25 years ago I was not blogging. I did not even have a computer, though I had graduated to Word Processing five years earlier: Random Friday memory 34: RAM 32k was cool in 1993! This was my beast in 1998:
I was studying again in 1998 — Grad Cert TESOL at UTS. And a shout out to Michael Xu who took pity on me and prevented me from accruing a HECS debt! Of course I had to write essays, one of the more fun ones being what was almost a blog. I think it was called “action research”. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT LEARNER OBSERVATION JOURNAL: A Japanese Backpacker’s year in Australia. Yes, you can read it all if you like!
I was able to restore this file on Sunday 17 April 2005 thanks to Google’s cache facility, despite having deleted it from Angelfire, where I originally published it, AND from my home computer! It was written originally as a Language Acquisition assignment for UTS in 1998. The lecturer at the time said it was one of the best assignments of its kind he had ever read.
This is where the Japanese Backpacker came from
Extracts
19 August, 1998
I first met ‘Hiro’ a month ago at the Flinders Hotel. He had just finished an eight week English course and had to move out of his home-stay accommodation the following Saturday, or so I gathered after a very tortuous conversation. A few days later he rang to let me know he had found a place in an Eastern suburb near the Harbour. I did not hear from him again until the night before last when he rang to arrange a meeting. After sorting out that Neil was my name and not the name of the hotel, we managed to make an appointment for Tuesday at 6 at the Flinders Hotel. Our communication obviously succeeded as he turned up at the appointed time.
His English pronunciation is clear. The text of his talk is heavily reliant on content words (in the right order) but very weak on inflections and grammatical words. His strategic competence is highly developed. Conversation required intense concentration on both sides with (at stages) frequent recourse to body language, paraphrase, repetition and a Japanese-English dictionary. The month spent living with an English speaker, looking for work, and generally going about town has led to some advance in his spoken English.
He had mentioned at our earlier meeting that he would like to practise his English with me. Since he is a very handsome young man, and since I had met him in a gay bar after all, there were dimensions to this situation. I determined to explore the situation tactfully, but I have not seen any analysis of the appropriate registers and genres for dealing with such a cross-cultural situation with someone of very limited English.
His family grows flowers, he told me, and he himself wanted work in photography, art or floristry. In the context of Australian culture one might by now have been drawing probably false conclusions about his being in a gay bar. (It proved to be a false deduction: he was unaware he was in a gay bar. The delicate matter of sexuality was successfully negotiated at our second meeting.)
From the age of six he had wanted to go overseas; an uncle had been living in America at that time, and it was to America he first wanted to go, but the pictures in an Australian travel brochure persuaded him to come here. He was drawn by Australia’s natural beauty and the surfing. So he sold his car (a Subaru) and came last May.
He said he wanted to experience all things. He wanted to meet Australian men. He wanted to learn English. Most interestingly, he wanted ‘a big heart’; eventually I worked out he meant an open mind–he found Japan too narrow.
Our conversation turned to religion. Having heard a sermon at a funeral he began practising Zen meditation. Asked what he got from it, he said ‘Nothing. Nothing is good.’ In the context this made perfect sense. We looked up dharma and Tao in his dictionary and discussed them wordlessly, as is appropriate.
At the end of the evening he proposed we meet again in a month or so, hesitant to be too demanding as I had been telling him how busy I was. In parting, we thanked each other for a very pleasant evening, and the best English lesson he could have had.
What can behaviourism offer in explanation for the amount of meaning we were able to negotiate together last night? Very little, I would suggest. Significant elements may be explicable in terms of a functional language model, but the drive for shared meaning on both sides seems to me more than that.
It was such an urge to communicate that drove some of my adult Chinese students in 1990 to tell me about Tiananmen movingly and with detail, even when their English language resources were barely developed. On the other hand, in my own experience pronunciation drills on contrastive pairs, for example, do work. Hiro’s clear pronunciation is undoubtedly largely a matter of imitation and practice.
I suppose too that last night’s conversation was partly a matter of positive reinforcement sustaining the talk, but it does seem reductive to see achievement of understanding, sharing some of one’s deepest concerns with considerable delicacy on both sides, merely in terms of ‘reinforcement’….
22 August, 1998
On Chomsky
While it is likely that aspects of Hiro’s performance in English last Tuesday night (his pronunciation, for example) may be accounted for in terms of behaviourism, or may be the result of behaviourist teaching techniques, other aspects may be explored from a Chomskyan perspective.
But not all. Chomsky’s critique of behaviourism may be summarised in his own words:
In support of his belief that science will demonstrate that behaviour is entirely a function of antecedent events, Skinner notes that physics advanced only when it ‘stopped personifying things’ and attributing to them ‘wills, impulses, feelings, purposes,’ and so on. Therefore, he concludes, the science of behaviour will progress only when it stops personifying people and avoids reference to ‘internal states’. No doubt physics advanced by rejecting the view that a rock’s wish to fall is a factor in its ‘behaviour’ because in fact a rock has no such wish… For Skinner’s argument to have any force, he must show that people have will, impulses, feelings, purposes, and the like no more than rocks do. If people differ from rocks in this respect, then a science of human behaviour will have to take account of this fact.” (Chomsky [1970] in Cogswell 1996:66-67.)
To Chomsky’s list of non-rocklike attributes one might add ‘living within a cultural context and operating to achieve personal and social purposes in contexts of situation’, but that is another story.
One element of Chomsky’s position is that we are natural/instinctive meaning-makers, whether this be expressed through the metaphor of a ‘language acquisition device’ or ‘simultaneous neural interconnections’ operating in ‘parallel distributed processing’ (Brown 1994b:27-28). One educational implication of this to encourage students ‘to create their own sentences, to somehow talk about what they want to talk about and not just what the book would have them say’ (Underwood 1984:7). Clearly this was part of what was happening between Hiro and myself.
A second aspect concerns the way we view error. In Chomsky’s view of first-language learning, the child’s language is a ‘legitimate system in its own right’ and error is part of the systematic hypothesising process by which the child’s language develops (Brown 1994:26).
In her story ‘The Angry Kettle’, Ding Xiaoqi describes the inhibiting effect error correction can have when a second-language learner is trying to negotiate meaning:
Michael was very eager to correct my English mistakes. I was delighted at first, but it soon became unbearable, because he always interrupted me the minute I opened my mouth. If it was not pronunciation it was grammar, and if it was not either of those, then it was to praise my command of the language. Five interruptions for every ten words would make anyone forget what they were saying. After a while I tried speaking like a machine-gun to stop him from interrupting me, but it was no good; no matter how fast I was, he was faster…
His behaviour only made my English worse and worse when I was with him. I was nervous before I even opened my mouth, not because I was afraid of making mistakes, but because I was afraid he would interrupt.” (Whitfield 1995:8.)
This is not to say that errors should never be corrected, but there is a certain discretion needed about when and how it is done. Had I focused on Hiro’s errors I would have learned less from him and he would have soon given up trying to tell me.
While it is highly questionable to draw an analogy between how a native speaker learns his first language and how either the same native speaker learns to read and write [Cambourne 1988] or how a second-language learner might best learn, those who have done so (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982) have certainly influenced my own practice as an English teacher and an ESL teacher.
It seems true that not all rules can be made explicit; it is equally true that some rules need to be. This paradox is a critical one for language teachers. Moving as I did in 1990 from ‘mainstream’ English teaching in secondary school to ELICOS sharpened my awareness and made me question both some ESL/EFL methodology and my own former practice.
It is certainly true that real communicative purposes enhance language learning: learning in language, through language, and about language. While he was concerned neither with teaching nor with the actual use of language in social context, we can partly thank Chomsky for this insight.
23 September, 1998: SECOND THOUGHTS:
In her excellent book Text, Role and Context, Ann Johns (1997:4) poses the issues with reference to L1 and L2 literacy teaching thus; mutatis mutandis one might apply this to second language acquisition:
A related theoretical element is the nature of the learner and the role the learner plays in literacy acquisition. Is the learner a passive recipient of data as adults model the language? Must the learner drill and practice the correct forms in order for literacy to be acquired? Traditional theorists tended to view the learner in this way. Or is the learner an active participant in the process, the prime motivator and meaning-maker, as many Learner-Centered practitioners tend to believe? Is the learner caught between his or her own motivations and purposes and the constraints of the context and culture, assumptions made by some Socioliterate practitioners? Theories about the roles of learners in literacy acquisition are basic to our pedagogic choices.
In an epigraph to her first chapter Johns (1997:1) very appositely cites Bazerman (1994):
It is within the students, of course, that the learning occurs, but it is within the teacher, who sits at the juncture of the forces above, below and sideways that the learning situations are framed.”
Neil's Commonplace Book 