The impact of physical environment on learning

The Devil is in the details

  In an article written in 2007 by Pamela Woolner, Elaine Hall et al, one can read a few practical suggestions regarding effective classroom environment. Below are the highlights of the things that positively influence student behaviour and attitude.

1) absence of environmental noise

2) adequate lighting

3) "horse shoe" arrangement of tables and chairs

4) colours

5) ventilation, air quality

   Here are some photos of  classrooms that, in my opinion, would be conducive to positive atmosphere in the classroom. 

 

Immersion programs

Language or Content?

    While teaching their subject to immigrant students, how should  teachers find a balance between the language instruction and the content? Moreover, to what degree can a teacher, not trained for language instruction, teach language along with his own subject? These are the main issues raised in the article called "Balancing Content and Language in Instruction: The Experience of Immersion Teachers" written by Laurent Cammarata and Diane J. Tedick in the Modern Language Journal in 2012.
  The study, discussed in the article, shows that most immersion teachers (with 5 years of experience) just take a stab in the dark in their attempts to balance language and content, often given the priority to the second. A sensible solution to this issue, proposed by the authors, is to create special programs and teaching materials that would guide immersion teachers in their attempt to arm their students both with content and necessary level of language.

Corpus-Based Language analyses

Language carries information

    "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world", Ludwig Wittgenstein says.
 Isn't he right? Language and brain have been interconnected for so long (since the times humans started to speak) that we have forgotten how it feels to live without thinking. To experience. To feel. To exist without the intermediary thought; to directly access and accept world. These are long gone for human beings.Our language, being the symbolic representation of our thoughts, carries a lot of information about who we are and our subconscious. It can thus be quite rewarding to analyze Linguistic corpora of various fields of human activity to find hidden patterns and meanings.
 This is what has been done by Li-Juan Li and Guang-Chun Ge in their research article called

Genre analysis: Structural and linguistic evolution of the English-medium medical research, published in 2009. One of the things discovered by the analyses is that modern Medical research writers mostly use past simple tense rather than  present simple or present perfect tenses. The implications are, as the authors say, that the research writers attempt to hedge their claims with the use of past simple, since present tenses are more certain and carry greater immediacy.

Translingualism in EFL 

Is the devil as bad as it is portrayed?

 The widespread belief in current EFL teaching is that using any language other than the target one in the classroom is to be avoided by all means. The "ecology" of the Target Language, in other words, is a highly valued asset in EFL classrooms. The main reason for such a radical view is the somewhat over-exaggerated fear of the negative interference from the native tongue.
   The article "Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom", however, tries to splash some more color on the white and black canvas of monolingual classrooms. Bilingual teaching , defined as "the use of two or more languages in instruction" might have its own benefits, the article states.
   Keeping the Universal Grammar in mind, the article views the availability of different languages in the classroom as a resource rather than a foe, a resource that

• promotes better participation
• makes meaning and transforms information
• makes social, cultural and linguistic links for classroom participants 

  Student code-switching, in other words, might actually be valuable in case of a careful and judicious use.
This is a comforting thought, I have to admit.
  Let me tell you what has recently happened with one of my EFL groups. I was talking about the English proverb "Every dog has its day", when one of my Russian-speaking students instantly came up with the Russian equivalent of the proverb.
 "I am sorry, people'', she said," I'd say the Russian version but I don't want to pay 300 drams'' (In my classroom each non-English word is worth 50 drams).
  With this article fresh in my mind, I violated the rule I have established myself and authorized the student to break the precious ecological environment of the English language (the black language of Mordor uttered in Elvish lands from Lord of the Rings comes to mind:)).
  The answer came quick;
   "И на нашей улице бидет праздник"
  What happened? No thunder broke from the sky. The students appreciated the help of the familiar language and I was glad to see that they learnt the proverb painlessly and quickly.
  And may the God of English forgive my little misbehavior.

Automated Scoring of Writing Quality

Machines and Human writing

  I am sitting in a lab with students preparing for TOEFL IBT exam. My left ear catches phrases like "In this set of materials...", "The listening passage discusses the difference between to types of bacteria...", while my right ear, to its great surprise, catches the second halves of the same sentences "... the reading passage is a news bulletin on a job announcement, while the listening passage..", " ... the reading passage casts a doubt on the information in the listening passage". The same "automated phrases" are also used in TOEFL writing, as experience has shown me. With a faint smile, I lazily pity the poor person who checks those essays. 

   

  However, a recent  discovery of mine, related to TOEFL and other high-stakes tests is that the essays, written by students, are not only checked by human scorers but also by special automated scoring engines (the  e-rater® in case of TOEFL).  The scores of the human rater and the program are compared and a final score is then assigned.

  The advantages of an automated engine are obvious:

a) Objectivity: A computer program has neither  interests nor judgments. There is no need to worry that it might have a prejudice against you just because you mentioned Justin Beaber as a person you thoroughly admire.

b) Financially economical: Needless to say a computer program is an ideal employee in terms of money. Once it is installed, it only required careful maintenance.The rest is obedience and hard work.

 Unfortunately AES can not be used as a sole evaluating tool of writing (in case of high-stakes exams at least). Although the results of AES have often correlated with human scoring, still it is almost impossible to imagine a computer program justly evaluating the highly complex nature of human writing. Let's have a look at the criteria that the AES take into account while evaluating writing:

• errors in grammar (e.g., subject-verb agreement)
• usage (e.g., preposition selection)
• mechanics (e.g., capitalization) 
• style (e.g., repetitious word use)  
• discourse structure (e.g., presence of a thesis statement, main points) 
• vocabulary usage (e.g., relative sophistication of vocabulary)

 While aspects such as prepositions, agreement between verb and subject and capitalization can be possible handled by an artificial intelligence, more complex parts of human language such as syntax, quality of argumentation, collocation, punctuation, appropriacy of vocabulary,etc seem impossible to asses without human intervention. The quality of argumentation, for example, has little to do with the complexity of vocabulary.

English as a Lingua Franca

Who does English belong to?

     I will start this post with an anecdotal experience. Here's a little piece of conversation I have recently witnessed between two of my students;

 Student A: " I have gone to Kharabakh last summer.  KHARAbakh, no ...KharaBAKH...  What's the right way of saying it?"

 Student B: "And is it right to say "have been" or "went"?" .

 Two questions standing in the queue of my thoughts. But before I can process either of them, it dawns on me that two of my students have just stopped the natural flow of their conversation because of their over-obsession with accuracy. It is one thing that an Armenian has to put his tongue twice between his teeth to pronounce an English word like "thousandth",(or "cenicero" in Spanish")  but why would an Armenian worry so much about the English pronunciation of an Armenian land? Is it KHARAbakh or KharaBAKH...? Who decides this? The English?

  After a brief pause I answered the first question, saying that past simple is preferable when speaking about a specific past event and, turning to the first student, I said smth that an English teacher would not normally say;

  "I think it's up to us to decide how to pronounce Kharabakh".

   Now, as you think of it, the truth is that English has long ceased to be confined to the English of the former British colonies, nor is it now restricted to any geographical location or nationality. The widespread use of English as a lingua franca  (ELF) has led to a change of perspectives as to what should be the model of language in learning English. Traditionally, we followed the model of the native speaker, supposing that the ultimate aim of the language learner is to communicate with the native speaker. However, such a perspective can no longer function. English is now used everyday between non-native speakers as a common tool for communication without any interaction with a native speaker. In fact, many EFL learners never ever meet the "perfect native speaker" in their lives! Keeping this in mind, how reasonable is it to promote the standard English in all circumstances ? Say an Armenian, Russian and a German work in the same office and interact in English, should it trouble them that their intralanguage deviates from the Standard English  as long as the communication is successful?
   Coming back to the question of "KHARAbakh or KharaBAKH" mentioned in the beginning. Not only has English successfully escaped from the British colonies and spread all over the world as a lingua Franca, it has also started to be shaped by the world. Whether English teachers accept it or not, billions of non-native speakers make "mistakes" (deviation from the accurate forms of standard English) every day all over the world. Is it right? Is it wrong? It is a fact. A non-native induced erroneous form "I am loving it" (EFL teachers, put your red pens in your scabbards. I know that "love" is a stative verb) became the slogan for McDonalds. Coincidence or a reflection of a tendency?
  In conclusion, I would like to say that whatever the case is, it's time for EFL teachers to stop blindly following the native model and prioritize the needs of their students in making decisions on what to teach, what to correct and what to leave as it is.
   

Paradigm controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences

  The vast ocean between theory and practice

    Some articles related to Applied Linguistics make me doubt whether they were written by humans. An article published in 2005 by Guba and Lincoln, called "Paradigm controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences" is a vivid example. The article raises some controversial issues among the practitioners of new and emergent paradigms, who are looking for key elements that would distinguish their paradigms from those of the others. An average reader, let's say an average language teacher, looking for some guidance for his teaching, will probably need some psychological help after reading this article. Abstract terms, ideas and theory without a hint of its applicability all flood together and leave the teacher clueless as how to improve his teaching the next day, how to make his lessons more effective. While it is clear that such articles might be useful for a narrow circle of researchers that speak the same language in which the article is written, the question is for who, in the long run, is all the research done? If it's ultimately intended for teachers, I am afraid, it will find its readers frustrated and will probably lose them after the first few pages.  
 P.S. I read Loudres Ortega's article called "For What and for Whom is out Research" after writing this post. The author brings up the issue of the "lack of relevance of SLA research for teachers". Research, as author states, is useful when it serves societal needs. Otherwise, it may face the issue of being useless.

Welcome to the Grey world of Applied 
 Linguistics 
Feel the Greyness

  5 multiplied by 5 is 25. Now try and say the opposite. Try to prove that in Europe numbers work in a different way than in Asia or that cultural differences, individual variables, the peculiarities of setting or participants involved may have an influence on a mathematical equation. Your chances, to say the least, are non-existent. Now step out of the black and white universe of natural sciences and go through the threshold of Applied Linguistics.There you are, embrace the Greyness.

      Here's the world where phrases like "take it with a grain of salt", "tentative claims", "non-conclusive data", etc come into play. In fact, they are much more common than words as "proven", "enough evidence", "generalizable", etc. Fortunately, linguistic research tries to shed some light on the overwhelming greyness.

  One issue, for example, that every teacher asks himself/herself at least once in life is how to give feedback.  In what form? How often? Recently I have read a 2009 article on Written Corrective Feedback by Bitchener and Noch. The article, based on a thorough longitudinal experimental study, shows that some  Corrective Feedback (CF) is a must in language teaching but does not distinguish any difference of efficiency between different types of CF (written/oral, direct/indirect). The study, focusing on a 10-month teaching experiment targeting on a single grammatical form (a/the in English), provokes obvious questions on its validity and practicality in day-to-day teaching. Here are a few questions that were raised during our class discussion of the article:

1) Both forms of corrections direct or indirect may lead students to improve their work (correct revision), but do they allow them to retain the information long-term?

2) Was the written corrective feedback the only means of imroving the students' skills for using ''a/the'' during the research period (remember that they had long intervals between the tests)?

3) Is it and if yes, how practical is it to apply WCF on a single-error category throughout a long period of teaching-learning process?

 These are all valid questions and come to show once again that research in Applied linguistics often times fails to bring any clearness and distinction in our understanding of teaching and language learning. Shades of grey, that's all we can hope for.