Happily Stomping All Over Noticing (a rant)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Image: freely licensed media file
from Wikimedia Commons 

So lately I've been thinking a lot about this whole concept of ‘noticing’ and how it relates to language acquisition and I’ve come to the (probably shortsighted) conclusion ‘so what!!!!’ that there is no there there.  Noticing as a mechanism of language acquisition seems no more important to learning a language than it does to learning chemistry and if you have a few moments to follow my logic, I hope you will read to the end of this post.

Now first off, let me state that I am not against the idea of noticing in a language class.  In fact, I run a whole bunch of activities which could be considered traditional language awareness raising activities.  If you look at my last post and my ideas for how to teach a story with lots of ellipses in class, I think almost all of the activities are language awareness activities in one sense or another.  Students read a short story, identify ellipses, identify the sentence components which make the ellipses possible, and finally rewrite the story with what will undoubtedly be awkward sentences in which all implicit information is explicitly stated.  You might say, “Hey Kevin, all of these are ‘noticing’ activities!”   

My problem with noticing is not that it happens, nor that it is a part of language education.  It is merely that there is nothing special about this process as it relates to language learning.  If you have a concept you want students to understand, students must notice that concept, see it in action, come to an understanding of it, and then use it themselves.  Nothing very controversial here at all.

For example, if you want students to use personal pronouns, giving a student a piece of writing or a listening assignment in which there are lots of personal pronouns and having them deduce what the pronouns are referring back to seems like a great first step in helping students learn how to use personal pronouns themselves.  Similarly, you could decide to just explicitly explain how personal pronouns work and have students do a similar activity.  But spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about the actual act of how a student notices and what is happening within the black box of their mind seems like a strange use of time and an even stranger foundation on which to rest a theory of language acquisition.

Now you might say, “But once a student notices the language, they end up seeing it everywhere and those affordances are integral to the language acquisition process.”  And I would say, so what?  First off, affordances are nothing more than a chance to reinforce learning and I’m not big on the term ‘affordances’ either.  Secondly, doesn’t this happen with all kinds of learning?  I used to be a chemistry guy.  I loved chemistry and was a chem. major at university up until I ‘noticed’ that I had a serious lack of spacial relations ability.  No matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine how a molecule would look in 3-dimensions.  So my chemistry career got squashed beneath the with of the only “D” I ever received at uni.  But before my chemistry dreams ended, I clearly remember learning about a chemistry concept and then noticing it in the world around me.  I remember drinking soda and thinking about how what I was drinking was actually carbon dioxide dissolved in water making a weak carbonic acid, and also trying to figure out how many moles of CO2 would be in a liter-bottle of soda.  I did all this without my chemistry teacher being particularly worried about my noticing or affordances or anything of that sort.  Now, do I think my chemistry teacher was totally uninterested in students trying to use their knowledge outside of class?  No, I think she was pretty hep on the idea.  Part of why we did experiments was so we could get hands on experience in how things work and that in turn made it easier for us to apply what we learned to our every day life.  But that is how all learning works. 

Then there is the other kind of ‘noticing’ which kind of drives me crazy, which is ‘noticing the gap.’  It’s another term which I think is just clearly stating the obvious.  A student uses language that differs from the target language.  There are all kinds of reasons for why they might not be able to accurately use the target language, including an internal syllabus which might make it impossible.  But once again the process of noticing seems to be so obvious as to leave me wondering how this became a fundamental concept of language learning.  Students use language, sometimes the language they use differs from how it should be used.  Teachers point out the difference.  Students take note and this is an important first step in learning how to use the correct or target form of the language.  Once again, this just seems like learning to me and not anything to get all excited about. And I think there are more important things to do in an academic article than writing a paragraph about the theoretical importance of ‘noticing the gap.’  For example, a very clear description of what language the student used, what text they used to compare their language with or what feedback they received from the teacher or fellow learner, what chances they had to produce the target language again, and how their language changed.  You can do all of this without ever resorting to the term ‘noticing the gap,” and would probably have a stronger, not weaker paper because of it.

So, by all means, let’s teach some wicked lessons in which students get to work with a ton of language, leave the classroom, and then in a moment of wonder, delight in the fact that the language they just learned is bubbling up all around them.  That’s our job as teachers.  And clearly describing the steps in the process so we and our fellow teachers can do it more effectively is an important part of building our ELT community.  I think we can do that without confusing the outcome of learning (noticing) with the process (step by step description).  Because lately, elevating the term ‘noticing’ to special status, is leaving me flat. 

(As a rant, this article is clearly the first step in an internal process in which I have noticed a gap between my ideas of language teaching and theories which are currently popping up in a lot of articles I am reading.  At a later date I might go back and revise, expand and cite, but for the moment, I just needed to rant.)

Update: well, that was quite an educational experience.  When I wrote this blog post, I had just gone through a marathon journal reading session and was a little annoyed with how the term 'noticing' and 'noting the gap' had become a kind of short-hand for what teachers could or did actually do in the classroom.  And that sense of annoyance started to bubble over when I got a few emails and read a few blogs which were short on details but long on jargon.  With a little bit of nursing, the annoyance became a full on flood of rant-iness.  But you know what, thanks to the comments I've received, I had a great chance to rethink my annoyance.  Over the past few days I've seen how the terms are used by all kinds of teachers to explain not only how they teach, but how they conceptualize their own classrooms.  So have I suddenly seen the light and become a terminology fan?  Nope.  But I'm maybe I'm more willing to read an article with a more open mind, regardless of if it's jargon heavy or not.  And for that, I'm feeling a whole lot of gratitude.     

The Closing of the Ocean (a short story for ELLs)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

The following is a short story for ELLs.  Usually, I write these stories so that they are as easy to understand as possible.  I try and keep as much of the vocabulary as possible within the first 2000 most frequently used words in English as identified by the General Service List.  Often times I will also write with a certain grammar point in mind.  This time, I decided to focus on ellipses.  There are two main types of ellipses.  Textual ellipses are when a word or phrase is omitted because it can be inferred from the clause or sentence either proceeding or following it.  There are also situational a ellipsis.  In that case, general knowledge of the situation allows us to imply something without clearly stating it.  For example, if someone is about to stick there hand into a running laundry machine, we might say, “I wouldn’t!” leaving out the, “stick your hand in a running laundry machine,” as the situation itself provides the information included in the second part of the sentence.  This story has a fair number of textual ellipses and, as far as I can tell, not even just one situational ellipsis (see comments).

It’s my hope that by keeping the story and the vocabulary simple, students will be able to recognize points in the story where things have been left out and perhaps even why.  Usually I just put the stories up as is, but in this case I am including a second version of the story with “[]” markings to signify an ellipsis.  The second version can be found at the end of this post.

Suggested activities:

- Students could be asked to fill in the ellipses after reading the story.

- Students could be given a list of clauses or phrases and asked to match them to the ellipses in the story

- Students could be asked to circle the word, phrase or clause which makes the ellipsis possible.

- Students could read the ellipsis-filled version of the story, then be given a version in which all of the implied phrases or clauses are included.  Finally students could be asked to read the ellipsis-filled version again, filling in the implied phrases or clauses.

I am sure there are lots of other, probably more interesting, activities that could be done to help students recognize and use ellipses, and hope you might let me know your ideas in the comments.  

Text Information:

First 1000 most frequently used words (GSW): 89.61%

Second 1000 most frequently used words (GSW): 8.23%

Academic Word List: 0%

Outside lists: 2.16%

Total Word Count: 457

Flesch Reading Ease score: 88.7

Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Leve: 3.6 (~9 years old)

The Closing of the Ocean





During the first week of November, all the police officers leave their clean pressed uniforms on the front steps of their houses.  Anyone in town is free to pick them up, put them on, and see what it is like, this work of being an officer of the law.  But this year the uniforms were left untouched.  It was the first time.

My brother and I are sitting in the coffee shop on Heart Street.   I pour some milk in my coffee.  My brother drinks his black.  My brother is a police officer.  Lately his eyes get kind of empty when he talks about work, which isn’t often.  He’s in charge of keeping people off the beach at night.  Too many accidents of late, so they decided to close down the ocean until summer.  Even put up a white sign with big red letters.  The sign reads, “Ocean Closed Until Further Notice.”  And my brother is the one who makes sure it stays shut down nice and tight.  I imagine him, walking on the sand, spending his nights making sure that no one is breathing in the salty air.  No one is looking and looking at the dark water as the lights of fishing boats flash on and off.  No one is counting the rocks shining like bones in the moonlight.   

My brother takes the last sip of his coffee. “A few weeks ago, we had a big problem,” he says and shakes his head.  “A bunch of old men, big Russians with big chests, decided to take a quick swim.  I had to pull them out of the water one by one.  Big steaming men acting like children.”  My brother looks in his cup like there might be an answer at the bottom.  “And then they just walked away.  They didn’t say anything.  Just walked away like it was all my fault.”

Now it is February.  Soon enough winter will end.  Soon enough the ocean will be open again.  My brother looks at the clock.  It’s almost seven.  “I’ve got to go close down the ocean,” my brother says and stands up.  As if it actually means something, this idea of closing the ocean.  But maybe it does.  Maybe it means something important.  And not only to my brother. 

In November this year, the police officers’ uniforms remained where they had been placed, untouched.  They just sat there, waiting.  It was the first time.  But every night the beach was filled.  Filled with footprints.  Filled with the whispers of lovers trying to hold on to a few more moments.  Filled with kids laughing like they already had a hundred tomorrows rolled up tight and put away safely in their pockets, saved up for the coming of spring.

Ellipsis Marked Version:

The Closing of the Ocean

During the first week of November, all the police officers leave their clean pressed uniforms on the front steps of their houses.  Anyone in town is free to pick them up, put them on, and see what it is like, this work of being an officer of the law.  But this year the uniforms were left untouched.  It was the first time [].

My brother and I are sitting in the coffee shop on Heart Street.  I pour some milk in my coffee.  My brother drinks his [] black.  My brother is a police officer.  Lately his eyes get kind of empty when he talks about work, which isn’t often.  He’s in charge of keeping people off the beach at night.  [] Too many accidents of late, so they decided to close down the ocean until summer.  [] Even put up a white sign with big red letters.  The sign reads, “Ocean Closed Until Further Notice.”  And my brother is the one who makes sure it stays shut down nice and tight.  I imagine him, walking on the sand, spending his nights making sure that no one is breathing in the salty air. [] No one is looking and looking at the dark water as the lights of fishing boats flash on and off.  [] No one is counting the rocks shining like bones in the moonlight.   

My brother takes the last sip of his coffee. “A few weeks ago, we had a big problem,” he says and shakes his head.  “A bunch of old men, big Russians with big chests, decided to take a quick swim.  I had to pull them out of the water one by one.  [] Big steaming men acting like children.”  My brother looks in his cup like there might be an answer at the bottom.  “And then they just walked away.  They didn’t say anything.  [] Just walked away like it was all my fault.”

Now it is February.  Soon enough winter will end.  Soon enough the ocean will be open again.  My brother looks at the clock.  It’s almost seven.  “I’ve got to go close down the ocean,” my brother says and stands up.  As if it actually means something, this idea of closing the ocean.  But maybe it does [].  Maybe it means something important.  And [] not only to my brother. 

In November this year, the police officers’ uniforms remained where they had been placed, untouched.  They just sat there, waiting.  It was the first time [].  But every night the beach was filled.  [] Filled with footprints.  [] Filled with the whispers of lovers trying to hold on to a few more moments.  [] Filled with kids laughing like they already had a hundred tomorrows rolled up tight and put away safely in their pockets, saved up for the coming spring.

Laughing Journal Challenge

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Inspired by Mr. Griffin,
I yearbooked myself.
Frightening stuff. technology

The semester has wrapped up at my school.  Which means I’m inputting grades in the school computer.  As I enter the grades, one by one, I can’t help but feel a certain regret at what I could have done better, seeing missed chances for growth for each student.  A-chan nodded off too often during extended reading time, why didn’t I help her pick more level-appropriate books?  C-kun came to every class except the TOEIC lessons, which he managed to miss with clock-work regularity.  Couldn’t I have helped him connect up the TOEIC work with the other classes he enjoys?  And the list goes on and on.  If it weren’t for the fact that I get to tutor students for the big summer speech contest in the morning, I would probably melt right down into a puddle of despair. 

Then Anne Hendler, a fellow English teacher in Korea, blogger, and friend, wrote up a courageous post about her dangerously high stress levels and how she was going to use a laughing journal to help cope.  Sounded like a good idea to me.  So here is my laughing journal for the past week:

Day 1: Not a big laughing day.  I was working on almost no sleep.  I was a test monitor at school for students taking make-up tests.  I was late getting home and made problems for my wife.  My daughter was cranky and sad.  I spilled some Jello on the floor.  Actually, a lot of Jello on the floor.  And then I went on Facebook and saw it was one of my favorite couple's anniversary.  So I typed in a message.  This message actually: "You guys still had the best wedding I was ever late for.  Congratulations.  Love you."  I finished typing and hit return.  But nothing happened.  I hit return again and nothing happened.  Facebook was bugging out.  I pounded the return key with frustration.   Nothing.  So I reloaded my Facebook wall.  There was my friends wedding anniversary picture, only now it had 42 comments where as few seconds before it had only had 6 comments.  I looked at my running list of fourty-two "You guys still had the best wedding I was ever late for.  Congratulations.  Love you," and laughed about one time for each of the 42 comments.

Day 2: My daughter Luca was working in her Kanji exercise book and she had a question about what she was supposed to write.  Without looking up, her mouth twisted into a half-frown off of concentration, she said, "Mama, what am I supposed to do here?"  And I said, "Did you call me 'Mama'?" And we both exploded in laughter.  

Later in the afternoon we went for a walk.  Luca was sleepy and wasn't listening to anything I said and complaining about being hungry.  Basically being a typical, slightly frustrating 4 year old.  So I sat her down and started to give her a lecture.  She looked really sad and serious as she listened to me.  She nodded at just the right times.  I stopped talking and she was about to apologize (I think) when suddenly she farted.  It was a big fart.  I forgot to be angry.  Luca forgot to be sad.  We just laughed.  

At 10:30 PM at night, Luca came downstairs.  She said she woke-up because her tummy was talking to her and she needed to eat.  That was after wolfing down about 11 pieces of sushi at the sushi restaurant earlier in the evening.  So Mamico (my wife) and Luca and I were sitting around the table while Luca ate a piece of bread to satisfy her hunger.  It was cheese and fig bread.  We told Mamico the story of Luca farting just before she could get her apology out.  Luca and I laughed again.  Mamico laughed, too.

(#TESOLgeek memo 1: the second day of my laughing journal had three bursts of laughter entries.  Right before I went to bed I was talking to my wife and I hypothesized that perhaps laughing is similar to language acquisition.  Perhaps the very act of noticing laughter leads to a higher rate of laughter uptake.  I was pretty sure that I would be increasing the number of 'laughter-events' as the week went on. Unfortunately, this hypothesis just goes to prove how over-generalizing language acquisition theory to life in general is nothing more than an excellent form of silliness.)

Day 3: We went to Kyoto for an essay reading event.  It was held at a small bar with nice sofas and people in expensive jeans who all managed to look shabbily smart.  We took Luca with us.  Because our friend was reading from her essay collection and you know, taking a 4 year old to an essay reading is often good form.  Or not.  Anyway, Luca was doing great.  She was sat quietly and listened to the first essay about how the naming of a child is the first gift that parents give to their child.  But the next reader started off by giving a color quiz.  A kind of pop psychology thing.  The woman was holding up a color chart which had a lot of little colored balls glued to it and one of the balls fell off.  It was very small.  Maybe the size of a pea.  It was red.  As soon as it fell off, Luca laughed.  A loud, rolling laugh that you don't really expect from a 4 year old.  And no one expects at a high-class essay reading.  It was, in short, a gloriously incongruous laugh.  And the people on the sofa next to us joined in.  As did the people across the coffee table.  There were eight of us laughing.  The reader didn’t laugh.  But to her credit, she did wait patiently.  

Day 4: We were all laying down on the floor in our living room.  It is very hot in Japan this summer, but we don't use the air-conditioner.  Everyone in Japan is trying to conserve power.  We don't like being hot, but we don't want the government to start up the nuclear power-plants even more.  So we lie on the floor.  And we don't stand up if we do not have to.   There we were, just lying on the floor, Mamico, Luca and I.  Then Mamico started talking up towards the ceiling and we noticed there was a great humming echo.  You know, like the kind of echo you get in a room with a curved ceiling; the kind of room where you can whisper and the person standing all the way on the other side of the room from you can hear it.  At least that's what I thought it was like.  I was really excited.  I made Mamico stand up and walk to the corner of the room.  I whispered in as small a voice as I could, “Can you hear me?”  She said yes.  I got even more excited.  I was talking about the interesting acoustic properties of our living room.  I was comparing it to a concert hall.  Mamico said, “Stand in the kitchen.”  So I did.  Mamico stayed in the living room a few meters away.  She whispered in a tiny voice, “Can you hear me?”  I said yes.  “I’m not sure it’s the acoustics," Mamico said.  "I think our house just isn’t that big.”  That made me laugh.

Day 5: I had a pretty informal lesson observation today.  I video taped one of my classes and sent it off to John Fanselow, and then we spent an hour going through the lesson.  He asked me questions (“Why are you having all the students do the dictation exercise at the same time?” “Why do you explain all the steps of the exercise at one time?” “Why don’t you give your sample sentences a title?”).  One hour of question after question.  Which did lead to some moments of laughter.  But it was more of a desperate laughter of exhaustion.  And it also led to this insight: a good observation starts with a sense of curiosity and ends with the sense of curiosity spreading from the observer to the observee.  At the end of the observation, John mentioned an article I had written about a dictogloss variation I had developed with my students.  He said, “You know, you have this paragraph at the end of page 22 and I have to say, I have no idea what you are talking about.  Why don’t you take that paragraph and rewrite it without any jargon.  And while you’re at it, see if any of your friends will give it a try as well.”  So I rewrote the paragraph.  It took a long time and gave me a headache.  I also posted the paragraph as a Google Doc and invited people on Twitter to give it a re-write as well.  Anne Hendler (@Annehendler) sent out the following Tweet:

“my original translation had the word "stuff" in it multiple times #imakenosenseeither”

Which I think was the point John was trying to make.  But the idea of taking an academic article and replacing all jargon with the word “stuff” made me laugh.  A lot.   

(#TESOLgeek memo 2: John very much enjoyed everyone’s translations and said, “This is the exact point I’ve been trying to make for the past forty years.” He also sent me a copy of his article Beyond Rashomon, recommended reading for anyone who talks about teaching English.) 

Day 6: I was writing an article on various approaches in language teaching and realized that while I had watched people use Cuisenaire rods to teach, I had never actually tried to use them in learning a language myself.  So I fired up Youtube and found a series of seven videos which use Cuisenaire rods to teach the Native American language Lakoto.  Mamico and I watched all seven videos over and over.  We were particularly confused by the words “ba-nis” and “jim” which seemed to be very important to the conversation.  We had figured out that “na” was a conjunction.  That “sapa” meant ‘both.’  We understood the basic structure of the sentences.  But “ba-nis” and “jim” remained a mystery.  Until Mamico said, “It’s their names.”  Oh, “Bernice and Jim.”  We watched the videos a few more times and every time I heard “ba-nis” and “jim” I would laugh.  And then have to rewind the video because I had laughed right over the lesson. 

(TESOLgeek memo 3: I ended up using Cuisenaire rods to help one of my students use adverbial phrases and noun clauses in his speech.  The fact that I could easily pick up an entire clause and physically move it around in the sentence proved to be very helpful for understanding.  Sandy Millin also has a must read blog post on Cuisenaire rod use.)

Assorted other laughs:

-        Michael Griffin’s (@michaelegriffin) mullet photo which can be seen on Facebook.

-        An academic essay on cupcakes http://www.samplereality.com/2012/07/24/on-the-predominance-of-cupcakes-as-a-cultural-form/ (favorite line: “Ontologically speaking, just what the hell are cupcakes anyway?”)

-        A series of tweets between Laura Phelps (@pterolaur) and Michael Griffin about toilets, toilet water, and unexpected dangers.

So that’s it.  Six days of things that made me laugh.  So did it work?  Did I feel less depressed about a semester full of missed teaching and learning opportunities for my students?  Not really.  But when I wasn’t busy feeling regretful, I was definitely more cheerful and ready to laugh.  Perhaps there is something to the idea that noticing laughter-events leads to more laughter.  And even if it doesn’t, writing up this laughing journal gave me a chance to laugh at my week again.  So at the very least, a laughing journal certainly leads to recycling of laughter-events and even a certain kind of joyful consolidation.

A La Carte Approach to Approaches

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I haven't been blogging as much as I would like lately.  Most of it was due to a heavy classload at work and a few papers I had to finish up for my dip TESOL.  Finally got the last paper written and sent off to my advisor.  So regular blogging will start again from tonight (I hope).  But until then, I thought I would link to my last paper.  It's a 7-pager on different approaches to language teaching.  I was pretty surprised during the act of writing this one how much ‘historical’ approaches to language teaching still influence what I do in my classroom. 

Anyway, here it is:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/100992463/An-a-La-Carte-Approach-to-Language-Teaching-Approaches

Talking about Not Talking (Hatless)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

The other day I got an email from Kevin Giddens of Do Nothing Teaching fame.   He said he was going to be giving a keynote at a conference for Guatamalan public school teachers and wondered if I would put together a short video in which I talk about my "Do No Talking" class.  So I did.  I filmed myself talking on and on about my no talking class.  Which seemed normal at the time, but seems kind of strange now. 

The video doesn't really have anything new in it.  But I'm kind of jealous of how all my friends have started adding video posts to their blog.  So I'm posting it here so I can feel like I've joined the multi-media world (do people even use the term multi-media anymore? Sounds very 1990.) 

Anyway, if you missed my post on "Do No Talking," or you have lots of free time on your hands, or you are wondering what I look like without a hat, please feel free to check out the video.  And actually, as I was watching it again, I realized that the last minute or so does have a new idea or two.  And I'm not just writing that to get you to click play...

And please ignore the whole "Hello in Guatemala" thing at the start.  Or if you want, you can simple swap out Guatemala for whatever country you happen to be in right now.   

Multi-word, phrasal, and prepositional verbs. Do you know the difference? Do your students? Does it matter?

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I've been doing a lot of reading about phrasal verbs lately (or multi-word verbs if you wish).  And regardless of who is writing, things invariably seem to get into a muddle.  As I read my way through Parrot, Aitken, Murphey and Swan, it seemed to me that the rules everyone wanted to hold onto, kept slipping away on closer inspection.  Perhaps the best thing I've read on the difficult nature of phrasal verbs is Scott Thornbury's P is for Phrasal Verb.  Luckily, I didn't decide to write a paper on the nature of phrasal verbs.  Instead, I've been thinking about ways I can help my students simply identify phrasal verbs when they run into them during our English classes.  So with that goal in mind I starting writing what I hoped would be a short paper on how to identify hard to recognize multi-word verbs.  Unfortunately, my desire to keep the paper short had very little to do with the inherently large and messy nature of phrasal verbs.  So the first draft of the paper is now complete.  But, messy.  Still, if you have students with serious issues when it comes to identifying multi-word verbs, you might want to give the paper a read.  It's a little too long for a blog post, so I have posted it to my Scribd account:

Multi-word verbs: how to recognize the recognizable parts that make up an unrecognizable whole

In Which I Try and Explain My (not so) Peculiar Situation

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I realized the other day that I usually include a sentence like, “Many of my students didn’t attend junior high school,” in my blog posts.  It’s my shorthand for explaining my school environment.  But it probably doesn’t do much by way of giving a full picture of what my school is all about.  So I thought I would take a few minutes and do a better job of putting the issues I deal with on this blog in context. 

Most of my students, about 80%, have suffered from school refusal syndrome.  Before I worked here, I had never heard of school refusal syndrome.  And even though it puts me at risk for loosing my A+ Empathy rating, I had always figured that students who didn’t come to school fell into one of two groups, those who were ill and those who were truant. 

But after talking with a large number of students who actually woke up in the morning, got dressed, and put their school bags to next to the front door to grab on the way out only to find that they couldn’t bring themselves to walk out the door, I realized that these students weren’t just skipping out on their education.  They wanted to go to school.  They just couldn’t get out the door to do it.  Not surprising as school refusal syndrome is usually marked by a kind of generalized and pervasive anxiety about school.  It can sometimes result in somatic features such as upset stomach or headaches.  But if you ask students suffering from school refusal syndrome, they will insist that in spite of the anxiety, stomachaches, and whatever else they might be feeling, they would like nothing more than to go to school (Hersov, 1972).

Aside from the syndrome presenting itself as physical symptoms, there are other major psychological symptoms which correlate strongly with school refusal syndrome, including: avoidant disorder, social phobia, fear of evaluative situations, depression, attention deficit disorder (Kearney and Silverman, 1993)…actually the list stretches on and on.  One striking aspect of most of these symptoms is how closely they align with the kinds of issues that impede second language acquisition.  And on top of that, in Japan school refusal is defined as a minimum of 30 days of absence from school per year.  That means that students missed at least 90 school days during their junior high school careers.  Most of them missed much more.  And some did not attend school at all from the age of 13 to 16.  Now in such a situation, I tend to think the best thing we could probably do would be to split up the English classes by levels, providing students with the kind of targeted content which would help lower anxiety and increase a student’s chances of success.  But, at least for the first semester, the school has decided that the most important thing we can do for our students is provide a school environment in which they feel comfortable coming to school.  And for most students, that means helping them develop a strong social network.  Basically, they need to develop supportive friendships, and to do that we let them stay together in their homeroom classes throughout the day. 

So my classes are made up of a dizzying array of students with varying levels of English ability.  There are students who like English, studied on their own at home, and are at an intermediate level or abov.  And then there are students who are almost entirely unfamiliar with the English alphabet.  With that in mind, I’ve tried to find and implement activities which can engage students of all levels.  The activities need to be challenging enough so as not to induce boredom, but not so difficult that they result in the kind of anxiety that keeps a student from walking out the door in the morning.         

One of the first things I noticed in class was that regardless of the level of a student’s other skills, almost all the students were true-beginners when it came to listening.  But because some of the students cannot write, dictation, one of my favorite listening activities, is pretty much unusable in class, especially at the beginning of the year.  So in place of words, I do a simple substitution table activity during which students keep a running dictation of the sentences by drawing pictures, an activity adapted from an in-service run by John Fanselow and expanded upon in his booklet Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks yuor stutends to (n.d.a).  Interestingly, image based tabling also closely mirrors a number of low stress early literacy activities recommend for very young L1 learners by the Center for Early Literacy Learning (CELL, 2010). 

As when using a traditional substitution table, the teacher chooses students to verbally produce sentences from tabled components.  In our first year classes, the preliminary sentence components are drawn on the board in picture form by the teacher.  The teacher chooses a student to combine the images into a basic sentence.  The remaining students do not merely listen, but must transcribe each spoken sentence into picture form.  As the students acquire more vocabulary, they are encouraged to create novel sentences based on the basic grammar pattern.  Here is a series of picture-based transcriptions produced by a student while the class was tabling ‘be’ verb in the simple present tense:

['be' tabled in simple present tense]

As can be seen from the image above, even at the elementary level, students find novel ways to translate function words such as the possessive adjective ‘my,’ into pictures.  As students’ reading and writing skills increase over the course of the year, students are encouraged to replace pictures with words to a larger and larger extent, but we always return occasionally to pictures.  Once students have developed a set of stable images to represent words, drawing the pictures often takes less time than writing words and allows for greater amounts of language exposure during any given class period. 

In addition, requiring students to translate information from words to images and then back, results in a series of decoding and encoding steps which requires a deep level of cognitive processing.  This deeper level of processing, especially as it relates to image creation, has been shown to lead to high levels of retention (Craik and Tulving, 1975). Paul Nation (2009, p. 47-49) also points out that these types of transformation exercises provide good opportunities to not only learn vocabulary, but, “grammatical items contained in the spoken or written text,” as well.  And students become quite adept at visually representing grammar items.

[picture based transcription of 'be' tabled the simple past tense]

As can be seen in the student produced table, a small arrow served to help remind the student of verb tense, and a cluster of the same symbols (in this case an equal sign) likewise served to help students remember that the form of the verb changed to agree with the subject of the sentence.

 

All in all, the activity allows all students to engage with the language on a pretty even playing field.  It is challenging enough for the upper level students to stay engaged, but accessible enough for even the lowest level student to succeed.  And by giving students five to ten minutes at the end of class to convert each image-based sentence into words, I can also provide students with the kind of practice they need to develop some fundamental writing skills without the pressure of orally decoding and writing at the same time.

I was talking to one of my coworkers today about the particular challenges our students face when it comes to learning English.  He said, “It’s kind of a difficult situation.  The more I know about our students, the more I feel we’ve set ourselves an impossible task.”  I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes feel the same way myself.  But all learners have their own obstacles to overcome when learning English.  Even for the students at my school, it’s really just a question of degree.  I have a third year student now who started her high school career without being able to read even the most simple sentence.  She sometimes would hover outside the classroom door, afraid to turn the handle and walk in.  She went from drawing pictures, to writing sentences, to being able to engage in full dictation exercises without any visible signs of anxiety.  And lately, she has been helping to coach the first year students to prepare for their mid-term exams.  Part of it is just the fact that she has grown up and grown out of some of her symptoms.  But I would like to think that picture based dictation and the other challenging yet low anxiety activities we use in class were the soil which, at least in part, helped make her growth possible.

[This blog post is based in part on a longer, unpublished article detailing a series of lessons using a more involved, image-based transcription method called pictogloss.  The pictogloss method was developed and implemented over the course of one school semester and with the assistance and timely feedback provided by my school’s International Course intermediate-level language students.]

References:

Center for Early Literacy Learning. 2010. Center for Early Literacy Learning. 3 July, 2012 <http://www.earlyliteracylearning.org/index.php>

Craik, F.I.M. and Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of Processing and the retention of words in episodic memory.  Journal of Experimental Psychology 104: 268-284.

Hersov, L. (1972). School Refusal. British Medical Journal 3: 102-104.

Kearney, C. and Silverman, W. (1993). Measuring the function of school refusal behavior: the school refusal assessment scale. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 22 (1): 85-96.

Fanselow, J. (n.d.a), Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks your stutends to: tapping the richness of sketches/images/icons for generating language

Nation, I.P.S. and Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. New York: Routledge.

To Gather Up (A Short Story for ELLS)

 Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Photo by David Sky



I live in Lone Temple, a small town surrounded by a ring of mountains.  I am the town's station master.  Not that it’s much of a train station.  Just two tracks, one platform, and two freshly painted benches.  I paint the benches myself twice every year.  This year in the fall I painted them sunrise orange.  Last week, I painted them tear drop blue.  Sometimes someone will notice and say something nice about the color, and that makes me feel pretty good.  

During a Lone Temple winter, there is snow and more snow.  Every year the neighborhood children build a snowman in front of the station.  Each year there are less and less children, but they manage to get the job done.  This January they built a real giant of a snowman.  It took them all day and it was already dark when they finished and ran home.  It was a cold evening and there was a touch of salt in the wind. Suddenly, I felt sorry for the snowman.  He was out there, left behind, and probably already forgotten.  So I dug through the Lost and Found box and pulled out a bright red knit cap.  I had to stand on a step ladder to put the hat on the snowman’s head.  The snowman had a strange half smile made out of grey rocks.  I thought he looked a little more comfortable with the hat on.

There is always something to do at a train station.  There's always a floor to sweep, a weed to pull, a sign to straighten.  But there is also nothing that must absolutely be done right now at a station.  And this is also good.  I can make a cup of coffee and watch the steam curl up towards the ceiling.  I can set a small plate of smoked fish down behind the worn row of lockers and wait to see which cat comes to eat it first. In this way time passes.

It was a long winter and the snowman didn’t really start melting until the beginning of April.  He got a little smaller every day and by May first, he was gone.  I went out, picked up the bright red hat from the ground, and started to put it back in the lost and found box.  I looked at the long pair of soft leather gloves, the folding umbrella with the bent handle, the pack of faded playing cards, the loose collection of keys and broken watches and I changed my mind. I put the hat in the bottom drawer of my desk instead.  It wasn't a lost thing anymore.  At least, not for a little while longer.  Not as long as there were still enough children to gather up the snow that was sure to fall in the winter.


470 words total
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 96.2
Flesch-Kincaid Grade level: 3.2
Words contained in the GSL: 96.63%

Thanks to a Words Woman

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

On the train this morning I was reading Grammar Dictation and thinking about a paper I'm trying to finish on a variation of dictogloss that my students and I have put together this semester.  The train was packed as usual and I was finding it hard to concentrate so I opened up twitter.  That’s when I learned that Ruth Wajnryb had passed away.  For the past month I have spent almost every day thinking about dictogloss.  And in researching dictogloss, I stumbled upon Ruth's blog "Words Woman." Just the other night I was drinking with my wife and discussing just what does make an apology and apology and enjoying some of Ruth’s examples of not so successful examples.  And now...and now Ruth is suddenly no longer here.  I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Ruth.  But she has influenced my ideas about language teaching.  She has helped me become a better teacher and has touched my students through her influence.  

This afternoon, I finished up the first draft of my paper.  Usually, when I finish up a paper, I feel relief.  This time, it was pure gratitude.  

There are some teachers who I count on to help show me how to take the next step in my journey to become the teacher I hope to be.  Ruth Wajnryb was one of those lights.  Thank you Ruth for reminding me that theory is about students.  For the way you held and turned the gem of language to reveal new facets.  You will be missed.  RIP.