25. Monolingualism and How to Fix It (if it needs fixing)

Posted on February 25, 2013 by thormay

Abstract: The argument I will develop in this essay is that the foreign students are a latent human resource who can assist with overcoming English monolingualism in the Australian population. Foreign students, properly rewarded, can be a major source of skills transfer. Every one of those students is a walking compendium of language and cultural skills that Australians need to know.

Nations which have English as a dominant mother tongue are often accused of foolish monolingualism. There are populations in other languages which are also monolingual for a variety of reasons, although multilingualism has been and remains the most common worldwide pattern. At this point in history however, English monolingualism is especially resistant to challenge, and will be at the core of this discussion.

Anglo-cultures nourish a widely accepted social meme which disparages language learning. The strong form of this meme is “we can’t learn foreign languages”, and the weaker variant, “it is a waste of time to learn foreign languages because everyone speaks English”. The supporting rationale to the weak form of rejection is that “if we need interpreting/translation there are plenty of people in this country who can do it”.

It is not difficult to disprove the hopeless “we can’t learn…” attitude. However it has proved very difficult to challenge the “language learning is a waste of time” attitude, partly because most Anglo-countries now do have large immigrant populations which are a useful source of language skills for at least one generation. The challenge is also difficult because “waste of time” in the end is a measurement of cultural value, and only incidentally a measure of economic value. Continue reading →

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24. The Probable Language Brain

Posted on February 13, 2013 by thormay

Abstract: Let us suppose that you are a research linguist, tormented by some doubts and questions about the state of your profession, and not constrained by having to repeat a catechism of “known truths” to Linguistics 101 students, and not worried about employment tenure. How would you actually go about tackling “the central problem of linguistics”, namely how we acquire and maintain knowledge of the probability of systemic relationships in a language?

Here are two simple pragmatic truths :

a) if you ask me the product of 9×8 I can tell you instantly : 72

b) if you ask me the product of 9×14 I have to calculate out each digit, then remember to add the results. It is slow and I might easily make a mistake. That is because in my primary school they only made us memorize up to 12×12.

The first act, a) is performed courtesy of my procedural memory and as a product of a physical neuronal relationship. (Procedural memories are routines acquired by practice until they become subconscious, such as the skill of driving a car. Psychologists would probably call the neuronal relationship some kind of “long term memory”). I am unlikely to ever forget the answer to 9×8, but growing that association was hard. It took a lot of childhood practice.

The second act, b) is performed by the conscious application of rules I have learned. Deliberate multiplication and addition seems to take place in a workroom next to my declarative memory. (Declarative memories are learned facts accessible to conscious recall. Psychologists would probably call the workroom “short term memory”). On a bad day I might stumble trying to apply the rules of arithmetic. Large numbers of people never become any good at it.

In one way, my knowledge of a) is somewhat similar to my knowledge of my native language. I don’t have to sit there trying to apply “grammar rules” before I can talk. Rather, the flow of words, like the result of multiplying 9×8 emerges instantly.

However, the mathematical outcome of multiplying 9×8 is 100% certain. In this, the behaviour of natural language is rather different. Continue reading →

Posted in Cognition, Grammar, Language learning, Linguistics, Probability in language, Research | Leave a comment

23. Testing for Teaching; Teaching to What?

Posted on January 13, 2013 by thormay

The outline which follows analyses the two halves of a language teacher’s profession:

a) The first half is daily classroom practice : what is taught and how is it evaluated?

b) The second half of a teacher’s profession is to know or at least estimate what is going on in the brains of her students : what is learned and how is it learned?

Teaching is a simulation machine. Learning is for life. The implicit professional challenge is in making the simulation useful for living.

Note: The discussion here reflects a teacher’s interest in actual language learning, rather than that special game which sets out to manufacture “the IELTS/TOEFL performing clone”. Also, I have termed these notes an “outline”. It would be an abuse of language to call them an academic paper in any finished sense, and the absence of referencing reinforces that. There are, after all, whole academic faculties devoted to the study of testing, though unfortunately most teachers have never heard of them. Still, for those in a hurry, these reflections of my own may crystallize some of the questions which, sooner or later, will trouble any thoughtful teacher.

Continue reading →

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22. Hidden Boundaries – A Joint-Venture Education Program in China

Posted on December 14, 2012 by thormay

This review is a post-mortem of an education joint-venture between an Australian college and a Chinese college in central China at the three year mark*. It has lessons for policy, management, teaching and learning. The focus is on foreign language teaching, but most of the elements also apply to other fields of study.

[* The Australian writer was leaving China due to an incoherent Public Security Bureau regulation that a work visa could not be extended beyond 65 years of age, regardless of real fitness].

Scene I: The Joint-Venture Business Model

The foreign partner’s business model was designed to move graduating students to Australia for further study. Such students would therefore have to meet certain academic and English language standards. The Chinese college’s business model had a public version and an implicit version, the actual one, which only gradually became clear to the foreign partner over time.

Admission to the normal college program was cheap in Chinese terms, but was cemented to a certain admission level by the national Gaokao (高考) examinations. The admission mark was not especially high, since this was not a prestigious institution, but it existed. There were however still large numbers of failing students whose families had suffered the humiliation of not being allowed to send their children to college. That failure of course meant a serious net loss of future opportunity and income to those families.

However, there was an even worse problem. In a culture where ‘face’ (面子mianzi) has immense force, buying one’s way out of humiliation has been an established principle for generations, and of course creates countless business opportunities. The college’s plan (so obvious in the Chinese universe, so opaque to the foreigner) was to legitimize the admission of failing students by bringing them into an “international” program at three times the standard national fee level.

Whether these “international” program students ever graduated at a level sufficient for international study was irrelevant to the Chinese college’s income stream, and (it turned out) beyond the expectations and finances of nearly all the students. This is not a new model. The South Korean tertiary education system plays out the same paradigm on a large and very profitable scale.

Continue reading →

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21. WHAT NEXT? Eighty things to do with students learning English

Posted on November 16, 2012 by thormay

This is a collection of things to do in a classroom, plus a little explanation for teachers. The collection is not a syllabus, it is not graded and it is certainly not “complete” (what would “complete” mean here?). However bits of it should be useful for almost anyone teaching English.

All teachers accumulate a repertoire of tricks. Over the years they find that some things work well for them, others not so well. Some approaches succeed brilliantly with one class, but fall flat with the next one. There is probably a common core of techniques and activities popular at any given time, with a fairly small number of creative teachers on the margins inventing (or reinventing) extra ways to get across and embed skills or knowledge.

The present outline is dedicated to those Monday mornings when all inspiration fails. Curriculums are dull documents, and unless a teacher is entirely a text book sludge repeater, she will want to use lively and interesting activities as tools for meeting the abstract curriculum objectives. It is therefore useful to have a reminder list of activities which can be adapted for the class waiting in room 201. Continue reading →

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20. Please Tell Me Some Idioms to Learn

Posted on April 13, 2012 by thormay

Abstract : What is an idiom? The answer is both complex and fuzzy. This short paper is a colloquial discussion that begins with a student inquiry about learning idioms and progresses to the realization that idioms are an indeterminate category which raise deep questions about the nature of collocation and cognitive language processing.

She was trying to be conversational. “Tell me some good idioms”, she said. I’ve been guilty of reversing this as a learner of Chinese. “Tell me the best 成语 (chengyu) to learn”, I’ll demand of some startled Chinese accountancy student or engineer. We should all know better. Not many of us can manage the turn-on-a-pinhead instant wit of an Oscar Wilde, and how can we find a fit for those expectant ears in another head? So we mumble the first thing that comes to mind from tens of thousands of English idioms or Chinese 成语.

This time I stonewalled the lady, not planning to be rude, just a kind of subconscious rebellion. “Some good idioms?” For what, when, how, why and under what level of threat?  She was asking for a bucket of seawater to explain the world’s ocean currents. That’s the trouble with knowing too much about a subject for a 30 second sound bite (no arrogance intended). She went off in a huff, looking for her soundbite. After all, for a real answer there was always Google online, with zillions of sources and lists. The trouble is, they wouldn’t help her much unless she had a photographic memory, and even then not much either. Why not?  Continue reading →

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19. Stress, Rhythm and Intonation

Posted on August 10, 2011 by thormay

Abstract: These are notes on English stress, rhythm and intonation. Part A is for students and Part B is for teachers. The treatment here is “technical”, as by a linguist, but in very plain language. Even with poor formal English, L2 speakers who “sound right” will gain social acceptance, and this in turn will greatly accelerate their learning. Firstly the concept of “the music of a language” is introduced. It is noted that languages are on a scale of “syllable timed” to “stress timed” (though this is not a simple matter). English is a stress-timed language. Both word stress and sentence stress are essential in English. However, proper word liaison and elision marks native speakers from non-native speakers. Some advice is given on how to practice privately and in a classroom. The importance of teacher talk as a model is noted.

Part A  – For Students

1. Recognizing the “music” of foreign languages:

I have a short wave radio. I can hear voices from many languages. I turn the dial and hear Russian. I don’t understand Russian, but I know it is Russian.

As I go through the stations I hear Japanese and Spanish, Vietnamese and German. I can’t speak these languages, but I know what they are when I hear them.

HOW DO I KNOW? Well, my mind has learned a little of the MUSIC of those languages. Each one sings a different “song”. Continue reading →

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18. Fluency Vs Accuracy OR Fluency AND Accuracy for Language Learners?

Posted on November 17, 2009 by thormay

Abstract : This seminar paper indicates a fundamental difference in objectives between language learning for certification and learning for live use. Whereas accuracy is an absolute goal within schooling contexts, its value on the street is highly variable. This difference is reflected in teaching perspectives. // This is the outline of a seminar on teaching methodology given as a teacher inservice for Chinese English teachers in Zhengzhou, Henan, China, in November 2009.

1. Why do we teach English?

  • Students learn a language supposedly to use it in their jobs, or other areas of their future life.
  • As teachers in schools, we mostly don’t teach language as it will actually be used in jobs or other areas of real life.
  • As teachers in schools, we mostly teach language for exam results, or for tests like IELTS. We can’t avoid this. It is a feature of mass education.
  • Our discussion will mostly be about teaching in this college in Zhengzhou, China, for college purposes. However, I will begin by looking at the larger idea of how real language is used.
    Continue reading →
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17. Basic Tips for Language Teachers

Posted on June 10, 2008 by thormay

Abstract : These notes [2300+ words] consist of three parts : 1. Some short backround notes on the profession of teaching languages; 2. A few useful links for teaching tips and content; 3. A collection of ten activities which the seminar presenter has invented or borrowed, and found to be popular with students.// This is an outline from one of a monthly series of seminars by Thor May on teaching skills. The seminars were given as a teacher inservice for Chinese English teachers in Zhengzhou, Henan, China. This seminar was conducted on 10 June 2008

1. Background Teaching Notes

1.1 The Language Playing Field

1.1.1 Language teaching is about a) skilled teaching, and b) USING language.

1.1.2 Many of the skills involved in the profession of teaching are common to teaching most subjects. The teaching profession is really about a) persuading people to learn, and b) helping them to learn.

1.1.3 As every salesman knows, persuasion is customer-centered. Selling refrigerators to Eskimos is tough work, just as selling a risk of embarrassment to teenagers is tough work. The salesman must be cunning.

1.1.4 A few people want to know ABOUT the inner workings of language. They are analytic linguists. Everyone else just wants to USE it. Learning a new language, it may sometimes help a student to know something about its inner workings. The teacher has to make a judgement about this, while also remembering her own limited knowledge about how the language works. However, the first duty of a language teacher is actually using the new language herself, and encouraging her students to use it.  Continue reading →

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16. Grammar for Language Teachers

Posted on May 13, 2008 by thormay

This entry has the structure of a seminar presentation. It was just that,  for Chinese teachers of English in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China, May 2008. I hope that you find it provocative enough to be useful.

Abstract: 1. What are we doing when we do grammar ? / 2. So what is grammar?/ 3. Where do the rules in book grammars come from ? / 4. So is grammar just about the links between words ? / 5. Language grammar always happens at the same time as lots of other things in your brain / 6. What should grammar teachers teach ? / 7. Do students learn useful language control from studying grammar books? / 8. Can teachers teach grammar? / 9. How can language teachers be most useful? / 10. Do grammar mistakes matter? / 11. Is accuracy more important than fluency?

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Think about the following -

1. What are we doing when we do grammar ?

1.1. Ducks _ _ _ _ [add one word / add one word / add one word …. complete this sentence ] (class game)

1.1.1. Why did you choose those words ?

1.1.2. Would native speakers choose the same words as L2 speakers on average?

1.1.3 Would Australians choose the same words as Americans?

Continue reading →

Posted in Grammar, Language teaching | 4 Comments