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Is Duolingo audiolingualism reinvented?

I really like Duolingo.

For those who are not familiar (really?) with the app, you sign up, choose a language, and work your way through a series of lessons devoted to different language areas, supervised by an over-enthusiastic cartoon owl. Who then follows you around your phone reprovingly if you do not keep up with your daily exercises.

Photocredit Uschi Dugulin from the site Pixabay

There’s a lot of repeating what you hear, copying what you hear, translating in and out of your language but, and this is the interesting thing, quite a lot of it is not meant to be particularly challenging. In the sense that I’m not sure you are supposed to be cognitively working out the right answers, or logically applying your analytical skills.

My excitement about this is odd. Firstly, there is my imminent redundancy as an English teacher and teacher trainer if it works. But also, if we were sharing our teaching philosophy, I would say that mine runs very much to making people intellectually engage with what they are doing. Not just the topic, but in actually understanding the grammar, or certain patterns attached to phonology, or words, or the whys and wherefores of strategies to help them process texts.

When I was first formally learning Russian, I was also a newish language teacher, and it was genuinely interesting to sit in someone else’s classroom to see all the techniques I wanted to master applied. Or, in some cases, not applied. Bonus professional development. Wheee!

The problem with this is that eventually I began spending more and more of my professional life watching other people teach, and there does come a point, even if you really like your job, when you do not want to do any more of that in your free time.

So, I stopped attending Russian lessons and moved to the UK. Oddly, this worked out, language learning-wise, as I got to speak more Russian. Which is a story for another day.

I am now the proud possessor of an extremely spikey profile; while I can listen and communicate quite effectively, I also butcher grammar and rely on about five basic verbs to do the heavy lifting, vocabulary wise.

I still cannot bring myself to go back into the classroom though. Hence, turning to apps.

Plus I do still enjoy looking at others’ materials design and spotting the underlying theories of teaching and learning involved. Useful, when part of your work involves helping others to see the same things.

Which brings us back to Duolingo.

Because, yes, we can all see the gamification involved in the carefully structured levelling up, and the earning gems, and the being in different leagues competing against other Duolingo participants and so on. And so forth.

But what I think it owes a debt to is audiolingualism.

What is audiolingualism?

Audiolingualism is a methodology associated with the theories of B F Skinner, who once taught a two year old to be deathly afraid of his mother’s fur coat. 

Similarly, language is also considered to be learned behaviour.

Small children copy what they hear around them, get corrected, and eventually end up with the full range of utterances. There’s not much thought involved – it’s an automated process mostly to do with good habit formation.

Audiolingualism took this idea and ran with it – the method consists of students repeating a model and being immediately corrected to stop any bad habits getting embedded. It was particularly helpful in contexts like language learning in the US army in the 50s, where you didn’t necessarily need to say anything too sophisticated, but you did need to be able to deliver an appropriate phrase under  pressure without needing to sit there and think about how to conjugate it or whether this word or that might be more appropriate. 

So grammar was not explicitly taught.

Now there are all sorts of objections to both the underlying theory of language learning and the methodology which I am not going to go into. Generally they focus on the idea that if language is so automated, how do we account for new variations? Not everything is a copy of what has gone before.

Of course, one of the things that access to corpus data of what we actually say has shown is that while it’s not the only thing going on, there is indeed a certain fixed chunkiness to what comes out of our mouths. Not having to construct completely new utterances from the ground up each time is, indeed, a thing. Getting your mouth and brain lined up at speed is not just a problem when you have a gun in your hand.

Audiolingualism, however, never did go in purely for the rote-learning, tourist phrasebook approach to language. And neither does Duolingo.

Audiolingualism and Duolingo

Famously, Duolingo has sentences like ‘Men are people too’, ‘Do you want to buy my giraffe?’ or, one of my favourites so far, ‘Take the cat and meet me by the bridge’, none of which you can really imagine being sentences that you need to actually say very often – they are not worth learning off by heart. 

Although I do think the last one has possibilities as an opening for a spy novel, and I was half way through plotting it by the time the sentence had recycled five times.

The idea, then, is that there is no need to explicitly wave the rules governing the structures around in front of our brains – they are perfectly able to sort out the underlying patterns for themselves if exposed to enough examples.

Take the lower levels of each lesson, where you get to select the words to make a translation of the sentences you are working on.

There’s very little need to think about it – they are not giving you distractors that give you much pause for thought. The idea, I think, is to do it at speed, allow your subconscious to recognise the pattern, without needing to get to the point of actually thinking about it carefully.

And then there is the repetition, over and over again, and by opening up a few more lessons at a time, Duolingo is signalling clearly you are not supposed to just stick to one set at a time. You do have to keep hopping around, circling back and though, giving your brain a bit of a rest from that pattern and then hitting yourself with it again. And again, And again. Until, tada! It has sunk in.

But there ARE grammar rules given, I hear some of you cry. Mmmmmmm. Not on the app version though*. And surely very few people are doing this anywhere other than their smartphones. I wonder if this is one of those grudging compromised most education professionals will be familiar with, the need to square what the teacher thinks is the way to go about it with the suspicion of said approach by the people you are trying to teach. 

Does it work?

Not for me. I saw a lovely tweet that said that after 365 days of using Duolingo, what they had got really good at is Duolingo. I rather agree.

The thing is, I find that unless I know what the rule is, I am either just learning specific, sometimes nonsensical sentences off by heart, or guessing, or applying a rule I have picked up from a grammar info dump app I downloaded after realising I had out precisely two rules from pure Duolingo. Everything else, not only did I get frustrated that I could not see the patterns, but I didn’t even realise there was a tendency I should be absorbing until I had come across it somewhere else.

I suspect the Duolingists might be coming around to this point of view as one of their new things for the paid version is to add little pop up messages explaining the rule you have just broken when you get a sentence wrong. Still not up front instruction, but fostering the noticing process, and fostering it in a nice interactive way. Because just reading about grammar (or having it explained to me), well, that doesn’t work either. Duolingo, in fact, now seems to me to be accelerating towards a much more cognitive approach. Good say I. It’s not that explicit instruction is wrong – it’s how you go about it.

Anyway, despite my reservations, I am (now) finding Duolingo beneficial. And even before I expanded my horizons it had got me back on the language learning horse. I was already able to decode Cyrillic reasonably comfortably, but all the typing involved in Duolingo got me much more up to speed on written production too. I also like the breadth of things being worked on at any one time. And the repetitive practice that other app is very short on, well, that is indeed a major bonus. AND just as you think it’s all over, they add another level to each lesson to squeeze that little bit more out of it and you. Whoohoo!

But I get a little toe curl of joy every time an idiotic sentence heaves into view because in my head I am having a little AUDIOLINGUAL KLAXON ALERT squee. It’s nice to see an old idea being reinvigorated, and this, just as much as the judgmental owl keeps me coming back.

Well, that and the fact that they are clearly on a roll right now and I’m interested to see what language learning/ teaching methodology will pop up next. I generally approve of not being so dogmatic in your approach to language teaching/ learning that you discount the idea that there might be other ways of doing it. That COMBINING other ways of doing it might indeed actually be the way forward.

And, of course, there’s the need to end up top of the leaderboard and out earn my teaching colleagues/ family/ friends. I’m stalking the top spot in the Diamond league this week. Wish me luck.

*It turns out that it depends which language you are learning – the big ticket languages do, in fact, have rules on the app version. You have to choose to click on them though – and we all know how difficult it is to get people to do extra clicking. And my other points still stand. She says, never one to give up on a theory too quickly.

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Grice’s Maxims, small talk and HEATHER!

It seems obvious that we need to give just enough info but not too much in any given circumstances, or at least so I tell my husband when he has been particularly cryptic and I need a bit more context to follow his train of thought. Enter philosopher Paul Grice’s Maxims of co-operative communication (again. See the beginning of this discussion).

The Maxim of Quantity and the Maxim of Relevance deal with just this issue. To be honest, these are the ones I originally meant to write about, but I got sidetracked by politics and social media infighting.

Well, haven’t we all lately?

Grice’s Maxims: the Maxim of Quantity

I find the Maxim of Quantity neatly encapsulated by part 1 of the Cambridge English language speaking exams.

Let’s say the examiner asks ‘Do you like Moscow?’ Which of the following answers is best?

A) It’s alright.

B) Living in Moscow has its advantages and its disadvantages. On the one hand, there are certainly more opportunities in a big city than in more rural areas. I refer to both career advancement and also the many cultural and sporting events and facilities that such a place boasts. On the other hand, big cities tend to have many cars, a lot of traffic, and as a result of this and other factors, also a lot of pollution. There is also a higher incidence of crime in such an urban environment.

C) I like it in spring, especially this year – all the rain has really encouraged some colourful flowers to bloom. I’m less keen when it gets down to minus ten for weeks on end though – that’s too cold for me!

The point is, it depends on the context, but let’s assume that part 1 of this exam simulates (because it does) making small talk with an acquaintance at the school gates, at a work conference coffee break, or even while you wait for everyone else to turn up to a Zoom meeting.

The first answer is too short. It does not give enough for your conversation partner to hook onto and continue the conversation without having to strain their own communicative resources. There is a time for a laconic reply. This is not one.

The second, of course, is too long. The interlocutor’s eyes will have crossed about half way through and the conversation will have failed again, because the next time the listener sees ‘X is connecting to audio’ looming on the monitor they will turn their camera off and pretend to be unavailable until someone more entertaining turns up or the meeting actually starts.

The third answer is just right, both for the test and small talk more generally. Nice couple of vocab items for the examiner there, look at that, and something non-taxing for the other fathers dropping their kids off at kindergarten to build on for the few minutes it takes to build rapport using small talk.

The examples I found myself mulling over, though, were given by Professor Elizabeth Stokoe, in her video* about what she has leaned from many years of doing conversation analysis (discourse analysis, but exclusively applied to, wait for it, conversation) on service related telephone calls. Especially, in this first example, receptionists at places like doctor’s or vet’s surgeries.

Now this was just a throwaway comment to one of her main points, but she mentioned that in the sort of telephone call where one of the people has to do some clicking around on a computer, this often necessitates a bit of a pause. So it can be helpful for that person to actually say that’s what they are doing. The danger is, otherwise the other person thinks that they are being ignored or have been cut off.

Which was a bit of a revelation to me as I have spent a lot of time over the years suggesting that teachers do NOT provide a running commentary about what they are doing in the classroom.

(‘OK, so I’m going to write these questions on the board now, where’s that pen gone, ooops, it’s over there, ok, so I’ve got the pen and I’m writing up the questions, look I’m remembering to use the blue pen just like Heather told me to, nearly done now, on the last one, yes there it is, and now you can discuss them’).

I still maintain this is a problem face to face. It’s wildly distracting, and threatens to overload the often quite low level students. They can, in this environment, see very well what is going on and are not very interested in some random woman’s opinions about the colour of pens.

However, online the teacher sometimes gets this intent look in their eyes while they fiddle around with some back end buttons preparing to open breakout rooms and such, and sometimes the students are definitely bemused about what is happening. A small amount of ‘I’m going to open the breakout rooms now’ or ‘I’m just uploading the handout to chat’ or ‘I’ll share my screen’ might be actively helpful, especially of the students have something else to be getting g on with while you make faces at your computer (‘…so think about what you will say about Marmite to your partner’).

So what is too much talking in one context, is not quite enough in another. We need to take the situation, the mode of delivery and the purpose of what we are doing into account. Not very groundbreaking, seemingly, but then good philosophy, like good education, is about making sure everyone can see the wood and not just the trees.

But what was Stokoe’s main point, I hear you cry? For this we need to think about another of Grice’s Maxims.

Grice’s Maxims: Maxim of Relation

This Gricean Maxim means you should make your contributions relevant.

Now this can be subtler than you might think. Take this (made up) exchange:

Chilly, isn’t it?

Go ahead.

Person two has correctly interpreted that the first statement is not just a comment on the weather but a request to close the window, which may have been aided, of course, by person A standing next to the window and making little gestures at it.

So utterances to not have to be ponderously overt to be successful in relation to relevance. And therin lies the rub. How obvious do you have to be then?

Now Professor Stokoe was not talking about Grice’s Maxims, but one of the conversations she gave as an example goes something like:

I’d like to know if I am eligible for the flu vaccine.

Yes, you are.

* crickets *

The caller feels that what should happen next is that they should be offered an appointment. The receptionist thinks they have answered the question and the call is over and is waiting for their thank you. In the next couple of moves you can hear the caller then having to fight to make sure the phone is not put down on them before they can get to the point.

Now you can blame the caller if you want for not being clearer up front about why they are ringing – see the post about the Maxim of Manner and the importance of not being ambiguous, yes these Gricean Maxims do tend to start overlapping after a while – but it IS after all a call to a doctor’s surgery. Offering to make appointments is surely something receptionists ought to be expecting to do every time they pick up the phone. Missing the relevance of that opening to the purpose of having a telephone line into a doctor’s surgery is weird.

In fact, I gather Elizabeth Stokoe has a bit of a career in being called in when this failure to understand the rules of communication results in terrible ratings on customer satisfaction surveys in these kinds of interactions. And suggesting that the way to improve is not to try to get the receptionist to engage in rapport-building exercises such as asking about the customer’s breed of dog and making a happy little noise about the answer. It is enough to just get the transaction out of the way in as efficient a manner as possible, with the caller having to do as little work a possible to get their desired outcome.

For the dangers of doing small talk to build rapport really wrong, take Professor Stokoe’s example of cold calling sales pitches, which sometimes start with ‘… and how are you today?’

‘How are you?’ is an integral part of the ritual of greetings, but only in certain circumstances, and it sounds odd in a cold call. It’s the wrong context.

My personal little bugbear in in this category is being called by my name when people are trying to sell me things, including themselves in an interview. I assume, as with many of Stokoe’s examples of truly bad communication, that this has come about because it started life in a training manual somewhere. But it. Drives. Me. Up. The. Wall. Because it comes across as a bit of a power move to me. Yet I was never quite able to put my finger on why it was so wrong until I realised that it is just out of place.

Generally, people only really use my name to greet me (‘Hi Heather’), to nominate me for a turn when, and this is important, there are multiple people in a conversation (‘Are you coming too, Heather?’ Or ‘The doctor will see you now, Mrs Be… Belg… Heather’. Or ‘Would you like some coffee, Heather?’), or occasionally to tell me off (‘HEATHER!!!’).

The use of the name Heather in the wrong context is an example of violating Grice's Maxims, so here are some heather plants
Image by JackieLou DL from Pixabay

They don’t go round inserting it into random utterances in a one to one conversation, or as a direct reply to something I’ve asked them, especially in the middle of a sentence. (‘Well, now, Heather, I’m glad you asked me that’. ‘Is that something you might be interested in, Heather?’ ‘So, Heather, the place I see myself in five years’ time is doing your job’. ‘This one time offer, Heather, will only be valid for a couple of weeks’).

It’s not following the natural rules of conversation, and as a result I cannot be doing with it and it’s like fingers down the chalkboard of my soul every time.

I suppose the counter argument is that it is so embedded in this kind of discourse nowadays that perhaps I should just relax into the new normal. But the point Professor Stokoe makes is that quite a lot of things which are given out as good advice about making conversation really isn’t when you look at the actual data. I expect in this case, for example, overusing people’s names came about because someone at some point noted that people like it when you remember what they are called. Yes, but there’s no need to be OTT in demonstrating that. Good grief.

Really it depends if I am alone in finding it annoying, in whether this is my personal quirk or if actually, like the ‘…and how are you today?’ it is counter productive in establishing rapport for other people too. Answers much appreciated. Is it just me, or is it them?

And in the meantime, here is a video covering all of Grice’s Maxims, except I think one of them has been labeled wrongly. See if you agree with me about that too – which one?

* It’s a Royal Institution lecture. Before there were TED talks, there were Royal Institution lectures, and they share much in common, except the Royal Institution has a kick ass desk.

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How to Make Jokes on Twitter Using Gricean Maxims

The thing about successful communication is that we all fail at it sometimes while others are really very bad at it on a regular basis. And this rarely has anything to do with not using the present perfect correctly. Which means we are going to talk about the Gricean Maxims.

Paul Grice and his four Maxims tried to explain how people cooperate to construct shared understandings. He was particularly interested in how they go about that even when they are not saying exactly what they mean, when they are flouting one of his guidelines.

The interesting thing for me is the fine line between flouting a maxim and violating it, leading to a communication breakdown. Bacially I think Grice’s Maxims are much better for explaining why sometimes conversations go wrong, rather than how they work.

Philosophers, huh. Not all that good at how to manuals.

Anyway. Since I want to talk about bad communication, it also means I am going to talk about political correctness, lying, and the closely related topic of telling jokes.

Gricean Maxims: the Maxim of Quality

In theory, this Gricean Maxim means you should not lie, should not deliberately say things you know to be untrue. Or rather that unless they have reason not to, your conversation partner will assume that you are telling the truth, and, or possibly or, saying what you believe.

Which is, of course, the point of lying. Wanting to be believed.

One way to get into trouble with this maxim is to tell a joke on Twitter.

Image by Devoka from Pixabay

Now of course, when you are saying the exact opposite of what you believe and you are followed only by 20 of your closest friends, or people who are long familiar with your posting style, this tongue in cheek tweet will be understood.

Until someone retweets you. And someone else retweets that. And the third person reads the words and not the context and boom you’ve gone viral and people are sending you hate mail.

Screenshots of Twitter posts where a satirical tweet is being misunderstood by readers who have taken it at face value

Which is much less funny than the RAF Luton account, which lives to tweet the daftest descriptions of aircraft related pictures, and have people tell them that they are wrong. Bonus points if the objection is about the aircraft model rather than the dubious morality of the supposed action of the Royal Air Force being shown.

'That is not an Apache, it's an Italian Augusta A29 Manguasta' Example of one of the Gricean Maxims, the maxim of quality, being flouted, with consequences

It’s almost a rite of passage on the site to be caught out on an irritated correction or horrified retweet.

It works because the account looks official, and the tweets are delivered in exactly the cheerfully bland style of most corporate accounts. People don’t expect it to be messing with them.

This is also the reason why fake news is so insidious.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we tend to expect information imparted in a particular way to be accurate, via websites that look like newspapers, via people with little blue checks next to their names, via official channels, and especially via the friend who was hitherto so reliable in steering us towards the best pizzeria in town.

It’s actually very tiring to have to be continually assessing statements which are not signalled as jokes or sarcasm for a lack of correctness. And so most of the time we do not.

And all of this is complicated hugely by those who do say what they believe to be true, but what they believe to be true is simply completely wrong.

The effect, of course, is encapsulated in the story of the boy who cried wolf. What you thought this problem started with Facebook? Of course not, but it does explain the damage that people in certain positions can do if you can no longer really trust what they say.

'She's also a Rhodes scholar, says Trump's press secretary of Amy Coney Barrett, who did not receive a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, but instead received her BA from Rhodes College in Tennessee'

If you cannot trust what they say, then you cannot trust what anyone says, and we are accelerating towards the horizon of picking and choosing what we believe based on how much we like what we hear.

Communication breakdown? Yes. The ultimate. And that’s just the first maxim.

Gricean Maxims: the Maxim of Manner

One way to avoid the ambiguity of bending the maxim to tell the truth is to clearly show you are not.  We use set phrases to start jokes off, sure, but we also have a mischievous twinkle in our eye, and we make a pregnant pause before the punchline. Not doing these things risks the joke falling flat.

Really not doing these things risks the joke being taken at face value, and quite right too.

Of course, online, this is what emojis were invented to try to help out with. Use them liberally is my advice.

But this Gricean Maxim is not just about the delivery, but also about not being ambiguous.

Now I do not know if you have ever been in the middle of a community stushie which seems to have come about because of what you consider to be a wilful misreading of someone’s utterance by someone else who should have enough familiarity with their conversation partner not to go down that interpretive road?

That happens all the time on social media. And I would say that when there are two possible interpretations of what someone has said, perhaps we might consider that they meant the more benign one. Unless we really do have more context or the person has form to aid us in suggesting it’s the other.

But then we come to political correctness.

And you know, if our job is to be as clear as possible, and if people also tend to think that what we say represents what we believe, then if we have said something that leads people to call us out, it is actually our fault. Whether it was a bit of fuddy-duddy stubbornness or simply an unfortunate choice of words.

Basically, there is something to be said on or off social media for not making a whole bunch of acquaintances, half strangers, or total strangers work any harder than they should to understand what we mean, rather than what we say.

I do think that if you have been caught out in an imprecision that has got you into trouble, it’s no good implying that the other person should have understood you.

Apologise and clarify. This will not actually work, of course, but still. Apologise and clarify.

And to be honest, there are always other words. That’s the nice thing about language. Consider using them next time.

On the other hand, pretending to misinterpret the message is actually great way to use Grice’s Maxims and the cooperative principle for humour, so…

Exhibit A:

I would think it odd that the new seem to have two kids named Phineas [....]: 'Justin Timberlake confirm to Ellen DeGeneres that he and wife Jessica Biel welcomed their 2nd child named Phineas.'

Exhibit B:

I learned this morning that my parents' unconditional love expires at NY: 'We love you. Next your will be different. XXX M+D'

As long as nobody pops up to say that, actually, what that person probably meant was…

I give it about five minutes.

[You may have noticed that I mentioned there were four Gricean Maxims and I have only covered two. Tune in next time for the next two and a rant about people calling me Heather. Yes, I know it’s my name; it’s still no excuse].

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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis with a frown

There’s a theory in linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which I’m afraid means I have to take a short break in order to imagine a large Klingon with a pair of trope-inspried wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose looking thoughtful in a lecture theatre.

[pause]

Image by blueprint2015 from Pixabay

(Yes, I know the spelling is different).

This is appropriate as the theory is to do with whether language affects thought. In the case of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the obsession seems to be about how speaking different languages produces different thought in different language speakers.

This turns out to be an absolute minefield. Both in terms of actually proving it, but also whether or not you want to.

The trick here is to find things that are the same for everybody.

The physical environment, for example.

That old story about Inuit languages having 700 000 words for snow, a feat unheard of in any other language? Part of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis*. The idea here is that if you name it, you notice it better. Nothing to do with just, I dunno, noticing it better than, say, someone who is not surrounded by snow for an appreciable part of the year because it’s more part of your life? But would someone who has not needed to consider the difference between dry powdery snow and really wet sticky snow and their relative merits for building snowmen simply not be able to tell the difference if they were suddenly dumped in that environment? Or would they pick it up actually fairly quickly when all their attempts at snowballs turned to dust after the temperature got down below a certain point?

Can’t imagine where I plucked that example from.

It’s not even particularly true about the surprising number of words for snow in comparison to other languages. It turns out**. I mean, take ‘powdery snow’. Not, it’s not one word. It’s not even a compound, where two words come together to make a new, distinct word. But it is a collocation, which means those words are found together with a greater frequency than chance in English. Even British English speakers, in fact, know about the concept of powdery snow, and have a phrase to describe it. Well, the ones that go ski-ing in the Alps, anyway. Or move to Russia.

Of course, this is one of those things that gets brought up a LOT. Such and such a language doesn’t have a word for… that our language has. Or, such and such a language has a word for… that our language has not. This often seems to be really an excuse to be smug about some aspect of national character. Or trotted out as an example of a national failing. Russian has a word that combines conscience, shame and morality in an untranslatable hodgepodge, as befits a country proud of its deep Russian soul. Russian doesn’t have a word for privacy, which…

Where this becomes the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis directly, however, is when people start saying that Russian doesn’t have a separate word for science. And speculating that this means that the findings of researchers conducting experiments in chemistry are given the same weight as the findings of scholars engaged in historical investigation. THE VERY IDEA!

At this point it is traditional to bring up the Pirahã Amazonian tribe***, who survived quite well without counting in their lives up to the point they got studied by behavioural scientists. While exploring the way this worked, someone actually measured what happened when, for example, you showed these people groups of animals with slightly different numbers and asked them to say if the groups were equal or not. Which proved difficult. As did copying exact numbers in lines of berries with any accuracy above something like 4. Clearly an effect that a (lack of language) was having on the thoughts of the people (not) experiencing it.

Except, it also turned out to be hard to teach them counting. Despite their having perceived a need (they wanted to make sure they were not being cheated in trading with outsiders), and being given the words, the attempt didn’t translate to success. New language didn’t cause new thinking to happen.

So much for the film Arrival**** and its contention that merely learning an alien language causes you to start experience the universe, nay, the laws of physics, differently.

Let us consider that in another part of the world, people locate themselves not in relation to themselves or some other arbitrary point (in front of me, on the left of the table, behind the church or whatever) but in absolute directional terms. South-west of the book, to the north, my western arm. And so on.

Are these people are actually better at locating themselves, specially-wise, as a result? Yes, yes they are*****. Now that’s the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, irrefutably. No?

But what I want to know is, is it really as a result of it being embedded in language or is it embedded in language because knowing exactly where you are at all times is quite important in that particular geographical context, which happens to be northern Australia?

My favourite example of this kind, though, is the one about how Swedish and Finnish factories had a difference in the number of accidents because something something prepositions vs grammatical cases having an effect on the way the factories and the work flow are organised. The Finnish languages fosters a fatal individualism, apparently. The thinking is here that the languages are very different (Finnish is, unusually for a European language, not Indo European), but the countries are neighbours and have similar standards of living and so on. Environmental factors causing difference are lessened.

Apparently. Look, it’s not my theory, OK? I’m not the one lumping Swedes and Finns together as indistinguishable aside from their language.

Of course, this is the point. Rugged individualism, I do rather gather, is a defining Finnish characteristic*******. But is this caused by their language? Or merely facilitated by it? Your answer to this question depends on whether you believe in linguistic determinism or linguistic relativity.

The idea that linguistic peculiarities constrain you to think a particular way (linguistic determinism) is hard to swallow, but perhaps they do force you to contemplate certain aspects of the world more (linguistic relativity).

Although if you don’t believe there is any relationship at all, you are Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker ********. Who think that language is governed by universal principles, and that universal concepts therefore crop up and are described across all languages, no matter how dissimilar, and that any differences are very minor small beer.

Yet it does seem as though gendered languages have people assigning stereotypically gendered attributes to different objects, depending on the gender they are given in their first language. Even when they are being asked to consider these objects in a second, non gendered language (English)*********.

And then there’s the colour blue. Colour perception has been a particular battle ground for this discussion because, well, (nearly) everyone sees the same range of colour, right? Differences in colour perception MUST be significant.

There’s a study which shows that speakers of Russian, which has two words for blue where English has one, react in a statistically significant different way when shown the two shades of blue compared to English speakers. They did brain scans and everything.**********

There have been counter experiments along those lines too, by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis sceptics. Did you know, for example, that while there are differences in colour description, generally speaking there tend to be eleven basic categories, and when there are fewer, they go: black and white; black, white and red; black, white, red, and green or yellow. It’s surprisingly predictable.***********

Not quite sure, if I am honest how that explains away the blue/ blue thing, but then it was a study published earlier. So perhaps it doesn’t.

Anyway.

I admit a distinct preference for thinking that linguistic relativity, or a soft version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, is a thing. In much the same way I think that all environmental factors have a bearing on how we behave (if you want to be cornered by me at a party and have my explanation of why free will doesn’t exist, which takes in quantum physics and everything, feel very free to invite me).

What I do not understand is why this always seems to be couched in terms of pitting one language against another.************

Surely it would be much easier to determine if language shaped thought if you tried to find out whether people whose backgrounds really are similar, and who therefore speak the same language, can be swayed by into one way of thinking or another by the power of words alone.

Or, to put it another way, advertising.

On the other hand, I have just found out (and this is the reason I am writing this post, in fact) that ‘frown’ means something different in British English, to US English, Canadian English and Australian English.*************

The (right thinking) Brits think it’s all in the eyebrows. The rest of them think it’s a down-turned mouth thing.

Russians and speakers of other European languages of my acquaintance agree with me. Except the Dane, who says that Danish doesn’t have a word for ‘frown’, but does associate different facial expressions with, variously, confusion, skepticism, surprise or disapproval.

I don’t know what this says about the Danes.

I don’t know what this proves in relation the the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis either, except that we are back to 700 000 words for snow again because I am now absolutely gagging to find out if North Americans (and Australians) have a different emotion as well as a different emphasis on the muscles involved.

Provocatively, a (British) friend suggested sulking. You?

*According to Google.

** Also according to Google.

*** Or at least it is when follow links suggested by Google.

**** Which I haven’t seen.

***** According to Google.

****** Also according to Google. Look, at least I looked a bit further than Wikipedia, OK? Although this example is also in Wikipedia.

******* This is based on my subscription to the Facebook page, Very Finnish Problems.

******** Says Google.

********* I haven’t read this paper either.

********** I did actually read this paper, but it was a while ago and I cannot be bothered to look up the reference, and in any case, it is all over Google.

*********** Google it.

************ This is, in fact, why I have not taken my reading further than Googling.

************* In the Lingthuiasm podcast, episode 20. I gather I am a number of years behind everyone else in linguistics in finding this out, which seems about right.

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The affordances of online teaching

EFL (English as a foreign language) teaching is driven by feedback loops.

Quite how we should structure lessons is up for debate – is it about presenting some language and then providing more to less supported practice, or is it about setting up a task you want students to get better at and then working with them until they do? Who should do more of the work of analysing performance or language, the teacher or the students? Even, what language do students need to be able to handle? Grammar structures? Words? Set phrases? Combinations of words? Combinations of words which have some kind of pattern underlying them?

But generally speaking, however lessons are frameworked, they are going to be organised around an activity, exercise, task or question the teacher asks, and students will get fairly immediate feedback on their responses. And then there will be another activity, exercise, task or question. With more feedback. It may vary in type or content, but it’s there, over and over throughout the lesson. The idea is that each round of feedback refines understanding or skills, and that students can keep putting into practice the lessons learnt when they do the next step.

So one of the things I found quite hard to get my head round when teaching teenagers in a state school context in the UK was this isn’t how it’s done there.

Now, I can see why. School is really quite tiring. The concentration needed to focus intensely on something individually or in pairs and then snap yourself back to work as a class, get your head down, drag your focus to the teacher, thinking, then talking, then listening, multiple times back and forth in one lesson… Well, doing that for a couple of hours twice a week is very different to sustaining it over what is quite a lengthy school day, every day, for five days, for months at a time.

Plus, given that school groups are really quite wide ranging and large, being able to manage the lesson so that each student is ready to have their work checked at more or less the same time as everyone else for a series of short exercises is probably wildly optimistic.

So lessons tend to work in thirds. There’s a whole class presentation type stage. Then comes a stage where students are working on things on their own, which if you are really feeling your oats as a teacher will be chosen according to each individual student’s level, needs, or preferences. And then there’s a plenary, where whatever they are supposed to have learned is checked, but in a sort of broad ‘what overarching principle have we learned this lesson’ sort of way. Specific outcomes for the exercises students have been working on will only be looked at when the teacher has time to take in books and mark them, assuming they were that kind of task in the first place.

And this will not be every lesson.

As you can imagine, this gives a very different pace to lessons, and a very different way of learning., and a very different idea of what makes a lesson work. It should, in theory, make a teacher think a lot more about what outcome for the lesson they want to achieve, rather than measuring success by a series of correctly answered exercises for a start.

I’ve been thinking about this because teaching online, it turns out, needs to be run a bit differently to teaching face to face.

A teachers stands in a forest surrounded by her pupils. The affordances of this environment will shape how she teaches.
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

The main issue is that everything takes longer. Particularly pairwork. Mainly pairwork, even. I mean, don’t get me wrong I love how intimate the space of breakout rooms can be. No longer are you trapped in a large echoing room with the buzz of voices all around – there you are, just you and your partner, together, preferably on a sofa with a cup of coffee.

Different sofas, I’ll grant you. But a sofa none the less.

And as a teacher I can hear the students (in that room) a lot better than when my attention is fighting to tune out everybody else. Online pairwork is great! But every time you use pairwork online it comes at a time cost. And so you cannot use it for all the stages of the lesson that a face to face teacher might.

Now this in itself is a good way of figuring out when pairwork is truly important, not just for maximising students’ opportunity to speak, but for the purposes of collaboration, peer teaching and so on. It cannot just be the default.

Then the challenge is deciding how to monitor. Because if you cannot listen in to everybody at the same time, or you cannot listen in to anyone because you have not got the time for breakout rooms, then you have to figure out ways to get feedback on what students are doing or what outcomes they have reached that is inclusive of as many of the class as possible.

Which brings me to the point that online teaching may be a bit more teacher led in places, but it can also be more inclusive. It’s very easy to throw out a general question to a face to face class and let yourself fly with the fastest because you think you have some idea of how everyone got on.

This is not something you can let yourself do when you are working with a group online.

Luckily, not only are there online tools that help with remote monitoring, like Google Docs, but features on the teaching platforms themselves, like the chatbox in Zoom, allow you to do this. You just need to figure out what to use and when.

(Just. Ahahahahahahaha).

What has all this to do with discourse analysis and online communication, you may be asking yourself?

Not much. ‘S my blog. I can write what I like.

Oh go on then. It’s a nice example of what is known as affordance, a term coined back on the 60s* to describe what the environment allows someone to do, the way that humans shape the world around them to facilitate their lives, and that learning to use what is around them appropriately, natural or not, is a crucial aspect of learning how to fit in.

Affordances don’t need to be physical objects. They can also be someone’s talent, skills or a desire for something to happen.

But affordance became associated, in the fullness of the 80s, with product development and programming and similar, connected with designing things to be used in a particular way, preferably so that people would understand and be able to use them in the way intended without intensive instructions. The form would fit the function, sort of thing, that reading the manual would be superfluous.

Why yes, in case you are wondering, a man most certainly did come up with that idea**.

The term affordances also comes up when people talk about online communication and the ways that different platforms shape language and language use in ways that are different to we are used to, or think are normal. Some of which is an intended design feature, and some of which is users adapting in novel and interesting ways to their environment. More of a bug, in fact. Think of the rise of the emoji as a solution to the problem of not being able to use a quirk of an eyebrow or intonation and so on to indicate when you were trying to be a bit tongue in cheek.

To be honest I think ‘allowances’ is a better word, but then a) its inventor wanted a totally new word for his concept and b) it does connect to the phrase ‘afford someone an opportunity’ which puts the whole idea on a resolutely positive footing.

Which definitely brings us squarely back to the topic of this blog. Online communication’s affordances are different, sure, but that just changes the way you go about it, and what you might get out of it. It isn’t necessarily a debased form of real communication, just as online teaching isn’t necessarily an imperfect copy of ‘real’ face to face teaching.

Now excuse me while I just get back to stripping out all the unnecessary bits from my next lesson plan in order to focus on the essentials.

*By, if you must know, a psychologist called James J Gibson.

**Donald Norman.