Phoneticians and thinking language learners

Recently a colleague posted this article on FB through VenTESOL.  It was originally given as a talk at Seoul University in 1996.  Consider,

In this talk I want to discuss the usefulness and importance of phonetic transcription for people studying languages. Since most of you here are phoneticians, you are presumably already convinced of this; I may be preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, there are many language teachers who appear to be far from converted, and I believe that certain arguments do need to be spelled out.

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For the language learner, a passive acquaintance with phonetic transcription enables him or her to extract precise and explicit information on pronunciation from a dictionary, bilingual or monolingual.

Without this information, a learner risks being misled either by an inadequately trained ear or by the dazzling effect of the ordinary spelling.

It should be difficult to imagine language teachers who are not impressing the significance of phonetic transcription upon their students.  Yet here, and based on experience, we see that many teachers are reluctant or even ignorant of IPA and its value.

As with many places where linguistics ties so directly to language learning, it is useful to consider how much a student of language should learn about linguistics.  Some complain that the topics are not appealing enough to learners.  Well, learning a language is not always a trip to the carnival, and learning phonetic transcription should become so much more than "a passive acquaintance" with which one can "extract precise and explicit information on pronunciation from a dictionary."  Of course, that is fully appropriate for a language student, but what about the value of learning the details of phonetics?

What about language students who study how these sounds vary between languages and within a single language? Learning to pay attention to such small details as described in this paper (how a phoneme /t/ changes based on preceding and proceeding sounds) trains the ear and the mind to pay closer attention to speech, and with appropriate direction, one's own speech.  Thus a learner begins to notice subtle clues that suggest how to make appropriate change toward more accurate pronunciation (or production, or writing, or listening).

Rather than studying how words sound by staring at some poorly understood symbols in a dictionary, language students become novice phoneticians, novice linguists, using the riches of the field to gain confidence, control, and autonomy.  To improve progress and depth of learning for language students we must devise plans with topics and projects on linguistic analysis and scientific study of an array of socio-linguistic phenomena.  Such critical study of details in the field of linguistics dovetails perfectly with self-analysis and self-assessment of language proficiency and learning strategy/outcome.  It's not to say that as language learners advance they should not study other topics, but language courses typically taught with a text full of somewhat arbitrary readings and activities would be well served by such a change in focus.  Even low-intermediate learners could manage simplified readings on these topics and develop their own analyses or surveys to make comparisons or study some other communicative detail such as facial gestures.

Just today I listened to a colleague talk about an ap for diagramming sentences--yes!  Learners need to become experts in how languages work.  Yes, we need content, but their is plenty of stimulating content, chock full of potential critical study, in the field of linguistics.  I also personally find x-bar structure more elegant that the traditional grammarian's sentence diagram if students are going to do some sentence structures, but anything would be a good start.

Taking time to recognize assumptions

Evaluating assumptions and their impact on thinking is a crucial step in critical thinking.  No matter how much practice a person might have at this, it always amazes me how easy it can be to make an assumption and fail to recognize that it is not a fact, and then make an inaccurate inference.

Everyone has their own beliefs, and for many, they may seem like facts.  For example, a person might believe that anyone willing to live on government financial support is lazy and abusing the system.  Such an assumption looks fairly obvious to be a belief or opinion.  We use prior experience to build these ideas, and new information is shaped by our assumptions.

Last week, I thought it was a fact that graduate students must be matriculated and taking graduate courses in a university.  When I learned my students were graduate students taking courses in our intensive English program, I assumed they were also enrolled in other graduate courses and so there would be some differences in the way their schedules worked compared to the undergraduates in the IEP who have not yet matriculated.  I went ahead and inferred that the schedule for these graduate students would necessarily involve just 2 or maybe 3 meetings per week, maybe 2 hours per meeting.

It turns out that these graduate students are in fact enrolled for 20 hours per week of intensive English, for the most part.  It turns out their schedule is nearly identical to other IEP students.  All of this means I need to be on campus every day, in the afternoon.

Having inferred that these students were somehow a special case with a different schedule also stemmed from my assumption that my teaching request form for the fall would have been considered in scheduling.  I indicated that working past noon would be problematic, so I assumed that I would be given some course that takes place in the morning.

None of this needed to come as a surprise, had I thought more about the circumstances of graduate students taking courses in the IEP.  My prior experience with this comes from other institutions.  The fact that these courses are being offered through our intensive program should have prompted me to ask more questions in the beginning.  I also know that my tendency when it comes to schedules is to not spend much time thinking about them. 

It's easy to look for ways to excuse or rationalize poor thinking.  I was busy, I was distracted (my favorite), I have two kids to care for, I don't spend enough time thinking about details that I believe I already understand well.  It takes discipline to stop and rethink what you take for granted; it's always more exciting to consider bigger ideas or novel topics and just speed by the things you think you know so well.

Critical thinking on Mars

There is no time like the present, right?  Start writing instead of thinking more about what to write.  Right.  Whatever I put here stands as reflection and exploration for myself, reminders for my own practice, and ultimately, ideas I can share and build on with others.

Though I usually think of critical thinking in terms of how long I've integrated it into my teaching practice, education that consciously attends to thinking started for me with science. Astronomy courses in college were most memorable since that's when I started to think carefully about my own thinking, though not from any particular guidance provided in the course.  It could have been a combination of keen interest in planetary physics and in the lab T.A., or maybe it was my studies in linguistics and Spanish, which had me looking hard at what happens in the mind when we learn another language and culture.  Why leave it to chance, though?

When we consider life on Mars, we have to imagine other perspectives.  It is an exemplary case of how creativity is crucial to make the most of critical thinking.  If we are going to live on Mars, how can we do it?  Purpose?  Questions?  Implications?  Significance?  Logic?  The elements and standards just line up with no end to the revisions!

There are 668.6 days in a Martian year.  Each day is around 24'40".  So, we have some grounding in our own perspective on earth to guide our imagination as to what life on Mars could be like.

Starting with something familiar, something we can relate to, is fundamental.  We all do it with scaffolding or schema activation; we bring in personal anecdotes or ask students to express how they relate to certain ideas.  As teachers, we find that we already have activities that involve reflection on thinking.  How can we develop these further? 

When we have students do reflective journals, it's important to first give them an idea of where they will end up (well, that's always the case).  Let them know that they will be monitoring their thinking and how it changes as they learn about and interact with new ideas.  Ask them if they've ever paid close attention to their progress as they practice some skill.  Give examples of noticing such progress and changes in thinking as you learn (modeling thinking).  Elicit their experience.  Once they've started on the reflections, have them share from time to time in the class or online, and bring attention to significant observations as well as other details that are relevant but may have been left out.  What about the medium?  Are they handwritten journals?  Oral?  Electronic?  Public?  Private?  Why? 

I don't actually want to live on Mars, by the way, at least not most of the time.

Valles Marineris is named after the orbiter that first showed pictures of it, the Mariner 9, and at one time, it was thought that water may have carved these valleys into the crust.  You can see what looks like a system of rifts or canyons running east-west near the equator.  What these canyons are and the status of water on Mars remind me how important it is to recognize and appreciate errors in thinking (rather than being embarrassed and potentially shutting out or even condemning other ideas).  Questions shouldn't be dismissed with answers, answers should refine questions, bringing others.  Mistakes should not be swept under the rug, they should be scrutinized for what they mean and other possibilities.  Whether or not there has been water on Mars has gone back and forth and elsewhere over many years.

While science appears to involve critical thinking de facto, the crucial reflective component often goes missing.  We can bring critical thinking into any topic, and we must in order to become more effective learners and decision makers.  Integrating CT shouldn't take time away from the curriculum you already have because it complements it, and learners should make better progress than they have before.  There should be more time for projects and deeper involvement, not less!

In this post, I thought a lot about S-14 and my much beloved, S-28.  I looked up complement to see if there was a better choice (and because I notoriously mix up spelling of homophones).  I always wonder how often other people use dictionaries, and how they use them.  It's a fascinating issue when it comes to language class.  There are so many great things to discover in dictionaries!  My go-to (monlingual English) online dictionary says that complement refers to something that 'completes or makes perfect.'  Great!  On that note, I hope to see more CT blogs appear in the future!