Category Archives: Language

MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son’s First Words, Graphs It | Fast Company

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In a talk soon to grab several million views on TED.com, cognitive scientist Deb Roy Wednesday shared a remarkable experiment that hearkens back to an earlier era of science using brand-new technology. From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear.

via fastcompany.com

This could be amazing. I’d love to see a write-up and the TED Talk. It’s not up yet 🙁

EDIT – The video was published (see below).  I’m not as excited about the talk as I thought I would be. Over have of it is essentially an advertisement for his new company focusing on social media analysis. However, I hope that he publishes (or someone associated with the group does so) findings of words, locations, interlocutors, and such.  Like many of the commenters are suggesting, this doesn’t seems to provide anything new theoretically; however, it can help to support (or weaken) these existing theories considering there has never been as complete (and unobtrusive) collection of data of this kind ever.

 

Amazing presentations (w/audio) on language teaching by Sue Swift

Selected Presentations, with audio, by Sue Swift (on AuthorStream).  I found this collection really amazing.  Not merely for the number of presentations, but for the great quality.  I’m using the listening presentations with my teaching listening class this semester as an introduction to the topics of the course.

I’m going to guess that Ms. Swift is a fan of Field’s view of listening instruction (or vice-versa) given that they dove-tail so wonderfully.  I no longer use the Field text with my students (too difficult), but I’m going to use many of the concepts.

Below are just some of the over 100 presentations that I found interesting.

Teaching Listening

Academic Discourses

Teaching Writing

Evaluating Written Work

Discourse Analysis

Error Analysis

History of Language Teaching

Myths about language learning – Nice slideshow summary from EFL Classroom 2.0


via eflclassroom.com
These are all great issues for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to consider. “Common sense” isn’t always the best approach in education.

Many of the questions are phrased in a way that could easily be either true or false, but you’ll get the idea. The great justifications will help.

Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices – English language quiz, fun but certainly not easy

Take the quiz at http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/quiz.html This is pretty fun, but not all that easy, even the “easy peasy” setting. Might be a little easier for someone raised in the UK, but not much easier I’d guess.

I especially like the corrective feedback.

——————————— EDIT —————————-

The quiz is no longer there, but you can see the results.

Pronouncing brotherhood (via @hanbae) – dialect problems cause adjustment issues for North Korean defectors

Check out this website I found at joongangdaily.joins.com

Thanks to @10_Magazine @holterbarbour @a_ahmad and @hanbae for this resource and their discussion of it on Twitter.

I’ve heard about this problem for a long time and it’s good to have some examples of the differences.

It’s common to hear Seoulites talk/complain about dialect distinctions that, not just with North Koreans but in those from other Provences as well. I’ve long held that Koreans in general, but Seoulites in particular, have very difficult time with language variance.

There are many reasons why this might exist, if it does. One of my theories is that Koreans have not had to deal with foreigners learning and using their language in the same way that Americans, for example, have. This may be true for Americans in more isolated areas, but in large urban areas you are likely to hear/interact with non-native English speakers every day. This has resulted in better coping mechanisms for language variation.

This is purely anecdotal, but a good deal of experience in both places leads me to believe this might be true. This is not to say that all Americans are better with language variation than Koreans, but I do suggest that this is likely a cognitive skill that is developed more in areas that see more variation.

“The appeal and poverty of CLT” – I always love a good attack on CLT

Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has enormous intuitive appeal. Despite this, I have come to believe that at the heart of CLT – especially in fundamentalist versions of it – we find a naive, even impoverished view of language. To demonstrate what I mean, let me examine six propositions upon which I think CLT is based. I am going to argue that if these propositions are true at all, they are only superficially and trivially true – and true only in essentially uninteresting ways. In other words, they are just as true as statements like “When people speak, they use words”. Such a statement tells us nothing about what kinds of relationships there may be between words, how people learn to assemble them into larger units, or what else they do to construct or interpret meaning. I will try to show this through six counter-propositions. Then – finally -I will briefly suggest an alternative – and also suggest reasons why pluralist methodologies are more likely to be successful than any single orthodoxy.

via btinternet.com

I really do like a good attack on CLT. All those smug teachers I had in the 90s pushing this method with little critical discussion really put me off of prescribed methods altogether. For this, I should probably thank them.

This piece has some great points. I’m not entirely thrilled with the way that fundamentalist CLT is positioned as the strawman in this arguments though. This view of CLT is so rarely pushed that I find the arguments quite weak in that regard. However, discussion of the basic tenets are still valid.

We are in a post-method era. Reasonable (yes, that is loaded speech for people like me 🙂 teachers and teacher-trainers don’t teach methods, but rather a whole tool chest of methodologies that can be used situated a particular context.

Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U.S. Educational System? – WorldWise – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U.S. Educational System?

November 9, 2010, 2:45 pm

By Francisco Marmolejo

It doesn’t take much to realize that the U.S. trails far behind other countries on the second language issue. Moreover, we constantly receive clear signals of the need to more seriously discuss the appropriateness and feasibility of implementing a second-language education policy. At the same time, we hear voices telling us that such an idea is just another unnecessary notion. The rationale used by many who justify this widespread second-language deficiency is that English is today’s lingua franca.

via chronicle.com

I really liked this post. It captures the immediate sense that learning languages is important in the global marketplace, but a lack of actions being taken my institutions and individuals to pursue this goal.

It seems a lot like the obesity crisis in the US (and elsewhere). We know what should be done to solve the problem, but our institutions and, more so, individuals will not do what it takes to live a healthier lifestyle.

I wish I knew what to do. Learning language in America is always compared to the rest of the world, but there are huge differences. The countries we are usually compared to largely have the ability to focus language learning on one or two obviously necessary languages. Just imagine if we, in the US, were able to focus all of our energy on teaching/learning Spanish. The outcomes would likely be much different.

The reality is that this is no focus in our education system across the country in languages for much of the same reason nothing is standardized in American education, local control. I’m not taking a position on good or bad here, just stating the obvious. There’s no agreement on whether or which languages should be learned. Also, there is no immediately clear reason why learning a language will be beneficial. My parent’s generation learned French for the most part. Asking them how they used French they likely answer either that they don’t remember any of it or that it was useful at a French restaurant once 🙂

The problem is, language isn’t something that you can learn in a short time frame when you need it. You can take 6 months of Korean before being transferred to Seoul and think that you’ll be able to function in society. How old are you and where are you from only take you so far. Try dealing with the local government office or diagnosing office problems with your 6 months of Korean study. Language learning takes time and lots of it. Learning a language early can result both in better performance in that language as well as improved ability to learn others.

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