Applied Linguistics: A classroom menace?

[LarryLatham]

What seems to be missing?

Larry Latham

[Sally Olsen]

I am also curious why you have to bite your tongue about your real feelings in your courses Woodcutter? I would feel terrible if I were your teacher, to think that you couldn't try out all sorts of ideas in your course. If you can't experiment with ideas in a course on Applied Linguistics, then I guess it is left to forums like this, but that is too bad. I understand that you are paying money and probably need this course to try and please your future bosses but isn't there a way to express your true feelings as well and have good discussions about them with other people who are surely interested? All I can say, is go to Carleton University in Ottawa - they have distance education courses as well. They will let you try out any and all theories and ideas. Each professor had their own ideas and were so enthusiastic to find out others.

[wjserson]

Sally, this is just a hunch, but did you happen to attend Carleton University in Ottawa? Or do you just happen to have heard about how excellent their ESL teacher training is? Do you know Professor Ian Pringle?

I happen to be an alumni member (of the French Linguistics program), just to explain my curiosity.

[Sally Olsen]

Yep, I did my Masters at Carleton in 2000. Ian Pringle was my mentor for the job in Greenland along with Devon Woods and others. Ian has since retired to the detriment of the department but there are new and exciting profs coming along. Fantasic group of people and so supportive. They mail you tapes of the class if you are doing distance learning and there is usually a chat line that you can get into even from a distance to talk with the other students. When I get in trouble, I go back and read my notes and get a better perspective of what I am doing or what is going wrong.

Where do you teach now?

[woodcutter]

I think my course (Leicester) is probably pretty standard. They present everything as only one possible theory, but in the end they have to allocate marks, and mark you down for disagreeing with the current status quo. And as others have written here, the current status quo is inadeqaute on questions of student motivation. Modern textbooks offend nobody, and inspire nobody, and many modern teachers are perhaps much the same. Since motivation is all important in language learning, I suspect there is much to be said for the traditional situation where there were many teachers following their own inclinations, since that gave a student the opportunity to find a teacher who suited them. Isn't that better than one size fits all, especially in a large city with voluntary students?

I don't say that an MA in language teaching is not worthwhile, it is just that the need to give it a pseudo-scientific sheen means that all the things you learn come along with some fad-of-the-moment dogma which must be repeated ad nauseum and acted upon in respectable text-books, and that is unfortunate.

[Sally Olsen]

What is science then and what would you consider to be proof of what to do in the classroom? Would you consider Psychology or any other field that has to do with people, a science? Do you want an experiment that proves that there is one right way to teach?

I like the idea of being able to choose your teacher. Of course, as things are set up, it is hard in most places. They are 400 teachers short in Greenland. You can see from the ads for jobs that they think they need thousands of English teachers in China. But I guess when someone asks me my dreams for the future, I think of the situation of a mentor with various ages of students who have chosen the mentor because of his/her love of the subject and her/his ability to pass on that love to a particular kind of student. I don't really think we pass on the knowledge because it gets coloured and changed by the students experience.

Have you read Vivian Cook's book , "Second Language Learning and Language Teaching".
- I found it a really good start to my own research.

[wjserson]

Yeah, Sally. I now teach as a 'consultant' for a local (for profit) school in downtown Ottawa part time while I search for better opportunities.

I took a few of his courses during my MA (the best of which was Language PLanning and Policy) and I also was forutnate to have him as the external in my MA Thesis defence (after a lot of begging). I'm aware of his retirement. He's had a letter published in the Citizen a while ago.

Anyway, nice to meet another Carleton Graduate here on this site, Sally.

[woodcutter]

It's nice to be bringing people together............

Sally, linguistics is a science, but my point is that applying it to the classroom is not really a matter for science. Every class, every context is different. If we drew from experience, and reading about other people's experiences, rather than from over-arching theories, I think we would be better off.

[Sally Olsen]

What do you think theories are then? What is the difference between experience and a theory? My husband is also a scientist (so I guess I am putting myself in the same category although I am just working on the PhD.) and he tries out lots and lots of ideas, some that work and some that don't about clouds and radio waves. What is different in what we do in trying out ideas in the classroom or wherever we teach? Just because we haven't written them down as much or don't get the official recognition that my husband might get, doesn't mean that they are not science. Just because we are dealing with people and not clouds doesn't make it any less a science IMHO.

[LarryLatham]

'Atta girl, Sally. But woodcutter has a point too. What counts, I think, is whether or not one reflects on one's experiences, or on the reported experiences of others. It is the reflection that produces movement, whether that movement represents "progress" or whether it is merely a sidestep (or even occasionally a backstep ). It is the reflection that may make experience into "science."

Of course, we all make mistakes!

Larry Latham

[woodcutter]

Let me try and give an example. I read in the Guardian recently an article which said that studies showed that people generally need seven encounters with a word before it sinks in. An interesting study performed in a scientific manner, and one with obvious relevance to the classroom. So, we should make sure that everything is met seven times in class? I don't think so. For example, students may review every night, in which case 3 and a half times would suffice. If you know that most of your students never review you could recycle seven times, but this would actively discourage anybody from doing any review because it would already be tedious enough.

It is always like this - the organic situation at the end of the process makes the scientific research very difficult to apply. Decisions are best left to the organic educators.

[Duncan Powrie]

Well, yes, hopefully nobody would read about a controlled scientific study (which presumably provided these "learners" with their only contact/encounters with their words) and begin applying those findings without considering how many times real learners, THEIR learners, will be encountering or reviewing words (wow, you must have some studious students, woodcutter!).

But the key point is that the study could (should?) be of some "relevance to the classroom" teacher, and there would seem little danger here of things getting disastrously misconstrued in the process of the linguistics being applied!

Can you think of any examples where linguistics seems to be positively misleading, at least as filtered through and interpreted (for us) by the Applied Linguistic "middlemen" (who stand between the proverbial ivory towers and the thin white line of the chalkface)?

[LarryLatham]

...studies showed that people generally need seven encounters with a word before it sinks in. An interesting study performed in a scientific manner, and one with obvious relevance to the classroom. So, we should make sure that everything is met seven times in class? I don't think so.

I don't think so either, woodcutter. Probably no one else here does.

First, if anyone looked into this study, one would discover that that 7 times is a statistical average (probably a mean), and that the range and standard deviation might indicate quite a wide divergence from that average. The number 7 carries hardly any significance outside that it might be an average for the study group.

Which brings up Second. Just because it may be science does not necessarily mean that it's good science! Or useful science. Before this study was conducted, probably not many of us had the idea that once was enough.

Larry Latham

[woodcutter]

Larry's point is more grist to the mill - the scientific research is also not necessarily to be relied on and must be carefully used, I quite agree. If language teaching really resembled science then many teachers might well want to apply this research in some classes and go through each item 7 times, again I agree with Larry that nobody really would, but mainly beacause we all know it isn't so precise an activity. I mentioned some misapplications of theory in my original post, there was the whole period of learn-by-rote behaviourism, and then some writers advocating absolutely input free conversational classes in the 80s. It seems that academia is only slowly moving away from the communicative mantra developed at that time, and on my Trinity TESOL course "keep the students talking" was the watchword, this presumably born of communicative ideology. The result of that, I think, is that many teachers feel they have a duty in foreign lands to release the birds from of their cages, and let those grammar stuffed turkeys have the years of chatter they have been missing out on. They feel simply to do that is enough, it represents a new world of cuddly, advanced teaching. IMHO that is a worse procedure than the balance of "teacher centred" time and speaking practice that mere common sense would dictate, since the endless grammar classes, if the students studied in such a way, are not going to affect the students production of language very positively.

[Duncan Powrie]

I suppose the best thing we can all do is become linguists in the older sense of the word (NODE: "skilled in foreign languages" - which entails us native-speaker teachers learning not only foreign languages, but also trying to appreciate English as a foreign language), and "be true to (the?) language(s)".

Doing this would help us clear a path through the overgrown jungle between "Descriptions" and "Teaching" (prescriptions?) below:

Descriptions----Theoretical AND Applied Linguistics---->Teaching

I would include Historical Linguistics, Anthropology, Archeology, and now Corpus Linguistics under "Descriptions". I can't see much difference between Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (are either a science, even when scientific expertise is involved?) - perhaps they are still pseudo-sciences at best. Does it matter? What we seem to be in search of above all is consistency, "discipline" and systematic rigour in whatever disciplines (but not at the expense of the truth, and/or of becoming too rigid or simplistic).

It's interesting that you mentioned Chomsky (along with Krashen) as being an applied linguist in an earlier post, Larry - I'm sure you'd agree that Chomsky is more a theoretician, and that he has made no claims as to the applicability of his work to teaching (although he of course must still hold great hopes for the whole enterprise he began)...I'm not sure if Krashen is an applied linguist...what is he, exactly? I guess he has done his share of teaching at least...

Anyway, it sounds like you'd actually be sympathetic to what Krashen has to say, woodcutter (re. your saying: "IMHO that is a worse procedure than the balance of "teacher centred" time and speaking practice that mere common sense would dictate, since the endless grammar classes, if the students studied in such a way, are not going to affect the students production of language very positively.")...or do you think he has nothing at all to say (regarding "input" etc) and is minting fake coinages? (I personally am not sure how many of the things he has said are ridiculously obvious, because I didn't qualify as a teacher before he came along, and therefore couldn't have been getting on with the eminently sensible business of teaching "ignorant" of his "contributions").

Guys like Chomsky and Krashen must have had something of importance to say, surely, or they wouldn't be so well-known! They may be over-rated and not deserve their cult followings, sure, but even the act of strenuously disagreeing with either (or both!) of them (or any other linguists) has to mean you are on the way to formulating an approach, and then a philosophy etc even if you believe you don't have (or don't need to have) any underlying beliefs, and are thus a "mere" method teacher (and like I've said above and elsewhere, method is no substitute for description - an obvious point that I recall you acknowledging on another thread, woodcutter! ).

The only thing is, having facts, input whatever at your disposal may suggest a natural pedagogy, but it'd be a tough slog to whip it all into teachable/learnable shape. We are then faced with the problem of choosing a method - and to do so, we necessarily have to examine the approaches on which they are based, and in turn the claims such approaches make about language, learning, the human mind, society and educational organization, power relationships, equality etc etc.