Mark Penny :: Blog

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Systematic Acquisition

Right now I'm working on something I call Systematic Acquisition. The focus is vocabulary and grammar.

Vocabulary

On the vocabulary front, I'm doing two things.

First, I'm compiling a wordlist (currently 27746 words) from various sources such as the the Dolch Sight Word List, the General Service List, the Academic Word List and the Collins COBUILD Learner's Dictionary. It's all going into an Excel file called Multilist. Multilist includes information about presence in a list, frequency in a corpus, type of entry in a source, inflections and alternate spellings. All this information will be used to construct a systematic list which I will use to create vocabulary learning materials.

Second, I'm refining a vocabulary teaching technique which combines Language Item Management (LIM) and Discourse Loading (DL).

Language Item Management empowers the learner to rapidly assess his or her own knowledge of various language items (including vocabulary and grammar) and to make decisions about which items should be learned to which degree. It begins with a five-item (Lykert) scale called the NUMPY Scale (No-Unlikely-Maybe-Probably-Yes). Learners grade each item in a list (for example, the target words in a reading passage) according to their answers to the question: Would I recognize and understand this item if I saw it in a sentence? The instructor verifies the assessments by asking for definitions or examples. Faulty definitions are corrected and unfamiliar words are explained. In the full form of LIM, the NUMPY Scale is applied to five Acquisition Fields and objectives for all items are set based on an agreed assessment of how well each item should be learned. Each acquisition field is a box which combines two parameters: Production-Reception and Competence-Competition. Production is active use of an item in speech and writing. Reception is passive use of an item in listening and reading. Competence is current and constant facility with the item. Competition is opportunistic facility in response to an ephemeral situation such as a language test, an interview or a presentation. An item may be assessed as productive-competent, productive-competitive, receptive-competent, receptive-competitive or null (neither competent nor competitive in either production or reception). On the NUMPY Scale, Y corresponds to productive competence, P corresponds to receptive competence, M corresponds to productive competition, U corresponds to receptive competition and N corresponds to null. Items may be bumped up or bumped down as learner and instructor agree based on learner needs.

Discourse Loading is the practice of generating "teaching sentences". A teaching sentence is an individual sentence or set of sentences that contains sufficient contextual information to make the meaning of its target item unmistakable. Imagine the blank in a cloze item without an accompanying list of previously distinguished vocabulary. To draw the learner's mind to a particular word out of the thousands the learner may have acquired, the sentence must contain an abnormally large amount of distinguishing information. For the word ant, a sentence like "There was an ____ in my sandwich" would be woefully inadequate if the environmental context of the sentence provided no clues. Ignoring the phonemic clue of "an", the target could be any noun whose real-world counterpart was small enough to fit in a sandwich, anything from a bacterium to a pickle to a small mouse to a cigarette butt. If we add sufficient context to the sentence (or set of sentences itself), the possibilities become limited to one word or one set of words which share one meaning--and meaning is the desired element in a discourse loaded sentence. "There was an _____ in my sandwich. It must have crawled in there when I set the sandwich down on the blanket at the picnic. There were thousands of the little black insects hunting in the grass for food to take back to their colony" tunes the choices down to pretty well one. Crawl, blanket, picnic, thousands, little, black, insects, hunt, grass, food, take back and colony all work together to restrict the potential meaning of the omitted item.

The advantages of Discourse Loading are at least four. First, in order to imagine the context necessary to limiting the possible meanings of the target item, the learner must concentrate very keenly on the target item's meaning, creating a tighter association between meaning and form. Second, in order to build the required context, the learner must recycle previously learned vocabulary, thus refreshing or reactivating the selected vocabulary. Third, having generated the context-laden sentence, the learner has an example for future reference. Fourth, the example makes the meaning of the target item so unmistakably clear that even ten, twenty or thirty years later, the item will be instantly reactivated if the learner happens upon the sentence in notebook or memory.

Grammar

On the grammar front, I am developing an approach to teaching grammar called Behavioural Grammar. The impetus for this project arose from the realization that a Grammar Gap exists between those who are able and those who are unable to translate the conceptual grammars taught in most language courses into behavioural grammars. Grammar is traditionally taught as a concept to be mysteriously transmuted in the learner's mind from a set of ideas to a set of procedures. Communicative and interactional grammar teaching seek to facilitate the process of translation by making grammar immediate and urgent; however, translation of concept to procedure is still left to the learner. Just as some but not all would-be musicians take rapidly and apparently effortlessly to musical procedures, with or without conceptual training, so some but not all would-be language learners take rapidly and apparently effortlessly to linguistic procedures. Rapid and apparently effortless acquisition of any procedure stems from what I call operance, or a natural tendency or inclination to emit behaviours that naturally lead to acquisition of a procedure. A learner who is operant in regard to a particular subject will seem to learn it rapidly and effortlessly, while learners who are respondant or, worse, resistant, to the subject will either struggle or rebel. One advantage of teaching behavioural grammar is that the non-operant learner is not required to translate concepts to behaviours.

The relationship of operance to respondance can be clarified by analogy to genius and ordinary intelligence. The formula for calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is annually acquired and applied by millions if not billions of ordinary adolescent minds the world over. Yet never in a million or billion years would even the average engineer have come up with that formula on his or her own. It takes a genius like Pythagorus to discover or invent such a thing, but any normal mind can comprehend and commandeer it. Even the formulations of later luminaries like Newton and Einstein are perfectly accessible to ordinary minds. How is this so? It is so because each genius translated his conceptual insight into a procedural formula and nearly anyone can grasp and make use of a formula. In principle, anything can be taught to anyone if it is taught as a behaviour and all useful concepts are eventually translated into behaviours. In terms of achievement, the ordinary learner is equivalent to the genius if he or she is able to acquire and apply the genius's insight. The only difference is that the genius acquired the insight and developed the procedure operantly, by virtue of his or her own natural tendencies, while the ordinary learner acquired the procedure respondantly, that is, in response to instruction aimed at instilling the insight and conditioning the behaviour.

At present, I am working on verb inflection. I have distilled a formula for consistent correct inflection of English verbs and am developing activities for conditioning this behaviour in all of my students, from those in individual classes to those in large group classes. Preliminary results are encouraging and I am swiflty refining both approach and technique.

Differential Acquisition Theory

Concerned about helping my students really achieve real native-like fluency in vocabulary and grammar, I have been striving to understand how first (L1) and second (L2) languages are learned and acquired by people of various ages. From all this cogitation, based on experience as a learner/acquirer of an L1 (English) and four L2s (French, Haitian Creole, Russian and Mandarin), on observations as an ESL instructor in Ukraine and Taiwan, and on reading in language acquisition theory and learning theory, has emerged a theory I call Differential Acquisition. In brief, it recognizes that human beings go through three stages of development when it comes to language learning: innate, instinctive and intellectual.

The Innate Stage

The innate stage may also be termed the neural stage, because all language activity at this stage is essentially neural. The idiolinguoverse (individual language universe) is "hooking up" with its instruments of reception and production, the auditory and vocal tracts. This corresponds by analogy to the early development of the universe as a growing collection of elements under high energies. This elemental stage is characterized by high activity and low organization. All activity at this stage is random, the elements behaving according to their properties and under no other control than their inherent nature. It is the stage of speciation, at which the individual acquires the the characterisitics of its species, including a characteristic set of faculties, among which is the language faculty (whether or not this faculty is separate from a general learning faculty).

The Instinctive Stage

The instinctive stage may also be termed the social stage, because language activity at this stage becomes increasingly social. The idiolinguoverse has come into contact with the sociolinguoverse (group language universe) and is chiefly concerned with copying it. This corresponds by analogy to the development of life on earth with a focus on survival. This biological stage is characterized by continuing high activity and increasing organization. It is the stage of genius for most individuals, the stage at which activity and organization are both high, resulting in frequent environmentally responsive reorganization. Early activity is random, but becomes increasingly subject to a developing instinct, an instinct focused on survival within the group and therefore on becoming recognizably of the group, that is, acquiring the culture and so, by inclusion, acquiring the language of the group to a degree that marks the individual as belonging to the group.

The Intellectual Stage

The intellectual stage may also be termed the individual stage, because language activity at this stage becomes increasingly achievement-oriented. The idiolinguoverse focuses now on its own ends, which often do not entirely coincide with those of the group, usually as a complex, but occasionally as separate objectives. This corresponds by analogy to the development of technology in human culture. This technological stage is charaterized by decreasing activity and increasing organization. It is the stage of lost genius for most inidividuals. The tension between activity and organization has settled in favour of organization and reorganization becomes increasingly difficult. Activity at this stage is mainly deliberate or intellectual. The individual already belongs to a group and is seldom sufficiently motivated to fully acculturate with another group. Lingustic interaction with other groups focuses on specific material ends rather than general acceptance.

Efficiency

The overriding principle of lanuage acquisition is efficiency. Each stage is naturally tuned to maximize efficiency in handling its material. Newborns essentially ignore the sociolinguoverse because they must first develop the idiolinguoversal equipment to perceive, interpret and respond to it. Very young children indiscriminately absorb the characteristics of groups to which they feel they must belong because belonging increases the chances of being cared for and protected and therefore of surviving at a time when the individual is incapable of surviving without a great deal of tending. Teenagers and adults (and younger children not exposed to language under survival conditions) aquire only those elements of new sociolinguoverses they find necessary to achieving their ends (which may range from very basic interaction through various levels of communication to conscientious artistic performance).

A Cure for Efficiency

Systematic Acquisition provides a means to access or at least mimic the dormant instinctive stage. When language items are taught as behaviours and accurate behaviour is crucial to success, intellectual learners revert, at least partially, to a survival-oriented acculturation approach. Of course, the elements of the target culture to be acquired and the degree to which they must be acquired come under the control of the instructor, whose artificial culture, one which demands greater instinctive accuracy than does the natural intellectual culture of the real language world, will push the learner's achievement closer to the native standard than the non-operant learner could manage by simple immersion.

http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/229

While the latest version of my wordlist uploads, I'll pop into this cooliris window and post a blog entry for the first time in six months or so.

It's been a fine time for me. Just got back a week ago from three weeks in Victoria (brother) and Prince George (parents). One of the big highlights was a two-hour canoe trip with my old friend Brock and my five-year-old son, Ben. Ben's a natural. With a little coaching and observation, he was dipping and feathering like a pro. Unfortunately, here in Kaohsiung, we won't get many opportunities to glide on lakes.

One little event that will have repercussions for the next several months at least is my invention of behavioural grammar. I had been reading Skinner's The Technology of Teaching and was just starting Chomsky's The Minimalist Program when it hit me that grammar-in-use is behavioural, not conceptual, and that I could develop a behavioural grammar that would guarantee consistently, continuously correct performance. I got on it right away and wound up with a good start on a behavioural grammar for verb inflection.

These days, though, I'm back to slogging it out over Multilist. I still have half a dozen sources to input, but yesterday I decided I had enough to start an acquisitional wordlist. Basically, I'm paring the list down to useful items, grouping the items by useable base form and splitting the result into two lists: the first containing the base forms and the second containing so-called derivations. The idea is to teach the base forms as a resource for extrapolative reading, add the derivations as fodder for extrapolation, and leave students with a solid intermediate vocabulary and trusty vocabulary building skills. Naturally, I'll eventually put together a complete basic-through-advanced list, but it will take time. I'm hoping to have the current project done by Saturday so I can test it on a new TOEFL student.

http://spajal.targeteil.org/?q=node/218

Missing in action might have been a more appropriate title, but most of what I've been doing away from the blogosphere is leading, I hope, to a well-earned academic title, among other things (fame and fortune, to name but two of the least).

Phased Acquisition Theory has turned out to be but a drop in the bucket of Differential Aquisition Theory, my current unified theory of language acquisition, inspired by reading in cosmology, evolution and computer programming and bolstered by reading in theories of language acquisition and theories of learning. Naturally, working out the theory, its hypotheses and potential research topics has taken a lot of my time.

Even more time-consuming has been the seminal phase of LIDbIT (Language Item Database of Integrated Tables), Multilist (Multiple Source Wordlist), a composite of wordlists from something like a dozen online and print sources. Got to View/Wordlists to take a boo.

I've also been developing this site, one of a complex of spajes, or student, professional and academic journals. The platform is Drupal and one of the kicks is setting up various content types to cover the range of contributions users might someday make. Another challenge is figuring out how to collect all of a single user's contributions to one view for feeding to other sites. At the moment I have My Blog and Subsites, but the blog module is not configurable and the Mysite module does not access user-generated content types. As far as I can tell, user-specific views are not yet creatable.

http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/218

Missing in action might have been a more appropriate title, but most of what I've been doing away from the blogosphere is leading, I hope, to a well-earned academic title, among other things (fame and fortune, to name but two of the least).

Phased Acquisition Theory has turned out to be but a drop in the bucket of Differential Aquisition Theory, my current unified theory of language acquisition, inspired by reading in cosmology, evolution and computer programming and bolstered by reading in theories of language acquisition and theories of learning. Naturally, working out the theory, its hypotheses and potential research topics has taken a lot of my time.

Even more time-consuming has been the seminal phase of LIDbIT (Language Item Database of Integrated Tables), Multilist (Multiple Source Wordlist), a composite of wordlists from something like a dozen online and print sources. Got to View/Wordlists to take a boo.

I've also been developing this site, one of a complex of spajes, or student, professional and academic journals. The platform is Drupal and one of the kicks is setting up various content types to cover the range of contributions users might someday make. Another challenge is figuring out how to collect all of a single user's contributions to one view for feeding to other sites. At the moment I have My Blog and Subsites, but the blog module is not configurable and the Mysite module does not access user-generated content types. As far as I can tell, user-specific views are not yet creatable.

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CTV and CBC have reported over the last couple of days on a piece of research involving babies watching videos of people speaking English and French. The study revealed that the children attended to the facial movements of speakers of the two languages in a manner similar to that in which they attended to the speech sounds of speakers of the two languages. Briefly, children in the process of acquiring language tend to attend more intently to sounds which differ from those they have already dealt with. This is considered an essential strategy in childhood language acquisition. The conclusion drawn by both news outlets is that small children can distinguish between English and French just by watching people's faces.

Although it makes perfect sense to me that children in what I'll call accelerated acquisition mode would be sensitive and attentive to differences in sound and sight, whether linguistic or otherwise, I do not think we are justified in assuming that the subjects of the experiment in question perceived facial movements as linguistic acts. As children learn to articulate the phonetic elements of languages, they most likely do pay attention to movements of lips and tongue. Mine, who happen to be bilingual Mandarin and English speakers, do, particularly when attacking their father tongue (English), to which they experience much less exposure. However, linguistically motivated attention to movements of lips and tongue is generally accompanied by attention to sound. In other words, it is quite possible, probably most likely, that the children in the experiment were responding to the facial movements in the videos as visual stimuli, not as speech acts and not as models of phonetic articulation.

I do not doubt that children combine attention to facial movement and attention to speech sounds as they acquire the phonetic inventory of languages they plan to acquire. Even adults do that. My objection is to the assumption that children interpret differences or sets of differences in facial movements as differences between languages.

I'd like to read the paper itself, but will have to wait, not doubt, some time for the electronic version to become available.

Other Sources

Yahoo! Canada News

Globe and Mail

University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre: Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy

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My wife is finally fully behind my pursuing a master's degree in applied linguistics. She's beginning to see how I'm going to need to get out of the hectic commercial cram school market and into an environment that encourages and rewards the background preparation I like to do. To get into that slightly more highbrow market, I need further credentials.

I started a master of distance education back in 2005. I really enjoyed it, but there were some problems. First, it took me in a direction that didn't run parallel to or even intersect much with my current career. Because of the amount of time and "heart's blood" (as the Chinese say) I spent on the degree, my job suffered. My heart certainly wasn't in it. Second, it got expensive as the Canadian dollar rose against the Taiwanese yuan. Third, I lost business because my heart was in distance education, not TESOL.

I did well enough during the two courses I managed to fit in before running out of money to be given an extension to my programme status, meaning that if I managed to fit in two more courses before a full year had passed since the time when I should have lost my programme status, I could continue as a programme student. I was flattered and grateful and sincerely hoped that I could take advantage of the department's gracious offer, but time passed and money did not accumulate in sufficient quantities for my love of learning to overcome my wife's love of money in the bank.

As we passed the point of no return with the extension, I was already reconsidering my choice of fields. My reason for choosing distance education in the first place was a desire to build an online language school, Target EIL . By the time I submitted my final paper for the first course, however, I could see the writing on the wall, albeit with some reluctance and a deal of blurring. To achieve what I wanted to achieve academically, I would need a hefty background in applied linguistics or TESOL. Most logically, I would have to get at least a master's in one of them, meaning I would have to quit distance ed. It pained me no end, and I'm still wondering if I can't work something out. Technically, I could just read up in applied linguistics and TESOL and keep chasing the MDE, but what would an MDE get me when I was done? My real field is applied linguistics, even though I intend to teach it online (and asynchronously once I've built the resources). The MDE gave me plenty of insight and introduced me to the technology I'm already using. Most importantly, to get the jobs I want, I need applied linguistics or TESOL, not distance ed.

I suppose it's just possible that an MDE with specialization in applied linguistics in TESOL (via a whizbang project/thesis on teaching English online) might perhaps maybe just potentially be acceptable in place of an out-and-out MAppLing, but that's an exceedingly uncertain risk to take on my wife's good faith. It's frustrating. I'm pretty sure I could write a thesis, develop a project and assemble a portfolio that show I know my stuff in both fields--and this would be my ideal. Heck, I already have two related websites (the Target EIL Course Portal and PILLAR ), not to mention my blog-forum networks SPAJAL and SPAJDE , and my own modular theory of language acquisition. The problem is that this rigid old world doesn't often think in terms of universal types and we universal types don't generally have the wherewithal (in the beginning, anyway) to meet the world on all its terms in every field of endeavour.

Someday I'll get graduate and postgraduate degrees in distance ed, applied linguistics/TESOL and linguistics (another field I have theories in). Meanwhile, I am forced to choose. I've always hated that.

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I was reminded today of the kind of learner I used to be.

Back in grade twelve I dropped algebra, because I didn't get trigonometry, and physics, because I didn't get grade twelve algebra (despite getting B+s in grade 11). Fifteen years later I picked up a university algebra primer and found I could not only get all the math, I could even derive formulae. What happened?

I had long suspected a change in my brain. How else could I have gone from clueless to clued in without a whiff of algebra for fifteen years? At seventeen, I wasn't ready for trigonometry. At thirty-two I was.

This evening I was working with an eleventh-grade student on listening and speaking in preparation for the first round of the second level GEPT (General English Proficiency Test ). We were doing the exercises in a book called Multiple Reading Skills H. On the whole, the student is very intellegent, if less than ambitious about anything but drawing. She draws figures from Japanese manga and Taiwanese budaihsi. She's very good at it and is making rapid progress as an artist. Her dream is to draw a manga of her own or to be involved in drawing someone else's.

She is not all that keen on two hours of English every Tuesday evening, but she obediently and politely attends every scheduled class. Her level is a hodge-podge and has been a source of puzzlement to me for a couple of years.

When I first started teaching her, she declared straight out that her reading level was low. I found that it wasn't quite that simple. She did read strangely, but she could read and she understood a good deal of what she read. Yet it was difficult to predict what she would and wouldn't understand and she seemed to have difficulty understanding from context.

Today it hit me. I was teaching her to systematically arrive at answers to questions about the content of a short reading passage by locating the paragraph containing the topic of the question and identifying information that could be used to complete a response. She wasn't getting it. And I suddenly and finally understood her problem. She was a holisitic learner. She either knew things or she didn't. She could not systematically derive knowledge from a body of information. Knowledge either stuck to her or it didn't. And just as suddenly and finally, I understood my problem back in grade twelve. At that time, I, too, was a holistic learner. I could not systematically derive knowledge from a body of information. Knowledge either stuck to me or didn't.

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Monday night I called my wife to see if we had enough money lying around for me to buy a reference book, How Children Learn Language by William O'Grady. I wanted to increase my understanding of childhood language learning, because although I'm mainly interested in teaching teens and adults, I do occasionally teach children and it is usually very frustrating.

One of my tentative conclusions about how to teach children language, and one that O'Grady's book seems to bear out for me, is that trying to teach them metalinguistically or even unit by unit is an utter waste of time (and their parents' money). Children seem to learn from a corpus rather than from a syllabus. In practical terms, this means creating lessons that provide environment rather than instruction. Stories, games and other language-laden activities are the order of the day with the wee ones.

This is, of course, no earth-shaking insight. Children's language instructors have known what to do for decades if not centuries. But I am not, strictly speaking, a children's language instructor, so for me it's a very helpful realization.

The book is helping in other ways, though. I'm beginning to formulate a sort of triangular cross-linked continuum of learning approaches for children, adolescents and adults. In the ESL context, children need to be continuously bombarded with carefully selected vocabulary (words and phrases) on which they will perform what I call corpus analysis. The teacher's job is to determine which items of vocabulary the children need now and will need down the next stretch of road. Adolescents and adults also need bombardment, but they are less efficient corpus analysts.  By way of compensation, they are capable of processing metalinguistic analysis, which is essential to differentiating language systems, in turn necessary because adolescents and adults tend to learn new languages through their native languages. Adolescents are hypersocial learners. For them, language is mainly communicative, so learning activities need to focus on productive and receptive interaction that serves a social purpose. Adults are independent learners. For them, language is highly reflective, so learning activities need to focus on classifying, describing and explaining their realities.

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I have to prepare a progress report for one of the students in my BULATS writing class at Maersk Kaohsiung. The Human Resources manager needs it to pitch the programme to his boss. I've decided to format it as a PowerPoint presentation, since this is a format familiar to business people. Moodle's Project module will allow me to upload the PowerPoint file to my Course Portal, where the HR manager can easily access it. One advantage to storing the report in the Course Portal is that it provides the boss direct exposure to the Course Portal, which is an integral part of the course as I run it.

So much for format. More important to getting more contracts at Maersk is the manner of assessment. I've come up with a set of ratios that I think will do it.

1. e:w -errors to words
   
2. v:w - verbiage to words
3. c:w - content to words

The idea is to show that this particular student has reduced the number of errors and amount of verbiage and increased the amount of content per number of words.

There are other factors I'm considering adding, such as idiomaticity, probably as something like i:w. Idiomaticity is a bit tricky, because there are phrases we immediately recognize as native-speaker idiomatic, the kinds of phrases we expect from native speakers and are surprised to hear or read from learners, especially learners in non-native-speaking environments, and there are perfectly idiomatic phrases which we barely notice because they do not strike us as requiring a high level of idiomatic awareness.