.  We passed a construction sight and students looked at a giant crane tearing down a building, opened up their dictionary and made notes.  But they didn’t really talk to each other.  What were the students getting out of our walks?  Were these words jotted in notebooks leading to anything? I added a bit more structure to the walks, encouraged the students to take photos with their cell-phones of anything they were interested in and then try and share with another student why they took the picture.  This led to more conversations.  In particular, I made note of a student who laid her hands against an old wooden pillar of a temple gate, looked up something in her dictionary, took a picture, and said to her friend, “It feels ancient.”  As we head into our third semester in Japan, the weather has made a sharp turn to cold and wet and I’m not sure I can continue our walks.  And I have no idea if the students have taken away from the experience what I was hoping they would take away, that the chances to think, feel, and express themselves in English are only limited by their ability to notice them.

Rethinking a conversation: one of the most talented language learners I’ve ever met once explained to me her main method for picking up a new language.  After she had a particularly enjoyable conversation with someone in her native language, she would sit down and try and reconstruct the conversation in the language she was currently learning.  I decided to share this idea with my students to see what they could do, so twice a week they were required to pay particular attention to a conversation in which they were engaged and then imagine having the same conversation in English.  To the best of their ability, they were then to write the conversation down in English.  Student feedback was mixed to say the least.  Many of them felt overwhelmed by the task.  A few mentioned that by the time they started working on reconstructing the conversation in English, they had forgotten too much to get very far.  But two students turned in full English versions of their conversations (one about a new part time job a friend had started, the other a conversation about elementary school mates with an childhood friend).  Following up later, I found out that one of these students was still using this technique every day.  She rode home on a train with a friend who got off about 20 minutes before she did.  The rest of the ride she tried to imagine having the same conversation in which she had just participated in English.

Overheard Listening Practice: this activity is a bit tricky and also a bit thorny ethically.  It started out when one of the students suggested we go to Karaoke as a class after school on a half-day.  I’m usually happy to join my students out for a group meal or for some singing.  But this time I said I would go, but first I wanted to do a bit of in-class listening practice.  I told them that I would call the Karaoke centre and make reservations, in English.  The students needed to listen and try to write down my half of the conversation.  I made a very conscious effort to avoid blatant foreigner speak.  The man on the other end of the line, Mr. Miyagawa, was incredibly kind and we managed to make a reservation for that afternoon for me and 12 students which included a large Karaoke room and the all you can drink service for two hours.  I did talk slower than usual and added a fair number of pauses as I spoke.  The students wrote diligently from the beginning of the conversation to the end.  As a class we then reconstructed the complete conversation with me supplying Mr. Miyagawa’s language.  After we had a complete conversation on the board, the students practiced it using some fairly standard dialogue exercises.  For our annual class New Year’s dinner, I called a restaurant and we did the same thing again.  After class, some of the students were discussing what had happened.  One of the students said that they felt bad for Mr. Miyagawa.  But another student quickly said that Mr. Miyagawa’s boss must have been really impressed and it probably bolstered his image at work.  Most of my students work at part time jobs and there is always the chance that someone will come in and talk to them in English.  Perhaps they will begin to see common work interactions with customers (even in Japanese) as a chance to think about and even practice English.  On the whole, while I think this activity is useful, I find myself worrying over the fact that Mr. Miyagawa (and Ms. Kurakami at the restaurant) where unwitting participants in a class activity.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t break any laws, but if/when I do this again, I think I will probably find a way to check with the person I’m talking to and see if they are OK with the situation before launching into the activity.

Leo van Lier (2000) postulated that perhaps the way we think about second language acquisition within a western empiricist tradition is too reductionist to capture what really happens when a person learns a language.  The fact that we break down language learning into component parts and then believe that these parts snap together inside our student’s head to build up a language system, basically the Lego block idea of language learning, can’t capture the complex and dynamic nature of language learning which takes place not only inside our students, but is born out of the interactions of our students with the environment.

In an article on affordances and their relationship to second language acquisition, Leily Ziglari (2008) looks at a number of definitions of ‘affordance’ and notes that the common terms in the definitions are, “relations, possibility, opportunity, immediacy, and interactions.”  Looking back on the second semester of the school year, I realise that in trying to broaden the ways in which my students perceived their environment and perhaps increase the number of English language affordances, I had done a pretty poor job of paying attention to the very first term Ziglari highlights (and which is also one of van Lier’s main points as well), relations.  Specifically, I think I could have (and should have) paid more attention to the relations that my students have with each other.  Helping students recognise that there is all kinds of English fruit they can pick in their efforts to become English speakers is just part of the story, and perhaps the lesser part at that.  The fact is, my learners are strolling through the very same orchard.  They are often times reaching for the very same affordances.  2014 will be all about finding ways to let my students turn to each other and compare the colour and texture and taste of the language they are discovering. Because perhaps the very fruit of learning is simply how much sweater it is, how much longer it lingers, when shared with others.

References:

Van Lier, L. (2000). From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J.P Lantolf (Ed.)Sociocultural theory and second language learning, 245-259.

Ziglari, L. (2008). Affordance and second language acquisition. European Journal of Scientific Research, 23(3), 373-379.

 

 

 

It’s only a test…but it could be more, you know

Lately my wife has been kind of worried about me.  We usually have a drink after we finish up our after-work-work and the other day she said, “You know, the way you talk lately, it seems like you’ve hit some kind of wall in your teaching.”  Which is exactly how I feel.  I’ve hit a big wall.  I think if I could step back a little and look at that wall, it would be covered in graffiti.  Maybe a nice red, green and black color scheme. And once the colors came into view, if I took a few more steps back, I would probably be able to read the words, “reflective teaching can hurt!” in giant loopy letters.

But right now there is no wall.  There is only my computer.  And if I finish up in the next hour or so, a drink with my wife.  On Valentine’s Day.  A rainy valentines day.  It rained all day today.  It rained all day yesterday as well.  So I was pretty sure that my students wouldn’t stick around for the STEP interview test practice.  But two students did.  They were waiting for me in room 403.  They were flipping through the notes from their last practice session.  Flip, flip, flip.  And right off the bat I felt guilty.  “Sorry guys, the answers aren’t in there.  I made a mistake,” I wanted to say.  But I wasn’t sure.  So I sent Mi-Chan outside so we could do a run-through of the test and see what happened.

Now the STEP test is made for the Japanese market, so I’m not sure how much teachers in other countries might know about it.  The written part of the test is pretty standard, with some vocabulary questions, dialog transcript based questions, and reading and comprehension exercises.  There’s also a listening section which is actually pretty uselessinnocuous as it only tests students ability to listen for specific information.  But my students rarely break a sweat when thinking about the written test.  It’s the interview portion of the test that makes them crazy.  And why?  Certainly not because of the content.  A typical STEP test question for the pre-2nd level (high school second year) might be something like, “Do you think Japanese young people watch too much TV?” or “Are Japanese people losing interest in traditional arts?”  And basically you only need to put together two grammatically correct sentences to receive a passing grade for each question.  But Japanese people have been told over and over again that they just can’t speak English.  If you Google “Why are Japanese people bad at English,” you will actually find page after page of articles which deal with this issue as if it is an issue.  Whereas if you type in “Why are French people bad at English,” only the first two hits actually have anything to do with French people’s perceived English deficiencies.  And if you type in “Why are Chinese people bad at English,” none of the first page of hits has anything to specifically do with Chinese speaker’s inability to handle English.  So while there might be valid reasons for lower level ability in Japanese learners of English (which I’ll take up in another post some day), there is undoubtedly the very real issue of self-confidence, or complete lack thereof.

Knock, knock, knock!  That was Mi-Chan banging on the door.  So I cleared my throat and doing my best impression of an official STEP test tester invited her into the room.  Mi-Chan had diligently studied her notes and answered every question I asked as if orally dotting a series of ‘i’s. 

Then I asked her, “Do you think people in Japan work too much these days?” 

Mi-Chan thought for a second and said, “Yes.  I know many people who work too hard.  They are working for 10 hours a day.” 

This was exactly the kind of answer I had been helping my students put together over the past week.  I looked at Mi-Chan.  Her shoulders were up.  She was looking over my shoulder.  When she finished her answer, she didn’t relax her pose.  She didn’t lean back.  It was like she was waiting for the next tiger to pop out of the door in the arena or something. 

“Mi-Chan,” I said.  “I’m sorry.  I made a mistake when I was teaching you how to answer these questions before.”  I explained that I didn’t want perfect answers.  I just wanted her to tell me how she felt and what she really thought. 

Mi-Chan hesitated, but finally she said, “My father works too much.” 

I nodded.

“He works every day.  I never see him.”

Pause.

“People need relax time.  Seriously, I think everybody need more relax time.” Mi-Chan looked at me, waiting for the next question of the test.

“I think so too.  I’m sorry your father has to work so hard,” I said. 

And then it happened.  Mi-Chan leaned back in her chair.  Her shoulders drooped.  And we talked about what it means to work too much.  I recorded it all.  We went over how to use the phrase “time to ~.”  We practiced three more sets of questions.   And Mi-Chan used language that she rarely has demonstrated in a classroom environment.  Probably my favorite answer of the day was in response to the question, “Do you like to stay in luxury hotels on vacation?”  Mi-Chan thought for a moment and said, “I can’t stay in luxury hotels.  I don’t have enough money.  If I were rich I would stay in a luxury hotel.  I think everybody wants to stay in a luxury hotel.”

The other day I wrote that even standardized testing can be an affordance.  I still believe that.  But more than that, practicing for standardized testing can be a humanizing endeavor.  Maybe, as teachers, that’s our job, taking the dehumanizing machinery of a standard test, and making it human, teacher to student, question to question.  I know that with the three students I practiced with today, just by giving them a little more space to express what they wanted to express, their English ability as measured by richness of vocabulary and complexity of grammar showed marked improvement.  And maybe more importantly, they laughed or sighed or shook their heads in a way that wasn’t just about answering a question.

It’s 11:00 PM.  It’s Valentines day.  Time to have a drink with my wife.  She’s right.  I’m bumping up against a wall lately.  But it’s probably a wall I should have bumped into a long while back.  And it’s only the first of a long series of walls I’m going to have to find my way over.  But tonight is Valentine’s Day.  Hope yours was filled with love.