Lomb Kató

One of the greatest DVD’s I ever saw on second language acquisition was the Krashen Seminar. It was produced by Blaine Ray in the late 90’s and on the DVD Krashen, in a very light and informative manner, outlines how we learn languages. If you want a copy of the DVD let me know and I’ll get one to you.

Anyway, on the DVD Krashen mentions a woman from Hungary by the name of Lomb Kató. [In English her name would be Katherine Lomb] She was a woman that learned 16 languages, mostly by self effort. I find myself asking the question, “What can I learn from Lomb Kató?”

Well, here are a few things that I gathered. She mentions that she drove three autos in World Languages: autolexia [reading for myself], autographia [writing for myself], and autologia [speaking with myself]. When thinking about my own language learning , it makes me feel better to know that she mentioned these three tools because I wasn’t sure if I was normal.

I also think about whether I am providing this for my students. Do we have a time where they can read what they want? This is basically FVR. I wish I did it more often and I think it would be good for the students. I am still getting my act together for a grant for some money.

Do we also have a time where the students have a time where they write for themselves? The closest I come to this is freewrites. I wish that they could do more free journaling in L2 and I wonder if my students are at a level where they can express themselves this way. It is a good thing to think about.

While I am not sure that autologia leads to acquisition, I do think that it leads to feeling like you are part of a club of language learners, which is very important. This is especially important for teenagers who are so locked into social approval. This happens in my room when I give a brain break and have them do mini-retells with each other. To be honest, it could happen more. I also think that this is something that can be encouraged to do on their own.

Other comments that she made was that when learning a language, we focus on the essence of the grammar and the important words. How true this is! I don’t know why so many programs use grammar to teach the language. Grammar will not win over the majority and will deprive the learner of the joy of natural language.

She also mentions that we need to cling to the enjoyable side of language study. Am I really providing this for my students? I really think so because we have stories that are all about their life and we are reading things that bring up real life situations. Reading can be a very enjoyable side of language study if we get kids into good stories and books!

These are just a few things that I learned from Lomb Kató. I find myself asking the question, “What good does all the Spanish I am teaching the students do if they never take charge of their own language learning?” I think that we need to help our students to acquire the language, but also to know how to acquire a language so that when they leave they can continue this language acquisition journey.

How Well Do They Really Know It?

When I first started using tprs I had the idea that if we used a phrase or structure in class, it was acquired. I have since learned that this may not necessarily be the case. As I work with students more I observe that there are different levels of acquiring a language. I have come to experience that a student may be able to identify a word in print and know its meaning, but not necessarily be able to use the word on demand or have the word freely come up for use when the right time comes. This means that a student needs more repetition on the word.

On the yahoo moretprs list Blaine Ray comments about recently teaching an upper level class. He mentions that although the students were in an upper level class, he found that they all benefited from the repetition that was in the story the class created that day. I found this to be very interesting.

Perhaps we underestimate the amount of repetition that students need and we should keep recycling previous structures all the time. Many teachers already know this, but this is a good thing for me to remember. I need to remember that the students more often than not need more repetition.

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the basics of teaching

Take a look at this Bobby McFerrin clip. Then if you have time watch it again and think about how he teaches and what makes him a good teacher.

We as language teachers have a lot in common with music because music has many similarities to language. In fact, many would say that music is a language. The interesting thing is that by the end, the whole audience knew which pitches to sing and when. Here are a few other common themes I noticed.

1. There was a sense of play

• You notice that it was not just the students, but also the teacher and there is a healthy amount of laughter.

2. Minimal grammar

• At the beginning, he didn’t say, “Okay everyone today we’re going to learn the major pentatonic scale. It consists of scale degrees 1,2,3, 5, and 6. Let’s begin on scale degree one in the key of C. Now we will write out the major pentatonic scale in all 12 keys. Okay, everyone got it? Good. Now you will write some songs that I have created to help you drill the major pentatonic scale. etc. etc.”
• The grammar was meaning based. The audience experienced the language of the music and it just flowed. It just made sense. Why? Because language makes sense to people when it is meaning based and not grammar based. Meaning-based grammar is the most that students want to know  and are ready for in the beginning.

3. Repetition

• He went over the notes several times to establish meaning and fluency so that later the students were able to have quick recognition.

4. The students are doing most of the work

• He runs with them for a little while and then eventually they are doing most of the work. He is just there to make sure they have a plan.

5. It is a story

• You may be thinking, “What?” It is true, they told a musical story. It went here and there, up and down, there was a direction and eventually it had an ending. In this case the ending made sense, but it still had a noticeable story line. We as humans are story beings and this is what makes sense to us.

6. He kept them focused

• At times you notice that the people are having so much fun that they start laughing and he keeps them on track by keeping the storyline moving. Water is the same way. If it is stagnate impurities start to find their way into the water. We remains pure by being in a current or a flow. So, we as storyaskers need to keep the plot moving in order to keep them focused. If we focus too much on the details, the story gets stagnate.

7. There was a community

• As they were playing and laughing there was a sense that people were engaged in what was going on and apart of something special. The audience was willing to come together to play and learn with each other. This is the way it should be in our classrooms. A time where the class comes together and faces  in the same direction toward a common goal.

At the end he makes a comment that everyone gets the pentatonic scale wherever he goes. I think that is because we all get language when it is presented in a meaningful way. We are all made to get language, it is innate. Why would we deny our students of this experience in the language when it can be so powerful? I hope I can strive to have this in my class. The possibilities could be grand.

Great comment from Norm Veilleux

Here is a great comment from Ben Slavic’s Blog

Don’t remember where I read this, but it was by a biggie in the SLA world (VanPatten I think) who believed that learning styles do not apply to language acquisition. There is only one way to acquire language and that is by comprehending messages. Language acquisition is so specialized and mainly unconcious that learning styles and their accompanying types of activities are not effective. I’ve dug up a few other quotes that I’ve used during workshops that really help explain the importance of input. I’ll paste them underneath and Ben you can use as you wish if you haven’t come across these already.

(From Input to Output, Bill VanPatten, p.25)The concept of input is perhaps the single most important concept of second language acquisition. It is trivial to point out that no individual can learn a second language without input of some sort. In fact, no model of second language acquisition does not avail itself of input in trying to explain how learners create second language grammars.
(Gass, 1997, p.1)

Although SLA as a scientific discipline is only four decades old, one of the most fundamental discoveries that revolutionized the way people thought about how languages are learned involved the concept of input. Although it might be a bit grandiose to imply that the discovery of the role of input is on par with the discovery of the earth’s rotation or the existence of the subconscious, the point here is that in the small work of SLA research, the discovery of the role of input completely altered the way in which scholars conceptualized how languages are acquired. Today, all theories in SLA research accord input an important if not critical role in how learners create linguistic systems.

(VanPatten, 2003, p.28)

Language acquisition happens in only one way and all learners must undergo it. Learners must have exposure to communicative input and they must process it; the brain must organize data. Learners must acquire output procedures, and they need to interact with other speakers.
(VanPatten, 2003, p.96)

Every successful learner of a second language has had substantial exposure to input as part of the process of language learning.

What kind of input is optimal for acquisition? The best input is comprehensible, which sometimes means that it needs to be slower and more carefully articulated, using common vocabulary, less slang, and shorter sentences. Optimal input is interesting and/or relevant and allows the acquirer to focus on the meaning of the message and not on the form of the message. Optimal input is not grammatically sequenced, and a grammatical syllabus should not be used in the language classroom, in part because all students will not be at exactly the same level and because each structure is often only introduced once before moving on to something else. Finally, optimal input must focus on quantity, although most language teachers have to date seriously underestimated how much comprehensible input is actually needed for an acquirer to progress.
A Summary of Stephen Krashen’s “Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition” By Reid Wilson

To correct or not?

Corrections have been something I have thought about lately. There is this part of me that wonders how much good it really does in terms of language acquisition. In my experience so far, I think that mostly it does little to nothing. The people that it may help are the 4%ers. So what does that mean for us? What do we do with errors, either in class or on tests. Should we kill ourselves over grading.

Well, this may be a little radical, but I am starting to think that the purpose of tests are to let teachers know what has been acquired and what has not been acquired. In other words, tests are for the teacher, not the student. Tests let us know which CI to focus on more. What a different way of looking at it.

This is good news for us as teachers. Even being a TPRS teacher, I still feel weighed down by grading. And I am a minimalist. I do not take papers home or work from home. Also, my testing is online and mostly graded by a computer. You may be thinking, how can this be or wow you must stink at your job? Well, that may be, but I am keeping myself afloat in this overwhelming profession.

You see, if we know that constant error correction does not do much, that means that we do not have to grade that much. It also means that we can relax when we hear our kids speak with terrible grammar. It just means that they need more interesting CI, that’s all. We don’t need to get upset. We just need to listen to our students and adjust our teaching accordingly.

I am find more and more that language class is meant to be the beginning of language learning or a springboard. It provides them with experience in the language so that when they leave they are ready to handle more advanced input. Without the language class, everything would be white noise and it would be much more difficult to acquire a language. The language class is not meant to make them perfect in L2. It is what helps the students to get their foot in the door.

Teaching multiple tenses

Today I started the road to teaching multiple tenses. It is freeing to me to present the language as a whole and not in segments. The wonderful thing was that the student completely understood the difference. It seems terrible to me that people would say, “Oh, they can’t learn that yet. They are not that advanced.” Who ever came up with that idea.

I think that when people start to view language as a different subject, they will start to see more fluency in their class. Language is not taught like physics. It is a completely different type of knowledge that is acquired through the natural order of acquisition. To teach it as an empirical subject limits the potential of fluency.

Not only that, but teaching with multiple tenses makes the story more fun!

Keeping it Personalized

I have discovered that it is essential that a language is personalized. As soon as I start talking about something that they are not interested in I begin to loose them. When I add a new detail, it sparks the interest again. I need get better at circling so that I don’t loose the kids while I am circling. I understand, though, that this is a process.

Following the rules

I realized today that rules are brilliant when you enforce them. It can be easy for teachers to just let it slide, but today in class I really enforced the rules. When I did this, it wasn’t in a harsh way. I simply just stated the rule to class when I saw that someone was breaking it and then I moved on. I didn’t humiliate the student(s), I just stated the rule to the class.

It worked like magic and by the end of the class period they were starting to acquire more of the language because there was an established order. The rule that was the most difficult was the “Speak English only to suggest clever answers — limit two words.” The students are used to speaking English all day, so this can be hard for some of them to remember. As long as I am consistent with enforcing the rules the students will continue to play the game.

The no English rule is actually a good classroom management tool because if there is no English allowed in a 1st year class, that pretty much means there is no talking.  When the students start to acquire more language and are speaking to each other in Spanish then I will then focus more on the “No talking over rule.”

These rules are brilliant and help the kids to acquire more language. No class should be without them.

False Beginners

When teaching a language like Spanish I am bound to run into the idea of false beginners. There will be so many different levels of Spanish with my students when they enter the classroom. A false beginner is a student who has prior knowledge of Spanish, but is in a class with true beginners, who are learning for the first time.

When a false beginner is calling out the answers feeling good about life, we really need to take notice of this. The reason is that all of the true beginners become demoralized and start to think that they are stupid when this is not the case at all. It is our responsibility to make sure that the true beginners do not get left in dust! We must make sure that everyone understands before we move on.

How do we do this? By going slow, teaching to the eyes, and paying close attention to the barometer students, the ones that are not getting as fast. If we do not do this it can have dramatic affects on a child and possibly turn them off to the language. We must keep this in mind at all times.

Teaching like Chet

There was a while where I really listened to a lot of Chet Baker, a jazz trumpeter who was most popular in the 50s. There was something about his music that I really liked. It had soul to it. Most jazz musicians know a thing or two about chords. In truth, jazz musicians are some of the most intelligent musicians of them all because they really know how music works. Chet was different, though. He couldn’t read chords. Chet Baker was not considered a slacker. In fact, he played with the best of them. He just knew the jazz language. Now, he could read music, but he couldn’t dissect it into analytical parts. The jazz language just came out of his horn. Chet was not the best trumpet player, but his style was unique because he was free and he could communicate what was in his head.

I was thinking about this the other day and how important it is to teaching. One of the reasons why Chet’s music was so good was because it wasn’t analyzed, but it contained a piece of his heart. That is what is inspiring to people, the heart.

I want to teach like Chet played. Chet knew the basics, in L2 this would be reading and writing. However, he did not know about chords, in L2 this would be the specific grammar. Our kids do not need to know the specific grammar to speak the language, they just need to know how to read and write. But the real music comes in the meaningful communication that they make. This happens when we create stories in class.

The stories are living and from the heart. They contain real forms of language that are personal to the students. They aren’t learning abstract, L2 jargon, they are acquiring and using meaningful, acoustical language that is real. The best part is that they are standing right in the middle of it, like a morning fog that embraces your whole being. What could be a better way to learn a language?