Since I will be working as a live-in nanny to save some rent, starting from January 2017, I have been busy packaging and looking for someone to sublet my apartment. One of reasons why this job attracts me is that the family pays much attention to the language education of the two-year-old toddler because of his speech delay. The child seems to be able to understand what people are talking about, but still he blurts only simple words like papa from time to time. Most of the time, he would use his sign language to ask for things or to convey information. The parents want me to speak to the child in Chinese or English, whatever language I am comfortable with (Though I feel that they prefer me to use Chinese). As long as I talk to the child in complete sentences rather than baby talk, it is fine. No baby talk is one of the hard rules in the house. The previous nanny spoke to the child in Vietnamese and French, and the parents talk to the child in French only. I cannot help guessing if it may be the case that the child is confused by various languages surrounding him. In contrast, there is a four-year-old girl named Bella who can speak seven languages. She's so popular that we even talked about her in the sociolinguistics class and wondered how she made it. According to my classmate Natalie, Bella's parents spent a lot of money hiring private tutors of different nationalities to "play" with Bella. Here's a video of Bella. By comparison and contrast, I negate my previous guess that the child is confounded by different kinds of input. Then I wondered if there is something wrong with the child himself . Vygotsky (1978) argued that the mind does not act upon reality or apprehend it directly but does so indirectly through signs. Signs, in contrast to physical tools that mediate labor and manipulation of nature, are psychological tools of mediation. Sign-mediated activity includes primarily the use of language but also of other semiotic tools, such as gestures, mnemonic techniques, mathematical symbols, and diagrams. According to Vygotsky’s theory, the child using his right index finger pointing to his left palm to ask for more food is able to carry out certain sign-mediated activity. Thus, I deduct that the child is sound in mind and well on the way to form verbal thought. Verbal thought defined by Guerrero(2005, pp.18) as symbolic thinking mediated by inner speech. After reading about private and inner speech serving a regulatory role played in social speech, through the study carried out by San et al (2011) that I learned that "the most notable increase in private speech occurred between 4.5 and 6.5 years of age for both speakers and listeners". Then I think that it may be still too early for the child to fully develop the language ability by means of mediation of private and inner speech. That said, I cannot help resisting the urge to ask "What language does your mind speak?" to multilinguals. Even though inner speech is not technically a language system and there is no point analyzing its structure, in which language is your inner speech turns out to be interesting. As for myself, my answer would simply be "mandarin" because I always see myself as monolingual. According to some linguists, bilingual refers to those who use both languages equally well. So the fact that my English level is rather limited leads to my answer. Nevertheless, is there some time that multilingual children feeling lost in acquiring more than one languages? How do they overcome such situation? If you happen to be a multilingual and have read the blog, I really hope you could share your experience. In the end, best wishes to you in 2017. References: Guerrero, M. C. M. (2005). Inner speech--L2: Thinking words in a second language (pp.18). New York: Springer. San, M. M. C., Boada, . C. H., & Feigenbaum, P. (January 01, 2011). Private and inner speech and the regulation of social speech communication. Cognitive Development, 26, 3, 214-229. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
1 Comment
Recently I have been asking many people the question in the tile. For sure I got varied answers. Some would say yes because of the "lifelong learning" big umbrella. I continued asking if they themselves would study a language when they are over 60. They grinned with a touch of embarrassment and hesitated. See? Here's the thing. Most people still lack the awareness of what good learning a language can do to the elder. I was first inspired by conversations with a senior client at EBM. Mrs. M is a lady from Italy who moved to Montreal after marriage like many other women here. Because of her fragile health, I was assigned to accompany her to the doctor's place. That's the first time we met. Then the doctor asked her to do a blood test next week. After two weeks, I went to help her with shopping. On the way to the supermarket, I asked about her results of the blood test over free talk. Beyond my expectation, she didn't remember the whole thing at all. Trying to make her conjure up the memory, I described many details about our visit to the doctor's place. Then she said that she couldn't understand my what I was saying and apologized for her level of English being poor. "I live alone, you know. I keep talking to myself in Italian. My English is so bad now." Not wanting her end up feeling very frustrated, I changed to another topic and adjusted my sentences to within five words. Her words struck right on my mind. There is no doubt that Mrs. M must be able to speak English and French quite well in the past since she had lived and worked here. Is aging the mere cause leading to her deteriorating language ability? The "MOM" framework mentioned in de Bot and Schrauf (2009, p.10) provides a plausible explanation for the language attrition phenomenon. They stated that language learning, use, and maintenance depend on three groups of factors: Means (linguistic knowledge, perception and memory capacity), Opportunities (possible contacts with, and use of the language) and Motive (socio-emoitional aspects of language use and language learning). In Mrs. M's case, most of the factors within the three groups are missing, causing severe language attrition phenomenon. According to Weltens and Cohen(1989), language attrition has “manifold manifestations”, referring to the various situational settings in which language attrition may occur. For example, of immigrants losing their native language (LI) on account of their heavy involvement in acquiring a second language (L2); of dialect speakers whose dialect gradually shifts towards the standard language; and of foreign-language learners, who upon leaving school, start losing their foreign language (FL) skills again. Mrs. M falls into the third category of language attriters. Because of language barriers, language attriters are deprived of much joy that they are supposed to be enjoying. I am a volunteer at a theater as well, where most, if not all, of the audience are senior citizens. They gather together, appreciate and discuss the play. If Mrs. M had been able to maintained her foreign language skills, she could have been enjoying the play and other entertainment services like the others, rather than living in loneliness and void. Besides, Swain et al. (2006,2010,2014) carried out a series of intervention studies about the influence of "languaging" activities on older adults' cognitive functioning. The study results showed that languaging has a positive effect on elders' cognitive performance. Now do you think if you would learn a language when you are over 60? References: de Bot, K., & Schrauf, R. W. (2009). Language development over the lifespan. New York and London: Routledge. Lapkin, S., Swain, M., & Psyllakis, P. (2010). The role of languaging in creating zones of proximal development (ZPDs): a long-term care resident interacts with a researcher. Canadian Journal on Aging, 29(4), 477-490. Motobayashi, K., Swain, M., & Lapkin, S. (2014). Autobiographic episodes as languaging: Affective and cognitive changes in an older adult. Language and Sociocultural Theory, 1(1). Swain, M (2006). Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. In H. Byrnes (Ed.), Advanced language learning: The contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95–108). London: Continuum. Weltens, B., & Cohen, A. D. (June 07, 1989). Language Attrition Research: An Introduction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 11, 2.)
"English/ French/ Chinese/ Spanish Corner" should be a quite familiar phrase to second language learners. This is a typical English Corner. Most of the time the responsibility of holding such events falls to clubs within schools. Of course, there are also learners voluntarily forming certain groups via online platforms to carry out such activity. I bet most likely you have joined such events at least once with certain purpose, such as practicing the language used in the group, making friends, or simply meeting your curiosity. Then what did you get from joining such activities after all? Did the event meet your expectation? You may want to stop here for a minute and try recalling the distant memory.
I clearly remember the first and the last time that I joined the English Corner at my university as a participant in China. After struggling for a while, I finally persuaded myself to join the English Corner with a classmate who claimed that she benefited a lot from taking part in communicating with other members there. With a mood mixed of nervous, curious and hopeful, I went to the classroom, only to find students scattered here and there speaking English fluently in cliques. My friend waved to me and asked me to join a clique. All I did that evening was listening to the others and nodding while blaming myself for being so terrible in oral English. I never joined any English Corner again after that due to my feeling of frustration and somewhat oversensitivity. Sarcastically, leading English Corner several times a week was one of my job duties after entering the workforce. What is more ironic is that I had to encourage everyone to join it. I used to work in an English education institute whose target group is the adult. As you can imagine, people in different occupations learn English for different purposes. They tend to seize every moment to learn as much as possible. Few of them regarded learning English just for fun. What posed as contradictory to me is that English Corners in my company is originally designed as an activity for entertainment. Students are expected to have fun rather than take notes. However, it is rarely the case when it comes to low level students. They spent much time looking up every unfamiliar word on their cell phones and asking their partners about grammar rules in Chinese, leaving little time that they are really speaking and using English. Joined the French-Chinese language exchange program last Saturday inspires me to reflect on the effectiveness of this series of events. During the event, one bilingual girl paired up with me. She speaks Arabic and French fluently. We were supposed to talk about address during that one hour, half an hour in French, half an hour in Chinese. It turned out to be we teaching each other random vocabulary. She asked me to translate sun, moon, water, party, etc. I tried asking her about the use of prepositions like to and from in French, but she told me that they used the two alternatively sometimes and could not explain why. Finally, the one-hour session went became taking notes of new words again. I can only recall we discussed clothing, but I have forgotten the exact words already. The one hour is almost wasted for me. I don’t think the girl is able to name the sun or moon in Chinese either by now. I am doubtful about the effect of such programs for low-level learners because I think they are hindered by the eagerness for learning new words, twisting the intention of such activities. That being said, we can hardly resist the tendency to learn as much as we can when we are like blank slates. As second language learners, especially beginners, we tend to attach much, maybe too much, importance to vocabulary. As Meara (1996) argues, “The basic dimension is size. All other things being equal, learners with big vocabularies are more proficient in a wide range of language skills than learners with smaller vocabularies, and there is some evidence to support the view that vocabulary skills make a significant contribution to almost all aspects of L2 [second language] proficiency” (p.37). Learners have a rather serious attitude towards English vocabulary learning. Further, Wen-Ta (2010) validates the inner hierarchical structure of attitude in terms of learning English vocabulary. Her study also introduces that each of the three components of attitude carries a different weight in learners' attitudes, namely cognition (Vocabulary is important for learning English), affect (I dislike learning vocabulary) and conation (When learning vocabulary, I persist until I reach the goals that I make for myself). Surprisingly, the data in her study revealed that it is highly likely that both the affective and conative components may play a more important role than does the cognitive component in predicting and explaining English vocabulary learning behavior. I thought it should be the cognitive component that is the most important in our "zeal" towards vocabulary learning. As a learner, we really need to get the most out of such communication activities. Can we turn down the conation for trying really hard to learn vocabulary? As a teacher, how can we organize activities really help learners to get the most out of events like English Corner? We may need to relate the task with Task Based Language Teaching to some extent and take learners' attitude into consideration. References: English Corner. Retrieved November 15th from https://bornformore.wordpress.com/english-corner/; Meara, P. (1996). The dimensions of lexical competence. In K. Malmkjaer, G. Brown, & J. Williams (Eds.), Performance and competence in second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Wen-Ta, T. (2010). Multidimensionality and Hierarchical Structure of the English Vocabulary Learning Attitude Scale. Social Behavior & Personality: an international journal, 38(7), 907-918. doi:10.2224/sbp.2010.38.7.907
I used to be one of the persons who assumed that written expression was a minor matter compared to "the facts" and "the findings of my research" (Barzun,1975). Taking some graduate writing courses at school and reading books like Simple and Direct (Barzun,1975) and The Craft of Research (Booth et al, 2008) changed my thought completely. Though my professors acknowledged that I have made progress in academic writing, I know there is much to learn and some seemingly impassable barrier lurking on the way. To be honest, I cannot say the process of studying to write is full of pleasure. When the composition on which I've spent hours drafting and revising was criticized here and there, I doubted my eligibility for graduate school. After all, writing is the most common task students would face in graduate school, especially for those who are majoring in humanities. That being said, I still cherish the harsh and direct feedback and contemplate how to improve my writing as well as why my carefully-worded work does not meet the standard.
The first reason for my work not meeting the academic standard is that I failed to use academic words and their derivatives. As long as my meaning is clearly expressed, the diction does not matter that much to me, so the style of my work does not seem scholarly. Since my first language is Chinese, a language is not cognates with English at all. (Cognates, as defined by Moss (1992) in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, it refers to “Akin, descended from a common ancestor.”) Route learning is the principal way for me to learn the vocabulary. The accompanying side-effect of mere memorizing is semantic mistakes and collocation misuse. I did well in English exams where the items being tested are something I've learned before, but when it comes to the output part that I am required to write something on my own, things are quite different from the test. Besides, the structure of my article is problematic as well. Though I have a clear framework of the thesis statement and supporting points in mind, the sentences become discursive when the idea comes to words. My meandering paragraphs lead readers to circle at the same point rather than move back or forward. Once I learned that I have such problem in writing, I have been trying to correct myself, but it does not seem to work well. Then I started wondering if there was something different in the way of thinking between the westerners and me, and if thinking should go before writing or the other way around. Thanks to Rachel Cayley's blog, I confirmed that the thinking before writing totally makes sense. Therefore, I am more committed to looking for the answer for the first question. The concept of Kaplan's contrastive rhetoric happened to popped up in my view when I was browsing online for solutions. Kaplan saw that "cultural differences in the nature of rhetoric supply the key to understanding the difference in international students' writing" (Connor, 1996: 11). Many scholars, like Spack, Zamel, and Scollon, later criticized the contrastive rhetoric because its stress on differences tended to apply polarized characterizations to cultural difference. Connor improved the traditional contrastive theory by bringing up the intercultural rhetoric. In her 1996 book Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second-Language Writing, she described the intercultural rhetoric from three aspects: culture is a complex intersection of national, disciplinary and other cultures; texts must be studied in the social contexts in which they were written and spoken; written discourse encounters necessitate negotiation and accommodation. Case studies carried out in China are also introduced in the book, which confirms the existence of differentiation between Chinese students' writing with westerners' writing. Having read the theories and studies, I think that it is not my ability that should take the blame. Rather, it could be the deep-rooted Chinese cultural background guide me to write in a different way. Using euphemistic sentences to support my idea is a habit just like using chopsticks to have meals for me. Though I feel relieved to a certain extent, cultural difference cannot be the excuse keeping me stop trying to better my writing skills to present appropriate scholar works. If you have encountered similar situations, say, not sure about the usage of collocations, you may would like to refer to this website http://ozdic.com/ . If you have make semantic mistakes too, broadly reading good works might help. Even if it takes time to make a difference in writing, I'm sure such skill will be collected into our arsenal in the end. References: Barzun, J. (1975). Simple & direct: A rhetoric for writers. New York: Harper & Row; Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., & Williams, J. M. (2008). The craft of research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Cayley, R. (2014, April 23). Writing as Thinking. [Web log]. Retrieved from: https://explorationsofstyle.com/2014/04/23/writing-as-thinking/ Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cambridge Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, U. (2003, March 08). New Directions in Contrastive Rhetoric. Tesol Quarterly, 36, 4, 493-510. Connor, U., Nagelhout, E., & Rozycki, W. V. (2007). Contrastive rhetoric: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric. Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co. Moss, G. (1992). Cognate recognition: Its importance in the teaching of ESP reading courses to Spanish speakers. English for Specific Purposes 11:141–58. TeachingWhat is a homonym/ homophone/homograph? G is a ninth-grade francophone student I tutored in YMCA. She was scratching her head because of the English homework when I came to her. The teacher asked G to revise the first part of her composition and to go on finishing the rest of the detective story. G told me that both the teacher and her mother, who is another English teacher, commented that her story doesn't make sense. We are not going to go over how I posited myself back to an age full of imagination and came up with some plausible scenarios to force the bad guys to be clumsy enough to leave some clues for the police. The constant misuse of homophones in her passage caught my eye. There is no difficulty for G to express herself orally, partly because she was born and raised in the states until she was eight. However, when it comes to writing tasks, she has trouble in lexical selection from time to time, especially the frequently encountered homographs. In G's composition, "She found TOO bracelets on the ground." contains a homophone of "two" which she intended to use in the beginning. This is not the only misused pair of homophones appeared in her passage. Typical examples like "by" and "buy" can also be found. I don't think the problem lies in G's overall English level. In contrast, there might be something peculiar about the homonym.
Then I looked up some materials about homonyms. Jared et al (2016) carried out three experiments to examine the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. They used the homophone error paradigm, which assumes that if readers activate the meanings of words using phonology, then homophone errors should be harder to detect than spelling control errors. When homophone errors are embedded in contexts of sentences or stories, both good and poor readers detect less homophone errors than spelling control errors. These three experiments provide clear evidence that phonology makes an important contribution to the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 readers. I also found an interesting effect named homophone effect. Homophone effect mainly refers to that a person need more lexical decision time compared to non-homophones. The homophone effect has been attributed to orthographic competition created by feedback from phonology. In addition, they suggest that homophone effects could not be diminished(Pexman et al., 2001). More recently, Newman (2011) discussed the the homophone effects during visual word recognition among children in greater detail. She conducted some experiments with a group of children aging between 7 and 13, leading them to participate in a lexical decision task in which lexical frequency and homophony were manipulated. The study found that homophony has a significant impact on children’s lexical decision times and brain activation patterns and that this effect was modulated by age. Since the significance of the homophone effects is revealed and there are surely quite a few students having trouble telling the homophones from each other, we need to think about what teachers can do to help solve the problem. I happened to come across an exercise on the other day. Student C had an exercise requiring him to use pairs of homographs to make up a sentence. The exercise includes "lead(n.) & lead(v.)", "tear(n.) & tear(v.)", "flour & flower" and "soar & sore". Such exercise raises students' awareness about the existence of homonyms though they don't know there is such a word called homonym, but how aware they can be when the words are put back into contexts remains unknown. On the other hand, such exercise poses to be a good opportunity to push the student to resort to the dictionary because there is no illustrative pictures or anything about the meaning. The teacher or the instruction should have clearly told the students that they should look the words up if they don't understand. Student C didn't know what "soar" means and he didn't have a dictionary with him. I explained two meanings of "soar" to C: The price of a bottle of juice goes up from $1 to $100; An eagle swoops down on a rabbit, and then? (with my hand gesturing flying up to the sky). At last we decided to use the latter meaning of soar here for the sake of easiness. Casenhiser's research clearly demonstrates children's dispreference in learning a different, unrelated meaning for a known word when that word is used in a linguistic context that fails to bias strongly for a new meaning. If language language exists for communication, it is possible that sound and meaning will evolve to form a one-to-one correspondence for the sake of avoiding ambiguity. Anyway, let's see! References: Casenhiser, D. M. (May 14, 2005). Children's resistance to homonymy: an experimental study of pseudohomonyms. Journal of Child Language, 32, 2, 319-343. Choose your words: Homonym, Homophone, Homograph. Retrieved from: https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/homonym-homophone- homograph/; "homograph". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: from http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homograph; "homonym". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homonym; "homophone". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homophone; Jared, D., Ashby, J., Agauas, S. J., & Levy, B. A. (January 01, 2016). Phonological activation of word meanings in grade 5 readers. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 4, 524-41. Newman, S. D. (January 01, 2012). The homophone effect during visual word recognition in children: an fMRI study. Psychological Research, 76, 3, 280-91. Pexman, P. M., Lupker, S. J., & Jared, D. (January 01, 2001). Homophone effects in lexical decision. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 1, 139-56. Since I haven't got the chance to join any volunteer organizations and all the day care centers I called said they don't need someone, I decided to record my experience of learning French first.
There are so many French language programs in Montreal, ranging from the ones hosted by Chinese to governmental language institutions. Different schoolmates have varied preference towards their choices as well. Most of my Chinese friends recommended several schools equipped with Chinese teachers adopting the traditional grammar-teaching-comes-first way to me. Undeniably, separating rules out of the content is the fastest way to get to know a language, and I studied English in such path. Phonetic rules are firstly taught so that even if you don't know the word, you can still pronounce it. Then grammar teaching follows. All the explanation is delivered in the mother tongue though. As a result, I achieved the awkwardly unsatisfying level of English - I don't have much trouble reading and writing, but I have difficulty in listening and speaking. Therefore, I want to try a different method this time, so I registered in a program of Dawson College where the Francophone teacher would mostly use French to teach and scaffold with English. I am not in favor of nativism, but I want to take a look at the difference between immersion classroom and the conventional classroom. So I kicked out my journey of learning French from the second class of the beginners' program. Since it's the first class, I paid extra attention to her teaching style out of educational intuitive. The teacher had a hard time dealing with students from different background: Some of them are real "zero-level" students who have never been exposed to French for even a single bit. Some of them have studied certain basic expressions and conjugates. Her instructions were firstly in French, then explained to "zero-level" students in English. Luckily, all the ten students can be paired into "expert-novice" groups. She asked groups to organize conversations upon her prompts. For example, she asked us to introduce ourselves to each other first, then introduce one's partner to the other students. The purpose of this activity is to practice personal pronoun and corresponding verb collocation (je + m'appelle, elle + s'appelle, il + s'appelle; je + parle, elle + parle, il + parle; je + suis, il + est, elle + est). With the teacher's correction, most of the students managed to use the correct verb in accordance with the pronoun, even though none of us is able to speak without hesitation. After reading about the textbook of Second Language Learning, I realized that the teacher was attempting to scaffold. However, how can we tell whether her scaffolding is efficient or not? Explicit correction is still employed largely in class. One noticeable shortcoming of her corrective feedback is that she didn't give students enough time to self-correct. One strength her teaching methods is that she tried using the same simple examples every time so that beginners would not find it hard understanding the vocabulary. Meanwhile, I think she might use more varied lexical terms to enlarge students' vocabulary in the future. |