Summer Theory Flood (listening and speaking edition)

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.

So I was at school today, cleaning the building with some students and having a great time.  I got to change light bulbs.  100 light bulbs.  I have to say that my ladder climbing skills improved considerably.  And I got to hear about my students’ summer vacations.  One of them cycled 200 kilometers around the Kansai area.  Another went to Kyushu and helped on his grandfather’s farm.  Now the students have headed home and I’m back at my desk about to read a few more articles and prep for classes. 

Aside from vacation and prepping for classes, I read a lot of articles and books on English teaching.  I’m pretty interested in improving how I teach speaking and listening, so most of what I read was around these issues.  Here is what I learned:

-          According to Cutler and Carter (1987) 90% of words in a 190,000 word corpus of spontaneous British English conversation begin with a strong syllable.  So when it comes to teaching listening, building students skills around segmentation (separating words on-line/during listening) based on recognizing stress as the potential start of a word is going to have major benefits.  Basically, tuning students in early to stress is a very good thing.  Cutler (1997) did a further comparative study of languages and found that while other language do make more use of various aspects of prosody, this information isn’t necessary for lexical activation, or recognizing words in English.  While it wasn’t clearly stated in the paper, this implies to me that students might be paying too much attention to non-determining factors when listening in English as a second language.  So especially for beginning learners, sticking with basic activities such as listening activities which encourage students to circle stressed words, or even placing dots above each syllable of a text and having them circle the stressed syllables, is probably crucial in helping them develop the listening strategies they are going to need to segment English while listening.

-          While other aspects of prosody aren’t crucial to segmentation, they are important to being understood.  Derwing and Rossiter (2003) had a great paper showing that students who took lessons focusing on global speaking strategies such as stress, rhythm and intonation are rated much higher on comprehensibility and fluency than students who were trained in segmental aspects of speaking such as the production of individual phonemes, identification and discrimination of individual sounds, and minimal pairs exercises.  In fact, students who were in the segmental group of learners actually showed a reduction in fluency.  So when it comes to speaking, stress alone isn’t going to be enough.  I do a lot of hand clapping during dialogue practice, both while listening and speaking to help students get used to the rhythm of English and I guess this is a good idea.  I think I will spend a bit more time making sure my students are doing some intonation work as well during the next semester.  During listening activities, I could just have students listen and draw a waveform of what they hear, an upward arcing wave for higher pitch, a downward one for lower pitch.  It might also be useful to have them use their smart-phones to record themselves and then do a similar waveform exercise while listening to the recording.

-          John Field (2003, p. 331) points out that assimilation, or the way in which the ends of words are altered in anticipation of the sound that follows, not only makes listening more difficult, but that the sounds most commonly affected by assimilation are /t/,/d/, and /s/, which are the sounds for most of the inflections in English.  Basically, if our students are listening for cues as to tense or plurality, those auditory cues might very well just not be there.  Which might explain why students end up leaving out the third-person ‘s’ and plurals during dictation exercises.  They are just writing what they hear. Which makes me think that for many students, we need to include think time during dictation exercises to allow them to process meaning and insert inflections that might have been lost due to assimilation.  It also makes me think that teaching grammar has an important role when it comes to listening.  Grammar knowledge can serve as the schema which allows learners to hear what is not there.  Just as topic knowledge allows learners to understand implied messages in a text, knowledge of grammatical forms might help our learners center an oral text in both temporal and psychological space. 

(guilty admission: the John Field article is actually on the need to provide micro-training  so our students can develop their bottom-up listening skills and get better at hearing what is actually said.  The focus is definitely not on what I have written here in this blog post.  This is much more of a riff on what I read.  Anyway, just wanted to make sure I wasn't coming off as the kind of guy who deliberately misrepresents articles to back up their own ideas.) 

I also read a lot of other stuff as well.  And when I write ‘stuff’, I pretty much mean ‘stuff’.  As summer vacation has stretched on and on, my ability to translate theory into the language of the classroom has gotten weaker and weaker.  It’s ironic that the summer months, when the classrooms are empty and I have time to catch up on my reading, is the time when that reading ends up being the least helpful to how I actually teach my classes.  Probably the only reason I had enough energy to put together this blog post is because I spent the first half of the day hearing about my students’ summer vacations while changing light bulbs.  But that’s OK.  I’ll take my illumination where I can get it. 

 

References:

Cuttler, A. & Carter, D. (1987). “The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary.” Computer Speech and Language 2: 133-142

Cuttler, A. (1997). “The comparative perspective on spoken-language processing.” Speech Communication 21: 3-15.

Derwing, T. & Rossiter, M. (2003). “The effects of pronunciation instruction on the accuracy, fluency, and complexity of L2 accented speech.” Applied Language Learning 13 (1): 1-17.

Field, J. (2003). “Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening.” ELT Journal 57 (4): 325-333.

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.

Do you really need it?

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.

Recently I’ve been running some activities to try and get my students used to the fact that when it comes to listening, they just ain’t gonna hear everything that get’s said.  I'm lucky to be working with John Fanselow who is advising our schools.  He is unbelievably generous with his time.  He was telling me a story of how the old Bell Telephone Company put together a kind of clozed test to figure out the minimum number of relays they would have to install before reception degraded too much during a phone call.  Bell technicians (were they even called technicians way back then?) would phone people up and start talking, leaving out words in a set script.  And it turned out that there was no problem up to a certain point.  For example, if the Bell people called up Mr. Smoking-his-pipe-and-reading-the-evening-paper-guy and asked him, "What did you eat for ＿＿＿＿ this evening?"  Well, Mr. SHP would maybe reply, "For dinner , son?  Well I had a nice steak!"  Mr. SHP didn't even seem to notice that the word dinner had been "dropped" from the sentence.  Of course now we have wonderful things like schema theory and ideas about top-down listening to make sense of what was going on.  But back in the 1940s, Bell Telephone was just happy to find out they could get away with less switches than they thought they needed and make even more money off of their telecommunications monopoly.

Now my students are about as far away from Mr. SHP as you can get.  They are hyper-vigilant listeners.  In fact, one could even say that their unending desire to hear every single sound that is uttered by a speaker (the bottom-up thing), is one of their biggest problems when it comes to understanding. And that's not the only issue facing them.  The way they listen, what they are listening for, is just not very useful when it comes to English.  If this kind of stuff gets your heart racing, check out Anne Cutler's article, "The comparative perspective on spoken-language processing" or maybe even my own totally unpublished and hence perhaps unreliable article.  So anyway, I wanted to get my students used to the idea that they didn't have to hear everything that was said, so I started doing a warm up dictation exercise in which I would leave out a few words or even in a sentence while trying my best to maintain the natural prosody of the sentence.  Basically I would end up saying something like this:

"・ mother read・ novels every night ・ ・ living room be・ go・ to sleep." 

And the students would write something like this:

                "My mother reads novels every night in the living room before going to sleep."

Now the thing about this activity I want you to remember, is that it was just a warm up.  I did 5 sentences in five minutes and then would call on students to read what they had written down and I would write it up on the whiteboard.  As time passed, students expressed to me how much they liked the activity and it became a regular feature of class.  I was pretty happy with the activity and the students level of engagement, so I took a video and sent it off to John Fanselow, who called me up and said, "Kevin, why are the students facing the board?"  (I bet you thought this was going to be another detailed lesson plan dressed up as a blog post again, didn't you?  Nope.)  Which was the first thing I learned from this episode.  What's the point of sending something off you are satisfied with if you think you're going to get praised?  If someone's going to be kind enough to put some time and effort into thinking about what I did in my class, I should be overjoyed that they have an idea to make it better.  But for some reason I wasn't overjoyed.  I was confused. 

"Where should they look John?"  I wasn't being smart by the way.  I had no idea where the students would look if not at the board.

"Out the window," John said.  "Have you ever had your students look out the window."

"Nope.  Never thought of it," I said.

I've observed enough classes to know that I can never know what is going to happen if I change this or that variable in a class.  And as John was obviously being sincere in his suggestion, that's what I did.  I went into class the next day and told all the students to turn their chairs around and look out the window.  And we did the same basic warm-up.  And you know what, when it came time to get the right answers from the students, I thought that it was kind of a waste of time to have one student say their answer if I couldn't write it up on the board.  And then I quickly realized that maybe having a student say their answer and writing it all up on the board was actually a big waste of time in general.  Instead I had them just exchange papers and see if there was anything different about what the person next to them had written.  Then I had them exchange papers again.  And again.  Finally I told them to get their own paper back and make any changes they wanted.  And then, just to see what would happen, I had the students all say their revised sentence at the same time.  And you know what, they all said their sentence with a lot more conviction than usual.

So the second thing I learned from this experience was you just don't know what you don't need unless you take it away.  The white board, that piece of white real-estate shinning at the front of the room, with it's alluring blankness, wasn't actually blank at all. It had filled up my class with all sorts of expectations and habits that I hadn't even noticed.  So I spent the rest of the class like that, no white board. 

Lately I've been reading Kevin Giddens posterous feed, "Do Nothing Teaching."  I dig it.  But I do think it's pretty hard to figure out what you don't need or don't need to do on your own.  Some things become so ingrained we don't even really think of them as an action anymore.  And if we don't think about them, we can't change them.  So a big thanks to John and to all the bloggers who are posting things to help bring my focus back to what I am actually doing moment by moment in the classroom.

As far as the rest of the no-white-board-lesson is concerned, well, I can't say that the rest of the class was perfect or anything, but at the very least, it was a sunny winter day and one of the students told me that the feeling of the sun coming in from the window felt good on his face.