Ken Carroll

Below is a passage taken from an old ChinesePod blog post about the lexical approach. It is a subject I hope to revist as I think it has certain connectivist implications, so here it is:  

“Beginning in the 1980s, computer-based studies (mainly of English) began to provide us with powerful insights into the workings of our language. Linguists fed millions of English documents into software programs to scan them and see what they might yield about their patterns of behavior. These studies were known as ‘corpora’ studies. From the beginning, the corpora studies began to reveal surprising insights into how words interact and behave with other.

The studies offered empirical data, based on a very broad range of English language sources. They allowed us to take a given word or expression and look at how it behaved over the course of thousands of examples - how it was used grammatically, where it was likely to be used, with whom it as most likely to keep company, etc. The results were often startling and they began to challenge traditional ideas about the role of grammar and even about how we defined grammar.

One outgrowth of these studies was the development of the ‘lexical approach’ to language teaching. The first description of a lexical approach is attributed to Michael Lewis, who wrote a book of that title in 1993. This book became a classic amongst language teachers and I myself have been greatly influenced by it over the years. I convinced that the lexical approach (with some revisions) offers very useful insights into how we might approach the study of Mandarin, so let me explain a little about what it is.

The most striking revelation from the corpora concerns how words tend to associate strongly with other words in the form of chunks, fixed expressions, collocations, etc. As an example, let’s take a look at collocation. The word ‘collocation’ refers to the tendency amongst words to collocate, or ‘co-locate’ (appear close to) certain other words. Some random examples (out of millions of possibilities):

seriously ill
serious problem
serious accusation
common cold
unfair advantage
decisive action
strong tea
join hands
commit a crime

If you typed the word ’seriously’, into the corpora software, it would yield thousands of sentences (taken from original documents) and show you the words that ’seriously’ was most likely to appear next to. In this case, ’seriously’ occurred much more frequently with the word ‘ill’ than with any other word. We can therefore say that ’seriously’ collocates with ‘ill’. The word ’serious’, meanwhile, is more likely to appear next to ‘problem’ or ‘accusation’ than with any other words, and so on.

The other phrases on the list above are every day expressions (or collocations) that every native speaker of English knows. But here’s the really interesting thing: even advanced level non-native speakers are unlikely to know these expressions! In fact a non-native speaker is more likely to make a mistake when using such expressions than to use bad grammar. (If ever you are in doubt about whether someone is a native speaker of English, just test his/her knowledge of these kinds of expressions.)

To non-language teachers, the examples of collocations I offer may seem trite, but let me tell you that they set off a firestorm of innovation and debate in the language teaching world that has continued unabated to this day. (Actually, while we’re at it, ‘to this day’ is a nice fixed expression, while the word ‘unabated’ tends to occur with ‘floods’ or ‘firestorms’ or things like that, for some reason!)”

Ken

Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL, is where language is taught through subject areas - math through English, for example.  (This is also known as immersion.) This week, I came across some CLIL initiatives in Europe, where the classrooms have two teachers in  what is called ‘team teaching’. Here, one teacher is a subject matter expert who delivers the lesson (history, biology, whatever) in the target language (or ‘L2′). The other teacher is an actual English teacher, who looks for opportunities to exploit the language from the context and draw attention to it at certain points in the lesson.

I love the sound of this - mining an authentic communicative context to source language items on the fly. There’s also something very real about it: learners experience the language in concrete terms, rather than as something  hypothetical, to be learned for some distant future need. 

Team teaching 

I can also attest to the power of team teaching through my Praxis experience - audio lessons typically include a native L2 speaker (Jenny) together with someone who reached proficiency in it (John). For us, this has opened the door to tremendous possibilities:

• Learners get more than one perspective on the topic - male/female, different cultures, etc - in a time-efficient way.
• There is division of labor and specialization: The native speaker is arbiter of usage, pronunciation, etc, while the second one understands the process of learning L2,  anticipates relevant questions, and offers experience, etc.
• The lesson becomes a conversation between two practitioners with different  expertise, working to solve one problem. The native speaker models/demonstrates the language while the other one anticipates learner problems. The to and fro between them means that it’s all very lively - it’s prepped but never scripted - and they have 7 or 8 minutes to make it stick in the learner’s mind.

Learning needs a context

But there are other similarities between Praxis and the CLIL approach. CLIL and immersion work because they provide the learner with an authentic experience. The context is real and so learners approach L2, not as an artifact to be examined out of context, but rather as a tool for communication (the real purpose of any language) and very much in context.

So, where does that leave ChinesePod? If CLIL is so good, why don’t we teach Chinese through academic or other specialist areas? Wouldn’t that kill 2 birds with one stone?  Well, the answer is that we do take a CLIL approach on ChinesePod (and all the other pods, too). Instead of an academic focus, however, the context for ChinesePod is Chinese culture. I’d even go as far as to say that, ultimately, the object of study on ChinesePod is culture, not language.

Mobile is the new immersion

And there’s more. Although immersion is undoubtedly an efficient way to learn a L2, it hasn’t generally been widely adopted in schools - it’s expensive to immerse kids in such an environment and not easy to administer. But it occurs to me, now, that mobile is the new immersion. The learner can simply pull those portable islands of context into his personal learning network and take them with in wherever he goes. This works at he leve lof the receptive skills, and especially listening, and it’s soemthing we have worked hard on. One new development phase for us will be to find ways to leverage the productive skills - ways to enable learners to practice with teachers but also with each other. I believe we’re starting to figure out ways to do that. Now all we have to do is, er, build the technology to enable that.

 Ken Carroll