Two teachers
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
September 27th, 2008 at 2:20 am
hey Ken,
how do you plan to assess if this really works? At Praxis the formats have changed very little over time, and few projects have been tested to the broader audience (us).
sure the commercial success is a qualitative measure of the podcasts as a tool for learning. If people did not learn it, they wouldn’t buy it.
for a quantitative measure of the podcasts I imagine you could run a statistical test with two different podcasts, like “Qing Wen” and “Elementary”, or two “elementary”, one more gramatical, the other more conversational.
the test would go as follows:
1 - Select two groups of 4 chinese words, worth learning, however not have showed up in any former lesson;
2 - Build quizzes with the words and present them to the learners in each lesson’s comments section;
3 - The learners final grade, whether they lerned the new words or not, would show which is the better way to teach and, more importantly, by how much.
of course there must be careful experimental planning to avoid bias due to other factors beside the method of teaching, like different learning abilities among the poddies in each lesson.
Recently I read an interview with Eric Hanushek, from Stanford University and MIT.
He addresses problems like how to choose good teachers and best reward them.
His research led to amazing results, like PhD’s are not the best teachers and often fare among the worst, and that there’s no scientific explanation for what makes a good teacher, so it’s best to pick the one whose students acquire the most knowledge under his teaching.
September 27th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Hi Ken,
oh, I wouldn’t mind to also get some Chinese Math, Physics, or Astronomy lessons. Think about it: English, Chinese, and Astronomy in one go? How can you become more efficient than that? So go out there and find some part time science teachers…
And what about teaching another language in another language. Embedded learning objects! Discussing language to discuss language. Teach us the first steps in Japanese. In Chinese. And afterwards analyse the Chinese to analyze the Japanese (and the Japanese might well be is Russian lesson…OK, too much Saturday afternoon caffeine).
But I agree that there is also still much potential on the culture front. The 红楼梦 group as well as Changye’s posts show me that beneath the contemporary surface there lies a deep ocean of philosophy, mythology, religious beliefs, history, ethymology, epics, interactions with neighboring cultures etc. etc.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:07 am
The idea of team teaching seems pretty solid; still, from a business perspective, anytime you have two people doing the job of one, it raises questions of efficiency versus effectiveness. The electronic medium of course eliminates that since you can reach a large audience.
I also felt your comment on male versus female perspective was incisive. Much of my Chinese is self-taught from hanging around with Chinese guys in various business and recreational settings. While attending class, sometimes I let something slip, and the teacher would lets me know in fairly direct terms that this is inappropriate. That’s certainly valuable knowledge. However, students who only had that teacher or, indeed, only a female teacher would miss a lot of commonly used, situation-appropriate vocabulary.
September 28th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
This is really interesting. Ken, when I was reading your bit about Chinesepod teaching culture and not just language I went into a daze on my experience with Praxis. For example; I am a native spanish speaker and really, the last thing I need is a lesson on how to speak my own language. However, there was a time when I regularly visited Spanishpod just to listen to “Del Taco al Tango” because of the cultural aspect’s provided there. Also, when I started learning Chinese on Chinesepod I had NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER on going to China or Taiwan or any asian country for that matter, but now I’m obssesed with the thought of visiting Taiwan at least for a few month’s and who know’s?..maybe I’ll want to stay!
Here’s my point. Language is a pretty dry thing. After you learn a new language (and I mean really learn it fluently) it just becomes another part of you. Kind of like when you die your hair and you keep it that same color for so long that it’s not even interesting anymore. What brings life to language learning is the culture behind it. That’s what keeps Chinesepod alive! The fact that there is so much beautiful culture in every nook and cranny is highly attractive.
That’s just my point of view anyway, but I really believe it! ^_^
September 29th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Great ideas, here. I love the idea of embedding different types of content into the lessons. The problem lies in choosing them - I’m not sure how we would get consensus on the topics.
I also found Helena’s comment very inspiring.
October 3rd, 2008 at 4:24 am
[…] the first, he discusses CLIL (content and language integrated learning), “where language is taught […]
October 7th, 2008 at 6:27 am
[…] Decline of education blamed on “deterioration of English proficiency” Pilgrimage To Japan, The Path Of A Warrior TEACHING OF SCIENCE AND MATHS IN ENGLISH: Let’s junk the ‘use English’ policy - TwoSenKen Carroll
February 19th, 2009 at 9:07 am
Bento - “if people didn’t learn they wouldn’t buy it.” Well, the ‘entity’ would still make money if 1, the customers weren’t
really paying 2, the schools weren’t needed, but rather proof of attendence was needed, or 3, it provided training in
something that wasn’t exactly ‘language learning’ but rather ‘testing cometenece’. These three issues (and I’m sure a myriad
of others) come together in places like china, places like BLCU.
But you bring up an incredibly interesting point, do people actually need true interaction to improve, learn, etc? Even when
you have true interaction does that necessarily make a difference? Take BLCU as an example yet again, those books being
churned out still contain the same piddling grammar and usage explanations as those from 10 years ago. Maybe in the classroom
the work is different and they know what to emphasize and what not to emphasize, but where’s the textbook production? (And
that is not my experience with BLCU instructors, however limited. And further if you sit in front of a class of 30 and give
your lecture and the class sits there doing nothing but take notes, is that really interaction you can believe in?).Where’s
the social responsibility in a sea of such horrible langauge materials out there around you? My theory with chinese teachers
is while they have the experience of learning a foreign language, rare is the chinese teacher who’s confidence in their 2nd
language is airtight. If your experiene in learning a language is a bad one and you have a bad result, are you really going
to be that good at explaining how learning is supposed to work for the other person so they don’t fail? I’m fairly confident
a chinese instructor with excellent english with no formal training in chinese or teaching would be a far better teacher than
a person who has a poor ability (but perhaps a rich lingustic understanding) in the learner’s language. To understand what is
hard about learning a language one must understand why it is hard and that comes from bridging that gap, learning x language
and ‘feeling’ what the barriers to comprehension and mastery are). Even if one is not successful, a certain thing likely
comes from the time and effort assuming you reached a certain level of comprehension.(You don’t have to master the use of ‘in
a row’ or the concept of continuation in english, but you have to struggle with it enough and get a decent enough
understanding of it so in theory you can help your student tackle (延续，继续，持续，连续，陆续，先后，接着，接连，etc). （Probably also why you are able to run a succesful english school in addition to working with cpod. And probably why chinese students have such poor results learning english and the english learners come out with such bad chinese.)
So, the related question is, how do the speakers on the pcasts and the developers really learn from their ‘mistakes’ without
true interaction, the kind of face to face revelation that students don’t get it, the disgust and chemicals that run through
your body when you realize your class hasn’t learned something, the pain of grading tests and seeing how bad things are. Do
forums do this? I think even video conferencing is still an unacceptable replacement for actual presence.
Helena - not everyone thinks language is dry, try talking to some writers, linguists, etc. Bankers don’t necessarily think
banking is boring. But somehow something like dance, or culture gets stamped “not dry” when the reality is america can’t
support a theatre scene to save it’s life. As I saw written somewhere today, we have the ‘part-time recreational shopping’ as
culture.
Ken- how to get suggestions? You have an email list, send out a random questionnaire asking for potential topics. From those
pick ones that are popular or you would like to do. Difficult?
And finally, to the actual post. A few points of contention
CLIL is a good thing to be explored, no doubt. But, some countries are really struggling with getting it right, singapore for
example. But there is a big difference between teaching language through subject areas (teaching a subject in a foreign
language) and teaching a subject in context with the foreign language. Example. You can teach astronomy in class with an
english textbook with the students talking in english and the teacher speaking english. This is not the same thing as on the
job training, vocational training, or anything not sitting in a desk sitting and listening to a person and taking notes. The
problem is not the learning ‘at’ language, but rather learning ‘at’ learning altogether. You bypass the issue partially when
you embed (sneak the language ‘teaching’) in a lesson on astronomy simply by using the target language, but you don’t have
real language use it context, you have real classroom language use in context, not actual usage. It is the difference between
the doctor teaching his students what the names of all the instruments are in a classroom, or even acted out in a classroom
setting, and the learning that comes from being in a real moment. Similar to Heidegger’s readiness-to-hand versus present-to-hand. Even some books, like Integrate Chinese among many others, keep up this shtick about ‘actual real-world’ dialogues. As if going to a restaurant was anything like that chapter in their book. I actually heard someone say they had an experience that mimicked it exactly, but I can say I’ve never ever felt any of those or dialogues from other books actually mimicked use at all. And even if they did, they’d never dare let the recording be authentic and come from an actual speaker who spoke unclearly, wth non-standard tones, etc.
Language learning needs a context. Maybe, in some cases, yes. But a lot of the time I think you still need to drill and learn at language, in that case your ‘context’ is grammar, or lexicology, or translation. I think this is completely dependent on your learners goals. For colleges, the context is literature, history, etc. You use the language to access the written, oral, and visual history to better understand the people and the historical users of the language. If you are learning the language as a tool to acheive certain goals (business english/chinese, etc, you have an entirely different curriculum which from day one should have little interaction with people learning for non-purely ‘practical’ uses. Some of the backend can be the same, grammatical explanations, etc, time devoted to tricky concepts can be proportional in some sense, but I think the important thing is to not group two sets of language learners who really have nothing in common. They may say they both ‘want to do business’ or ‘be more comfortable talking to people’, but they don’t really mean the same thing. The quicker you can segment a market and realize the the types of people you are dealing with, what the want, what they are willing to do, the quicker you can craft strategies and materials properly dedicated to these vastly different groups. After about a million years the english speaking world started to recognize this and stopped making everyone take the toefl or gre. China recently introduced it’s business standard and the new hsk is essentially a move in the direction of the old hsk idelogy as well.
When I was teaching english I always use to say and think, there is no language, there is only culture, but I have to disagree with your statement somehow that the object of study for cpod is culture and not language. Certainly there is learning there on culture, but I think its picked up in the background, as one tries to get the language, or the language points. The culture is kind of a trick and you can see through it because things after all are still produced. That’s why I’ve never understood why something like cpod or any learning regime is superior to authentic text, by authentic speakers, pretty much from day one. No graded readers, you get actual readers, you start with kid stuff and you move up, quickly. The rest is annotation. Sure, an intro at the beginning must sounds, basic grammer, etc, but after that why don’t you start attacking one by one what your learners want to acheive. Put them in a conversation at a table next to two people talking, give them newspapers and books, give them tv shows. It’s hard, yes, but the alternative is slow and we’ve seen the results.
Finally, I’d like to talk about what ‘immersion’ is. I mentioned this above, but immersion is actual in-place doing. Mobile, is not the new immersion, but rather a new way of simply delivering more. Immersion involves actually being in a place, being immersed in it, not experiencing it through a medium. Mobile is the new immersion like porn is sex, but not even that close. It’s not even flight simulator to actual fight training close either, it is just much more, maybe. Permanent listening is just the same as when people used to carry around a book with them and start reading it at restaurants, on the subway, etc. The senses in this case are simply audio instead of visual. Being there, matters. Doing it, matters. More of learning ‘at’ learning is good and better than not, but it is not strictly ‘immersion.’ Even if one is dedicated and studying and listening non-stop they are only immersed in a bastardized way of using the term. Immersion requires more than doing ‘at’ something, it requires ‘being’ somewhere, and you can’t ‘be’ somewhere if you are ‘trying’ do something/be somewhere.
I have two more posts that I picked out that I wanted to respond to, so more soon.