Big Questions in ELT

by Scott Thornbury

  The notion of identity has now moved to the very heart of second language learning theory. As Norton and Toohey (2002: 115) argue: ‘Language learning engages the identities of learners because language itself is not only a linguistic system of signs and symbols; it is also a complex social practice in which the value and meaning ascribed to an utterance are determined in part by the value and meaning ascribed to the person who speaks.’ Becoming a member of what Lave and Wenger (1991) term ‘a community of practice’ assumes the capacity – and willingness – to identify, and be identified, with the members of the target group (and, by extension, to relinquish membership, even temporarily, of one’s own group).

  In fact, a post-modern gloss of Tony Judt’s condition (and of mine) is not that we have no identity but that we have multiple – and often contesting – identities, and it’s the business of the second language acquisition project to find a match between an existing identity and the target one. This at least is the thinking that underlies the concept of ‘the ideal L2 self’ as promoted by Zoltan Dörnyei (2009: 29) in a compelling new theory of motivation: ‘If the person we would like to become speaks an L2, the “ideal L2 self” is a powerful motivator to learn the L2 because of the desire to reduce the discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves.’ But being an ‘edge person’ means that this ideal L2 self is elusive.

  In the absence of appropriating the identity of a real or potential L2 user, one possibility might simply be to manufacture one. This strategy, at least, seems to underlie the practice in Suggestopedia, of assigning learners new, L2 speaking, identities, including giving them new names and biographies. Larsen-Freeman (2000: 82) comments that this is based on the assumption ‘that a new identity makes students feel more secure and thus more open to learning’.

  Does this openness to learning extend as far as pronunciation, I wonder? Because pronunciation seems doggedly resistant to identity reconstruction: however much we might want to ‘lose our selves’ in a new language, our accent survives as a trace of our former selves. Apart from purely physiological reasons, this L1 identity ‘residue’ may be the result of the tension between ‘belonging’ and ‘becoming’. In a study on the relation between accent and group affiliation (Gatbonton, Trofimovich and Magid 2005: 504), the researchers concluded that ‘L2 learning entails choices … between the reward of being efficient in the L2 (indicating the need for language ability best suited for communicative success) and the cost of not marking the right identity (implying a risk of being labelled disloyal).’

  The tension between wanting to sound like a native speaker but not wanting to let go of one’s original identity is particularly acute for teachers of English, as Jennifer Jenkins (2007: 231) found out, while investigating attitudes to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF): ‘There was a strong sense that [her NNS informants] desired a native-like English identity as signalled by a native-like accent, especially in their roles as teachers.’ Hence most of her informants rejected the notion – urged by proponents of ELF – that an intelligible but locally accented English is acceptable. Jenkins adds: ‘Many perceived an almost immutable link between a native-like English accent and their chances of success in their teaching careers. And yet most also expressed an attachment to their mother tongue and nationality, projected through their English accent, that they seemed reluctant to relinquish’ (ibid.). Those who recognized the contradiction used the term ‘linguistic schizophrenia’ to describe it. It could be argued that this split personality is simply the healthy tension that results from having two competing identities – as emigré football supporters might also have experienced, watching their (new) home team play the team whence their ethnicity originates.

  More recently, the construction of an idealized identity is at the heart of computer gaming and of virtual environments such as Second Life (SL). My avatar in SL, for example, allows me to interact there in ways that – arguably – outperform my ‘real-life’ personality. Does online identity creation offer advantages to language learners, then?

  James Paul Gee would argue most emphatically that it does. In his book What Video Games have to Teach us about Language and Literacy (2007: 46) he suggests that, by allowing gamers to customize their virtual identities, video games ‘encourage identity work and reflection on identities in clear and powerful ways’. Such identity work is crucial, he claims, since ‘all learning in all semiotic domains requires taking on a new identity and forming bridges from one’s old identities to the new one’ (2007: 45). Video games and virtual environments would seem to offer learners the opportunity to design ‘ideal language-using selves’. The question remains, of course, as to whether these games and these environments provide the kind of language-using opportunities that these ideal selves can usefully exploit.

  As a footnote, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg is reported to have said: ‘The days of having a different image for your … co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity’ (Guardian Weekly, 6 June 2010: 22).

  Clearly Mark Zuckerberg has never learned another language!

  Questions for discussion

  1. Do you experience (or have you experienced) a tension between two different identities as you move from one language to another?

  2. Can you learn a language and not identify with the speakers of that language?

  3. Have you observed, in your students, a correlation between identification with the target language community and communicative success?

  4. Can teachers influence their learners’ perception of their ‘ideal L2 self’? How?

  5. Does the idea of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) contradict the idea that language learning involves identification with a target language community?

  6. Do you consciously adjust your accent – in the classroom – to reflect the learners’ expectations of an idealized English speaker?

  7. What do you think of the idea of assigning learners (or letting them choose) an English identity, e.g. by giving them English names?

  8. Do you think that avatar-mediated online interaction offers a viable language learning experience for some learners?

  References

  Dörnyei, Z. and Ushioda, E. (eds.) (2009) Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

  Gabanton, E., Trofimovich, T. and Magid, M. (2005) ‘Learners’ ethnic group affiliation and L2 pronunciation accuracy: a sociolinguistic investigation’, TESOL Quarterly, 39, 3.

  Gee, J.P. (2007) What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Jenkins, J. (2007) English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000) Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching (2nd ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Norton, B. and Toohey, K. (2002) ‘Identity and language learning’, in Kaplan, R. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

  http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/i-is-for-identity-2/

  17 How do you get a ‘feel’ for a second language?

  I was once teaching a group of fairly advanced students and the ‘structure of the day’ was gradable vs ungradable adjectives (of the type angry vs furious, hungry vs starving, cold vs freezing, etc.) and, specifically, the intensifying adverbs (extremely vs absolutely) that they collocate with. Not sure either of my ability to establish the difference nor of their existing knowledge of it, I decided to test the students first, and asked them to decide which intensifier (extremely or absolutely) went best with each of a list of adjectives, some gradable, some not. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, when I checked the task, most of the students had most of the answers c
orrect. ‘Starving?’ ‘Absolutely’. ‘Hot?’ ‘Extremely’, etc. ‘How were you able to do that?’ I asked at one point, fishing for the rule. Whereupon one student answered: ‘It just feels right.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘you just saved me the trouble of having to teach you something!’

  It just feels right: isn’t this, after all, the ideal state we want our learners to be in? To have the gut feeling that it’s not ‘How long are you living here?’ but ‘How long have you been living here?’ and not ‘I like too much the football’ but ‘I like football very much’ – irrespective of their capacity to state the rule. This is what the Germans call Sprachgefühl – literally ‘language-feel’: a native-like intuition of what is right.

  So, how do you get it? Proponents of the Direct Method would argue that the kind of native-like intuitions that constitute ‘feel’ can be acquired only in a monolingual learning environment , analogous to the situation of first language acquisition. Use of translation or any cross-linguistic comparison is therefore proscribed. As Berltiz (1911: 3) put it: ‘He who is studying a foreign language by means of translation neither gets hold of its spirit nor becomes accustomed to think in it.’ Otto Jespersen (1904: 48) expressed it more vividly: ‘The first condition for good instruction in foreign languages would seem to be to give the pupil as much as possible to do with and in the foreign language; he must be steeped in it … he must be ducked down in it and get to feel as if he were in his own element, so that he may at last disport himself in it as an able swimmer.’ Total immersion takes this ‘deep end’ metaphor to its logical conclusion.

  In the same tradition, but coming from a humanist point of view, Caleb Gattegno (1972) believed that – in order to get a feel for the target language – no amount of telling or of repeating or of memorizing would work. Instead, learners must develop their own ‘inner criteria’ for correctness. In order to do this, they would need to access ‘the spirit of the language’. And this spirit was to be found in its words – not the ‘big’ lexical words, but the small, functional words that – in English at least – carry the burden of its grammar:

  Since it is not possible to resort to a one-to-one correspondence, the only way open is to reach the area of meaning that the words cover, and find in oneself whether this is a new experience which yields something of the spirit of the language, or whether there is an equivalent experience in one’s own language but expressed differently.

  In the Silent Way, then, learners engage with a relatively limited range of language items, initially, but with a great deal of concentration. Concentration is facilitated through the use of such tactile devices as Cuisenaire rods.

  Subsequently, Krashen (e.g. 1981: 1) would argue that a ‘feel for grammaticality’ cannot be learned; it can only be acquired. In much the same spirit as Jespersen, he argued that a feel for language can be internalized only through ‘meaningful interaction in the target language’. And the sole pre-requisite for meaningful interaction is exposure to quantities of ‘comprehensible input’.

  Researchers in the cognitive tradition would disagree. What I am calling ‘feel’, they would call ‘implicit knowledge’, defined (by Ellis,1997: 111) as knowledge that ‘is intuitive, in the sense that the learner is unlikely to be aware of having ever learned it and is probably unaware of its existence’. But the fact that the learner isn’t aware of it now doesn’t mean to say that the learner wasn’t aware of it once. Contrary to Krashen’s claim that explicit instruction and intentional learning play no role in language acquisition, scholars such as Skehan (1998) cite evidence that shows that conscious learning of rules, or intentional memorization of examples, can – over time – ‘sediment’ into implicit knowledge. Or ‘feel’.

  One way this happens may be through the accumulation of ‘episodic instances’. As Dörnyei (2009: 157) explains it, ‘initially, a person performs an action following explicit rules. However, on every subsequent occasion that the person is engaged in performing the particular skill, a new memory trace is formed corresponding to the action executed, and thus practice leads to the storage of an increasing number of these memorized instances.’ The original ‘algorithm’ that generated the behaviour is forgotten, to be replaced by these stored episodic instances. In language learning terms, we don’t remember the rule; we remember the examples that the rule generated. We ‘feel’ that something is correct because it matches this mental database.

  Of course, this doesn’t deny the fact that incidental exposure also feeds into this database. Researchers into brain function have simulated the way that repeated firings across the mental network serve to strengthen neural pathways, resulting in behaviours that are consistent with rule learning, but in which conscious attention to rules played no part. But such models assume fairly massive amounts of exposure – amounts that most learners don’t experience.

  Moreover, the mental network for second language learning is not a blank slate, but is already massively reticulated with well-entrenched pathways derived from exposure to – and use of – the L1. As Dörnyei (ibid.: 168) concludes, ‘When we look at SLA, the processes that seem to work so effectively and effortlessly for infants ... do not seem to exist, or if they do, they have a rather limited impact.’

  A further problem with implicit knowledge is that, if the knowledge is wrong, it is much more difficult to access, root out, and re-configure than is explicit knowledge. We all know learners who stubbornly insist that something is correct, when it is not. They may even be convinced that they have heard the erroneous form before. Dick Schmidt, learning Portuguese in Brazil (as described in Schmidt and Frota, 1986: 304), was convinced that the word for wife was marida (by analogy with marido, or husband; the correct word for wife is in fact esposa or mulher). When this error was brought to his attention, he was ‘astounded’. As he wrote in his journal, ‘I have the strongest feeling, in fact I am ready to insist that I have never heard the word esposa, but I have heard marida many times.’ Despite having been corrected, he continued to use marida, and ten weeks later, after further corrections, he wrote: ‘I … cannot shake the feeling that I didn’t make it up’ (ibid.: 305). Eventually, the correct form asserts itself, but, as Schmidt notes, ‘Five months to figure out such a simple thing!’ (ibid.: 305).

  So much for feel!

  Questions for discussion

  1. Do you have a ‘feel’ for a second language? If so, how did you get it?

  2. Is it simply a matter of practice?

  3. Some grammar you have to learn; some you can only get by ‘feel’. Is this true? Can you think of examples?

  4. Do you think translation or any reference to the learner’s first language will inhibit the development of ‘feel’?

  5. How do you accumulate a ‘mental database’ of stored examples?

  6. What’s the best way of ‘undoing’ a learner’s mistaken intuitions?

  7. Can learners eventually forget the rules they once learned, and function solely on ‘feel’?

  8. Is the ‘spirit of the language’ in its words, its pronunciation, its syntax – or its cultural associations?

  References

  Berlitz, M. (1911) Method for Teaching Modern Languages, English Part: First Book, Berlin: Siegfried Cronbach.

  Dörnyei, Z. (2009) The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Ellis, R. (1997) SLA Research and Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Gattegno, C. (1972) Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools: The Silent Way (2nd ed.), NY: Educational Solutions.

  Jespersen, O. (1904, 1952) How to Teach a Foreign Language, London: George Allen & Unwin.

  Krashen, S. (1981) Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, Oxford: Pergamon.

  Schmidt. R. and Frota, S. (1986) ‘Developing basic conversational ability in a second language: A case study of an adult learner’, in Day, R. (ed.) Talking to learn: Conversation in a second language, Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

 
Skehan, P. (1998) A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

  http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/f-is-for-feel/

  18 Can you learn a language if you’re not paying attention?

  There’s been a steady stream of shock-horror press stories recently, about the pervasive role of technology in our lives. Many of these touch on the issue of attention and its role in learning. A front page story in The New York Times reported on a trip into the wilderness undertaken by five academics, the purpose of which, according to psychologist David Strayer (2010), was to study ‘what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains – in particular, how attention, memory, and learning are affected’. Strayer added: ‘Attention is the holy grail. Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.’

  Then there was the publicity associated with a new book, Hamlet’s BlackBerry by William Powers (2010), documenting one family’s retreat from an over-reliance on information technology. The book’s blurb reads:

  Journalist Powers bemoans the reigning dogma of digital maximalism that requires us to divide our attention between ever more emails, text messages, cellphone calls, video streams, and blinking banners, resulting, he argues, in lowered productivity and a distracted life devoid of meaning and depth.

  A similar point is made by Hal Crowther (2010: 108) in an essay in Granta:

  Though the educational potential of the Internet is limitless, it is becoming apparent that wired students use technology less to learn than to distract themselves from learning, and to take advantage of toxic shortcuts like research-paper databases and essay-writing websites.

  Finally (and more directly relevant to education), The Chronicle of Higher Education (Young 2010) reported on a move on the part of a handful of teachers to ‘unplug’ their classrooms. One of the teachers was quoted as saying, ‘Banishing the gear improved the course ... The students seemed more involved in the discussion than when I allowed them to go online ... They were more attentive, and we were able to go into a little more depth.’