“Technology” has been one of the hottest buzzwords in the world of education for a couple of decades now. Teachers, education authorities, multinational companies, entrepreneurs and investors around the world are waking up to the transformative possibilities of digital and online technologies applied to the learning process.
Likewise, the EFL/ESL conference circuit has shown a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for any presentation involving online platforms, podcasts, tweets, blogs, or mobile devices. No TESOL or IATEFL national chapter meeting or global conference these days is complete without a smorgasbord of talks showing how teachers of English can use new sites and services to drag their lessons kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
So I would suggest it’s time to formally recognize the new opportunities these technologies bring to the domain of English language teaching, and to mark their pedagogical importance, with a collective label. For no other reason than its widespread identification with evolved (i.e. interactive, socially connected, hardware-agnostic) digital networks, I humbly suggest English 2.0.
The term has an immediate weakness, which I am the first to admit: that of implying that the set of teaching advances represented by English 2.0 is solely focused on technology; on the medium. In this case, Marshall McLuhan was only partially right. The medium is indeed part of the message, but not all of it. I will explain why.
It has by now become a cliché to say that technology is just an educational enabler, not the objective of digitally enhanced teaching. Nevertheless, it’s healthy to remind ourselves that sound pedagogy must always be at the heart of the teaching endeavor. Always, always, we must maintain our focus on how technology can help implement those pedagogical principles, not substitute for them. If we can use that as our starting point, and if we think laterally about all the new things we can now do in language teaching instead of vertically about how technology can merely improve what we are already doing in the classroom, we can consider English 2.0 as following on from Grammar Translation, Audio Lingual / Structural Situational, Cognitive Code, and more recently the Communicative and Lexical approaches not as the latest in a series of pedagogical fads, but rather as a further step in our understanding of how additional languages are learned and what we can do to empower and facilitate that process.
Of course, there is always the temptation to over-reach, to ascribe to a new vision foundations that have in fact already been in place for some time. At its heart, even though so much of what it can achieve in scale is unprecedented, English 2.0 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. As a pedagogical orientation, it builds on the more valid elements of those ELT methodologies that preceded it, in particular the Communicative and Lexical approaches.
This deep nod to Mssrs Chomsky, Nunan, Widdowson, Krashen, and Lewis (and even, in a way, to their distinguished critics, like Michael Swan) is reflected in the fact that English 2.0 is best understood as providing new, unprecedented facilitation and acceleration to the best of the past four decades of pedagogical advances in EFL/ESL; as well as adding new dimensions to them.
Some of these concepts – immediate personalized feedback and continuous positive reinforcement, to take two examples – have been seen and appreciated in the past, but were hitherto used only in small-class or tutoring contexts and thus unavailable to the majority of learners. Other dimensions encompassed by English 2.0, on the other hand, are totally new, such as the ability to connect the learner with a quasi-unlimited choice of current authentic input; the extent to which new online and mobile teaching platforms can extend EFL/ESL education to a vast “anywhere/anytime” arena, including transforming the whole notion of homework; and the ease with which these platforms can foster autonomy and intrinsic motivation in the learner. Another new dimension created by English 2.0 is the ability to effectively “gamify” EFL/ESL for learners, thus allowing the educator to replace the learning-unfriendly stress brought on by grades and pass/fail marks with learning-enhancing game-like reward systems and the social sharing of learning achievement.
There is one aspect to English 2.0 that might seem counter-intuitive at first. It is that this vision for language learning can completely and comfortably embrace stripped-down, “unplugged,” high-touch teaching methods like Dogme, which often are positioned in direct opposition to a learning-with-technology approach.
Unplugged ELT: not at all in opposition to English 2.0
This is because English 2.0 fully recognizes that some things are best done by a human being spending time with other human beings in a physical space, such as a classroom. These areas include person-to-person unscripted discussion (i.e. “talking”); gentle pronunciation guidance; or communicated centered on local and present topics relevant to the learner and teacher.
Learners can only spend so much time in a fixed location with a teacher, however, and thus if we want to make the learning process faster and deeper we need to add out-of-classroom learning into the mix. It seems fair to say that this is where the new generation of networked, interactive digital resources and platforms can make a real difference. Compared with the textbooks of old, we can now give learners access to vast collections of authentic language samples (which in turn allows much lexical and grammar work to be contextual); allow them to explore language in a non-linear fashion; and achieve levels of intake frequency and repetition-with-variation that allow them to better lock vocabulary items and language usage principles into long-term memory.
In fact, there is more than mere parallelism to the relationship between online resources and Dogme-style teaching. It is precisely the ability to shift lesson components like Presentation and Drilling away from the classroom that allows more if not all classroom time to be dedicated to the high-touch methods and human-interactions principles on which the Dogme concept is based.
So we see that English 2.0 is not just a collection of technology tools, but rather a way of using assets like time, place and the teacher-learner (and learner-learner) relationship in new, more flexible, more creative and more productive ways.
This is the key thing to understand about English 2.0. It is a combination of the best of past pedagogical breakthroughs in linguistics; of a better understanding of how learners actually learn (including the latest advances in cognitive neuroscience); of a re-valued and enhanced role for the teacher and what his or her core function needs to be; and, yes, of technology to increase and optimize time spent learning. More than yet another “approach,” it is a spirit of openness, of adaptability, of trust in the learner’s capacity to become engaged in the learning process; and of ambition that we can harness the new communications tools and social networks around us to make learning a new language more enjoyable, effective and efficient. It is also a spirit of democratic access to learning, made possible by digital technology. For the first time ever, the ability to learn the global language of opportunity does not depend uniquely on the presence of qualified teachers in one’s school or home town, nor on the ability to afford language courses and expensive textbooks.
There is one additional facet of English 2.0 that is worth emphasizing. The digital revolution of the past 20 years has unfolded in the context of increasing globalization. Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the number of speakers of English as a foreign or second language will surpass those who speak it as their native tongue. English 2.0 belongs to those born in the midst of this technology revolution. Digital natives tend not to have a marked preference for British English or American English, because all imaginable variants of English are reflected in the terabytes of input material now available to learners and reflected in the reality of everyday digital communication among speakers and learners of English across satellites and the Internet.
Learners today know that they want to be at least capable of understanding all forms and regional variants of English, from formal written business texts to the most informal verbal, regional slang, including idioms, acronyms and cultural references that will tend to pop up as they expand their roster of entertainment references and their circle of English-language conversation partners. Most of these learners will never develop a Texas drawl or even attempt to affect a Cockney’s dropped consonants, but they will benefit from knowing that one seldom actually “takes a bull by the horns” these days, and that being invited over to a London friend’s “Mickey Mouse” does not imply paying a visit to a Disney character. English 2.0 is World English. Not some neutered “globish” version of the language, but an all-inclusive appreciation for the vastness of English that encourages recognition and understanding of all its manifestations, even if we don’t use them ourselves in everyday discourse.
There is one last extraordinarily significant aspect of English 2.0, true to the significance of the “2.0” label, that bears mentioning: the extent to which blogs, Twitter, webinars, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn professional groups have allowed teachers everywhere to create Personal Learning Networks that help them become better teaching professionals as well as forming productive friendships with other educators. Whereas once a teacher in a small town might only hear about a new pronunciation approach or classroom management technique months or years after it had first been introduced somewhere, that information now reaches hundreds of thousands of EFL/ESL professionals around the world in seconds. Where once information was power; now it is the sharing of that information that confers status on the person sharing it. We have thus moved into an era where good teaching ideas circulate faster, productive experiments can be brought into practice more quickly, and great educational resources can be made available to both learners and teachers instantly and regardless of physical location.
A facet of English 2.0: Powerful Teacher Training and Sharing via PLN's
So, in conclusion, as we glide into 2012 and the 20th anniversary of the internet’s reaching “adulthood” via the standardization of the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) in 1982, let’s honor this landmark event in the history of human evolution via lending part of its nomenclature to the way we can finally start teaching English to reach the hundreds of millions of people who thirst for it, keeping all that is great about the best in EFL/ESL pedagogy; communicating it and sharing it among ourselves collaboratively; and amplifying it through the power of personalization, context, creativity, emotion, choice, speed, interactivity, motivation, and community. Think “twice as good.” Think 2.0!
For all the excellent progress in ELT pedagogical theory and practice over the past 30 years, there are two areas that remain, one could argue, fairly untouched. One of them, out-of-classroom learning, I addressed with a talk at this year’s IATEFL conference in Brighton. The other, which I’d like to go into here, is the concept of Frequency.
Most language-teaching methods tend to take a quantity-driven approach to advancing towards the goal of fluency: have the learner do the required number of “learning units,” lessons, courses, hours, or levels, and he or she will surely reach the Promised Land. We start with this mentality as soon as English is introduced as a Foreign or Second Language in primary school, parceling out English lessons in weekly doses, accumulating over the school year, then successive years, until the point where, somewhere between Middle School and Secondary School or even University, depending on which school systems we are talking about, the learner is felt to have received “enough” instruction to have, it is expected, achieved a certain level of English language proficiency. We test this, evaluate it, and declare whether the learner’s level is commensurate with “where he or she should be” given the amount of time logged in the classroom and/or the language lab.
Insofar as components of learning go, quantity and duration of instruction is certainly a valid parameter: one can hardly expect to learn how to play the piano flawlessly in three lessons. However, like learning how to play the piano, the notion of frequency is just as important to achieving fluidity and, not least, confidence in one’s ability. The notion of frequency also allows for a dynamic which the sum-total view does not: that of potential regression if a degree of frequency is not maintained. As Vladimir Horowitz famously put it, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.”
So what does the academic literature say about frequency of instruction in English, and, no less important, frequency of exposure to English? You guessed it: not a lot.
In a paper published last year, Elena Lieven of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (imagine the business card!) summarized the state of evidence:
Psycholinguistic research demonstrates adult language processing to be sensitive to frequency effects at all levels of language processing (Bod et al., 2003; Bybee and Hopper, 2001; Ellis, 2002) and this is also true in studies of children’s production and comprehension. The frequency of experiencing an event affects such diverse aspects of behaviour as our speed of recognition, our ability to recognise or recall whether we have encountered an event before and our ability to encode novel but similar items.
Most linguists concur that target vocabulary needs to be seen a number of times (the minimum requirement ranges from 11 to 18, depending on the study quoted) in order to pass from input to intake to long-term memory, but these conclusions reflect an accumulative theory of language acquisition, without relating it to ongoing frequency. The literature on the effects of frequency in relation to achieving a feel for usage or grammatical structures is far more shaky; and there seems to have been no work at all on self-confidence or motivation in language learning in relation to frequency.
In fact, the best piece of writing and thinking that I found on this topic was not at all on the subject of English language learning, but came instead from a blog about learning Japanese. In it, the author, an American who became fluent in Japanese through total immersion without taking a single lesson in the language, describes the notion of “Critical Frequency.” He postulates that even very short periods of exposure to a language can build to proficiency as long as the time in between those periods is kept short. Ideally, according to the blogger, who goes by the name of Khatzumoto, exposure sessions of as short as two or three minutes per hour can be effective, as long as this pace is kept up every hour (with allowances, I would imagine, being made for sleep). Traditional language teaching, of course, is exactly the opposite: a single hour-long weekly lesson, interrupted by six days and 23 hours of near-zero use or exposure.
Khazumoto-san’s insight is supported by neuroscience when it comes to the developing adolescent brain, what it seems to retain, and why. Teenage brains undergo a rather dramatic “clean-out” period during which brain grey matter is lost due to a selective strengthening or pruning of brain cells based on whether they are used often or not. Brain synapses continually used will flourish; those that are not wither away.
It seems a given that anything remotely in the vicinity of Khatzumoto-level frequency – and the strengthening of the neural synapses that go with it — can only be achieved outside of the classroom. Let’s assume we are shooting for a reasonable daily average expsosue / use of 15 minutes, every day, with the learner living in a country where English is not commonly heard or spoken. From a purely logistics point of view, and with that goal in mind, it seems obvious that we need to wholeheartedly embrace media, online communications, social networks, and social learning as tools with which to trigger this cadence of exposure.. It is here that we circle back to the point I made at IATEFL about the need for this out-of-classroom learning to be something very different to the work done in class. Tasks and materials which can be enforced in the classroom setting are quite simply non-starters in a home or free-time context, and thus we need to use a very different set of resources to entice the learner to come into contact with English as often as we’d like.
To result in frequency of exposure, the materials we need to propose to the learner must incorporate most, if not all, of the following qualities:
Novelty. People are fascinated by the new, the fresh, the unexpected. That’s why we read newspapers, listen to news radio or watch the news on television; and check the news on the web every few hours of so: these media are, by their very nature, infinite streams of never-before-seen facts, sights and sounds. By leveraging news streams and the relentless parade of new entertainment releases, we turn the English-exposure chore into a never-ending and highly motivating flow of fresh opportunities to increase the learner’s familiarity with the language.
Emotion. Teens and young adults are largely the servants of their emotions during their development years, as demonstrated by the important role that emotion-stirring experiences like music, friends and romance play as their personae evolve. Thus, learners of English will be far more likely to increase their exposure to to the language if the target material triggers emotions, rather than consist of artificial texts or situations which they find sterile or irrelevant to their dreams and desires. Analysis of Google search data shows that the most popular English–language pages searched for by speakers of other languages are, by a wide margin, those bearing the lyrics of pop songs.
Connectivity: the frequency with which young people connect with each other, whether via text message, instant messenger, or social networks, can resemble that of a colony of red ants relentlessly rubbing antennae. Introducing English as a vehicle to add a new and interesting dimension to this interaction, through making friends with other English-speakers or English language learners from around the world, is a powerful way to “go with the flow” in terms of existing learner behaviors and preferences.
Autonomy: shaping frequency comes down to Motivation, and there is no better way to create the conditions favorable to motivation than to give learners freedom of choice and autonomy. Let them choose what English-language materials they practice with, and they will repay you with a much higher frequency of exposure than if the choice of materials is dictated.
Reward systems: currently, traditional language teaching does not actually reward out-of-classroom exposure to English, nor the frequency of that exposure. Some homework assignments may be given, but these are seldom-enforced and often half-hearted requests for compliance: the learner activity is not positively rewarded for doing the assignment, much less for going beyond it. We thus need to think about motivational systems that actually recognize frequency of exposure to English outside the classroom, and give tangible, open-ended rewards for this behavior.
The good news is that all of the above is packaged into English Attack, which was designed specifically to increase and enhance both the quantity and frequency of exposure to (and communicative use of) English in teen and young adult EFL learners. But the internet is a pretty big place, so if you don’t want the packaged approach you can also find the above qualities piecemeal across a range of sites and organizations.
Novelty, Emotion and Autonomy are nowadays available freely on tap from YouTube and other similar entertainment-streaming sites. Connectivity is at the core of what sites like Facebook are all about, and you will be hard-pressed to find a learner who doesn’t already have an account. The trick is to get that learner to join Groups and Pages that will lead him or her to take part in Facebook’s community features in English (there are dozens of Groups on Facebook dedicated to learning and practicing English; just type in “English” in the Facebook search bar and you will see a long list of them). The IH group of language schools recently launched an online community, presumably for graduates of its courses worldwide, and of course there is the always-excellent EnglishClub.com. As for Reward Systems, these are built in to most online gaming communities (Farmville, Cityville, or The Sims, all also on Facebook) where the operational language is mostly English.
We’ll conclude with another quote, this time from a rather underrated 19th-century English preacher, Frederick W. Robertson, who “got it” when it comes to today’s topic:
It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things until the truth in them becomes you.
So let us go forth frequently, brothers and sister EFL teachers, and in all earnestness!
“Games,” defined as activities with goals and rules but which are amusing or designed for pleasure, have been used in EFL and ESL classrooms for decades now, and have spawned a wide range of useful and very creative books, workbooks and articles.
What is still relatively new, however, but making great strides in the wider fields of marketing, training and now education is the concept of “gamification” (ugly word, I know), which, although integrating them on occasion, should not be confused with “games. “
What is gamification exactly? Different things to different people, as with any new development, but at its heart gamification is an approach that takes challenge dynamics, motivational tools and feedback mechanisms from the world of videogames and applies them to new, real-life areas.
On some levels, gamification has been happening for years without our realizing it, and it has indeed already started to change and shape our behavior. Take the fidelity points or “air miles” you earn by flying with certain airlines. Yes, we recognize them as purchase incentive programs, but if we look at them more closely we see that they are built with a myriad of game-like structures and reward loops: you need to accumulate a certain number of points; the way you can accumulate and spend them varies with flight, season, etc (enabling you to “game the system” if you are so inclined); you can combine points with real money in various ways to create a range of outcomes; and you “move up” in levels (blue, silver, gold) according to how many points you accumulate, with each level bringing you new status and privileges.
In reality, teachers have used crude forms of “gamification” for years: the classic bronze, silver and gold star stickers on commendable class work or homework, for example. What modern-day gamification does, however, is to digitize these mechanisms and make them far more personalized, graduated and social than anyone ever thought possible.
To be taken seriously, however, gamification applied to education should embody the pedagogical insight that learners react better to educational methods based on cognitive neuroscience rather than those based on a “body-of-knowledge-to-be-absorbed” approach. This vision recognizes that:
Meaning is more important than information
Emotion is the gatekeeper to learning
Intelligence is a function of experience
The brain is social
Learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by stress
The more stimulation, the more likely long-term memory is created
From this starting point, educational gamification then needs to then do two things:
(a) apply the videogame “ethos” to learning so that learning starts to feel like less of a chore and more like an entertaining, enriching and personally relevant pastime, and
(b) create a game-like reward eco-system that utilizes web 2.0 technology to make the motivational mechanisms employed as immediate, clear and social as possible.
What can we learn (and adopt) from Video Games?
In terms of (a), the videogame “ethos” applied to learning, the key points to keep in mind are to understand how people actually achieve success in videogames, and how (and why) people will continue to play a videogame over and over until they achieve their objective.
Failure is, by design, part of the game; you advance by failing, by understanding why you failed, and by taking corrective action on your next attempt (e.g. try and try again without stigma)
Repetition breeds competence; it is not a function of intelligence
Positive reinforcement all the time
Positive stress (the thrill of challenge) vs. negative stress (the embarrassment of a low or failing grade)
Level design: progress to the next level of a videogame is always a challenge, but an achievable one by anyone if enough time is spent on it
Progress in the game = status enhancement within the game environment
Social tools amplify the challenge and status advantages of progressing within the game (multiplayer gaming; leader boards; in-game chat; challenge-a-friend)
What are the key gamification components?
In terms of (b) above, the gamification ecosystem, this should include:
Points and achievement levels (instead of grades)
A progressive difficulty curve (easy to “play,” difficult to master)
Missions/ tasks / badges, so that most activity results in a reward
Feeback that errs on the side of reinforcement and avoids creating stress
Social sharing of rewards and challenge mechanisms among friends
Why does gamification often work better than classic educational feedback mechanisms?
Gamification allows the learner to benefit from a gradual but constantly forward-moving approach to the subject matter. Let’s take grades as an example, contrasting them with a points-based approach. In a conventional educational setting, if you take a test (itself a stressful experience) and score 20/100, you will feel terrible about it. Assuming you want to re-take the test, and you expend a lot of effort studying for it, and are able to actually double your score to 40/100, you will still end up with a “fail” grade, and will inevitably feel demotivated.
However, in a gamified framework, assuming you score those same 20 points (out of a possible 100) in a game, then double it to 40 points next time, you have still accumulated 60 points towards your goal. Even if the goal in question is, say, 1,000 points to get the next level, the “system” has neither (twice) labeled you a failure, nor has it shown you that your efforts have (twice) provided you with no traction at all. There has been progress, albeit slow, and effort has not been wasted. This builds motivation.
Gamification in EFL: English Attack!
Our vision for English Attack!, at the end of 2008, was to build and launch the first online EFL/ESL service integrating solid ELT pedagogical principles (the lexical and communicative approaches, for example) and the triple combination of cognitive neuroscience principles; a videogame “achievement ethos” and the right gamification components. We also wanted to create something for a demographic segment that seemed to us to be under-served: the “digital natives” (those born after 1995) who are fast losing patience with linear, rules-based, textbook-focused teaching methods.
We thus borrowed from our media and videogaming backgrounds to create content units based on film, television and music entertainment; created a range of learning games made for the memory reinforcement of seen content; devised a reward system of instant exercise feedback, points, levels, achievement badges, and coins; and situated the whole in a social network of learners where information sharing, commentary and other uses of English are encouraged and rewarded.
After 12 months of Beta testing involving 25,000 learners from 70 different countries, we officially launched the site at the end of June and have so far been encouraged by the enthusiasm of the learners who use the site; their comments on (and sharing via social network of) the various content units; and their apparent engagement with the points, levels and coins system put in place. It is frankly too early to tell whether we are achieving the kind of personalized, goal-driven behavior aimed at improving one’s English that we are shooting for, but the first signs are positive and we look forward to this Autumn and the next stage of site development when we introduce the tools and systems that will allow teachers and schools to integrate English Attack! into their programs as an out-of-classroom educational platform.
From the Winter issue of the TESOL France Teaching Times, published this week.
The world of English Language Teaching has yet to fully get its arms around a central pedagogical paradox: that teens and young adult learners – who in terms of neuro-linguistics are at the peak of their ability to absorb, retain, and reproduce sophisticated language structures – often make such unmotivated language learners.
It is an experience so common as to have virtually driven EFL teaching specialization to either margin of the great ‘teen divide’: young learners (ages 12 and below) to one side; and adult/business English to the other. Why does the profession seem to have given up on finding the right specific approach for these kids? Part of the answer, I believe, lies in the all-too-comfortable stereotype of teens as going through life changes that make them difficult to teach. But that is lazy thinking at best. We owe it to ourselves, and especially to our learners, to make the effort to figure out how best to reach them, based on a more thorough understanding of how they are evolving as human beings.
To begin with, their brains are going through physiological changes that require specific pedagogical approaches for each phase of maturity. The teenage brain is significantly different from that of a child or an adult. During the approximately 11 years from early adolescence to young adulthood, this teenage brain goes through evolutionary changes that start with a heightened re-activeness to emotion, social connection and issues of self- and group identity. At the other end of the maturation process, the young adult brain is finally able to reason, control impulses, and organize and prioritize information. During all this time, the teenage brain is selectively strengthening or pruning neurons on the basis of those synapses which are used, respectively, the most or the least. And concurrent with this weeding-out process, the teenage brain is increasing its raw processing capacity to an extent equivalent to a 3,000-fold increase in digital network bandwidth.
Going hand-in-hand with these physiological changes is a societal change – one might even call it an evolution in human development – which means that this specific demographic cohort acts, learns and
self-motivates differently than any other preceding it. We are now in the era of the Digital Native; and for the time being – until those born in the mid 1990’s start to enter the teaching profession themselves – the teaching profession exists in a bi-polar frame of reference: digital immigrants teaching digital natives. We, as the older generation, are simply incapable of understanding – or, truth be told, accepting – the newer generation’s relationship with digital technology; with social hyper activity; and with 24/7 connectivity. Attempting to reach out and ‘touch’ these digital natives using mainly 19th century tools like textbooks, workbooks, blackboards and traditional teacher-led classroom settings is already delivering diminishing returns.
The good news is that the answers to these challenges are already with us, and are being used by progressive EFL / ESL teachers in hundreds of locations. There is no silver bullet, no miracle solution, but rather teachers will have to mix and match those new digital tools that fit their learners (and their own teaching styles) best.
Part of that array of tools is English Attack!, a web service set up in 2009 by entertainment professionals specifically to address the lack of motivation in teen and young adult EFL learners. Our solution is to embed EFL exercises into a range of online entertainment (clips from movies, TV series, global news channels; music videos; thematic visual dictionaries; professionally produced games; social networking; and a game-like system of points, levels, badges, and virtual currency) and to motivate self-learning by providing choice and encouragement in a fun, non-stressful, learning-through-media immersion environment. This ‘edutainment’ superstructure is supported by pedagogical principles which pull together those elements of the latest EFL thinking most appropriate to this age group (and to the way young people around the world are increasingly learning ‘World English’) formally or casually, including the Lexical and Communicative approaches; manageable chunks; authentic materials; reward loops; drilling; fluency over accuracy; and above all the importance of input.
From Day 1, we designed English Attack! to be fully complementary to the classroom teaching of EFL / ESL, never in competition with them. As opposed to some turnkey ‘e-learning’ approaches, at English Attack! we feel that nothing can replace teacher-to-learner, face-to-face interaction in areas like discussion, coaxing shy learners, and situation-sensitive error correction. That is all the more reason why precious class time should not be taken up by exposing learners to input, and with lexical exercises, drilling, and other tasks that now, thanks to digital platforms, can be done more efficiently outside of class time.
English Attack!, currently in worldwide Beta with over 13,000 testers helping us improve the service, will launch in France in early March 2011. We are delighted to invite all TESOL France members and other ESL / EFL teachers around the world to register for the Beta in order to qualify for free Teacher status ahead of the launch; and to join the English Attack! teacher community bringing together teachers from around the world with a common interest in fulfilling the huge English language learning potential of teens and young adults.
What works better to convey the meaning of “homecoming”: a dictionary entry, or this?
When I think back to my school years, from kindergarden pretty much through to the last lessons of grad school, I must admit that I can remember precious few individual classes or lessons; and – dare I say it – even fewer individual teachers. Those who stand out from the hazy recollection of those clock-watching days are those who were able to inject a sense of importance, of excitement – of passion, for the best of them – into their teaching. We remember these teachers not only because they were most probably more colorful characters than their greyer colleagues, but also because of a significant quality that the brain responds to better than any other in a learning context: emotion. These teachers moved us in some way – with a joke, an anecdote, a private word of encouragement or a particularly creative or vividly conducted lesson – and we learned from them as a result of it.
Emotion has often been called the gatekeeper to learning. Its immense powers over what and how we learn are rooted in ancient survival mechanisms which directly linked the Paleolithic brain to emotion-driven reactions. We progressed as a species because our brains back then recognized emotions as mainly triggered by survival or procreation-type situations, and were biologically wired to switch all synapses to the “on” position in order to retain those behaviors that resulted in successful outcomes in these situations.
The wiring has stayed with us to this day, which is why we learn to like new foods (and which new chat-up lines seem to work) a lot faster than we learn how to fill out that new “simplified” income tax form. And the way our brains work vis-a-vis emotion has clear and even fundamental relevance to what and how we teach, and specifically what and how we teach to learners of different ages. Teens, for example, are in a state of mental development in which emotions subliminally instruct the brain as to whether something is important or not. The emotions, if present, trigger the brain to open up the synapses to create the physiological conditions for a learning episode to occur. If emotion is not present, the teenage brain does not consider the input worthy of consideration. (Put another way: if your teen learners grunt a lot, it’s basically because their brains are more caveman-like than fully matured adult brains… the only way to get through to them and turn them into proper examples of Homo Sapiens is to use emotion.)
In his book The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux (1996) argued that emotions activate chemicals such as epinephrine that stimulate the brain and help stamp memories with extra vividness. For this reason, we need to find ways of making our lessons memorable by engaging emotions as they increase retention (Wolfe, 2000). This has become more important than ever in the past decade, during which on-demand video, music, social networking and videogaming experiences have become the norm for digital natives, significantly raising the bar for teachers who can no longer get much traction from assigning a few exercises from a workbook. Fortunately, those very same digital technologies can be marshaled to create emotion-laden educational experiences, as long as the emotion-inducing input and the instruction that it is paired with are working in synch (admittedly the impact is rather diluted when a teacher is attempting an in-lesson installation of Flash on her battered laptop in front of an eye-rolling, smirking audience of teens).
So, assuming we can get the technology working in a reliable fashion (and this is often easier to do with services that focus on home use rather than use in the classroom), we are better equipped than ever to unlock learning via emotional triggers. The key is to start with the senses: sight and sound (in a word, multimedia) and why not play around with smell and touch as well (“This is a can of Lynx deodorant. Does it smell as good as the television ads would lead you to believe?”). For teens, guaranteed emotion-sparkers include video clips about romance (yes, including the young vampire kind), sex (tricky terrain, but it can be danced around using technically tame suggestiveness, for example of the kind to be found in some advertisements: this also provides a good segue discussion on media literacy/exploitation); rebellion; humor (they can’t get enough of the stuff); and danger (teens like nothing better than a moderately scary slasher movie).
You may not be able to use all of these in a teaching context, but here is a list of support materials and teaching approaches which are guaranteed not to result in emotion-facilitated learning among teen and young adult learners:
- Flashcards
- Most EFL / ESL textbooks, no matter how hard the authors and editors try
- “Virtual lessons” which replicate the thrill of the classroom environment in a sterile setting like Second Life.
- Most “e-learning” platforms, often cumbersome to use, which end up incorporating all the disadvantages of the textbook without the advantages of having a teacher to provide support and encouragement
- Those “straight to webcam” language lessons you find by the bucketload on YouTube. No offense to the valiant teachers who create these, but give me skateboarding Jack Russells any day.
In conclusion, there is a very good reason why we keep forgetting the room number of the classroom where we are scheduled to teach tomorrow, but can remember every word and even every guitar solo note of a song that stirred us decades ago. Our brains are programmed to retain experiences that make us sit up and take notice – teens particularly so – and this retention is what leads to learning. We miss academic opportunities when we overuse strategies that neglect our emotional and cognitive constitution. So hunt those video clips, gather those music videos, and inject some heart-thumping pizzazz into your lessons and homework assignments. Tell yourself you’re doing it for your learners, but you’ll soon find that it’s you who will benefit most of all. We all want to be remembered, don’t we?
I’m just back from the Braz-Tesol conference and trade show which this year took place in Sao Paulo, and I want to quickly get things into writing while everything’s still fresh in my mind. It was my first time in Brazil, and my first impressions are of a country on the cusp of a real breakthrough in adopting English as a generalized second language, not least as a side-effect of Brazil’s growing export-oriented economy and in anticipation of the World Cup and Olympic games to be organized here later in the decade.
A few EFL-related observations: first of all, Brazilian teachers of English seem to have zero issues with American vs British English: I heard plenty of both (in the context of generally very high English proficiency) at the conference. The consensus among both delegates and speakers seemed to be that learners should be exposed to all variants of the language and be able to function in “Globish” regardless of the origins of their conversational partners.
Secondly, I was surprised by the presence and clout of the big home-grown language-teaching franchises – CNA, Cultura Inglesa, Alumni, Wink, and Casa Thomas Jefferson, just to mention a few – who don’t seem to have left much breathing room for the global multi-school or franchise players like Berlitz or Wall Street Institute. That said, small and medium-sized language institutes from all over this vast country sent teachers to the event, which probably benefits from the rarity value of being held only every two years. Brazil is clearly a honey-pot for the big publishers and for the British Council as well, with investments in stands, staffing and imported star speakers even more significant than those at IATEFL earlier this year.
In terms of innovation, I was interested to see the efforts being made in the public education sector, in particular the Centro Interscolar de Linguas in Brasilia, which runs a network of state language schools attended by over 30,000 students and was presented by Claudia Arantes Batista during the well-attended EdTech Special Interest Group meeting. Brazil also seems to be a leader in the practice of partnerships between high schools (both state and private) and language institutes, something which might be a valid approach in some Southern European countries where state sector secondary school teaching of English leaves much to be desired.
I was impressed by the number of Brazilian teachers using film clips to illustrate grammar concepts, and attended a particularly impressive workshop on this topic given by Claudio Azevedo of Casa Thomas Jefferson. The subject of Teaching Teens was also addressed by several speakers (the English Attack! presentation is here ) and proved popular with delegates, as did – as is now the norm for these conferences – any talk or workshop incorporating the key words “technology” or “social media” in its title.
On a personal note, I had the immense pleasure of finally meeting several Twitter friends from Brazil face-to-face, including Fernando Guarany, Willy Cardoso, Rafael Medeiros, Deniliso Lima, and the irrepressible “Junior” from Natal, all truly great guys whom I got to know a lot better at the fun MacMillan party on the Wednesday night. I travelled back to Paris with a notebook crammed with scribbled notes, new friendships, about a dozen new ideas for English Attack!, and a much better idea of what a good Caipirinha tastes like (and when I should stop drinking them).
A word about the plenary talks. I was attending the conference in parallel with some business meetings, so attended only about half of these sessions, but most of those I attended were excellent: David Crystal’s hilarious tales of his globe-trotting experiences, for example, but also the more academic presentation given by Donald Freeman of the University of Michigan, who gave an very smart talk on the need for EFL teachers to protect and promote their professional status by developing a profession-specific lexicon and teaching-specific assessment systems comparable to those used, say, by airline pilots or medical doctors. There is a clear pattern emerging for the proper role of plenary session speakers at this type of conference: that of the speaker either as entertainer, or as original thinker with useful pedagogical insights, or, ideally, both. Those speakers who fall neither into one category nor the other – and I did sit through a couple such talks in Sao Paulo – need to “find a new shtick,” as they say in Brooklyn.
In general the conference was extremely well run, with a smooth registration process; sessions starting and ending on time; video projectors working as intended; and a wide range of speakers and topics. There was some carping about the absence of Wi-Fi internet access at the venue, but I’m ambivalent about the inconvenience caused: at times I missed being able to connect with the outside world, but being cut off probably also resulted in delegates more tuned-in to the speakers and less engaged with Tweet Deck. So congratulations to Vinnie Nobre, to Braz-Tesol, and to the numerous volunteer Minders (all teachers of English themselves) for organizing a memorable conference. Something tells me I will be visiting Brazil more often in the coming months and years.
How to end this little post-conference stream of consciousness? In the final plenary talk, Jeremy Harmer gave a typically congenial, charismatic and thought-provoking presentation on the subject of “endings,” one that for me raised the bar on how to choose an appropriate closing for anything, even a humble blog post. I started worrying about this a couple days ago, as the notion of writing about the conference began to form in my mind, and then last night, at 3am while jet lag did its worst on my sleeping patterns, providence came to my assistance while I was hopping from channel to channel on the television in an effort to bore myself back to sleep. I happened to stumble upon a documentary – in English! – on brain plasticity fronted by Dr. Normal Doidge, author of “The Brain That Changes Itself.” It powerfully presented, through a handful of amazing case studies, the emerging science of investigating and manipulating the brain’s ability to learn new functions and competences through stimulation and repetition, and detailed the brain’s amazing ability to find alternate neural pathways when the most obvious ones are dysfunctional, damaged or, in the incredible story of a girl literally born with half a brain, inexistent.
As I had incorporated the subject of brain plasticity into my talk on Wednesday, I stayed awake for the entire film and by the end of it understood more clearly that we are just beginning to understand how profoundly we can influence what and how the brain learns, for any individual, in any condition of health, and at any age. I guess it is this message of discovery and faith in the future that allows me to select, from the many possible styles of ending amusingly illustrated during his talk, Harmer’s “ending of hope” option, and I look forward both to investigating this field further in the context of language learning, and to a continued and mutually beneficial teaching, learning and life dialogue with my new Brazilian friends. To everyone I met there: Obrigado!
Here is a list of words. Try to commit them to memory: you’ll be quizzed on them and asked to reproduce this list a few weeks from now.
rings
archery
budget
minister
brownfield
rights
Despite your familiarity with both the words and their definitions, I’d be willing to wager a Learner’s Dictionary of your choice that most of you would not be able to retrieve the list from your memory in a month’s time. We can safely assume, therefore, that ELL’s would have a far harder time of it. A vocabulary lesson based on such a list would be failure pretty much assured.
But what if you could “hook” these words to a narrative… say a news item about the 2012 Summer Olympics which will see the famous five rings flying over London; and in which a government minister is trying to play down fears of massive budget overspend on the Games by promising better use of brownfield sites, for example holding the archery competition in a former fuel depot, and by reporting that proceeds from the sales of licensing rights to the 2012 Games mascots are much better than forecast?
And how much better would the retention of this lexis be if the news item in question were audiovisual, tightly scripted, and illustrated with zoom-ins and panning camera shots of the people, locations and items being talked about? How much more impactful if the news item were not an bespoke creation for a textbook or a course DVD, but rather an actual video package carrying the credibility of the BBC or ITN or CNN, and available online for viewing and re-viewing at the learner’s convenience?
Clearly, this approach would be superior for learners in terms of interest, of negotiated meaning, and above all retention. And fortunately, that is what is happening in EFL today: authentic materials are taking over the classroom, slowly elbowing aside the classic “Two return tickets to Brighton, please” taped artificial dialogues and other vestiges of the TEFL industry’s early attempts to go beyond the textbook and the chalkboard. But while language teachers and linguists seem to buy in to the authentic materials movement on various levels, I nevertheless get the feeling that they underestimate the power of the concept of Context in the overall language learning dynamic.
For the role of Context is not just to provide a more realistic or engaging language setting: it’s much more fundamental than that. When we teach language contextually, we are providing precious help to the learner by allowing him or her to filter the language through a logical, mental framework often validated by personal experience (a work setting vs. a party setting pre-disposes the learner towards entirely different communicative interpretations of the language chunks that will follow; a concept often referred to as the register of the communication). We are thus engaging the learner’s intelligence, from the outset, on a level beyond the purely linguistic. Furthermore, by providing context, we allow the learner to pick up all the non-verbal clues, hints and messages around the language – the glint of wistfulness in a glance; the hard edge in an irritated voice; the slump in the shoulders of a defeated opponent – that accelerates the all-important negotiation of meaning.
Make My Day (context = meaning)
This meaningful context thus becomes not just a “nice to have,” but a vital ingredient that provides what language learners would typically have at their disposal anyway in real-life meaning-negotiation situations, but which has so often been artificially stripped away in the language lab or classroom. Context synthesizes form, use, and meaning all at the same time, constituting a veritable Swiss army knife of pedagogical value. It’s why language learning in an immersive environment – in which the learner is bombarded by context all day long — is far more efficient than learning in the learner’s L1 country; and why communicative tasks work so well in forcing learners to associate specific language chunks with goal-driven, real-world, meaningful behavior.
Yet we still see far too many teachers draw up disembodied vocabulary lists; compendia of idioms or common collocations; out-of-left-field grammar lessons; and random usage drills which seem to have been grown in a petri dish, devoid of any and all context. These materials and lessons lack not only situational meaning for their learners, but also fail to provide the kind of motivation that context often provides.
Because a key component of context is emotion, and there is no question by now that emotion is both a learning motivator and a learning facilitator. Our brains associate exposure to new information while in an emotive state to information that is important, information that should be retained. That’s why we forget an office phone number as soon as we don’t need it anymore, whereas we can remember every note in a guitar solo from a song we heard on a significant romantic encounter years or even decades ago. And there is no question that an authentic news package about a current world event; a clip from a blockbuster movie, or a chart-topping music video will convey more emotion – and thus encapsulate a lot more learning potential – than an artificial dialogue created specifically for the purposes of language instruction.
Emotion is particularly crucial in motivating teens and young adults. The reason why your average 16-year-old girl is keen on the latest Twilight sequel but couldn’t care less about modals and past participles is that one resonates strongly with who she is as a person, as a teen, and as a young woman buzzing with hormones; and the other is totally abstract and without meaning in her universe. One, in other words, creates an emotional response; the other does not. But if we divorce an item of learning achieved through a clip from Twilight from its context, we also lose the power of that emotion in creating retention of the learning, and thus we are back to square one.
So in order to leverage emotion to trigger learning, we need to not only use the right authentic materials — ones relevant to her age and interests, as input (see my previous post on input here) — but we also need to force ourselves to present all derived language learning from that input in, and only in, the context of that input, so that we avoid breaking the connection between emotion and language that works so well for this age group.
Allow students to connect with language, through moving the concept of context right to the front of the line in your teaching priorities, feeding it with the right input, and watch the kids come alive. If you engage them with meaning, with relevance, and with emotion, you will finally start getting through to them.
Imagine joining a secret society ruled by strange rituals, coded phrases and cryptic symbols. The society members, who employ a wide range of complex handshakes and hand signals to use on different occasions, demand that you, as a new member, quickly master these gestures and integrate yourself smoothly into the group. You are expected to be communicative, gregarious even; and to know not only the group’s ways but also something of its history and culture. Furthermore, you must not only prove that you understand the society’s basic rules and practices, but that you are able to pick up new ones, and show proficiency in using variations of traditional ones, as and when they occur in the group’s day-to-day activities.
A challenge, without a doubt. “But,” you would say to yourself, “Not impossible. I shall watch and learn. I will start with just the one or two basic handshakes, then I’ll start to pay close attention to what they say and how they move; I will observe the rituals and build up my proficiency over the course of the coming weeks and months until I have cracked their codes and can pass as one of them.”
Except…. if you are learning English outside of English-speaking countries.
For that is exactly what we all too often expect of English language learners trying to learn in their L1 country : to crack the code of a new language without regular immersion in it, without repeated observation and absorption of it, without – in brain learning terms – a chance to develop and reinforce the neural pathways, through exposure and repetition, that lead to learning and retention. Instead, we expect — or rather hope – that a single weekly lesson or two, consisting of a group reading of another chapter of the soft-cover Secret Society Guide to Hand Signals and Handshakes, can result in learners’ ability to use the rules seamlessly, on-the-fly, to decode (from English) and re-code (from the learner’s L1 to English) a range of complex communication tasks in a succession of entirely different contexts. Achieving proficiency in the finer points of Bridge starts to look easy by comparison.
The biggest problem with most language learning that occurs in the learner’s L1 country is that the learners in question are simply not exposed to enough input, over the course of the days, weeks and months, to develop recognition of the lexis, patterns and uses of the language being studied. Even if the classroom work is of the highest standard, powered by the best efforts of a truly heroic teacher, learners have little guidance; few practical resources; and often insufficient motivation required to voluntarily expose themselves to English in the long stretches of time in between classes.
This means, for learners in the “worst case” scenario of a weekly hour-long English language class, that for the six days and 23 hours in-between each of the lessons, there is no reinforcing brain work taking place. In theory, there is the notion that homework can be assigned to tide the learners over until the next class, but in practice – in particular for adolescent and teen learners – textbook-based homework assignments are politely ignored, leaving teachers able to do little more than give the vaguest recommendations that learners try to “read something in English” or “see a movie in English.”
This encouragement for learners to expose themselves to more English in between classes – without being very specific about it — is laudable, but can be unrealistic. A lot of focus has been put, as of late, on a widened use of “authentic materials,” and of course this is a good thing. For a learner living in an English-speaking country, there is indeed an osmosis effect whereby dribs and drabs of English picked up in this way begin to make sense and create a language reflex. But for English language learners trying to learn in their own countries, it is far better if this exposure to English can be packaged with the learning challenge in mind. It is, after all, as unrealistic to expect a beginner or even intermediate English-language learner to sit through a 90-minute English language movie, trying to follow what can often be a complex and cryptic plot line (not to mention often impenetrable accents), as it would be for us English mother-tongue speakers to do the same with a movie in Armenian or Malaysian. We would inevitably end up just reading the subtitles, which would marginally improve our English-language speed reading skills, but do nothing for our comprehension skills in the target language.
What ELL’s living in their L1 country need, in terms of “training wheels” exposure to authentic English language input, is something in short format (no more than one to five minutes per unit); accessible for free or for a very low fee; and which incorporates tools and resources to help the learners construct and retain meaning from the input. When we have this type of packaging, we start to develop what Krashen labels “comprehensible input,” which typically is constituted of messages slightly above learners’ current English language level but not so taxing as to produce discouragement.
Kate Wolfe-Quintero of the University of Hawaii reinforces this pedagogical track with her notion of “input noticing,” (2006) which stresses the importance of manageable chunks (or short formats) and recommends other ways of massaging the input so that it becomes intake and then knowledge, resulting ultimately (if the knowledge is indeed acquired) in output. She contrasts this with traditional grammar-oriented teaching, which places the emphasis on production, thus standing the natural sequence of language acquisition on its head. Far better, says Wolfe-Quintero, to require learners to pay explicit attention to input in context, and allow for them to inductively figure out how the grammar works.
Let’s keep in mind that the Digital Native generation — pretty much anyone under the age of 20 today, plus all of those that will follow — thinks and learns differently from past generations, even ours. Where we studied step-by-step manuals, they learn by observation and experimentation. They know what they like, they find it online, they play around with it, they see what works through trial and error, and after a bit of tinkering, coming back to it a few times, they’ve mastered it – inductively, via short-format exposure.
Wolfe-Quintero also provides a neat segue from input to the all-important area of motivation: a subject providing a particular challenge for teachers of teens and young adult learners.
A fundamental element in promoting input noticing is motivation. The more students are motivated to spend time with a source of language input, the more they will notice about how the language works. This is where the content of the input matters. The more meaningful the content of the input, the more motivated students will be to respond to the input, pay attention to the grammatical features of the input, and use the input as a model for their own production, particularly if the topic is one that triggers ideas that they want to communicate.
Well said, Kate. The issue of motivation for teen and young adult ELLs will definitely be the subject of another post, but that quote is a great place to start.
So teachers, if you want to start seeing those glazed-over eyes and blank stares replaced by nods of recognition and the sparkle of understanding, forget about step-by-step manuals and softcover guides to secret handshakes. Go back to learner basics and give a lot more importance to the input side of the equation. With all the fantastic, free resources available today thanks to the web, it would be rude not to!
English Attack! website