Ken Carroll

I think it’s the early career epiphanies that make the greatest impact. Here, I share mine. This post is my contribution to Dave Ferguson’s Work/Learn Carnival.

1989
I’m a fledgling ESL teacher who learned a few languages through immersion and a self-directed approach. But language teaching is dominated by grammar in Europe and behaviorism in the US (the audio-lingual approach). There’s an awful lot of lectures and grammar drills going on. It’s neither fun nor effective.

I read Stephen Krashen and a new world opens up. One idea above all starts to sink in: He notes that most teachers are too concerned with structures and the what of language teaching: What are the structures of the English language? He suggests that the real question is psychological and concerns the how: How can we help induce the process of language acquisition? Suddenly, the world of cognitive psychology becomes relevant to the classroom. We can stop obsessing grammar, and look to a million other sources for creative ideas.

For me, language teaching was liberated from its structural shackles in one act. I was then able to look at it in entirely new ways and from the perspective of different disciplines.  In a sense it was a double-whammy epiphany: 1. Grammar isn’t the key to language teaching; 2. Get eclectic, and seek ideas from any discipline that fires up the creativity. It’s hard to capture how invigorating this was at the time, but this set my teaching practices and career on a new course.

2009
It was the insight that keeps on giving and it still affects my work. True, these days things are more complicated. There’s way more research and diversity in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In fact, the only thing the theories seem to have in common these days is the fact that no-one really agrees on much. Muriel Saville-Troike describes (2005) how SLA theory struggles to integrate linguistics, psychology, and sociology, like so many blind men touching the elephant. Some touch SLA at the tail, others grab its trunk. Each views SLA through his own framework, methods, and procedures. Linguists see grammar, competence, lexis, etc, while the psychologists look to cognitive, affective, and other processes, and so on. Meanwhile, the web has forced me personally to look at social theory to understand the online relationships that are emerging.

All of these things can feed into how language teachers go about our work. If we’re looking for grand-unification, the cross-discipline approach frustrates, but if we’re looking for inspiration, it invigorates. My advice to any learning professional is to make sure you get ideas that, on the face of it, are from outside your own discipline. They could be the source of enduring insight.

Ken Carroll

By looking at speech ‘beyond the level of the sentence’, discourse analysis reveals some of the conventions that underlie it. Speakers use conversational structures to engage listeners, create cohesion,  and facilitate comprehension. As we talk, we subtly adjust the lexis and structures in accordance with roles, status, and context. There’s a lot going on under the surface of your average chat.

Most conversations have a beginning, middle, and an end (with lots of subtle movements in between).  We signpost to each other where we are in the process through appropriate phrases, from, What’s up?, to I’d better be getting back to the office, for example. We indicate turn-taking through pitch, pauses, and discourse markers (well, anyway, right then, ok, etc).

Meanwhile, speaker roles determine why this exchange would  be expected between a doctor and  patient, but not between a commuter and ticket collector at Waterloo Station.

 Thank you so much.

Not at all.

Conversational structures can frame relationship roles and status, as Deborah Tannen has argued for some time. (Framing roles inappropriately can send very odd signals.)

After recording 400 podcasts and 200 mobile lessons (or learning objects) it is very clear to me that each medium is  a new form of discourse with different rules of engagement.

Engagement is a good word here because without it there is very little learning. There are things that work and things that don’t, and content designers definitely work in the R&D department of new media. Clive Shepherd has done a tremendous job in laying the groundwork for this, with his 60 Minute Masters, while people like Tom Kuhlmann , Cammy Bean and others also explore  the subject.

I believe discourse analysis offers helpful insights for the new media instructional designer, by helping to make explicit the structures, strategies, and cohesive devices that work for them. There’s no space here to go into every aspect of this but let’s take a look at roles and relationships as they might be framed in an audio-based learning object.

The first question we ask inevitably concerns the whom:  Whose problem am I solving? and How do we frame the relationsip?  We tend to open lessons with propositions or calls to action to indicate a direct message for the listener and signal their involvement.  It’s important  that we project a sense of authority on the subject but without framing it in a negative way. (Getting the human element right makes a big difference. Contrast the ChinesePod approach with that of a traditional textbook. I think it’s the parasocial dimension that explains ChinesePod’s stunning success.)

There are many other dimensions and many other questions. One project we’re working on is a set of 90 second learning objects for Nokia cellphones. This might sound incredibly short but by boiling the medium down to its essentials and describing the elements of that discourse format, I beleive we are finding ways to make them effective. Questions like How do we organize/structure the conversations? Is there cohesion? How do we convey the movement of the conversation? etc, are all truly relevant when you only have 90 seconds to make something happen. Here is an example of a prototype lesson that targets young Chinese managers on the subject of time management. (It comes with a transcript, plus translation, etc, on the learner’s handset.) 

More on this nascent subject later. In the meantime, you thoughts are requested.

 Ken Carroll

There’s lots of start-ups in the language learning space, mostly variations on the social networking and Skype models. Most of them aren’t very good though, and many miss the point entirely. What, imho, are they doing wrong?

 Medium and message

These are early days for Learning 2.0. There’s  still an overall lack of understanding of how new media enable learning. Designing content for a podcast, cellphone, or web application is a new discipline with new challenges, but a lot of the content that I see is simply old-style content stuffed into the new channels.  (Content decisions are frequently coming from software developers, rather than teachers.) Simply putting learners in front of some content and expecting them to learn isn’t enough. You would not, for example, film a newspaper and put it on TV - the medium determines the message. In the same way, learning content has to be  created, written, and designed for the medium through which it is consumed. Too often that isn’t happening.

 You can usually spot this problem on the interface, but I also got to see it up-close when I recently visited a multi-million dollar start-up (language instruction again) and met their leadership team. The team didn’t have anyone with any real concept of how learning was to happen on the platform. The result will almost certainly be a content dump.

Misunderstanding social networks

I think there’s a lot of  confusion about the role of social networks (SNs) in learning. One common start-up approach is to simply create a SN (with random extras thrown in) and call it a language learning community. This is naieve, as quite often there’s neither a business, nor a learning case for it: SN features in and of themselves have no intrinsic value or interest. Nor do you create value for learners simply by allowing them to register and sort through random lists of people who are equally at a loss as to how to learn a language. They need more guidance than that. 

Note: I use the Facebook SN to connect with professionals in my field. It definitely has value. But Facebook is a destination site so the value is in the connections. In a language learning context, by contrast, the SN is a feature, not a destination. 

There’s another class of language instruction sites that are being called SNs but aren’t. Mango Languages offers free lessons - 100 of them translated into various languages. It’s not bad as a free resource but it’s kind of 1996 in its approach - static lessons, a closed system, highly structured and didactic, heavy on the software, etc. No idea where the SN tag comes from there, but their press release assures us that Mango is ‘quite literally opening up a world of possibilities to people worldwide’. I think that’s more naievete (and poor word chioice) than arrogance and it says something about the maturity of the genre.

Global ambitions

Another tendency I’ve seen is aiming way too wide. The hope is obviously to create VC appeal and consolidate a global market, etc. English is the obvious market, since there are millions of English learners around the world and no dominant market player. (That’s because there is no single addressable, global market for English - there are hundreds of them.) Yet even this is oftentimes not ambitious enough for some.  I’ve seen some fairly zany collections of people with the most wide ranging, if not irreconcilable, agendas in some of these places. This willingness to throw focus to the wind is evidenced in plenty of other ways, for example, the music videos, particularly when they’re not formatted for learning and could be found in dozens of other places.  

Skype - leaving it to chance

I’m seeing a lot of new Skype-based start-ups. Again, the hope is to consoildate a global audience, generate advertising, or take a cut of tuition. However, the act of connecting people is now a very easy thing to - online platforms of this sort have become commodities, so it’s hard to wring value out of it. Most see one of two options. The first is to connect teachers with learners and take a cut of the tuition. But teaching over Skype is difficult, and not terribly rewarding, even for experienced practitioners. It is and will remain a skill that is relatively scarce, and Skype doesn’t allow you to scale that up, as lessons tend to be one-on-one.  Whether you plan to make money from advertising on the platform (ouch!) or take a cut of the tuition, it will require one hell of a lot of teachers to reach any scale. 

The second option is to allow to individuals to create language exchanges, i.e. no teachers in the equation. The problem here is that there is no revenue, apart, again, from advertising. But worse still is the fact that you have  amateur teachers, with cross-cultural and language barriers to overcome, and no accountability to speak of. I’m afraid this is a case of leaving it too much to chance.

Clearly these new market entrants will mature and iterate, but we do have a ways to go at this point. But it’s also interesting that many of these iniatives are being tagged as if they were new, and original ideas. In fact, however, by September of 2005, we had put into practice all of the main ideas behind web 2.0, the social networking, and yes, even a Skype-based business model into practice.  Both ChinesePod and SpanishPod are fully-fledged communities of practice that have devloped the elements of social networking way beyond what many of the start-ups are now grappling with. I might be biased but I at least I can claim to speak from experience!

 Ken Carroll

  Obligatory pic of horrific looking 19th cen school that should add impact to the post.

In a previous post, I talked about what language learning 2.0 meant to me. In the coming weeks and months I’ll try to elaborate  through examples from projects that I’ve been involved with. I begin with a description of a key concept in learning 2.0 - its non-linear nature. I’ll try to outline my thoughts on this before showing how it has affected the design of ChinesePod and SpanishPod in the next post.

Linear learning 

Textbooks, curricula, and our educational system itself are the products of a mechanistic past.  School knowledge is pre-determined by a centralized authority, and delivered in a linear format to a mass audience. The system is standardized, mass produced, scheduled, etc. In the classroom, the emphasis has been on teaching - it is expected that the learning will simply follow. The act of teaching, then, is seen as transfering information in a controlled sequence, a process that eliminates context - all learners receive the same content in the same format - but fails to accommodate variations in learner needs.  

At the individual level, traditional learning is also ‘linear’. Most textbooks stagger information - you can’t proceed to Unit 2 until you’ve learned Unit 1, type of thing. Let me give you an example: English languge textbooks for decades, have begun with present tense (aspect) verbs with an emphasis on the 3rd person. It’s always the first lesson. Thereafter the books invariably proceed with simple past tense, then past continuous, and so on. In fact, however, most learners of English do not ‘acquire’ the earliest items until they reach an advanced stage of fluency. It’s obvious that these sequence of items are presented out of expediency. The question is, however, whose expediency - the teachers’ or the students’? (There is no natural order of language learning that can be described as a linear set of morphemes.)

Non-linear learning 

 In nature, linear learning doesn’t exist. Children learn their mother tongue through random exposure and make sense of the language by identifying patterns.  Our brains are designed to work/learn this way, but it is a subjective process because each individual experiences distinct social and psychological phenomena.  

If there is a metpaphor for learning in the natural environment it may be the network rather than the line: our neural networks forms the basis of memory/knowledge and even the brain itself. Which is interesting because all networks come down to two elements: links and nodes. (This is as true for the internet as it is for the human brain.)

The internet is changing the way we learn and that’s because of its  network qualities. I believe we’ve moved beyond the Mechanical Age, and beyond the Information Age, to the Age of Networks, and therefore to the Age of Networked Learning. Networks are every where and, as Jay Cross persuasively argues, they are changing everything, including how we learn. The last time that happened we had the Enlightenment on our hands.

 In the next post I’ll try to show how we’ve applied these insights in the real life design of our learning programs. In the meantime, feel free!

 Ken Carroll 

  By the time we finished school, 90% of my generation hated the mandatory Irish lessons. Hundreds of thousands of kids (aka language learning machines) failed to master even rudimentary communication in the language we had studied for years. If the teachers had set out to kill the language, I’m not sure they could have done it more effectively. But, of course, they didn’t set out to kill it, they set out to teach it, which would sound almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic.   

There is no single reason for the failure of traditional language teaching. It’s more like a constellation of bad pedagogy, irrelevant objectives, a school system that was calcified in another era, etc. Crowning it all was the illusion that you could and should teach a language to children, i.e. that you could/should explain it to them. The teachers’ focus was grammatical, rather than psychological - What are the structures of the language?, rather than How might we induce the language learning process?  It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that if the kids were encouraged to use the language they would pick it up painlessly and quickly. Nothing (and I mean nothing) could have been less relevant than lectures on declensions or the conjugation of prepositions (they do that in Irish) to a bunch of children, but that’s what we got.

I don’t want to harp on about my particular country. I used it to make a point but it was definitely not unique. For the most part, language teaching the world over remains in a fossilized state. The paradigms that inform it are often more Quintillian, and less web 2.0 even though there’s tons of amazing alternative ideas on the web these days - try Stephen Downes’ Stephen Web, or Connectivism for starters. (These treat learning generally, rather than language learning specifically, but they are relevant.) As far as I can see most kids leave schools to this day, with an abysmal record on language learning.

 Yesterday I talked with JP Villaneuva. He’s a tremendouly talented linguist and teacher who is leading the new SpanishPod team that launched last week. (You can sample his excellent work here.) Well, JP and I share a belief in the need for change in language teaching - in this case in how Spanish is taught. (Note: I’m not saying there are no good Spanish teachers out there. Of course there are! I’m saying the discipline as a whole needs change.) JP and I will be working together and reporting here as we progress. (I’m delighted to say that we also have an awesome tech team behind us to help make our ideas possible!)

 Over the coming week and months I’ll try to bring concrete examples of what we might call ‘language learning 2.0′. I beleive ChinesePod has already demonstrated a number of these, but I’m keen to keep developing the discussion beyond Mandarin. We certainly have ideas over here but we realize that you, the Big Brain, know far more than we ever could. I hope you’ll all stop by to add to the conversation in a ‘co-active’ way.

Ken Carroll